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Message: <blockquote data-quote="PaulKemp" data-source="post: 3129706" data-attributes="member: 2809">I suppose I don't have any particular qualms with the contention that all art has some value.  I would simply answer that in many cases that value is only slightly above zero.  My young son can draw me a finger painting of green and blue blotches.  He loves it; I love it; no one else thinks much of it, but up it goes up on the refrigerator.  It has value as art (in the broadest sense of the term "art"), but that value is nearly zero.  If it makes you more comfortable as an aspiring writer to conceptualize art's value in this way, I think that's fine and even reasonable.  I'd further agree that there is little in the way of objectivity to be found in the evaluation of art (there may be objective components, but their value with respect to the whole, and the impact of the whole, is ultimately a subjective evaluation).  The prevailing standards at any given time tend (as I think Mark Hope put quite well) to be little more than a collective judgment, an agreed-upon conceptual convention of the time and place in which the art and the evaluator co-exist.  There is no objective standard to which one can point to argue that Pollack's work is great, rather than paint thrown randomly against a canvas by a depressed man.  But I'd argue that there's value in the collective wisdom, in that the sum of the subjective judgments do the work of an objective standard against which we evaluate art in our time and place.  Now, you can reject the collective wisdom.  Lots of people do, and some of what I regard as the world's best art has been produced by those who've refused to accede to a conventional sense of what makes "good" art.  But expect heated discussion over it, and that's a good thing.  After all, it's that discussion over standards that reinforces or challenges (and perhaps changes) the collective wisdom about the art under discussion.    Incidentally, I think you are mistaken when you claim that people mistake their opinion for fact. I think instead they simply think their opinions are better than the person with whom they have the difference of opinion.  Are they objectively right in that regard?  Of course not.   There is no objectively right in this context.  But the opinion of one might be better informed or more fully thought through than the opinion of another.</blockquote>

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