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Originally Posted by Adam_S
Sure. I can agree. and, I would add, an unfortunate side effect of intellectual analysis of art, culture, and philosophy is artists becoming pretentious by catering to the stated flavors and theories of the moment. For decades, a leading movement in still photography has been conceptual art, meaning that so long as the core concept behind a photographic installation/series/presentation is suitably interesting the actual execution and artistic quality of the pictures is significantly less important. Now there are conceptual artists who produce work of incredible caliber, one thinks of Robbert Flick, the Bechers, or Cindy Sherman, but in many ways it's a means for university students to be lazy with their skills and 'exercising' only the mind.
Though not necessariy alliterative.  This is not true of all art, particularly forms of art that are appreciated en masse. But I think the issue I have here is with objective rather than inchoate or obscure. no objective consensus of art could be reached by the general masses. you'd never get everyone to agree on precisely the same thing, but a subjective consensus can be aggregated from a specific mass (an audience). And that many of these subjective consensi can be aggregated again to get an idea of what artworks are particularly important to a given people--Casablanca, for instance, or Schindler's List.
Agreed completely. |
A mass consesus opinion approaches objectivity more than an individual subjective opinion because it weeds out the statistical outliers and approaches a bell curve distribution, where the peak of the curve is closer to objectivity than the bottom-feeding outliers. That is to say, there is no objectively objective opinion, only a subjectively objective opinion. And, following my awkward logic, a subjectively subjective opinion is gathered when n = 1 in your statistical gathering.
But I probably should have clarified my use of the word "objective" -- you're right.
Adam, I am surprised you agree with me, though. You agree that art should be obscure but clear. Ok. Do you really think Schindler's List is obscure and clear in the same moment? On the contrary, it's meaning, its resonance, its aspirations or modus operandi, is very clear to nearly every viewer. Everybody has the same experience watching that film.
Then how do you reconcile this film to be great art when it is so clear?
*Of course, this is by my estimation that it's clear. You might disagree, so then I ask for your counterpoint to my point on this issue before you would need to get into the reconciliation part.
This is why I think Spielberg and co. make GREAT craft and not GREAT art, aside from Sugarland Express, for reasons stated elsewhere on HTF.