Why do you guys have trouble acknowledging that there is no objective high and low brow division and that taste is...

Why do you guys have trouble acknowledging that there is no objective high and low brow division and that taste is arbitrary?

Is it because you cling to your media consumption as the only means of distinguishing yourself?

>taste is arbitrary

this doesn't mean anything

>arbitrary
>[ahr-bi-trer-ee]

>adjective
>1.
>subject to individual will or judgment without restriction; contingent solely >upon one's discretion:
>an arbitrary decision.

High art, is usually distinguished by rarity, if anyone can do something its not that special, this also does not necessarily mean that anything one of a kind if great, or that everything difficult is great, but rarity and difficulty (inventiveness, novelty, genius, style, artistry, creativity, passion, depth) usually contribute to the effect of being in awe of a work.

Yes, anyone can like anything and potentially receive joy and value from it, for instance, an ant might think the particular leaf it is eating is the most important thing to ever exist in the world

>taste is arbitrary

Because the democracy of taste shapes the world, if 99% of people agreed that it was of great taste smearing themselves with shit before leaving home each morning, well hopefully you get the picture

Not sure what your point is.

I believe that appreciation of a work of art depends on knowledge. Two people whose knowledge is wildly different will have wildly different opinions on a piece of music. For example, a person who has listened to a lot of music has a different opinion from a person who has listened to very little music (but it doesn't have to be "quantity", it could just be different kinds of music). Therefore, knowledge determines what you like and what you don't like. To a large extent, the "emotion" that music makes you feel depend on what you know (not on the music itself, which is simply a vibration that resonates with your brain's circuits). My experience is that people who have similar knowledge have remarkably similar opinions.

Very often, the "opinion" of a person is simply a reflection of what that person has listened to. The more a person knows, the more likely that her "opinion" is truly "her" opinion. The less a person knows, the more likely that her "opinion" is simply a reflection of whatever marketing/publicity she has been exposed to as she grew up.

If I had to come up with a "theory of musical appreciation", I would probably quote one of the philosophers who influenced me: Abhinavagupta. This Indian thinker (who lived around the year 1000) first formulated a theory that in my opinion is simple and elegant: experiencing the flavor of a work of art requires not only that the work evoke an emotional response, but also that the "experiencer" possess the aesthetic skills required to respond in an appropriate way. The experience of appreciating a work of art is a process of exchange: the artist provides the work of art to be experienced and the "experiencer" provides his aesthetic skills. The appreciation (i.e., the emotional response generated in the experiencer) is not an absolute value: it depends on the aesthetic skills of the experiencer. Those "aesthetic skills" are mostly derived from "knowledge".

desu this sounds pretty convincing
Scruffles is a smart guy

>James Patterson should get the Nobel Prize

Taste is arbitrary. Quality isn't. Faggot.

He's a sophist, of course he's convincing.

Difference between high and low brow is reverence.
It's a quality given by the expectations and response from the public and not from art itself.

Quality is merely the degree to which a product lives up to your arbitrary demands, friend.

>quality is arbitrary

road to nihilism

>nihilism
road to truth

this is so bullshit
>people who have similar knowledge have remarkably similar opinions.
what the fuck does this mean?

It's not bullshit at all. People with similarly wide knowledge of literature tend to acknowledge Shakespeare and Joyce as among the greats, just as people with similarly wide knowledge of music exalt Beethoven and Mozart, etc.

are you saying that it's
>arbitrary?

It means people who undergo similar indoctrination end up thinking alike, but he's trying to frame it more positively.

heh...

No it isn't. It's a road to something less than a lie.

Mistakes of the subhumans. They immediately interpret the idea of subjectivity as giving them free reign to support any viewpoint that they want, no matter how incoherent, ignorant and wretched. Sure, the ant too has its own perspective of things, and therefore its own subjective reality, but who gives a shit about the reality of an ant? The greater the man the greater — and hence the more objective — his perspective, and therefore the idea of subjectivity does not undermine the absolute rule of inequality in the universe but is precisely the mechanism by which it comes about.

I remember being an edgy teenager

it means great minds think alike ;)

Higher quality works are those preferred by higher quality people.

The latter is subjective, of course, but I know who I would place in that category and what their tastes are, so that's that.

Seems like you forgot what you knew then because you don't dare to remember.

Youd be wrong though. Firstly, when no goalpost is assigned, standards are assumed to be based on pragmaticism.

Somebody whos skimmed through harry potter novels may be a better person than you, could be smarter, may be happier, but they sure as fuck dont match your literatuee powerlevel.

In that very moment, they do have less appreciation for books, they cannot distinguish between cliches/ideologies/prose as well. If they wrte something, the plot would look like a Stephan king novel.

For general purposes, that person IS a literary peasant.

Please use fewer commas in your next post; or at least use them more correctly. Otherwise carry on, fill my board up with decent posts such as this one.

Why are you assuming Stephen King is inherently worse than, say, Nabokov?

>muh edgy

>high, med low brow division
shit made up by rich fags/NEETs to feel superior to normal people

>her
i agree with you though