Does the subjective worldview destroy critical thinking...

Well yes, art is certainly subjective to an extent, but saying there is no standard whatsoever is a very lax system of evaluation (Lax in this case meaning non-existent)
As implies, a totally subjective view simply leads to a decline in general literacy.

> Viewing all art as totally equal

Not all definitions of 'equal' are equal

By who? Equal in what way? As texts?

Yeah you can 'measure' art by these standards like running a stopwatch for the duration that someone makes a piece but these don't necessarily translate to quality. These are all contextually-biased understandings of art and thus not really objective

But the standards are extremely 'lax' as you say, that is they change greatly from place to place, person to person, era to era. What an ancient egyptian found beautiful and what a 60's beatnik hippie found beautiful and what Bill Gates find beautiful and what your Mom finds beautiful.... it's all different.

I don't like Katy Perry. Some people do, ALOT. I enjoy silent films, other people don't.

Art is subjective, you'll never find a stable reaction to any given work of art. You'll find groups that agree or achieve consensus, but you won't find anything totally universal.

>You realize each and everyone of your 'metrics' are actually subjective judgements? None of these things are measurable,
Yes they are, pal.

>How original/innovative/unique is the work?
Analyze the multiple components of the work, which will vary wildly between media so let's just take a piece of music as an example. You could very easily, with enough data, chart out the song's structure, scales, timings, motifs, lyrics, chords, sounds used, genres, etc., and compare them to the structures, scales—whathaveyou—used in pieces of music throughout the eras and cultures preceding the date of the work.
>How much effort was put into the work?
This could be measured by time spent in development, amount of revisions and improvements made to the work throughout its creation, amount of original content in the work, the amount of personal sacrifices made by the artist to create it, and many more. Those are just off the top of my head.
>How much talent was required to make the work?
To determine this, you simply need to a) compare the artists technical ability against other artists in the field and b) determine to what extent the artist's talent was pushed in order to create the art, which you could find by asking the artist to recreate the technicalities of the art and see how frequently he successfully recreates them
>How well does the art cultivate the emotional reaction the creator was hoping to instill?
We can easily measure physiological reactions to stimuli and determine the emotion that caused them, and we can also easily just ask the artist what they wanted to do.
>How many lessons and meanings can be extracted from the art?
How long is the piece examined, discussed, and dissected after its initial release? This is a more murky one because you'd need to adjust for the pieces' relative fame, but I don't consider it impossible
>How much does the general population enjoy it?
I don't think I even need to bother telling you how to measure this

By aesthetic subjectivists. Many believe that quality is simply an illusion, and that there's no clear boundary that separates Dante and somebody's middle school poetry except time and style.

What do you mean by 'passed off' then?

>critical thinking is good

>These are all contextually-biased understandings of art and thus not really objective
This is why pragmatism is such a great concept to have around. IQ is completely based on contextually-biased understandings of intelligence and success (how well you did in school, how well you work, how much money you make, etc), yet by continuing to compare different hypothesized measurements of intelligence, finding correlations between them and abstracting what makes the two metrics correlate, and eliminating what is deemed irrelevant or redundant, we ended up with an incredibly useful quotient that has proven to be a reliable predictor of personal success.
Did we perfectly distill such a nebulous concept as intelligence and quantify it? No. Most people wouldn't claim that. What we did do, however, was agree upon what qualities a person can have that can be useful to describe as "intelligence," and then find an underlying, measurable quality that accounts for them the best it can.

It's kind of symbiotic. Intelligence and IQ both define each other in a strange way. I don't think it'd be too difficult to do the same with music quality and some sort of theoretical "music quotient"

This is actually kind of interesting, but also terrifying. What you're describing is monetization. How long does someone watch the youtube ad? How much do their eye's dilate? At what volume do they laugh? Does their heart rate increase? How much do they salivate? Can we measure every microscopic detail of the painting? Reproduce it identically in a 3D printer? How many essays have been written about it? How many page-clicks? What is someone willing to pay for it at auction?

You could generate endless data and information about an artwork. You could create an entire governmental agency to do it.

But I still don't think this measurement means that the art itself is 'objective'. A mathematical equation is objective. A reading on a thermometer. But when it comes to creating these measurements of art and the art expierences, you'll be left only with a bunch of statistical data. Averages of what is most liked, most hated, most/least arrousing, cheapest to produce, most expensive to produce and the ratios of desired outcomes based on cost.

The fact that not everyone enjoys the exact same things, and that these tastes have changed and shifted through time and culture, should indicate the subjective nature of aesthetics. People -could- like anything, given enough time, enough consideration, enough cultural messaging.

The definition of a sexual fetish is sexual attraction to non-sexual objects. But if an object elicits arousal, then it becomes a sex object. And so anything, and everything, can become a fetish. I'd guess it's the same with art.

agreed

Well, if you want me to be specific, Rupi Kaur is currently being hailed as some sort of genius in popular culture, despite her work being almost totally without distinction.

We have a whole history of art though to base this theory on, and most of your points can't be applied to successful art of the past. This is what I mean by contextually-biased; it's an idea of art based on an idiosyncratic modernism rather than any attempted universal understanding of art.

Given how easy it is to create fake Kaur poems I'd say she's pretty distinct. I don't know what you mean by 'some sort of genius in popular culture'. This isn't very specific at all.

>But I still don't think this measurement means that the art itself is 'objective'.
I certainly wouldn't call it objective either, I only meant to find objective measures that could be used. It's still a subjective opinion that deems them worthy measures or not. That's why I brought up IQNo one sat around and thought "what is intelligence? we need to come up with a metric that fits the definition of "intelligence"
Instead, many people collaboratively decided what qualities in a person a quotient like IQ would be MOST USEFUL to measure.

You should read the initial critical reviews of Ulysses, or Lolita. They say essentially what you say. And just like them, you opinion stands under the work in question. I dont understand why anybody would mistake citicism for anything more than slander. And im not against slander, but i like my slander honest, and not pedantic as if it could challenge the work.

If you're going to bring up the idea of 'use' in regards to art you introduce a new quality for objectivity in art depending on whatever art is used for. Making people passively feel emotions is one such use.

I think people get hung up on the wrong premises to argue about the quality of work. For example something as garbage as video game or Hollywood schlock is also art. It's not a high form of art but it is art nonetheless. You can't really disregard any mode of artistic expression as "totally not art", the argument should always pertain to what kind of art it is, then only can we focus on actually making substantial arguments about its true value.
Also anyone that says all art is subjective or there's no way of objectivity judging art is an anti intellectual faggot. There's a hierarchy of art and objective criteria of judging that art.

Well, most art is pretty useless. And their are pretty wide disagreements about what makes it good and bad. I don't see these differences being resolved.

Lets say we found your criteria, we discovered what would be 'MOST USEFUL to measure', in the way an IQ test finds criteria. Ignoring whatever these new criteria are, do you really expect the rest of humanity to agree with your new system? Religious conservatives, feral children, libertine sex addicts, sadists, communists, professional golfers, etc, etc. These people will continuing trust their other systems of judgement.

It would be an impressive act of cultural regulation if you could limit humanity to a single system of aesthetic judgement, and somehow erase all traces of past systems.

So think it, barring some very extraordinary cultural (or evolutionary?) events, there will be an ever growing plurality of aesthetic systems and naive personal judgments.

btw, I'd make the exact same arguments about morality. The only certain thing is that the nature of good and evil are highly disputed, and that no single system, no agreement has ever achieved universal social acceptance.

That's a dank Varg you got there.

>There's a hierarchy of art and objective criteria of judging that art.

You mean like the hierarchy of genres from the academic era? Which is funny because despite portrait being the second-highest genre in the hierarchy it is almost completely absent from art discussion threads.

>Ignoring whatever these new criteria are, do you really expect the rest of humanity to agree with your new system?
No, of course not. That certainly isn't the case with IQ. But if whether the entirety of humanity agrees with your proposition or not is your litmus test to determine the value of a proposed psychological system, metric, or theory is valuable or should be used, you'll simply never develop anything

Not all art is equal faggot and sometimes some art does come by that transcends the collective thinking and zeitgeist, people make mistakes and the objectivity can be questioned in these contexts but it's definitely not a regular thing and objectivity as a whole doesn't become superfluous.
I could literally make this same argument for every opinion you have, against your philosophies and logics I could use the outliners. You would never be able to think straight if you keep hanging on to this shitty misconception.

You mean here or in academia? I'd say in both places there aren't enough intelligent people that can actually talk about these things.

Not only does it destroy critical thinking, it destroys quite literally any possibility of a dialectic and rational discourse. See Aristotle's objection to Protagoras

>Not all art is equal faggot and sometimes some art does come by that transcends the collective thinking and zeitgeist

Then it gets forgotten

Yes, yes. All art that was criticized long ago, not deemed important and not discussed now is actually a hidden masterpiece. Here's what you should do champ, you should get into academia and start a movement with like minded individuals to find all the hidden gems and while people think you are finding stuff from the past, what you're actually going to be doing is changing the thinking of academics subconsciously. Once you've spread out enough pieces, you show everyone the whole picture, that every art is important, of value and equal. Can't fucking wait for the day where I can listen to obscure shitty music and read garbage fiction (by today's standards of course) and put it on the pedestal where every art is being held. If by some chance there isn't anything obscure to define as important art on that day, fuck it, I'll start creating my own. Can't wait for world and specifically academia to see the paper towels I paint with my semen as worthy art to be discussed and dissected.

>All art that was criticized long ago, not deemed important and not discussed now is actually a hidden masterpiece.

This doesn't seem to relate to what I was saying. Mind telling me why I should read the rest of the post?

You sound genuine butt blasted. Consider a glass of water.

Not an argument.

This. People here don't seem to understand that objectivity is not necessarily a thing in of itself, but is something a critique should strive towards. Subjectivity and objectivity are one and the same, both being insufficient tools for some totalizing project.

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Pragmatism, Learned Judgement, Scepticism.

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Your personal opinions are not in any manner completely unique because you have no personal sign system to qualify values that are somehow separated from the world. In fact the language you use to critique is outside of you always and is always in flux, the terms denoting shared meanings co-created in the production of critique.Therefore you're tastes are in many ways not yours alone and can be objectively predicted fairly accurately. But that doesn't mean we have complete access to the world or that we can know for certain what the ideal of the forms might be, to use the platonic conception of values.

Subjectivity is to be within the world, and objectivity is to understand that all is of this world, and so to be fair and accurate in judgements you end up striving towards some common understanding of value with those who you are in-common with. This is done with a relational subject that places itself within the largest inclusive group possible to its understanding of the objective world.

That's just the thing. Anyone with any education at all could have written the same things.

>Art isn't good or bad.

pathetic..

youtube.com/watch?v=SFcvOv9zAHg

>No, of course not. That certainly isn't the case with IQ. But if whether the entirety of humanity agrees with your proposition or not is your litmus test to determine the value of a proposed psychological system, metric, or theory is valuable or should be used, you'll simply never develop anything

You're twisting my argument. I'm all for people developing aesthetic and philosophical ideas, for finding criteria for judgement, for deciding what is good and bad, right and wrong, beautiful and obscene.

It's just that these criteria will always remain in dispute, people will always disagree, and a universal consensus will never be reached. This doesn't mean the practice isn't worthwhile, or useful, or fun, its just that any justification of such a system that bases itself in 'objectivity' isn't being honest about it's own subjective nature.

Once you realize that all artistic/moral/philosophical judgements are subjective, it becomes a matter of acknowleding the role that personal desires play in your own philosophy. Whether or not you want to affirm your own position as more important than other people's, because it is your own position and because you do believe it.

But it's always helpful to remember that if you were born in another time, another place, another body- you'd likely believe something entirely different than what you do believe.

pic related, mayan mask made from a human skull, turquoise and gold pyrite.

>t's just that these criteria will always remain in dispute, people will always disagree, and a universal consensus will never be reached.

You shouldn't ignore what I said. You're missing the point.

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As long as Art exists within the context of itself, meaning a piece of art is related to all known art we place it in context with, than in the same way, a single critique from an individual is made about some art and this exists within a context of all other known critiques. All these known critiques are a subjective striving towards an objective understanding of Art, and so there is a possibility that there is objective points about art that we all agree on - and if you can either pick those out or pick them out and dispel them, you'll be known as a genius or morally reprehensible.

Universal consensus will not be found in totality, for sure, but in cases where Art is meant to serve a purpose, to know how to employ techniques that have been judged for centuries to be the best possible technique for achieving a result - then you're going to want to use this learned judgement, then to look over the consensus with scepticism, and then precede with some pragmatic approach.

If you want to call that subjectivity, and you want to believe cave art or some neo-primitive art is equal to the Renaissance, you're an idiot. There is qualities within cave art that makes it beautiful, but that doesn't make it equal in beauty to even a picture on the internet.

you're replying to two different people, just in case you think I posted both of those.

>, a single critique from an individual is made about some art and this exists within a context of all other known critiques. All these known critiques are a subjective striving towards an objective understanding of Art, and so there is a possibility that there is objective points about art that we all agree on

I don't know this is how criticism works though. It doesn't often generate consensus, or anything approaching it.

Take two essays, Peter Halley's "The Crisis In Geometry" and Donald Judd's "Specific Objects". Both are about minimalist art, but they arrive at entirely different judgements. For Halley, minimalism is an expression of the industrialization/digitalization of society. For Judd, Minimalism is about pure form, mathematics and has no relation to society. I don't think you could call either an idiot, and any preference for one interpretation over the other is just that, a subjective preference.

>but in cases where Art is meant to serve a purpose, to know how to employ techniques that have been judged for centuries to be the best possible technique for achieving a result - then you're going to want to use this learned judgement, then to look over the consensus with scepticism, and then precede with some pragmatic approach.

But will the time tested techniques hold up? Painting might have been a great way to spread christianity 500 years ago, today I doubt it could be a useful vehicle for spreading that message. Today you'd want to make a rock and roll song, or maybe a snapchat post. Similarly, the old techniques of painting (stuff like egg tempera on plaster) isn't at all a good way to make a painting. It's heavy, it's brittle, it fades quickly, it requires toxic chemicals and raw eggs. Today, most painters are going to use acryllic paints, made from plastics, or maybe they'll use oils (but not with the same toxic chemicals used 100 years ago).

>If you want to call that subjectivity, and you want to believe cave art or some neo-primitive art is equal to the Renaissance, you're an idiot. There is qualities within cave art that makes it beautiful, but that doesn't make it equal in beauty to even a picture on the internet.

I do kind of like cave painting more than renaissance painting though... I'd certainly take assyrian stone reliefs over 1960s pop art. But some jihadi will want to blow up that assyrian relief. And some rich dude will spend millions on a warhol painting.

Regardless, 'being an idiot' shouldn't matter. In fact, that some people can 'be idiots' and prefer Katy Perry over Mozart just goes to show how subjective the judgement of art is.

>means that no criticism is valid
It always depends on the pre-agreed criteria, especially when it comes to singular elements. Plus there are generally promises being made and there is room to argue whether a work fulfilled them or not, how it didn't or it did and so on. Just because there is no objective good or bad art, doesn't mean you can't go full autism explaining why you think X is good.

>as the only worth something can have is that someone "likes" it
But that's irrelevant. It's the "why" that counts for criticism. Opinions like "I like it/I don't like it" are pretty much worthless.