[Mister Underhill]

I was fortunate enough to find the Downs very early in my internet experience, and I’ve been hunkered here inside the barrow ever since.

Look. There are no rights or wrongs in this argument (please let's avoid the religious dimension just for the moment). And there's no pompous morality.

Quite, quite. I hope I don’t come off as aggressive in probing your system here (I don’t quite know what to call it; “the primacy of collective subjective evaluation”?). You just seem like quite an articulate fellow and I’m interested in finding out what you think. Therefore, even though folks are throwing down their weapons and surrendering left and right, I’ll press on with a few more questions.

The only way is to find, and be willing to accept, aesthetic conceptions that (by consensus, and knowing they may change) are not completely subservient to the individual. That somehow reflect a collective act of definition and aspiration. Once you have those, then you can fight against them, you can be snobbish or elitist, you can abuse or misuse them, you can do all the things that we do, but you DO become a stakeholder in the experience of art that goes beyond self-gratification.

In real life, don’t we have many, many different sets of consensus aesthetic conceptions, whether we like it or not? For anyone who takes up pen or paint brush or movie camera today, there are artistic establishments with which they must contend if there work is to be widely disseminated. And any student growing up in the world will receive indoctrination in some set of “what’s good for you” aesthetics, as well as “what’s popular” aesthetics. I’m a bit of a pragmatist myself, especially when things start getting really abstract. I don’t see why aligning yourself with the collective opinions of one (or several) schools of thought is more valuable than following your instincts on what you, individually and subjectively, like and admire.

After all, most of us have a concept of beauty, for example. If we deconstruct everything in the cold light of our individual subjectivity, then beauty and its bedfellows (including entertainment for its own sake) are simply irrelevant. It just becomes a narcissistic justification - "I like this so it is good. Why is it good? Because I like it". Once the deconstruction takes place, you can't put beauty back into the equation - "I like this better than that, because it's more beautiful. Why is it more beautiful? Because I like it more".

In practical application, my experience has been that people only need to engage in this sort of justification if the consensus evaluation of the group to which they subscribe conflicts with their own personal evaluation. “The group likes this so it is good. Why do I like this? Because the group likes this.” There’s no need to justify yourself if you’re guided by your own subjective evaluation. Who do you need to justify yourself to? You like what you like, with or without the seal of group approval.

I don’t mean to be flip – investigating the tastes of various schools of aesthetic thought can lead you to the Great Works of human achievement and many a fine artistic experience. And there certainly are fundamental, universal principles in any art form that tend to be required to make a work of art in that form at least satisfying. But attempting to codify a set of aesthetics for any given form is practically worthless, and at worst results in “formula”. Aristotle’s Poetics is a useful example. Aristotle correctly identifies certain essential elements of a drama – beginning, middle, and end – but his rules on what meter “must” be employed in a particular genre seem charmingly quaint today. Ray Bradbury keeps coming around lately for some reason, so I’ll open the door for him (here paraphrasing Oscar Wilde):

Art will fly if held too lightly,
Art will die if held too tightly,
Lightly, tightly, how do I know
Whether I’m holding or letting Art go?

I would submit that the best artists, and certainly the great innovators, do their work without reference to the collective aesthetic consensus of whatever time period, culture, social stratum, and art form in which they work. They listen to their own “voice”; they follow their own “heart”; they give primacy to their own subjective evaluation of what is good. Ray again:

I learned that I was right and everyone else wrong when I was nine.

I think a key here is that though art may be appreciated at a group level, it is created by individuals. Film is, of course, a special exception – which is probably why most films don’t rise to the level of high art. But even in film, the endeavor is usually guided by the aesthetic values of one predominant individual.

P.S. – Respect to all. Fischer, Karpov, Korchnoi, Tal – all worthy practitioners of the art. Aiwendil – sports cannot be compared to literature in the same way that a painting cannot meaningfully be compared to a great role-playing game experience. I would submit, however, that a great football game, for instance, far transcends the mere rules that govern play, just as a great RPG experience transcends its rules. The rules are simply form. Also, your prime requirement of a pleasurable experience is met. [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]