Objective quality in purely subjective things

[Farm Boy]

The inevitable degeneration of all systems regardless of type or mode into chaos without energy from outside the system.

 

[Angst]

The inevitable degeneration of all systems regardless of type or mode into chaos without energy from outside the system.

i know what entropy means lol. you want to apply it to aesthetics, so if i mistook your take, you are free to elaborate

 

[Hygro]

Yeah I'm a little confused too, semantically.

 

[Farm Boy]

We're triggering a discrete and intentional resonance of emotion(which itself is chemical balances and electrical dances across meat stages when you get down to it really) through the use of aesthetics, right? This emotional synchronization is the result of sucessfully communicating an idea that the viewer at least shares enough reference to understand. I am feeling this to be the opposite of the universal trend towards disorder. Misunderstanding. Randomness. Art(music/photos/whatever) are often described as "moving" when they're particularly powerful. I'd guess less powerful art is still "nudging," and there are many things everyone passes by in a day that their mental attention span simply filters out.

To this extent, I'd guess popularity of a piece of art is suggestive that it stumbles across an objective thing that people experience. That they should be so moved. Seeing as moving requires effort, the Newtonian default is to be unmoved. Then we need to tease out when something's popularity is grand enough that the default of being unmoved changes to a default of being swept along by the momentum of the path of least resistance, at least until that social current slows.

 

[Angst]

We're triggering a discrete and intentional resonance of emotion(which itself is chemical balances and electrical dances across meat stages when you get down to it really) through the use of aesthetics, right? This emotional synchronization is the result of sucessfully communicating an idea that the viewer at least shares enough reference to understand. I am feeling this to be the opposite of the universal trend towards disorder. Misunderstanding. Randomness. Art(music/photos/whatever) are often described as "moving" when they're particularly powerful. I'd guess less powerful art is still "nudging," and there are many things everyone passes by in a day that their mental attention span simply filters out.

To this extent, I'd guess popularity of a piece of art is suggestive that it stumbles across an objective thing that people experience. That they should be so moved. Seeing as moving requires effort, the Newtonian default is to be unmoved. Then we need to tease out when something's popularity is grand enough that the default of being unmoved changes to a default of being swept along by the momentum of the path of least resistance, at least until that social current slows.

alright so you're trying to science juice.

using a frame of reference to experience something has absolutely nothing to do with entropy as you describe it. i can literally not fathom the connection.

i've taken a few passes at what you're trying to say, because it's bluntly buck wild - it's not because your language is unclear, but because of... yea. - anyways, ok, so - you're saying that because of entropy, we can't engage with art through a reference of framing. none of the two have any whatsoever to do with each other*. it's especially confusing from you, since studying art is so chaotic from the scientific perspective you're appealing to.

like, it doesn't even compute with whatever you think entropy is. framing the same thing** with different genres, genres that sometimes change even, is the very core reason there's indeed a lot of what i think you believe is misunderstanding and randomness. (to the aesthetician, it's neither; the reality of the experience isn't innately important, and may only become a question down the line.) like, how can you look at this and think such an approachs tends away from a state of disorder, when you use this train of thought?

bluntly, it's like saying that because of entropy, i can't sit down in my chair. no, i'm serious. we're not at the heat death of the universe yet. i can sit down and remain reasonably still. and then i get up again...

*as for chemical balances and such, as i noted earlier in the thread, we may figure a scientific formula for "art" out someday, but in spite of some wacky headliners i assure you all attempts so far are completely bonkers.

**yes, art most often involves a material, however if you deal with the subject matter seriously, you'll soon realize the lack of universality sprouting from the material itself. this is why serious scholars today moreso deal with why people like something, rather than why they should like something. what good aestheticians do is basically to generalize about tastes within their contexts, and then make prescriptive writings about that. i have no clue why you'd think such a thing runs contrary to a state of disorder. both tastes and contexts change.

 

[Farm Boy]

As as far as social entropy goes, I read your first sentence. I may come back later! Probably not.

 

[Angst]

sure. if i understand what you're talking about, you don't seem to understand what i'm (or we're) talking about. i don't want to mince words here, your notion of it is all over the place.

i am asking some of my science friends about entropy within the next few days, to see if there's anything missing. i've encountered it in statistics and material and all sorts of things, but your idea that genre framing is stable (it isn't) and therefore breaks physics is kind of bonkers.

 

[Farm Boy]

Why would art or framing or music beat/break entropy merely because it acts against it? Self reinforcing systems are more likely to persist over long durations. It doesn't mean they're perpetual motion or something.

Bear in mind, I let the rest of post #125 die on the vine. I've not read it. So if you're now referencing something there, I'm only guessing at what it would be.

 

[Kyriakos]

I also don't see the tie to entropy. Humans don't operate as a miniature heat-death of the universe; that is alone a trait of the universe.
You can obviously organize in various ways, and organizing in more in no way means that your self-implosion (ala heat death) comes closer.

 

[Farm Boy]

Stop feeding a human oxygen and see what happens to the systems? This one is cooked into everything.

 

[Kyriakos]

Oxygen is something that comes from outside. It's not something that forms in your mind from something from outside.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Perhaps he is talking about two kinds of entropy: Physics and cultural. Cultural entropy might be the idea that over time "narrow" and "hard" standards and values get diluted and weakened as new ideas and values get integrated into a culture. We see the breakdown of language standards over time as former banned words make it into everyday media. We see it dress standards as more and more people accept nudity as part of how it is part of life. If entropy is a dissipation or dilution of something, then it might be applicable to art.

 

[Kyriakos]

Angst touched upon that. Personally I don't see it - it's way too theoretical. If anything, one would expect notions to ever multiply, not risk to be diminished if thought of too much/in too many ways.

 

[Gori the Grey]

The whole thread is way too theoretical. We need a concrete case.

Since rap is out, well, we have at least two participants in the thread that take writing prose fiction seriously. And so if the opinions of practitioners in a particular art form hold special weight, we have @Valka D'Ur and @Kyriakos to testify.

How about a short story?

I'll float "Samsa in Love" by Haruki Murakami. New Yorker's got it available for viewing on line (the Eng trans anyway).

Even better than that would be something that fits H-dog's original description: something where you can notice the impact of craft (my word for objective), but also feel a magic that's more than the sum of its parts (my word for subjective). I'll go fetch his actual description; here I'm working from my memory.

Here we go:

You can have better technique, labor harder, and have all the inspiration and probably will make superior art, but sometimes make inferior art to a piece made by less of all those things.

Who has a concrete recent instance of this they could share?

 

[Farm Boy]

Cultural energy comes from the human interacting with and influencing other humans. Literally from the meat sack fueled by the oxygen energy from outside.

Much cultural energy is created, all the time, new mixed into old. Much is lost, all the time. To forgetfulness, to age, to death.

Edit: but yeah, that's a better idea, G

 

[Gori the Grey]

I think H was speaking as a producer: how come sometimes you can put in a lot of effort, to very exacting standards of craft, and the result doesn't come together as fully as another thing that's just "inspired"?

So the very best test case would be two pieces, produced by one of us, so the artist him/herself could speak to what went into each, one that falls into each of those two categories.

Maybe I could dig up some of my limericks that illustrate one or the other of those. In fact I'm going to do just that.

Ok, here's a limerick that got as many likes as I can remember any one getting, plus a special note from Sommer. So. critical acclaim:

Two places for flies are most fit.
In a month we will know which is it.
A corpse is the worst.
If it isn't the first,
Then it's only a pile of [bleep].

It was about the fly landing on Mike Pence during one of his debates and him not noticing.

Here's the previous limerick I'd written. It only got two likes:

"Well, Sir, you're the President now;
Give us something so we can say how
You yourself also pay
Toward the U S of A!"
"Well . . . okay . . . Make it less than an thou."

That was when it came out that, in his first year as president, Trump paid, like $900 in taxes. This is imagining the discussion he had with an advisor that led to that: him paying anything at all only under duress, and being such a miser that even to convince people of his patriotism, he couldn't bear to part with more than a thousand dollars.

The first one was more directly nasty than I usually let myself be. The situation it concerned was more absurd, and the form is well suited to registering absurdities. In retrospect, I guess what's good about the first one is the aspect of reality on which its logic is based. It is true that there are two main places flies gravitate, and each of them is an insult to a politician: wooden like a corpse or full of crap. (and both are charges against Pence specifically).

I think it probably is fair to say that I loosened my technical standard for the first one. The real expression is "which it is," and I don't usually let myself alter the phrasing of a fixed phrase just to meet the demands of rhyme, as I did here, unless the new phrase is funny/appropriate in its own regard, which this isn't. There was a stretch when I would let sloppy limericks out the door here, let me confess. I wouldn't say the first one falls fully into that category. I guess I'd have to track down one that did. The internal rhyme of "okay" makes the second one a little better on that count.

So, on reflection, I think this probably qualifies as an illustration of the principle described in the OP.

 

[Angst]

so bluntly, from what i can tell, i was part of misdirecting the thread; the core question is why inspiration can often lead to material criteria with a often better reception than material without?

the following is very quickly written and will need rephrasing.

if it's the case, as i'm lucky to also create besides having studied it, it's often because you can intuitively hear where something is "supposed" to go, and also when to break with genre framing. there's two functions here. during a process of inspiration, you're often in the mode yourself before and during material creation. you can pretty much just intuit where it's supposed to go. also, inspiration also often leads to genre breaks. when engaging with material, people rarely use just one framework to begin with. part of the complication is that people have tastes, but they also like to be surprised. so engaging in formal structures in a material is one part, but being surprised, challenged, etc, in the particular engagement having your framing "vibrate" if that makes sense, is also part of the engagement. codexes on style are often very rigid, and they give you the framework which you can then explicitly apply, but it doesn't mean you can't enjoy the instability of challenge and surprise (when other genres you know are invoked or when you have no framework to engage with whatsoever). some framings are purely made out of the former (muzak and educational composition assignments), and some purely out of the latter (avantgarde)

think of opening a present - something i think about a lot because i don't much like it - the two sole genre framings there is that it's gonna be hidden, and that the opened part has some kind of significance, but the actual instability of the material involved - the present can be anything - is completely nuts. still, the whole ritual is quite restricted as a process compared to many other practices we do.

 

[Kyriakos]

There's a nice story by Level, about a person who visited all dangerous circus acts, not out of interest but because he expected someone to die during the show.
The twist is that the entertainer dies because he ironically relied on that dangerous audience member as a point to focus on during his act - and then revealed this to the insane person.
It's part of the "conte cruel" motifs, but still required an elegant idea; you don't typically expect the bluebeard to be relegated to audience member.

 

[aelf]

We're triggering a discrete and intentional resonance of emotion(which itself is chemical balances and electrical dances across meat stages when you get down to it really) through the use of aesthetics, right? This emotional synchronization is the result of sucessfully communicating an idea that the viewer at least shares enough reference to understand. I am feeling this to be the opposite of the universal trend towards disorder. Misunderstanding. Randomness. Art(music/photos/whatever) are often described as "moving" when they're particularly powerful. I'd guess less powerful art is still "nudging," and there are many things everyone passes by in a day that their mental attention span simply filters out.

To this extent, I'd guess popularity of a piece of art is suggestive that it stumbles across an objective thing that people experience. That they should be so moved. Seeing as moving requires effort, the Newtonian default is to be unmoved. Then we need to tease out when something's popularity is grand enough that the default of being unmoved changes to a default of being swept along by the momentum of the path of least resistance, at least until that social current slows.

i've taken a few passes at what you're trying to say, because it's bluntly buck wild - it's not because your language is unclear, but because of... yea. - anyways, ok, so - you're saying that because of entropy, we can't engage with art through a reference of framing. none of the two have any whatsoever to do with each other*. it's especially confusing from you, since studying art is so chaotic from the scientific perspective you're appealing to.

I have a feeling FB is trying to make some case for art having a unifying effect in a time of (political and social) disorder. Though I can't really think of any time - at least any significant length of time - without (political and social) disorder. Might be a particular post-pax Americana American perspective.

The whole thread is way too theoretical. We need a concrete case.

Here's one that touches on something that I think hasn't been delved into in this thread.

A case against objectivity in art can be found in cultural frames of reference. For example, traditional Chinese art can be difficult to appreciate outside of the particular cultural frame of reference. Traditional Chinese art is full of cultural symbolism, and viewed from a Western perspective (or Western-adjacent ones like Japanese - partly by chance, not just because of cultural diffusion), it might appear repetitive, unoriginal, and garish.

An example:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/水陆画宝宁寺_右第七_迦力迦尊者_佛陀罗尊者_罗汉.jpg

 

[Farm Boy]

It does have a unifying effect. But not at only one time, and probably not one that is particularly political for any specific reason?

Unify might not be the right word tho. I like synch better. It doesn't need to be cooperative, right?

Oxygen is something that comes from outside. It's not something that forms in your mind from something from outside.

Sometimes what looks like two trees is actually one tree which has been shorn off and is regrowing in the form of multiple shoots from a common root.

The something outside shares a common something inside.