Objective quality in purely subjective things

[Hygro]

This is an impossible topic for which my language faculties are useless.

But there is, meaningfully, better and worse art. Not in all ways and who knows why. 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. Better art by less technique, less effort, and less inspiration. It cannot be pinned down how, even if it can be helped and fostered, but ultimately, it just happens.

We have no way of interacting with art in a non subjective nature. Nor can it be broken down into constituent parts with definitely quality, merely a recognition that some things communicate more powerfully and meaningfully and Goodly than other things. Two 1-4-5 chord progressions based songs might result in one great chord progression and one boring one. There is no superior BPM.

Robots suggest music to us by mean regressions to categories and none of those categories are "good". If you only like the, what I am calling objectively better music in 4 genres in hopes it gives you the objectively good artist of a 5th related genre (already working within their world of "genres"), it will give you instead 4 mid but popular artists among those who also like your 4 preferred genres.

The educated will feel this tension between knowing objectively better purely subjective things exist, and knowing that they cannot exist, by definition.

How can we even talk about this stuff?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Just don't tell me that a high rating on Rotten Tomatoes is objective evidence of good quality.

 

[Narz]

How can we even talk about this stuff?

Dunno but good to try

 

[Narz]

Just don't tell me that a high rating on Rotten Tomatoes is objective evidence of good quality.

imdb is a better metric

 

[Valka D'Ur]

imdb is a better metric

Nope. I never let other people decide for me whether something is good or not. I'm not saying the site isn't interesting, but it's not something I'd use to decide if a show or movie is good.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Are we talking about Art art or any efforts by any type of artist that can be called art? Picasso, Titian, ee cummings, Isadora Duncan, Bob Dylan, Mozart, and Rodin, etc.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Art itself means different things to different people. I consider rap to be noise. Other people may be bored silly by Shakespeare, but I love Shakespeare. It's subjective.

 

[Bestbank Tiger]

You could poll a large, diverse group of people to rate a painting or sculpture or song. Then have a computer analyze the work and see what elements are common to the higher rated works.

 

[Narz]

Nope. I never let other people decide for me whether something is good or not. I'm not saying the site isn't interesting, but it's not something I'd use to decide if a show or movie is good.

I've liked movies with terrible reviews & hated ones with good reviews but if IMDB gives a movie 4 of 10 I generally will not bother to watch unless someone I know personally vouches for it, it's not that I trust the masses necessarily especially regarding what's good but if something is universally panned it's usually for good reason

 

[Bestbank Tiger]

I've liked movies with terrible reviews & hated ones with good reviews but if IMDB gives a movie 4 of 10 I generally will not bother to watch unless someone I know personally vouches for it, it's not that I trust the masses necessarily especially regarding what's good but if something is universally panned it's usually for good reason

I always thought a better way to do the ratings is "People who liked ________ also liked _________"

There might be a popular movie where I don't get the appeal, or a widely panned movie I enjoyed. But if I know that people who liked Trading Places liked a movie I haven't seen, I'm more interested in seeing the new movie.

 

[Hygro]

Art itself means different things to different people. I consider rap to be noise. Other people may be bored silly by Shakespeare, but I love Shakespeare. It's subjective.

It does different things to different people, but your examples just show how you have taste in certain categories regardless of their quality, and that high quality things are insufficient to override your categorical distaste.

I have some of that too, but I used to be that way really intensely.

 

[Hygro]

I always thought a better way to do the ratings is "People who liked ________ also liked _________"

It helps to an extent, but it's not enough. I'll make it really simple, too simple to work in practice but it makes the point.
You watch a great samurai movie. You click "like" and that's how the algorithm knows you.
You also like westerns.
But you only like great movies.

Some guy who loves samurai movies also likes this mediocre samurai movie.
The algorithm suggests that one. It's wrong, you hate it.

Some girl hates samurai movies. But she similarly only likes movies when they are great. She likes a great western film.
The algorithm doesn't suggest it to you.

 

[tjs282]

How can we even talk about this stuff?

Short and flippant answer is, wait 50 years, and then see what survived

 

[Gori the Grey]

One hundred used to be the standard. How everything is hurried up these days.

 

[amadeus]

I for one think Picasso SUCKS
art is totally subjective​

Dali is better​

whatever you think, that’s like

your opinion, man​

you do what you gotta do​

art should please yourself first​

 

[Hygro]

Short and flippant answer is, wait 50 years, and then see what survived

Yeah I mean, that validates it later. Generally. But... it happens at the speed of recognition, which can be instant.

 

[Gori the Grey]

It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound – that he will never get over it. That is to say, permanence in poetry as in love is perceived instantly. It hasn't to await the test of time. The proof of a poem is not that we have never forgotten it, but that we knew at sight that we never could forget it.

Robert Frost

 

[Hygro]

He was careful to include the word "right" in there. But I do believe his point is that it is good not just because the reader was right for it, but half of that equation is that somehow, magically, objectively, even if it could never be objective, actually good.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I always thought a better way to do the ratings is "People who liked ________ also liked _________"

There might be a popular movie where I don't get the appeal, or a widely panned movie I enjoyed. But if I know that people who liked Trading Places liked a movie I haven't seen, I'm more interested in seeing the new movie.

Sometimes I get some really odd YT recommendations. And sometimes I get some wonderful ones.

I'd never have been introduced to Wuauquikuna if not for my MLA's habit of never replying to FB posts and someone getting annoyed enough to post a link to Simon & Garfunkel's "Sound of Silence".

I clicked the link just on a whim, because I was in a terrible mood that day and music usually helps. I love that song, even though it's got depressing lyrics and I usually end up crying (partly from the mood and partly because it's a beautiful piece of music anyway).

But what happened next was a variety of other versions of the song popped up, so I tried the one played on a zither. I'd never heard zither music before, and it was nice. And then I noticed Wuauquikuna was playing it on panflutes and other instruments I'd never heard of.

"Blown. Away." doesn't begin to describe it. It's like the Yanni concert in 1994, at the Acropolis. It took less than a minute to get me hooked. Those two guys are medicine for a bad mood or a depressed mood, or just when a person is tense or anxious.

Some day I should thank my MLA for being such a horrible politician. Her arrogance made it possible for me to discover a whole new kind of music I'd never been into before (didn't dislike it; I just hadn't heard of it). And the sad thing is that she wouldn't even understand.

It does different things to different people, but your examples just show how you have taste in certain categories regardless of their quality, and that high quality things are insufficient to override your categorical distaste.

I have some of that too, but I used to be that way really intensely.

Don't mistake my love for Shakespeare as love for bad Shakespeare. I have a distaste for modern versions with modern settings, and so forth. In short, I despise that Leonardo DiCaprio crap, and I don't even like Branagh's abominable version of Hamlet. That was a disappointment, because he did such a wonderful job of Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing, but his Hamlet was terrible. Mel Gibson's Hamlet was much better.

The one exception I make is West Side Story. That's basically Romeo and Juliet set in the 1950s, in New York. The difference is that West Side Story is a masterpiece of musical theatre, and I worked on a production of it in the 1980s. Actually, I ran across one of the guys who was in that production just this morning on FB.

Okay, two exceptions. Red Green did a short skit that started out with, "Now is the winter of our discount tent..." as the skit took place in a forest in a tent, in the middle of winter.

Short and flippant answer is, wait 50 years, and then see what survived

The problem is that some of us in this thread won't be around in 50 years. I have my doubts that I'll live to the age of 110.

Robert Frost

Frost is one poet that most people are familiar with, even if they don't know they're familiar with him. Justin Trudeau quoted part of one of his best-known poems at Pierre Trudeau's funeral when he gave the eulogy. It was very apt.

Frost was on the English curriculum in my Grade 12 year.

 

[Hygro]

The 90s decaprio Shakespeare is an incredibly powerful great work of cinema.

But like I said, for some people if it’s outside your taste filter, greatness cannot overcome that. I wouldn’t ask you to identify great rap music let alone ask if you liked any of it.

Like for me, I won’t like all great works, and I won’t always recognize it even. Many of these things, like Shakespeare and most music genres, require a certain amount of training to perceive it as anything discernible.

But I have come to understand there’s like, a force that exists. A force of objective artistic greatness. And that force exists whether or not ones own preferences align.

I tried talking to chatgpt about it just to get a hint at what the averaged form of the total sum of online discourse can say about it, and … not much. It’s basically regarded as “there’s cultural values and subjective experience and popularity”… ok. Yeah, we know.