Beauty is the canonical example of a subjective criterion. There's even a well-known phrase about this you've probably heard: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder", a phrase so old and time-tested that it predates Christianity by several centuries.
It's hard to even make sense of what you're saying because you're using words in exactly the opposite manner that everyone else uses them and thus only offering up contradictions, which are by definition already false.
I disagree. Beauty is a transcendental attribute of being. As such, it is not contingent upon cultural diversity, religious doctrine, or personal ideology, but is an objective property of all that exists.
For one thing, it captured a place/era almost perfectly (as agreed by tons of people in that place/era - including fellow musicians).
Second, it has the height of maturity of what was considered the most important band of all time (and close to such as seen by both the critics and commercial success).
Third, it unarguably has considerable skill in several areas (melody, harmony, orchestration, playing, etc).
Fourth, it was largely influencial.
Fifth, most experts (critics, rock musicians, etc) agreed so for half a century.
Those things are enough to call it beautiful in mind book.
Just because we can't measure something (e.g. beauty here) with some technical instrument doesn't mean it doesn't exist, or people can't agree on it.
i was going for an explanation of how art and aesthetics are not purely subjective. and how one could arrive at the statement "semi-objective ranking". so im not arguing "Sgt. Pepper is beautiful" im arguing "there is objectivity in art therefore some art is better than other art" thus implying some form of objective "ranking". nonetheless, ill try to answer what makes something (in this case music) beautiful. there are many different explanations that converge on similar concepts/ideas.
in many traditions, ranging from Chinese philosophy to the ancient Greeks, beauty is associated with goodness, virtue, and truth. particularly of the Greeks, there was an emphasis on its relation to mathematics, namely proportion and symmetry. aesthetic considerations like symmetry/asymmetry, simplicity/complexity are utilized in mathematics, physics and cosmology to define truth (or lack thereof).
the Thomistic view is that:
A) beauty is a transcendental (a Platonic view)
and B)that there are 3 conditions:
1. integritas (wholeness, integrity, perfection)
2. consonatia (harmony and proportion)
3. claritas (radiance/clarity that makes apparent the form to the mind, analogous to processing fluency)
The definition of beauty thus converges on the idea that: something is beautiful when it is harmonious, complete, and clear. something beautiful is virtuous, good and true. you could also argue this as "in accordance with natural order" as the natural order is complete, clear, and harmonious (and thus beautiful). you could go further with this idea and argue that beauty is "of God" or "in accordance with God" or "in accordance with the Logos". but that is a different argument for a different time.
art is the field of human interest whose ideal is beauty. therefore, it follows that beautiful art is complete (has integrity, wholeness), is harmonious (perhaps in accordance with natural world i.e. proportions such as golden ratio, etc. this is not limiting), and is clear (the form is readily made apparent to the mind, i.e. high processing fluency, the information is easily processed)
Does Sgt. Pepper fit this criteria? Is it beautiful?
If you are saying beauty has some degree of objectivity because we share some common genetics that predisposes us to develop similarly, I understand what you're getting at, but it's still completely subjective.
Not quite what I'm saying. Beauty and goodness (being fundamentally identical) are attributes of objective reality. Subjectivity is the confusion of our limitations for the eternal truths of the universe. I hope this makes my position more clear.
I wouldn't say that I agree. I don't think a delusion of any sort is produced. If something is beautiful (which is objective), saying "it is ugly" does not make you ignorant so much as it makes you simply incorrect. Calling beauty ugly is equivalent to saying "truth is false", which i would argue is a "problematic" view to hold.
Can you make this more concrete for me? What are the concrete levels of objectivity as applied to the judgment of quality of musical albums? The thing about objectivity is you can define what you're talking about very precisely, i.e. "This angle on this triangle is 72 degrees" is an objective statement (subject only to measurement error). I'd love to see some similar statements about how we can make objective statements on the beauty or quality of music.
Sure. I replied to another comment with a longer explanation of the definition of beauty, i suggest you check it out and give me your thoughts.
to be brief, beauty is a transcendental. thus, it exists independently of the individual, and further, exists independently of the material universe. thus, a claim like "this angle is 72 degrees" does not have an analog in metaphysical space because the object does not exist in an empirically measurable space. think of it this way: can you measure beauty, truth, or goodness with calipers? the notion is ridiculous because these ideas exist in metaphysical space, not in a material space. the definition of beauty converges on the conditions of integrity, harmony, and clarity. Does the music have integrity? Is it complete and whole? Or is it incomplete? Is the harmonious (think about this in terms past musical theory...)? Is it proportional? Does it exhibit symmetry (imo this is not limiting)? Or does it sew discord and disharmony? Is it asymmetric and poorly proportioned? Is it clear? Is processing fluency (ease to which information is processed) high?
A more interesting question to ask is: is this music in accordance with natural/divine law?
So, you can get an objective statement on beauty by understanding beauty as true, good, and virtuous. It is objectively complete, harmonious, and clear. It is the ideal to which art strives. Therefore, when something is in accordance with the nature of beauty, we can say objectively it is beautiful. We can make an antithetical statement to this if something (say the music) is in discord with the nature of beauty.
This is an interesting point of view that I hadn't considered before. Thank you for making this argument. How do you square your ideas with musical genres like dubstep, likely not the best example but the one that springs to mind, that lack some or all of these features and are still beloved by a subset of the population?
Would the variance in taste not imply that beauty itself is subjective?
Thanks for the kind response. I would say that variance in taste or popularity does not imply beauty at all. Something can be popular but not beautiful. Just because something is popular does not make it beautiful. People liking lots of different things does not imply that all these things are beautiful or that beauty is subjective, relative or meaningless.
there does exist partial subjectivity in judging the aesthetics or beauty of art, but are not fully subjective in aesthetic judgment. beauty has levels of objectivity. as such, "good" or "beautiful" art exists, and "bad" or "ugly" art exists. ranking could naturally emerge from this distinction.
Art isn’t simply about aesthetics though. There is meaning, metaphor, context, intent, and all sorts of other nebulous characteristics that matter. This means that ugly art can still be good art.
philosophically, aesthetics is the study concerning the nature of beauty and taste. art is the field of human interest with beauty as its transcendental ideal. ugly art cannot be good art as beauty is what is good. metaphor, meaning, context, intent could be factors in the definition of beauty as it pertains to the art's integrity, harmony, and clarity.
>art is the field of human interest with beauty as its transcendental ideal.
I have no idea where this definition is coming from. I don't think many people would agree with it.
The most obvious counterexample that comes to mind is Picasso's Guernica[1]. It is one of the most renowned pieces of art of the 20th century. It is also ugly. There is no color. The characters are distorted in grotesque ways. It is too large, too chaotic, and almost confusing to look at. This is all intentional, it is after all a depiction of a war crime. It is a work of art that isn't meant to please its audience, it is meant to upset and challenge them. Is it bad art?
To your first point, would you argue art is not the field of human interest with beauty as its ideal? Would you argue art strives for ugliness? Art holds ugliness and "badness" as its ideal? I find that to be a very untenable position to hold.
"To produce the beautiful, art must imitate nature. Yet not every imitation of nature, merely because it is an imitation, is therefore beautiful, as realism pretends. The reality imitated by art must also be beautiful, or art must add to it the idea that will give it beauty." Br. Louis de Poissy
"Beauty and goodness in a thing are identical fundamentally; for they are based upon the same thing, namely, the form; and consequently goodness is praised as beauty." Summa Theologica P1 Q5
Guernica imitates reality as it is a depiction of a war crime. However, just because it is a depiction of reality, it does not mean that it is beautiful. Further, it does not depict the beautiful nor give it an idea that makes it beautiful. As you say, the grotesqueness, horror, and chaos depicted was intentional. You yourself say it is ugly, and I agree. Following Aquinas's thoughts above, if beauty and goodness is fundamentally identical, then it follows that the antithesis of beauty and goodness is also identical. Therefore, since this work of art is the antithesis of beauty (ugliness, as you yourself say), it is also bad art, not to mention that the bad is not praised as the beautiful. I hope this answers your question.
>To your first point, would you argue art is not the field of human interest with beauty as its ideal? Would you argue art strives for ugliness? Art holds ugliness and "badness" as its ideal? I find that to be a very untenable position to hold.
Originally maybe, which may be why your quotes are so old. There are certainly some segments of the art community that put beauty as the ultimate ideal. If you are looking for decorative art to display in your home, you probably want something that is nice to look at. However I believe since the modernist movement the ideal has shifted to be more about eliciting an emotional reaction. Sometimes the emotions that an artists wishes to evoke are negative in which case ugly or upsetting imagery might be more appropriate.
>Therefore, since this work of art is the antithesis of beauty (ugliness, as you yourself say), it is also bad art
I really don't think you are going to get many art critics to agree with a "Guernica is bad, actually" take.
>However I believe since the modernist movement the ideal has shifted to be more about eliciting an emotional reaction
That does not mean that what they produce cannot be ugly or bad.
>I really don't think you are going to get many art critics to agree with a "Guernica is bad, actually" take.
...Okay? Does the existence dissenting opinion mean that I am incorrect? Let's say my claim about Guernica is true. It is indeed ugly and bad art (remember, this is objective). Art critics saying "No, Guernica is beautiful and good" essentially say "the truth is false". So, if Guernica is indeed the antithesis of beauty, it matters little what dissenting art critics say, as they are incorrect in stating that something is not what it actually is.
You can get small raspberry pi based seismographs from https://raspberryshake.org/ ... could be interesting to integrate it with a small alarms or web/mobile apps that go off when it detects p-wave/s-wave arrivals with amplitudes above a user-specified threshold (so its not going off every day with smaller/distant events that are not felt by humans at the measurement location)
