What Is Art!? (Baby Don't Hurt Me...)

Not Games
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As I am wont to do.

Have I talked recently about the elegance of the dozenal system?

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Some thoughts:

Logic is not subjective because it is not something that humans invented - it is something we describe as we discover it. It was true before we understood it. It is universally true. You can hate that 3 doesn’t evenly divide into 10 (I very much do), but my discomfort doesn’t change reality.

However, art is subjective because it is something humans invented. Beauty and aesthetics exist naturally, but humans create art. As our creation, we can choose to define it however we wish - it has no meaning until we give it meaning. It’s a category of works that we defined. We could decide that ‘art’ is a useless concept altogether and just say ‘pretty things are good’, cutting down the arbitrary seperation between the sunset and the acrylic interpretation.

I’d say that buttoning down a useful definition of art would be great if we could agree on it. Too bad that’s not likely. Definitions that are too rigid exclude things that many humans already value as art. Definitions that are too broad are considered too vague to exclude that which most humans do not consider art.

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There’s a difference between saying that something is “art,” meaning that it has artistic merit, and saying something is “art,” meaning that it’s a certain kind of thing. If classical musicians think hip-hop is bad art, or hip-hop musicians think classical music is bad art, that certainly reflects their perceptions—though I think it would be more honest in either case to say “I can’t judge that,” which is what I say about jazz, for the most part. But if they are saying that “music” is not the kind of thing it is, I think either one would be objectively wrong. Bad music is bad music.

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So the answer is 42?

Give me 5 million years and I’ll find out what the question was.

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We agree here, but you would be surprised (or maybe not) how much “THAT IS NOT ART” is thrown around in a community that features a major music school and a large art department. It’s not just by students either. I’ve been told that my art isn’t art specifically because I don’t create it to sell it and because I didn’t go to school for it, which are evidently important aspects of the definition of art to some.

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I would point out that what I said was this:

I’m a professional copy editor, AND I read philosophy for pleasure; both have given me a very strong attachment to high precision in the use of language, and a very strong sense of the errors in thinking that can result from its careless use. That’s where I’m coming from in this.

There is in this no claim to authority or prestige. Rather, I’m describing the distinctive elements in my life history that have shaped my motivation in certain ways. I didn’t even suggest “and therefore you must believe that what I say is correct.” I was explaining why I care about certain things.

I really don’t think that there is any such thing as authority in intellectual matters. There’s only logic and evidence.

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Conversely, long ago, I was a tutor at a community college. Among other things, I tutored English courses. And one day one of the instructors came in and sounded off about how terrible science fiction was, and how it didn’t count as literature because people just wrote it for money; apparently making money made something not count as art.

(I asked him how he felt about Dostoyevski frantically scribbling novels to stay ahead of his gambling debts. As you see, my affection for striking counterexamples goes way back.)

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What??! Whaaaat??!!! These people are entitled to their opinion, but dang that’s some gatekeeping right there if I ever saw it.

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I think I would have hated all of them.

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You have no idea. It could be funny if it weren’t so completely sad and obviously driven by insecurity (not about “comparative” quality of my art, but of their security with their own).

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I have no doubt that you believe that, and actually I agree with you, except for the bit about divisibility (I have a close personal relationship with the first hundred integers). But it’s not an uncontroversial position in philosophy. Ayn Rand, who got it from Aristotle, has been dismissed by many academic philosophers partly for her adherence to it. Anglo-American philosophy largely derives from David Hume (among other things, the first modern philosopher of science); and Hume made a sharp distinction between Relations of Ideas and Matters of Fact. In his view, Matters of Fact come from the senses, and logic can never prevent us from supposing that they might be otherwise; Relations of Ideas operate under logical principles such as noncontradiction, but have nothing to do with what we observe, being purely conventions of our language. That seems to be very nearly the opposite of your view (and mine). Rand believed that everything that exists is subject to logic; Hume believed that logic was purely a matter of how our minds worked—which might be what you are calling “subjective.”

Not everything that humans invent is subjective. Humans invented cooking, but certain methods of cooking will make things inedible or indigestible, and cooking certain things will kill you. Humans invented civil engineering, but you have to build bridges in certain specific ways or they fall down.

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I’m afraid I can’t guess what “them” refers to here. All of what?

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Haughty professors.

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Okay, gotcha.

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But how do you know that I live in a culture that counts in base 10? It’s a logical assumption I grant you, but I might not be this slightly drunk lout with an interest in structuralism banking away at his keyboard when he really should be going to bed. I could be a fanatical devotee of John Conway or indeed Seed-brother Violet-μ-ØBΔ who’s tapped into the underwater data cable that runs near to the flumepod that we inhabit.

Anyway the point I think I was trying to make is that to discuss anything successfully we need to agree on an Axiomatic frame of reference (ie that we’re both counting in Base10) and if we don’t then it’s likely we will never agree because fundamentally we don’t understand the other’s position. Instead what tends to happen is that we end up shouting at each other which I think is axiomatically ‘a bad thing’.

Come, come my dear fellow, everyone knows that the most efficient way to count is Base e!

It actually is…

…because Base e has the best Radix Economy of all.

Radix economy - Wikipedia

It’s basically how efficiently you can use a set of symbols to give you any number you want. This is why the Russian spent a lot of time trying and failing to build a computer that worked on Ternary rather than Binary, but that’s another story.

Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead spent several hundred pages of The Principia Mathematica, their three volume work on the foundations of mathematics, trying to validate that 1+1=2. They failed, so don’t give up hope on the 3s and 10s thing. :grinning:

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Well, I could give you a detailed analysis of what I think on the matter, if you’d like me to take the question seriously. I’m afraid I can’t offer a clever joke to top yours, if you’re making a joke (as I suppose you probably are) . . .

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When the flush of a newborn sun fell first on Eden’s green and gold,
Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mold;
And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart,
Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves: “It’s pretty, but is it Art?”

Wherefore he called to his wife and fled to fashion his work anew—
The first of his race who cared a fig for the first, most dread review;
And he left his lore to the use of his sons—and that was a glorious gain
When the Devil chuckled: “Is it Art?” in the ear of the branded Cain.

They builded a tower to shiver the sky and wrench the stars apart,
Till the Devil grunted behind the bricks: “It’s striking, but is it Art?”
The stone was dropped by the quarry-side, and the idle derrick swung,
While each man talked of the aims of art, and each in an alien tongue.

They fought and they talked in the north and the south, they talked and they fought in the west,
Till the waters rose on the jabbering land, and the poor Red Clay had rest—
Had rest till the dank blank-canvas dawn when the dove was preened to start,
And the Devil bubbled below the keel: “It’s human, but is it Art?”

The tale is old as the Eden Tree—as new as the new-cut tooth—
For each man knows ere his lip-thatch grows he is master of Art and Truth;
And each man hears as the twilight nears, to the beat of his dying heart,
The Devil drum on the darkened pane: “You did it, but was it Art?”

We have learned to whittle the Eden Tree to the shape of a surplice-peg,
We have learned to bottle our parents twain in the yolk of an addled egg,
We know that the tail must wag the dog, as the horse is drawn by the cart;
But the Devil whoops, as he whooped of old: “It’s clever, but is it Art?”

When the flicker of London’s sun falls faint on the club-room’s green and gold,
The sons of Adam sit them down and scratch with their pens in the mold—
They scratch with their pens in the mold of their graves, and the ink and the anguish start
When the Devil mutters behind the leaves: “It’s pretty, but is it art?”

Now, if we could win to the Eden Tree where the four great rivers flow,
And the wreath of Eve is red on the turf as she left it long ago,
And if we could come when the sentry slept, and softly scurry through,
By the favor of God we might know as much—as our father Adam knew.

— Rudyard Kipling

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Well, I think we can all agree here. This is nice, but it’s not art.

(I joke, I joke)

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There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
And every single one of them is art.

(also Rudyard Kipling)

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So are you contradicting your previous statement that 4’33" isn’t music?