Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Here's a standard for what is Good in Art. Or not::

Warning: tough thinking ahead!

Good art has lots and lots of logical, textual, emotional and cultural interconnections: both internal, within itself, and external, to all of our experiences and to the world around us. The connections enable us to enjoy resonating multiples of meaning. Good Taste in the viewer is (in part) the ability to perceive and experience many of these interconnections.

The reason there is also "no such thing as good taste" in art is that anyone who falls in love with something and experiences it over and over eventually finds an enormous amount of interconnection in it, and deeply enjoys, let's say, the simple woven basket better than I can appreciate Mahler's 9th symphony. If I spent hundreds of hours viewing a single painting, say, Christina's World, always finding new things in it, relating it to my moods, current events, and a philosophy of life, you would have to say I'm having a complex, deeply artistic experience. An experienced reader of, say, James Joyce is unlikely to have a more complex or more satisfying artistic experience than that; even though the novel she reads displays such depth of interconnection on its surface.

The person who experiences some art HAS to bring the connection-making ability to it; Joyce may provide more to work with, but the viewer of any sort of art may bring a nearly infinite connection-making ability to it. Since the list of possible connections is so great, no artwork can be certain to offer a deeper experience than any another.

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