On the topic of excellence and achievement I realize very well that the two terms are usually conflated in common usage. Miller cannot be faulted for relying on that unexamined usage to support his argument that the terms can be mixed.
I was trying, rather clumsily I admit, to argue that excellence is not transferable as a salient quality. Thus, whatever is said to be excellent is uniquely excellent in a specific sense. If Shakespeare's Hamlet is judged excellent, it cannot be the selfsame excellence attributed to his Macbeth. I also argued that achievement can be transferable and can be determined by standards or measures independent of anything said to represent an achievement. Is that too dense? Something may be judged to be both excellent and an achievement, or not excellent and yet an achievement, or neither excellent nor an achievement, depending of the standards set for achievement. If sonny learns to plunk his way through a Brahms lulaby at age 6 it may be a fine achievement. But only a teary parent would likely say it was "excellent". However, if sonny grows up to be a fine pianist, he may play a particular Brahms piece with excellence one day, even if he has not achieved reknown. Each excellence is a singularity and therefore cannot be measured (except by metaphor or analogy, both of which are inexact and fanciful modes of correspondence). We experience excellence as we experience beauty; they are the same. I would like to claim excellence as something extremely rare, perhaps it is the condition or experience of Beauty itself, a unique fusion of self with form and the natural caprice of life -- as Frederick Schiller (1795) suggested -- whereas achievement is something can be predetermined, abstracted, formulated, like a goal. The football star may run the ball to the goal, an achievement prescribed and measured by the rules of the game, but his achievement may or may not have been an "excellent" display. When Miller conflates the two terms by reference to the Academy Manner, he employs the common error of the Academy system. Isn't it all but universally agreed that the Academy Manner (the State Academies of the 18-19C) trained mostly hack, redundant, formulaic artists? The few geniuses who rose above the academy system prescriptions/proscriptions demonstrated inimitable, unrepeatable excellence in powerful, demanding artworks that still move us (one example: David's Death of Socrates or his first Death of Marat, or Delacroix's Massacre at Chios). I happen to like Manship's sculpture but it's too decorative to be great art. For him the style makes the image but the image does not seem necessary to the style. I also agree that that this difference is difficult and subtle, like the difference between J. Gris' early cubism and Picasso's early cubism. One of my favorite public sculptures in Chicago is Borglum's bronze General Sheridan. I experience excellence in viewing it. However it's not much of an achievement, either as a late work in the Beaux Arts tradition, or in scale, and in fact it may have been finished by his son. WC
