Imago Aesthetic has written:
>"our age is no different than any other, in its willingness to
investigate the nuts and bolts, as you put it, of artistic phenomena."
First -- I am doubting that Aristotle's approach was any more characteristic
of 4th C. Greece than Alberti was of 15th C. Italy -- even if we now consider
them the most important intellectuals of their day.
Consider the difference between Aristotle's day, with a few hundred idle
young aristocrats attending lectures in the Lyceum -- and today's university
system with branches in every urban center as it qualifies practitioners for
every human profession except fortune-telling and prostitution.
Second -- each of them were investigating a single style (or, in the case of
Aristotle's Poetics, a single playwright) -- whereas today our scope of
"artistic phenomena" is so broad that William tells us that "pictorial space
means make-believe space suggested on a flat surface" -- which could be
anything from a blank white canvas to Raphael's "School of Athens")
Times have changed, Mr. Aesthetic -- and if you would like to present some
"measurable and definable truths " regarding the artistic phenomena available
to us today -- please do so.
----------------
Aristotle's _Poetics_ is an early version of this (not to mention his
_Rhetoric_ and _Homeric Questions_. The entirety of the Italian Renaissance
is premised on the idea that if one master's technique, which involved the
codification of ways of structuring pictoral space through geometry and
perspective, one achieves the standards of fine art.
We could indefinitely continue such a list. But what would be the point? For
you have recently taken up the tactic of merely rejecting, with preposterous
statements like X is too ugly for me to contemplate (a fine, philistine
attitude, which closes down aesthetics entirely), the good natured attempts of
other people to respond to your initial demand for measurable and definable
truths -- as if truth itself were subordinated to your personal, and equally
undefined and immeasurable standards of judgment (I'm surprised that Cheerskep
didn't notice that). The problem, Mr Miller, is that you mistake the truth of
a claim, which can be measured and defined, with Truth itself.
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