Mando, no one in this dispute will get kicked off the forum. Frances was never kicked off when she repeatedly took the position that if a bevy of "experts" "deemed" a given work to "be art", it thereby WAS art.
William's position on the precedence due the "judgment" of learned art historians and critics is as arbitrary and vacuous as Frances's was. There is in the ASA forum's archive an abundance of effective rebuttal of Frances's position, and all of it applies to William's current stance. It's understandable that William should be vexed at seeing others, not nearly so learned as he, reverence their own opinion more than they do his, but the history of aesthetics is stained by how often "experts' judgments" have been disdained by later experts as the "objective" standards on which the earlier experts based their judgments were shown to be not just arbitrary but sterile. In my current field, theater, there have been "objective" standards such as the rules for a "well-made play" that have come to be seen as inapplicable to what makes a theatrical work prizable by many of us. I agree with Miller when he rejects similar allegedly objective citations by William of, say, criteria for compositional excellence, that William evidently feels in some way "proves" Titian's "Diana and Callisto" is above reproach by others less learned than he. Titian, at his best, like Picasso, Shakespeare, Beethoven et al, is unsurpassed, but they all, like Homer, have nodded. It does not take a learnedness comparable to William's for laymen justifiably to claim that something does not work for them. William wants Miller to cite his published papers etc that give Miller the right to have an honorable opinion. That strikes me as nonsense. I wrote the only book ever issued about the craft of editing fiction. The idea of my wife, because she never wrote a line on the subject, not being entitled or able to utter a worthy editorial opinion strikes me as ludicrous in the extreme. I've never known a better sensibility than hers for reacting to fiction. I feel William is wrong is to say that you, Mando, and Miller, and I, and, I'd guess, others on the forum, are simply not entitled to say Titian's 'D&C' is wanting. I have never seen a learned disquisition lead me to have (my own criterion/standard) an "aesthetic experience" where there wasn't one without the disquisition. I myself feel only disappointment at Titian's rendering of the prone Callisto in that painting, and surely that is a key element. No one's argument that I SHOULD approve that rendering will change my response. ************** Worried about job security? Check out the 5 safest jobs in a recession. (http://jobs.aol.com/gallery/growing-job-industries?ncid=emlcntuscare00000003)
