On Jun 27, 2010, at 11:12 AM, [email protected] wrote: > His line, "Good art weathers the ages because once in so often a man of > intelligence commands the mass to adore it," actually does apply to a narrow > stratum of sheep-like would-be intelligentsia all of whose opinions are > adopted verbatim from a convinced, forceful "authority". Smarter people cannot > like something simply because someone has told them to, and less > sophisticated people simply don't care about "good art".
I am sure everyone of us has had the Eureka moment in our youth when we push back against intellectual authority, and I am confident it happens when we realize that our own judgment doesn't square with what some authority or teacher or such has told us. "He says that this is great, but I don't like it/see it/agree with him." Formerly, I might have said, "Can you explain, because I cannot make the same connections and reach your conclusion." Of course, that's my grown-up language; I'd probably say, "What? I don't get it," and my expectation would be that the teacher was right and I was deficient in my understanding. But at some later point, I'd say, "Naw, I don't agree," which would be the moment I began to develop independent judgment. What you're describing above is closer to fashion than to judgments of taste and quality. Fashion comes and goes, and has two striking properties: one is that it tends to level all elements and range of quality and raise novelty to a high rank; and the other is to depend heavily on trendsetters (the "man of intelligence who commands"). ---------------------- We all accept the working premise that the remains of ancient art are representatively distributed across the range of quality. The best of the ancient Greek or Sumerian or Chinese art are in fact the best. WE rely on the probability that all degrees of quality are represented in the total body of works that have come down to us. Thus, our evaluations of old art are based on a subset of works of high quality, as we judge them. What if there were qualitatively better works, but all of them perished, none survived, so that the outstanding examples we know of are more like B+ efforts compared to the best of the period? Would that change anything in our evaluation? | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
