YES. But that does not mean any judgment is going to stick. Judgment is a subjective valuing and the way it is articulated may actually become part of the artwork's larger context. Thus when we "see" the artwork we also recreate the judgments we know about and then fashion our own in that larger context. In this way everyone who looks at a well-known artwork is refashioning all that he or she knows about it.
I'm not going to bother reading the article because I know it's about the populist choice of the contest in Michigan, the one with the big money prize. My thought about that is that the artworks are/were made to illustrate a populist taste and the one that captures the widest taste of the populist voters wins. That means it will be the work that is most generalized as exemplifying to most commonplace aesthetic values. As Melamid and Komar discovered years ago in their professionally run poll, the most loved artwork is realistic, blueish water/landscape, has some historical people, a tame animal or two, and at least one child. The winning work, I predict, will come close to matching that template. Making real art is like the Odyssey, where Odysseus must survive many trials (making art) with the help of the gods before he can return home to destroy his lazy stealing enemies and recover his family and honors. It's not for intellectual weaklings who merely serve up a populist stew of other artists' ideas. WC ----- Original Message ---- From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]> Sent: Mon, October 4, 2010 5:40:35 PM Subject: "Is the public qualified to judge the merits of art?" http://www.mlive.com/artprize/index.ssf/2010/09/where_does_the_artprize_conversation_stand_after_the_first_week_1.html
