-Caveat Lector-
thew <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Subject: Post Office Honors COMMUNIST with a Stamp
>Should we judge artists by their politics? Is their work enough? how
much ,
>if any, does their personality or belief systems shape the validity of
their
>work?
>I think these are interesting questions - any thoughts?
They are interesting questions, which keep coming up in other contexts
(cf. the 604 list) as well.
Hard to answer, though, without clarifying a few terms. For instance,
what are we talking about when we speak of "judging"?
One common meaning of "to judge" is to determine how something measures
up to a certain set of standards or values. In this sense, one can judge
the size, legality, beauty, etc. of some phenomenon.
What can we judge of an artist by assessing hir politics? Indeed, what
aspect of someone's politics does it make sense to judge? How far to the
left, right, or other vector? And even if we have made a judgement of
where someone's beliefs or politics fall on some scale, what can we
assume this says about the person hirself? Practically nothing, I would
say. Even less if we look for what it says about hir art. Wagner is a
good example, of whom Thomas Mann said his success as a human being was
in inverse proportion to his success as an artist. But then is there
any agreement about what it is to be a success as a human being?
Let's face it -- in most cases attempts to judge usually amount to value
judgments of how "good" something is, which takes the subject into
territory with no fixed or universal foundations. In practice, most
judgmental thinking is little more than an attempt to spread a patina of
objectivity over a statement of personal preference, as part of a
broader, if unconscious, agenda of self-exaltation.
In most cases, judgments are attempots to elevate the self by putting
down the other or by associating oneself with what is seen to be
acknowledged as the higher. A poor substitute for actually improving
oneself.
One last question, of the annoying form of "define your terms, please".
I know what it means for reasoning to be valid, but what does the word
mean when applied to expression or work? Do some people serve French
fries validly and others fallaciously?
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