Mike: Discriminating between liking and appreciating moves things forward
for me: I like Alex Colville's works, I don't appreciate Jackson Pollock's.
My unsophisticated tastes have a place in the hierarchy somewhere but I can
concede that I lack sophistication which would help me appreciate certain
works.
And yet, does increased sophistication require that all viewers of sufficent
sophistication either appreciate or like a work? I guess we're back to those
other criteria Hume posits.
Geoff C
From: Michael Brady <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Appreciating art
Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2008 10:02:40 -0500
On Nov 6, 2008, at 9:27 AM, William Conger wrote:
But another distinction remains to be queried: What is the difference
between like and appreciate? Is it one of kind or one of degree? Does
appreciate require taste (guided by "True Docents")? Is liking simply a
preference that may or may not involve good taste. Can liking be a
matter of bad taste (False Docents)? I think these questions are
pertinent but I'm not sure how to answer them. I said earlier that I
tend to agree with Gombrich's view that "there are no wrong reasons for
liking an artwork" (possible paraphrase). For him, some liking, even bad
taste or tasteless liking was at least a first access to art. Perhaps he
would've agreed that it was a prejudice that disabled prejudice. He did
think that any liking may or may not be really salient to an artwork's
central or fullest content -- I mean with all the implications of
historical, formal, cultural, and personal content.
My own view is that "appreciation" is very low on the scale from liking
to aesthetic engagement because it does not evoke inherently aesthetic
content even if it can be assigned such content by True Docents.
Greenberg made the distinction between liking a given work of art and
appreciating it, that is, between having some kind of affective feeling
for a work (liking it) and evaluating its quality (appreciating it).
Indeed, he made the point that a person of taste and discernment (himself)
can like a small piece of kitschy sculpture on a side table, directly
across the room from a work of high quality (a Newman, as I recall).
Liking is an impulse of our emotional connection to something and someone;
appreciation (as its etymological root suggests) is an evaluation of the
quality of a thing. We may like a thing for many reasons not closely
related to its artistic quality, from nostalgia to something in the
representation you like or its size or its materials.
Good taste is part of the practice of appreciation, of evaluating of
quality. The term "good taste," btw, suffers some drive-by condescension
from critics who claim that it is merely a habit of the socially
self-conscious, i.e., those who know and care about whether the shoes are
Prada or not; or worse, a systematic codification of approved objects that
culls out the less worthy (people of bad or pedestrian or vulgar taste)
from the more worthy. You know, like art museums that exhibit big, ugly
modern works of art and claim that the works are good, i.e., tasty, so
that the exhibit shows how good the museum's tastes are to other, more
prestigious museums, while simultaneously demonstrating to the general
public that they (the public) lack taste if they do not like the show.
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Michael Brady
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
