Cheerskep has totally confused my position in order to toss out his favorite word of insult, vacuous.
He loves to claim that I'm vacuous, but has no significantly superior credentials to mine, if any, and dare say he was never tenured at a major research institution where being vetted by distinguished and named professors from ALL fields is a starting requirement. I think Cheerskep knows the distinction between judgment and personal gut opinion. But he is so eager to throw his favorite word that he packs it into any slushy snowball. No one is claiming that an expert consensus can make or declare a work of art because no one can share another's experience. But there is the matter of judgment that declares that so and so or such and such represents the quality and achievement we ascribe to artworks and artists based on evidence and consensus. Yes, it's called the institutional theory. There's a long and wrong history of gossip that has been magnified regarding the contemporary judgment of some art and artists. Impressionists are often cited as a top example. But the dumb criticism being referred to was mostly hack journalism and not at all expert opinion. The Impressionists had many very astute apologists and most of those artists enjoyed huge success in their peak years. In fact, most of the wrong views about the modernists as a whole came from those who went with popular, man in the street, uninformed opinion. In short, what Cheerskep says just ain't borne out by the evidence. I was not claiming that art should include the compositional practices of its time. I said that they can't be avoided altogether. I said that Titian was stretching the central compositional and painting practices of his time and with hindsight we can see it led to the full Baroque. Those who say his compositions are bad are just trying to fit them to a norm he was stretching. There is a huge difference between saying something is art (no one says that except in casual chat) and saying so and so was/is a great artist and his/her artworks have bona-fide art historical status. And Frances' ideas are not invalid, except to Cheerskep, for the reason that she follows a consistent pragmatism and he follows, I don't know what, a churlish solipsism or some sect of Cartesian idealism, if that's possible. wc ________________________________ From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, April 6, 2009 8:15:20 PM Subject: Re: Judging the late Titian 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)
