Quantitative = more or less moral or aesthetic reasons Qualitative = morally or aesthetically of a different order or kind
On 5/16/10 11:51 AM, "William Conger" <[email protected]> wrote: This conversation assumes that quality and quantity are fixed concepts. But they can be exchanged. The old slogans "bigger is better" and "less is more" are examples of the tendency to confuse or exchange the terms. In America and maybe throughout world culture there is strong evidence that the tendency is to favor "bigger is better" until the tipping point is passed. Then bigger becomes a liability and the swing back to "less is more" starts anew. Almost always this exchange occurs for economic/political reasons, I think, far more than for moral or aesthetic reasons. An example today would be the rejection of corporate farming (corn, soy, chemicals) for organic farming (the less is more turn). When manufacturers and economists decided that bigger (more) is better they adopted the notion of "good enough" which enshrines the view that things should not be made better than they need to be for a short-term use (planned obsolescence). This was a radical shift from the earlier manufacturing ideals -- to make things as well as they can be (to outlast expectations). What was formerly quality became quantity and visa-versa. Warhol and Duchamp and even the utopian models of modernism reflected the bigger is better mode (unlimited possibilities of art, multiples, accessibility) but that may be reaching a tipping point back to less is more. Ironically -- how else? -- this tipping point is revealed by the exchange of 100s of millions for a very few examples of the bigger is better art notion, a sort of inversion of the concept so that the more-ness and big-ness of modernism and post modernism is exchanged into money itself, bigger money means the simultaneous apotheosis and death of the bigger is better view. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Saul Ostrow <[email protected]> To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>; William Conger <[email protected]> Sent: Sun, May 16, 2010 9:44:47 AM Subject: Re: Rewrite The proportion should stay the same On 5/16/10 8:13 AM, "[email protected]" <[email protected]> wrote: Isn't lots of people making more pieces of art and there consequently being more quality pieces a lot like the monkeys with typewriters-the more monkeys, the quicker they get to War and Peace? It doesn't sound right. Kate Sullivan -- --
