Consensus? A consensus of two is adequate to fulfill the general meaning we assign to the term.
Berg seems to think that the public, (an-all encompassing and impossible-to-define term) can and does decide greatness in art, the identity of art, and other totalizing values. In fact the public, assuming it means in this case a large group of people of much diversity, has never decided what is great art, or even art. When and if millions of people say that Michelangelo was a great artist, they are mostly repeating what someone told them, or what they were told by way of books, stories, or films. The so-called art experts over the centuries have pretty much made it official truth that Michelangelo was a great artist. This is a an example of an accumulated force of the Institutional Theory. It has been embedded into our Western culture and helps to define the artistic, cultural, and even moral values of many people who actually don't recognize that they did not invent their own tastes. So when someone says, "I think Michelangelo was a great artist" it's asserted as a statement of individual judgment of Michelangelo's art, but in fact it's far more likely, almost certain, that it's an expression of accepted cultural values and not a result of individual analysis of artworks by Michelangelo. Closer to our own time, it's less easy to see how we adopt the opinions of "experts" without giving them credit or pretending that we came to our opinions through some careful and first-hand study and experience. In our own time we fairly debate the experts' opinions if we take the trouble to examine them or we simply declare the experts wrong and go with the standing rule that anything new -- anything lacking a convincing language in its favor -- can and should be rejected simply on the grounds that the present is disorderly and filled with all sorts of worthless options. Thus the public in (Berg's notion of the term) will always reject the new because no accumulated expert language has yet congealed around it. I'll call this, grandly, Conger's Law of Rejection. Name one event in human history that received immediate universal public acclaim. (I think of the Polio vaccine but am not so sure it was taken as a universal panacea until relentless expert support was disseminated through the popular media. Also, Polio only affected a tiny percent of the general population). Finally, Berg's contention that the public dismissal much new art should be taken as evidence of a mass of individual and careful analysis is a fallacy because Conger's Law of Rejection asserts that anything new (affecting accumulated cultural values) will be rejected out of hand until a solid expert opinion by a few becomes persuasive by means of language. That takes time as the new must become enmeshed with broad cultural values thus become a widely accepted sign of those values. This works for deciding both the new as good and the new as bad. For instance, the swastika has been a sign of positive values among past cultures but today is still a sign of evil values. People need to have cultural values denoting what is good for them and what is bad for them, and even what is still undecided. This does not lead to the false conclusion that anything new will eventually be a sign of cherished cultural values since most of what is new is indeed worthless and thus establishes the logical position for rejecting the new until its worth has been well argued. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sat, December 11, 2010 5:26:17 PM Subject: Re: the boring false opposition between money and art On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 1:06 PM, ARMANDO BAEZA <[email protected]>wrote: > Do you mean consensus by compromising ? > ab > "Absent consensus about standards for measuring excellence in art, ["greatness"] becomes an empty term of endearment and a marketing label." (Recent article) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/15/arts/design/15women.html
