Frances gets into trouble when she conflates art with its uses and links qualitative judgment with those uses. There is also a problem with intentionality because of the Intentional Fallacy: whereas it may be necessary to have an intention to engage in creative activity or to have an artistic goal, those intentions are not sufficient to guarantee success. That depends on other factors. The Institutional Theory provides them. Yet even the Institutional theory is a fallacy because there's no way to assure any uniformity of outcome among authorities. It comes down to power one way or another. The most enduring form of power in culture is money. Money is rare in big amounts, and relatively stable, and thus when a lot of money is attached to a group or individual exercising the judgment according to the pragmatics of the institutional theory, it becomes the standard of quality.
A criminal is determined by law, not by other means. Deviancy or perversion are societal conditions defined by societal laws. Although there are probably deep evolutionary reasons for those laws. We don't speak of the deviancy or perversion among animals but most people have seen it. Art is determined the same way we determine the value of other societal acts, albeit much more loosely than by laws. In art we speak of conventions of taste and allow for plenty of latitude in that. In the end there are no really fixed boundaries for judging human behavior or for judging human art and thus there's no real reason to seek correspondence between those classes of judgments. Their correspondence or lack thereof is coincidental or coercive. For example, Hitler made quite ordinary and nicely pleasant watercolor paintings. We can find nothing in them that reveals his propensity to evil. He did them in full conformity to artistic conventions of the era. His social actions with people and in war did not follow conventions. Artworks and all other non-human objects cannot be moral or immoral. They are meaningless things. Their meanings and morality is ascribed to them and it is always fluid, changing from moment to moment, from person to person, form context to context. Laws and other modes of coercion try to fix meanings and morality,quality, etc., for a time, as if these attributes are inherent to objects. Money does it best because money enables power. No a happy, uplifting thought but true. Maybe that's why people invented religions and gods...to have at least the belief that something was more powerful than money. Isn't it interesting that the religions' afterlife scenarios are always really affluent, bejeweled, golden, etc? ----- Original Message ---- From: Frances Kelly <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wed, March 23, 2011 1:10:04 PM Subject: RE: "Today we often confuse certification with education. In fact our society seems to value the former more than the latter..." Frances to Armando and others... No person need likely be educated to be artistic or to be an artist or to posit good artworks. The individual person alone however cannot determine this, because they may be suffering a deluded illusion. Only a group of normal peers therefore can tentatively determine if any of this is true. This raises an issue as to whether the nice crafts of perverts and deviants and maniacs should be held deemed as bad art or rather as applied art or as ordinary objects of say kitsch or simply as nonart. To call bad art at least as fine art at all seems to be wrong somehow. The potential artifices and artifacts and artiforms as artworks therefore will grow from being ordinary nonart or applied art to becoming extraordinary fine art by the natural process of evolution. Such growth entails adeptive chance and adaptive change and adoptive choice. The overall direction of an aspiring artist therefore leans toward a good end goal, although many of the exploratory paths and routes may be bad or wrong and evil. The correction must however lay with the normal group of learned experts. Armando wrote... I don't think art follows the process of evolution into goodness, but more likely the process of change into variations of it.
