I'm not sure I do. IF aesthetics is Kantian, consisting of an involuntary experience then anything at all can produce it. In that case I agree with you. If aesthetics is something else, a social construct, or mediated experience in recollection or a form of disinterestedness anyone can learn to adopt, then I suppose it's learned in accordance with social conventions. Some say it's a matter of evolution ...survival via the pleasure principle. (Dutton). Good and bad art is like good and bad friends. You choose yours and I choose mine. Your bad friend could be my good friend, etc. wc
----- Original Message ---- From: ARMANDO BAEZA <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wed, March 23, 2011 3:49:58 PM Subject: Re: "Today we often confuse certification with education. In fact our society seems to value the former more than the latter..." you do agree that under the umbrella of Aesthetics, there is good and bad art, made by all levels of minds. ab ________________________________ From: Frances Kelly <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wed, March 23, 2011 11:10:04 AM 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.
