> Me
>> ...Why it is that
>> some people cannot distinguish between the mediocre and the high quality.
>
Berg
> The better educated and more experienced a person is, the better he/she
> will be able to distinguish between the mediocre and the high quality.
William
> If Berg's comment is true then it's also true that the distinction of high
> quality from the mediocre is only a 'class' distinction.
But Berg's remark is a clichi, true in a vapid way and in any event not
exhaustive. What is a "better educated and experienced person"? And the
if-then argument ("if better educated, then better able to distinguise
quality") is suspect, if not specious. I know trained and educated artists who
seem not to be able to produce high quality work and sometimes not even able
to evaluate the quality of other works. If by "better educated," Berg means
trained in the production of high art, then his comment is tautological.
My question still remains unaddressed: Why can some people not distinguish
between mediocre and high quality? Perhaps I need to brush up on "Avant Garde
and Kitsch" again. Greenberg goes on in a subsequent essay (in two parts in
the Saturday Review, IIRC--I have packed up some old notes and can't get to
them right now) that under the sway of industrialism, quality in production
became "good enough" (which seems to echo William's comments about product
quality).
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Michael Brady
