Whenever something is named art it is assigned a value that is presumed to exemplify something essentially human in imagination or reflective thought. Although objects can have many purposes in addition to being so-called artworks, the one constant function for artworks is to evoke feelings that can't be measured or fully shared by other means. So we say.
When the doctor asks you to rate your pain from 1 to 10 with 10 signifying acute, excruciating pain, you are being asked to do the impossible. How does one rank pain? Is a number two pain eight parts pleasure? If pain is truly excruciating, a ten, no sensible response can be made, except perhaps a screech or grunt or some foaming of the mouth or even unconsciousness. But some pain can be terrible but not yet incapacitating. Then there is the mental pain, so bad that it can drive one to suicide, insanity, or rage or murder. Is that a 10? How can one rate an aesthetic response? Is there a number 10 response? Is that ecstasy? What about, say, a number 3 aesthetic response? Or what about the zero response when it's all intellectual as in some conceptual art (for those erring buffs who claim to separate feeling from reasoning)? How does one price a feeling ...pain or pleasure, fear or affection? How does one express a number nine pleasure without accounting for the one part pain? Quantification of art, like any feeling, is impossible. But because it's impossible we need, must, find some way to quantify it anyway because that's the only means we have to convey its importance. Name anything that inherently defies being priced and it will be priced anyway. That's how we know the ineffable exists, somehow. If we don't price the ineffable then we can't say it exists and we become nihilists. What's the pain/pleasure number of nihilism? If I shrug when the doctor asks me to rank my pain, is a 5 recorded or O? is a 0 pain the same as 10 pleasure? This nonsense helps to show that the aesthetic response or experience or feeling is oceanic or unconfined or inseparable from any other responses but claiming some irrational status for it is all we can do to insist it is experienced, and thusly, that we exist. wc
