On Sat, Jan 12, 2013 at 1:54 PM, William Conger <[email protected]>wrote:
> 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. > But isn't that like saying that if something cannot be quanitified, then it has no value and therefore doesn't exist.? What about the subjective?
