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If you are not capable of evaluating anything outside your totalizing culture war impulses, your art criticism will look like this, verbose and childish. Naive but not in an unpretentious and innocent way. The opposite.
You hate Angelus Novus because of what you assume about the painter and his intent, not because of any intrinsic ugliness or "degeneracy" in the work.
If you had been told that Klee was a devout Christian who spent his life trying to understand God and His angels and show them to others in a particular symbolic way, resulting in a very idiosyncratic, arguably "ugly" art style? Your opinion would flip like a bit. Maybe you still wouldn't particularly enjoy his work, but you'd appreciate his intent and wouldn't be railing about degenerate filth corrupting the youth.
Which ironically makes the point of a lot of art appreciators (a point Scott tries to negate, not very successfully) that art has context, and no matter how much you try to "appreciate it on its own merits" you and it are not in a vacuum and your priors and the context of the piece influence your perception of it.
I do not like modern Catholic art or music. It has been aesthetically barren since halfway through the 20th century, at least, and terminal before. (This is hardly due to bias, because some of my favorite composers are Orthodox John Tavener and Arvo Part, recently dead and living, and I’m not an Estonian or British Eastern Orthodox). Even the new “traditional”ish style is mediocre-to-okay, and my God, I have no words for the new stuff. Neither is this just me liking old stuff, because I do not like Eastern Orthodox iconography, generally speaking. Traditional European art moves you with powerful social emotions, with everything working together to heighten to effect, and pieces were selected according to the taste of patrons who didn’t need to flex pretention, having nothing whatsoever to prove, being the highest status and occasionally sovereign. Also, it focused on perfecting a handful of scenes for a maximum social-emotional response, ie the crucifixion must have been painted 200 times a year in every city, and gradually the visual language of the scene evolved to become perfect through a centuries-long selection process, involving artists selecting the best micro-motif over hundreds of years, the wisdom transferred in studios with an imitative learning structure. But we want to discard all that today, because we are very foolish.
It moves you.
Do you think it possible that people who are not you are moved by things that do not move you, and are not moved by things that move you?
I'm not saying "Everything is subjective" so no one can say anything is good or bad. But when you make absolute statements about not just the artistic, but the social and moral value of art, as if your judgment is clearly true and everyone else is either pretending or being deceived by the devil, well, it's beyond the arrogance of someone saying "I don't like modern art" or "Twilight is a crappy book." It's presuming that you can define good art (according to your particular fixations) and see through the pretense of anyone who likes things you don't like.
As I said, Angelus Novus doesn't move me. But clearly it moves some people. They aren't just degenerate angel-haters. Even I can see that while at first glance, sure, it looks like something I might put on the fridge because my kid drew it, ("Oh, it's an angel? Of course it is!") but further examination shows a level of intentionality, composition, color, and drafting that required artistry. Maybe not to my taste but there is meaning there. Even you evidently sense that since you so strongly react to its "degeneracy," which certainly could not be the case for some unskilled scribble.
People are moved by the placebo effect, authority bias, the desire to fit in, and ambient cues in the environment. Just as they were in 1924, four years after Novus Angelus, where this was proven:
…
https://time.com/archive/6656527/hoax/
I do not consider it art. I do think this is just rusing the tasteless and easily-influenced.
Perhaps some people really were moved by Yes, We Have No Bananas or "Jerdanowitsches's" other works. More likely it took in some critics who weren't really moved by it but were signaling, which is what Scott (and you) claim is all that people who say they like Klee's work are doing.
Certainly people can be hoaxed (Jordan-Smith isn't the first guy to put one over on a community of pretentious snobs). But people have in this thread have expressed why they find Angelus Novus worthwhile. You can disagree with their analysis, but all you've offered are personal expressions of disgust. There is a difference between "I don't like this" and "This is objectively bad and if you think it's good you're either lying or stupid." And as I said, bluntly, I don't believe your analysis is based on the art but on the artist.
One day I hope we find a TQ measurement similar to IQ. The low IQ do not realize why what they like to do is destructive. Similarly, I don’t think the low TQ realize why the art they like is destructive (to their own wellness and civilization). Until we have twin studies measuring the longterm impact of beholding works by different artists on wellbeing and prosocial behavior, we will just have to disagree.
If you just want to lob Dunning-Kruger Syndrome accusations at people who disagree with you, I could make up some Qs of my own, but again, it's not in any way a convincing argument.
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If I was told this, I would say "tried to and succeeded at are not the same thing". If I was also told that he had succeeded, I would say "that claim is unfalsifiable, compared to having failed".
Why would your reaction be meaningful to anyone who is not you? You're just saying "Yuck!" with more words.
Why should anyone else's reaction be more meaningful than mine? They're just saying "Yum!" with more words.
...And to be clear, I'm at least provisionally willing to give a "Yum!" for this specific work, and my reasons for doing so appear to align with yours: technical details of the process. On the other hand, it seems you share my skepticism of the work in the broader context outside the technical.
"That claim is unfalsifiable, compared to having failed" seems like a reasonable statement, and one that I'm not sure you're even disagreeing with.
When someone tells me "This is bad" or "This is good," I'd rather hear why they think that. Not just "I liked it" or "I didn't like it" or "It disgusts me."
I do think to some degree there is such a thing as "objectively" good and bad art, but that is mostly in the realm of technical skill, and perhaps to a lesser degree, does it accomplish what it intended? So for example, I think Twilight largely fails in the first category (it's badly written, though not the worst written book I've ever read) but obviously succeeds in eliciting feelings in its (mostly teenage girl) audience that the author intended. Angelus Novus actually shows technical proficiency which is perhaps not obvious at first glance, and it elicits feelings and analysis that some random minimalist angel sketch wouldn't. I wouldn't claim it's great or even the best in its class, but when people just sneer at it because it's "ugly" or "degenerate," or claiming "it fails because I didn't like it," I don't see that as meaningful critique. And it's telling that most of the critique seems to come not from a genuine analysis of the work, or even a particular dislike of the style, but because of culture war reads.
I disagree that "having failed" is more falsifiable than "it didn't fail." It implies you can objectively say it "fails" as art (because I didn't like it).
How do you feel about popularity? As a very simple toy model, say that society's tastes as judged by 'this is bad', 'this is good' boil down to a predictable 95%/5% split of obligate normie vs. obligate edgy. Lots of room for individual preferences within that, but basically two clusters of markedly disproportionate sizes.
Would you accede to the proposition that a work of art which is loved by much or most of the 95% is 'objectively good' and one which disgusts and repels them is 'objectively bad'? To my mind, whether a given work will delight the vast majority of people seems like a far better indication of its quality than technical skill or whether it accomplished what the artist wanted.
Personally, I've enjoyed lots of things that were technically bad - everyone dunks on Rowling's prose, the art for Higurashi is genuinely terrible, etc. And I have relatively little interest in whether the artist succeeded in his wish to discomfort and repel me (tragedy is a bit more complicated) vs. failing to please me if the result is repellent.
I think you have this exactly backwards. This is the Culture War. It's the beating core of the culture war, far deeper in many ways than immigration or politics. For complex reasons, in the West a group of extremely unrepresentative people rose to control of the beating organs of our society including but not limited to the arts and the universities. They enjoy disharmony, extreme novelty, and 'modernism' for lack of a better word, and their tastes are broadly genuine but anti-correlated with the tastes of the vast majority of the population. To please and delight themselves, they acted in a semi-coordinated way to move society towards what pleased them, aided by the cultural and literal razing of the two world wars. The built environment (bauhaus and brutalism), the social environment (immigration, the more culturally dissimilar the better), etc. This wasn't necessarily malevolent in intent, though it was sometimes selfish. Often they thought of themselves as uplifting the normies, albeit by force. However, they completely overlooked or even applauded the long term psychic damage it did to the normies who were forced to live in their world and to bow to their tastes thanks to their control of the institutions.
Contrast with Japan, which has certainly changed over the last 150 years but in which normies remain firmly in charge, and with even the very early Marxists. (Marx himself once said that the point of Marxism was to give every man the privilege of being a hunting, shooting, fat, happy aristocrat.)
TL;DR: The binary of objective vs. subjective obscures that you can have a 'subjective' question where 99.9% of people agree. It's not objective in the way that 'the sky is blue' is objective, one can perfectly well hold the opposing opinion without being mad or evil. Nevertheless, it doesn't seem to me to be particularly subjective in the, 'what's better? no way to say, really...' way where we have to abandon audience reaction and go for something explicitly relativistic like 'is the author skilled at doing this thing that almost everyone hates?'.
I think popularity has a loose, but certainly not precise, correlation to "good."
Can you give me an example of a work that is loved by 95% of the population but which you think might be arguably "bad" on a technical level? I wouldn't agree that popularity defines "goodness" but I'd be hard-pressed to think of something so universally beloved that just somehow snookered everyone and is bad, actually.
I am not familiar with Higurashi, but I've written about Rowling before. Her prose is not great (though she's improved quite a bit since Harry Potter), but it's also not the strong point of her work. I would not agree that she is "technically bad," though I would agree that there are other authors whose prose is objectively better.
When you conflate bauhaus and brutalism with immigration, you kind of lose me. Bauhaus and brutalism are not to my tastes but I've seen works of both that I thought were pretty good and I am unconvinced they are some deliberate construct imposed on the masses by the same elites who do all the other social things you disapprove of.
Not really - genuinely terrible-all-round stuff doesn't get popular. Harry Potter is known for not having great prose but good story, Fate Stay Night has terrible prose but good story, Higurashi had terrible art until they remade it (look it up if you're interested) but good story etc. I'm mostly pointing out that 'technical skill' is not a good indicator of popularity and therefore of 'goodness' by my lights beyond a base level.
By my own definition, I don't think something almost universally beloved can be bad. The idea that one can 'snooker' people into liking something that is actually bad seems like a confusion of terms to me. Of course, if one says something like, "Potter's plot is great, everyone loves the plot" then we are in a fully circular realm.
Did you read that one famous debate between architects where the Bauhaus guy basically said, "I love disharmony, I love that I can put it in the middle of the city, and if the vast majority of people find it uncomfortable that is their problem not mine"? On immigration, my brother has a genuine preference for both brutalist architecture and the parts of London that I find extremely culturally uncomfortable, he actively enjoys the strong non-Britishness of it all. I'm genuinely trying to take his expressed preferences and those of @Primaprimaprima and Ozy seriously and at face value.
I tried to be clear that I wasn't writing a polemic or positing a malevolent conspiracy, it's just that the people broadly in control of the culture genuinely have preferences that can't be publicly satisfied without making lots of other people unhappy as a side effect. There's other stuff going on, economics and technological changes and so on, but I believe that the taste incompatibility is a hugely understated influence on what has become the Culture War and it's why these questions have been bubbling up with increasing frequency lately. Scott's essays, the failed efforts by both the UK conservatives (Build Back Better) and Trump to enforce building styles that are popular against furious institutional resistance, and so on. I'll also say that the idea that much of this stuff arises from an unfortunate incompatibility is much, much more charitable than the position I held when I started thinking about this a decade ago.
I think perhaps we disagree about cause and effect. I think if something is universally popular, it's almost certainly because it's good. You seem to be arguing that popularity makes it good by definition.
This is probably true to some degree, if by "people broadly in control of the culture" you mean the Left, because pretty definitionally leftists want to change society, and that is going to upset lots of people. There might be a correlation between "likes brutalist architecture" and "likes immigration" but I am not convinced it's coming from the same place or that "upsets people/is bad" is its defining characteristic.
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