Aristocracy of Taste v/s Democracy of Acquisitions (Reflections)

Sure, "I don't know" is clear. But you keep circling back to:

. . . which is the view of "great art" as just a popularity contest, or a kind of racket. I hope I didn't come off snide when I said your opinion was a mystery. Of course you've been explaining all along that you believe there's no intrinsic reason for assessing a work of art as great or important, that arguments to the contrary are just the product of groupthink and market manipulation by "experts" (who are tyrants, but also slaves).

I disagree with this, but if it really is your opinion, you of course have a right to it. I'm just not sure how it is that "Rembrandt and Mozart are Great Artists" is the farfetched position requiring pages of explanation, philosophy treatises, and illustrations, but "these works are important because the people who control them want to boost the price" is the commonsense view that waves all the foregoing away.

I used that example to push back against the idea that people meekly accept what they're told in matters of taste and aesthetic value. Koons is a polarizing figure in the art world and approximately nobody seems to shrink from offering their opinion about him and his work. That said, the photo you posted was well chosen and gave me a new appreciation for an artist I had long thought of as an obnoxious prankster.

I think a lot of us are talking past one another, in part because we're using "taste" and "aesthetic value" and "greatness" interchangeably at times.

Some of what you mentioned in your last post reminds me of something someone somewhere said about fiction (I think—I suffer from CRS* syndrome), that when a truly great new art emerges, people will hate it and denounce it as ugly and monstrous. It has been a useful way to approach works that I don't fully understand at first, and has possibly made me into the insufferable aficionado of precious, unlikeable music that I am today.

* Can't Remember Shit

No one disputes that everyone is entitled to their own, individual views of what is beautiful, but pressing the point so hard is dubious. Perhaps there are people who would find used cigarette butts glued indiscriminately to a canvas to be more beautiful than a Rembrandt painting, or the sound of a police siren played at high volume to be more beautiful than a Mozart sonata. But given that (minimally) the vast majority of people would find the opposite to be true, does that not have meaning? When there is near universal agreement about the beauty of nature, or the work of particular artists, can we not agree that there is such a thing as intrinsic beauty?

To a starving person there's not much difference in a Big Mac and Beef Wellington.

Hey, I keep trying!



😝

But Michael, I used extreme hypotheticals for a reason. If the ratio were 9.99999:0.00001, would you still argue that the consensus hadn't identified some kind of basic truth?

Again, I feel like we're swapping out terms like beauty, taste, great, etc., where they're not strictly interchangeable. Isn't it possible to say, yes, that's beautiful, but it doesn't really float my boat?

If 99 people believe that water is wet, but Mr. 100 comes along and says he doesn't really think so, does that mean everyone needs to redefine wet, or wonder if we've all convinced ourselves that water is wet just because of the malign influence of Big Water?

I'm not sure why, but you seem to want to take every sentence I write, and make it the most extreme representation of something that it can be. Of course doing this is your choice, and in the end it doesn't matter to me, but if you are trying to understand my opinions as you claim, I don't think this is the way to do it.

I am not trying to insult people who collect art, or artists, or even art dealers, so if you are any of those, please don't take my comments personally. For me this has been a very interesting thread that has made me think a great deal about the art I have, why I chose it, and also about the art that I personally consider great, and why that is. I don't think anyone can reasonably deny that the art market is one that is subject to hype, people pursuing the latest and greatest thing, etc. In that respect it has parallels in the watch world, the wine world, and many other things that people love and collect. It doesn't mean that the love people feel in the end isn't real.

I have a lot of art in my house (more than wall space to hang it all), some painted by my MIL who is an artist, some by a good friend who is an artist, and I have spent sometimes many thousands on a piece of art. I have travelled to galleries, spent money to enter many of them, have seen in person the works of many great masters, so I want to be clear that in general I "appreciate art". The question is why do I appreciate the things I do.

I've never denied that there are artist, musicians, composers who are considered great. The question is why, and why do some people not like the works. If this idea of greatness that you and Tony keep bringing up exists in an intrinsic and truly objective way, then why would anyone dislike it? Why doesn't the great work of art or piece of music have absolute universal appeal? You will note these are questions...not statements of a position.

I think part of the problem with the "great" artist that people keep bringing up, is that you cannot separate their reputations from their works. If all you have ever heard is that these were great works, then you will be inclined to believe this, even if you don't appreciate the specific piece of art in question.

Art preferences can be varied and regional. For example in Canada, when I was young the only artists we were taught about in primary school were the Group of Seven. These were considered the first truly great Canadian artists - of course indigenous artists were discounted back then, so clearly that is in dispute, but I'll leave that issue aside for now. We were taught about how their works represented Canada, and when I look at the landscape paintings done by them and other contemporaries like Tom Thompson, it evokes a lot of emotion as a Canadian. Is that because of the paintings, or because of what I was taught these paintings represent? Or is it because I spent a lot of time when I was young with my parents taking family vacations in Northern Ontario, where a lot of these scenes were painted? It's probably a mix of all these things, and anyone who has not had the same experiences and been taught the same things, may look at them and say "meh"...and that would not be an invalid reaction. So are these objectively great? Not sure I can say that they are, even though they are to me.

I recall in the 80's on a trip to Montreal, going to an art exhibit in a warehouse type setting. There was one installation there that was a box with three viewing ports in it. One on each end, and one on top. When you looked in one end, all you saw was white, and as you came close to look inside you could hear a looped recorded voice softly saying "it's white, it's white" over and over again. The other end the scene was black, and of course the voice said "it's black, it's black" over and over again. But when you looked through the top port, seeing things from above, it was grey, with the voice repeating "it's grey". That piece I found odd at first, but it made an impact that has stuck with me years later, and I don't remember any of the other artworks in the exhibit. It is a great analogy to this discussion, and to life in general - when seen from one side or another things can look very black and white, but when you see the whole picture, it's actually grey...

Cheers, Al

You are speaking about the subjects, not the artwork itself. To use a much more extreme example, few, if any, would find the subject of Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son to be pleasant, let alone beautiful, but there is, I would argue, an undeniable beauty in the power of the work, and impact that it typically elicits.

But while I agree that beauty can be difficult to define, there are things, both natural and man-made, that are considered by the vast majority of people to be beautiful. Why should a very small percentage of dissenters somehow undercut the implied meaning of the perception being shared by such a large majority?

No one is required to agree that a dazzling sunset, or Mozart sonata is beautiful, but when the (very large) subset of humans who have an appreciation either for nature, or classical music, are in near-unanimous agreement about the beauty of them, are they not responding to a form of intrinsic beauty?

I view “good taste” as something generally accepted by the experienced group on a given topic, and as such, subjective in nature. Good taste requires a level of conformity to current generally accepted opinions on a given subject matter. To be “ahead of your time” would then simply mean to have a taste for something not yet en vogue, but likely to be in the future. Tastes do change rapidly in certain subjects, and endure in others.

Taste is personal. Food, art, clothes, cars and furniture.
But taste is influenced by many things, probably too many to list from Age to Zip code.

We have three art collections at my house.

Stuff I bought by Myself - Everything I buy is “ I wouldn’t of bought that tacky,”😉

Stuff the Mrs buys by herself - Everything Mrs STANDY buys is weird 😉

Then there is all the cool pieces we buy together that are usually pretty cool pieces.

Between the 3 collections that are all in the house we have a nice art collection.

It’s funny to see what piece a visitor is drawn to sometimes.

Taste is personal, but “good taste” is generally accepted. It requires the consensus of the group.

This is why when it comes to watches I continue to hammer home the notion of simply buying what you like.

Also I’d love to see photos of those 3 collections.

I wanted to push back against this as well, the way Twiggy and Rubens keep being brought up. Fashion is one thing, a thing that derives its energy in large part from subverting the current vogue and staking a claim to uncontested ground in a way that captures the imagination of people who value being ahead of the curve. This obviously intersects with art in a lot of ways.

The point is, Twiggy did not appear unbidden from someone's tortured imagination. She was a reaction to the buxom pinups of the 1950s. It's also not true that everyone suddenly decided that looking like a 14-year-old boy was the new standard of beauty. Her fame endures precisely because she was such a break from the trends of the time and set a new path that lasted longer than anyone expected, but keep in mind that Ann-Margret was part of the same scene, and it's not like she was left by the wayside during that time.

Rubens is useful as a way of illustrating how fashions and standards of female beauty have shifted back and forth over the centuries. But the reason we all know his name is not because he was the Herb Ritts or Mario Testino of his time. His fame does not rest on his having painted the pretty ladies of his day. We keep invoking a painter whose reputation has endured for 400 years and gliding right past this very salient point.