To speak meaningfully about art

Most people are not aware there can be a difference between "art I love" and "masterpieces of Art History".

You do not have to appreciate La Joconda or the Last Supper,just as you might like the art from your neighbor. Both are fine.

Plenty people out there applying academic rigor and discipline to discourse on this subject. This is not that.

Edit: typo

For example, why do you defend archeological architecture? Are the pyramids "good" because they are opulent? That sounds like a sensible stance at a glance, but then what of the Burj Khalifa?

Is Calvin and Hobbes not acclaimed? Is it not art? What of obscure manga about gender identity?

Why is Turning Red controversial? Who is it relatable to, and does that matter?

Suddenly equating one's opinion w/ "good vs bad" seems superficial. There's historical context, there's political commentary, and commentary on the commentary, and how that shapes the rest of the contemporary works.

I think we've extended the use of the word art too far. In my opinion art is really just paintings and sculptures. Good art involves a lot of skill, eg: years of practice, attention to detail, sophisticated processes, careful choice of mediums, tasteful composition, and choice of subject matter. While a lot of this stuff is opinionated there are definitely rules to a lot of these things. There are essentially guidelines that have log existed for measuring an artists ability to capture color, shapes, light, and movement. Even with more modern styles like van Gogh and Monet these rules applied.

At some point we threw this out the window with the post modern movement and said art can be anything, becoming more focused on the cleverness and profound underlying message that this new "art" contained rather than the skill, dedication, and aesthetics that went into it.

Judging good from bad requires hubris, and a strong internalized belief in some kind of inalienable order. The inability to distinguish good from bad is an inability to distinguish between virtue and vice, wholesome and depraved, worthwhile and worthless. In other words, someone who distinguishes between good and bad takes on the role of judge and all the responsibilities that entails. The one who doesn't, abdicates this responsibility, and thus frees themselves from accountability. Which is cool. But lame.

Judging art is harmless. So dare be a judge in the presence of art. It is strangely liberating.

> And realistically, you'll never really know what is "good" or "bad" art without years of exposure to the ideas and thoughts that go into the work.

That's a premise, which is relatively modern. With art, you can just known in your bones when something is good, and when something is bad. When in the presence of "good" art, there's a gravity you can physically not escape. That feeling can be intellectualized, of course, it makes for fun dinner conversations. Nonetheless, it is absolute.

All that said, the article is actually pretty good (although it is not to my taste).

And this notion is precisely one I reject. The author himself makes the distinction between art one likes and good art, though he doesn't offer an explicit metaphysical explanation and I wish to stay clear of any kind of relativism that may be implied. (My initial reading allows for competing interpretations of the article.)

For instance, if we take the example of the fine arts, we must distinguish between beauty and taste. Beauty is objective (and as a transcendental, is to be identified with the transcendentals of the good and the true). It concerns a thing's perfection in relation to some telos, some form. Taste, on the other hand, concerns one's subjective experience of pleasure experienced in the reception of a thing. This is why we can, in principle, speak of someone having poor taste or refined taste. Poor taste is undiscerning and lacking in sensitivity, even going so far as to prefer vulgarity to refinement. If beauty were a mere matter of taste, then we could not speak of good or bad taste, or of garishness and the sublime, except as a glorified way of saying "I like this, but not that; this pleases me, that does not". I do not accept this view, though it is the received and conventional view today. A shabby and nihilistic view rooted, no doubt, in our Cartesian inheritance.

Now, this doesn't automatically mean that there can be no debate about the beauty of an art piece. Indeed, the very possibility of debate presupposes a distinction between beauty and taste, between the objective and the subjective reception of a thing. What it does mean is that aesthetic judgement is, like moral discernment and logical reasoning, something that requires not just capacity, but something that must be refined and perfected. If we debate such things—the good, the true and the beautiful—we do so with a view of conforming ourselves to the truth, and in the case of beauty, our tastes with the beautiful, just as through ethics we seek to conform ourselves to the good.

Good art makes the world a better place by existing and bad art makes it a worse place. True, that does mean it's contextual and can change over time.