[etage3]

>Please, we can discuss art theory without political dimension.

Bourdieu discusses this very point in the Preface of The Rules of Art.

"(...) countless are those who forbid sociology any profaning contact with the work of art. (...) I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why they are so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational, understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the 'work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence."

A scientific understanding of art doesn't or negate or lower it. On the contrary : "(...) scientific analysis, when it is able to uncover what makes the work of art necessary, that is to say, its informing formula, its generative principle, its raison d'être, also furnishes artistic experience, and the pleasure which accompan­ies it with its best justification, its richest nourishment. Through it, sensible love of the work can fulfill itself in a sort of amor intellectualis rei the assimilation of the object to the subject and the immersion of the subject in the object, the active surrender to the singular necessity of the literary object (which, more often than not, is itself the product of a similar submission)."

It's a short but dense 5 page read.

[fsloth]

(The below is with an intent of explaining my view of Paul's essay and is written with the tone of a devil's advocate)

Sorry I prefer quoting Feynman - art theory is about as usefull for enjoying and doing art as ornithology is for birds. The original quote was "Philosophy of science is about as useful for science as ornithology is for birds."

Note! This does not denigrate the "useless" fields as such - but the point of view is that their usefulness for the field they claim to study is at most limited.

As a trained physicist and hobbyist artist I can pretty much agree with this. Doing physics and doing art is so friggin hard that while focusing on them, human cognition has no space for analysis in any other domain.

Want to analyse a classical painting? Well, there is a very good technique for this but it requires a huge amount of labour - replicate it.

I realize this is a very technical point of view, but having a hands-on experience, it's very hard to convince me any other way would offer superior understanding of the core issues at play.

I must repeat that I am not discounting analysis - but they are only secondary in importance to the ding an sich.

Sorry. This is getting a very long winded way of expressing my point of view.

I read Paul's essay from this very specifically technical point of view that acknowledges the inherent complexity in the chosen domain (classical art) and hence takes it obvious that there are some works 'better' than others. But there is no numerical metric we can use to gauge paintings - hence we must refer to an intuitive understanding of the quality of a work. Paul calls this 'intuitive understanding of quality' taste.

I think the whole point was to point out that some things can be considered rationally better than others, even though we don't have an objective numerical measure for this goodness.

[pyrale]

> I think the whole point was to point out that some things can be considered rationally better than others

While it's anyone's right to pass their opinion as a fact, it helps little in terms of explaining how different people react to art.

> art theory is about as usefull for enjoying and doing art as ornithology is for birds.

I believe the trouble here is that birds rarely try to pass as ornithologists. Trying to formulate a general theory about what makes art or artistic taste is sociology work, not art.

> some things can be considered rationally better than others

I hope blue is your favorite color, because it's mine; and if it's not yours, you're wrong.