Hallo!

On Wed, 27 Feb 2008 11:00:58 -0500, Jim Henry wrote:

> >  However, And Rosta, or so it seems to me, maintains a fundamentally
> >  different position - he claims that there was art that was objectively
> >  better than other art; I felt a desire to voice my dissent on that.
> >  The fact that he had to draw dog-turds into the discussion IMHO shows
> >  just how bankrupt that kind of reasoning is :)
> 
> It's probably useful, on the one hand, to make a distinction
> between natural beauty and human-made art, and on the other
> hand, to avoid extremes of subjectivism or objectivism in
> assessing art.  (For the beauty of turds and similar
> natural phenomena, see below.)

Yes.  And with both natural phenomena and works of art, beauty is
subjective.

> The main problem I had with And's comments was not that he
> maintains that some art is objectively better than other art, but
> that he seems to say that some artforms are inherently
> better than other artforms, and that conlanging is one of the
> lesser artforms.

Yes, that is a completely fallacious notion.  You cannot say that,
say, music was "better" than ikebana.  All you can say is that
music moves you more than ikebana - the next person may feel
differently.  It is also very dependent on culture.  Many if not
most westerners consider shadowplay an amusement for children.
In China, it is a highly respected art; shadowplays were performed
at the imperial court - and not just for the Emperor's
grandchildren.

>       I don't know enough about his other examples 
> of lesser artforms to comment on them, but it seems to me
> fairly obvious both that, e.g.,
> 
> 1. "Hamlet" is a better play than "Fanny and the Servant Problem",

I haven't heard of the latter play, and don't know _Hamlet_ well,
so I cannot say which was better.

> and
> 2. It's pretty well undecidable whether "Hamlet" is a better play
> than the "Moonlight Sonata" is a sonata, or vice versa.

Such comparisons are often made (e.g., "Tolkien was the Beethoven
of conlanging") - but they are subjective on both legs.

> That is, people can generally find some consensus about
> extreme differences in quality within a given art form, but
> can't come to any such agreement about the relative quality
> of the best exemplars of different art forms.  I would add,
> 
> 3. It's not obvious whether the Moonlight Sonata
> is a better sonata than Quenya is as a conlang.
> 
> And probably,
> 
> 4. It's not obvious whether the Crab Nebula is a more beautiful
> natural phenomenon than the Moonlight Sonata or Quenya
> is a beautiful work of art.

Agreed.

> It's also probable that some people are, whether by nature
> or by circumstances, more attuned to some artforms than
> to others; better able to appreciate and be deeply moved by
> the best exemplars of those artforms than by the best of
> some other artforms.

Sure.  Ballet does nothing for me; literary criticism is an
arcane art for me to which I never found access.  You mention
comic books - an often underrated art form.  Most comic books
may contain "trivial" subject matter - but the same is true
of literature, film, drama and even opera!

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