Alan Dudley wrote:

>I have not read Hume's book, and possibly will not.

You may still not want to read it, but I'll mention anyway that it's only a
brief essay, not a book.

>I will try to show, with little hope of convincing Nick, the impossibility
>of absolute standards "for distinguishing better from worse art".
>
>If I were to take any widely accepted masterpiece of Western art - a
>recording of a Beethoven symphony, a painting by Monet, a film of a .pas.
>.seul. by Nureyev - to a small village I once visited a day's walk from
>the nearest four-wheel-drive track in Papua New Guinea, I doubt if I would
>find anyone there who would appreciate it as art.  It would be easy to say
>that the residents of this village are merely uneducated savages, but this
>would be wrong.  They are as educated as Nick, but in entirely different
>directions.

(Oh, if coming up with compelling counterexamples were only this easy . .
.)  Look, we can raise this discussion to a higher level if need be, but
let's start out with the obvious.  Absolutists in regard to aesthetic
standards do not, so far as I know, make either of the following claims:
(1) Everyone who encounters masterpiece X grants that it is a masterpiece;
(2) No one ever needs any preparation to appreciate the greatness of any
masterpiece.  There are, of course, good reasons for not making either of
these claims, starting with the fact that they are both transparently
false.

What the absolutist claims is that there are absolute standards of better
and worse in the realm of art, not that everybody is in a position to
recognize them.  Since I mentioned Hume, let me explain how he combines
the subjectivity of art with absolutist claims.  (FWIW, I'm not a Humean,
nor do I offer this as anything more than an example of how subjectivity
need not involve relativism.) Hume holds that claims about art are based
wholly on how works of art affect the subject (there's the subjectivity).
He also claims that responsible judgments rest on various factors:
delicacy of taste, practice (experience), comparison, freedom from
prejudice, and good sense.  However, individuals differ from one another
in these characteristics (often in straighforward, even quantifiable ways).
For example, with regard to Mozart's piano concerto no. 23, the people
referred to in Alan's comment might be the Western music connoisseur's
equal in delicacy of taste, freedom from prejudice, and good sense; they
are unlikely to equal him or her (based on what Alan said) in practice and
comparison (of the sort relevant to reaching an aesthetic judgment about
the Mozart).  More importantly, even people from the same cultural
background can greatly differ from one another in such matters as delicacy
of taste.  So Hume introduces the notion of a "true judge," one who
exhibits these characteristics in a very highly developed way (demonstrable
observational sensitivity, lots of experience, etc.).  The claim is that
true judges, when operating with their faculties in high gear, will arrive
at like judgments of better and worse (absoluteness); the true judge *is*
what Hume calls "the standard of taste."

Again: there are lots of ways of defending the absoluteness of aesthetic
judgments, so it would be a mistake to get very involved with the question
of the merits or deficiencies of Hume's ideas.  I mention them ONLY because
(1) they show the independence of subjectivity and relativity in aesthetic
judgments, (2) they don't involve a commitment to either of the implausible
claims I mentioned above, and thus (3) they help to explain why Alan's
attempted counterexample is so weak.  For whatever the deficiencies of
Hume's position, I take it that any absolutist (and most others, I would
think) would want to endorse the part of it that says that the aesthetic
judgments whose agreement or disagreement matter are those made by people
in a position to appreciate the works of art being judged.  (Unless you
know something about sonata structure, unless your ears are attuned to
the major/minor system, unless you've listened attentively to a lot of
classical symphonies, unless you don't have an axe to grind, etc., why
should your scandalous preference of Dittersdorf over both Haydn and Mozart
trouble anyone or establish anything about "the relativity of taste"?) Of
course utterly uninformed evaluations of art are going to differ one from
another, but why should anyone in general, or the absolutist in particular,
be disturbed by THAT.

Now of course one can challenge Hume's claim that true judges always agree
with one another, and one would probably be right to do so.  But before
making too much of it, I would urge people to notice how striking a fact
critical consensus is.  Not that there is no intelligent disagreement, not
that works don't fade and enjoy revivals; it's just that the extent of
critical agreement is very remarkable and demands just as much attention
from the relativist as disagreement does from the absolutist.  Now just as
Hume can tell stories about why a particular individual's judgment fails to
accord with that of the true judge (lack of delicacy of taste, lack of
familiarity with the work or style, etc.) so stories can be told about why
whatever agreement there is exists (political power structures of the art
world, influence of art education, etc.).  The question then is just how
persuasive one finds one or the other of these.

Nick
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