Nick Perovich

>I think these are staggeringly fine works, and it's the existence of such
>works that makes me suspicious of the common claims about "subjectivity"
>(i.e., the ones that suggest a sort of relativism.  This connection
>needn't, of course, be made; as I've said before, if people think granting
>that the appreciation of art is a subjective phenomenon is incompatible
>with an absolute standard for distinguishing better from worse art, they
>should read Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste.")  If the slow movement of
>the A-major concerto, no. 23, is not a test of the sensitivity of the
>listener, then I'm sadly misguided.

I have not read Hume's book, and possibly will not.  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.  Nick could not survive in their environment, and they could
not survive in Nick's.  They too have their arts, musical and visual, but
quite different from anything I could find in my culture.

In fact I would not need to go anywhere near as far as PNG to find a group
of people equally as unimpressed by my masterpieces.  There are people in
my town who see the acme of art as something they do on building walls with
spray cans, the acme of music as "something with a beat".

Are the Papua New Guineans, and the graffiti artists, wrong? Are they
demonstrably wrong? If demonstrably wrong, let Nick demonstrate it.  Or
Hume, if he can!

The masterpieces of Western art are masterpieces because parts of our
culture, parts of our education, have moved us in a direction from which we
can see that they are masterpieces.  The only absolute "quality" values are
the values resident in each of our educated minds.  Those can reasonably be
called absolute values.  They are different for each person.  There are so
many different absolute values that it is absurd to claim that those
values, or any others, exist independently of their holders.

I'll grant Nick .his. absolute values.  Will he grant me mine?  Will
he admit to the separate and different absolute values of everyone on
the planet?  I cannot see how he can claim that there is somewhere an
independent set of values, available to all, which can enable anyone,
given the proper study, to distinguish good from bad art.

It is only too easy to consult with your friends and colleagues and find
so much agreement between you that you convince yourself that there are
standards that everyone should recognise.  There are many other worlds out
there!

BTW I pass Nick's test of sensitivity, but I know a lot of sensitive people
who would not.

Alan Dudley
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