Alan Dudley replied to Nick Perovich:

>If, as Nick believes, there sre absolute standards of good and bad in art,
>and if, as Nick appears to concede, these cannot be reliably accessed by
>anyone, it must follow that
>
>their existence cannot be proved
>
>the standards are useless, and
>
>this argument is absolutely stupid and we should both stop wasting the
>time of listers.

Theoretically, I have no idea whether artistic standards are absolute -
I doubt it, given that art is only a man-made facsimile of Nature or God.
The fact remains that the more we know about a particular style or body
of work, or about a particular culture that a work is created in, the
more qualified we will be to say whether a work is good or bad *in its
particular context*.  The more works you know to compare, for example, a
Haydn string quartet with, the more easily you will be able to say what it
is trying to do and how it does it compared with works that try to do
similar things.

However, you will also be able to assess it in light of works that try to
do different things (Romantic quartets, for example).  You will have to
acknowledge legitimate, uncomparable differences between the two types of
work, but you will also be able to discover similarities, and compare the
two works by the light of those.  That sort of thing is called criticism,
and I do not think it is a waste of time at all.  As long as you are clear
about the armoury of comparisons a critic is equipped with, you can still
gain valid insights from him.

The more informed we are - the larger our field of comparison (and
that will also go towards forming Hume's other factors, like delicacy
of judgment and taste - what, after all, is taste but the ability to
discriminate?), then at least our assessment will have taken into
account a larger number of criteria - we will be able to make greater
generalizations and in that sense our judgments will indeed be more
'absolute'.  'Good' and 'Bad' may indeed be the wrong use of words - what
we are trying to do is to discover where a work 'fits' and how it fits in
that place.

I would certainly think that a classical scholar is more likely to give
a valid opinion on a Haydn string quartet than a native from the heart of
Africa - simply because the scholar knows more string quartets.  Vice versa
for central African sculpture, for instance; but a scholar who is as much
at home in both worlds as the music scholar and the native are in their own
will probably be able to do more justice to either work than the other two
combined, and I think can objectively be said to judge on a higher level.
That is not absolute, but I don't think it is relativist or unproductive
either.  What is so frustrating about the post-modern relativists is the
unwillingness to compare and discriminate.That process of ever wider
comparison is called learning.

Felix Delbruck
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