I'm not sure, but the grand-parent might be drawing from Hakim Bey's distinction between Net and Web. This is from TAZ, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (1991):
We’ve spoken of the Net, which can be defined as the totality of all information and communication transfer. Some of these transfers are privileged and limited to various elites, which gives the Net a hierarchic aspect. Other transactions are open to all — so the Net has a horizontal or non-hierarchic aspect as well. Military and Intelligence data are restricted, as are banking and currency information and the like. But for the most part the telephone, the postal system, public data banks, etc. are accessible to everyone and anyone. Thus within the Net there has begun to emerge a shadowy sort of counter-Net, which we will call the Web (as if the Net were a fishing-net and the Web were spider-webs woven through the interstices and broken sections of the Net). Generally we’ll use the term Web to refer to the alternate horizontal open structure of info-exchange, the non-hierarchic network, and reserve the term counter-Net to indicate clandestine illegal and rebellious use of the Web, including actual data-piracy and other forms of leeching off the Net itself. Net, Web, and counter-Net are all parts of the same whole pattern-complex — they blur into each other at innumerable points. The terms are not meant to define areas but to suggest tendencies.
I think itake understands this and was making a point (an important one at that). Douglas R. Hofstadter made the same point (perhaps more eloquently) in "A Person Paper on Purity in Language"[0], which might be another avenue if you wish to understand what the parent comment was pointing at.
Portugal decriminalised drugs in 2000 and this is regarded as a better solution. Drug use is treated as a health issue rather than a crime issue, and the results are better.
See here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal
I'm Portuguese and can confirm this works pretty well overall.
It's still too strict though - I got convicted of essentially "possession with intent to distribute" just for having ~15g of hashish when I was young and a regular smoker some 15 years ago (the legal limit is 5g). I only got a bit over a year probation and it never showed up on my record, but it was extremely unfair IMO and a traumatic experience - to this day I still have nightmares of being arrested and my home being searched every once in a while, and a big distrust for police and the justice system which will probably never go away.
Decriminalizing drugs wasn't the only thing Portugal did. They virtually force people into rehab. They don't just go around distributing crack pipes like the US.
>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)."
(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.
> 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.
"I hope blue is your favorite color, because it's mine; and if it's not yours, you're wrong"
No, but if we both are at a painting course and painting the same still life, it is plausible we can come to a honest agreement about whose painting we prefer, which details are better presented in the others work and so on.
We are obviously talking of two entirely different things - art as a social phenomenon, and art as art (a technical skill, an aesthetic experience ).
"Taste as a metric" has entirely different meaning in these two contexts. In the sociological context I completely agree with you.
But in the "art as craft to be done, not merely observed because that is boring" sense the sociological analysis offers nothing (for the skill or the aesthetic experience).
We could be discussing of racing - the sociological aspect of observing the race - or of the actual driving which operate on completely two context.
So sociology studies audiences, while I am talking about actually driving/painting and how the perceptions in that domain have nothing to do with sociology but the craft based aspects only.
Considering the complexity,we are beyond the point where the work is so difficult that Taylorian external analysis of purely mechanical facts leads to an incomplete understanding of the actual work done.
So if someone would focus only on the sociological, observe-without-learning-craft type of analysis, their viewpoint would not envelope the art-ding-an-sich. Which is totally fine - but external to actually _doing art_.
As you can see, the three artists didn't value the same things in their composition. All three are recognized enough to have their place in a museum. And I seriously doubt you can find a consensus about a general theory to rank their work.
Yes, which means all of whom have recognized mastery of their art. So in a way they all are at the top.
But can we "rank art" at all? I think we can but we need to look not at the masters, but at the multitude of nameless students, most of which will never get their works displayed.
Let's take an thought experiment - an art class of local hobbyists is given the task of copying only one of them, let's say the Pissarro one.
After everyone considers their work done, each student is given the task of distributing the paintings to two groups, "the better half" and "the not-as-good" half.
Are the groupings random, or is there "a sense of taste and quality" guiding the students?
If you agree that it is likely that this grouping can be done in a way that is not random, we can agree on my point that there is a non-numerical-yet-not-random way to rate art that can be applied at least some of the time. If we disagree, we disagree and that's fine.
Another example:
Our daughter likes to draw a lot in her own style. Now she is revisiting her old drawings and redrawing them few years later. While her earlier work has some naive charm, she tends to prefer her later pieces, and indeed I do find her current work "better" in the sense that the characters are "more" there - they are more skilfully renderered and have "more character".
I think she is "a better artist" a few years later. Would others agree on this? Again, I would imagine they do.
I think the condensed version of my claim is "There are scenarios where within a given genre/style art can be rated by a non-random yet non-numerical measure".
I think piano competitions, especially the ones where the contestants play the same pieces work this way - there is a non-numerical, yet non-random measure guided by the jurys taste on who is the best.
I do appreciate you have the patience to continue this dialogue!
> Within the group, the extent of your knowledge will help you distinguish from others.
> the way this taste (but also the artist's skill) is acquired is highly correlated with social belonging: your appreciation of a specific piece of work is informed by your past experience within your social environment.
The setting you describe is a perfect example of this: a group with agreed upon acquired taste, which uses knowledge of that taste as criteria to rank art pieces. In that setting, the judgement is bidirectional: not only do people judge art pieces' worth, but they are judged for their good taste by their ability to separate the pieces according to the group's criteria.
> Our daughter likes to draw a lot in her own style. Now she is revisiting her old drawings and redrawing them few years later. While her earlier work has some naive charm, she tends to prefer her later pieces, and indeed I do find her current work "better" in the sense that the characters are "more" there - they are more skilfully renderered and have "more character".
I don't want to judge your daughter's art, but it is perhaps unsurprising that she uses her latest opinion to judge her own work. As she acquires a sense of aesthetics, her new artwork will tend to confirm to that new taste.
"... but they are judged for their good taste by their ability to separate the pieces according to the group's criteria."
On this we disagree. I think the students can do the sorting without peer pressure, driven only by their innate perception and love of the specific genre.
If we enforce this by making the selection process completely anonymous? Do you still feel the students will still feel judged for their taste?
There is no specific peer pressure mechanism in what I discussed. The system is internalized by the people doing the rating; it is learned as a part of being in the group, discussing whith others about what you like and how you create, and by following the courses in your example.
It is also not only values, but also knowledge. If you know classical music theory, you will be able to appreciate and distinguish baroque music, while people with other educations may seek different things in the music they listen to.
> Do you still feel the students will still feel judged for their taste?
The main point here isn't about judgement. It's a personal gratification for the viewer to be able to see subtleties in the author's art. It's very similar to people personally enjoying learning about technology, while also being able to acknowledge peers in a technical discussion and also seeing social benefits from being able to program.
The excessive detail is a necessity and a precaution. Researchers need that information (textual genetics or any art history for instance, maybe future archeology). A message can't be separated from the form it embodied; you need both to understand how an artwork has been received.
Besides, you always want to preserve more information than what is needed today, just in case new ways to exploit data appear later. That's what archeology does when it refuses to exploit some sites and preserves them for later : maybe the current techniques destroy data, so we save some sites for later - just in case.
Keep in mind that requirement is because we can’t eradicate yellow fever like we did smallpox, and hopefully covid. Yellow fever is endemic and has natural animal hosts which we can’t control
Speaking for France, but I suspect it is the same elsewhere: back in the day, the license exam was to build your own radio and operate it in front of an inspector, so it might be a remnant of that era. You also need to know this stuff to set up antennas.
Science is faith based for the non-scientific. As you put it yourself, it is about trusting studies and the institutions that produced it (including whatever in them creates the incentives for p-hacking).
No scientist expects anyone to trust studies or the institutions producing them. So, that's wrong from the beginning. The expectation of refuting something is just a bit higher than "I don't believe it!", e.g. read the study and show flaws in it - or make a counter study which shows different results. Maybe combine both.
Comparing this to faith where from the start you cannot check anything doesn't make any sense (if you know that something is true or false it isn't faith anymore, that's the point).
That's not really true. Scientists do (and expect others to) respect "established" and "trusted" journals that group studies together in some kind of authentication process. Even open journals like Sci-Hub are like this.
Otherwise, you could believe any PDF you can find on Google and know it to be true and representative. What if someone wrote a net to generate 10,000,000 studies on the same set of topics and scattered them throughout the Internet? Given a random study, you wouldn't know whether it's real or generated, without the "authority" aspect of a journal.
Now, whether or not the journals actually do a good job at authenticating the studies is another question. But, the principle stands that they are what we trust as consumers of science (a role which scientific researchers themselves play as well).
I agree with what you're saying. However, I think the parent's point is that people without education or a good understanding of the scientific process feel like they are accepting it (or not) based on faith.
I think this total lack of understanding of how the scientific process works is one of the biggest problems facing America today.
We’ve spoken of the Net, which can be defined as the totality of all information and communication transfer. Some of these transfers are privileged and limited to various elites, which gives the Net a hierarchic aspect. Other transactions are open to all — so the Net has a horizontal or non-hierarchic aspect as well. Military and Intelligence data are restricted, as are banking and currency information and the like. But for the most part the telephone, the postal system, public data banks, etc. are accessible to everyone and anyone. Thus within the Net there has begun to emerge a shadowy sort of counter-Net, which we will call the Web (as if the Net were a fishing-net and the Web were spider-webs woven through the interstices and broken sections of the Net). Generally we’ll use the term Web to refer to the alternate horizontal open structure of info-exchange, the non-hierarchic network, and reserve the term counter-Net to indicate clandestine illegal and rebellious use of the Web, including actual data-piracy and other forms of leeching off the Net itself. Net, Web, and counter-Net are all parts of the same whole pattern-complex — they blur into each other at innumerable points. The terms are not meant to define areas but to suggest tendencies.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hakim-bey-t-a-z-the-...