Objectivity in Art

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the art and media we consume in terms of a spectrum between low and high art.

A lot of media slides towards one side or the other, most of it is in the middle somewhere.

News is a bit of a special case, but still clearly has higher and lower forms. Higher news is more impersonal, fact based, less opinionated, and has open and transparent incentives. Lower news tends to entertainment.

What about enjoyment?

There is also enjoyment, and a humility or lowering/raising into the medium and expectation. What is ‘best’? in the objective sense it can be universal. the godfather is a great movie.. your fave might be inception. There is such a thing as good taste, however. And it’s a good thing if your top 10 changes over time, it means you are developing and improving your taste.

This one dimensional diagram misses a key metric which is enjoyment. Really these artworks should be undeniable, they hit you in your soul, and no analysis or explanations are needed.

Total area gets closer to a measure of the value of the work.

We should not lie to ourselves, and this is hard when we can’t really know ourselves. Like a knife that can’t cut itself, it’s impossible to fully grasp everything happening in our own mind. It would be like a computer being able to simulate the whole universe, it can’t be done because it can’t simulate itself when it’s inside the universe, it’s a recursive problem.

We have a strong bias towards the quick, low effort stuff on this chart, I think I am rating things wrong on that scale. Enjoyment is really too broad a term.

Personally, I love the fact that there are so many intimidating, hard works out there yet to read and watch. Literature is more exciting in that way than movies. With film, as far as I can tell (or imagine), it doesn’t really get better than the godfather, 2001, and a few others. It’s interesting as well because film has a much higher bitrate, with more artistry able to be expressed. I have to think about this more.

It’s fascinating to consider great works of art that went mostly undiscovered for decades before having a resurgence later. Some examples that come to mind are novels like moby dick, the great gatsby and stoner. What this reveals is a deepness, ‘high’ on the spectrum of art, that isn’t able to be appreciated easily. It’s hard to imagine this happening to a ‘popcorn’ movie, or genre fiction novel. In fact what we see is the opposite problem for those works: The Da Vinci Code for example has mostly faded from culture at this point.

What makes something ‘worth reading’?

There is a schism in literature between genre fiction and literary fiction.

There are a lot of reddit threads about this, saying a particular book or series has flaws but was still worth it because they “enjoyed it”. That makes no sense. There is opportunity cost with everything. You will never read or watch everything, it’s very important to be choosing good, nourishing things to read when we can. If we want to have some escapism that’s ok but let’s not equate everything, to reduce it all and squish it down to just enjoyment. That loses so much. It’s a postmodern, nihilistic view of the world.

Western culture today is very much into coddling, saying everything is ok, everything you do is fine, reddit represents that mainstream consensus view. This is the archetype of the coddling mother, smothering her children and never letting them grow. The natural antidote to this is the father, making harder choices, not always bending to compassion and not being taken advantage of. The heroes journey for a mother is letting the children fly the nest, represented in the Pietà, that’s courage.

It really is a deep question. If you just want enjoyment and dopamine, why not just drink/do drugs all the time? It’s easy to see why someone would do that. The hard question is why not, we need something higher to live for, greater purpose.

What is the purpose of art?

Art is in part a reflection of culture and deeply connected to all history and experience so we can’t really explain why it’s important without bringing in all of that. We are part of culture and history.

One small part of our purpose can be to connect deeply with the human experience, using art. Experience what we have collectively been going through for thousands of years, every heartbreak, great loss, cavalry charge, and extreme experience, and our smartest and most attuned ancestors captured some essence of that to pass down to us. We actually do owe them something, we honour them by remembering and connecting with it. In a sense reading and honouring great books is similar to observing Anzac day, independence day, Trafalgar Day, and our other great heroes and history.

Who are our heroes? We conflate fame with role models in our culture. It’s easier today for shocking, loud, weird people to be famous. Why have a statue? a statue is in the open, it’s architecture, history, and honouring right there in the town square.

Let’s be careful about who we are honouring, and what we are doing with our time.