Good Art is Objective And Here's A Really Long Post Explaining Why · 2:31am Mar 2nd, 2015
I did the thing again (the thing where a response to a comment elsewhere on FIMFic gets too long and becomes too much of a general statement to really work as a reply to just one person), so here goes, I guess:
Too bad statistics and art aren't compatible.
For reference: imagine a story with impeccable grammar, coherent story, overall decent writing, but with content that 90% of the audience finds offensive (because it doesn't fit into their hugboxes), so they all give it negative ratings out of spite, or just ignore it completely. Does that make it a bad story?
To be blunt about it: yes they are and, by direct association, yes it does.
Let's roleplay for a little bit. Let's say I'm a powerful business mogul with a great deal of expendable income, and you're a painter with a great deal of passion for your craft. One morning, it occurs to me that the western wall in the seventh guest bedroom of my mansion looks a bit drab compared to its accompanying other three. As I consider myself something of an artistic aficionado, I decide to commission a minimalistic painting with which to decorate said wall, and after a couple days I end up in contact with you.
When you hear of my request, you're gobsmacked. Minimalism? That insipid modern trend of painting a few lines along the edge of a ruler, slapping a one-word nonsense title like "Austerity" on it, and calling it art? You'd love to take my money to do what you love, of course, but not if that's what I think qualifies as good art. On the contrary, you believe you have a much better idea about what to do for me. When asked for a preview of your work, you show me a sweeping rendition of a verdant countryside scene, each stroke of your brush evoking the impressionist techniques perfected by the masters of old. It is sensual and subtle, you tell me, and the skill inherent in your methods is plain to see. Surely, you assure me, this is what I never knew I really wanted.
So it comes as a great surprise to you when, instead of praising your genius and admitting my own folly, I shake my head and terminate our partnership, expressing at the same time my disappointment that you painted some boring, stuffy field when what I wanted (and asked you for) was something fresh and exciting to fit in with the rest of my décor. At first you're heartbroken, but your despair quickly morphs into frustration. How am I so ignorant, so completely unaware of good art presented right in front of my face? How is it fair that I'm the one determining what art styles become popular, and you're the one living paycheck to paycheck because no one will appreciate what you produce? People used to know what good art, and good music, and good writing was, but now everything's upside down and the lunatics with money are running the proverbial (but tastefully decorated) asylum. The masters you've studied and idolized your whole life surely never had this problem. Van Gogh and Renoir, Monet and Manet and Mignolet (not an artist, admittedly, but a damn solid keeper for Liverpool as of late), even the Renaissance greats like da Vinci and Michelangelo surely never had anyone forcing them into situations like this, right?
And this is where we end the roleplay, because this is where I inform of the very simple truth: yes, every single one of those artists did face the exact same circumstances, and produced most--if not all--of their greatest and most revered works within those constraints. Van Gogh's first masterpieces began as commissions from his uncle. Pope Julius II wanted the Sistene Chapel's ceiling to be painted in such a way that it could have multiple meanings and contexts for different viewers, and insisted Michelangelo do the job despite the artist's preference for sculpture over painting. Basically everything Leonardo da Vinci did, including timeless works such as his "Last Supper" mural, were first requested and specified by someone else. Even the ancient Greeks and Romans commissioned artists to build monuments and installations as indications of royal power and military might, many of which (the Coliseum among them) still stand today.
Now, it's both true and relevant that some artists were not appreciated in their time and only critically lauded years after their work was first rejected, but in the general sense--and certainly in the context of fan fiction on the Internet--artistic merit and audience appreciation are mutually inclusive. The first cannot exist, has never existed, and will never exist without the other, and by consistently denying this fact, you do yourself, your public persona, and your critical perception a disservice. An artist "ahead of their time" in such a way that their work holds merit beyond what the public thinks of it is exceedingly rare, and likewise rarely recognized during their natural lifespan. To phrase that a more relevant way: you are not Vincent Van Gogh, and neither for that matter is anyone here.
A poor reception (or on FIMFic, a negative vote ratio) for a story containing objectionable or controversial content indicates poor craftsmanship on an author's part, because it shows the author has not presented that content in a way that its audience found excusable, enthralling, entertaining, or any combination thereof. For lack of any objective definition of how "art" may be defined and what "good art" entails, we must substitute our own personal definitions, and the collective average of a society's personal definitions forms that society's objective opinion on those subjects. In modern society, the measure of art's success has indeed been established as numerical in nature: how many units does your art sell? How many people have seen your art? How many people have expressed their enjoyment of your art in a quantifiable way, be it specifically directed at an individual piece or towards you as the artist responsible for creating it? The answers to these questions form an objective account of how well your art has been received, and that in turn defines your art's objective public worth.
It's important to differentiate between public and private worth in this sense, as many people--yourself included, it seems--mistake the latter as the only valid form. The private worth of a piece of art cannot be measured objectively. It's your personal and intrinsic response to that piece, and it's valid no matter what anyone else thinks about it. Public worth, on the other hand, can be measured objectively, because it's defined by objective statistics as I just explained. If you're creating art for your own sake, its private worth should be your first and only concern. If you're creating art for the sake of others, its public worth and private worth should bear equal weight during the process of its creation. In case there's any confusion about how to tell which category your art falls into, allow me to clarify: if you're posting it somewhere where a lot of people can see it and then complaining to great lengths about how wrong it is that people are looking at other art that doesn't resemble yours, it's public art that you've sorely misinterpreted as private. No one looks good when they make that mistake.
If you've read this far and feel offended by my implicit assertion that, under this logic, things like Fifty Shades of Grey qualify as "good art" purely because they're popular, you may want to sit back down again for this: things like Fifty Shades of Grey absolutely do qualify as "good art" purely because they're popular. "Popularity" is just a summative term for the various forms of public worth, and I make no secret of the fact that I believe public worth is more important than private worth in the grand scheme of artistic expression. The inherent purpose of art is to communicate ideas (which ties into why I tend to dislike modernist philosophies for art), and the number of people who view and/or experience your idea determines the effectiveness of your method of communication. So in other words, if your intention is to get other people to read what you write and no one wants to do so, you objectively suck at writing. You'll certainly improve with practice and time, but delusions of nonexistent grandeur not only prevent that growth from occurring, but remain patently obvious to artists who put in the effort necessary to shake off those delusions for their own sake and that of their audience too.
I think it's worth adding that when people argue this and they see a response of this sort, they assume that what's being argued is that this model is inherently good. It doesn't have to be. It's just how things work, and if you want to get known, you need to jump on it for your own benefit. It's completely possible to write what you want to write the way other people will enjoy it, and that's the simplest way I can think to reconcile the two viewpoints.
... Dude are you kidding? Your ultimate conclusion seems to be that if something is popular that means it's objectively good.
That's not what objective means.
Popularity is irrelevant to the notion of something being objectively good or bad. Popularity cannot be taken into account. Popularity is, in and of itself, a result of the emotional investment of a group of people.
I'd actually argue that if you're centering your focus on good art around the dissemination and transfer of ideas, then you have to be able to weigh the positive response to art against its negative response. Works like Fifty Shades of White and Gold/Black and Blue and Twilight feasibly suffer relative to "better" works not because they're more or less popular, but because in the marketplace of ideas they produce a substantial number of people who've--for one reason or another--decided that they want nothing to do with those ideas. And in some cases oppose them outright.
Surely an idea's success also needs to take into account the number of people who believe it's a bad idea. Not just total dissemination, or the number of people who believe it's a good one.
What you've described isn't what objective means I'm afraid. Even if you used the soft definition of objective as 'free of feelings or bias' instead of the usual usage as 'universal fact,' popularity is not actually a measure of good or bad and to suggest it is shows a very narrow view of reality. Many things become popular based off their incompetance; nobody watches Plan 9 From Outer Space because it's good, they're watching it because it's spectacularly bad. It's Schadenfreude mixed with morbid curiosity, with a bit of being part of a larger conversation sprinkled over it.
Additionally, you sort of bizarrely give an example of how artistic tastes and cultural value is a subjective and mutable thing, and use it as an argument for your objective view. There are plenty of other artists that have had the opposite thing happen to them, where they were lauded and popular in life, but the cultural perspective has shifted and their art has become passé by current tastes. You in fact give that occurence in your example of the mural—which is flawed in its own way, because not everyone has the same tastes. Someone else might have gone wild over the nature scene because that's what they were looking for and liked.
Which is really the heart of the problem with your argument; when people say art can't be objective, what they mean is that someone can hate something that the majority of other people like. What makes something good or not is entirely within the eye of the beholder, operating as a conversation between the audience and the piece itself.
Now, I get what you are really trying to say is that you feel that popularity and mainstream success is more important than any other artistic pursuit. And that's fine, you're allowed to feel that way. Hell, I mostly feel that way myself; I don't see as much value in making something if nobody's going to care. But that is not the only reason people write publicly. Many people write for prestige, as in they are writing to impress a specific group of people. On fimfic, that might be certain authors or reviewers that are respected for their opinions. In the real world it might be critics or certain modes of thought in academia. And the people who are writing for that reason and successful at their endeavors are often not mainstream popular. They can be, but a work being lauded by a specific critic or groups of critics and part of their conversation, and being mainstream popular and getting a lot of views/sales/etc. are not mutually inclusive figures.
Public opinion has no place in the creation of art and does not define what "good art" is or isn't. What separates good art from bad art is how the artist implements both the elements and principles as well as what their intended motive was in the creation of their work.
Public opinion is mutable whereas an artist work, once finished, becomes a constant. It doesn't suddenly sprout an additional head thereby making it a masterpiece.
If your objective definition is correct, you should be able to use it to compare art and tell which one is better, right?
Is art better if fifty people enjoy it and will remember it forever, or if one thousand people will enjoy it and forget it tomorrow?
Is an artist better who tries something experimental fifty times and has only one of those gets attention, but that one changes the course of art, or who does ten of something that's already been done to moderate public acclaim?
Is it better art if it's something that everyone has an opinion about, for good or bad, or something the no one hates but no one loves?
Your answers don't have to match mine, but if you can answer those for me in a way the vast majority of people will agree with, I'll agree that you've discovered the objective definition of good art.
I really like it when you do these things, personally. I'm not always tuned in to whatever current events inspire you to make them, but your thoughts are insightful and sometimes entertaining regardless of the context. Obviously, this one has a certain direction in mind, but I think it could stand well enough on its own without it.
To stay relevant, I'd actually argue that private worth holds more value than public worth (when it comes to creating, anyways), because the inherent value of the former has a direct impact on the effectiveness of the latter. Your example of an art commission is a good one, but I think it glosses over that the artist was just an idiot for going against the commissioner on the basis of bad business practice alone, and as a relevant analogy I don't think it's as sound of one as you aimed for, despite carrying the sought after weight. But I digress.
While not always the case, generally the amount of effort one puts into a project is returned by the public reception. By "effort" I don't necessarily mean work, but something more qualitative that I can't pin a single word to. I can spend an hour trying to draw the perfect circle, endlessly erasing and tracing and using different pencils, while someone else can do one with a single motion of the arm. Some supporting evidence, in my case as a writer anyways, is that the stories I've written which I've cared about the most ended up being better received than those I didn't care as much about.
I don't have a clear understanding of what makes a story good, but I like to think I know what makes a story solid. Does it sound right? Is the urgency of the current action reflected by the pacing? Am I referencing this symbol enough so people may get it, while not shoving it down their throats or even hindering the story if it goes unnoticed? This is why it takes so long for me to write: I'm the one on their hands and knees trying to make my circle the best it can be.
I think I'm digressing. I don't know where I'm going right now. But anyways, the amount of care one puts into the private work is often reflected by the public worth. And if the public worth isn't at all proportionate to the amount of private worth held, it shouldn't be an issue besides. Any private worth should outweigh any public worth. The only thing that matters then is how big of an ego or self-esteem issue the artist/writer/creator has.
Or I could be completely wrong. I dunno. I'm selfish like that. I write for myself.
I agree with you to a certain extent. I would say that making art in such a way that it can be accessible to a general population is something that should be taken into account with regards to its overall value. To not do so at all would be the equivalent of a five year old inventing his own language of gibberish and getting angry at people that fail to understand him/her. If it's not accessible to anybody, then what's the point?
However, I do think this issue goes a little bit deeper than only distinguishing between the "public" and "private" worth for art, though I think that's definitely a better way of quantifying it than what a lot of people try to do (AKA: dismissing the concept of artistic value entirely).
It's one thing to convey an idea effectively and accessibly, but I also think you need to put more weight on what that idea actually is. Take, for example, the song "Sexy and I Know It." Very effective with conveying its meaning and ideas; he's sexy. And he knows it. Aww yeah. This song was enormously popular back in 2011, and I'll admit that it was a bit of a guilty pleasure song for me for a while, but would I consider it "good art"? Not at all.
In other words, for all of those people that did like that song, you also need to look at what the private worth of that song is to all of those millions of people, too. For starters; why did I like it(for a time)? It had a ballin' beat, the lyrics made me giggle, and... it had a ballin' beat. But that's it. It was easy for people to wrap their minds around it and embrace it, because there wasn't much there to embrace to begin with. And, as such, it was really easy to let go and move onto something else.
Ask people why it is that they really like a catchy mainstream pop song. If the massive overall consensus is that they like the song because "tHe beet izz PHAT!!!!11!!1" or something similar, then it would seem to me that whatever private reasons the majority of people have for liking that song... those reasons aren't worth very much, least of all to themselves. And as such, I think the value of the art would have to be lessened, as well.
Vapid, empty content is easily accessible. Now, getting a large population of people to actually sit down, think, and reconsider their perceptions of the world around them as a result of an art piece you have made... that's much more valuable.
If there's an objective standard to be had, then it needs to be something that's fixed. Unchanging. Objective truths aren't one thing one day and another thing the next. They're universal. All-encompassing. Fact.
That's why you can't have popularity be any sort of objective quality standard. Tastes change over time. Take a Renaissance piece that met a universally "meh" response back in its day, or was even disliked, but is now widely accepted among the art world as one of the best works ever put to canvas. Take Kubrick's 2001, or Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. If they weren't popular when they were first made, but they are popular now (or, conversely, they were popular but now everybody is confused what all the fuss was about), then that art has objectively increased or decreased in quality over time. Nothing's been done to it at all, mind. It's still the same canvas with the same paint, or the same film reel, or the same jumble of words. But just because people like it, the art itself is now magically better? Or, now that people hate it, the art itself is terrible?
It's like... ask the question "is 2001 a truly great film?" - it's 2015, film critics have re-evaluated it and most movie buffs consider it one of the finest films ever made. You have to answer yes because public worth is very high. But then immediately time-travel back to 1968 and ask yourself the same question. Does the answer change?
If it does, then what you're describing here is not an objective standard. If it doesn't, then the system is completely unreliable. What if we've got it wrong? What if in 20 years, nobody likes Twilight anymore, and it's no longer popular? Was it bad all along? I think it's important not to confuse successful art with quality art - quality really needs to be evaluated just based on the piece itself, not whether or not it sells. That certainly describes successful art (and you can argue that success is more important than artistic merit all you want; that's a whole separate issue I won't even touch), but not quality art. I don't really think Casablanca would make its money back if you released it to general audiences today, let alone become an everlasting, iconic institution of cinema. Doesn't mean it is or ever was any less of a good film, because public tastes and artistic quality are not one and the same. They never have been, and they never will be.
2842410
I feel like Aqua's point in that regard is that while the art itself is constant and can't change over time, the art's overall importance is fluctuating, because he's defining art's value as a communication of ideas, and more people responding more positively to a work of art over time improves the transmission of whatever ideas the work of art is putting forth--which makes it "better."
So the art's a constant, like a bar of gold is a constant, but how much they're "worth" is going to change over time.
At least, that's what I took from Aqua's perspective on that. He may have something different to say.
One thing that comes up a lot in my literature classes is the difference between "commercial" and "literary" fiction. The difference is as such: Commercial fiction does exactly what you expect it to, while literary fiction does not. In commercial fiction, a comedy will contain wacky misunderstandings, a horror story will have some sort of monster, a romance will always end with the girl getting the guy, and so on. When you pick one up, you know exactly what you're going to get from the experience, which lets you select your reading material based on what emotions you want to feel. Literary fiction is experimental, mixing styles and genres and doing things that take a lot more thought to comprehend. Commercial fiction sells well. Literary fiction is mostly reserved for people like us.
What makes one technique "good" is completely different from what makes another technique "good". It bugs me when people try to argue about when one work of art is objectively superior to another, because not all art serves the same purpose. You don't judge all livestock based purely on how energy-efficient they are; that's an important thing to consider, but there are a ton of other factors involved. So while I'd agree with you that popularity is a valid frame of reference for the quality of art, using it as the only measure of quality lends itself to a new set of problems.
Also, you know people reflexively thumbing down FlashLight shipfics is just wrong.
Throwing a further wrench into all this, where do trollfics fit on this scale? They're a form of art, clearly, and if it was the author's intent to get people angry and have them try to bury it, can it be said to have failed when exactly that happens? Or what about intentional absurdities like Dada or the Futurist movement? Or art about the fact that it itself will fade into obscurity? (My goodness I'm sounding hoity toity all of a sudden. Since when am I an art snob?)
Do you honestly believe this Aqua?
The discussion that has been created around this short essay has raised some excellent questions that I would love to see answers to. Myself, I was in agreement with your points, but I think I've since been convinced otherwise. You make a very good argument, but your argument assumes a definition of the worth of art--and I don't think there's any way to convincingly make the case that one definition is more correct than another.
I ended up writing a post about the subject of the objectivity of art myself.
2842250
Popularity is an objective measurement; I can count how many copies Fifty Shades sold. You aren't objecting to its objectivity; you're objecting that you don't think liking a thing has to do with whether it's art.
You disagree about the type of category "art" is. I could talk about extensional vs intensional semantics, but let's talk about grammar instead, since more people are familiar with it.
Some people think grammar is prescriptive: there are rules of grammar which smart people have figured out from observing lots of sentences, and we can tell how good someone's grammar is by measuring it against those rules. That's you. You're the prescriptivist.
Some people think grammar is descriptive: Whatever people speak and understand out in the real world, that's correct grammar, and Latin scholars mumbling about split infinitives are just
whackingshowing off.The advantage of Aquaman's approach is that it is objective in that you can measure the numbers.
The advantage of your approach is, ultimately, that it places more value on the opinions of smart and well-informed people. This supposes that artistic value is objective in that it's a category with some logical internal structure to it, so that the opinions of smart and well-informed people can be more correct. Aquaman is assuming that's a meaningless statement, that "good art", like "good food", just means somebody likes it.
(If a French chef tells you that you shouldn't like Philly cheese steak, is he right?)
But suppose you're right. Suppose art is a thing that has rules, like physics. Then consider this: Galileo leans out from the Tower of Pisa and drops a ball, and you want to know how fast it's going when it lands. Aquaman uses a camera to take 4 photos each 1/10th of a second apart, and does interpolation to figure out its speed. You use Newtonian theory to calculate its speed when it hits the ground. Who gets the more accurate answer? You might be right in theory, but Aquaman might still get the more-correct answer.
In the longer view, your view is the one required if we suppose that there is such as thing as progress, that we can grow as individuals or as a society, whereas Aquaman's view is the post-modernist view that there is no logos and hence no arbiter of value; value is just a feeling, and everyone's feelings are equally valid. I like to think there is such a thing as progress, but making theories about art that tell you how to feel has a long history of FAIL.
2842462
I will note that popularity is, more or less by definition, an objective measure of how popular something is - and if your goal is to be popular, then as far as the goodness of fit for your goal goes, writing something which is popular is by definition good, because that is your goal.
Popularity does correlate with quality, though - good stories are not always more popular than bad stories, but the more popular something is, the more likely it is to be good. Something which is unpopular is much more likely to be bad - and especially more likely to be terrible - than something which is popular. There are plenty of bad popular stories, but that only proves that it is not a 1:1 correlation. If you were to go through your favorite stories list, and then go through the stories you downvoted, I'd wager that the story which is the 50th percentile for your favorite stories has vastly higher views and a vastly higher rating than your 50th percentile downvoted story.
2842462
Yes and no. Consider Einstein's theory of relativity. It explains how the same object can have a different length depending on who measures it. But each of those different lengths are objectively true, given the observer's frame of reference. The theory of relativity defines what a frame of reference is in a precise way so that what was formerly observer bias is exactly factored out of the measurements.
Or consider simply the question, "How long is the Washington Monument's shadow?" This changes from moment to moment, but you can take the measurement, and it's always an objective measurement.
Something is fixed. But that doesn't mean the particular number you get is fixed. It could be that the method for getting that number is fixed. If you specify a procedure for counting something, and ten people do it and they all get the same result, that's an objective measurement. Counting the number of people who gave a story a thumbs-up is an objective measurement; it is free from observer bias.
Eh, I'm just here to write horse fiction and have fun with people.
Spending my time worrying about what's "good" or "popular" strikes me as being quite silly. Long as you had fun writing it, and in turn long as you give respect to people for trying to write something they wanted and putting it where everyone can see it, the rest is window dressing.
Sorry, had a longer, more coherent response planned, but I saw a car go by and had to chase it
2842884
This.
~Skeeter The Lurker
The evaluation of public vs private worth is important, but I have to disagree and say that you cannot objectively state that public is superior. Rather, my feeling is that it is crucial for each author to identify their feeling on the matter (and constantly reevaluate, if need be), always striving to meet this balance.
My favorite cautionary tale with this is darf. For those who don't know, he was a really prolific clop author from a few years back, nearly 3000 followers, thousands of views per fic. For a period of time, he was probably one of the bigger names on that side of the mature filter. And then he started writing SFW stuff. And I mean like, homages to Ulysses. Suffice it to say, reactions were poor. And maybe this is just the romanticized version of the story, but the way I hear it, frustration with being typecast as "that clop guy" and being unable to branch out, is part of what drove him off the site.
In this situation, we have an author who had terrific public success. Few people could dream of 3000 followers on this site. (In fact, his stats page says that he's the #11th most followed user on the site, over a year after his quitting, so now I perhaps feel silly for explaining who he was.) And any new story that he posted—so long as it was another clopfic—was pretty much guaranteed gold. And perhaps he was particularly proud of some of those clopfics. But for stories like Alectrona to which he held with tremendous private worth, the inability to reproduce that success was infinitely frustrating. Indeed, that fear of public failure on my highest privately-valued fic is what keeps me in revision hell, too scared to commit to something that isn't perfect
Now granted, you might say "well, idk if 3.3k views and an 80% upvote can really be considered failure". Or perhaps "well, it was silly to take a ton of followers that like over-the-top fetish porn, and expect them to appreciate an homage to James Joyce." But in the end, none of that honestly matters. What matters is darf and his thoughts. Because I can't sit here wrapped up in my Snuggie and tell him that his own opinions are irrelevant, and that there's some other objective measurement that he should appeal to. In the end, he identified too late what it was that he wanted to write for, and hit dissonance when his fic results went elsewhere.
You can write a silly trollfic that hits the Featured Box mostly due to hate comments, 50% downvote, and still be happy with it. It rustled jimmies, and whatever. A trollfic with under 100 views, on the other hand, would be disheartening to most. You can write one of the top 50 most viewed stories on this site, even if it's pretty widely panned (think 50 Shades) but in the minds of some authors, the viewcount might trump the actual comments. Or you might have a underrated fic that you wish could do better, yet you have some of the best commenters in the world, ones who will write hundreds of words of commenting on each and every chapter, and wow, you wouldn't trade that small devoted fanbase for anything. Or perhaps you as an author can't be defined by one desired reaction for all fics, and you really take it on a case-by-case basis.
The sooner you discover what it is that you're seeking, the sooner you can strive for exactly that. On the contrary, a lack of understanding and a subsequent misalignment are some of the leading causes of author melancholy on the site.
I find it odd that objective statistics are being derived from a massive sample of subjective opinions. Granted, that applies to any opinion poll, but that doesn't change the strangeness. What's the critical mass beyond which subjective becomes objective, or is looking for such a thing a fool's errand? And if art is truly dependent on the audience, then how can it be said to be objective if a change in time, place, or both can result in a completely different reaction?
Also, I feel that "good art" and "a good product" need to be distinguished. Fifty Shades, for example, is a much better product than it is art. A critic-praised film that flops at the box office would be the opposite. Van Gogh's work became better products over time, and The Song of the South became a worse one, to the point where Disney tries to pretend it doesn't exist. An alternate distinction might be "good art" and "successful art." Popularity is certainly one way of measuring artistic value, but it's far from the only one.
Nicely said.
Everything is subjective and doesn't matter, so you might as well have fun.
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I agree, and this is a very important point to make. Your goal is your goal. If your goal is to be popular, then a story which fails to be popular is bad. If your goal is to impress Bad Horse, then a story which fails to impress Bad Horse is bad. If your goal is to make money, then a story which is critically lauded but makes you very little money is bad; if your goal is to be critically lauded as a literary genius, then you don't care if you don't make much money off of it, because every English professor in the country is writing your praises.
For me, personally, I consider "making the featured story box" a success, but "getting someone I deeply respect as a writer to compliment my story" as a greater success than making the featured story box.
Since we've stooped to name-dropping, I might as well respond accordingly:
"Brave New World," "Lord of the Rings," "Across the River And Into The Trees", and "The Master And Margarita" were all divisive among critics in their respective times, to say the least (that fourth one actually ended up heavily censored and/or banned outright). Nowadays, they are all regarded as classics, there are probably countless other examples of the same phenomenon.
How is this "objective" compared to something like mathematics? If I dumb it down, 1 + 1 still equals 2, and it has done so ever since humans began to employ addition. Maybe some higher and more complex number system will give a different answer, but it will still give the same answer every time, and I'd be happy to hear the "objective" arguments against having this value for this particular addition. Conversely, the same painting/book/movie/song/etc. can have its "value" change within days, let alone centuries, and every single person you ask will have a different opinion. Who decides which one is more "valid" than the other? How is the "value" consistent if it keeps changing?
The point you're arguing is whether or not a work is more valuable if it can "please the crowd", i.e "how famous it is". By that logic, the "troll face" and every other shitty meme the internet had produced is currently more valuable than anything produced by the big-name artists of the last 1000 years.
Will the same thing be true in a year from now?
2843246 Well, yes. That's essentially marketing in a nutshell. Your degree of success is measured against the moving goalposts set by the ever-changing expectations and desires of the world around you.
The goalposts' location may be defined entirely by subjective variables, but that doesn't change the fact that the goalposts themselves objectively exist, and your success will rely on you being able to accurately discern where they lie at any given time.
Good art is not created in a vacuum.
2843445
But objectivity does function in a vacuum. Indeed, it's easiest in a frictionless one, if we're talking physics.
This is what I meant with my first statement. How can a standard for quality be said to be objective when it's summed up as "people like it"? That's a value judgement, an inherently subjective process. Taking the opinion of the greater zeitgeist doesn't change the fact that you're still taking an opinion. There may be goalposts, but their nature as goalposts only comes from societal consensus on that role. Objectively, they're just poles in the ground.
Of course, by that argument, objective art is just pigments on canvas, ink on paper, or some other material description, and nothing more. At that point, we're diverging into a semantic argument over "objective" and "subjective."
I suppose at this point I'm just trying to justify why this whole treatise makes me queasy.
2843464 Objectivity does function in a vacuum. But we don't exist in a vacuum. We exist in a society where our ability to engage with others is crucial to our success.
Other people's opinions may be subjective value judgments, but those value judgments objectively exist. To ignore those opinions in pursuit of our success would be unsound.
Also, I just recognized your name as belonging to that one person who comments on, like, every picture on Derpibooru. Hi!
2843436 Objectivity isn't static.
I'm not the best at math, but I like to think of it as a math equation. Say, x - y = z. The variables x and y may change depending on the needs of the equation's user, but z will ALWAYS be the difference between x and y, and this is a fact that cannot be refuted.
Replace "x - y" with "what society likes, minus what society dislikes". Together, they add up to "z", which one could interpret as is "the thing that society is most receptive to at the time". Now, design your product according to "z". Boom. Success.
Ultimately, while x and y are subjective opinions that change depending on the times and atmosphere and culture or what have you, the fact that they add up to z (and that x, y, and z all exist in the first place) is an objective truth.
People's opinions may change over time. Society may change over time. But at that moment in time when LOTR was first published, the nature of the audience (x - y) was in a particular state (z) that meant Lord of the Rings would be considered critically divisive. Fast forward to today, and the nature of said audience has changed rapidly, to the point where they're much more receptive to LOTR.
2843639
There's nothing objective here. For starters, what are the criteria for deciding the values of "x" and "y"?
Sales? Views? Reviews? Ratings? Fanbase size? Fan material?
Each and every one of these completely throw off any "equation" you could come up with. Just to stay on the subject of "stories that are popular to hate": Fifty Shades of Grey wasn't popular because it "got something right." It was a book people read the same way everyone watched "Gangnam Style", i.e the "You have to see this shit to believe it!"-effect...
It wasn't the story that did the most hardcore BDSM ever. It wasn't even the story that combined BDSM and romance the best way ever. It merely found this very odd niche where some people can genuinely find something endearing (maybe even arousing) in it, while others read it just to laugh their asses off, or because they love being angry at bad works of art. It didn't advance literature in the slightest. In a few years from now, you'll see it on Top 10 lists such as "Top 10 cases of 'Did you know they wrote dumb shit like this, and it became a hit?'"
Still, right now, it's breaking bestseller records in several countries, and the movie is selling like hotcakes. Am I supposed to think it's good after all? And, by that logic, should I count all those stupid cat videos and "The Annoying Orange" with their millions upon millions of views as "masterpieces"?
2843791
All of the above and more.
Me boiling it down to x - y was a vast oversimplification made to demonstrate an extraordinarily complex phenomenon that simply can't be quantified, yet still exists and plays a huge role in the success of one's product. There are hundreds, thousands, millions of variables that play into it, and all of those variables are causally influenced by other variables, and it's so staggering and complex that ultimately we will never know the formula. But it's there, somewhere, and the end result is always z, and the best we can do is get as close to z as possible. It's an astronomical goal, but it's essentially the entire marketing industry in a nutshell.
The objectivity lies not in the nature of x and y, or how they came to be. The objectivity lies in the fact that x and y conceptually exist: people do like certain things, and don't like other things, and those opinions exist and matter and are critical to the success of your product.
If I walked up to a person who loved apples and hated oranges and I wanted to sell them something, it would be irrational for me to try and sell them an orange. Because, even if their hate for oranges is subjective, the fact that they hate oranges is an objective truth. For whatever reason, reality and causality have conspired to dictate that, at this singular point in time, this particular person dislikes oranges. Not acknowledging that truth is illogical. My logical course of action must change to suit the subjective whimsy of this individual if I seek to meet my goal.
Well then I would certainly count that as a success. To be able to attract so much ire from audiences that they feel compelled to watch it? That's extraordinary.
Would I rate it as a literary masterpiece? Not by a long shot. But I would rate it as an extraordinary success in regards to creating a product that people massively enjoy, getting the world to know it exists, and turning it into a worldwide phenomenon.
Marketing is an art. 50 Shades may not go down in history as a literary masterpiece, but it will go down in history as a remarkable case study of how to appeal to a global audience, including those that may potentially hate your product.
P.S. I see my avatar and your avatar and I am massively entertained by the visual. Rarity's just sitting there, looking over her newspaper, going "no, dear, that makes no sense", and Sweetie Belle's just like "but siiiiis hang on a sec if you look at it this way", and bahahahaha I love it.
Oh wow, this blew up. Looks like that title choice worked out even better than I'd hoped. It's a bit late, but let's see how much I can reply to without being redundant:
2842250
2842347
2842410
Most of your objections, it seems, have to do with some confusion over whether I'm arguing that artistic quality is objective all the time or just in certain circumstances. To wit, at no point did I claim that art in its entirety is objective, or that popularity implies objective quality in all artistic categories. All I said, and am repeating now, is that "good art" in the public sense is objective, and that objective popularity is only applicable for defining public worth. Defining objectivity as "representing facts" doesn't invalidate my use of it in my argument, because for any given piece of art at a certain moment in time, its public worth can be objectively measured. I can look at a novel and list the facts and figures about how many copies it's sold or how many reviews it's received on Goodreads--not how many five-star or one-star reviews, mind you, just total reviews as a metric of overall exposure and response. To extend off of that, public worth can change over time, but that doesn't make it not objective. The variables contributing to a piece's popularity or lack thereof shift and evolve in sync with the attitudes and desires of the general public, but the end result--the raw numbers we use to measure exposure and popular awareness--remain purely objective fact.
If we were analyzing private artistic worth, on the other hand, the process would based around the piece's critical reception and adherence to generally accepted principles of the art form in question, and as a result be completely subjective. Subjective as well is my opinion that public worth is more important than private worth; I'm a marketing major, so it kind of runs in my blood to value results over intentions. To that end, our opinions seem to differ primarily in that context, and that's a point I'm happy to concede as subjective as well. That being said, I maintain that pieces of art with high objective public worth and low subjective private worth still qualify as "good art", since that label can be subjectively applied to pieces that succeed in just one or in both categories.
2842411
Only in a public sense, which is all I've claimed a descriptor of "objective" can be applied to. I can form an objective opinion on which books have more public artistic merit right now based on number of copies sold and an estimated number of readers, and my subjective opinion is that such an analysis provides a relevant definition of what the public considers to be "good art", as my subjective opinion of "good art" factors in both critical and commercial success. I can't make an objective claim about a piece's private artistic merit, and neither can anyone else.
2842425
I'd say that's about as close as we can get to an objective definition of private worth, so I think you're on the right track. The established conventions of any artistic genre exist because they've proven successful many times over in the past, in the same sense that worn-out tropes only get that way because they work so well in the first place. That doesn't mean there's no artistic merit in writing a second-person future tense story in complete violation of those conventions, but it does mean you're likely to have a harder time achieving public worth as opposed to private worth.
2842447
As a writer, I agree with you. As a marketer, I couldn't disagree more. That's why I try to assign separate but relatively equal definitions of merit to art with high private worth versus public worth: I hold just as much respect for a story that makes me think as much as one that purely entertains me for a few afternoons, as much as one that I didn't enjoy but sold a hundred million copies. To me, personal enjoyment--what I've been calling "public worth"--is on level pegging with personal significance--"private worth". So in that sense, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Ernest Cline's Ready Player One, and E.L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey can all be said to have artistic merit and thus qualify as "good art", just in different forms of the term.
2842462
"Objective" doesn't necessarily mean "unchanging". As I believe others have said here, all it means is that something can be measured in the form of inarguable facts, which does fit in with a piece of art's public worth. The amount of books an author sells or the amount of revenue they take home after taxes are inarguable numerical facts, and although those figures can and almost certainly change year-to-year or even day-to-day, each individual number still remains objective. Public tastes, narrative trends, and stylistic conventions all change as well over time, but those are factors that play into creating those objective figures, not objective figures in and of themselves. As
2843639 rather brilliantly put it: the variables are dynamic, but the formula is static.
2842541
You've hit the nail on the head as to why the difference between public and private worth is so critical to defining "good art": a movie like The Avengers is in no way on par with films like Citizen Kane or The Godfather, but at no point was it ever trying to be either. The purpose of The Avengers was to be a smash-hit summer blockbuster while also maintaining the integrity of its diverse cast of licensed characters, and its box office revenue and popular reception both prove how immensely successful it was at achieving precisely that. Even if a film doesn't intend to be timeless or win every Oscar it can, it still can hold artistic merit--public andprivate--by executing on whatever its primary goal is. I had a great deal of posthumous respect for Roger Ebert (as well as when he was alive and writing) primarily because, as opposed to far too many other film critics, he understood this concept and centered his reviewing policy around it.
2842587
I do honestly believe that, although I feel I should emphasize once again that public worth is not the same thing as private worth. I have no interest in reading or watching Fifty Shades of Grey and have found what I have seen of it to be of exceptionally poor quality. That being said, its sheer commercial success demands that it be respected for its near-unprecedented public worth, if not for any private worth to speak of.
2842630
In my defense, it's true that I've based my argument around a certain definition of the worth of art, but I don't assume that definition is objective. This is just my perspective on how art should be analyzed and classified as "good" or "bad", and everyone here and elsewhere is free to feel otherwise about how best to go about doing that.
2842884
Me too, man. I just have a lot of feelings and no one's figured out yet that I don't even go to this school.
2842963
Couldn't have said it better myself. Darf is a perfect cautionary tale about what can happen if one assumes that public worth and private worth are one and the same, or even can be conflated as such with enough influence and elbow grease. Art won't achieve high public worth just because it has high private worth to the author, and vice versa. To achieve the former, you have to find the latter in the process of appealing to the masses. Otherwise, the writing process gets pretty miserable pretty fast, not to mention the final product tends to suck on both levels.
2843130
That's absolutely a factor worth a great deal of consideration, but it does still fall under the canopy of private worth since it's based around one's own opinion of what messages are the correct ones to send. The piece in question does still have a whole heap of public worth because of how well-known (not to mention well-selling) it is.
2843246
To be fair, that's a valid alternate way of phrasing "private worth" and "public worth". I chose to apply "good art" to both categories just because of how I personally feel about the definition of art and what makes it qualify as "good".
2843436
I'm gonna be honest: I was all set to reply to this comment as I have to so many others just now, but 2843639 and 2843875 again here said everything I would've said to such a thorough and accurate degree that I honestly can't think of anything else to add. So in other words: what she said.
(Seriously, though, since I guess Swan Song will be tagged in this reply too: are you actually a business major like me, or do you just very effectively argue like one? I'm feelin' ya pretty hard right now, man.)
2844503 Well, there's not much else to say besides I rather strongly disagree with everything you've said on the subject, but I'd rather not pursue it terribly further. If the quality of my work is solely dependent on how much money it makes, then that's a really bleak world I would want nothing to do with as a content creator. Successful art and quality art are two completely different things in my eyes. Overlap exists and is significant, but it cannot be used as the only metric.
I can't imagine telling a posthumously lauded Renaissance painter his work was terrible but would eventually become good over time. That's just... well, frankly, it's one of the worst ways of looking at art I've ever heard of. A painting is a painting, and you don't ever hear people talk about how good art is now when it was previously considered mediocre or bad. I used 2001 as an example; on release, it got mixed reviews, but decades later people go back to it and say it's one of the greatest films ever made, and wow, this was actually a good movie all along, not wow, somewhere between 1968 and now this mediocre waste of time became a masterpiece. That difference in the way people phrase it, along with the general idea of re-evaluation leading to a changing of opinion, suggests to me that the quality of the art exists as something at least partially detached from public opinion.
2844503
I'm still not sure I agree with you. What comes to mind is the quote about the band The Velvet Underground, that their album only sold 30,000 copies, but everyone who bought one started a band. How do you account for the "public artistic merit" of art which is relatively unpopular, but hugely influential? The objective value would put The Velvet Underground as having less "public artistic merit" than Herman's Hermits, at the time at least, but their public artistic merit both grew over time and was more important in shaping the face of music.
So in 1968, your objective evaluation of how good or important The Velvet Underground is would eventually turn out to be drastically wrong, which is a weird judgement to defend. It makes such judgments kind of useless.
2844503
My point remains that if the public worth of something is dependent on the society and time in which it's viewed, that means it's intrinsically not objective; it's mutable and based on factors that are entirely variable. Yes, being able to state that a book has made X amount of money is an objective fact. That you place greater weight on facts like that is a perfectly acceptable opinion. These things are, however, tangential to artistic quality or merit. It is one of many factors that different individuals may or may not assign value to when rating something's quality—many people do factor in box office when deciding whether or not to catch a movie, and many people take into account votes and views when deciding whether or not to read something on fimfiction—but it is not an objective measure of good or bad, which was the main thing I took umbrage with in your post. It's fine that you put more weight on saleability than you do on the prestige of pleasing such and such a group of people with artsy opinions, but it is not factual to say it is better to achieve one or the other.
2844526
I agree completely with your position, and the fact I also agree with Aquaman leads me to believe you're both on two sides of the same coin.
If I could rewrite 2843639's wonderfully tact equation, let's make it so x + y = z, where x is negative, y is positive, and z should be as close to 0 as possible.
Whether or not you value quality over success or success over quality, the end product (happiness, pleasure, validation, whatever) is ideally the same in both cases, but we simply can't reach 0. We can come incredibly close, but we can never reach it. The only difference is whether or not that z is positive (because of success, or public worth) or negative (because of quality, or private worth).
2843875
2844503
You are talking about how to sell a work of some kind, which is artificially giving it monetary value based on how much people are willing to pay for it, using marketing strategies to further encourage them to want to buy it and increase the price, and so on...
At a certain point, this process becomes wholly disconnected from the work itself, since people can easily be manipulated into thinking something is worth more than it really is. If anything, the "success" belongs to the marketing department, and not whatever they were actually trying to sell.
Besides, on its own, a work of art is worth precisely as much as the materials used to create it. It's people who attach value to it, and you'd be hard pressed to find two people who would give the exact same amount of money for the same work, let alone give the exact same opinion. Sure, you can just take averages, like any clever salesman would, and sell the thing based on that, but this doesn't change the fact that "value" is perspective-based. There's no "universal value" that can be applied if it keeps changing from person to person. Just because 3 billion other people liked the latest crappy pop hit, it doesn't mean you could apply the world average to my own opinion and expect to be on the mark.
If I follow this logic, art has absolutely no value whatsoever. You basically just have a variable for every single person on the planet that says "how much would they buy it for (if at all)?" In other words, this is how you give something a price...
Monetary value, however, is just one aspect. A work of art also has historical, sentimental, psychological, scientific, *insert more words here* values as well. Sure, these can affect monetary value, but it doesn't change how, on their own, they are all subjective. Also, even if I "objectively observe" how other individuals feel about a certain work of art, I'm still just "building another perspective" at best. Others approach the work thinking "how much do I like this?", while you approach it thinking "how well can I sell this?" You're not even evaluating it on the same grounds. There's no objectivity, you just move to a different plane and look at things from there.
2844503
Wow. I somehow missed the whole part on public vs. private worth. This is why I shouldn't get involved in these kinds of arguments.
2844623 Somewhere at the core of this, at least the way I'm reading it, there's something that could be restated much better as "good works of art tend to be popular, and successful art is generally good art," which, in terms of applying quality rules to something as abstract as the entire concept of art? Yeah, I've seen worse than that, I can get behind it. What I can't even tangentially support is the idea that the most popular pieces of art are the best pieces of art, or that art needs to be popular in order to be good. I hate sounding like a hipster, but a lot of mainstream media is designed solely to cash in and make money on an audience that is purchasing a product. I won't say most media is entirely devoid of creative minds, but it seems like more and more, studio pressure to get the product to market tends to override the creative voice a lot of the time. It's hard to really blame them, because they're not content creators themselves but rather the people writing the checks so content can get made.
But that's sort of the problem. The person writing the check is trying to get the art made so he can make money from it. How good the art is at reaching that goal is important, yes, but if we're only meant to evaluate the art based on that metric, then you get into all sorts of stupid stuff like scenarios where you don't even have to look at the art yourself to know, objectively, for a fact, whether or not it's good. You don't have to have it described to you, you don't have to form any sort of mental picture. All you have to do is look at the bank statement after it goes on sale, and you know all you need to know about the quality of that piece of art; any further discussion of the art's merits more or less become irrelevant. Popularity = quality.
I cannot in any way support that viewpoint.
And I'm rambling long after I said I was done pursuing this. Whoops.
2844538
The ability of a piece of art to be influential for other artists is a subjective quality for that art to have, since it can't be objectively argued that literally every single person who bought that album then proceeded to start their own band (although it does make for a nice turn of phrase to say so). In my book, such a quality doesn't contribute to that piece's public worth, but rather its private worth as defined by the impact it had on those who consumed it: a category which is no less valid--debatably more so, as you and others have argued--than public artistic merit, but a different concept nonetheless.
Meanwhile, my objective analysis of The Velvet Underground in 1968 would be just that: an analysis of The Velvet Underground in 1968. If I were to ask people right now how they'd vote in a presidential race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, the responses I'd get might vary wildly from the vote counts tallied after Election Day in 2012, but that figure--while interesting and socially relevant today--would not invalidate that objective vote count from 2012, because that vote count measured the opinions of the American public during a single slice of time rather than over the course of their entire political lives. While public worth can be objectively measured, every instance of objective measurement is only perfectly accurate in the moment it first occurs. After that, we have to depend on averages and general trends: still objective in that they're based in inarguable facts, but a bit less specific all the same.
2844566
As I emphasized previously, though: while the factors that play into public worth are indeed variable, the formula with which we can objectively determine public worth at any given time remains static no matter what form the variables take. It appears that we fundamentally differ on the subject on how we define "good art", which may be why we're having difficulty getting through to each other. To be as clear as possible in that regard, I believe that the "best" art is that which combines unique stylistic/thematic excellence with commercial success; in other words, that which has both private and public worth on a grand scale. This is my subjective opinion, and yours (if it's as divergent from mine as it seems to me) is equally valid, but subjective as well. So really, I agree with you that it wouldn't be factual ("objective") to say that public worth is a better achievement than private worth, but I never made any claim that my opinion was factual in that sense, just that it was my opinion and that it formed the basis on the interpretation of "good art" that I'm presenting here.
2844630
Interestingly enough, this is actually becoming less and less the case in the 21st century. The traditional methods of "selling what we have" and, a little more recently, "selling what customers think they need" are quickly becoming obsolete thanks to the Internet's capacity to disseminate useful information, and while that process hasn't fully run its course yet, it's certainly not quite so simple to "manipulate" people anymore as how you're portraying it. A fan fiction site like this provides a unique "New Sales" (for serious lack of a better term off the top of my head) arena for "selling" stories free of any monetary or corporate constraints. Here, all that matters in terms of public worth is whether or not people read, upvote, and/or favorite your stories, and subsequently pay attention to you as an author. Which brings to my next point:
Yes it does, yes they do, and yes they are, respectively. What you've pointed out, however, is that critical difference between public and private worth I've been harping on about. Monetary value--in terms of sales figures or, on FIMFiction, vote counts--counts as an objective variable of public worth at any given time. The other values you've listed all play into private worth, which I agreed in my initial post and now several times afterwards is subjective and equally valid in the act of measuring artistic value. My belief that public worth is more important than private worth as the current market stands is a subjective opinion extending from that construction of what "good art" entails, and nothing more.
2844751
To emphasize this one last time: this is not in any way what I said in my original post or what I have been saying since then. It is my belief that public worth (i.e. popularity) is more important than private worth (i.e. the more "traditional" definition of quality in art) in terms of creating "good art" in the modern sense, because of how market-driven and consumer-based our society has become. A good artist must of course be able to say something powerful about the world from a fresh, uniquely original perspective, but that has always been the case. As I mentioned with the examples of Van Gogh and the like, it has also always been the case that a successful artist must be able to please the masses as well as the cultured elite, but never has that ability been more central to an artist's success than in the 20th and 21st century, when the creation and proliferation of art became a multi-genre, multi-form, multi-billion dollar international industry. The scenario in which someone defines a piece of art's quality purely by the bank statement attached to it does exist, and is valid because of the nature of that industry and its influence on the artistic stylings of today. That being said, that's not the only way to define "good art", and I haven't argued anything that runs contrary to that. The subjective qualities of art are just as valid as its objective qualities, and where I and many commenters here (yourself included) seem to disagree is on which type of qualities we believe should take precedence over the other. That's a completely subjective argument and one I'm happy to have, but only so long as we're clear on where exactly we differ versus where our identical beliefs are being misinterpreted or ignored.
Mmm yeah, sorry. I originally did get a lot of Aqua's point, regarding that "popular art" is "good art" to a large extent, strictly because successfulness is one measure of goodness, and because it's hard for a fantastic vision to be considered successful if there's no one to see it. But 2844526 and 2844566 swayed me: the time axis makes everything screwy.
Let's look at an on-site case study. You can click the story's Stats tab to follow along.
April 2012: The author submits the story. The author later recounted that they put a ton of work into the story and were proud of it, with the building unease and the hidden whitetext and other fun elements. Unfortunately, the release is bumpy. I can't get an accurate viewcount that far back in Fimfic's history, but it only picked up a few hundred views. I do have the like/dislike ratio, which was 30 to 1. At launch, the author considered this a failure, and was pretty beaten up about it. I think many of us would be disappointed with those stats as well.
Nov 2012: In their second round of reviews, a fledgling group of tryhards known as Seattle's Angels features this story in a sitepost. (Interestingly, SA specifically only reviews underviewed fanfics. By OP's definition, this means SA only reviews bad art.
I can already hear some people giggling gleefully at that.) In the week after the sitepost, this story gains 233 views and 35 upvotes. It was a nice little boost, percentage-wise to be sure, but I'm pretty sure that the story was still under 1000 total views at this point.
Dec 2012: Touched by the kind words in the SA review and the story comments that resulted from it, the author decided that perhaps he'd been a bit too hard on himself. On a whim, he submits to EQD.
i.imgur.com/cVRxmxV.png
The story explodes, in a single week gaining 4,483 views and 244 upvotes.
Since then, the story eventually got a sequel. It's now at 14,511 views and 856 upvotes. According to Fimfic's ranking system, it's the 1,521st highest story on the site. By Aqua's definitions, it is a story with great public and personal value, so it's definitely good art.
But... at launch, it wasn't?
SA, aka the guys who review bad art, featured it. That feature made it... slightly less bad? But the author disclosed that he wouldn't have bothered submitting to EQD without that nudge.
EQD helped the story explode in popularity. Does EQD turn bad art into good art? The story did have minor EQD prereader feedback and some subsequent edits, but no major overhauls. Did a correction of an improper semicolon cause this art to quadruple in value? Or is it really as simple as "marketing is everything", and that this story was incapable of being good art without first getting the right publicity?
In short, if we accept OP's premise, then when and how did the story in my example transform from "bad art" to "good art"?
2844862
If there's any fundamental disagreement going on, it's that I do not find this binary separation of public vs. private to hold any sort of water, as it is more complicated than that by far. I don't think that separating it as public value, which I'll simplify to things directly relevant to saleability, and private value being everything else, is terribly apt, and I feel that it results in a rather simplistic assessment of artistic expression as a thing.
But that's honestly neither here nor there. Anyway, in my first comment I stated that I'm mostly of the same mind; I don't see much point in writing something that's totes deep and appreciated by three people when I could write something that's actually entertaining to a lot of people. My objections were never in regards to the conclusions you've reached, honestly. I think most people this is in response to—the "art's subjective and I'm misunderstood, that's why my fic has 15 views and 5 downvotes with no upvotes" types—are using the idea of subjectivity as a shield to deflect criticism and excuse themselves from ever growing and improving, and your general conclusion is a valid argument to make against those deflections.
Ultimately I was only taking issue with your use of the word objective. Yeah, semantics argument, totally classy of me. I just find these specific distinctions important to make, as I feel that thinking in terms of certain ideas as being "true" vs. "something I value" can be narrowing in perspective and lead to a dismissal out of hand of new ideas.
2844862
Then it isn't an objective view at all, it's simply a momentary snapshot of subjective opinions declared objective. If a view is subjectively true at a particular moment in time, that does not imply it is ever at any point objectively true unless it happens to match up to an objective truth. This is the difficulty of declaring anything objective about the worth of art. You can easily make objective statements about the quality of the technique and materials used, but the overall worth of any piece of art is always going to be a subjective measurement of personal value.
2844926
Ooh, nice choice in subject matter for a case study. That's a good 'un. Specifically regarding your point, though:
In the public sense, when it achieved some degree of mainstream recognition on EqD and subsequently displayed a quantitative increase in upvotes and favorites. In the private sense, its value (a.k.a. its qualification as "good art") never changed at any point during its lifespan. Assuming it remained more or less the same story between when it was first published and when it achieved popular success through EqD, the only difference its increased public worth makes is that more people have been exposed to the story and thus had a chance to decide it had subjective private worth. This forms the base of why I consider public worth more important than private worth: any story can have private worth to one person or even to several, but it takes a special case for a story to achieve public worth at the same time. I suppose that's a reflection of my philosophy towards life, which is that the most difficult things are the ones most worth trying to do.
You've brought up something important that I think is worth elaborating on a little more, though, which is this model's implication that low public worth constitutes "bad art" in the same way that low private worth does. I don't believe that to be the case, but I can see where that connection could be made, so I want to clarify that a bit. The nice thing about failing to meet quantitative standards (since, by virtue of calling them "standards", they're not quite purely objective anymore) is that there are accordingly quantitative ways to improve to the point that you meet them. Stories with low public worth in a given moment are, in that moment, "bad art" in that sense, but a month later circumstances could conspire to raise that story's public worth, thereby making it "good art" when analyzed at that point. So as paradoxical as it seems, this is how I think this sort of thing works: the more objective an individual analysis of a story's worth is, the more that worth can fluctuate depending on the circumstances the story occupies during each subsequent analysis.
2844939
Fair enough. I'll admit to most of this being a thought experiment at heart, and I've certainly put too much thought into semantics as well. No hard feelings on my end, in any case.
2844992
You quoted me earlier saying that I was talking about irrelevant stuff that you weren't arguing. What I was referring to was effectively this, but condensed.
I understand your argument fully and there's really nothing about it we line up on. I reject the notion that the "objective quality" of art, and whether or not it is good or bad, can change over time. That does not make any sense at all.
If I dig through my attic and find an old photo album full of family pictures, I might for instance find a picture there, of my grandparents' house in 1965. On the wall there might be a painting that was something of a family heirloom; it would have been considered a good picture in 1935 when it was first produced, but by the middle of the century it would have been considered pretty tacky and old-fashioned, yet they kept it up on the wall anyway because it had high enough private value that the subzero public value didn't matter. But now in 2015, we'd look back on it as a pretty good piece, and you'd even find a few professional art critics who'd hang it somewhere in their house if they got their hands on it.
Now... is this a photograph of a piece of good art? When it was released, the painting was celebrated, and in the present day, it is also celebrated. But I've taken a picture of it - the same canvas, the same paint - from a period of history where the culture at the time didn't really like it at all or have any interest in it.
So now, when I'm showing off my family heirloom to guests, do I have to go "hey look at this cool painting," and "hey look at this picture of this really awful tacky painting," - despite the fact they're the same?
Any rational human being is going to look at you like you're an idiot if you do something like that.
Art can differ in appreciation over time, and that's definitely something to consider, but quality? It is not possible for me to disagree more.
2845050
Once again (this seems like it's becoming a pattern), you're putting words in my mouth that I didn't say. In fact, I specifically said what you've slated as the opposite of my argument: private worth does not differ over time, whereas public worth does. In my model, appreciation of art is equivalent only to private worth, and quality of art can be equivalent to either private or public worth depending on the context. In the context you've described here, the photograph of the painting is not an objective summation of the painting's quality. Nothing about the image suggests anything that could form an objective opinion of the painting's quality; in essence, it's technically a piece of art all its own that must be analyzed according to its current context. As such, one would look irrational if they insisted the photograph of the painting represented something different than the painting itself as you showed them both to a guest today, because neither's public worth today differs at all in the sense you're talking about, just as it didn't differ back in 1965 when the painting (the important thing being analyzed here) was considered to be tacky.
The painting itself differed in public worth over time because the attitudes of the artistic community evolved over time, but never varied in private worth because your family considered it a heirloom. Likewise, the public worth of the photograph of the painting changed in sync with that of the painting itself, because unlike an objective tally of votes like I mentioned before, it doesn't in and of itself represent anything objective about the time period or the painting other than "this is what my grandparents' house looked like in 1965". Either way, the subjective private value of the painting and photo never changed within your example, which means you've essentially just repeated my own argument back to me.
2845152 You're not making any sense at this point, because I was never talking about how much I personally valued the painting in this hypothetical, I was talking purely about whether or not the painting in the photograph would be objectively of different quality than the painting in a photograph taken in 2015. Or, for that matter, 1935. Short of interfering variables, such as the likelihood that you'd have a black and white photo, a vaguely orange-hued photo, and a crisp digital image, it's the same painting every time.
I mean, my heirloom painting hypothetical is a pretty wildly absurd idea, but it illustrates the problem I have with this well enough. If you as a reviewer look at photographs taken at different time periods and reach different conclusions, then I have no idea what to say to that because that whole idea is just ludicrous to me. If you say the quality is fixed across all photographs, then you agree with me and the entire premise of this blog falls apart.
When I look at something that used to be considered bad and now is considered good, I think "those guys back then had it wrong," not "wow, this is a good piece of art now." The art has not changed whatsoever or magically increased in quantity. Its public worth might have changed, but saying art is good such that the public values it doesn't seem like you're talking about the art itself or anything about what it is. It doesn't really matter if your film has bad CGI, wooden acting, and a predictable plot - if the public eats it up, it's good art! I can't really think of anything you could possibly say that's more creatively stifling than that. Actually saying something with your art is vastly more important to me than whether or not it does well.
You can talk philosophical about how one group might measure something to be an yard long and the other measures it as three feet, but the objective existence of the object is fixed and measuring it differently or reaching any kind of conclusion over whether or not it is good art cannot change with time. Successful art, yes, tastes change and that's important. Good art, no. You're vastly oversimplifying the issue into a format that doesn't make any sense.
2845229
This is exactly what I just said.
This is exactly what I didn't just say.
I've spent a great deal of time tonight explaining in various contexts how this isn't the case.
And I believe this is the root of our constant miscommunication. Our fundamental beliefs about the nature of art don't seem to mesh together, which is totally fine, but it doesn't feel like we're having a reasonable debate about that. It feels more like you're treating an ideological difference as an logical fallacy, and I'm constantly repeating myself trying to think of some way to communicate this concept to you so the three aforementioned misunderstandings don't continue to happen.
Problem is, Aquaman, you do have a logical fallacy going in that you are conflating the objective measurement of popularity in the form of likes/public value with a statement of objective quality. The two aren't the same, as even your own argument about changes in perception over time illustrates.
Objectively bad art can be popular because the quality of art is not the sole or even main source of popularity. Bad art can be vastly popular when it is socially desirable to be seen to like it.
Edit : This is the whole point of the discipline of marketing. The entire reason, for example, why Twilight is popular while better written works in the same genre are not is attributable to the massive marketing efforts of its publisher. Without their advertising and distribution, it would never have been more popular (and thus by your logic of greater objective quality) than any other World of Darkness/Anne Rice fanfic you could dredge up.
No.
2844862
So we're arguing two different points. You're trying to equate "monetary value" (or, on a site like FimFic, "user ratings") with "artistic value". The problem is that not even monetary value is objective. Even if you just look at whether people like or dislike something, the amount they're willing to pay for it (or rather: the "amount they like it") is hardly ever equal between any two people. Sure, you can always find a price that most people will agree to, but that's when you turn "art" into the same thing as any other product. By that logic, doesn't bread (and its variants across cultures) count as "the most successful work of art"?
In a similar fashion, yes, there are ways to find niches here that allow you to get a ton of views, praise, and whatnot. But that's just exploiting people's curiosity and short-term attention. I'll be the first to admit that a clickbait fic is "excellent at being a clickbait", but if I had to go deeper and find something more to talk about, I tend to find them pretty shallow. On top of that, for all the buzz these fics these get to enjoy, they also vanish just as quickly from everyone's memories. This is why "Cupcakes" puzzles me so much, by the way. For all of its "shoddy quality" people complain about (and I tend to agree), it still had to get something right (beyond the primitive method of shocking the reader) if people are still talking about it to this day.