Postscript to How theme suggests what characters to use: The Middle Ages · 4:31am Dec 23rd, 2016
Still not the next post on the survey, but two postscripts to How theme suggests what characters to use. The first is about why views might be expressed as characters; the second has to do with medieval stories.
bookplayer wrote:
I agree with people who are suggesting that these "characters to take sides in an argument" happen naturally, and/or are more read in after the fact, because I think there are other things besides individual characters that can easily take their place as elements of the argument, like events, locations, and symbols. They're simply the things that your protagonist has to be exposed to or react to for the ending to make sense.
(To take the Star Wars example, Luke has to be exposed to a source of skepticism and a source of faith for there to be a conflict. If one side or the other was ignored, the story would fall flat. But those don't have to be characters: Han could be replaced with a series of events where the Force failed Luke, or Obi-Wan could be replaced with a location or object that reaffirmed his faith through the strength of the Force, and the conflict would still be there so the ending, theme, and argument would still work.)
Yes--I think these viewpoints need to get expressed somehow, and they get expressed in characters in movies because movies can't look inside the protagonist's head. In the 19th century, you'd just describe the main character's inner arguments. You can't do that in a movie; it's invisible. You have to externalize it, into events or characters.
I wondered if anybody would pick up on a seeming contradiction in what I wrote: I said a story about faith should fairly represent doubt, and then I said that stories from the Middle Ages didn't fairly represent doubt. Does that make them all bad stories? Isn't that very present-centric of me?
The fashionable thing would be to say that, no, it just means people then lived in different times, and had a different concept of faith.
Except that they didn't. Belief is a necessary component of Christian faith, and always has been. The struggle between not just faith and obedience, but faith and doubt, was rarely allowed to be depicted in the High Middle Ages (1000-1300 AD). You could, in some places and times, convert to Judaism or Islam, but if you were going to question Mary's virginity, you'd better have asbestos underwear.
Take Pilgrim's Progress, not medieval (written 1678) but very medieval in style. Consider the tale of Little-Faith. This is an allegory about faith, meaning John Bunyan writes characters whom he jerks about like puppets on a string to deliver a sermon. It is a serious problem, then, that the allegory is framed so that Little-Faith can never have any doubt of what he believes. It is unclear, if one tries to spell it out, what Little-Faith's "faith" has to do with faith, since all it consists of is self-interest and the presence of mind not to forfeit his place in the Celestial City for a few good meals. This is the character of all medieval religious allegories; they take the difficulties of Christian life and pretend they are all simple. Authors weren't allowed to show the difficulties, any more than a writer under Stalin could talk about difficulties with agricultural collectives.
They are bad stories. If a story is explicitly about faith and nothing but faith, and faith has to do with believing things unproven, and the story doesn't represent any valid doubts, it's an objectively bad story.
This is going to be a key example of the extent to which I believe art can be evaluated objectively. I'm going to (eventually) argue that the High Middle Ages produced a great deal of objectively bad stories and representational art. Good cathedrals; lousy paintings. This was because the dominant powers at the time would not allow the freedom of speech or thought needed to make an argument, or even to paint a subject, that was necessary for some types of art.
This shouldn't be seen as a radical claim. Many of the clergy of the Middle Ages said they were anti-art. Tertullian said that anyone who made a sculpture or a painting should have his hand cut off. Priests were forever worrying about music, sculptures, paintings, and poetry, calling them wicked, a distraction, or at best a waste of money. The Byzantines were at times actual iconoclasts (forbade making images of religious figures), and so were the Muslims surrounding Europe, and Western Europe played with the idea as well. It will take several posts to describe the extent to and thoroughness with which medieval theology was anti-art.
Church-approved medieval art had another problem that made it especially bad, in addition to the suppression of dissent, and it's the same reason most post-modern art is bad: it assumed that the real world contains no meaning. And that's because Plato's Cave is central to both Catholicism and post-modernism. (Plato, not coincidentally, was the first guy who said poetry should be outlawed.)
In case you still aren't convinced, after visiting the Middle Ages, I'm going to talk about the approaches to art dictated by Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, and show how strongly they resemble the approach to art dictated by the Church in the Middle Ages, and how the art produced was objectively bad in the same ways.
"I'm forever yours ... faithfully." - Journey, 1983.
You, my man, got guts. I tip my imaginary hat. (Tbh, I only really understand half of your blog post. But what I do understand is enough to keep me intrigued)
As a counter-argument, I'd posit that we still offer as an evaluation of a work of art's quality: "It accomplishes what it sets out to do." This is often said about something we don't find particularly objectionable, but not particularly enlightening either, like a comedy story that's mildly funny or a piece of landscape art that accurately depicts what a certain hill looks like. People simply had different attitudes about what was art back then, and while it's probably not a good idea to look to a government authority to define what art is for you, we still have "rules" today saying what should or should not be in a story, how to handle perspective in it, how to design interesting characters, etc. While the modern world affords more freedom to the artists to determine what they consider art, there still are effectively rules in place that confine them. Some choose to flout those rules with varying degrees of success, and at least they can do so with relative disinterest in how it affects their personal safety. While it's easy to look back on those times and say we know better now, I have to think that after an equal amount of time has passed, we won't look so enlightened now. Many medieval artists accepted the rules places upon them and expressed themselves earnestly through them. I wouldn't presume to say that makes their expression invalid or objectively bad. It's like someone drawing a pony and having someone else say, "That's bad because it's not a person," only to have the artist reply, "I wasn't trying to draw a person." Or a little more toward the literature side of things and the way such things were taken then and now, it's like complaining that a textbook contains no conflict. And that brings me to the place where I'm finally comfortable saying the Middle Ages could be called objectively bad: limitation on what information was considered appropriate to be made available. The method is more procedural. Take music. Have you ever read through the rules on how to write counterpoint? They're awfully restrictive, and yet they can result in exquisitely beautiful and complex music, though other styles can be just as beautiful, and I wouldn't care to weigh one against the other.
I'm really interested to hear a more detailed argument for why postmodernist art is usually bad.
Also, doesn't declaring a work of High Middle Ages art objectively bad by these standards first require subjectively interpreting that work as not achieving the goals you think it's set out to achieve? Also, how do you determine what those goals are? My reading of this blog is that, at least for the work(s) discussed, you're using author testimony to define the attempted intrinsic meaning, but isn't that hamstringing yourself a little bit?
4351913
You lost me here. I don't know what "The method is more procedural" refers to. Counterpoint is baroque; you're talking several centuries after the Middle Ages.
Well, this all depends on what you mean by "good" or "bad" stories. It revolves around what the contextual purpose of the story is—what function does telling this story serve for individuals and/or for society?
These medieval tales are "bad" stories in our modern conception of stories as entertainment presenting an argument between opposed positions like faith vs. doubt from which the reader must then make their own choices. But you could argue that this isn't the purpose that the stories were meant to serve in the circumstances of their own time and place. In the medieval era, telling stories possibly wasn't really that likely to be about making an argument, but more about reinforcing hierarchy, stratification, and societal norms and expectations. Their message was some variant of, "if you're a good person you're a devout Christian who accepts his lot in life, and here's a handy example to follow." It doesn't need to show that example struggling and arguing back and forth with doubt, since this would imply that there's some valid argument to even have, which was anathema to the point of the story. The Church and other forms of authority at the time probably didn't want people to think there was legitimacy to any such argument, preferring it to simply be a foregone conclusion that certain things were true and not questioned. They were so sure of it that asking the question and having that argument is what would have made those stories "bad" from their perspective... bad enough that any such efforts were often made illegal, as you pointed out in your first post.
So, "bad" stories from our perspective and for our purposes today. Great stories from someone else's, though.
4351932
I gave an example. It wasn't actually a medieval text, but I could find a very similar example in medieval allegories:
- The work itself declares what its topic is.
- The work can objectively be observed to fail to address the topic.
- The work has failed.
Explain to me how my example is not objective. Where is the subjective element in it?
It is really not hard to figure out the goals of medieval religious allegories, because they bash you over the head, over and over again, with what their goals are.
4351934 It doesn't matter when it was. That wasn't the point. The point is that rules change over time, and it's not exactly fair to judge ancient things by today's standards, especially for artists who were perfectly happy to work within those rules.
4351936
If all you're going to do is call whatever people do "art", then, sure, we couldn't call it bad art. But we couldn't call it "art", either. You should just call it "behavior." Using the word "art" implies we think their poems are somehow more akin to our poems than to our ditches. That the function of art then, whatever people thought about it, was something like it is now. That one should be able to call a story whose purpose is to manipulate, deceive, and oppress you a worse story than one whose purpose is to free you and help you grow. You're telling me instead that I shouldn't anthropomorphize people of the Middle Ages.
Saying that art that deceives and oppresses is just another conception of art is like saying that ethics that cause death and misery are just another conception of ethics. When we hear that Nero liked to light his dinner parties with human torches, we don't call that a valid alternate ethics. The word "good" in "good art" must mean something closer to "good" than to "evil".
Ethics and aesthetics are very closely related. We have all these religious folks running about, saying, "How can you have a good and a bad without God?" And in art theory, we have all these modernists running about, saying, "How can you have a good and a bad without God?" It's the same argument. I'm not making this up; lots of people have called modernism the search for the logos, the Word of God. It's in Derrida.
Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have said, Look, it isn't that hard to have an ethics without God. You just have to agree that helping people is better than hurting people. And the same answer works for art. If you just agree that helping people is better than hurting people, you can start talking meaningfully about good and bad art. It doesn't make the discussion simple, not by a long shot. It brings up all sorts of difficult questions about what, in art, hurts or helps people. But they are useful and productive questions, the things we should be asking rather than renouncing our ability to make judgments.
We have some idea what art is and does. We have seen it hijacked, many times, in a short period of time, by dictators who force their artists to produce propaganda rather than art. We do not say that Nazi art was "good art" because it was really not about expressing an opinion or emotion or helping someone understand or deal with a situation, but more about reinforcing hierarchy, stratification, and societal norms and expectations. We recognize that something went wrong there and artists were forced to make bad art. The Middle Ages were just a very long period of time where the dictators won.
4351952
Interesting. This kind of throws into releif for me the question of art vs. entertainment, and whether a book that's fun to read should be considered "good."
Because being entertaining wasn't against any of the stated goals of the Middle Ages, and in some cases they even managed things which we still consider entertaining, implying there's a good reason to consider them as successful works from that angle.
4351952 The closest I can see anyone getting to some sort of objective definition about what the purpose of art and stories "should be" and what they "should do" for us is maybe using a consequentialist argument about what effects achieved through art and stories would ultimately create the objectively measurable greatest good for the greatest number of people in the society producing the art or stories in question.
Other than that, stories and art being "good" or "bad" is just down to whether or not they accomplish what you want them to accomplish for you, according to your own subjective view on what you think they should.
I agree that the medieval era was just a really long stretch in which the dictators won. Those dictators had a particular view on what they wanted stories to accomplish, and they got stories to accomplish them. From their perspective, that makes those "good" stories. We don't have to agree with them that those stories are good now, but that's how they saw it.
4351938
But why is what the work declares as its intent the only valid axis along which one may judge it? There's a world of possible interpretations packed in there, IMO.
4351952
While I agree with your first paragraph whole-heartedly, that reads an awful lot like committing to a stance. And not being objective. You've just changed the meaning of the word "art" from how they used it and then said that HMA art is bad because it doesn't do what you expect it to do, coming from a modern perspective of what art is. Which is a very useful thing to do, but it isn't an objective thing to do.
Umm, post-modern means 'after modern'. I think you mean 'pre-modern' but I'm not sure.
I love your blogs, I always walk away knowing something I didn't before.
4351941
Using a scythe to harvest wheat by hand is much less efficient than using a combine harvester. Modern farming techniques have vastly better yield than ancient ones, which is why we use them.
If your goal is to maximize yield, modern farming techniques are objectively superior.
It is entirely fair to say that medieval farming techniques are objectively bad compared to modern ones, or that medieval sanitation was objectively bad compared to modern sanitation. In fact, we use the terms medieval and Dark Ages to describe primitive, backwards things, be it technology, beliefs, society, or what have you.
It isn't really surprising that medieval writing is bad, and I don't think it is unfair to say it is bad. The fact that people in the past produced things inferior to what we produce today is not exactly surprising.
4351990
Postmodernism is an artistic and philosophical movement. It is so-named because it came after the Modern Art movement, which ran from the late 19th century to the mid 20th century. Modern art is closely associated with the philosophical movement of modernism.
It made sense to name these things modern art and modernism at the time because they were, well, modern.
But as time went on, new artistic movements and philosophies rose. And thus, they needed a name for it. And modern art and modernism were already taken. So they called it postmodernism.
The real kicker is that postmodernism started around the time of World War II, plus or minus a decade, and is running through the present - which means that even postmodernism is actually relatively old at this point (it is older than I am!). There's actually another artistic movement that probably started somewhere in the late 20th century.
I refuse to call it post-postmodernism, but that's what the Wikipedia article is called.
Clearly, we here on FIMFiction need to create an artistic and philisophical movement and give it a damn name, because post-post-postmodernism is an abomination that cannot be allowed to exist. It is just antidisestablishmentarianism all over again.
4352011
See? Another thing I walk away knowing! I'm learning.
4351962
I'm curious what the average person would find as being entertaining from the Middle Ages. The main thing I see are people looking at cathedrals; plays are either from Shakespeare or later, or Ancient Greece. Art is the same way - the Renaissance is a pretty hard line, before which art looks quite bad and isn't much shown.
In fact, I think I see far more Egyptian art than I see Medieval art, and people seem to have a greater appreciation for Egyptian art despite it being several thousand years older, possibly because it is designed to be iconographic rather than realistic.
I'm not sure about sculpture, either; most of the famous Old World sculptures I can think of either date from the Renaissance or later, or from Ancient Greece and Rome or before (again, Egypt).
Story-wise, there's only a handful of works I can think of, and I've never found things like Beowulf very fun to read. The best Medieval stories I can think of are Norse legends, which I think can often be appreciated even if some of them are very strange by modern standards (though Loki turning into a mare to seduce and lure away an ice giant's stallion and getting knocked up in the process is still deeply amusing), but those come from outside the world of Christendom.
I'm completely unfamiliar with medieval stories, and only loosely familiar with the Christian Bible, but the impression I'm getting is that the Bible itself had better stories about faith conflicting with doubt than all these medieval stories supposedly honoring it.
4352021 You're getting that impression because that is in fact how it is. The Bible has a lot of good stories (the kinds of stories Bad Horse is arguing are good, I mean) about things like faith vs. doubt. The appeal they had by being such good stories is part of why Christianity was able to survive despite starting as a small fringe thing that was sort of illicit for a while and the authorities tried to stomp out because it encouraged people to have views that challenged the status quo of the time.
Then it got big and became the authority, and found the formerly very successful approach of asking people to deal with questions to be suddenly not convenient for establishing an orthodoxy in which they wanted a centralized consistent source to dictate all the answers. So they reversed tack and started doing the stomping out of things that might lead to challenges to the status quo like having real arguments and addressing real questions acknowledging that doubt is a thing that really exists and needs to be faced.
If I was younger and naive, I might accuse them of "selling out" or something, but I think this is more or less the lifecycle of any hugely successful organization that started small and beat long odds. It's human nature to do what makes the most sense in your own particular circumstances, and that changes drastically when you transition from underdog to king.
4352015
The Canterbury Tales?
4352015
Arthurian romances, especially Merlin, and Guenievere and Lancelot. A number of popular folk songs first get mentioned as medieval ballads, though they can be hard to pin down (Tam Lin was first mentioned during the renniassance as having been a medieval ballad, for example;) I know people who enjoy The Canterbury Tales a lot. In terms of visual art, the Unicorn tapestries are still very popular, and the Book of Kells.
Edit: Huh, I was not aware that Carmina Burana was a medieval text. As a lyrics person, I enjoy O Fortuna regularly, put to Orlaff's music. Looking at wiki, the book also had some very pretty art.
Edit 2: Also, along the same lines as the Norse Eddas is the Celtic Mabinogion. And just as weird.
Edit 3: It occurs to me that many of the things I'm naming were entertainment for common people. I suspect there's a good argument to be made that where they're preserved, these kinds of things will always translate better for their intended purpose than "art." Ideas change, but people are people, and there's not really a bad way to do "magic duel between the Queen of Elfland and a guy's baby mama over his immortal soul."
A wise man indeed. :V
4352116
Yes. I already have all those things listed in a longer document about medieval stories. The chivalric romances were not entertainment for common people, but the Arthurian romances we know were written well after the Black Death, which is a good marker in many cases for the end of the Middle Ages. Mallory wrote his Arthur in 1485, in French, not Latin. One thing most good stories from the Middle Ages have in common is they weren't Church art. All those Nordic and Celtic stories were not Christian. Beowulf and Roland were only a little bit Christian. Arthur was Christian, I'd say, but a transitional story, half medieval, half Renaissance. As a general rule, any story for which we know the author's name isn't entirely medieval.
Dante's Inferno is another transitional work--medieval in some aspects, but Renaissance in others (written in Italian, by a named author, lots and lots of innovation and freedom taken expressing the author's personal views). Note when talking about Italy that the Middle Ages ended there first, by about 1300. Giotto was a Renaissance painter, not a medieval one.
4352070 Yep, I already talk about that also in my draft blog posts. Another exception that proves the rule, being (A) written at the very end of the 14th century, and in English, so it's not really medieval, and (B) not considered good art until hundreds of years later.
4351963
I see no problem with doing that. But it's not the only way to have an objective definition.
No; stories do certain things. For example, they represent reality or nature--all art theorists before the 20th century agreed about this, certainly the medievals, although they disagreed about what reality was. And they make arguments. Inb4 somebody says I'm projecting my contemporary notion that stories are to make arguments--I don't think so. Folk tales and medieval stories were more explicit about the arguments they were making. You often find the narrator making comments about his argument or conclusions. An allegory, especially, is little else but an argument dressed up as fiction.
And we can look at how they represented reality and see that it was wrong, and we can look at the arguments they made and show where they were bad arguments. Good and bad reasoning isn't relative. It remains the same.
Consider medieval maps. They were lousy, because they were Platonic maps. Medieval map-makers drew them giving areas proportions and locations that were meant to indicate spiritual truths, which they considered more true than literal truths about where places where. That was their intention and their cultural practice. But it happens that they were wrong. Their spiritual truths were lies, and so their maps were bad maps which misled people, literally. We can equally well say their stories were bad maps of reality which misled people. This isn't even a metaphor. And we can point out places in their stories that made bad arguments, just as we can point out the bad arguments in Aquinas, because of their constant religious blindness.
4351968
You've said that we can't judge it by our standards of art or our intentions, and we can't judge it by their standards, either. What's left, then? There's no "world of possible interpretations" left; you've eliminated all possibilities.
4352165
Ah, gotcha. I grew up being much more interested in political than literary history, and being taught that "medieval" in England ended with the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. That tends to be my instant reaction even now, though of course I know it's a lot more complicated than that!
4352004 I have no idea what you're saying. What does technological advancement have to do with artistic expression? Bad Horse is talking about what artists couldn't do because they weren't allowed. You're talking about what the general population couldn't do because it was impossible or undiscovered. What's the relevance?
4352189
That's my point. There IS no way to judge it...objectively. Because to do that in the paradigm you're suggesting first requires an interpretation of the work, and whether it's from a modern perspective or a Medieval perspective, the interpretation is subjective. You can make objective statements within the interpretation, possibly, but not general statements.
4352182
I'm interested by this perspective--I think it's what we're really all discussing here--but I don't think you've supported it enough for me to accept it generally. You've given some examples that seem to support your hypothesis, but still nothing that makes me ready to accept this one paradigm of criticism over all others as The One True Way of Art Crit that is actually objective.
4352182
Alright, I guess I can see that. If the medievals and us agree about stories being intended to represent reality, and we can show that their stories objectively did it worse, then by that measure I'd agree it can be said those were bad stories.
4352285
A great deal. Writing is a form of technology the same as anything else; same goes with art. Knowing about vanishing points and understanding how to create perspective allows you to draw things realistically. Understanding the difference between iconic and realistic art allows you to make conscious choices about what you're doing, and also allows you to create things along the spectrum between them, consciously. Art improved markedly between medieval and Renaissance times. Digital art has given people the ability to produce things that previously were extremely difficult to produce, and has lead to a proliferation of artwork, including a lot of stuff of extremely high quality.
Novels barely existed prior to the invention of the printing press and paper-making; prose fiction was barely a thing back then, with the emphasis mainly being on epics. The quality of writing has gone up over time; a lot of older texts are rambly. They didn't have famous authors with their rules of writing and lots of good examples of good works to work from; they didn't have the sort of modern analysis of plot structure. I'm not even sure how well they articulated the basic plot skeleton, let alone taught it to children in school and had them practice creative writing, however poorly.
4352561 You are so badly missing the point.
Whether the steel plow exists has no bearing on whether anyone had thought of doing stream-of-consciousness writing. Whether we have computers or typewriters or parchment and India ink has no bearing on whether omniscient or limited narration is prevalent. It can affect distribution or who has the means to write, but it doesn't affect what's possible to write or what methods of expression an author might choose. To go back to music (which I think is the largest counterargument to this entire thread, though everyone seems to be avoiding it), the guitar existed centuries before rock music did. Technology allowed it to be developed into an electric guitar, which lent itself well to the form, and that didn't exist at the advent of the guitar because people didn't have the technology to build an electric guitar or the cultural interaction to know about the forms of music that became rock, not because someone told them they weren't allowed to use a guitar that way. They might have, had it come up, but it didn't come up. Sure, technology affects what forms of expression are possible, but that's a different thing than quality and far more subject to personal taste. If not, then wouldn't newer always be better? Is a photograph better art than a Renaissance oil painting? Does Vanilla Ice produce more artistic music than Palestrina? Is a James Patterson novel better than a Charles Dickens one?
And then you start talking about things like vanishing point, which isn't technological advancement at all. It doesn't support what you're saying. If you don't know about vanishing point, you might not be able to make as realistic a picture, but you're making the most realistic one you know how, and not because vanishing point exists but someone's told you not to use that evil thing.
I'll state it very simply: Bad Horse and I are talking about the quality of art that was created under ideological restrictions, whether or not the artist even recognized that. It's not tied to the technological level, except possibly in the very tangential vein that increased technology may lessen ideological barriers, but that's not the argument being made.
4352293
People keep saying there is no way to judge art objectively, but saying it doesn't make it so. There are technical points we can make about medieval painting, such as their inability to use perspective, get shoulders right, keep arms and legs proportionately sized, draw faces, or to draw people's feet, or their impoverished use of colors (using a reduced palette partly for symbolic reasons). There's obvious problems with monotony, like Gregorian chant (literally monotonous, for theological, not artistic, reasons), or that 70-80% of Byzantine art is either portraits of Jesus or portraits of Mary in stereotyped poses that remained constant for many centuries.
But there’s no clear-cut distinction between technical points, style, and art. People have claimed that the medieval ignorance of perspective is a different aesthetic, that their lack of attention to the distance between objects is aesthetic, that their limited set of colors is an aesthetic, that Gregorian monotony is an aesthetic, that their ignorance of harmonic theory in music is an aesthetic, that their use of polyphony rather than harmony is an aesthetic. These are all things that began as ignorance or technical limitations that can now be called an aesthetic or a philosophy, and it isn't wrong to do so.
In most cases for the Middle Ages, the “aesthetic” is a theological belief that I believe is objectively wrong, and that makes the art objectively bad. That's the problem with totalitarian art--it is designed, down to the last detail, to conform to a set of beliefs, and it stakes everything on being right. If those beliefs are wrong, it is bad art, because it gives a false picture of the world.
And if we’re not willing to call the beliefs of the medievals objectively wrong, then God isn’t dead and why are we even having this conversation?
There's also no clear-cut distinction between art and non-fiction, yet we can judge non-fiction objectively in many ways. Much fiction is meta-fiction, and much art--especially modern art--is meta-art, meaning it's art about art, meaning it's writing or arting about art, and we pretend we can judge writing about art (say, Aristotle's Poetics) objectively. The very claim that you can't judge art objectively claims to be an objective claim about art, and we usually find that claim made in post-modern essays that are not logical arguments but poetic or rhetorical, meaning they are themselves art claiming to make objective judgments about art.
It is difficult to render a final objective judgment about any art work, but there are many small, more-objective-than-subjective judgments we can make.
Also, the division between "objective" and "subjective" is highly subjective. Even the things I call "objective" are relative to being human. If something is relative to being a European during the years 400-2016 A.D., I still call that "objective" because it remains constant across the population I'm studying. If some measurable opinion varies, but its mean stays within one standard deviation over the course of several centuries, I may treat it as constant, and its assumption as "objective" during that time period.
An example of something I'll call "objective" that isn't, really, is the odd fact that the only characters that were drawn smiling during the High Middle Ages were demons and sinners. This conveyed the "deeper truth" that smiling, and by extension being happy, was evil, or at best impious. I feel comfortable calling that an objectively bad philosophy, one that directly teaches people that being unhappy is better than being happy. For all practical purposes, teaching people that smiling is sin is bad for them.
I'm not one of those One True Way of Art Crit people. It's fine to use literature to do cultural criticism rather than to criticize the literature itself; I'm just arguing you can do other things, also.
That's the big problem with modernism, all this One True Way nonsense. You could say the real change with modernism--the thing that distinguishes it from romanticism--is that modernists unified art and politics. Look back to the artist manifestos of 1910-1925, and a lot of them are political. They talk about art and forms of government and economy and industry, all combined. Around 1910, artists decided they were political activists. That was the big change, the thing that turned art vile. A big distinction about lit crit today vs. before 1960 is that today, literary critics lie. Or, at best, they present views so biased that they are little better than lies, and feel justified in doing so because they believe no one can have anything but subjective opinions.
People used to disagree with their predecessors, but they tried to understand what they'd said, represent their views, and explain their disagreements. Literary critics since the late 1950s or early 1960s just lie about what earlier critics said. Lying, deceptive argumentation, and trying to win arguments by sophistry, rhetorical flourish, or redefining the terms, have become standard operating procedure. And this comes, I think, from the Marxist strain that entered literary criticism in the 1920s, the belief that by pushing a particular type of criticism, people were being revolutionaries, and lying was simply a necessary and justifiable tool.
It might be more fair to say that lit crits today don't fact-check. They assert whatever is in their head as truth. This includes whatever they would like to be true about earlier critics. TS Eliot may have begun this; he was notorious for saying in his essays that things were universally-accepted truths that were neither true nor generally accepted. (I find it hard not to fall into this habit myself.)
Or it might be more fair to describe this as just the result of the post-modern fuzziness about concepts. Many statements are effectively lies because they're statements about perverse edge cases that are used as if they were the normal cases. For example, the opening lines to Barthes' "Death of the Author," which talk about one line of a Balzac novel where you can't tell who's talking, which I would say is just bad writing. Barthes builds his theory upon it as if that were how things should always be done. Or Stanley Fish's example of how he forced his students to interpret a list of names as a poem--relying on his authority and power as instructor--and they did, The place his example occupies in his narrative implies that that is how story reading usually works. You could say these "effective lies" happen because post-modernists have no theory of categories, so they can't even ask themselves whether something is a typical or atypical example of a category.
4356462
My understanding is that "the beliefs of the medievals" here refers specifically to what you discussed in the OP; that medieval authors and artists were not allowed to express doubt in faith through their art. While I certainly think this status quo is wrong, I'm not sure how I would go about saying it's objectively wrong, nor do I know why that means that "God isn't dead and we certainly can't agree that judgments are subjective."
While I again agree that being happy is, in general, good, and telling people they shouldn't be happy is, in general, bad, I'm again just not sure with what authority you can state that it's not just bad, but objectively bad.
You address what might be one of the biggest parts of this argument in the paragraph prior the one I've quoted above--what is the difference between an objective statement and a subjective one? By my best interpretation, you seem to be defining "objective" as "what is mostly true of people, based on what I see people saying they think is true." So for our topic, if you assess the historical opinions and the contemporary opinions of people and determine they all think that the purpose of art is to make an argument, then it's objectively true that the purpose of art is to make an argument. Is this interpretation correct?
(Even if my interpretation of your words is correct, though, I still think that leaves holes open in objective grading of art. Because, again, even if it is objectively true that art is meant to make an argument, how is it possible to determine objectively what argument a piece of art is trying to make?)
I'm not as familiar with this literature as you are, so forgive me if the following thoughts are entirely erroneous, but isn't it possible that it doesn't matter if a particular case is typical or not? If one is trying to construct a Theory of Art™, then shouldn't one have to account for every possible convolution? If it is possible to tell a story that could be interpreted multiple ways, given that you aren't sure who's talking, or if it's possible to interpret a list of names as a poem in a way that's interesting, then doesn't that Theory have to accommodate those examples, niche as they are, in ways that might mutate the Theory into something unexpected or counterintuitive?
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Sorry, I'm referring to things I haven't explained. There are many different and specific theological beliefs that determined the content of medieval art. Just off the top of my head:
- That thing with medieval maps, where eg a world map has Jerusalem at the center to indicate its central place in theology, and east is at the top of the map for some reason I forget, and the sizes of different areas may correspond to their spiritual importance.
- Similarly, in a lot of paintings, the size of each figure indicates their religious importance, so Mary might be a giantess. Things far apart are drawn close together, because empty space is... not just unimportant, but almost bad. Aristotle and Plato said that a void, itself, is nothing, and nothing cannot rightly be said to exist. Empty space therefore should not be depicted, so a map or painting of something that would actually have empty space would leave that out. Town maps, for instance, might not show the streets, because the streets were empty spaces.
- Gregorian chant was monotonic, with one melodic line and no instrumentation, because the only purpose of the music was to communicate a message, and they wanted to make sure the words were heard clearly. Polyphony and instrumentation with voices were suppressed for many centuries by the Church, because they would lead people to enjoy the music rather than listen to the words, until Paris grew powerful enough to go ahead and do it anyway.
- The colors used in art each had a spiritual meaning in France, though the meaning changed over the centuries. Shading was generally not used, and I can't remember the reason. So for instance the sky was not painted as blue until about 1300. It was usually gold or yellow, for some theological reason which I forget. The colors the medievals mostly used (blue, red, yellow/gold, white, black) are the same colors most-popular in early modern abstract art.
st.hzcdn.com/fimgs/23024a9c081f1529_2051-w240-h180-b0-p0--home-design.jpg
- Representations were not supposed to be drawn well, because a realistic drawing could mislead people into worshipping it.
- Artists were according to many theorists not supposed to draw common people, because they were ignoble, and people should meditate on the best people, not on the worst people. This is really weird for Christianity, which was all about the common people, but it was a core principle of ancient Greek aesthetics until IIRC about 450 BC. It's also not clear if this was really why artists seldom drew commoners, or if people just didn't draw commoners because nobody would pay them to.
- If you look at Byzantine madonnas, they're really creepy, and so is baby Jesus. They are drawn with skill, but inhuman in physiology and expression. I haven't yet found an explicit explanation of why, but I expect it was to make it clear that these two are more divine than human.
- That thing I mentioned about not smiling. The last smile was painted around 900 AD, and other than demons, the next one after it I could find was by Giotto, on a camel, around 1300.
- Because meaning came from God, and creation at that time referred only to acts of God, humans could not make anything new. New ideas, meanings, or art could come only from a revelation from God. Both Plato and Christians believed this. This is Death of the Author, and one of the views post-modernists are trying hardest to bring back. This meant originality wasn't just considered unimportant; it wasn't a concept. People tried to make copies of earlier paintings; copying earlier writings was considered much more important than writing new things (which may have been a good thing, considering how ignorant the medievals were compared to the ancients). This is a problem to us because the practice of attributing your own writing to an ancient philosopher or religious figure was so widespread--it was the default thing to do until maybe 1200 AD--that the record of who wrote what is certainly full of errors.
- Because medievals had no theory of beauty--artists couldn't create, couldn't do anything except move pieces around, and weren't supposed to depict things from the real world in great detail--medieval theories of beauty amounted to very simple superstimuli theories. They regarded beauty as synonymous with our word "pretty" or "attractive", and said it consisted of bright colors, sparkly things, and loud noises. Their theories put beauty out of reach because they had no conception of it. They sometimes experienced things we would call beauty, but they attributed this not to the beauty of a work of art, but to the work of art successfully reminding them of higher spiritual truths.
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You don't think being sad rather than happy is objectively bad? Do you think pleasure is objectively better than pain? If not, what do you mean by "objective"?
If a thing
- should be true according to our theories of how people evolved
- is supported by animal models of pleasure, pain, happiness, and sadness
- is attested to be true by nearly all human societies everywhere throughout history
- is true in your own personal experience
- is replicatable in the lab, e.g., if you test 1000 subject to determine whether they respond more positively to ice cream or electric shocks, most will prefer ice cream
- is true on a neuroanatomical level, e.g., there are neural circuits that initiate withdrawal responses in response to pain (and depression)
then why do you hesitate to just say it's true? What requirement must something satisfy to be "objective" that is more stringent than being true?
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The general consensus--though I don't agree with it--is that the only reason we say things are subjective is that there is no God to provide objective truths. If you agree with this consensus, you must believe it is objectively true that there is no God. If there is doubt in your mind whether God exists, you then can't (according to standard Western accounts) assert that truth is subjective, because it isn't if God exists.
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If all the people involved--which might have to include the ancient Greeks, because it would seem odd to say everyone agrees the purpose of art is to make an argument if people during those times are reading ancient documents which say other wise--say so, then I wouldn't believe it's objectively true that the purpose of art is to make an argument, but I would say we can take it as if it were for purposes of critique of those people. We could say fiction from Europe in 1000 which made bad arguments was bad fiction.
However, when I say "fiction makes an argument", I mean that in a much more general sense than people think of when they hear me say that. And I don't think all fiction makes an argument. Finnegan's Wake probably doesn't make an argument. Nabokov's Pale Fire probably doesn't; it's more like humorously commenting on a commentator who is abusing a poem to make an argument that isn't in the poem. Pious fiction of the Middle Ages doesn't, exactly. And humor doesn't.
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I think I would say that in order for a statement to be objectively true, there must be no imaginable perspective from which someone could declare it to be false without that judgment also being objectively false by the same definition.
Which is sort of an explosion recursively, but that's the best logical phrasing I can think of now to express what's in my head. I'm willing to concede that this definition is basically destined to disallow unqualified objective facts from existing, but then that's exactly why I've phrased it this way.
4357955
That's really really interesting, and I think I agree, but am left with one more question. Do you think that "bad" as applied to a work of art also means that it is impossible to derive a valuable experience from that work? Does it seem possibly limiting--or, rather, imprecise--to say that a work is bad if there's still something we can gain from it? (Which I think there is, and judging by how you spoke of aesthetics earlier, you definitely think there is too, even if you personally don't get much out of it.)
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Can't I just think that whether or not God exists, such a being would not be in the business of disseminating objective truths to humanity and so such theoretical knowledge is unknowable and therefore useless? Or, hmm, does that mess up the logic somehow? I guess I could see the theoretical possibility of unqualified objective facts existing as being disruptive.
To the things I didn't directly respond to: the information was well-appreciated and interesting, I just didn't have anything important to say in response.
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I think you're going for a rationalist's desired degree of certainty. I don't think that's useful in the real world. You end up doing a Descartes, doubting everything, then constructing a logical system that proves stupid shit 'coz it's a logical system that is pure and perfect but doesn't match reality. I can make arguments that animals don't feel pain--Descartes did--but the evidence that they do is strong enough that arguing over it, calling it not objectively true, just wastes everybody's time and eventually leads to torturing animals.
No mental proposition can ever be validated as "true" in a rationalist sense by any evidence, because evidence comes in bits, and it would take an infinite number of bits to adjust a proposition's posterior probability (posterior to the evidence) to 1. (That's because to do so, you have to make the numerator of its likelihood ratio infinite, as per Bayes' law.)
Never say never. Things aren't usually all bad or all good, and even if they were, you could have a valuable experience by seeing through it, by misinterpreting it, by learning patience with bad works... ("Valuable" is too vague a word to be combined with the word "impossible" anyways. If I trip over a bad romance novel and find a $100 bill on the ground did that romance novel give me a valuable experience?)
Perhaps I was abusing the word "must" again. But I don't think anyone who doesn't even know whether God exists can be certain about God's inclinations, and so could not dismiss the possibility that God does such things.
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It's definitely not a very useful definition for someone trying to do science with facts, or for someone who is needing to apply that definition with extreme levels of rigor. It's just philosophically (like, worldview philosophy, not rigorous logic philosophy) most likely to result in optimal behavior for me. Considering all objective facts as objective* facts, with the footnote as a constant reminder that nothing is for sure, feels like a vital mindset to keep.
...but it also results in multi-week conversations in Internet comments sections that boil down to each interlocutor's personal definition of "objective." Though this has been fun, so I suppose that's also a plus.
So then why use the word "bad" instead of something more descriptive? Seeing as it's probably inevitable that anyone presented with the phrase "this art is objectively bad" who cares enough to spend more than five minutes thinking about art is going to end up arguing semantics (
), doesn't it sidestep that hazard to just say what you mean, which is that the art doesn't succeed at the goals you think it definitively set out to achieve? (Obviously there are cases when "bad" means something very specific--like your example with the bad romance novel--and in those cases there's no argument to be raised except perhaps by a true pedant, but "art," "objective," and "bad" are just fiery words to string together in that order IMO. But then basically all of my experience with the topic is from Internet comments sections that reliably detonate in much this way, so my sample is biased.)
Why not? It's really just three options: God doesn't exist, God exists and tells humans objective facts, God exists and doesn't tell humans objective facts. Nothing about believing that option 3 could be true seems to force the implication that option 2 could also be true, at least to me.
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Believing option 3 /is/ true wouldn't force the implication that option 2 could be true. It would rule it out. I don't find it reasonable, however, that someone who doesn't know whether God exists or not could rule out option 2. Ruling out option 2 requires them to know lots of things about God.
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I think Stalinist and Nazi art, and also Italian fascist art, were bad art, but much better art than high medieval representational church art. I think it's very revealing to compare the two. Here, for instance, is a very famous medieval tapestry of the Battle of Hastings:
static.greatbigcanvas.com/categories/medieval-art-11307.jpg
Here's one that's considered a very fine medieval fresco, from St. Georg's church in Reichenau, Germany, and its execution is technically very good for the High Middle Ages:
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/Reichenau_Oberzell_Fresko1.jpeg
(This is actual medieval art. If you Google "medieval art", almost none of the results are medieval art. They are Renaissance or Enlightenment art. People don't put medieval art up on Pinterest, because medieval art sucks. Notice, for example, there are no faces, the feet just hang beneath the figures, the sky is not blue, the fresco is very crowded (trying to make "efficient" use of the space rather than have some sense of composition), and the building is drawn with the kind of perspective an 8-year-old would use. If you see a painting with well-drawn faces or feet, or blue sky, or use of perspective, it's not medieval.)
Compare some examples of Italian fascist art, which it is totally okay to call "bad art", because it's fascist:
wthistory.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/alfredo-gauro-ambrosini-aeroritratto-di-benito-mussolini-aviatore-1930-flickr-kitchener-lord.jpg
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These are creepy, but it's hard for me to dismiss them as art. My guess is that this kind of art, and some Stalinist art, feels like art because part of fascism, and even Nazism, calls on positive human qualities: courage, fraternity, optimism, energy.
Medieval art is based on a theology which has some positive values for society (charity, love, compassion), but those values never come across in its art except in forms so extreme that it twists the message into something different. Instead of seeing love or compassion, we get a tortured Christ dying on the cross, and the message is no longer "love others" but "Jesus loves you more than you are even capable of loving anyone, you piece of scum." Love in church art is exhibited only by Jesus, Mary, or saints, and they are deliberately painted in an inhuman manner to emphasize that love and positive emotions are not human feelings, but come only from God. Medieval church art was designed to crush the human spirit and make people feel weak, insignificant, vile, fearful, undeserving, and dependent.
So what is really interesting is that the 20th century totalitarian art is, I think, much better than medieval art, and yet it's okay to dismiss it as bad art, and not okay to dismiss the much worse medieval art that way. It shows that it's all politics, not philosophy or art criticism.