Ain't No Puzzle, Poindexter

More Digs at Others' Pontificating on Art

Against my better judgment I’d like to talk a little bit about art in what follows. The reason is that we’ve got another ‘situation’ on our hands, a mess we might like to wash off, similar to the one regarding morality in my previous post.

In particular the writer I’m concerned with today has chosen two pieces of music – Moonlight Sonata and ‘Baby Shark’ – to compare and attempted to decide whether, as he puts it, ‘good art is better than bad art’. (See his full piece here.) 

His initial argument is that art that is usually considered bad is often seen or heard by more people than art that is usually considered good. In large part he bases his reasoning on how many ‘views’ an artwork has on YouTube (I kid you not. . .), and then he links this aspect of popularity to the proposition, which forms the first premiss in his argument, that ‘the purpose of art is to produce aesthetic pleasure’.¹

To his credit, however, he does then ask sincerely about a ‘puzzle’ that he thinks he has generated. Specifically he discovers that the artwork which has the most views – and so the one which has supposedly given the most aesthetic pleasure (i.e. ‘Baby Shark’) – is not pleasurable to him. He seems to find it to be bad art, and yet he refrains from saying that it is therefore worse than the good artwork (i.e. Moonlight Sonata) with which he has chosen to compare it.² 

He then goes on to find that artistic aspects such as beauty, taste, robustness and quality of experience are all insufficient to provide the ‘artistic value’, as he calls it, that would be required to say conclusively what everyone must be thinking at this point, namely, that a piece like Moonlight Sonata is probably better, of more value, compared with a piece like ‘Baby Shark’. (Of course I absolutely grant him that it’s hard to explain why, and hence this post of mine.)

Now in my view the writer in question errs, not just because he has chosen to use a deductive argument to evaluate art on a large scale, but also because has taken a vast human project and subordinated it to a single purpose. To my mind this way of thinking borders on incomprehensible. After all, art, like morality, is very obviously too complicated to be crammed into a frame of certainty.

There appear to be several problems with his reasoning, but two stand out for me. First, his deductive argument is valid but the conclusion of it is at best uncertain. This means that no puzzle in fact results from the argument. It seems to me that, for example, his first two premisses are false (and further it would be fairly easy for someone to say that the terms ‘aesthetic pleasure’ and ‘artistic value’ are unclear).

That said, to continue with these objections would leave me vulnerable, given that I’m never going to beat this writer in any prolonged act of logical argumentation. And also, again to be fair, he ends his piece with questions rather than with statements. Which is to say that he ends, not in dogmatism as our writer in the previous post on morality does, but in an attempt at posing a question refined from its initial framing. Which is to say, further, that that way of working is almost always the best you can do in your philosophical takes on huge subjects: ask better questions about age-old difficulties.

And so this leads me to the second, and more important, problem, that it is wrong to use deductive reasoning in the case of art. Doing so obscures the size and significance of the issue. Questions about what art is and whether some artworks are better than others can be answered only so well with deduction, and even then only in bits and pieces. So far as I can tell, a better method of argument would be to stick with the refinement of these initial questions into more specific and sophisticated ones. In this process certainty must be put aside, as things like necessary and sufficient conditions will be hard (if not impossible) to come by.³ 

Indeed even to come by something like a criterion, a thing which seems reasonable to look for when facing extraordinary difficulties such as evaluating art, will most likely be a bridge too far. One reason is that the writer’s use of deductive argument, and his subsequent ruling out of several individual criteria that might be used to say which art is good and which is bad, makes it so that he disallows himself from saying something like, ‘Well, good art appears whenever there occurs a combination of criteria of craft and mood and taste and convention and context. . .’.

What’s more his use of this certainty-directed reasoning makes it seem as if he’s asking, not just for a single criterion, but for that criterion, once discovered, to be placed within a rule. And then that same rule could be methodized, say, by art critics, so that those critics could at long last tell us consumers with confidence, ‘Here is good art and here is bad art’. And that would put a merciful end to the problem of deciding on taste, value, quality, &c., in art.

The thing of it is, there is no need for an ‘end’ in the first place. Few people, and least of all artists themselves, are asking for a rule to guide them in how they create and receive art. The messiness of doing and consuming art is, in stark contrast to philosophical talk about art, very much part of the fun of it.

This isn’t to say that philosophers should stop looking for a criterion, but even if they were to find a decisive one, concocted a rule with it and set that rule into a method to determine ‘the best that has been thought and known’, they would still have a nagging problem. Being right doesn’t bind, especially when the consequential stakes are so low and the temperamental ones so high. (Art doesn’t really ameliorate; and as your mood changes, often so does the art you like.)

A correct and complete philosophical theory of art, if it did exist, still wouldn’t compel artists to create in the way stated by the theory, nor would the theory guide taste and reception regarding art. For that you would need an entirely new moral theory (God help us!) to tack on to your aesthetic theory. I suppose all of this is at least logically possible, but that ain’t saying much, is it?

Enough of this. What would I answer our writer here, regarding how we can ‘reliably’ tell good art from bad art? In the immortal words of Brandt: ‘Well, Dude, we just don’t know’.

But seriously, the answer, of course, is, ‘It depends; but it’s good to keep asking about it’. And it’s good to remember, as Dan Kaufman has put it in a similar context:

‘[D]isagreements over these subjects [like art] are irresolvable. And it’s not just that people are stubborn or thick-headed and refuse to see the “truth” or “reality” or whatever it is, but that the kinds of [philosophical] positions we trade in by their nature suffer from indeterminacy. It’s not just that we can’t resolve disputes over them; they are not the kinds of things over which one can have resolvable disputes’ (‘Philosophical Expertise’; emphasis in original, but would have been emphasized by me if it hadn’t been).

A deflationary position, perhaps; and so probably unsatisfying or even a bit philistine of me. And yet a position that hands out no restrictions whatever to a human practice that surely needs none.

1. Here is his initial argument:

‘1. The purpose of art is to produce aesthetic pleasure.

‘2. Artistic value should be judged by reference to the purpose of art.

‘3. Baby Shark produces more aesthetic pleasure than the Moonlight Sonata.

‘4. Therefore, Baby Shark has greater artistic value than the Moonlight Sonata.’ 

Now, though he states otherwise, number one is clearly not true. If he had written ‘a’ or ‘one major’, &c., then we might be onto something. But the purposes of art are in reality as varied as the artists and consumers involved in it. ‘The’ purpose of art could be to get laid; or it could be to have a laugh (Henry Fielding or the Lonely Island); or perhaps to talk to or through other artists (Steiner, Real Presences, p. 12); or to politicize an issue and preach; or to ‘realize the idea of experience in experience itself’ (Tallis, Newton’s Sleep, pp. 159, 162); or how about to listen to or look at as a casual backdrop to hanging out with friends; or in order to worship God or pay reverence to a religious tradition; and so on. And so if I’m right here, then number two cannot be true either.

2. Naturally I wouldn’t describe ‘Baby Shark’ as art. I’d say instead that it’s a game or a toy. And then I’d say, following Richard Taylor’s thoughts on unique creativity (Metaphysics, p. 141), this: Imagine you could sit the composers of the music down and play (or show the score of) each piece for them. They have never heard the tune before and so you give them a minute and then you then ask them to replicate the piece on the spot. 

Of course whereas Beethoven, probably after retching, would rattle off the shark song with no trouble, the composer of ‘Baby Shark’ would in all likelihood not be able to play the first movement of Beethoven’s Sonata. 

In other words the complexity that exists within art, in all its forms, exists within individual works of art as well, and this means that, not only should artworks for the most part not be compared with one another lightly, but also that no one purpose or principle will do to explain the phenomenon of art itself.

3. But there is nothing wrong with or disturbing about this situation. I mean, it’s not a failure to have failed to find, say, a necessary condition with regard to the purposes of art. The situation only appears to be a failure because it is often seen through the eyes of ‘originality’-obsessed professors and graduate students or those of ‘certainty’-obsessed popularizers and intellectuals.