fans of popular music may respond to the elitist claims of classical music with a facile relativism. But they abandon this relativism when arguing, say, the comparative merits of the early Beatles and the Rolling Stones. You may, for example, maintain that the Stones were superior to the Beatles (or vice versa) because their music is more complex, less derivative, and has greater emotional range and deeper intellectual content. Here you are putting forward objective standards from which you argue for a band’s superiority. Arguing from such criteria implicitly rejects the view that artistic evaluations are simply matters of personal taste. You are giving reasons for your view that you think others ought to accept.
Further, given the standards fans use to show that their favorites are superior, we can typically show by those same standards that works of high art are overall superior to works of popular art.The view roughly is that some things are better than others because they are more interesting, from which Gutting apparently draws the conclusion that the more interesting something is, the better. But what if it's too interesting? That sounds paradoxical, but by 'interesting' here I mean having the kind of features Gutting mentions: complexity, originality, emotional range, and intellectual content. It is surely possible for art to be too complex, too original, too emotionally ranging, and too intellectual. I can prefer this dessert to that because this one is sweeter without its being the case that the best dessert of all would be pure sugar.
How original or complex a work should be seems to be relative to the audience or the context: to what extent is the relevant scene tired and in need of something new?, how much intellectual content can we handle? We don't want Zizek references in a Sesame Street song. Complexity and emotional range also depend on the general context, and on personal taste too, I would think. If everything is complex, simplicity might be a breath of fresh air. But it's also true that different people will be happier with different levels of complexity. I like a certain straightforwardness, a rawness of emotion. But something above the level of the moronic. I can also imagine liking a song, say, that is purely sad, or purely happy, but if too many songs are like this then I will crave emotional range. Other people are likely to be roughly similar, but their preferred ranges of complexity and emotion will vary at least somewhat, as will the background of what they have been reading or seeing or hearing lately. The relative absence of a common culture makes universal judgments of quality difficult. If the scene is Broadway or the Vienna State Opera then we can be fairly objective about what is stale and what is refreshing, what builds on recent trends cleverly and what is merely derivative, but when the scene is your cable package or my iPod then it's much harder to speak to a general audience about what is an exciting new TV series or just the same old rubbish. That is, The Wire was a great TV series, but if you are five years old it will not be much fun for you. Nor will it be if you are fifty but have been fed such a diet of unsophisticated televisual gruel that you cannot handle something so complex. When we all watched the same TV, listened to the same radio, went to the same plays and concerts, it was much easier to talk about what was good or bad, because there was one audience for whom it might be too much or not enough in one way or another. (Of course there never was such a time, but some times have approximated it more than others. We are far from it today.)
Another thing that led me to think about all this (or to want to blog about it, which, alas, is not the same thing) is the debate about the relative quality of philosophy journals and areas of philosophy. In this discussion at NewAPPS, for instance, some people claimed that the general standard of originality and rigor is lower in aesthetics and applied ethics than in other areas of philosophy. These people work in aesthetics and applied ethics, as well as in other areas, so they aren't simply attacking other people by attacking their territory. And their expertise gives a lot of credibility to what they say. And it surely is possible to distinguish good work in philosophy from bad, otherwise how would we grade student papers or conduct peer review?
On the other hand, it would be odd if someone said that, say, History is better than English. That more original work and greater rigor were to be found in one discipline than the other. Such claims might be defensible (perhaps English has been taken over by trendies spouting pomo nonsense), but they would still sound odd, like a claim that jazz is better than medieval music. How can you compare the two? This is (at least one reason) why it is important that the people on the NewAPPS thread stuck to words like 'rigor' and 'originality' rather than using the less helpful word 'better.' There probably isn't much originality in applied ethics. There would be a risk of absurdity otherwise. "Surprise! The ethics of assisted suicide is actually a pseudo-problem after all." We don't, most of us, want that kind of originality. And the kind of rigor that is possible and desirable in such a field is going to be different from that in, say, logic. Judgements about what is better than what else just don't seem helpful, or even very meaningful, in such contexts. (The relative ease with which a given person can knock out a publishable paper in one area but not another is irrelevant, it seems to me. This could just reflect that person's strengths and weaknesses rather than the easiness of the discipline or area in which she finds it easier to work.)
Statements like "Mozart is better than the Beatles" or "work in the philosophy of language is better than work in aesthetics" seem pretty useless to me, except as revealing or expressing the speaker's preferences. Expressing such preferences is perfectly reasonable. It would be weird not to have any, and there is something to be said for acknowledging them. Be true to your school, as the Beach Boys said, and the sentiment is more defensible, I think, when applied to, say, the Frankfurt School or Antirealism, than when applied to a literal school. Within a specific context one can accurately and valuably make distinctions of quality. The new Camera Obscura album is not their best work. That's pretty much just a fact, just as the Philosophical Investigations is better than the Brown Book. But is analytic philosophy better than continental philosophy, or ethics better than metaphysics, or Kant better than Nietzsche? On their own those are silly questions. Not because they cannot be answered, but because a simple Yes or No answer is no use. We need to get into the details. And after a detailed answer a summary thumbs up or down would make a mockery of the thought that preceded it.
the fact that this 'argument' is still using the beatles as its place-holder for popular music fifty years later says something depressing about the academic philosopher's attitude toward culture and feigned existence outside of tradition.
ReplyDeletewhenever someone starts talking about criteria for objective judgments that somehow magically or automatically render the obviously different comparable, i wonder whether they can even hear a track like this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41qC3w3UUkU
i don't know how to separate that from the history of popular music, or from the conventions of freestyle battles and dis tracks, or how to appraise the furious invective separately from the fact that there was an east coast/west coast beef, or from the fact that both biggie and tupac ended up shot.
gutting needs to read some bourdieu or something. wait, he probably has! what's the deal then?
Yes, the examples are uninspiring, but he presumably played safe to reach the widest possible audience. It still seems very strange to compare the incomparable (or, as you say, the obviously different). One thing that works of art often are is moves in a conversation, and deciding whether move 1 in conversation A is better or worse than move 2 in conversation B is kind of a weird thing to do. What's the point? How can the judgment be made?
ReplyDeleteGutting tries to answer that last question, but I don't find the answer very persuasive. The point might be a kind of loyalty, it seems to me. "This moves me greatly and strikes me as profoundly valuable, while that just seems like crap, or trash at best. I will not accept that this judgment is purely arbitrary." That seems fair enough, at least the positive part of it does. But there are things you can say about what makes something good good (up to a point--after that maybe you just have to say "listen!" or "look!"). So it isn't just arbitrary. To say that one whole tradition is superior to another, though, is a bit like saying that one country, or one color, is better than another. It's little more than chest-thumping.
perhaps "better" is too broad an honorific for some purposes that would be better served by more pleasing, more useful, etc.?
ReplyDelete-dmf
The more specific the terms of criticism the better, I think. Gutting wants to insist on the superiority of high art over popular art, and I have some sympathy with him. Dostoevsky is better than Dan Brown, for instance. But if I can't back this up then what's the point of saying it? And in some cases there is no backing such claims up, because there are no (or too few) relevant comparisons to make. Are apples better than oranges?
DeleteIf I did bother to make the case that Dostoevsky is better than Dan Brown it is still possible that a Dan Brown fan might insist that s/he simply didn't care about the things that make Dostoevsky good, and just likes a good page-turner. I might have to say, "Well that's OK then" in that case. What I ought not to do is find out what the difference is between Dan Brown at his best and Dan Brown at his second best and then assume that any book that has even more of this difference-maker must thereby be better than anything Dan Brown ever wrote. More of something good is not always better.
yes, I think these matters are more pragmatic questions of taste/use (better for whom/what) than something more essential/elemental/Platonic about the work/performance at hand.
DeleteYes, except that I still want to leave room for greatness. If you reject Tolstoy's work or Beethoven's or Raphael's for sophisticated reasons, then fair enough. I'm not qualified to argue with you and will respect your opinion. But if you reject them simply because "they're boring" then (I really do believe) you are missing something. These works really are good, and the more one can appreciate good things the better. Being able to appreciate simple things is good, too, but the inability to do so seems to be less of a problem than the inability to appreciate sophisticated things.
DeleteA work cannot be too interesting. It would be absurd (or a kind of joke) to say "I wish this painting was less interesting". Instead, we talk of a work lapsing into obscurity, becoming too clever for its own good, loading in more than the subject can bear, etc. And the point is precisely that the work has ceased to be interesting; it has become confusing or pretentious or irritating, etc.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting (!) to reflect on aesthetics-related adjectives that DO allow of superfluity as opposed to those which don't. A work can't be too deep, but it can be too clever. It can't be too original, but it can be too radical. And so on.
As for the whole Mozart/Beatles thing, it seems to be the case that the more distant the objects of comparison the more general the discussion needs to become in order to make sense. "Beefheart was better than Zappa" makes sense, but "Beefheart was better than Paganini" seems the opening to a completely sterile argument (and likewise, really, "Beefheart was better than Bucks Fizz"; the distance involved is not just temporal).
However, "Classical music is better than pop music" (or vice versa) does seem to have mileage in it, and I think the generality of the terms involved is an important part of that (cf "Early 16th C choral music was better than early 70's prog rock").
Let me put it this way: you could argue about the merits of Rimbaud vrs Baudelaire without straying much from the poets themselves. But a Rimbaud vrs Pam Ayers debate could only make sense (if at all) if you used the two poets as tokens for wider cultural phenomena.
meh, I have a friend who manages a high-end gallery and regularly has customers reject works because they might compete with some other aspect of the interior-decoration, different strokes/folks....
Delete'but this involves a further point. architecture gives shape to space. space is what surrounds everything that exists in space. that is why architecture embraces all the other forms of representation: all works of plastic art, all ornament. moreover, it gives a place to the representational arts of poetry, music, acting, and dancing. by embracing all the arts, it asserts its perspective everywhere. that perspective is _decoration_. architecture safeguards it even against those forms of art whose works are not decorative but are rather gathered within themselves through the closure of their circle of meaning. modern research has begun to recall that this is true of all works of plastic art, which had a place assigned them when they were commissioned. even the free-standing statue on a pedestal is not really removed from the decorative context, but serves to heighten representationally a context of life with which it is decoratively consonant. even poetry and music, which have the freest mobility and can be read or performed anywhere, are not suited to any space whatever but to one that is appropriate: a theater, concert hall, or church. here too it is not a question of subsequently finding an external setting for a work that is complete in itself but of obeying the space-creating potentiality of the work itself, which has to adapt to what is given as well as to create its own conditions. (think only of the problem of acoustics, which is not only technical but architectural.)
Deletehence, given its comprehensiveness in relation to all the arts, architecture involves a twofold mediation. as the art which creates space, it both shapes it and leaves it free. it not only embraces all decorative shaping of space, including ornament, but is itself decorative in nature. the nature of decoration consists in performing that two-sided mediation: namely to draw the viewer's attention to itself, to satisfy his taste, and then to redirect it away from itself to the greater whole of the life context which it accompanies.'
- gadamer, _truth and method_, pp. 150-51
I agree with Philip, at least for the most part. That's why I said that it sounds paradoxical to call a work too interesting. But it could be too complex, say. Could it be too original? Maybe not (although I said above that it could), at least not in a bad way. That is, a work might be too original to be commercially successful, but it doesn't really make sense as criticism in aesthetic terms to call something too original.
Delete"Classical music is better than pop music" could certainly get a discussion going, but is it a matter that could ever be resolved? It seems a lot like "Classical French cuisine is better than chocolate" to me, and that seems more like an invitation to air prejudices than a recipe (ho ho) for a fruitful discussion. But of course all kinds of insights might come out in a discussion like that. I listen to both (although much more to pop music than to classical), and I can't imagine having fruitful thoughts on my own about which is better.
More on the idea of being too interesting: I don't think something can be too interesting simpliciter, but it can be too interesting for a given context. If there are words in a painting, or dance performance, or on some clothes, then the words might be so interesting that they become a distraction, throwing the work as a whole off. And so a painting might be too interesting for a particular room from a decorating point of view. That wouldn't make it a bad painting. Just a bad painting for that room. And if the painting is really that good maybe the thing to do is to change the rest of the decor. Or to care less about the art of interior design and more about the art of painting.
DeleteAnd far be it from me to try to take on Gadamer, but is decoration the perspective of architecture? Loos, Wittgenstein, and the guy in that Ayn Rand movie (the one based on Frank Lloyd Wright) might disagree. Otherwise it's a nice quote.
Deleteyeah, there is a very coherent and noticeable anti-modernist tendency i haven't figured out what to make of, yet. it's weird to read someone on aesthetics who isn't obviously exercised by the existence of color field paintings and white canvases!
DeleteYes, odd. Unless it's a conscious rejection of all modernism. That would be a bit odd, or maybe just boring (if it's knee-jerk conservatism), but could perhaps be given a thoughtful defense.
DeleteI take it that you view Larkin's conscious rejection of all modernism as "a bit odd" instead of "maybe just boring"? I'm being unfair here (although self-reflexive about my unfairness in a way that is itself Larkinian). But Larkin's position has always seemed to me to say: "Look how self-reflexive I am about my knee-jerk conservatism, so how can you dismiss it as just run-of-the-mill knee-jerk conservatism". Which, although it is intended as a defence, just puts me personally off even further.
DeleteKnee-jerk conservatism, including Larkin's, is boring just because it is knee-jerk. As you say, Larkin is self-reflexive about it, which makes it more interesting, albeit perhaps a little odd. (Odd because to dislike all modernism seems eccentric to me, except when it's unthinking knee-jerkery.) But it depends which conservatism you have in mind. His racism is not odd, just boring and depressing. His distaste for modern jazz is not very interesting, but I sympathize with it. An important thing for me is focusing on what you like, on the good that there is to be found. And Larkin does that enough (his poem about Sidney Bechet, for instance) for me to forgive (if that's the word) or overlook (if that is) his reactionary condemnations.
Deletei was thinking, at the time of the above, that nothing gadamer ever had to say about modern music or painting really occurred to me - and that, for example, film or recorded music seemed outside his purview by the 1960s (when he was already in his 60s). who knows - i'd have to check his critical writings, especially considering how non-particular he tends to be in his theoretical writings.
DeleteBUT i forgot about, e.g., the rilke epigraph to 'truth and method', or the entire book of readings of post-'turn' celan. perhaps those are pretty romantic modernists, but modernists all the same.
In The Relevance of the Beautiful (1977), Gadamer says that "the Threepenny Opera, or the records of modern songs so popular with the young people of today, are equally legitimate" as "the highest claims of artistic, historical and musical culture" that are "parallel to Greek tragedy" (pp. 50–51). However, he immediately feels the need to add a hackneyed warning about "often irresponsible, commercially motivated experimentation for its own sake". He sounds unbearably avuncular throughout, but he was 77 years old by this time.
DeleteAlso, a large portion of the same essay is given over to discussing "the festival" as an aesthetic category, and it is tempting to think mischievously of a rock festival when reading it.
hey, that's pretty good! surely validation of crass and wu-tang albums can't be far away.
DeleteWhat j. said. The Stone really seemed to have jumped the shark with this one, only to land in the bottom of the barrel. In fact I immediately expected Duncan to write something about this, just as I expected j. to comment. And it turns out that both my expectations were met delightfully.
ReplyDeleteIt's telling that Simon Frith's Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music was already intended as a final synoptic summing-up of this creakingly old and quaint debate in aesthetics, which was already viewed at the time as having exhausted itself quite some time ago in the past – and Frith's book was published seventeen, seventeen, years ago this month.
But one point of my own that I still feel like making. Gutting completely neglects the role of timbral qualities in giving a musical work depth, complexity, and so on. His is a black-dot-centric view of music that foregrounds melody and harmony, thinking hastily that their depth, indisputable as it is, is depth tout court.
And the thing I dislike most about European classical music, much as I like a lot of it, is that the timbral palette is more or less limited to the instruments of the symphony orchestra in the form that became stabilised in the nineteenth century. In popular music, I can enjoy drum paradiddles with the echo switched on and off electronically every few seconds, or an alto saxophone played through a rotating Leslie speaker of a Hammond organ, or Paul McCartney's laughter played backwards, or any number of sounds that are not only different from each other but limited to these single appearances on a particular record, giving them a very particular scarcity value of a "one night only" kind. What is more, if I want I can enjoy the best of classical music played with interesting timbres. But in classical music as made by classical musicians (outside electronic music), I am confined instrumentally to a) a 19th-century symphony orchestra or b) some subset of a 19th-century symphony orchestra. Which – if what I'm looking for is variety of tone colour – gives an impression of deadening sameness, not "complexity" or "depth".
Thanks! I wonder what Gutting would say about the limits of European classical music. It surely has them, as you point out, but Gutting might say either that they don't matter or that they are a positively good thing, making life more interesting by making it more challenging. Or something. But then the obvious move for the classical-music-hating Beatles fan is just to say exactly the same about the limits of that genre. At which point the futility of the debate (such as it is) would surely be evident.
ReplyDeletei'd be interested to hear high-minded defenses of the european art music tradition that embrace serialism, stockhausen, music concrete explorations of timbre, cage, that kind of thing as continuations of the tradition. exclusionary gestures from THAT sort of position i can at least respect. but my experience has been that the kind of apologist for tradition that gutting is trying to represent also often gives up around about chopin, or stravinsky or mahler, and at that point also starts being quite a bit more selective than the musical and critical traditions themselves were about what counted as outstanding musical achievements.
DeleteYou're making Gutting sound like Wittgenstein here. But the difference is that Wittgenstein was born in 1889, and died in 1951.
DeleteI've fantasised sometime about W. sneaking away during his 1949 visit to Norman Malcolm in upstate New York, and going to Harlem to hear some honest R&B at the Apollo Theater. But this tells more about me than about him. There is that tantalising remark about the word "jukebox" in Bouwsma's notes on the same visit, though.
Yup. I don't know whether Gutting really is trying to represent that kind of person, but he does come across that way.
DeleteAnd Wittgenstein had very interesting ideas about modernism. He didn't just reject it all (in architecture, for instance). His taste wasn't merely conventional--he liked Labor a lot. And he had ideas about different ages (see p. 39 of Bouwsma, for instance, where he asks about 'juke' but also talks about rootlessness (which can be dodgy, of course, but needn't be)). He might argue that Mozart was better than McCartney, but not on the same grounds that Gutting provides.
Delete