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This may be a little off-topic, but as I was reading the article, I started wondering about something. The author uses examples of genius in art and literature

This may be a little off-topic, but as I was reading the article, I started wondering about something. The author uses examples of genius in art and literature, and noted how Cézanne's early works weren't "very good" and how his later one's were much better, whereas Picasso's early works were considered his best. So I googled paintings of both artists, and I'm perplexed. I have absolutely no clue what is considered "great". Obviously this is because my work is in science and I know next to nothing about art, but I'm still kind of curious what makes a work great in art and literature. For instance, there's thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of painters in the world right now. And if you select the top 100 and showed me their paintings, and then showed me a Picasso, I wouldn't be able to point out why Picasso's is "better". Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is also mentioned as one of the best poems of all time. I'll admit, it's very beautiful, but I just don't understand what makes it that much more amazing than a contemporary poet's work. Imagine if you took the world's population and wiped everyone's memories of great artists, and then asked them to reevaluate which which works are the "greatest". Would we arrive at the same conclusions? Without the bias of knowing "this is a famous artist, therefore his work must be good", would the rankings of art remain the same? Unlike my literature teachers in high school, I don't believe in "magical qualities", so there has to be some numeric metric one could use to separate the very best from the "just good". What is it? (Perhaps it's not an easily calculable number, but it still must exist; if it didn't, then the whole field of art and literature criticism would be nonsense.)

dboard 12y ago
Is there a numeric metric to separate the very best from the "just good" in any field?
- Xcelerate 12y ago
  Yes. In athletics for instance it's very easy. Each sport has a built-in scoring system from the get-go. I would also say it's pretty easy to pick out the best scientists. Simply evaluate the improvement in predictive power that their contribution to the field elicits, and I think Einstein, Feynman, et al. would fall out pretty easily as the best.
  - jtbigwoo 12y ago
    Many competitive sports are strongly context-dependent, though--just like art. Part of the beauty of basketball, for example, is we will never know if Wilt Chamberlain or Michael Jordan or LeBron James is really the greatest basketball player of all time because they played in different eras. Athletic training was so much different in Chamberlain's era that it's tough to predict if he'd be as dominant today. Even in the early years of Jordan's career, plenty of players didn't lift weights for fear of becoming too bulky. Sports where competitors are measured against a clock or a tape measure are easier to compare across eras but even then equipment changes make it difficult. Pole vaulting, for example, became a completely different sport when flexible fiberglass poles were introduced. Major track events were still being run on cinder tracks into the 1970's.
vanderZwan 12y ago
The thing about a work of art being "good" is that it also largely depends on the surrounding art traditions of the time. Picasso's early works contributed most to new aesthetic thinking and the discussion of the nature of art, and within that context they are revolutionary and genius. To give another example, in my opinion Duchamp's readymades were a genius piece of artistic trolling, great thought-provoking statements on aesthetics and the nature of art. Pretty much everyone who followed missed the point, as they did not add anything significant to the discussion - they just accepted the Fountain as art and proof that their readymades are therefore also valuable art. Also, with many works of art you really need to see the real thing to even get the opportunity to "get" it. A real Mondrian is much better than you would expect based on pictures, because it's possible to empathise and "feel" how the artist made his brush strokes, the emotion behind it. That embodied experience of a work of art, which is essential to the readability of a painting, or any work of art, is often lost when translated to a digital JPG. As for your last point, you fall for the mistake of believing that the external objective truth, which applies to the natural sciences, applies to art. Art is about (partially shared) subjective experiences, which can still be quantified to some degree if put in the proper context, but not in the same meaningful way we can calculate the value of Pi. For example, our eyes work mostly the same across our species, so before interpreting what we see the input should be largely similar, creating similarity in otherwise subjective experiences. But it's obvious that this similarity in perception is limited. I suggest "Philosophy in the Flesh", by Lakoff and Johnson, if you want a nice empirically grounded discussion related to this - they apply empirical insights from the cognitive sciences to philosophy and in the process give you a good non-magical sense of how this subjective but shared experience works.
- monocasa 12y ago
  And as an engineer, this makes sense to me. True innovation in the field is respected just as much as if not more than implementation details.
VLM 12y ago
There isn't one number. Lets extend this to an easier subject we all have extensive experience with... evaluating the taste of the food we're eating. If the food critic fad of the day prioritizes flavor balance, the "winner" will have an amazing balance of flavors but perhaps the texture will resemble dog food or clam chowder. If the food critic fad of the day prioritizes texture, or heat, or visual appearance, or smell, or sweetness (well, food critics don't like corn syrup but walmart shoppers certainly do...). Even worse, fads aren't binary either, its all a big ratio. That's at least partial explanation why some authors go in and out of favor in lit over centuries. Its actually a lot of work in lit to keep up with who is supposed to be cool and who is supposed to suck based on changing tastes. Then dog pile a ton of groupthink on top with some politics and inevitable cultural issues (racism, nationalism, etc) and you can see how faddish some of this is. On the other hand, if you have an agreed upon definition of impressionism, then you can evaluate who makes the best impressionist painter under that set of carefully defined rules. I think it would be hard to argue against Monet. Someone could claim Sisley but I think on long enough study that Monet beats Sisley overall. (edited to emphasize, beats Sisley at the defined rules... nothing wrong with liking a set of rules where Sisley beats Monet, just don't name that set of rules impressionistic painting) Or, you can compare your Robert Frost to this dude named Robertson who wrote similar, yet somewhat inferior poems. I think it would be a lot of work or outright impossible to compare Frost to Kipling or to T S Elliot beyond sorta "and heres a different genre"
moron4hire 12y ago
Think of it like people who quote movie lines too much, like Arnold Schwarzenegger saying "Hasta la vista, baby" in Terminator 2. When the line first came out, it was interesting. The repetition kills it for a while. It can eventually make a comeback, a nostalgic throwback, less a reference to the movie itself and more a harkening to our shared experience of it. And it could then eventually fade away completely, at which point a new movie (Terminator 4D!) could use it and kick off a whole knew wave, completely oblivious to the original, until a cultural anthropologist somewhere writes a paper somewhere that will get poorly summarized in the popular news. There is nothing objectively, measurably different about when Arnold said it the first time, when your coworkers drove it into the ground around the water cooler, or in later uses. What differs entirely is the cultural context in which we experience it. And when it comes to "Ahht"-art, it's never about the pretty picture. It's about what it communicates about culture.
murbard2 12y ago
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/arts/design/23pain.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/arts/design/23pain.html?_r... I think this story is evidence that there are some non arbitrary qualities to artwork that you (and I) are not perceiving. It would never have occurred to me to pick up this painting in the trash, but the woman did... a woman who was "not a modern-art aficionado" but felt the painting "had a strange power".
snowwrestler 12y ago
Art exists within contexts, and without understanding those contexts, you will have a hard time understanding why one piece of art is more respected/revered than another. Here's an analogy: imagine you found an artist who had almost no background in science, and gave him a bunch of scientific papers to read. Would he be able to identify the significant or groundbreaking papers? By what criteria would he make his decisions?
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  That's perhaps disingenuous. Artists are not known for their critical thinking skills. Scientists are defined by them.
  - snowwrestler 12y ago
    I think it's probably a more accurate statement to say that scientists do not respect the critical thinking skills of artists. The fact is that many artists feel the same way about scientists. Feynman wrote about this in some of his memoirs.
  - mtalantikite 12y ago
    Maybe our definitions of critical thinking are different, but I've always regarded artists as masters of critical thinking. From the wikipedia article: "The National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking defines critical thinking as the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action." Try to do anything in art without a mastery of that and you're probably not going to produce good work.
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      Then why do so many artists practice crystal magic and goofy food fads? Why are so many deniers of science? Maybe its just the posers, the non-masters that do that?
dubcanada 12y ago
The problem with art/literature is it's all opinions. And some people feel that their opinion carries more weight due too reasons.
collyw 12y ago
>whereas Picasso's early works were considered his best. Having been to the Picasso museum here in Barcelona, it maybe because he could actually paint, as you can see in his earlier work, as opposed to his later stuff - which looks like it is done by a 5 year old. I personally believe there is a lot of "celebrity culture" in art, even Banksy said something along those lines. "The Art we look at is made by only a select few. A small group create, promote, purchase, exhibit and decide the success of Art. Only a few hundred people in the world have any real say. When you go to an Art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires..."
freyr 12y ago
So since you (an admitted neophyte who knows "next to nothing" about art) can't discern good art from great art, art criticism as a whole must be invalid? It might be, but that's surely not evidence of it. You tout your ignorance as if that somehow lends credence to your comment. Sure, there's a high degree of subjectivity inherent to art. But we can look to the originality of a given work of art, and and cultural impact that it has had. If you wiped everyone's memories of great inventions, scientific discoveries, etc., and then asked them to compare the Model T to a Ford Focus, they'd of course say the Focus is a much better automobile. And an understanding of the impact and importance of the Model T would be lost on them.
- Xcelerate 12y ago
  > So since you I knew where this was headed as soon as I read the first three -- rather passive aggressive -- words of your reply. Yours seems to be the only comment among many implying I think "art criticism as a whole must be invalid". Curious that... I really despise people putting words in my mouth that were never there. You're looking for a fight that doesn't exist, so I flagged your post since it detracts from the discussion. Please abstain from these sorts of comments in the future.
  - freyr 12y ago
    > [You're] implying I think "art criticism as a whole must be invalid". Curious that... I really despise people putting words in my mouth that were never there. Weird, I wonder where I got that notion from? > so there has to be some numeric metric one could use to separate the very best from the "just good". What is it? (Perhaps it's not an easily calculable number, but it still must exist; if it didn't, then the whole field of art and literature criticism would be nonsense.) That's where I got confused. I thought you were being sarcastic when you said that that art can be converted to a number. I think it's possible (or very likely) that no such metric exists, and that if it did, it would be of little value. For instance, do you rank art based on aesthetic value, or the visceral effect it has had on viewers (mean or max?), or societal impact? Perhaps all the factors, but how do you weight them? Is there an objective measure of aesthetic value? It's more likely that different individuals/groups/cultures have different aesthetic tastes that vary over time, so perhaps you average over these variables? By averaging over these variables, will the "best art" be the perfectly pleasant art you might find hanging in a hotel lobby? Or will it be bolder art that a subset of people will revile? Who gets to decide? There's always a chance that art can be converted into a meaningful and objective number. But if this metric does not exist, then by your logic, "art and literature criticism would be nonsense." In my personal opinion, art is by its nature subjective. Aesthetic value is rather arbitrary. Art criticism is probably mostly a sham. But without them, how would rich people know which paintings to buy? Most people like being told what to like, what to wear, and when to laugh, and so they provide a useful service.
wmil 12y ago
Picasso and Cézanne both got popular in the 190x's. As photography got better the art world stopped being impressed with accurate perspective. Cézanne was famously bad at perspective, but kept painting anyways. Essentially they were both doing interesting things with color and shape at the moment that became trendy.

dboard 12y ago

Is there a numeric metric to separate the very best from the "just good" in any field?

Xcelerate 12y ago
Yes. In athletics for instance it's very easy. Each sport has a built-in scoring system from the get-go. I would also say it's pretty easy to pick out the best scientists. Simply evaluate the improvement in predictive power that their contribution to the field elicits, and I think Einstein, Feynman, et al. would fall out pretty easily as the best.
- jtbigwoo 12y ago
  Many competitive sports are strongly context-dependent, though--just like art. Part of the beauty of basketball, for example, is we will never know if Wilt Chamberlain or Michael Jordan or LeBron James is really the greatest basketball player of all time because they played in different eras. Athletic training was so much different in Chamberlain's era that it's tough to predict if he'd be as dominant today. Even in the early years of Jordan's career, plenty of players didn't lift weights for fear of becoming too bulky. Sports where competitors are measured against a clock or a tape measure are easier to compare across eras but even then equipment changes make it difficult. Pole vaulting, for example, became a completely different sport when flexible fiberglass poles were introduced. Major track events were still being run on cinder tracks into the 1970's.

vanderZwan 12y ago

The thing about a work of art being "good" is that it also largely depends on the surrounding art traditions of the time. Picasso's early works contributed most to new aesthetic thinking and the discussion of the nature of art, and within that context they are revolutionary and genius. To give another example, in my opinion Duchamp's readymades were a genius piece of artistic trolling, great thought-provoking statements on aesthetics and the nature of art. Pretty much everyone who followed missed the point, as they did not add anything significant to the discussion - they just accepted the Fountain as art and proof that their readymades are therefore also valuable art. Also, with many works of art you really need to see the real thing to even get the opportunity to "get" it. A real Mondrian is much better than you would expect based on pictures, because it's possible to empathise and "feel" how the artist made his brush strokes, the emotion behind it. That embodied experience of a work of art, which is essential to the readability of a painting, or any work of art, is often lost when translated to a digital JPG. As for your last point, you fall for the mistake of believing that the external objective truth, which applies to the natural sciences, applies to art. Art is about (partially shared) subjective experiences, which can still be quantified to some degree if put in the proper context, but not in the same meaningful way we can calculate the value of Pi. For example, our eyes work mostly the same across our species, so before interpreting what we see the input should be largely similar, creating similarity in otherwise subjective experiences. But it's obvious that this similarity in perception is limited. I suggest "Philosophy in the Flesh", by Lakoff and Johnson, if you want a nice empirically grounded discussion related to this - they apply empirical insights from the cognitive sciences to philosophy and in the process give you a good non-magical sense of how this subjective but shared experience works.

monocasa 12y ago
And as an engineer, this makes sense to me. True innovation in the field is respected just as much as if not more than implementation details.

VLM 12y ago

There isn't one number. Lets extend this to an easier subject we all have extensive experience with... evaluating the taste of the food we're eating. If the food critic fad of the day prioritizes flavor balance, the "winner" will have an amazing balance of flavors but perhaps the texture will resemble dog food or clam chowder. If the food critic fad of the day prioritizes texture, or heat, or visual appearance, or smell, or sweetness (well, food critics don't like corn syrup but walmart shoppers certainly do...). Even worse, fads aren't binary either, its all a big ratio. That's at least partial explanation why some authors go in and out of favor in lit over centuries. Its actually a lot of work in lit to keep up with who is supposed to be cool and who is supposed to suck based on changing tastes. Then dog pile a ton of groupthink on top with some politics and inevitable cultural issues (racism, nationalism, etc) and you can see how faddish some of this is. On the other hand, if you have an agreed upon definition of impressionism, then you can evaluate who makes the best impressionist painter under that set of carefully defined rules. I think it would be hard to argue against Monet. Someone could claim Sisley but I think on long enough study that Monet beats Sisley overall. (edited to emphasize, beats Sisley at the defined rules... nothing wrong with liking a set of rules where Sisley beats Monet, just don't name that set of rules impressionistic painting) Or, you can compare your Robert Frost to this dude named Robertson who wrote similar, yet somewhat inferior poems. I think it would be a lot of work or outright impossible to compare Frost to Kipling or to T S Elliot beyond sorta "and heres a different genre"

moron4hire 12y ago

Think of it like people who quote movie lines too much, like Arnold Schwarzenegger saying "Hasta la vista, baby" in Terminator 2. When the line first came out, it was interesting. The repetition kills it for a while. It can eventually make a comeback, a nostalgic throwback, less a reference to the movie itself and more a harkening to our shared experience of it. And it could then eventually fade away completely, at which point a new movie (Terminator 4D!) could use it and kick off a whole knew wave, completely oblivious to the original, until a cultural anthropologist somewhere writes a paper somewhere that will get poorly summarized in the popular news. There is nothing objectively, measurably different about when Arnold said it the first time, when your coworkers drove it into the ground around the water cooler, or in later uses. What differs entirely is the cultural context in which we experience it. And when it comes to "Ahht"-art, it's never about the pretty picture. It's about what it communicates about culture.

murbard2 12y ago

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/arts/design/23pain.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/arts/design/23pain.html?_r... I think this story is evidence that there are some non arbitrary qualities to artwork that you (and I) are not perceiving. It would never have occurred to me to pick up this painting in the trash, but the woman did... a woman who was "not a modern-art aficionado" but felt the painting "had a strange power".

snowwrestler 12y ago

Art exists within contexts, and without understanding those contexts, you will have a hard time understanding why one piece of art is more respected/revered than another. Here's an analogy: imagine you found an artist who had almost no background in science, and gave him a bunch of scientific papers to read. Would he be able to identify the significant or groundbreaking papers? By what criteria would he make his decisions?

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
That's perhaps disingenuous. Artists are not known for their critical thinking skills. Scientists are defined by them.
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  I think it's probably a more accurate statement to say that scientists do not respect the critical thinking skills of artists. The fact is that many artists feel the same way about scientists. Feynman wrote about this in some of his memoirs.
- mtalantikite 12y ago
  Maybe our definitions of critical thinking are different, but I've always regarded artists as masters of critical thinking. From the wikipedia article: "The National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking defines critical thinking as the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action." Try to do anything in art without a mastery of that and you're probably not going to produce good work.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Then why do so many artists practice crystal magic and goofy food fads? Why are so many deniers of science? Maybe its just the posers, the non-masters that do that?

dubcanada 12y ago

The problem with art/literature is it's all opinions. And some people feel that their opinion carries more weight due too reasons.

collyw 12y ago

>whereas Picasso's early works were considered his best. Having been to the Picasso museum here in Barcelona, it maybe because he could actually paint, as you can see in his earlier work, as opposed to his later stuff - which looks like it is done by a 5 year old. I personally believe there is a lot of "celebrity culture" in art, even Banksy said something along those lines. "The Art we look at is made by only a select few. A small group create, promote, purchase, exhibit and decide the success of Art. Only a few hundred people in the world have any real say. When you go to an Art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires..."

freyr 12y ago

So since you (an admitted neophyte who knows "next to nothing" about art) can't discern good art from great art, art criticism as a whole must be invalid? It might be, but that's surely not evidence of it. You tout your ignorance as if that somehow lends credence to your comment. Sure, there's a high degree of subjectivity inherent to art. But we can look to the originality of a given work of art, and and cultural impact that it has had. If you wiped everyone's memories of great inventions, scientific discoveries, etc., and then asked them to compare the Model T to a Ford Focus, they'd of course say the Focus is a much better automobile. And an understanding of the impact and importance of the Model T would be lost on them.

Xcelerate 12y ago
> So since you I knew where this was headed as soon as I read the first three -- rather passive aggressive -- words of your reply. Yours seems to be the only comment among many implying I think "art criticism as a whole must be invalid". Curious that... I really despise people putting words in my mouth that were never there. You're looking for a fight that doesn't exist, so I flagged your post since it detracts from the discussion. Please abstain from these sorts of comments in the future.
- freyr 12y ago
  > [You're] implying I think "art criticism as a whole must be invalid". Curious that... I really despise people putting words in my mouth that were never there. Weird, I wonder where I got that notion from? > so there has to be some numeric metric one could use to separate the very best from the "just good". What is it? (Perhaps it's not an easily calculable number, but it still must exist; if it didn't, then the whole field of art and literature criticism would be nonsense.) That's where I got confused. I thought you were being sarcastic when you said that that art can be converted to a number. I think it's possible (or very likely) that no such metric exists, and that if it did, it would be of little value. For instance, do you rank art based on aesthetic value, or the visceral effect it has had on viewers (mean or max?), or societal impact? Perhaps all the factors, but how do you weight them? Is there an objective measure of aesthetic value? It's more likely that different individuals/groups/cultures have different aesthetic tastes that vary over time, so perhaps you average over these variables? By averaging over these variables, will the "best art" be the perfectly pleasant art you might find hanging in a hotel lobby? Or will it be bolder art that a subset of people will revile? Who gets to decide? There's always a chance that art can be converted into a meaningful and objective number. But if this metric does not exist, then by your logic, "art and literature criticism would be nonsense." In my personal opinion, art is by its nature subjective. Aesthetic value is rather arbitrary. Art criticism is probably mostly a sham. But without them, how would rich people know which paintings to buy? Most people like being told what to like, what to wear, and when to laugh, and so they provide a useful service.

wmil 12y ago

Picasso and Cézanne both got popular in the 190x's. As photography got better the art world stopped being impressed with accurate perspective. Cézanne was famously bad at perspective, but kept painting anyways. Essentially they were both doing interesting things with color and shape at the moment that became trendy.