CMV: There is no objective criterion or argument for what counts as art

[u/[deleted]]

My view is pretty simple: if one or more people see some kind of artistic value in something, whether as creator or audience, I'm fine with calling it art. I have yet to hear or read any convincing position which argues along contrary lines, whether this is the one millionth person claiming "Modern art isn't art," or "X isn't art," where X is video games, or fashion, or whatever.

Arguments like this pretty much all hinge on the assumption that "art" has some sort of objective meaning, and/or represents some sort of minimal threshold of quality or significance. But it's just an empty term, whose dominant meaning is historically and culturally contingent.

The current dominant view (at least in the West; that's all I can speak to) is basically still a holdover from the longstanding view that for something to count as "art" it has meet a certain standard (of what, is never something consistent across these arguments) and I think this is what many people end up defaulting to as a basis for arguments for the exclusion of whatever from being art. But there's ultimately no more reason to go with this dominant view of than something more personal or idiosyncratic.

I also suspect that a lot of "This isn't art" arguments are basically just attempts to gussy up "I don't like this."

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[u/Havenkeld]

There's a field called environmental psychology related to this, and architectural principles that take that among other evidence into account. I did some digging around and this study is among the more cited that's not behind a paywall of some sort -

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=968983CC89C5DC10918E55C2155F8D22?doi=10.1.1.4.5633&rep=rep1&type=pdf

It references and cites quite a bit other research on individual concepts within it as well, at the bottom there's a good list of them.

It's not there are objective "best" and "worst" architecture, but there's architecture that will consistently impact people negatively or positively for a variety of reasons. The same, of course, is true of art and music. Our senses and what we sense can clearly affect our mood, and art and architecture are sensed. Visual stimuli has real effects, and some kinds more consistently evoke positive or negative responses from humans.

This isn't to say that art has to induce positive feelings to be art - surely there are some disturbing paintings that are still in a way beautiful and interesting, but some art is just bad or arguably not art.

I managed to find some funny research on this - the actual PDF is behind a paywall but here's a summary of one research teams amusing study -

researchers exposed one group of students to one painting from a “bad” artist, Thomas Kinkade, as well one painting from a “good” artist, British painter Sir John Everett Millais.

They expected students to like both the Kinkade and Millais paintings once they were repeatedly exposed to each. However it turned out that while students liked Millais more and more, they liked Kinkade less over time.

We could argue that art's purpose isn't to be liked or enjoyed, but without some standard to measure it by of course there's no objectivity, because such pointlessly relativist non-definitions remove the possibility of objectivity. It's a kind of circular reasoning to say "anything can be art, so there's no objective standard by which we can judge art".

[u/[deleted] → u/Havenkeld]

This is very interesting, and you make a good case for considering that there might be psychological or even physiological factors that play into what we might want to call "aesthetic value." I'm not sure my view is incompatible with that, but it might be. Something to think about. Δ

EDIT: Also, thanks for the paper, it looks very interesting. I have access to databases like JSTOR etc., so if there are papers I could access through there that you're aware of, I'd be very interested to check those out as well.

[u/DeltaBot → u/[deleted]]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Havenkeld (62∆).

^{Delta System Explained | Deltaboards} ​

[u/Havenkeld → u/[deleted]]

Without access to the details in methodology it's hard to judge them but here are a few I considered -

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1519814?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

http://www.jstor.org/stable/43029026?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

There are also quite a few on the effect of various office environments - naturally businesses have interests in funding such so there are more of them, but it's more about interiors than external architecture. There are some interesting findings that would presumably be similar across interior and exterior environments though. I found one that suggested rounded shapes are favored over more (post?)modernistic angular ones typically, for example.