Been mulling the phrase over this afternoon. "art for art's sake", meaning... what? Other than the subtitle of the Lion's roar, that is. Literally, it implies the divorce of art from didactic goals, and is hence anathema to collectivists. Being a radical individualist and existentialist, the idea that art 'is what it is' does not, for me, bring on a case of the vapors. This does, however, leave us with the peculiarly unsatisfying idea that art is beyond criticism, or does it? If we can't critique art as 'not suitable to a purpose', how do we critique it? Here's a question, WHY do we critique it?? Why is it essential to us to be able to rate something... make that EVERYTHING. Why do "we", and by "we" I'm primarily referring to the people I've spent most of my life interacting with on a day to day basis (European descendants, by and large); why do we need to be able to place every object in a container, and every object in that container in some kind of hierarchical, mathematical order?
One of my passions is playing guitar, writing arrangements of jazz standards for same, and doing a little composing. There is a most peculiar mind set among musicians that you can 'rate' their capability by comparing their speed on the instrument. This is particularly true of guitarists, but it extends to horn players and pianists as well. The faster you play, the better you are. Why?? Faster is "better"??? No, faster is measurable. And most forms of criticism work backwards from what the critic needs to be true, to what is "true". Subjective qualities like "sensitivity", "empathy", etc., can't be measured with a marked stick and hence, won't work for the baseball card mentality, i.e., so many RBI's, so many hits, so many errors... So if you want to be able to "objectively" compare Beethoven to Liszt, count the number of notes they can get out in a minute. This desperate need to be able to measure things derives from the equally desperate and equally pointless need to rank them in some unarguable order that everyone will agree to. Again, why? I think it comes down to this: most people are so utterly devoid of confidence in their own perspective that they have to find a way to convince the world to agree with them, and you can't do that with vague notions about "sensitivity", but you can do it with a radar gun, by yiminy! Liszt BURNS man!! The dude was SMOKIN!!!
Me, I'll stick to what I like... and I don't care if you like it, approve of it, rank it 3d or 300th. What's the value in being anti-social if you can't tell the world to bugger off...
By the by, I'm not even going to suggest any symbolic relationship to penile endowment comparisons... no, not I...
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