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lmao yeah Hamlet's critical opinion... clever marketing

marketing is instrumental in popular bestsellers, no doubt. of course. it's entertainment like a prime-time tv show - it needs advertisements.

classics? marketing? really? have you ever been to an art gallery jay?

globefish23 wrote:

In general, every form of art it subjective.
Show the Mona Lisa to an African Punu tribe sculptor, or play Beethoven's Fifth to an Indonesian Gamelan musician and you suddenly get totally different opinions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRS13e5R8GI


Although, certain characteristics of art are viewed the same by everyone, because we're all human and many basic brain functions can't be overridden by culture and education.

yes but "in general", every single thing we ever do in life is subjective. all you are stating there is that we are individuals with our own perspectives and relative cultural values. i.e. you are saying nothing. it's background noise. of course everything starts from a subjective position. the point i am trying to make is that in order to make any coherence out of the world around us, we must construct some objective, communally-held positions and systems that transcend the individual (and his subjectivity) and give Meaning to the external world (and its objects) in search of some Truth/Beauty. this is basic aesthetic philosophy. all you have said with your post is that art is a part and representation of the culture it comes from. that truth and beauty are values that differ from culture to culture, depending on how it is fostered. well... have a star.

your point about gamelan and other exoticism and primitivism would have made sense in 1910. would have made sense when picasso was first doing his primitivist paintings. back when gamelan music was first entering the discourse of western music. nowadays gamelan is standard fare - avant-garde music critics and many western ears are used to it. likewise with art from africa. what my point was is that we can establish some objective (or quasi-objective, if you will, seeing as our subjective condition can never be truly transcended, ok) in order to appraise what is good and beautiful and what is merely derivative. as such, one cannot deny that macbeth is a fantastic tragedy: if you consider the art as an object, you can break it up into form and content and examine it; you can analyse it, aesthetically, philosophically.

sure, we all have our individual response to art and things in life. but art is a collective, shared endeavour, right? the whole point of art is to share some meaning, some inherent Truth, with the other. all art is communicative. thus it is shared; it transcends subjectivity and attempts to say something that can be understood by more than one one guy clapping to himself in a dark room. right? so why are you guys all insisting that art is solipsism? and then making cool-cynical hip statements like "art is all marketing". lmao. it's hard to explain how aesthetics works when no one here has even read kant or any of the basics that explain a shared system of meaning and idealism. and no, a quotes.com signature from jay doesn't count.

Last edited by Uzique (2012-04-06 06:00:51)

i love how all the counter-arguments so far just consist of tired cliches and worn-out truisms. ok, so we've now firmly established that human beings are subjective (nobel prize) and that now the human brain cannot metaphysically conceive of anything it has not experienced (dilbert, PhD). well we are really plumbing the depths of Being here, aren't we? what does it have to do with whether the mona lisa is a great painting or not? are you perhaps trying to say we have never seen a female visage before, so we can't judge? or that because it is a face, it is derivative of the long tradition of other face paintings, and is wholly unoriginal and thus rubbish? i guess you're onto something there.

in any case at the end of the day the world will be divided into two parts: those that care and value art, who have an interest in aesthetics and who understand how 'taste' is constructed and how Beauty is evaluated; and those that simply don't care, get by reading tom clancy novels and watching the x-factor for their weekly dose of music. that's fine. they're not going to go to hell because of it. but it's typical brutish arrogance and philistinism to say that there is 'nothing to art' because you simply don't take interest in it or have any understanding. to cling to these empty truisms (of which all human knowledge is based on the assumptions of - even science, dumbie) is the lowest form of intellectual activity. seeing as we are not capable of producing anything which is not derivative of something, i.e. built from experience and existing Forms (this is platonic in fact, dilbert, well done-), does that mean astrophysics is meaningless?

Last edited by Uzique (2012-04-06 06:17:55)

yeah i get really bored too when people that don't know what they're talking about start these discussions. it's like me arguing with engineers about the construction of a bridge for 3 pages and then complaining at the end of it that it's tedious. if any of you guys want to brush up on your aesthetics and discuss the finer points with me, it would be an absolute pleasure. for now i think you guys should reserve the right to perhaps not make grand edicts about something you have literally no interest in or knowledge of. it's a bit foolish.

Yes, but if everyone doesn't complete the same paint by numbers painting whatever will people talk about at parties? Chaos!

I've never come across anyone who has suggested art is objectively appraisable, any more than I've ever come across anyone who will tell people they're listening to the wrong kind of dubstep.

oh and your inane comment about dubstep is pretty funny, considering you're the guy that hates every song posted in the music section for 2 years and then, finally, cottons onto skrillex and starts saying skrillex is actually good. of course it's convenient for you to say that the widespread mass of people that say skrillex is awful are elitists, pure morons making nothing out of purely subjective material. i'm sure that's a very convenient thing to tell yourself. what you always deny is the fact that other people out there have interests, specialisms and knowledge that you don't have, and thus perhaps know more about you on certain things. you blanket, outright deny this about all arts. it's a bit circuitous. i think you're just evading the uncomfortable truth that, perhaps, you have no taste, or a bad taste if you do. for some reason you're uncomfortable about admitting you take no interest in art (or dubstep, for example) and then hence have no real discerning way of telling between the good and the bad. instead that distinction becomes a mere folly to you, right? very convenient.

Last edited by Uzique (2012-04-06 06:53:12)

right. nothing that isn't black/white and thus scientific can be 'known'. guess we should close this entire thread then. and the movie one. what's the point in such threads if everyone is just blindly submitting their own deeply subjective opinions, with no hope of evaluating something from an indifferent/impersonal perspective? surely we should just ignore everyone else's ratings of movies and books because they can't KNOW anything about those movies or books. close all the threads then, what a giant waste of time. guess you should stop posting scores yourself as well dilbs. i mean what is there for you to actually know? a little arrogant of you to post your review of something as if we care about your deeply personal, solipsistic conclusions.

Jenspm wrote:

You can safely dislike Beethoven, the Mona Lisa and Shakespeare, and put it down to subjective personal taste. (ie, I don't really enjoy Shakespeare, Imma read Dan Brown instead)

You can say all of the above are 'bad', 'overrated', or '[insert negative adjective here]', if you base it on (relatively) objective arguments/knowledge.

But you cannot mix the two. You cannot say something is bad because you don't like it.

Walking around the Ufizzi bored me (the only excitement came from seeing famous paintings, rather than the paintings themselves), but I'm not going to sit here and say that Giotto, Boticelli, Caravaggio, Rubens, Rembrandt etc etc are all 'bad' painters, mainly because I have no grounds on which to do so.

Virginia Woolf isn't my cup of tea, but I still recognise the fact that she is a great author.


Anyways. Books. Recently read this, and thoroughly enjoyed it:

What does imperialism mean in the absence of colonial conquest and imperial rule?

Capitalism makes possible a new form of domination by purely economic means, argues Ellen Meiksins Wood. So, surely, even the most seasoned White House hawk would prefer to exercise global hegemony in this way, without costly colonial entanglements. Yet, as Wood powerfully demonstrates, the economic empire of capital has also created a new unlimited militarism.

 By contrasting the new imperialism to historical forms such as the Roman and Spanish empire, and by tracing the development of capitalist imperialism back to the English domination of Ireland and on the British Empire in America and India, Wood shows how today’s capitalist empire, a global economy administered by local states, has come tom spawn a new military doctrine of war without end, in purpose or time.

It does a great job of quickly running through empires from Rome, Spain to current day, showing the common traits and how they evolved, and finishing off with a convincing account of modern-day imperialism. Well researched, short, very readable. Parts of it might be a bit repetitive if you have some knowledge of imperial history from before, but she goes through it so quickly, and only really highlights the bits relevant to her argument, so it's not really a big problem.

Some reviews:

“A splendid book.”
– Eric Hobsbawm

“A thought-provoking genealogy of empires throughout history.”
– Publishers Weekly

“The best articulation of the secular Left's critique of global capital.”
– Tikkun

“...a timely book...a powerful antidote to one of the afflictions of the interregnum, the belief that appearance is everything.”
– London Review of Books

“The most compelling account yet of imperialism in its current phase.”
– Robert Brenner


It's pretty left-leaning (as you might expect from a Verso-published author), which might scare some people off, but oh well.


Just ordered her latest book as well, 'Liberty and Property: A Social History of Western Political Thought from the Renaissance to Enlightenment'.

That was sort of the topic of the IPE class I had yesterday.

Heard about him before. Learned about him and his work in class. Never gave the neocolonism stuff any serious thought until yesterday. This required reading this week has something of his. I haven't read it yet.

spivak and said are another two massive must-reads here.

it's pretty funny that i'm literature student and i have to read stuff for my course that the economist/political science majors haven't covered yet. the fuck?

oh and achebe for fiction/actual writing.

Last edited by Uzique (2012-04-06 09:06:22)

We've covered Said/Spivak/Fanon, but only briefly, with the aim to do proper reading/analyses of them in the last two (of four) years of your degree. Subject (IR, that is) is too big and broad in the first couple of years to cover them properly, in my opinion.