O, Hume.

Hume seems to be unable to convince even himself that art can be judged based on both taste and objectivity. This could be an interesting point, however, Hume starts claiming that all tastes are correct, by nature and definition, but some tastes are better, or more qualified. This starts to tread some dangerous elitist ground, and is also very difficult to support logically and fairly, which Hume also fails to do. Even when the reader thinks the objective judgement of art will be his saving grace, Hume continues to dance around this theory, saying that some artworks are inherently better than others, and only those with selective judgments can really differentiate.

I thinks this is a big mistake. To say that certain artworks just ARE better is pompous and unfounded, since what is valued changes from group to group, from era to era.

Art as Family

Weitz’s statement about having no criteria for art is something particularly of interest. Since it is society and the culture therein that decides what is art and what is not, the true definition of art is completely insubstantial and transitory. Several movements throughout the twentieth century have rejected the accepted criteria for art and created things that very few today would deny is art. The DaDa movement of the early nineteen hundreds is a prime example. What is Dada? Even Dada didn’t know what DaDa was, yet it was and it was most certainly art.
But all this proves that until the criteria of art expands to include movements such as DaDa, they simply remain undefined, without falling into the category of art or not-art. They simply exist. What a world we could live in if all art were simply allowed to exist without being judged by a social elite as to whether it is worthy of the title “Art”.

Representation

Bell’s discussion of representation seems to be hinting at, in a somewhat obtuse manner, a very true thing. Art should at all costs avoid representation. Representation is meaningless. It is embodiment that truly counts. For example, a man spends two years painting a picture or a chair, pure and simple. Upon the completion of the painting, he shows it to his friends who immediately laugh at him for his foolishness. “What good is this?” say his friends. You can’t sit in it, you can even put things on it. The representation of a chair gains nothing. However, if that same man embodies the meaning of that chair through his painting and imbues each brush stroke with the importance of that chair to him, than his friends would never be able to mock him. “I know that chair.” They would say. Or perhaps “I once owned a chair quite similar and it meant the world to me”, or even “That chair looks like what rest would be if rest had physical form.”
Representation is hollow and useless and should be met with ridicule. Art has a power that can reach beyond representation towards true incarnation, and therefore anything less is a failure.

The particular, the Peculiar, and Aesthetic Emotion

Bell quite accurately discusses the concept of an overarching aesthetic element that is common to all art. There is something that is innately presentational about art, no matter how interactive or affecting the piece may be. That is what makes art, art. It is separate from the daily, from the mundane. It contains this precise quality of an aesthetic. Whether it was intended or not, every piece of art has an aesthetic, whatever it may be, and therefore all art has a molecule of cohesion with all other art. Go Bell. Good Call.

Creative Expression of an Experience

Allow me to disagree here. Art is neither formulaic, nor goal oriented in nature. It may begin with a plan, however, just as with battle strategy, the plan doesn’t last past the first engagement with the enemy. Whether you try to control it, or whether you allow it to be improvisational and fluid, any piece of art is going to adapt and change throughout the process. Therefore the “fulfillment” of the finished product may have little to no resemblance to the intended, or planned, outcome.
A far better statement than art being goal oriented is that art is process oriented. It isn’t the applause at the end of a theater performance that fulfills the participants, but the arc through which the characters and the audience travels. This is similar to the fact that the rehearsal process is far more crucial and fulfilling to a performer than the actual performance, because it is therein that true discoveries are made, many of which are completely unexpected and therefore could not have been planned. A structure is necessary, true, for much of art to exist at all. However, as vines winding themselves around a truss, the freedom of a Bacchanalian exploration of thought, feeling, expression, and emotion, must be integrated into that structure for anything beyond a clinical shell of the motions of art to exist.