I am not sure that beauty in art is completely subjective. People react to patterns in predictable ways. When the artist veers from the pattern - just enough - the viewer/listener sits up and takes notice. Veer to far, and the audience is disturbed. I think Andy Kaufman experimented with dancing this edge between startling and disturbing. Sometimes the audience felt played with. I'm betting they could not always express why.
Believing in God - Challenge
by jgnat 153 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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frankiespeakin
Jnat,
Beauty can be a completely subjective but who cares it's still beauty To be completely objective and see beauty to me is imposible. Dna and the simplistic survival of the fitest and all the little nueances that too numerous to mention made us have the experience of beauty. I think good art comes from deep levels of the unconscious. I think Van Goeh writting mention that the stroked were becoming more deliberate no doubt he was exeriencing peak moment coming from the unconscious.
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Twitch
I remember a music teacher who said another way to cover a mistake was to repeat it, as if to say, "I MEANT to do that!" Obviously a questionable strategy, depending on how obvious the mistake was!
A drummer I played with said to do it again next time 'round and change it up slightly. If the heads are up and everyone's on board, it works like a charm and only those on the inside track know the difference.
'course most times, somebody just flubbed a note, nobody looked and everyone just carried on...;)
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King Solomon
ST, that lottery story is a great example about internal beliefs only confirming themselves, and not changing the external reality...
jgnat said:
I am not sure that beauty in art is completely subjective.
Well, humans do respond to certain common elements, eg the appearance of order is appealing to most of us on a basic level, but it's hardly universal. For instance, the ancient Greeks were fascinated with creating art using "Golden ratios" which they considered as necessary for achieving perfection in beauty. Even today, as jgnat well knows, there's certain principles of composition used in placing objects in a photograph or painting.
Heck, even in the stock market, Fibonacci's sequences are used in analyzing price movements of stocks, although I strongly suspect that the analysis becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, when the patterns occur simply BECAUSE others respect the principles. That's confirmation bias on a massive scale, where independent actors are engaging in a conspiracy based on an unspoken but agreed-upon definition of "beauty" (and what is more beautiful to a day-trader, than a stock responding as he expected)?
Certainly, even human standards of beauty and perfection have changed: one need only look at images of females who were considered "ideal" 150 years ago, and they invariably are heavier than the thinner models seen today. Hence such ideals are hardly universal (i.e. shared across all cultures), and are largely based on one's prior exposure in the World that the person has encountered
There's some interesting experiments that have been conducted on the development of infant vision, where certain cells develop preferentially when the infant is exposed to different shapes, eg in an environment devoid of circles, they don't develop a sensitivity for seeing that specific shape. I'll see if I can find more on that topic, as it's pretty interesting stuff.
But really, my broader point is that it's easy to assume much, when it's just that: assumptions. The more I learned about vision and hearing, the more I realized how variable and subjective ALL perceptions are, much more than most people are comfortable even considering.
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DarioKehl
No. It's entirley detrimental and a waste of time, energy, emotion and resources.
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still thinking
I'm not sure why we are trying to connect and attribute our creativity and appreciation of it to a god...if anything, if shows that we are capable of creating a god.
The fact that we are moved by music and art and things we percieve as beautiful does not point to a god. It is our perception and our perception has evolved in a way that we are capable of enjoying things. When we enjoy things it has a positive effect on our bodies and our health. We release chemicals when we are happy, they are good for us. What has that got to do with a god?
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soft+gentle
ST, for my part I am not coming at this topic from the point of view of a belief in a higher power such as God but I guess I am interested in Jgnat's intial question which includes asking about whether or not there is a part of us that reaches for what is bigger than ourselves.
I find that I have a lot in agreement with Christopher Hitchens when he turns his attention to the arts as a way of reaching for what is bigger than ourselves (of course I disagree with a lot of what he says as well but not to the extent that I did previously) And in this I find myself at odds with rationalism taken too far as I believe that even after we have taken confirmation bias on board it is still possible see truths that are bigger than ourselves in what is made/invented (wahtever we may want to call it) and that they make us bigger than ourselves. does that make sense?
Taking up your earlier point about emotion and feelings leading to tightly held beliefs - the difficulty I have with your example is that the emotions felt by the woman who was hoaxed are in no way unauthentic because she was deceived and I hope she did not beat herself up too much about her feelings of euphoria. I know that you are not arguing authenticity and inauthenticity but on the other hand I don't want to see emotions being cast in too negative a light either without saying something in defense of them so I want to go back to the point made earlier - that of having enough confidence in our feelings and emotions so as to allow them to guide us more - this especially after our experience with Jehovahs witnesses where emotions were cast in a completely negative light. What I mean to say is that at least in becoming Jehovahs witnesses our beliefs were not tightly held because of emotion as we are/were trained to turn these off.
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jgnat
I wasn't trying to point to god in art. I was trying to express the inexpressible. There's a big part of us that is moved outside of reason. Our reasoning side may come up with a rational explanation, but it falls short. We can't dismiss it siimply because it is not linear.
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slimboyfat
Much of experience does lie outside of reason. I am reminded of this fact whenever I attempt to read Derrida.
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jgnat
You have read more widely than I have, SBF. I had to run off to read the wiki account of Derrida. I don't want to try and express the inexpressible in words. In the trying, I fear the rational may suppress that side of my nature. When that side dominates, I use pictures.