Fran Fine Quantifies the Quality of Experience

Sometimes the foibles of art can be hard to discern at a casual glance.  To most people it can be like trying to find a needle in a giant pile of needles.

Unfortunately pointing out the defects of art can be like scorning an ad on TV; no matter how valid your rebuke is, you will always lose the exchange because you’re the one who’s talking to a TV.

The art world seems to have conjured up an all encompassing response to criticism, that if you don’t like something the problem is not the art, but your own inability to appreciate it.  However, with a bit of perspective I think some of the problems with art can become clearer.

Firstly, art doesn’t like to be compared with anything outside of itself.  It resorts to terms such as “priceless” to actively avoid having to deal with appropriate perspective.  

Art likes to think that to stand in the presence of a Kandinsky is an experience so incredibly transcendental that it cannot be compared with other experiences such as watching a TV show, reading a comic or buying a hat.

However this is incorrect, there is a perfectly legitimate way of comparing the value of the experience of a Kandinsky against the value of the experience of buying a hat, and you don’t even need to delve into the murky waters of aesthetics.

 We all have a certain amount of free time, and we allocate this time according to the value of the experiences of our options.  You can’t have an ulterior motive for allocating your time, because whatever that motive is, it still boils down to the value of the experience of that motive.

What does this mean in real terms?

It’s Saturday afternoon, you’ve got a couple of hours to spare and you can either crack open a copy of Shakespeare, or catch an episode of the Nanny.

Many people will attempt to believe that the value of the experience of Shakespeare is far greater than the value of the experience of an episode of the Nanny, but in most cases these same people will choose to watch that episode, rather than reading Shakespeare.

By choosing to watch the Nanny, in perfectly real, quantifiable terms you’ve proven that the experience has greater value in that situation. 

By choosing to go buy a hat rather than heading to the Kandinsky exhibition you’ve proven that to you, the experience of buying a hat is greater than the experience of the artworks of Kandinsky.  It doesn’t matter how many times a gallery curator uses words like transcendental, the experience of art is always going to be perfectly quantifiable, and in the vast majority of cases a person will decide that there are many other things to experience of much greater value.

Of course, I’m not saying that quality is quantifiable, or that if the majority of society believes something it makes it true.  If that were the case we’d all have to believe that Rebecca Black’s classic track “Friday” is of a higher quality than many of the works of Bach.  

I’m not saying that the Nanny is objectively greater than Shakespeare, or even that the Nanny doesn’t owe a great debt to Shakespeare.  I’m saying that we shouldn’t try fool ourselves into believing that the value of the experience of Shakespeare is greater than the value of the experience of “lower” art forms.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t feel good about being pretentious.  That would certainly cause me a lot of troubles.  By all means, believe that your ability to enjoy Matisse places you a cut above the commoners. Dissecting the reasons behind why you enjoy something is not likely to provide you with more enjoyment, but understanding and accepting your own system of values might.

The material point is to understand that when someone insinuates that there is something indescribably deeper and more meaningful about the time spent viewing an original artwork, take it with a grain of salt.

By which I mean take a large grain of salt and throw it at their eye, because they’re probably a very annoying person.

In the next post I will give evidence that not even the art world believes there is any value to the experience of an artwork.

It’ll be an awesomely transcendental experience.

Le Sime.