Conde Lucanor wrote:Maybe, but as Kant well put it, aesthetic judgement implies a notion of universality,
One of the many things that Kant said that he was completely wrong about in my opinion.
When judging aesthetically, one behaves AS IF the object had the esteemed properties.
That's only the case for those enchanted by the mistaken belief of objectivity (re aesthetics) or those kowtowing to those enchanted by that mistaken belief.
Also, one could determine the current state of an artistic practice, with its known stylistic codes, compare it with new works that divert from the canon and come up with a pretty objective assessment of the gap between one and the other.
You could talk about objective differences in things like paint handling, color selection, figure and line tendencies, etc., but none of that is an aesthetic judgment. There is no way to attain any objectivity with respect to aesthetic judgments.
You can give a value to that difference as manifestation of a creative process.
Which would be completely subjective.
Terrapin Station wrote:The notion of artistic versus non-artistic semantic content seems dubious though.
Not really.
It doesn't really seem dubious to me? Hahaha.
You can find semantic content in a newspaper headline,
If you're talking about where the semantic content is located, it's in your head.
If you're simply saying that one can have semantic responses to both things that one considers an artwork and things that one does not, that I'd agree with.
However, based on your comments, you believe that semantic content is somehow contained in the objects at hand. That belief is mistaken.
As Marx said:
You like quoting people who said a lot of shit that's completely wrong.
Well, no.
Is too.
There are distinctive artistic practices, ideologies, formal codes applied to composition and performance. You can compare among the works of any discipline and make objective assessments of them.
None of that stuff, none of those assessments are evaluative, none are aesthetic assessments, etc. without simply being some individuals' preferences, their feelings of like versus dislike.
If one is focused on artistic achievement, one can easily forget the other "lot of stuff". And the opposite is also true: you can focus on the other non-artistic stuff and forget there's an artistic intention behind it.
When I write "any judgment necessarily involves a lot of stuff that doesn't have anything to do with works of art" I don't use the word "necessarily" just because I think it's a pretty decoration or something. So obviously I disagree with you.
Terrapin Station wrote:And not all artistic assesment is about likes or dislikes.
It is when we make any kind of evaluative judgment a la good, bad, better, worse, sublime, crass, beautiful, repulsive, etc. etc.
I generally agree with Kant about the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgement.
I honestly don't recall agreeing with Kant on anything but the most trivial comments he's made.