Some popular sayings are so calcified that at first they seem like monuments. In fact they often are petrified idiocies. Here is two I just came across again.
“Art is in the eye of the beholder” and even more astounding : “Art is what you think is art”. What the first saying claims is that the artistic experience is created by the clever viewer, not by the artist. When you look at a painting ,say by Giorgione it is you, not him who succeeded in giving an intense aesthetic experience. In that same vein of unwarranted hubris listening to a symphony it is you, that musical genius who created the immortal beauty in your ear, not the composer., who surely tried to cobble some notes together but only when it entered your ear it coalesced into art. Another belief expressed by that saying is of extreme subjectivity of the reactions to a work of art. One may be enchanted while someone else might find himself repelled by the same art. That is also a colossal nonsense. When ten eaters lift up ten spoons to their mouths and nine of them experience chocolatey sweetness and one exclaims that he sensed a taste of spoiled cabbage, he must be wrong, having some gustatory and olfactory disorder. People's reactions to beauty do not vary all that much. How many viewers would be leaving Athens's Archeological Museum with overall sense of dissatisfaction or even disappointment?The second saying is of a newer origin and arose with American boosterism, lefty feminism and the idea that we all are equally gifted. Boosterism, because we love to shout to a kid who fumbled a ball "Good try, Johnny". Lefty feminism because the New World they build should pretend that there is no failures, no stratification of abilities, no radical scale of actual, true endowments among people. In such a clown-world anything you say is art- must be art.
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