Step 11: Strawberry and Hazelnut Cream

On taste theories of art.

They are a bit out of fashion, really, and that in itself is quite significant. In the era of superficial relativism (and oh boy is there another type, which in reality is all we have), theories of tastes are at best a confusion of liking and judging (de gustibus.....), at worse they are thinly veiled aggressions that intimate to let the matters be, for we will never come to head on it.

But we don't want to drop the matter. In our opinion it is important that we recognize, that, willy nilly, we are able to comunicate, and maybe even express our thoughts, that we are not really unspeakably alone.
It is our opinion that, magically, we can share what is most important to us, our thoughts, our feelings, our ideas. And that indeed we do, and we have all the reason to be satisfied of our sharing.

Such stuff as we are made of.

It fine to drop the matter and to be civil, to agree to disagree ecc ecc if pursuing a discussion will only be struggle and strife that can only bring ruin to a fine evening by the sea in front of the ice cream parlour. For really unimportant things, or things for which we really are as yet (and maybe for ever) incapable to decide, to leap beyond informed opinion into certainty.

But if the matter is close to our heart,or if on our opinion ride important matters and courses of actions, significant things?

Then it just wont do to let things be, it wont do to bite the matter of with a smile, roll the universe up with a smile...if indeed we are not disposed to examine and discuss, to put to discussion our ideas, what value do we give to these things? And what sort of truth is it if it is truth only for me?

Superficial relativism sins either of laziness or of incoherence. It lazily does not consider the meaning of the words. Real relativism does not exhonarate us from furnishing criteria or defending our thoughts. It simply requires that we furnish a "complement", fill in a preposition for our thoughts. It requires that we specify what something is relative to, it requires and exogenous criteria that does not beg the question, is not implicit in the judgement or the problem. (Absolutism says everything is "relative to God", whatever that means, but unfortunately that begs the question....)

You see, relativism is simply a recognition that reality is complex and manifold. That an umbrella is an excellent portable shelter against the rain, but a tragic parachute...

And superficial relativism is incoherent. It simply is not true that I can believe anything. I cannot even immagine everything. I can't immagine for instance a society that is based on the values expressed by the Addams family.

If opinion and truth weren't really two distinct things, then there would be no reason at all to speak. That we may not have access to the truth, and thus justly we value tolerance and democracy, does not justify that we deny that the truth is a meaningful concept.

This is the problem of taste.

Rooting esthetic judgment in taste, is an implicit recognition that - for whatever reason - the formulation (at least) of an esthetic judgment is not a mere description, or verification of class, but a decisive role is played by sentiment and sensibility. Which is problematic. Because it does not satisfy our aspirations, and also because the in the realm of sense and sensibility, the air is "too thin", and concepts wizen and wilt. And descriptions are like unto angels.

And we haven't a criterion for distinguishing the "goodness" of different and differing judgements. It is perhaps for this reason, that historically the modern theories of taste (way back to dear Hume, here reported),really fall back to a sort of plural and lay version of auctoritas. But that just shifts the problem to the next turtle below...For quis custodis custodinis, and there is always a third man that steals our true love....

Perhaps Deleuze was not far from the truth when he asserts that God, the truth, and the presence of present are unseparable drinking buddies.

Step 10: Genre Theories and the Neutrality of the Critic

Genre theories of art are more or less a development of the Aristotelian approach to criticism. That is, art objects as a result of a technique, or techne.

Let us pretend that we have not yet discussed, as we have, the closure or completeness of our daily concepts (Wittgenstein) nor of our abstract concepts (Goodman and compliance classes).

Let us begin with what is by now an acquired concept of modern semiotics, and that is the openness of works. This is by no means a quality shared by all cultures, but it is a distinct product of the European aesthetic research, a sort of cultural vice that we first raised as a banner and flag with the French revolution, but whose roots sink down well into the first modernism, Michelangelo and the cult of genius and originality.

We see this in the perduring 19th century rethoric of critique, crisis, war. The Bushes are Marx's leanest and meanest illegittimate children.

Looking into the openness of works, appears a logical vice in the genre theory of art, a vicious circle.

Let us suppose a clean slate, where we not only have not developed the criteria for belonging to a certain class or genre, but where we are yet to develop the genre's themselves. From a theoretical point of view, this veil of ignorance has to be admitted, in as much as the strong version of the genre theory hopes to trace out a descriptive and not evaluative, theory of criticism.

Let us suppose then to have neither criteria nor genre, but just works of art (how we come to classify certain objects as works of art and not other things, is quite misterious, but it is in the end just the same game...). The role of the critic behind this veil of ignorance, would be to distill the essential properties of each work of art and define the genres. But to do this, he would have to have instance of the genres. Just what he does not have, for not having the class, how could he have the instance. Look at it this way: it is the same problem faced by art historians in determining falsity or authorship of 16th century paintings.

He has to rely on his authority or on the individuation of the intentions of the artist (supposing he/she is known). But auctoritas is not something that we can believe in (step 12), and we have shown that intentions are meaningless. Particularly in our age, where not only revolutions happen, but they are the highest of our values.

Our concept of art is conceptual. Our concepts are open and in open evolution.a

The ouroboros, is the emblem of this sort of operation. It is not casual that it is also a mythic and mistical beast tied to all that is life.

It is also the emblem of the architecture that slithers beneath these words, and fills the empty belly of the white trojan horse that is this architectural novel.