A central question in Philosophy of Art is whether art is objective or subjective. In its most basic and simplified form, the objectivist argues something like "there must be something about the Mona Lisa that makes it better than a four-year-old's scribble of a smiley." The subjectivist argues, "even amongst the most refined critics there is disagreement over what paintings are good and what are bad. How could we conclusively say that some of these critics are wrong and some are right, and who has the authority to say such things?"
What makes characterizing art criticism as an objective science difficult, is the fact that there are no agreed upon criteria with which to criticize works. Furthermore, any proposed criteria, unless rigorously supported, would seem arbitrary and subjective in itself, and so would actually deepen the problem rather than resolve it.
One attempt to create such a criteria, undertaken by the great David Hume in his essay Of the Standard of Taste, comes close to providing some solid arguments for why there is an objective standard of art that could be provided by hypothetical "Perfect Judges," which are basically critics with no prejudices, no biases, and perfectly refined taste. If you want to see his argument check out the essay (I'm sure it can be found online somewhere and if not check out the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
Hume's proposal is a good first crack at setting up a well-founded mechanism for objective art criticism. Below I will propose another possible foundation and an experiment which might have implications on objective art criticism. Note: my argument is a conditional one in that I am not arguing that art is objective, I am arguing that if art is objective then the theory below might be a good way to start developing objective criteria. Much of what I will write below might seem flimsy, but that is okay because I'm not going for a super-rigorous point here. Just a suggestion of thought, rumination, and experimentation.
Okay, so, I'll start off with a whopping proposal with little foundation: let us say that art is simply communication (as countenanced by Tolstoy). Let us also say that communication can be broken down into units of information, something that can be objectively measured in bits. So if I say to you, "I am 23 years old" let us say that this statement has X number of information bits. If I said to someone else that "I am 23 years old and I am male" let us say that statement has Y number of information bits. Now, it is clear that the following is an objectively true proposition: X " < " Y, or, in English, I have communicated less information in the first sentence than I communicated in the second sentence.
So if (1) art is communication and (2) communication can be directly measured in bits then (3) art can be objectively measured. Now this doesn't prove that art is objective qua art, it proves it is objective qua its communicatory mass, after all, Tolstoy would claim only that art is communication, not that the more it communicates the better it is (if he did contend this, then the OED would be far superior to the Mona Lisa!).
Now I am going to my a claim (more like, a suggestion) and this is a big leap, I know: let us assume that there is an analogy between elegance in mathematical proofs and in the quality of art works. When we talk about elegance in mathematical proofs, we are usually referring to how simply a proof can be successfully contrived. If student A proves some postulate in 10 steps, and student B proves some postulate in 30 steps, we can say that A has a more elegant proof. He has managed to demonstrate (communicate?) the exact same thing using less Space (the word "Space" is very ambiguous. Defining my use of "Space" here would take a whole other essay so I'm gonna forgo further explanation for the time being).
My conclusion is that perhaps we can measure the quality of art the same way we measure the elegance of mathematical proofs: the amount of information bits communicated per unit Space (Space used ambiguously). In this sense, the best writer would be able to communicate the same amount of content, emotion, etc. etc. (all reducible to information bits) in a smaller amount of Space (here Space might = words, sentences, lines, pages , but not necessarily). The sentence "It is me and my age at this particular moment in time is equal to the number that is three more than 20" is much worse than the sentence " I am 23" because both sentences communicate the same thing but one takes up much less Space.
Here is a little experimental proposal that could put my theory to the test. Have a few artists and writers work together to do the following: take an already painted work of art, write a 3 page description of the work, and have another artist who has not seen the original work paint what the writer wrote. The writers goal is to have his artist's samizdat painting match the original painting as precisely as possible. My theory entails that, assuming the painters are all equal, a writer's work could be judged objectively based on how close the reproduced painting is to the original.
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