![]() Thus your second to last sentence is also called into question. ![]() But there is also a huge difference between someone whose subjective tastes are informed by years if not decades of study and appreciation and contact with probably many thousands of art objects-study and exposure which usually leads to a tempering of personal taste to the point of abeyance when evaluating art works-and someone whose study, knowledge, and contact is only a tiny and casual fraction of that assembled knowledge. Also, being judgmental (as opposed to realistic) about other people is typically just mean. That last sentence is true up to a point, as long as we are talking apples to apples and a level playing field. The only people that are fools are those who use their own subjective tastes to judge the tastes of others. I don't get to decide for everyone what is good or bad and neither does anyone else. I see pictures winning photography contents regularly that I don't care for artistically but can respect the technical merits and understand that they are more meaningful to others. The personal is trivial, important only to us personally. And this is why they are meaningful to us as a whole-not because we "like" or "dislike" them personally. They constantly force us to re-think concepts, even hundreds or thousands of years after they were made. I would say that is an important, vital reason why they are so valuable to society. The arts are not science or engineering-they incorporate values that are real but cannot be fully pinned down. Happily other things that were ignored back then are starting to see the light of day. In my own lifetime (I'm 59) I 've seen this process at work-some stuff from the '50's and '60's that was thought extremely important in the years it was fresh has started to be re-evaluated-more and more of it is now sitting forlornly in storage and being de-accessioned. Then the problem starts becoming the fossilization of consensus, which is a story for another day. That time allows for consensus to build over why a certain object is or is not important, and it also allows the subjective biases to at least partially drain away. But the true worth of these objects can't really be wholly evaluated at this time. In contemporary art there is of course a great deal of bleed-in from the sewer-casino that is the art market today. The exceptions are certain gifts that for one reason or another cannot be looked in the mouth. ![]() One effect of this increasing expense is that it is a rare thing indeed when an object enters a museum without having had a lot-a whole lot-of very expert evaluation. The art that is in those places has been evaluated for its worth-non-monetary worth-and that is why those objects are being protected, at enormous expense, I might add. If it was all down to the personal, there would be no such things as art museums. There is no denying that there is a heavy subjective element to why we tend to like this art or that art-but that is largely a personal issue. Today evaluations of some of art's non-monetary values can be remarkably cogent and precise. We have circumstantial evidence that art connoisseurship began at least as far back as the old kingdom of Egypt and maybe Sumer slightly before that, and we have documentary evidence from Greece and Rome. And indeed the consensus of experts and the learned or knowledgeable over time can make these distinctions. Art has many values-aesthetic, cultural, historical, etc. There is also no such thing as "ordinary" art or "bad" art or "good" art. With all due respect, art has no intrinsic value.
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