Art Can be Objectively Better or Worse

A Foray into Philosophy

I spend a lot of time talking about Honesty, because most people have no idea that it’s a basic dimension of personality. But the personality trait that most distinguishes me from other people is imagination, reflectivity, intellectuality, or Openness. I’m about two standard deviations above the mean on Openness.

Terms that describe people like me include artistic and philosophical. I love art; drawing, composing and playing music, writing stories, even sculpting and composing poetry gives such a richness to my existence that I dread the idea of going without it. Music runs through my head as I drive through the countryside. Doodles, musical notes, and rhythms dot the pages of my notes. Arriving too early to class, I used to draw nature scenes on the chalkboard; Sitting in the grass outside I still make sculptures of rocks; waiting for a meal in a restaurant, I stack the forks and condiments together, this is the kind of guy I am. The only forms of art I don’t much go in for are interior decoration and dance—most likely I’m too masculine for that but even there, well… look, suffice to say I love art.

And I want, really really want, to love philosophy. The problem is that most philosophy is a complete aberration. Skeptics complain about parapsychology making no progress in 150 years, but look, the progress of philosophy over the last 2500 years has been something like this:

1. Around the turn of the 5th century BC, Socrates articulates the idea that “I was conscious that I knew practically nothing,”¹ which is a limitation that affects everybody. This realization makes Socrates the wisest man in Athens, because he knows that he knows basically nothing; his fellow Athenians think they know things, but they don’t actually know anything.²

2. In the 17th century, René Descartes figures out that we can all be satisfied that we exist, because we couldn’t question our existence unless we existed to question it: Cogito ergo sum.³ There’s some principle or implied framework here that isn’t well articulated; something like “verbs require nouns,” or “only a thing that exists can take any action, and thinking is an action” but good enough.

That’s it. Courtesy of Socrates and Decartes, we know 1) basically nothing, other than 2) that we exist. All the other philosophers out there are essentially just bloggers from before the age of computers. Yes, thinkers like Confucius, Odin, and Laozi had some interesting notions that do seem somewhat wise: Ordering relationships by status is a reasonable default practice that reduces friction;⁴ if you’re going to tell someone a secret, only tell one other person, because what three people know, the whole world knows;⁵ and what makes a container useful is the empty space within.⁶ But these are just guidelines, nothing amazing. There are other questions I’ve been asking since I was in my twenties—for example about the nature of morality—that no one was ever able to answer for me.

Various philosophers have, for some time, been aware of the problems in the discipline. I like Lorenzo Warby because he’s very explicit about the failings of philosophy, writing about the way philosophy suffers because it lacks reality tests which would keep it from going wrong. Before that, David Stove gave a really thorough review of the situation titled What is Wrong With Our Thoughts, which balances the dreary disappointment of the message with a healthy dollop of humor.⁷ But even before that, as I was growing up in the southwestern United States in the early nineties, my older friends were already warning me that “philosophy is shit.”

So when I tell you that I am now going to enter the world of philosophy and attempt to make a philosophical argument, I realize I am doing something difficult. I realize I’m going somewhere where it’s extremely difficult to establish anything with confidence. I realize the possibility for my going wrong is going to be pretty high. So rather than just do the thing that philosophers have been doing for the last 2500 years, I’m going to do something different from what most philosophers do: I’m going to follow the lead of mathematicians.

Math and Philosophy

Mathematics and philosophy are both inherently rational disciplines. They work not through the messy empirical methods that characterize science, but by drawing logical conclusions on the basis of what is known. Yet though they’re both rational rather than empirical, math has been as successful as philosophy has been unsuccessful. Trying to make discoveries in philosophy has been like 2500 years of mucking around in the fog, while something about mathematics has made it an absolute playground of discovery.⁸

Philosophy vs Mathematics

You discovered counting? OK, try counting in chunks, and you have addition. Add numbers in chunks, and you have multiplication. Go backwards from addition and you have subtraction. Subtract a bigger number from a smaller one? You just discovered negative numbers. Divide numbers that aren’t clean multiples of one another and you have fractions; divide by zero and you have infinities. Multiply a number by itself, and you have squaring; take the inverse and you have square roots; then take the square root of a negative number and you have imaginary numbers. It even works higher up in mathematics, past calculus—ask what happens if you only take a derivative halfway, and the answer is a fractional derivative.

My university training is in physics, so I have a strong background in mathematics. Physics is arguably the most successful science there is, in terms of the breadth and solidity of its discoveries, and physics is also in many ways the least empirical, and the most mathematical.

Yet despite this, physicists have an extremely informal way of using mathematics: math to a physicist is basically a wrench for hammering nails. When physicists do math, often flying by the seats of their pants, everything still comes out all right. But when philosophers do philosophy, spending years steeped in the traditions of their discipline and taking great care to express themselves precisely, they end up stuck in a quagmire.

So OK, why not try being more mathematical about philosophy, and see if that works?

Is quality even an objective feature of things that exist?

What I want to be able to do is say things like, “Mozart’s Requiem was his best work; his other work shows a callow overreliance on the major key,” and have people agree or disagree with me without someone eventually offering the inevitable “Well, that’s merely your opinion,” or “you can’t speak of one piece of music being better than another.” And if I do have to listen to that, then what I want to do is create a graph that has Mozart’s songs on the X-axis, and Quality on the Y-axis, and say “My opinion about Mozart’s Requiem may be wrong, but look, I can speak about one piece of music being better than another, see, here’s a graph:”

But drawing this picture doesn’t really address the argument. Because even though we can talk about things that don’t exist, and draw graphs of things that don’t exist, that doesn’t mean they exist. Leave the subject of aesthetics aside; can anything be of higher quality than anything else, or is it all merely in our minds?

This question is really worth addressing: Does quality even objectively exist?

Lots of people seem to think that it doesn’t. I’ve done a bit of independent research into these realms, and a sizable portion of the population says things like “beauty exists only in the eye of the beholder,” and “Most things aren’t better or worse.” Published research identifies many of these attitudes as primal world beliefs, or instinctive attitudes about reality that people disagree about, but aren’t even aware that they hold.⁹

So deep down, lots of people really feel as though most things aren’t better or worse, and some people even think there’s no such thing as better or worse. Obviously I can show quality exists if I can show art varies in quality. But how to do this?

Clarifying The Problem

Since we moved in with my wife’s relatives, we haven’t been able to have consistent Internet access, or access to the computer I use to make most of my music. But they do have an old, out-of-tune piano with broken keys. And the other night, as I was improvising on Beethoven’s Bagatelle 25 in A Minor…

…I lingered for a long moment on the place this video reaches at 35 seconds, and added a G-sharp. And because this is the kind of thing people very high in Openness do, I jumped up afterwards, saying, “Aha! How did I know it had to be G-sharp?” And then I lectured everybody on chords, and the children listened very patiently, and Mrs. Apple Pie told me that I was very cute. But listen, if I had used G-natural it would have been too dark, and if I had played B-flat it would have been flat wrong, and you’d have to be tone-deaf not to notice.

But good philosophy doesn’t take this for granted. If I want to even begin to say that B-flat would have ruined the piece, I’d better establish that this is even possible. So can art be objectively said to vary in quality? Many will say that all works of art are too unique to be compared—that all art is simply art.

So I’ll begin this argument with definitions. The American Heritage Dictionary, 5^th edition, defines quality as:

• 3a. Superiority of kind: an intellect of unquestioned quality.

• 3b. Degree or grade of excellence: yard goods of low quality.

Now “quality” is just a word. I could use different words, such as “excellence” or “success,” or “fitness,” or even just “better and worse” if you prefer. The concept is what matters.

It gets a bit thornier when we get to the word art. According to the 5^th edition American Heritage Dictionary, art is:

• 1. The conscious use of the imagination in the production of objects intended to be contemplated or appreciated as beautiful, as in the arrangement of forms, sounds, or words.

This isn’t a terrible definition, but it’s extremely complicated—probably too complicated. Isn’t Playground AI creating art even though it’s unconscious? And does art need to produce an object—or isn’t theater an art? And what does beautiful mean? And if art has to be contemplated or appreciated as beautiful, what are we to make of Dadaist art like Fountain, Marcel Duchamp’s signed toilet?

I’m not saying this is high quality art. But it isn’t really that beautiful, and if you’re spending time contemplating it… OK I guess you really like thinking about toilets?

What I’ve noticed from years creating art is that it arises as a means of self stimulation. The elementary purpose of art, made spontaneously and without any other ulterior motive in mind, is to create a stimulus for the artist to react to. The artist may find that others are similarly stimulated as well, and in this way achieve pride and notoriety, or acquire other goods by means of exchange. But this is secondary to the basic reason for art, as a form of creative play aimed at achieving some emotional or cognitive state. It serves as a kind of psychological mirror with which the artist probes his or her own responses to a world of private imaginings.

So I’m going to try to use a simpler definition:

Art, n. Something created specifically as an emotional or intellectual stimulus.

I won’t try to claim that a flashbang or firecracker is art; perhaps they’re intended as sensory stimuli only. Food may not necessarily be art, but if it is created to make others happy or to provoke analysis, then it is art. So is dance, poetry, anything designed to stimulate what people think of as the heart or the mind.

Most critically, by this definition, art need not be beautiful. I’m sidestepping the issue of aesthetics entirely, here; you don’t have to believe beauty exists for art to serve its function. We simply observe that some art is a better stimulus than other art. Then, since stimulation is what art does, some art will inevitably be of higher quality than other art.

I want to stress this point. Quality is what I mean when I talk about excellence or success. If what a work of art does is stimulate a person intellectually or emotionally, then some art might do that more, and other art might do that less. True, some works of art might engender a sense of mystery, and others joy, and others might only stimulate thought, and comparing these different forms of stimulation might be impossible. But a work that achieves a high degree of one stimulus is at least successful, excellent, and thus of high quality with regards to that one way in which it stimulates a person.

Mathematically: Quality Q is an upwardly-sloped function of the degree of stimulus S. More stimulus always entails more quality, at least with regards to that channel of stimulation.

Now the many, many ways a work of art can stimulate a viewer, and the many, many viewers who can exist, in principle make it very hard to weigh and compare the stimulation offered, let alone the overall quality, of two pieces. Very commonly it’s asserted that there is no way of ever comparing any two pieces of art with one another—that any artworks A and B will be fundamentally different in ways that render comparison impossible. So I’ll substantiate the claim like this:

Compare A with A

Consider some work of art A. The art is finished at time t₁, and it is able to stimulate someone intellectually or emotionally at that time, because that’s what art does.

As soon as we agree that this work of art A is effective at time t₁, then, we compare it with itself at an earlier stage in its development, t₀—or also, if we may be allowed to veer into the world of hypotheticals, with itself at a later time, t₂, after being (hypothetically) vandalized.

Since we may choose any t₀ or t₂ for comparison to its effectiveness at t₁, we may go back further and further in artwork A’s development, or farther and farther forward after its completion, until we compare a statue with an unformed lump of stone, or a painting with a pile of cold ash.

Even though a skeptical opponent may protest that there are a thousand ways of comparing any two pieces A and B, with each piece evoking unrelated thoughts or feelings through different sensory channels in different kinds of people, if we compare A only with itself at different times, then we may restrict the discussion to only one specific work of art, invoking a specific set of sensations in one kind of person.

And clearly the work of art is of higher quality—more effective, more successful, or whatever term you prefer—in all ways and on all pathways at t₁ than it is at t₀ or t₂. Mathematically speaking, all stimulations S(t₁) > S(t₀), and S(t₁) > S(t₂). And since offering intellectual or emotional stimulation is the purpose of art, and art which offers more stimulation is more successful or effective than art which offers less, we then have the quality Q(S(t₁)) > Q(S(t₀)), and Q(S(t₁)) > Q(S(t₂)).

So we can speak of art having quality—quality is a dimension on which all works of art, of any kind that can be created over time or subjected to vandalism, can vary.

Ways to avoid the conclusion

Are there ways of escaping from this conclusion? This is the critical part.

A lot of philosophy asks the reader to follow along and agree with a chain of reasoning which, if it breaks at any point, can’t support the conclusion. So I’ll clarify the chain of reasoning:

1. The purpose of art is to stimulate a viewer emotionally or intellectually

2. Quality indicates success or effectiveness.

3. The definitions at 1 & 2 imply that quality of art is a function of the degree to which the art is able to stimulate a viewer.

4. A completed work of art is more stimulating, on various channels, than it was at some point as it was being created, or after being harmed.

5. Combining 3 & 4 gives us the result that a completed work of art is of higher quality, in all senses, than it was at some point as it was being created, or after being harmed.

Where are the weak points where a counterargument could be formed? I can see four right away.

The first way to attack the argument might be to attack the definitions. But frankly I think these are the definitions that capture what I mean when I talk about art having quality. I don’t mean just paintings, or just consciously created things, are art. Maybe hills are art; maybe the Milky Way galaxy is art. That doesn’t bother me. And while some people might think of quality in other ways, this definition for quality seems to get at what I’m trying to talk about.

The second way to react would be to insist that the art is incapable of stimulating anyone even at t₁; then it would it be no better than itself at any t₀ or t₂. But we already agreed that the work of art was effective at t₁, so this cannot be possible.

But OK, what if, now the we see where the argument goes, we’d rather hesitate about agreeing that the art was effective at t₁? Unfortunately for the skeptical opponent who tries this tactic, the work of art in question is unspecified; if any work of art, now or in the past, has ever been generated that was an effective emotional or intellectual stimulus, then that is the work of art we are talking about. So this only works if nothing exists to meet the definition of art—in other words, it only works if nothing is ever created specifically as an emotional or intellectual stimulus. While it may be possible that nothing has ever been created as an emotional or intellectual stimulus, to deny this requires a sharp divergence from consensus reality.

The third way of escaping this is to insist that at t₀ or t₂ the piece in question isn’t art, because it doesn’t stimulate anyone emotionally or intellectually. But if that’s the case, then just don’t go so far back, or so far forward. Choose a t₀ where the art is clearly a partially completed work, or just have a bit of dust cover the piece at t₂. (If you ever get a t₀ or t₂ that’s better than t₁, make that your t₁ instead. This happened with a statuette I helped Mrs. Apple Pie make.)

The fourth way is to insist that the art at every t₀ or t₂ is equally effective as a stimulus as art at t_1. But if this were the case, why would an artist spend hundreds of dollars, and hundreds of minutes, working on a single piece? Why not release a 30 second album, or a movie consisting of merely the opening credits, or a video game consisting only of the tutorial? An unfinished work like would have to be orders of magnitude more intense for every unit time in order to offer a total amount of stimulation matching the finished piece, and how is that even possible, if the opening credits are the same opening credits between the finished and unfinished pieces?

And why feel any regret when a statue is destroyed, or a cathedral is damaged by fire (as Notre Dame was all too recently)? Why even create a painting at all, if a canvas with a few pencil marks on it, or a single stroke of paint, is just as intellectually or emotionally stimulating?

These four ways of escaping the conclusion don’t work. Maybe there are other good ways of arguing that I can’t think of?

Other ways to avoid the conclusion

OK, I can actually think of many, many more ways to get out of this. It’s just that they aren’t good ways, because they all require abandoning even the most basic aspects of consensus reality.

Statements like “art doesn’t exist,” “we were all created five seconds ago with implanted memories,” or “paintings are no better than the canvas they’re painted on” all belie our everyday actions and experiences. These are the same kinds of ways a person can avoid believing in, say, relativistic physics: “All physicists starting with Einstein have sworn membership of a cabal to deceive the masses—the only reason I can safely say this is that I’m anonymous, and they haven’t found me (yet).” If this kind of reasoning appeals to you, you’re probably ready for a mental health diagnosis, or maybe for a school of philosophy called subjective idealism, which holds that only minds and their contents exist. I can’t deal with the entire mess that is philosophy in a single post, but I will say that if you are willing to go so far as to deny external reality to avoid admitting that some art is better than other art, well, you can do that.

Conclusion

I’m posting this partly because I’m still thinking about it, and writing about it helps to organize the argument, encourage feedback, and reveal weaknesses. But until I can think of something wrong with this, or someone else can point it out, I’m going to conclude that some art really is better than other art, and some art really is worse than other art.

I have no way of directly measuring the quality of art. I can’t prove that G# was the right note to play at the right time on the piano. Whether that piece of art you like is any good or not, I really can’t say from this. Indeed, I strongly suspect that the aesthetic quality of art depends not only on its own characteristics, but on its millieux, and more broadly, on its position within the culture stream.

But at least it isn’t complete nonsense for me to put Mozart’s works on a graph and rate Requiem higher than Figaro. It may be wrong; it may be straining credulity to compare an opera with a mass—but it isn’t nonsense.

1. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 1. Translated by Harold North Fowler. (1966). Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd.

2. H. Bowden (2005). Classical Athens and the Delphic Oracle: Divination and Democracy, Cambridge University Press, p. 82.

3. Descartes, René (2009). La recherche de la vérité par la lumière naturelle. Presses universitaires de France.

4. See for example Confucius’ Analects 9.15 or Analects 12.11.

5. Havamal, Stanza 63. Available Online

6. Tao Te Ching, Chapter 11. Available Online

7. Stove, D. C. (1991). The Plato cult and other philosophical follies (chapter 7). Oxford: B. Blackwell. Available Online

8. Image credits to Ana F. and Quang Nguyen Vinh.

9. Clifton, J. D., Baker, J. D., Park, C. L., Yaden, D. B., Clifton, A. B., Terni, P., ... & Seligman, M. E. (2019). Primal world beliefs. Psychological Assessment, 31(1), 82.