Episode #054 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

So, I’d like to begin the show today by having everyone take out their Shakespeare Bibles to the book of Macbeth, Act V, Scene V. I just want to read a little excerpt for you here. “Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Now, hold on a second. Don’t put your books away yet because I want to read you another excerpt that’s equally as good as that one by the great Shel Silverstein in his magnum opus Where the Sidewalk Ends. “Who wants a pancake, sweet and piping hot? Good little Grace looks up and says, ‘I’ll take the one on the top.’ Who else wants a pancake, fresh off the griddle? Terrible Teresa smiles and says, ‘I’ll take the one in the middle.’” Absolutely beautiful, beautiful. You know, what’s the difference really between Macbeth and Where the Sidewalk Ends? I mean, they’re both literary masterpieces, right? They both captivated the people of the time period that they were released in. I mean, how can you really say that one is better than the other?

Ask most people this question that are on your Facebook wall right now—“What separates good art from bad art?” or, “What separates good art from great art?” for that matter—and they’ll most likely just retreat from the conversation, right? They’ll most likely just retreat into their little protective cocoon of radical subjectivism. No art is better or worse than any other art on a cosmic level. It’s purely personal preference. When a five-year-old kid says that The Cat in the Hat is the greatest book that’s ever been written, well, there’s nothing wrong with saying that. And his opinion is no more or less valid than some lady that’s 65 years old, spent every waking second of her life reading and critiquing books. There’s no better or worse here, just different.

Well, consider the flip side of this for a second. If every piece of art is good, then nothing is good. But you know what, maybe I’m getting a little ahead here. Let me back up a second. I’ve been learning the song “Moonlight Sonata” on the piano lately by Beethoven. Beautiful song. I was listening to it a ton last week, and my friend was over at the house. And I wanted him to hear it. I wanted him to see how masterfully this song paints a picture in your mind’s eye. So, I pulled up a YouTube video. I had him sit down and listen to it. And he just kind of sat there—nothing, nothing in his eyes, nothing in his brain. It looked like he was part of one of those weird science experiments, like the neuroscience experiments where the scientist removes the portion of your brain that comprehends that music is playing.

Like, he just sat there looking at me with these eyes like he’s part of a heard of livestock. “What? What am I supposed to be hearing? It sounds like a piano.” This is the same guy, by the way, that will look you straight in the face—like, he is dead serious when he says this; he is not joking around—he will look you dead in the eyes and say that dubstep is the greatest music that has ever been composed in the history of planet earth, dubstep. You know, folks, sometimes when a computer from the 1990s that’s trying to log onto the internet loves a woman, sometimes things just happen. I’m just kidding. I actually like dubstep music.

But in keeping with our radical subjectivism from before, I have to have reverence for his opinion, right? You guys all know what I’m talking about. You guys have all had a conversation at some point in your life with somebody that they swear by this movie or this song or this painting, and you know in the moment that they are unquestionably a moron. But you couldn’t say anything because, well, there is no better or worse when it comes to art, only different. But is this really where the conversation ends? Is there really nothing more that we can discuss here? I mean, if we’re just being honest, most of the people that take this position—that there is no better or worse art, just different—most of them are probably assenting to that belief out of laziness at some level. Like, if you hooked them up to a polygraph test, they’re probably just tired of thinking about it.

But that doesn’t mean that what they’re saying doesn’t have merit. That doesn’t mean that they haven’t landed on something that’s philosophically respectable by accident. David Hume would have agreed with this point that they’re making, strongly. But he would have thought they gave up too soon. He would have thought they stopped short of thinking about the real conversation that they should be having, the truly useful conversation, the one we’re going to talk about today.

David Hume would say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This is the layman’s way of expressing the philosophical concept that there is no objective, cosmically defined, a priori beauty out there that we can somehow relate to. Now, this is contrary to people like Plato who would say that there is an objective form of beauty out there and that through rational inquiry and looking at beautiful things we can connect with it and understand it. Hume, on the other hand, would stick to his subjectivist guns. He’d say, no, there is no art that is necessarily better or worse than any other art. After all, custom or human experience is the great guide of human life. But just because there isn’t an ideal form of beauty or good art for us to arrive at, that doesn’t mean that everyone’s opinion about what good art is is equally valid.

See, what David Hume points out is that whenever we’re having one of these discussions with our friends about, for example, what a good or bad song is, we’re actually talking about multiple different things and then assuming we’re only having one conversation. We assume as though we’re only merely discussing whether this song conforms with some form of beauty out there. And then, at that point, we think about it for a while, and we realize, wow, there is no obvious, objective form of good art that we can point to. We get frustrated at this point. We jump to the conclusion that there’s nothing left to talk about. Everyone’s opinion on the matter is equally valid.

But again, Hume would point out here that someone’s opinion about what good music is and whether good music is something objective at all are two completely different conversations to be having. After all, we may not be able to say definitively that The Cat in the Hat is a worse book than Macbeth, but is the five-year-old kid that reads his first book called The Cat in the Hat and then proclaims from the mountain tops that it’s the greatest book ever written—is his opinion equally as valid as the passionate fan that’s been reading and critiquing books for decades? David Hume would say no.

This is actually something very common to the time period. Thinkers were turning away from focusing on the cosmic or objective form of things, and they focused more on the experience that individuals were having when trying to connect with these things. David Hume here is presenting not a way to judge the art itself, which is a lost cause in his mind, but to judge our ability to judge, which is possible in his mind. So, at first glance, this may seem like a departure from the Hume we’ve been discussing the last few episodes. But it’s actually remarkably similar.

Think about it. We may not be able to objectively define what good or bad art is, but look, we’re still here, right? We’re still on planet earth, experiencing art. We’re still listening to Miley Cyrus on the radio every day. We’re still listening to Justin Bieber. I mean, despite how willing everyone is seemingly to concede the point that everything is subjective, you still have feelings about what bad art is. You still have that hateful, vitriolic, burning sensation within you when you look somebody in the eyes and they tell you, “I actually really like the song ‘Friday’ by Rebecca Black.” You still have that feeling in you that says they are sadly, sadly mistaken when they say that. Where does that come from?

It reminds me of the skeptical ideas we’ve talked about on this show before. Ask anyone if they think they know everything there is to know in the entire world, and they will invariably tell you, “No, that’s ridiculous. Of course I don’t know everything there is to know.” Yet so many people that would answer no to that question spend their entire lives desperately trying to validate what they already think they know. Now, in that same way, most people if you asked them about art would probably say they think that art is entirely a matter of personal preference, completely subjective. Yet we can all think of that person that fancies themselves a connoisseur of fine art or music or movies, and they never even hesitate in the moment to castigate someone else whose reasons for liking something are not as good as theirs are.

Here’s my point. We may say that what good art is is entirely subjective, but we’re still making those judgments about how good or bad art is all the time. And we point to very specific things about the art to justify our claims. You know, the perspective of the painting is incredible. The composition of this piece is great. The symbology, the symmetry. People come up with all different kinds of criteria for determining what something good is. Hume would ask the question: are some of these criteria better than others? He would say yes. In fact, this is what he lays out in his essay “Of the Standard of Taste.” He has five qualities that you should be cultivating if you want to truly consider yourself a critic of art, an ideal critic.

And if this seems ridiculous that there can be an ideal critic, Hume would ask the question: what do we do whenever we have a disagreement about something else? Like, what do we do whenever we have a disagreement about something, say, scientific? Well, you consult an expert on the matter. You go and ask a scientist. That scientist garnered a specific set of skills over years of training that make him uniquely qualified to answer the question that you have, to settle that disagreement. Why is it so crazy, Hume would ask, to think that we might be able to do the same exact thing when it comes to judging art—to spend years of your life judging art, cultivating a set of skills that renders you a master critic, or a tastemaker as Hume would put it, in tune with the standard of taste?

This episode of the podcast, we’ll take a look at what Hume thinks it takes to look at art as it truly is rather than you just being a passenger with your own fleeting prejudices and biases as your chauffeur. Wow, that was beautiful. That was beautiful. But first, before we talk about Hume’s correspondence course that he’s come up with of how to become a proper critic of art, I want to take a second to talk about a few misconceptions here. There’s kind of a speed bump in the road. It’s historically been a speed bump for me. I was guilty of making this mistake in thinking for many years of my life. And that mistake is, some people just think that they’ve done it. They’ve solved the problem of art. I know what good art truly is. Everybody else seems to be confused about it, but I know. Silly humans, so confused about it for centuries upon centuries. I’ve arrived at the promised land.

Have you ever met that person that actually thinks that their music is better than your music and you’re too stupid to realize how great their music is; and they give all these reasons why that’s the case? Well, I can tell you from experience because I used to be one of these morons when I was younger, without exception if you press these people on the reasons why they like the music they do, they always point to one of these specific, faulty criteria that Hume talks about in his essay that are truly founded on nothing. We’re going to talk about a few of the most common ones people use right now. They’ll be great as references later on in the show.

But look, I guess the cool thing here is that, don’t just think about this episode as a look at Hume’s essay “Of the Standard of Taste.” Don’t just look at the episode—like I would as a masochistic person that truly hates myself under the surface, somebody that likes to look at my own beliefs with a critical lens and find flaws in them and always feel like I’m growing—no, don’t just think of it those ways. These criteria that Hume talks about for what a proper critic of art is can also be used to reverse engineer the terrible arguments thrown your way by angry people that need to cling onto their refined taste in music as a means of asserting themselves as superior to you. Look, take it from me. These criteria that Hume talks about are an incredibly useful tool if you want to quickly identify what assumptions people are making about what good art is. And that’s the beauty of this essay, in my opinion, is that what we’re talking about here can be used both defensively and offensively.

Anyway, so, one of the things people commonly point to when they’re asked why their music is so much better than everybody else’s music is nostalgia. They say that their music evokes a certain emotional state much better than any other music out there, and in that way, it is superior. If you ask a million people what their favorite music is in the world or what they think the greatest album ever written was, what a coincidence that the vast majority of them point directly to the music that they listened to when they were a senior in high school or music that they listened to during a time in their life when memorable stuff was going on. You see this reasoning from people all the time. And by the way, it doesn’t make you a bad person.

I’m personally horrendously, horrendously guilty of this. The most inept judge at a local district court could convict me. Judge Judy would convict me in about eight seconds if I walk into a court room. Look, I’m speaking from firsthand experience here. What otherwise would have been my senior year in high school, for a long period of that year I was homeless. I was in this transient state. Like, I had a job, but I wasn’t old enough to sign a lease for an apartment. So, I was in this really weird interim limbo phase where I slept in the back of my friend’s car for a while. I slept on friend’s couches. I would rent a room from someone as long as I could. But it was weird because these sleeping situations that I was in—they weren’t always conveniently located when it came to the obligations that I had on the other side of town—work and school, miles away.

I remember, there was this giant street where I lived at the time called Meridian. I’d just wake up at like 0-dark-hundred, 4 am sometimes. It was pitch black outside. I’d just start my long, 2-hour walk down this giant street. Buses didn’t run that early. But anyway, the point is, when I was making this long, 2-hour walk each way every day, I’d listen to the exact same 2 CDs over and over and over again. This is long before the age of iPods when you got 10,000 songs at your fingertips. I had one of those non-skip CD players. I would hold it really, really still in my pocket to try to get the CD not to skip. But I’d just cycle in between these 2 CDs over and over again. I’d listen to the same CD 5, 6 times a day sometimes. And how convenient, by the way, that for the next several years of my life, whenever somebody asked me what my favorite music was and what I thought the greatest music ever written was, I would point directly to these 2 albums.

Now, this doesn’t make me a bad person if I do this. At least I hope not. But David Hume would want me to realize that this is a very unfair prejudice that I’m bringing to the table here, a prejudice that clouds my ability to be an expert at critiquing art, an ideal critic. I mean, you could swap my body out with anybody. You could have a different person have the exact same experiences that I had, and instead of listening to the CDs I was, they could have listened to Brittany Spears. And every time “Oops!...I Did It Again” came on the radio, they’d have the same emotional experienced stirred up within them. But that was the flaw in my thinking. How well a piece of art evokes these subjective emotional experiences within you really has nothing to do with how good or bad the art is, necessarily. And I learned my lesson one day.

Now, another criterion that people use to justify why their taste in art is better than everybody else’s is novelty. But it’s almost always not actually novelty. They just think it’s novel at the time. This is yet another prejudice that Hume would want us to leave at home if we’re going to be the kind of tastemaker that he talks about in his famous essay. By the way, people do this all the time. Like, for example, my friend, the same guy that talked about dubstep being the greatest music that’s ever been written, he also was of the opinion that SpongeBob SquarePants is the greatest TV show that has ever been created. He honestly thinks that in 500 years people will look back on 2015, and they will see this as the SpongeBob SquarePants era. It will be the Shakespeare of our time period.

And it’s funny, because when you ask him why—there was this one time he came over to my house. And he walked in the door, and there was this amazement in his eyes, childlike wonder. He was overflowing with childlike wonder. And he comes up to me, and he goes, “Alright, Stephen, last night I swear I found it. I was watching SpongeBob and there was this moment in the show that hit me like a semi-truck. Do you want to see it? Do you want to see it? Because I can pull up a video if you want to see it. Do you want to see it?” Man, he was crazy. I was like, “Of course, I do. Why wouldn’t I want to see that?” Anyway, so he pulled up this YouTube video, and this sponge man that lives at the bottom of the sea, I gather, he said something at the time. I think it was that he referred to a city as a concrete jungle.

And my friend just right after he says it, he stops the video, and he just stares at me. He just looks at me like a little kid. He’s like, “Did you hear that? He referred to that city as a concrete jungle. I mean, come on! How do you deny the brilliance? Look, you’re just a hater if you deny the poetic wordsmithing that’s going on right before your eyes. You just don’t want to admit that a cartoon is the pioneer of culture of your time period. I mean, concrete jungle? That is a profound metaphor that is on the level of the greatest poets that have ever lived throughout history. And you need to acknowledge it. Admit it! Admit it to me.” I couldn’t bring myself to tell the guy that “concrete jungle” is a common phrase that people use. I mean, it’s practically a cliché at this point.

But what an awesome example of this prejudice of false novelty that we oftentimes bring to the table when critiquing art. I mean, I’m sure parents see this all the time when they’re talking to their kids about their favorite music. You know, their kids, having never heard a I-V-IV chord progression in their entire life, they might be listening to Miley Cyrus on the radio thinking, “Wow, this is the greatest song I’ve ever heard in my life. This is groundbreaking. What a talented gal she is.” Their parents are probably not as impressed because it’s just not new to them. They just had the luxury of seeing decade after decade of the same formulaic template song created over and over again because the industry knows there’s a market for it.

Now, I’ve been guilty of this many, many times in the past. So, now what I do whenever I hear a song and I’m like, “Wow, that’s a really unique scale to use for that guitar solo,” or “Wow, that switch in time signature right there was a really novel idea,” I try to think of David Hume. I try to take David Hume’s advice and reserve judgment about it being musically better simply because there’s some ostensible novelty that I see. Maybe I haven’t seen every piece of art ever created. Maybe this isn’t as novel as I think it is. Maybe SpongeBob SquarePants did not come up with the phrase “concrete jungle.”

One more common thing that people use to justify why their art is better than your art is complexity. The thinking is that if a piece of art is more complex than another piece of art—if something is more complex than something else—it took more skill to execute and is, therefore, better in some way. People who think like this will look at a band like AC/DC and think that they’re absolutely terrible. I mean, listen to them. They’re so simple and basic. See, I like music much more complex. I like music like Yngwie Malmsteen or Dream Theater where there’s dozens of complex layers in every song. The problem with this thinking is that complexity does not necessarily imply superiority. Other people would say that it’s the simplicity of AC/DC that makes them so brilliant. There’s that saying: perfection is not when nothing more can be added; it’s when nothing more can be taken away.

Now, that said, I am completely guilty of this one too. I mean, add this to my rap sheet of mistakes that I’ve made when judging art. I used to think that because something took more mechanical skill to execute that it makes it better art than something that’s more simple. But just take that thinking to its natural conclusion for a second. Like, there are thousands of different genres of music, let alone bands or songs, that are much more complex than just hair metal bands from the 1980s. The person making this argument would have to recognize the utter and complete superiority of things like obscure music that’s super complex like Icelandic banjo picking and stuff like that. And really, as long as a painting is more complex than another painting, it’s instantly better? What is complexity? That’s another conversation you could have. These are the kind of questions you want to ask this person if they’re making this claim.

So, here they are, the five skills David Hume thinks are absolutely necessary if you want to consider yourself an honest, true critic of art, in tune with the standard of taste. He says in his essay, “Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character.” So, this may be the most dense sentence that Hume wrote in the entire essay, so let’s break it down one piece at a time.

So, first, Hume thinks that if you’re going to be a critic of any kind of art, one thing you need is a delicate taste, or to be perceptive of delicate sentiment. The idea that he’s getting at here is, if you’re going to be one of David Hume’s ideal critics of art, you should at least be able to look at something and actually see the entire work of art that you’re judging, including all the finer details, all the choices that were made that makes this piece of art what it is. The thinking is, if you look at a piece of art and immediately after seeing it somebody asks you a question about what you thought about this detail over here or how these two things over here work together, and they ask you that and you have no idea what they’re even talking about, well, you probably weren’t paying close enough attention.

The best real-world example I can think of this that we can all relate to is that not everyone hears a song the exact same way. Have you ever experienced that before? You’re listening to a song with a friend. Oftentimes, when somebody’s never studied or written music before or even if they’re just not a maniac—a hardcore fan that listens to it all the time and tries to break it down into its individual parts—oftentimes, they listen to a song, and they don’t really differentiate between the pieces of the song. They just listen to it as one whole. So, someone will ask this person after having listened to the song, “What did you think of that syncopated drum part that happened during the chorus?” And they’ll go, “I didn’t even notice it. I had no idea that was even going on. I don’t think of this song that I’m listening to as all these little details and layers coming together. I think of it as one sound that I’m listening to, and I just kind of enjoy it.”

Now, David Hume wouldn’t think that this makes this person dumb. And it doesn’t make them incapable of ever being able to see details like that in the future. But what David Hume would say is that to be one of what he considers the ideal critics of art, they would first need to spend some time on their own cultivating this skill, cultivating this eye for detail that he talks about. Again, he’s not saying that art with more details is necessarily better than art with less details. That’s not what he’s saying. He’s just saying that look, it seems pretty reasonable that one requisite before you can call yourself an ideal art critic should be that you’re actually looking at everything the artist put out there, not just a surface-level sensory experience of the art where you believe you see all the details, but you’re actually not seeing them. You can imagine how difficult this must be, just this first criteria by Hume.

I mean, after all, when you’re going through the museum with your family, bored out of your mind, and you’re looking at a piece of art, and you’re trying as hard as you possibly can to have an eye for detail; how can you ever be sure that you’re actually seeing all the details as opposed to just believing that you’re seeing all the details and then judging it based on that? On that same note, what if you go in the other direction? What if you read too far into something? Like, what if an artist made a painting, and then it sat in his basement for years? And over the years his kids are playing down in the basement, and they put a big scratch in the side of it. That painting becomes famous and renowned a hundred years later, and then you, in a museum, are looking at that giant scratch on the side of the painting, and you’re reading into it. You’re thinking that line is, oh, that’s obviously the artist’s depiction of the progress of mankind. It seems really easy to read too far into things. What I’m saying is, this truly is a delicate sentiment that Hume’s talking about here.

The second thing David Hume says you need if you’re going to be a true critic of art is pretty uncontroversial: practice. It makes sense. The more you practice something, the better you get at it. The more you practice judging art, the better you become at judging art. The funny thing here to me is that most people that consider themselves critics of art in today’s world—most of them don’t think of every new experience that they have with art as an opportunity to further develop their skills and become better. It seems like most of them are thinking, “Let’s see if this piece of art measures up to my refined set of expectations for it.” It’s just an interesting difference in attitude.

Now, the third thing that David Hume thinks we need to properly appreciate art is to compare it to other art. This one’s also pretty straightforward. There’s a certain context that you garner from looking not just at your generation of art, not just looking at SpongeBob SquarePants. Hume thinks you should compare all kinds of art from all different generations. You can’t just limit yourself to one kind of art. I mean, just imagine the extreme of that for a second. If the only movie you’ve ever seen in your entire life is Fight Club, how could you ever possibly know whether that was a good movie, a bad movie, a mediocre movie, or whether any details about the movie are noteworthy at all? The thinking here is that you become a better critic of art when you understand the piece of art you’re judging within its proper context. David Hume thought this practice of comparison—comparing art to different pieces of art—was incredibly important to the process.

The next quality you got to have if you’re going to be one of these ideal critics in the eyes of David Hume is that you must be completely free of prejudice, or at least as free from prejudice as is possible. We’ve already talked about a couple of these that might raise a problem: whatever personally brings you nostalgia or mistaking things to be novel when they really aren’t novel. But what about other things? What about removing the prejudice you carry around because you like or dislike the person that made the piece of artwork? Think of how tempting it would be to hate a TV show that was produced by a member of the KKK. Think of how tempting it would be to despise a painting that was painted by Hitler.

Now, that goes the other way too, right? Think of how tempting it would be to say that you absolutely love a painting simply because you just spent two million dollars on it. Think of how tempting it would be to love a painting that your stepdad painted while he was going through his midlife crisis. Hume would say this is a crucial skill to have if you’re going to be critiquing art. You have to be able to separate yourself from these prejudices. And it doesn’t take much of an imagination to realize how difficult of a task this really is.

The last quality of an ideal critic that predicates all the rest of these skills and in many ways is the most important one of all is that Hume thinks you need a strong sense. To put it simply, you need to be able to see or hear or just be present to be able to experience the actual art that you’re judging. The thinking here is that if somebody’s hearing impaired, they’re probably not going to be the best judge of music that we could possibly find. You’re probably not going to find the next Siskel and Ebert by interviewing people in the hospital that are in a coma. To be an ideal critic, we need strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice. And that alone entitles critics to this valuable character.

So, just to sum up what we’ve talked about on this topic so far, what is Hume getting at here? It seems like he’s saying, sure, we may not be able to say that this piece of art is objectively better than that piece of art. But is everyone’s ability to judge things accurately equally valid? Can we say that some people, through years of cultivating the skills and training themselves, have become better judges of art than others? David Hume would say yes. It’s really interesting when you look at these criteria how so many of these things that he tells us we need if we’re going to be an ideal critic really involve us just removing the clouds, removing the clouds from the world that prevent us from seeing art as it truly is rather than just how it relates to this narrow framework that we’ve set up so far in life so that we can make sense of things.

One of the most profound points in the entire essay, at least to me, is his idea that art seems to be a very subjective matter. And as subjective of a matter as art seems to be on the surface, there’s definitely something consistent about great art, a consistency, ironically enough, that you don’t really see in other areas of inquiry where things are less subjective, where things seem a lot more set in stone. Hume says, the greatest scientist of our generation will probably not be the greatest scientist of the next generation. The philosopher that we regard as the greatest philosopher today will probably change as the centuries go on. But for some reason, the da Vincis, the Homers, the Shakespeares—the brilliance of these people is oddly timeless. How do you explain that? How crazy is it that we can read a poem written thousands of years ago and still recognize it as greatness? What are we connecting with there?

Now, this discussion is far from over. Lots more to talk about. But next episode we’re going to look at it through a very different lens, a very different idea of what beauty is. And to borrow a pun from a guy on Twitter, I Kant wait to tell you about it.

Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.