Re: conlangs as art (was: Re: Wikipedia:Verifiability - Mailing lists as sources

On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 8:38 AM, Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...> wrote:
>  On Wed, 27 Feb 2008 08:32:34 +0000, R A Brown wrote:
>  > Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
>  > > On Tue, 26 Feb 2008 19:50:01 +0000, And Rosta wrote:
>  > >> I can say, truthfully & without hyperbole, that I have been saying on
>  > >> this
>  > >> list longer than anyone that conlangs can be art. Nevertheless I am also
>  > >> convinced that as an artistic medium conlanging does not lend itself to
>  > >> the
>  > >> creation of great art that, say, exalts us, or moves us deeply, or gives
>  > >> us
>  > >> profound insights into life.
<snip>

>  Amen.  Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, and any discussion of
>  greatness in the arts tends to be subjective.  I can easily accept if
.....
>  However, And Rosta, or so it seems to me, maintains a fundamentally
>  different position - he claims that there was art that was objectively
>  better than other art; I felt a desire to voice my dissent on that.
>  The fact that he had to draw dog-turds into the discussion IMHO shows
>  just how bankrupt that kind of reasoning is :)
It's probably useful, on the one hand, to make a distinction
between natural beauty and human-made art, and on the other
hand, to avoid extremes of subjectivism or objectivism in
assessing art.  (For the beauty of turds and similar
natural phenomena, see below.)

The main problem I had with And's comments was not that he
maintains that some art is objectively better than other art, but
that he seems to say that some artforms are inherently
better than other artforms, and that conlanging is one of the
lesser artforms.  I don't know enough about his other examples
of lesser artforms to comment on them, but it seems to me
fairly obvious both that, e.g.,

1. "Hamlet" is a better play than "Fanny and the Servant Problem",
and
2. It's pretty well undecidable whether "Hamlet" is a better play
than the "Moonlight Sonata" is a sonata, or vice versa.

That is, people can generally find some consensus about
extreme differences in quality within a given art form, but
can't come to any such agreement about the relative quality
of the best exemplars of different art forms.  I would add,

3. It's not obvious whether the Moonlight Sonata
is a better sonata than Quenya is as a conlang.

And probably,

4. It's not obvious whether the Crab Nebula is a more beautiful
natural phenomenon than the Moonlight Sonata or Quenya
is a beautiful work of art.

It's also probable that some people are, whether by nature
or by circumstances, more attuned to some artforms than
to others; better able to appreciate and be deeply moved by
the best exemplars of those artforms than by the best of
some other artforms.  I am frequently delighted by good
conlangs, paintings, and instrumental music, but I would
hesitate to say that I've been deeply moved by works
of art other than literature (including rare comic books),
vocal music, and a rare film. Opera and ballet
bore me to tears; but I wouldn't because of that say
that they are lesser artforms than conlanging or painting,
literature or film.

===

Henry David Thoreau wrote:

"Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe
the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing
down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which
I passed on my way to the village, a phenomenon not very
common on so large a scale, though the number of freshly
exposed banks of the right material must have been greatly
multiplied since railroads were invented. The material was
sand of every degree of fineness and of various rich colors,
commonly mixed with a little clay. When the frost comes
out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter,
the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava,
sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it
where no sand was to be seen before. Innumerable
little streams overlap and interlace one with another,
exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half way
the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation.
As it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines,
making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth,
and resembling, as you look down on them, the laciniated,
lobed, and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or
you are reminded of coral, of leopard's paws or birds' feet,
of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds."

<http://thoreau.eserver.org/walden17.html>

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/review/log.htm

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