There are objective realities in this world. Some of them are invisible and can only be understood inwardly.
Whose inward understanding?
Because even the wisest sages cannot see eye to eye on those
No, wrong. That's an outright denial of the worth of human intelligence which, among other things, would put into question what you just said.
Your claim that every perception is subjective is in itself subjective thus it denies itself at the outset. Try again.
but i cannot prove this to you with words alone.
You can and people have
Because objective standards have long been established and proven correct
But "Laziness never kept good servants" as we say here
Ok, prove to me in words alone that Beethoven is greater than Britney Spears.
Have you ever listened to an album that has great songs in it but also derivative songs that are pretty much just filler? Have you ever wondered how did you know what the good songs or the derivative songs were?
Except it's quite common that what some people deem as filler, others deem good
So it's all, like, subjective man?
In which case, why even bother partake in this discussion. Everything you say has as much value as everything i said, meaning, no value at all.
Understanding what art is requires the same kind of intellective realization.
Ironic, because this is the "modernist" conception of art
As again
The oldest and most common conception of art is a skill or craft
It's only by the 17th century that this shift of art as a "higher" pursuit begins to take hold in the western world
Yeah but you seem to be unaware of the fact in the ancient world every craft was an art and not the other way around like you seem to believe here. Apropos:
http://www.studiesincomparativereli...ibit_Works_of_Art-by_Ananda_Coomaraswamy.aspx
Essentially, even those so called "practical" objects the ancient world produced were artistic in the 17th century sense, which is why they appear to be beautiful to us. Everybody agrees for instance that Greek vases were an HIGH art. The fact they were every day objects doesn't devalue them or make even remotely related to the every day objects of our own age. Even instruments of war used to be works of art, just look at the decorations and embellishments in the gear and weaponry used by ancient armies.
With that said, even back then there was still an hierarchy where even the most beautifully made implement wouldn't compare to an icon, or the reliefs in a cathedral and so forth. There was still an awarness that
content in art mattered.
That's how we got to modern art
Modern Art began because artists in the late 19th century were tired of observing the conventions and standards of time which art shcolars held in reverence
Modern art begun because the Renaissance replaced sacred art with formalistic art, formalistic art being a rationalistic art. In this sense, modern art is very much related to post-modernism in thought.
In sacred art, the forms were sublimated by the object being rapresented, which, being "not of this world", required a degree of approximation and couldn't be too "literal" by necessity. Christian icons were made the way they were because a truly "realistic" depiction of Christ wouldn't be able to convey the divine or celestial nature of Jesus as the eternal Word or Logos. A realistic painting of Christ would be nothing more than a mere man, no matter the talent of the painter. Likewise, if you look at those ancient landscape paintings from the far east, both Chinese and Japanese, you can feel the art was consciously trying to avoid putting too much stress on what can be seen with the eyes in order to convey something of the unseen. As far as what the eye can see, there isn't much to this art, but that's because the point was to implicitly rapresent what CAN'T be seen, the spiritual reality that is beyond what our senses can percieve.
Thus, both ancient art and modern art have a tendency to mistrust form. The main difference however is that ancient art avoided putting too much emphasis on form for the sake of conveying something higher. Modern art, by contrast, does the opposite. The moderns having declared there is nothing higher than our reality, attempted to escape from the limits of form not by transcending it from within like in sacred art, but by transcending it from without, by breaking it apart, which is akin to trying to wrestle infinity out of the finite. And why this was a reaction or a revolt against the excessive formalism and literalism introduced by the Renaissance, it was still a push towards something worse. Same with rationalism vis post-modernism, which, limited that it may be, it's still preferrable to the latter.
