The objective and participant stances Karnofsky’s Beethoven - Scientific and Artistic Progress Aesthetic responsibility essay
To read/listen:
- The Elephant in the Brain on art
- Apparently Callard’s art is for seeing evil touches on the social recognition role of art
- Emerson’s quotation and originality
- We are as much informed of a writer’s genius by what he selects as by what he originates. We read the quotation with his eyes, and find a new and fervent sense; as a passage from one of the poets, well recited, borrows new interest from the rendering. As the journals say, “the italics are ours.”
- The mere foreignness of phrase, whatever the idea, found in other people’s writing causes a certain admiration we cannot reclaim once we’ve digested the text. As consequence, we sometimes prefer to cite our thought as anothers, or even write better as another, macpherson/ossian is perhaps the best example
- quotes book, art, writing, originality, quotation.
- Havelock Ellis - every artist writes his own autobiography
- O. W. Holmes - And I thought, like Dr. Faustus, of the emptiness of art/How can we take a fragment for the whole, and call the whole a part.
- Mencken - Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man
- Rothenstein - there are fashions in immortality as there are trivial fashions.
- Carlyle - the merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man.
- Landor - Pardon a quotation: I hate it (can’t actually find this one bcs. there are two dialogues)
- Emerson - quotation confesses inferiority
Could be funny and include lots of uncredited quotes as a point about originality? Can include disclaimer at some point about the fa t I’m doing that. I like the idea of having this as disconnected aphorisms or pensees maybe.
The referencing of poems by characters in the genji is a great example of the use of unoriginality in showing off your learnedness. Montaigne’s use of quotation is also a good example.
Paul Graham twitter: The idea that mellow patina is better than shiny newness is of comparatively recent invention, and indeed has still not spread to much of the world. I suspect it only got going after the Industrial Revolution made shiny newness a commodity.
- Pretty sure this is wrong at least with moralistic art, Chinese poetics is the best example.
- Check against a summary of art in the age of mechanical reproduction? Could see who cites Benjamin in the anthology
Whats wrong with seeing replicas of the sistine chapel? (Is this about scarcity or credit or originality or what?)
The fact philistines can’t like something that sounds like random noise unless they believe it’s rehearsed is a relevant fact
Consider the game-theoretic/social function of our norms of responsibility and how they should apply to art given it’s distinctive function
Authorship and aesthetic value, check note on moral/aesthetic value. What kinds of aesthetic value are dependent on the moden idea of authorship, and how suspect are they? Why and how must artworks be tied to authors, responsible creators, for them to possess this kind of value? The idea of the artwork as a discrete thing, attributable to an author ir authors, rather than a shared, diffuse cultural artefact seems closely linked to the idea of authorship.
Selection from the library of Babel is just creation. A biography of an immortal is similarly a work of fiction. Very Borges. As a consequence, the more you say, the more freedom you give others to create what they want (or must) from your words. Conversely for saying less.
Look at award ceremonies for music and film to see how responsibility is divied up. What causal contributions to a products existence are worth rewarding? Where are the ‘joints’ of credit for the piece existing that we carve it up by?
Also the responsibility for ideas, people can independently co-originate ideas and co-discover things without eother one being less than fully responsible for their creation/discovery
This is likely because facts and artworks are closer to universals than events, so their instantiations can be multiplied, and hence so can responsibility for instantiating them, without the authors having to ‘take a share’ as when two agents co-cause an event
Note difference between joint sufficiency in co-causation, and overdetermination in co-causation
Whats wrong with seeing replicas of the sistine chapel?
Cecil Sharp’s english folk song: some conclusions has a somewhat chinese view of aesthetics and ownership, though it may differ in other ways. Could be an interesting contrast with Child’s approach - see journal articles comparing the two.
Also the attribution/accountability distinction generally. This is naturally framed as Strawsonian RAs. But did my trust essay, or Hegelian/Brandomian views offer a different option?
Re Hanson’s claims about aesthetic value and status hierarchies, why do we value being/consuming the 100th-best guitarist rather than the 100th best guitarist/bassist/drummer/singer/tambourine player? Is it just because one hierarchy has much stricter competition, so excelling in a denser hierarchy signals more widespread ability to succeed than succeeding in a niche hierarchy, or is it because we simply value some hierarchies more than others? How could you empirically tell?
Also obviously this all can touch on AI stuff, but leave that to the end bc. people are innoculated on it.
Huawei rnd headquarters is a good example of kitsch. The accusation of kitsch is just metanorm enforcement, which is deployed when someone copies or cheapens beautiful techniques cheaply.
Why is it important to credit people when using their art? or code? Why not just say it’s not yours, without saying whose it is?
Girards mimetic desire stuff?
I think the social aspect of media consumption will keep blogs, podcasts, etc. competitive over AI alternatives even if the AI is aesthetically better. Some evidence for this is the prevalence of ‘authentic’ parasocial content over aesthetically superior content on social media. In fact, we might even see a kind of new AI aestheticism (AIstheticism), where a certain class of people pride themselves of liking art for art’s sake, contra moralists, historicists, and romantics.
But anyway this suggests that AI won’t significantly replace traditional human-authored media until new generations grow up naturalised to it. I don’t think this desire for the parasocial needs to be innate, but it does seem hard to reverse post-adolescence.
Re wolf
- learning a painting was made by an elephant, accident, or AI are all nice cases
- what is aesthetic praise and blame
- Does aesthetic luck exist? Do we apportion credit for artworks differently depending on whether constitutional or circumstantial luck caused the quality? Generally, no, we don’t care how hard or easy it was to create, or what their motives were, perhaps so long as the motives weren’t outright immoral, that might be a defeater. All this is in contrast to judgements of moral responsibility. Though of course we do care about the actual or ex ante results in moral judgements, so you need to be more precise about these differences
- The intentional fallacy != the psychology of the artist is/should be irrelevant to the appreciation of the art. If it were, what would explain the relevance of the elephant accident ai cases. What, also, of the intention behind a self-portrait? Can we not acknowledge the intention behind the work as a subject of the work itself?
- How does this account for the selection from the library of babel of great poems?
- Contra common conceptions of moral responsibility, to be aesthetically responsible you need not
- have been able to do otherwise
- been in control of himself
- be able to explain or justify his behaviour
- these differences may arise because it’s unfair to morally blame someone if they weren’t in control of their actions. Moral responsibility is more blame focused, aesthetic responsibility is more praise focused.
- Attributable and accountable are two kinds of more-than-causal responsibility. For us to attribute X to S is to say S discloses something about S, or perhaps something a bit more agentic than that, that S deliberately? disclosed something about themselves. Blame and censure doesn’t really come into attributability.
- Contra Wolf I think we often think someone can have a robust enough self to disclose, so we can attribute art to them, even if they aren’t a fitting subject of RAs, e.g. schizo artists. Though having a robust self is probably a necessary but not sufficient condition for being subject to RAs The sociality of personhood, moral knowledge, and responsibility
- Nice that wolf tied it to the objective/participant stance dstinction.
The aesthetics of effortlessness (sprezzatura, vs prog rock) (tho even prog rock tries to make it look like it’s easy for them BC they’re so cool. What tries to make something look straight up hard for everyone? Some metal or punk singing?)
Obvious relation to credit in other areas re Types of value and their relation to equality and meritocracy hh