"High Art" (a.ka. "Fine Art")

[Henk]

I try to learn both from low art and high art. I want to appreciate both fully. When I experience both fully, then finally I can say high art is better then low art, supposed that I experience the difference in quality.

I think some pop/jazz is better then some classical music, though pop/jazz is considered as low art and classical music as high art. So this is also a method to distinguish good classical music from bad classical music. If I enjoy jazz more then classical music, the low art is actually better then the high art, so the "high art" must be bad art.

Furthermore I think high art can never replace low art and low art never can replace high art.

Henk

[karlhenning]

I think some pop/jazz is better then some classical music, though pop/jazz is considered as low art and classical music as high art.

To unpack this, we should start by observing the fallacy of the pop/jazz conflation.  To a greater degree than classical, probably, jazz has drawn from or overlapped with 'low art' sources.  But it is an error simply to equate jazz with pop, or to consider jazz a 'subset' of pop.

[karlhenning]

"Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" is low art.  But Mozart's variations on the tune are high art.  (Though by no means the highest in his oeuvre.)

[Elgarian]

The story must be a reduction/emergence story which goes up and goes down. So lets follow where it leads, all the way up to emotions and conscious qualitative judgments and all the way down to the whizzing particles.

Yes of course, that's fine in principle. The difficulty with reductionism, though, is that in the practical application of the process, crucial information is often discarded; and then, having been discarded, it's declared unimportant, or not real, and we end up with the absurdities of systems like logical positivism and related philosophies. But there's no point in retracing all this ground, because we've been there already in different contexts to very little purpose - and to continue with it would be to turn attention away from the original question, which I think is really about limitations of language: that is, meanings and definitions (all of which turn out to be unhelpfully fuzzy when we try to resolve them in the case of 'art').

So, to try to pull the thread back on track: I suppose my point is that if we can reach a consensus about what we mean by the word 'art', then I suspect we might have a lot less trouble distinguishing between high and low forms of it. And I'm sorry to say that I still haven't found my copy of Feeling and Form, which I'm sure will be helpful in resolving at least some of the issues relating specifically to music that Greg has raised.

[Elgarian]

I think high art can never replace low art and low art never can replace high art.

I'm put in mind of the swings of fashion concerning, for example, artists like the PreRaphaelites. Their pictures were painted with very self-consciously 'noble' motives, and by the 1860s/70s were unquestionably regarded as 'high art'. But quite early in the twentieth century (when issues of concepts like 'significant form' were being thrown around), the PreRaphaelites were considered so banal as to be barely considered as producers of 'art' at all, but mere illustrators; and now the pendulum has swung right back again. This is part of the trouble. These definitions shift as art itself develops. 'High art' to the Victorian didn't mean the same as it would mean to someone today.

[karlhenning]

. . . This is part of the trouble. These definitions shift as art itself develops.

This is a pearl here, folks.

[greg]

      Wouldn't the best rap be closer to high art than mediocre smooth jazz?

Yes, that's why I use the term "generally."

Fairly quickly I arrived at an interpretaion of this event involving me liking classical music (not, I realize now, good music)

Come on, now, this place IS called "Good Music Guide."