/lit/ - Literature

yeah

Define good and bad.

What is a bad man? What is good art?

>>5348935
I don't think so. A man can only make a representation of what he knows in art, and seeing as a bad man does not know what is good he can't possibly create a representation of the good in art, I.e. make good art, can he?

This is a dumb question, of course he can.

Exhibit A: Wagner

>>5348933
more importantly, can a stupid man, an inefficient, bad man make good art?

>>5348946
Aesthetics and morality are different things. Good art is not defined by representing the good, but by being beautiful/aeshetically intriguing.
On the other hand, pick related.

>>5348933
Adolf Hitler was an okay artist

>>5348945
Well if we take the most commonplace definition of those terms and say that a bad man is one who murders, or steals, or cheats, or lies, or drinks too much, and good art is whatever appeals in a gallery or is praised by the critics, then clearly bad men can make good art. But we have to ask whether these definitions are correct, especially the one concerning good art because it seems to be the more offensive. To judge whether a work of art is good we have either to examine the art itself and discover in it the quality of goodness, or we have to look at the effects that the art has on people and discover in these effects the quality of goodness. Immediately one might say that there is no such thing as good or bad art, but this is obviously a sophistry that we will disregard as everybody distinguishes between good art and bad art, and if there were no such thing as good art there would be no need for galleries, literary canons, universities teaching people the merits of good art and how to create it themselves, etc. One contradiction we find is that a lot of art that we call good, or that is commonly praised as good, has had bad effects on people. A notable example would be Goethe's Werther which influenced young men to commit suicide in imitation of the work's romanticized protagonist who himself commits suicide. Now, the work isn't Goethe's best, but it displays what we usually refer to as literary talent (mastery of language, exactness in characterization, distinctiveness in tone/mood, etc.). Goethe himself, however, later said that the book was "everything that is sick". So we must ask ourselves if there is art like Goethe's which is sick, but which is also adored by critics and falsely called good (because what is sick is not good).

>>5348950
Wagner is an example of art that I would call sick, or bad, and that is adored by people who are themselves sick, or bad. I won't substantiate this myself, I'll just point you to Nietzsche's Contra Wagner, because he knew this better than I.

>>5348966
>examine the art itself and discover in it the quality of goodness
>one might say that there is no such thing as good or bad art

There is good and bad art, it is a subjective and intersubjective position, but there is no inherent "goodness," only the applied construct of 'good' by the individual or collective body.

>>5348956
>Good art is not defined by representing the good, but by being beautiful/aeshetically intriguing.

What is the difference between the good and the beautiful? Surely everything good is beautiful, and everything beautiful is good. I mean, we say that there is such a thing as a beautiful woman or a handsome man that is bad, but what we really mean to say is that there is such a thing as a bad woman or handsome man that has a good face, in the same way that you can have a bad man with a good coat or a good man with a bad coat. The ugliness or badness of a man's soul (or personality, if you want to be modern) does not detract from the beauty or goodness of his face.

What you are saying, anon, is that ugliness can be beautiful, a clear contradiction. By aesthetically intriguing I believe you mean making what is ugly appear to be beautiful.
I would say that good art IS defined by representing the good, because what else would it represent? The bad? I'm not saying that an artist can't represent, for example, a bad character in his work, it's just that he has to somehow make this bad character resolve into a harmonious whole that is itself good, in the same way that a musician resolves a dissonance, or a painter balances contradictory colours, and in the same way the theologians day that God bring good out of the evil in the world so that the world is still essentially good when viewed as a whole. However, I do not think art can be good when as a whole it represents what is bad. There might be art that is made up of ugliness that somehow resolves into the good. For example, Van Gogh's Potato Eaters is ugly in all its details but you could argue that this visual ugliness causes us to reflect on the squalid life of the poor, and this reflection is good. In the same way, you might take Titian's Venus which is beautiful in all its details, but as a whole Mark Twain condemned it as offensive pornography.

>>5348956
>Aesthetics and morality are different things.

I would say that they aren't. The reason people separate aesthetics and morality is because they are disordered and take what they know to be morally bad as beautiful, but if they reflected on this they would discover that what they are doing is treating what is ugly as beautiful.
See, we must be careful not to be misled into taking what is ugly as beautiful, like Titian's Venus.

Don't respond. This is a troll thread.

This tripfag will, once again, claim "you cant know nuffin" then shoehorn in his fundamentalist reading of the bible.

But it's you that will make art out of it

>>5349003
>What is the difference between the good and the beautiful?
cmon mate, i know you're some hardcore religious troll, but you have to be smarter than that. doesn't it say somewhere that lucifer himself is of stunning beauty? isn't beauty one of the things evil can use to seduce us? and for this to work, doesn't the beauty have to be real?
You can't in all seriousness deny that a face masking an ugly personality can still be beautiful. in such a case, the ugliness is the part you don't see, which is aesthetically irrelevant.
>By aesthetically intriguing I believe you mean making what is ugly appear to be beautiful.
Not necessarily, i rather mean an aesthetic appeal that is beyond the dichotomy.

>>5349014
This isn't a troll thread mate. Because if I'm right and to be a good artist you must also be a good man, then all artists ought to first of all be occupied with seeking goodness, which we know is not the case. So it is a serious matter that concerns the lives of many people. Think of recent examples like Hemingway and Joyce, reputed to be good artists but the first was a suicide and the second a wretched pervert. Now let me ask: do you think these men would have been better off taking care of their heart and mind than in pursuing the ghost of "literary fame"? If they would have been better off taking care of themselves, then we need to inform the many people around the world that are neglecting themselves and torturing themselves in trying to reach that phantom.

>>5349017
And you clearly don't understand that while you are looking at an art piece you just choose the "good" parts of it to your preference. As it's no clear definition of what is bad and what is good, everything falls on what you prefer, so are left to discern it in the dissonance, make it congruous yourself, even if you won't know truth behind it.

>>5349028
>doesn't it say somewhere that lucifer himself is of stunning beauty? isn't beauty one of the things evil can use to seduce us? and for this to work, doesn't the beauty have to be real?

It's not that the beauty is real, it's that it appears to us as real and we are apt to be deceived.

>You can't in all seriousness deny that a face masking an ugly personality can still be beautiful

I am not denying that. In fact, that is exactly what I said: a good face face is still a good, or beautiful, face, even if the man within is bad, or ugly.

>>5349031
Your underlying premise will be that "good" or "goodness" comes from the Christian God, right?

>>5349011
How do you even mistake uglyness for beauty? Your argument only makes sense if you completely eliminate aesthetics as an independent category, so morality becomes the only thing you judge art by. Then however, your original question becomes: can a bad man make morally good art?

To which the answer might still be yes, btw: he who is evil by choice and wickedness can probably understand the thing he rejects, and accurately depict it in art.

>>5349039
>It's not that the beauty is real, it's that it appears to us as real and we are apt to be deceived.
Aesthetics only concerns itself with appearance. Beautiful is that which appears beautiful.

>>5348977
3undergraduate5me

Bernini tried to murder his brother in the Vatican, beating him half to death with an iron bar, and then sent a servant around to his girlfriend's house to disfigure her face with a knife when he found out they were having an affair.

>His sculpture of a damned soul was a self portrait.
Shitty person, great artist.

uh

yeah

How many tripfag personas do you have on /lit/? Why do you post under so many different names?

>>5349100
Well, that settles it. Threads over. Move along.

>>5348966
I can see you've read aesthetics, buit I can also see you've stopped somewhere in the XVII century.

We've walked a lot since then

>>5349031
None of what you just said relates to the work they produced being good or bad art.

>>5349031
This is a disgusting post.

>>5350182
But it actually makes sense from a certain viewpoint.

>>5348933
>Can a bad man make good art?
>>5348935
>yeah
>>5348946
>I don't think so.

nice discussion

if there is one thing i've learned since Jude Thaddeus has started posting it's that i'm never gonna start with the greeks because it only makes you have tone-deaf and antiquated opinions

I assure you, lit/, that the greatest artists in history were among the wacked, cowards, pathetic men that this world has ever seen. otherwise, they could never make thier great art .

>>5350216
But the Greeks are awesome.

Roman Polanski

When people say good art, they don't generally mean 'art that contains that which is morally good'. They mean good as in better than average/standout/emotionally, intellectually appealing. e.g. 'that sandwich was good' or 'he is good at running'. Don't even try to tell me that a bad man can't be good at running.

That's a pretty fucking big difference and you need to distinguish this yourself.

>>5350187
A dumbass Christian viewpoint.