Carrol Cox wrote:
>> I like what I like as art. There fore I don't need a
>> gatekeeper. Because I grew up around the arts I never depended on a
>> taste maker or gatekeeper
>
> Chuck, this is bizarre. The proposition "I grew up around the arts" is
> in blatant contradiction to "I never depended...." You should have
> written, "The fact that I grew up around what were presented to me as
> arts demonstrates the the truth of Art is what people define as
> art. How
> did you know that the things surrounding you were Art rather than
> weo;kasdjkl?
Not if, as Marx claims, "beauty" is objective and social relations can be more or less successful in developing a "sense" for it.
“let us look at this in its subjective aspect. Just as only music awakens in man the sense of music, and just as the most beautiful music has no sense for the unmusical ear – is [no] object for it, because my object can only be the confirmation of one of my essential powers – it can therefore only exist for me insofar as my essential power exists for itself as a subjective capacity; because the meaning of an object for me goes only so far as my sense goes (has only a meaning for a sense corresponding to that object) – for this reason the senses of the social man differ from those of the non-social man. Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form – in short, senses capable of human gratification, senses affirming themselves as essential powers of man) either cultivated or brought into being. For not only the five senses but also the so-called mental senses, the practical senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, human sense, the human nature of the senses, comes to be by virtue of its object, by virtue of humanised nature. The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present.
"The sense caught up in crude practical need has only a restricted sense. For the starving man, it is not the human form of food that exists, but only its abstract existence as food. It could just as well be there in its crudest form, and it would be impossible to say wherein this feeding activity differs from that of animals. The care- burdened, poverty-stricken man has no sense for the finest play; the dealer in minerals sees only the commercial value but not the beauty and the specific character of the mineral: he has no mineralogical sense. Thus, the objectification of the human essence, both in its theoretical and practical aspects, is required to make man’s sense human, as well as to create the human sense corresponding to the entire wealth of human and natural substance.” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm
Ted