> Of course anyone can 'make' a v alue judgment'; there is sijply no reason for anyone else to accept it.
> There is no way toadjudicate, for example, the different 'judgments' of Michael S & Joanna on Vivaldi.
Sounds like in the face of some degree of relativity, you've chosen to fold your tent and declare the effort of aesthetic evaluation an impossibility.
We perceive aesthetic values in an art object: we value Mahler's orchestration in "Das Lied von der Erde." We can also perceive non-aesthetic values: the clacking of the string section in the Ferrier-Walter recording, for example. Some perceived quantity and/or degree of aesthetic value enables us to declare an object an "art object."
We can evaluate an art object as well, create a hierarchy of aesthetic values. Mimetic values in painting are an easy example: we evaluate mimetic values based on the degree of correspondence between its form and the thing imitated. Some paintings are more skillfully mimetic than others. (Although this says nothing about the expressivity of the same work.)
There's a degree of relativism in all this. In the late 1940s, not many were willing to perceive aesthetically Jackson Pollock's cigarette butts in his drips of silver automotive paint. Today, it's a commonplace. You can't really judge whether Vivaldi was a better composer than Corelli, which may go to your point, but you certainly can evaluate elements of their work in relation to one another. You can also evaluate the output of a single artist over time, say Rembrandt over a period of years. You can also evaluate Rembrandt in relation to his school: answer why a Rembrandt seems more "valuable" than a Govert Flink, Ferdinand Bol or Carel Fabritius.
> Ct: The cited building types are "office space on a corporate campus" and "hotel (in an entertainment quarter)." You can certainly make judgements about how well their design addresses their intended use.
So for architecture, I'd claim that a building type, "hotel" for example, can act as a frame of reference similar to the above in allowing evaluation to take place. Its sufficiently bounded by time and form to act as such. So when Joanna says that Peter Dominick's Grand California hotel is "crap," it sounds to me that she's conceding it as aesthetic object (she didn't say "it's not art!"). Unfortunately, she didn't enumerate any of the values she judges so harshly, nor offer up an example of a hotel that she thought WASN'T crap. Perhaps, Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel in Japan, done in the "Maya Revival" style?
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ImperialHotelFacade.jpg>
Here, beyond the utilitarian issue of satisfying a hotel's program, both architects have "scaled up" the Craftsman style and applied it to a much larger building than in was originally conceived for.
> Cbc: You can describe/analyze the proces of using the arrangements. A formal "value judgment" is redundant. Or you could do a poll of the users I suppose. Again, everyone can make "value judgments," but no one can _ground_ t hem if they are challenged
This response of yours seems to deny that we could even consider a building to have aesthetic value. And again, just because we can't ground judgements absolutely, doesn't mean we can ground them relatively (and that doing so is a worthwhile activity).
Charles
