One means of assessing a piece of art is how you react physiologically to it. You might find your face seizing up slightly before tears come while watching a movie, or find yourself springing to alertness as you suddenly realize that a song is manifesting greatness, or find yourself laughing out loud at a passage in a book, all before you've had a chance to reflect on what you're listening to, reading, or experiencing.
Whether or not you regard this as a valid (or the central) means of judging a work of art will depend on whether you believe your instincts are capable of ascertaining meaningful value before you've applied your train of thought to it. I don't just mean aesthetic value, but underlying value that goes deeper than pure aesthetics (though is perhaps partly demonstrated in aesthetics, but that's outside the scope of what I'm talking about here).
My operating schema is that you are taking in and processing information at all times, and that this information is of a sufficient quality that while you are capable of parsing it with words, and revealing its aspects and its implications for you with words, you don't need to mediate it with words before it enters your comprehension and your operating schema.
Your instincts are surprisingly capable of metabolizing complex information, but your train of thought can still act on and draw complex conclusions from observed phenomena in a way which your instincts are willing to follow if they don't detect a mismatch from what they've observed. In other words, your instincts and your train of thought work in tandem, checking each other, but despite the instincts' reputation for atavism (and their occasionally atavistic goals), both your instincts and your thoughts are fully capable of processing the information of the modern world.
Your instincts are not stupider than your train of thought, but are more focused on managing your responses to the sum total of your observations rather than linguistically parsing elements of your attention (which does help order your knowledge somehow, if it jibes with what your instincts have apprehended).
When you physically react to a work of art, I believe that this is a comprehension that it embodies something of significance, something that you can recognize even before you attempt to investigate it with your train of thought, and that this has some relationship to the truth or the potential of what you're experiencing. 'Potential' here including both implied potential, and 'the expansion of your world's potential.'
I believe this revelatory apprehension to be part of a system similar to the one in which your instincts constantly check your environment, your thoughts, and your behavior for reliability, solidness, and correctness, taking into account more variables than your train of thought alone could assess. It is continually assessing new information and referencing it against all the information that you have retained.
The revelation that you experience in a piece of art can have the properties of information, in that it expands your domain of consciousness, or it may signal towards this expansion without a full revelation, compelling you through implied potential. This revelation could be called the value. It might take the form of informational revelation, or of a subjective expansion of what is possible.
It's tempting to think of this as the work's 'utility.' I am not attempting to justify being moved by art by saying its power is that it merely embodies utility. What I'm reflecting on is that the most powerful art often has a valence of truth (truth with respect to reality and/or truth with respect to the human spirit in its ironbound, narrow, and billion-faceted nature), and the weakest art often has a valence of falsity. Also that powerful works often have great verisimilitude, regardless of the specific content (which may be fantastic or beyond the viewer’s experience), and also that there have always been powerful works depicting the information of victory and of catastrophe; heroism, tragedy, and romance, alongside the subversive and picaresque stories of the true-truth.
(I am not speaking of these as universal qualities of great work, but of tendencies. Obviously there can be significant works built upon the tease of potential, and of the brain-illuminating force of the embodied unknown; I enjoy doing these, in fact I think they are essential phenomena. However, a work that contains only mystery with no revelation is not, to quote Sun Tzu, the acme of excellence; we tend to prefer works that masterfully tie their threads together.)
I believe that one's instincts are capable of detecting veracity in a work of art, just as they are able to detect veracity (or at least possibility) in your own conclusions, and are faster and perhaps more reliable at this with regards to art than your train of thought; that this is why you feel a sensation of revelation and harmony with a powerful work, even one that is very tragic.
What is this sense of harmony? Why can we usually not adequately assess why it emerges in a given work? You can still apprehend it, contain it, embody it, adapt it, and deliver it with the same experiential power, the same catharsis of surprise with harmony, in a new work. The phenomenon replicates.
This deeper intrinsic value is embodied, rather than explicated and didacted, and perhaps it is more true because of that, in the sense that a poem can be true, than a legalistic explication of the same thing. It is more flexible, has more nodes, is more able to fit into the billion contours of a subjective reality than a mandate or flowchart ever could. This is the kind of truth that I believe we are referring to when we assess truth as an aspect of artwork.
This is why it can be enrapturing to read something perfectly true, whatever its characteristics, but it can positively erupt when you encounter truth in a piece of fiction; it is able to comfortably span more surface area across reality's many dimensions than something perfectly contingent.
When you experience this, you experience a sense of harmony with what is indicated, some facet of reality that your deep existence can accept unity with. Your perceptions line up with what is indicated without the jagged edges of reality revealing imperfections in the medium. When these do appear they leave you partly outside it, apprehending that something about it won't quite do, isn't quite sufficient. When it works you see clearly, without contamination, fractures, warping in the glass.
When you experience something and it is simpatico, you apprehend its rightness; not goodness, nor necessarily its universal correctness, it is like a conduit passing between between your perceptions and something of intrinsic value, and you feel at ease with this connection because part of you has already assessed it.
I took this instinct-based approach to assessing which card art I liked most from the first few years of Magic: The Gathering. I don't collect the cards, and never play unless someone harangues me to, but I have always appreciated them as a vehicle for art.
I didn't asses; I looked, and felt. If I felt any hesitation in putting my cursor over a card, opening it, or saving it, I didn't do it. I was worried during the process that I wouldn't have that many cards here by the end of it, but decided that would be okay, if there were five cards then that would probably be a pretty good distillation of my taste in them. It turns out there were almost one hundred. I make no specific claim to the nature of the cards' objective quality, nor that each card embodies objective truth and value beyond whatever power is entrapped in its aesthetics, however I did trust the process, and allowed my instinctual reaction the final word on whether or not I should share the card.
I liked 85% of the card art I saw, but these are the ones that went seamlessly into the Magic Art folder.
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