Values and Limits of Reviews

[syrakusos]

You ought to watch .... I really enjoyed... ... was a waste of time ... has no talent... noise...

Reviews serve a purpose but introduce a problem in aesthetics. Given that you actually know the reviewer personally, you can evaluate their opinion on several levels. If their evaluation is based on objective criteria, then you can rely on the factual nature of their statements. Often people will "review" a work based on their feelings. That can be appropriate as aesthetics is about emotions: art engages, draws out, expresses and reflects the deep and broad conceptual abstractions that are encased in a feeling. Therefore, when someone says that they did not like a movie because it was slow, or the acting was wooden, or the ending did not make sense, that can be valid as far as it goes. The question is, though, does that go far enough. Woozy fuzzy approximations of something almost foglike in the recesses of a stranger's conscious (or subconscious... or unconscious) mind are hardly the basis for you to act on going to a gallery or not, to a movie or not, to a recital or not.

The problem may be that art forms cannot always easily be transduced. You can say, in summary, that a dance recital was formless, disjointed, and a chaotic. I can take you at your word. But what exactly would be involved if I asked you "What do you mean?" If you say that lacked a central theme, I am going to cut you off. I know what formless, disjointed and chaotic mean: I want to know what you perceived that caused you to form that judgment.

How do you describe dance in words?

• If it could have been said in words, it would not have to have been danced.
  

At some level, the poblem can be solved by insisting on conceptual language. Some Objectivists have spoken well of Babylon 5. They do not say why, exactly... I have a close friend who purchased the entire series a year or two at a time as he could afford it. He recommends it highly. But, like the others, non-conceptually. I watched four episodes and found the sets cheap, the acting unpolished, the writing unsurprising, and the characters stock. The very idea of the military running an interplanetary trading post demands far more explanation than was offered, which was none. My complaints here were deeper and more involved than any of the endorsements from Objectivists.

Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance says that people will find reasons to explain imperfect choices that cannot be reversed. Having invested time watching a television show, critically analyzing it requires overcoming the tendency to excuse the initial choice. So, the movie, the show, the painting, the concert will be "all right."

Edited December 22, 2009 by Michael E. Marotta

[anonrobt]

You ought to watch .... I really enjoyed... ... was a waste of time ... has no talent... noise...

Reviews serve a purpose but introduce a problem in aesthetics. Given that you actually know the reviewer personally, you can evaluate their opinion on several levels. If their evaluation is based on objective criteria, then you can rely on the factual nature of their statements. Often people will "review" a work based on their feelings. That can be appropriate as aesthetics is about emotions: art engages, draws out, expresses and reflects the deep and broad conceptual abstractions that are encased in a feeling. Therefore, when someone says that they did not like a movie because it was slow, or the acting was wooden, or the ending did not make sense, that can be valid as far as it goes. The question is, though, does that go far enough. Woozy fuzzy approximations of something almost foglike in the recesses of a stranger's conscious (or subconscious... or unconscious) mind are hardly the basis for you to act on going to a gallery or not, to a movie or not, to a recital or not.

The problem may be that art forms cannot always easily be transduced. You can say, in summary, that a dance recital was formless, disjointed, and a chaotic. I can take you at your word. But what exactly would be involved if I asked you "What do you mean?" If you say that lacked a central theme, I am going to cut you off. I know what formless, disjointed and chaotic mean: I want to know what you perceived that caused you to form that judgment.

How do you describe dance in words?

• If it could have been said in words, it would not have to have been danced.
  

At some level, the poblem can be solved by insisting on conceptual language. Some Objectivists have spoken well of Babylon 5. They do not say why, exactly... I have a close friend who purchased the entire series a year or two at a time as he could afford it. He recommends it highly. But, like the others, non-conceptually. I watched four episodes and found the sets cheap, the acting unpolished, the writing unsurprising, and the characters stock. The very idea of the military running an interplanetary trading post demands far more explanation than was offered, which was none. My complaints here were deeper and more involved than any of the endorsements from Objectivists.

Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance says that people will find reasons to explain imperfect choices that cannot be reversed. Having invested time watching a television show, critically analyzing it requires overcoming the tendency to excuse the initial choice. So, the movie, the show, the painting, the concert will be "all right."

One could make that claim regarding different aspects of, say, language - as in the difference between poetry and novels... but it would not necessarily be true.... like all literature, poetry, for instance, evolved as a means of describing experiences... but it evolved in a time before the written word, so means had to be devised to be able to handle large amounts of experiences in a verbal format - hence the rhyming schemes and extreme conciseness of compression [which, as consequence, gave for ambiguity]... it allowed, for the very memoric ambitious, a means of compiling epics which could be remembered by others of the same memoric ability and thus passed on thru generations... when written language got evolved, then came possibilities, depending on which language was used [as different languages allowed or disallowed facilitating certain ideas - which is why so hard translating sometimes]... novels arose out of the evolving complexity of plots, something different from journalistic viewing of things... this does not, however, mean that what is in a novel couldn't be described by poetry, just more difficult...

The same could be said regarding, say, movies or paintings - visualizations - and novels, but in the same manner as poetry, namely that the visualizations are as such concisements of the expansions of the novel, just as poetry is... the problem is - it rarely is, because of the ease of seeing tends to overwhelm the analyzing [ much as 'one sees but not observe' dictum of Holmes]... you do acknowledge this when you say "art forms cannot always easily be transduced" - but, then, the proper answer is "SO?" is difficulty an excuse? when you said, of dancing - "If it could have been said in words, it would not have to have been danced." not true - merely that it would have been more appreciated being danced, because, like poetry, there is a concising involved that to cover adequately in words would have measured more time and effort than worth the reading or listening to - unless one wasn't there to see and wanted to know what it was all about... the same with painting, the most concise of all, beyond poetry - as it makes it all in a 'one shot' performance, BLAM and it is there to see, just take your time in the seeing, and even more in describing [if you are observant enough to more than just 'see']...