> But is there a real connection between being wrong and not being read or are you yourself wrong ?
You don’t need to be a standup comedian yourself to spot bad comedy.
> Furthermore, I doubt there are any chances "right/wrong" applies to aesthetical types of philosophical discussions.
It’s hard to figure out what readers want because you don’t get direct feedback. But if you spend any amount of time in front of an audience, it becomes incredibly clear that some things work on stage better than others. I truly believe charisma is a learnable skill. By treating it as talent we deprive people who aren’t charismatic the chance to improve. Writing is just the same. Claiming that there’s no “right/wrong” here implies that it’s impossible to learn to write in a more engaging way. And that’s obviously false.
I did a clowning course a few years ago. In one silly exercise we all partnered up. Each couple were given a tennis ball, and we had to squish the ball between our foreheads so it wouldn’t fall. And like that, move around the room. Afterwards the teacher got half the class on stage and do it again, while everyone else watched. Then the audience got to vote on which couple we liked the most. It was surreal - almost everyone voted on the same pair. Those two in particular were somehow more interesting than everyone else. In that room there was a right and a wrong way to wordlessly hold a tennis ball between two people’s faces. And we all agreed on what it was.
> You don't need to be a standup comedian yourself to spot bad comedy.
I am not a native english speaker, I don't know anything about humourous form of language in that tongue.
Charisma depends on your audience, and audiences can differ quite a lot. There is no "right/wrong" because what please you as an audience may be considered wrong by another one.
"Writing in a more engaging way" aka changing your conceptions of what is right/wrong in order to conform to the current cultural supremacia that is built up everyday by pushing some kind of fast-food culture or idk.
Your story is interesting, and I don't understand how you could be surprised : people that go to clowning classes can share the same taste about what is good/bad ? That's not a very surprising fact ! If you had told me that they were people from different cultures ...
Do you think Baudelaire cared about engagement ? You talked like there were no way taste could dramatically change to the point "ugly" is becoming "good" or vice-versa. Some of the writers and artists I like the most braved the taste™ of the different hegemonic culture of their time, and just trusted their own intuition of what they did want to express, say, create.
Marcel Duchamp is a great example of how a mid level joke can change the art world suddenly (and people's taste with it).
> Charisma depends on your audience, and audiences can differ quite a lot. There is no "right/wrong" because what please you as an audience may be considered wrong by another one.
Yes; one of the most aspects of charisma is being sensitive to your audience. Charismatic people watch how their performance is received, and adjust it on the fly. Not too much, but enough to make the audience feel cared for. This is one reason why there's a sort of magic in live performances.
I also think we're talking about two extreme ideas here that are both wrong:
1. Performances are on an objective spectrum from "right" to "wrong"
2. Nothing is good or bad. Everything is subjective.
The truth is somewhere in the middle. There's no such thing as "the objectively best pieces of music (/art / writing / etc)". But some music, art and writing is enjoyed by many people. And some is junk. There is no objective measure of music. But also, nobody would consider my amateur piano playing to be as good as The Beetles or Mozart.
> "Writing in a more engaging way" aka changing your conceptions of what is right/wrong in order to conform to the current cultural supremacia that is built up everyday by pushing some kind of fast-food culture or idk.
I don't know where to start with this.
Again, there's two extremes that are both wrong: a) As a writer / performer, you should conform exactly to whatever the audience wants. And b) Forget the audience. Write however you want without any regard for them.
Both of these extreme positions will result in bad work. The answer is somewhere in the middle. We don't want a performer to be our slave or our master. We want you to be our friend. Our leader. Our teacher.
In other terms, write however you want. But if you don't care about your audience, don't be surprised if your audience doesn't care about you.
> people that go to clowning classes can share the same taste about what is good/bad ? That's not a very surprising fact ! If you had told me that they were people from different cultures ...
I'm Australian. The class was in France, taught by a French clown. There were students from the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK, South Africa, NZ, Finland, Germany and more.
Not all art works across different cultures, but clowning does. I think if you showed our performances to a group of monkeys, even they would also find it funny and if they could, they would pick out the same favorites.
Of course everything is subjective. The fact we're social animals creates the feeling that there's some kind of rules, but that's just a bias. We're biased.
There is no absolute junk art-artefact, because humanity potentially extends timewise to so many instances of different humans that you cannot know in advance if something will be considered "good" at some point in time, culture, individusl brain etc...
> Both of these extremes position will result in bad work.
That's absurd, if someone "conform exactly to whatever the audience wants" then everyone in the audience would be pleased, how could it be bad work ?
Side note. Is it really possible for some artist to forget the audience ? I mean "however you want without any regard for them" is possible, but due to the fact you write as you want, it would be an absolute masterclass if you succeeded to be not cared about by anyone.
But yeah, that's not constituent of what is an artwork or not. This discussion is useless to the artist.
> [clown class]
Okay, but mondialization, hegemony of certain cultures etc...
Are we truly different cultures ? I don't think so.
But anyway, that's not the problem.
The problem is that you were using this example to justify the fact that taste is not relative.
I accept that a group of clown students got impressed by the same clowns. But I don't accept that there wouldn't be some differences if the whole humanity (past and future) voted that day.
> There is no absolute junk art-artefact, because humanity potentially extends timewise to so many instances of different humans that you cannot know in advance if something will be considered "good" at some point in time, culture, individusl brain etc...
Look at the number of plays each song gets in Spotify. If everyone had their own, totally unique taste, there would be no mathematical correlation between which songs I enjoy and which songs you enjoy. We would see a uniform distribution of plays of all the songs in spotify. But the distribution is very non-uniform. Some songs get billions of listens. Some songs get essentially none.
However, if we all had exactly the same taste, Spotify would only need a small selection of "the best" songs for everybody to enjoy. This is also not what we see.
Art has fashions. But many of aspects of music and storytelling have remained relevant across culture and across time so far. We like musical rhythm. We enjoy narrative in stories. We enjoy stories about relationships between people. We like some variety, but not too much. And so on. I'm sure tastes will change. But if I just mash my hand on the piano with no skill and upload that to spotify, I doubt even in the fullness of time I'll ever get as many spotify listens as The Beetles.
> That's absurd, if someone "conform exactly to whatever the audience wants" then everyone in the audience would be pleased, how could it be bad work ? [...] This discussion is useless to the artist.
Yes exactly. An artist can't work like this. It wouldn't work. It has the wrong energy.
Its kind of paradoxical, but the audience doesn't want to feel like we're in charge too much. We like it when performers take risks on stage, and show us who they are so we can judge them. Look at the top rated videos on youtube. Or the most popular songs. Or any list of the best movies ever made. All of them will contain a strong, clear point of view of the artist. Stanley Kubrick and Mick Jagger don't ask the audience what we want. They tell us what we want. (And they get it right.)
---
At a broader level, I think this whole discussion is a diversion. You seem to have argued both that all art is subjective. And that creating works of art based on what people want would be submitting to the "current cultural supremacia". Both of these arguments sound like excuses to me. Excuses to not try and become skilled. Excuses to skip being be sensitive to your audience. Excuses that protect from failure. For what its worth, I struggle with this too. My clown teacher told me I need to "try to not die so much" when things don't work on stage. It is very difficult. If human tastes really do change so much across time, then don't create for people in the future. Create for people right now. The people right in front of you, who you can understand.
The most successful clowns, businessmen and writers all care about their audience. But when things inevitably don't work, they acknowledge the failure with lightness and try again.
I'm happy because there is a misunderstanding of my words here.
I am not saying that the ethos of the artist should be "taste is random".
In fact the act of being an artist is to embrace biases.
I agree with the Kant interpretation of aesthetics as a "teleologic" thing : there is no objective "beauty" yet we perpetually fail to embrace this and instead, when we find something "beautiful" we consider this judgement as if it was universal, absolute and objective (when it is not).
On the other hand, to complete this, I agree with Wittgenstein when he says that "you cannot SAY anything about aesthetics/ethics".
These two ideas aren't forming any paradox.
> Create for the people right now.
I would prefer :
Set your own dogma or not, but do what you feel you want to do, be it creating for others, for yourself (you abominable narcissus), for your cat, for the banana you just eaten, or for whatever supreme being you chose to believe in.
Choose your audience, let an audience choose you, or choose to be alone, whatever fits for you.
To me, we're in a difficult position because the only way you have to quantify the value of an artwork (music in this case) is the number of streams it has.
Call me a mad man but it is not rare for me to hate most streamed music and to prefer <none> streamed music.
Yet I seriously doubt I am "musically dumb".
What I find instead is that advertisment, reputation, exposure, a good label, radio streams will get you a long way to become a <most streamed> artist.
And no, that's not "an excuse" to not try and become skilled... What sense does it make to say "Dua Lippa is better skilled than J.S.Bach because she has more streams" (or the contrary) or "AC/DC is better skilled than Alan Vega because they sold more disks" (or the contrary).
> If I just mash my hand on the piano with no skill
Okay, that's pretty sure.
Now if you wrote a small piano piece, there is no way you could predict if it will become a hit or not. It depends on factors that are really far from being limited to "the piece in question".
> Now if you wrote a small piano piece, there is no way you could predict if it will become a hit or not. It depends on factors that are really far from being limited to "the piece in question".
This is where I think we really disagree. If I want to make music people like, I’m pretty sure piano lessons would help me. Theory. Rhythm. Learning to sing. Then I need to practice! Making a smash hit isn’t predictable, but it’s not random either. Luck is a necessary but not sufficient quality. As the saying goes, most overnight successes are 20 years in the making. Watch the early stuff from Louis CK. From Trey Parker and Matt Stone. It’s not as good. They got better over time.
You can learn to write better. To be more charismatic. To connect better to an audience. You’re not in control of whether or not an iOS app is successful. But you can’t make it at all if you don’t know how to code. And if you’re bad at design it probably won’t make it. It’s not simply a coincidence that some blog posts get read and others are ignored. Ask anyone successful. By honestly any metric of success. Practice, skill and hard work won’t guarantee anyone cares about your craft. But if you don’t try? Don’t listen to your audience and improve? Good luck.
What I said is the banal : no matter how you're skilled, there's no guarantee of success, and in the small window of opportunity that is "becoming successful", there are (maybe normally distributed) skilled and non skilled people.
Not sure about "most overnight successes are 20 years in the making"; if I want to be perfectly rationnal, I recognize that this sentence is often false (but don't have the data to analyze this in depth, I would love to be able to check this though).
I don't want to offend you by any mean, but we have a tendency to pick up some examples and to hallucinate something from that few examples (which is a natural and quasi-reasonable thing to do when you have a sufficient large dataset); here you tell me about Louis CK, and while it can be true that they did better over time, I am pretty sure we can find counterexemples of this, no ? I imagine that's not a rare thing to meet people that prefer early-xxxx more than later-xxxx.
> Ask anyone successful.
I decided to erase what I meant to answer here (maybe it's time to move on haha).
Well, I think I understood you position, I'm glad we took the time to talk. The internet is full of these opportunities and I enjoy that from time to time, even if thinking in a language I master less than my main one is always tiresome and somewhat "violent" (I feel dumber in English ?). (Wow, it's late in Australia !)
You don’t need to be a standup comedian yourself to spot bad comedy.
> Furthermore, I doubt there are any chances "right/wrong" applies to aesthetical types of philosophical discussions.
It’s hard to figure out what readers want because you don’t get direct feedback. But if you spend any amount of time in front of an audience, it becomes incredibly clear that some things work on stage better than others. I truly believe charisma is a learnable skill. By treating it as talent we deprive people who aren’t charismatic the chance to improve. Writing is just the same. Claiming that there’s no “right/wrong” here implies that it’s impossible to learn to write in a more engaging way. And that’s obviously false.
I did a clowning course a few years ago. In one silly exercise we all partnered up. Each couple were given a tennis ball, and we had to squish the ball between our foreheads so it wouldn’t fall. And like that, move around the room. Afterwards the teacher got half the class on stage and do it again, while everyone else watched. Then the audience got to vote on which couple we liked the most. It was surreal - almost everyone voted on the same pair. Those two in particular were somehow more interesting than everyone else. In that room there was a right and a wrong way to wordlessly hold a tennis ball between two people’s faces. And we all agreed on what it was.