This article is authorized to be reproduced from the public account Fat Fu Mantou (ID: amazingfounder).
There are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people's eyes .
——William Shakespeare
There are a thousand Hamlets in the eyes of a thousand people.
—William Shakespeare
If you look at the history of western and Chinese art, you will find an interesting finding: Western art is constantly pursuing innovation, and artists are always doing never-ending novel experiments. Chinese art gives artists more time to pursue elegance and subtlety. On the business side, Western entrepreneurs have a lot to learn from in the ming dao and the good art, while Chinese entrepreneurs are extremely keen in taking advantage of the situation.
We can't help but think of a commercial company as a work of art, and the founder is the artist who carved it. Sir Ernst Gombrich, a titan in western art history, mentioned in his book "The Story of Art" that the biggest obstacle to appreciating great works of art is the refusal to abandon bad habits and prejudices. Similarly, on the eve of the birth of a great company, when it is full of criticism and controversy, whether we can study judgment in a more open and peaceful way, free from external factors.
There are a thousand Hamlets in the eyes of a thousand people, and every reader of Hamlet, combined with his own experience, will have a unique understanding, which may not be quantifiable, but will there be a difference between high and low? Today's sharing is related to this issue, from a sharing by Paul Graham, the godfather of Silicon Valley YC, at the Cambridge Consortium (Cambridge University Debate Club) – "Whether aesthetics are superior or inferior". We've shared Paul's thoughts on "what's more valuable than being smart" before.
I believe that aesthetic literacy is very worth cultivating and can be continuously improved. This is closely related to the accumulation of relevant knowledge, a brain that can react quickly, is clear enough and agile, and can filter out interference from external factors.
In the process of managing Fat Fu, my aesthetic qualities have also been exercised and I have benefited a lot from it. Good aesthetics can help us improve the quality of decision-making in more complex situations. I hope that Paul's content can play a role in throwing bricks and bring inspiration, in fact, the thinking process of discussing the topic of "whether good aesthetics exist" is also very interesting.
At the same time, I sincerely recommend a previous work from Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong," "How Companies Make Decisions from $0 to $100 Billion" as a reference reading.
In order to give you a better reading experience, this article has made certain adjustments without affecting the content. If it inspires you, we'd like to help share recommendations. Let's get started, Enjoy!
Does the so-called good aesthetic exist? When I was a kid, I would say it didn't exist. Because my father told me that turnip greens, each has its own love, who can say who is right and who is wrong?
Obviously, the so-called good aesthetic does not seem to exist. It was only through indirect proof that I realized that my father was wrong. This is what I'm going to tell you: a result proved by a reductionary fallacy. If we assume that good aesthetics do not exist, we draw conclusions that are clearly wrong, and therefore this premise is wrong.
We'd better start by talking about what aesthetics are. In the narrow sense, it refers to aesthetic judgment, and in a broad sense, it refers to any type of preference. Aesthetics in the narrow sense are the strongest evidence for the existence of good aesthetics, so let's talk about the aesthetics of art first. If the art you like is better than the art I like, your aesthetic is better than mine.
If there is no good aesthetic, there is no good art. Because if there is good art, it is easy to tell which of the two people has the better aesthetic. Show them the work of many artists they have never seen before, let them choose the best, and whoever chooses better art has a better aesthetic.
So if you want to abandon the concept of good aesthetics, you must also abandon the concept of good art, and you must deny the possibility that people can create good art. This means that artists cannot do their job well, not just visual artists, but also artists in any sense. You won't find good actors, novelists, composers or dancers, there will be popular novelists, but there won't be good novelists.
We don't realize how many problems we face if we abandon the concept of good aesthetics, because we can't even discuss the most obvious things. Let's not talk about which of the two painters has a better work, and neither painter can say that his work is better than that of an eight-year-old.
In this way, I realized that my father's views were wrong. I started learning to draw, just like any other job I've done: you can do it well or you can do it poorly, and if you try, you can do better. But it's clear that Leonardo da Vinci and Bellini are much better than me in this regard. The chasm between us is insurmountable, after all, they are too good. If they are good painters, then there is good art, and good aesthetics do exist.
Now that I've explained how to prove that good aesthetics do exist, I should also explain why some people think it doesn't exist. There are two reasons for this. First, there are always many differences in people's aesthetics. For example, most people's reaction to art is simply out of an untested impulse. Is the artist famous? Is the subject matter attractive? Is this the kind of art they should enjoy? Is it hung in a famous museum, or is it copied in a large and expensive book? In fact, most people's reactions to art are swayed by these foreign factors.
And those who claim to be good judges are often misunderstood. The paintings admired by the so-called generation of masters are often far from those promoted by generations later. So it's easy to conclude that aesthetics are not called good or bad at all. You can only see that good aesthetic does exist if you think independently by cutting out this idea, such as by trying to paint and comparing your work to Bellini's.
Another reason people doubt whether art is good or bad is that there doesn't seem to be this so-called good in art. The argument goes like this: Imagine several people looking at the same work of art and judging how good it is. If the goodness of this work of art is really an attribute of it, then that goodness should exist in this work of art in some way. But this is not the case, and it seems that every observer has different ideas in his head. If they disagree, how do you choose?
To solve this problem, it is necessary to realize that art ultimately acts on people, and people have a lot in common. To some extent, the object on which a thing acts reacts in the same way, which is the meaning of the object having the corresponding properties. If a particle and everything that interacts with it exhibits the mass of the particle as if it were m, then its mass is m. So the difference between "objective" and "subjective" is not binary, but a matter of degree, depending on how much the subject has in common. Interacting particles are at one pole, but people who interact with art are not always at the other pole; Their reactions are not random.
Because people's reactions to art are not random, art can be designed to act on people, and the quality of the work depends on how effective it is. It's like a vaccine. If someone talks about getting immunity by getting a vaccine, it's very flippant for others to say that getting immunity isn't really a property of a vaccine. Everyone's immune system gains immunity. However, people's immune systems vary, and a vaccine that works for that immune system may not work against another, but that doesn't mean it's pointless to talk about the effectiveness of vaccines.
The situation in art is more complicated. You can't measure the effectiveness of vaccines by a simple vote, as you would with vaccines. You need to imagine reactions to a work of art with deep artistic knowledge and a clear enough mind, and you also need to ignore external influences, such as the artist's reputation. Even so, you'll still see some disagreements because everyone is different and it's hard to judge art, especially recent art. There is absolutely no total order relationship between the work and people's ability to judge the work, but there is definitely a certain partial order relationship between the two. So, while there is no perfect aesthetic, good aesthetics exist.