wb54885, I believe you, along with the rest of us, are pondering age-old questions: what constitutes art? Is some art better than other art? And what is the interplay between art and proficiency?
I don't know anything about music but my wife was an art history major so we're in a lot of museums and over the years have talked quite a bit about painting. If we were to compare two renaissance paintings hanging in a museum, it's probably a good bet both artists achieved the level of proficiency necessary to create their art.
Once proficiency has been attained, while we might say one artist is more proficient than the other, one painting may evoke more of an emotional response with me, the other painting may resonate with my wife. I don't believe it's possible to say one painting is better than another. I'm sure you see where this is going, but substitute "pizza" for "painting" you'll have my view.
best,
QD, thank you for these ideas. One of my favorite concepts in criticism is the idea that proficiency/mastery is at the same time the “final” stage of learning, and also, seemingly paradoxically, a stage that looks sometimes wildly different from practitioner to practitioner. This is a major guiding thought in my appreciation of all trades and arts. It means that it doesn’t make sense to rank the greatest pizzerias against each other, but that it makes sense instead to identify the tier of Greatness and then to look at the ways individual artists express themselves at that level. Once you have reached technical mastery, what is left is playfulness and invention. And as Hans alludes to, whose expression of Self you individually connect with the most can be an illuminating event of self-discovery and even revelation. Is the pizza good because people like it, or do people like it because it’s good? I don’t know if it matters!
