geordief

Doesn't technical ability increase the "vocabulary" of the artist and thereby the work? And ,as is often mentioned you can be fluent in any number of languages and have nothing worth saying in any. So ,as a corollary you can be highly technically skilled and also have a worthwhile expression ** which would make the object more intrinsically valuable than if the opposite were true. The "business " of art ,whilst it is in the OP might be a red herring as to whether an artwork can have genuine worth. ** not sure how I could define that ,though as a self professed "philistine".

I have a friend who travels around the country from one poetry competition to another. She quite often wins a monetary prize.Some value there

John Fahey claimed he changed his preferences very suddenly https://www.johnfahey.com/Blood.htm "Where I was brought up was very prejudiced towards Negroes," Fahey explains. "I was taught to hate and fear them. I didn't like black music very much, I wouldn't even listen to it." Two years later, Fahey heard the record that turned his music and life around: Blind Willie Johnson's "Praise God I'm Satisfied". "[Blues connoisseur] Dick Spottswood and I were sat in a store where they were selling up old 78s," he remembers. "They weren't catalogued or anything, they were just lying around. We were going through them and I was not picking up any records by Negroes for myself because all I wanted was bluegrass. I found several black records and gave them to Spottswood. Then we went over to this other collector's house and he put on the Blind Willie Johnson. I started to feel nauseated so I made him take it off, but it kept going through my head so I had to hear it again. When he played it the second time I started to cry, it was suddenly very beautiful. It was some kind of hysterical conversion experience where in fact I had liked that kind of music all the time, but didn't want to. So, I allowed myself to like it." Is that what you meant by "personal preferences"?

Can they be wrong?Do you need to understand a work of art before you give an opinion that can be considerered "considered"? Suppose we segregate all those people who can be considered knowledgeable enough that their opinion is valuable and we (as we surely will,I imagine) find a spectrum of responses to the piece... Can we collate those varied reactions and come to something of a consensus amonst the cohort of some intrinsic value(s) of the piece? Not to say that the opinion of the relatively ignorant is not also important but that its importance can be overstated. For years I thought Hendix wanted to "kiss this guy".I still liked the song...

But not all value is monetary. Suppose you happen to be an artist and you are questioning the value of what you do on a daily basis (reflecting on you life choices and actions).. well your work as an artist would be one of those choices or activities that you might wish to evaluate on its own merits. Could that be done or would personal judgements of that kind be kind of "flip of the coin"? (Whether or not it was appreciated,perhaps?) What about Zelensky's refusal of the offer of an American helicopter out of Kiev?

What about intrinsic worth? Can that be evaluated in any way? Purely subjective,aside from technical ability? I Any examples? Edith Piaf?

Would there be an evolutionary advantage to "art creators"? It is very common for artists to say that they picked up an instrument "to get laid" John Fahey ,for one.

Who does understand the art? Anyway the masked figure was probably posing for inclusion in a latter montage where they run the risk of ridicule by anyone who knows them. How does Banksy manage to do all those murals more or less incognito? Was it perhaps a self portrait this time? To the OP art works as a mirror into the creator and viewer.How effective I can't say - or whether what is being reflected necessarily has intrinsic worth.(everything is faceted)

There used to be gods for everything ,at least in Greek and Roman religion. Why not an extra God of the Vacuum ? Could give it a name....Miele or Henry?

No ,most of the people in our road were second homers from London (and Southend) It was Mersea and not really a pier .Just a jetty to moor small boats and go crabbing .Think it was part of the River Colne and we had the best known oyster population until the winter of 63 wiped them out.

Edit.This site is loading incredibly slowly this past while.Maybe that is the problem?

I normally use an android phone but there is a Samsung Tablet in the house and I am now using it (with Chrome) I don't see a problem this end (there are ads af the top of the page) Have you tried both landscape and portrait? I find that sometimes one works better than the other.

We had a neighbour who owned a gift shop in Southend in the 60s .We always thought of him as a millionaire (presumably because he told us) They were the nicest people and used to walk down to the pier every morning to jump into the sea ,even in '63 when he broke the ice when even the sea water froze. He had heart problems and his doctor eventually told him to stop the practice. When the next door house to both of us was demolished by the council as a health risk he paid me and his son piece rates to gather the old bricks which my father used to build a new wall beween the houses and all around our own all around - (his nickname was "Myrddin the wall" and he used to ferry extra bricks from across the river in our sailboat. His son was 6 foot 10 and once made the mistake of diving off the pier into shallow water ,damaging his neck(nothing like what happened to poor Hanif Kureishi thankfully)

There is a well known remark about time stopping everything happening at once. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/07/06/time/#:~:text=Dear Quote Investigator%3A Albert Einstein,doesn't happen at once. Can we say the same about space ?(did someone famous actually say it ? I thought they did.) ie that space "prevents things all being at the same place"

Definitely. We have to take things as we find them. What is the connection between space-time and space? Is space timeless? A 3d surface in 4d space-time? Just because I was wondering ,do excitations of the fields attract gravitationally ?(think the answer should be "yes")

Not if it was an extremely large black hole. They might die of boredom.(or enlightenment)

I can't comment as some (most)of those terms are outside my knowledge bubble.

https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/news/2023/07/04/time-universe.html#:~:text=“Looking back to a time,at the University of Sydney. Is this relevant to the discussion?The link above says that astronomers have found that processes in the early universe... (and this is their quote) “This expansion of space means that our observations of the early universe should appear to be much slower than time flows today. In this paper, we have established that back to about a billion years after the Big Bang.” So the cause is "the expansion of space". Since this (accelerated?**) expansion is ongoing ,it seems to me that future processes should (if we could see them but we can't because by definition they haven't happened yet) .. should appear more rapid . In the actual frame of reference of the processes themselves I think no change in the rate of time passing is observed (or observable?) This,also is the relevant paper in Nature Astronomy from a year ago (I have no subscription) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-023-02029-2 **I am unclear as to whether space is/has been just expanding or undergoing an accelerated expansion and how that would affect the time dilation caused by the phenomenon.

This ,in March from a Trump supporting website https://www.theamericanconservative.com/trump-2028/ "This is plainly unfair. Indeed, there has long been support for axing the Twenty-second Amendment due to the artificial limits it places on voter choice"

Hope that is not a euphemism.Let the good times roll On topic I hope @Janus is not too close to the fires.

I had a downslope ankle f'up a couple of years ago .The very day I was to drive a neighbour into the doctor with a sprained ankle from twisting hers in a pothole. I walked down to the garden in slippery wellies the very next morning and my foot slid away from me in the slippery ,slightly inclined wet muddy surface . I slid a couple of yards and came down with the right foot squeezed directly under my right buttock and pointing backwards. A loud snapping sound but nothing broken. Still, quite a bit of recuperation involved (they don't always heal properly if you don't give them time) @exchemist I just got a preliminary letter from the hospital , some 40 days since I saw the optometrist from the ophthalmology dept to have a look at the Weiss ring .I wonder should I bother as I have had nothing untoward in my vision since**.(there have been long waiting lists in the hospital but I assumed this would have been classed as fairly urgent for them to refer me at all) (the optometrist told me at the time that she saw a paler part of the floater that she couldn't tell if it was still attached to the retina.That is why she referred me to the ophthalmologist at the hospital) **of course the Weiss ring is always there.

He is the joint leader in a poll to be vice pick at 21%. Not sure if he is realistically in the frame. He was interviewed by Kaitlan Collins tonight and seemed in good form . Said he liked how Harris was framing the discussion around "freedom"

I think the better of him now(was starting to have doubts and worries) I couldn't see him doing a proper job into his mid 80s as we could see that mortality was settling on him. Is Gaza still the key?

I was listening to the radio and it seems that the new weight loss drugs(soon to be in pill form apparently) have upended the diet industry completely(eg weight watchers stock is down 90%) I eat very little sugar myself and feel that that has allowed me to ignore any inclination to reduce my food intake in any department (also I just feel there is no actual nutrition in sugar and mostly avoid it for that reason) So I am wondering if obsession with weight may now be a thing of the past and the general public may attain the weight they want just by consuming the new fat burning drugs. Good for us all as we will no longer have to listen to people obsessing about weight and diet -which is certainly distressing for them. I think juicing is out of fashion and blending is more recommended(not that I do that either .Our blender has sat in the cupboard for some 10 years - they are a bit messy and noisy)