Inferential distance comes in because art is designed to push the buttons of people, firstly the artist, in a given time, place and culture. As distance and shared cultural vocabulary increase, inferential distance increases.
Inferential distance, or cliquishness? Is there a way to distinguish whether they’re hitting some objective target, or are just agreeing to pat each other on the back?
Not really. But “are you really enjoying this or just pretending to enjoy this?” may be a technically meaningful question, but I doubt it’s actually much of a useful one.
In any case, “Thank you, but no sir, I don’t like it” is always a valid response. Since creating a subjective experience is THE WHOLE OF THE POINT of art.
(There’s little more miserable as an actual fan of music than to find oneself listening to music that is merely objectively well constructed, particularly in a smoky pub, notepad in hand, charged with writing something about it.)
Though it can be entertaining in itself to nerd about the lines of memetic descent of the cultural vocabulary used and so on. One can justifiably feel quite clever about being able to do so. But that isn’t the point. Unless, of course, for that person it is.
Inferential distance comes in because art is designed to push the buttons of people, firstly the artist, in a given time, place and culture. As distance and shared cultural vocabulary increase, inferential distance increases.
Inferential distance, or cliquishness? Is there a way to distinguish whether they’re hitting some objective target, or are just agreeing to pat each other on the back?
Not really. But “are you really enjoying this or just pretending to enjoy this?” may be a technically meaningful question, but I doubt it’s actually much of a useful one.
In any case, “Thank you, but no sir, I don’t like it” is always a valid response. Since creating a subjective experience is THE WHOLE OF THE POINT of art.
(There’s little more miserable as an actual fan of music than to find oneself listening to music that is merely objectively well constructed, particularly in a smoky pub, notepad in hand, charged with writing something about it.)
Though it can be entertaining in itself to nerd about the lines of memetic descent of the cultural vocabulary used and so on. One can justifiably feel quite clever about being able to do so. But that isn’t the point. Unless, of course, for that person it is.