Feeling

When we react to a piece of art, our feelings arise from a whole bunch of different places. Some of those places are "measurable" and some are not, some are from inside of us, or from some sort of contextual information we happen to have, and which we inflict upon the thing. There are no straight lines here, there are great swirling masses of interacting ideas, facts, falsehoods, and more feelings, all smashing in to one another and producing more of the same.

There's a bunch of things a piano player can do to interpret a piece of music. They can play it fast, loud, they can play individual notes more or less quietly. They can fool around with tempo, they can "swing" the music, and so on. All these things are measurable, which is not to suggest that we ought to measure them. These are audible effects. Some piano players also do things that don't affect the sound, at least not directly. Pressing keys "deep into the keybed" has no effect on the sound, although it may affect the player and thereby alter the interpretation in audible ways somewhere else.

Other things, though, affect the way a piece of piano music takes us. If the player is very pretty, or known to be very talented, if the hall is elegant or shabby. If the stereo system we're listening to the recording through has solid gold speaker cables, and so on. None of these things are audible, but they nevertheless change the way we hear the music.

I do not care to deny anyone their "open soundstage" or their "three-dimensional print," these are real sensations that happen not to arise from anything that is actually present.

There is one important point to be made, though: these feelings which arise from externalities are not transferable. If you don't happen to know a priori that platinum prints, well made, can appear to glow, then when you see one you won't feel the glow. Measurable, the property so disdained by the aficionado, is not the point. Transferability is. The two happen to overlap, perhaps even be exactly the same, but nobody is going to take a densiometer to your print and nobody is going to measure your ridiculous stereo's output.

If I, as a would-be critic, want to tell you, an unknown reader, about a piece of art I cannot be nattering on about non-transferable things. I cannot be telling you about properties of the print, or the painting, or the performance which you cannot perceive unless you've been prepared properly. Critical understandings of Art need to stick to what is in the piece of art and a few details and facts that reasonably surround it. Can I talk about the artist a bit? Sure. Can I talk about the artist's mother? Maybe. Can I talk about the bacon the artist ate the morning before she took the picture? Probably not. The line is a bit blurry, the area is grey.

The region of legitimate discourse may have somewhat fuzzy edges, but it is constrained, and really needs to be mostly about the work at hand.

What I really can't do is talk about things only cultists perceive. I can't talk about the way an ambrotype seems to have such depth because that phrase doesn't mean anything, and it refers to a feeling that only people who like to talk about how ambrotypes have such depth perceive.

Indeed, by introducing such a phrase to the uninitiated, I am likely to do harm. A phrase like such depth might well mean something to the tyro, they might with a bit of struggle invent their own imaginary sensation to fit the phrase. Likely it will not match the feeling it describes to the aficionados, and now the tyro is not only perceiving things that are not actually present, but they're the wrong things.

If I tell someone willy nilly about cat piss flavor notes in wine they might well roll a bit of wine around, imagine they have found it, and then start tasting cat piss in all the wines that the experts agree don't have that note.

Now, not only have I made all wine taste like piss for this poor blighter, I have probably embarrassed him in front of his wiser friends.

To cast it in earlier terms, much of the mystification surrounding, say, photographic prints properly lies with the personal reading, and in that position is a wonderful and rewarding thing. These things do not, however, belong in the critical reading for the simple reason that there's an entire category of people (the uninitiated) who won't include it in their personal reading.

The critical reading seeks to understand the world of possible personal reads, and therefore properly hews to the transferable, or measurable.