art school - it's a culture,

art appreciation - is language, but

art creation - is a feeling and expression.

some of it can seem artificial, as with any monastic creed, or guild.

much of it is real - the creed honors good artists with no schooling as well.

some of it is mystique - and that powers the gallery system

Volodymyr Durmanov

perhaps you know Zen Archery, the art of living in the moment.

the tools of art themselves can be transcended, the horse, the guitar, the weapon, even the steppe.

Leaving records and souvenirs of the moment, the accessible artifacts, is bonus, but not the core idea.

However, in such terms, what differentiates art from artifacts and the business of selling valued articles, is that objects of art invariably (when engaged) raise the human spirit, or invigorate the mind, or inspire the heart, depending on which metaphor fits the observer. That can certainly include what happens when a person enters any space, or perceives beauty from afar as well.

Volodymyr Durmanov

Jerry Waese thanks for your response, but honestly I have no idea what you are talking about LOL :p

Vahid Rakhshan eventually meaning becomes accessible :wink:

I think that if you discover that your friend is a professional art critic then it would make sense not to call them a charlatan as the friendship has greater value than anyone's opinion.

Thank you dear Volodymyr Durmanov

You know, my original question was a little bit neuroscientific and/or psychological.

I was talking about people's rather strong intuition along with their lack of strong self-appraisal or self-validation. They usually tend to intuitively say for example "The voice of this singer is very good (or not good, very bad, etc.)" without even trying to ask themselves "Why I am so sure about this".

The result is severely conflicting opinions of different people about the same music or singer! Many say his voice is very good, many others say his voice is very bad, and all of them are so sure about their esthetic judgments!

So my question was:

Perhaps I should clarify my question even more.

Vahid Rakhshan When anyone says intuition to me, I simply map that to in-a- flash perception.

i.e. perception - all perception - all thinking, is fundamentally one or a series of perceptions which are intuitions.

The use of the word "intuition" as in-a-flash thought has come to mean something magic while it is the most fundamental non-magical function of the brain. Longer sequences of perceptions (==intuitions) are known as deliberative thinking, and amazingly people imagine that such deliberative thinking to be normal while intuition is not normal - well if a person is not aware of their own mental operation, that can be the case, and it mostly is.

now what really is your question? since intuitive ideas are the ones you are most immediately ready to have in any particular context naturally and always.

Thank you so much dear Volodymyr Durmanov

Thanks Jerry Waese .

• You said: "When anyone says intuition to me, I simply map that to in-a- flash perception. ... i.e. perception - all perception - all thinking, is fundamentally one or a series of perceptions which are intuitions."

I am not sure I follow. To the best of my knowledge, intuition is not much about perceptions. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition

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• Jerry: "The use of the word "intuition" as in-a-flash thought has come to mean something magic while it is the most fundamental non-magical function of the brain. Longer sequences of perceptions (==intuitions) are known as deliberative thinking, and amazingly people imagine that such deliberative thinking to be normal while intuition is not normal - well if a person is not aware of their own mental operation, that can be the case, and it mostly is."

I agree it is not magical. I too was not referring to it as something magical. Actually I was not even talking about intuition. I was talking about the judgment of art and its beauty in an intuitive and dare I say ignorant way.

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• Jerry: "now what really is your question? since intuitive ideas are the ones you are most immediately ready to have in any particular context naturally and always."

By "you", do you mean me (Vahid), or do you mean everybody in general? I guess it is the latter.

Regardless, my question is about the very prevalent combination of intuition and ignorance, when it comes to the judgment of art.

Jerry Waese you might find this interesting. Kant seems to agree with you (in certain regards):

"Immanuel Kant’s notion of "intuition" differs considerably from the Cartesian notion, and consists of the basic sensory information provided by the cognitive faculty of sensibility (equivalent to what might loosely be called perception). Kant held that our mind casts all of our external intuitions in the form of space, and all of our internal intuitions (memory, thought) in the form of time.[42]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition

Vahid Rakhshan

One of the new(er) terms I have encountered in psychology is Valence - although it is one of the oldest concepts in psychology when you look at it even-mindedly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valence_(psychology)

Valence relates to the positive pleasure aspect or the negative pain aspect that can accompany any "feeling".

I tend to use "feeling" in a global sense about how an experience feels; and let the related term "sense" or "sensation" refer to a particular neural input signal from one of the body's sense channels like touch, or vision; and as you are already familiar, I use "perception" which is related to both (and sometimes equated in dictionary definitions) to refer to the brain reflex to current mental contents.

Now if I look at it very even-mindedly while perception is the reflex to mental contents which is both sensation and perceptiion that has already occurred, and if feeling is an overall sense, I note some crossover remaining, ie. am I suggesting that feeling is an extra sense channel accreting from all other mental contents (and this is reasonable since we have a frontal cortex that can contain copies of cortical activation in other corices), or am I suggesting that feeling is an overall average perception of all mental contents which is just perception anyway.

The answer that I have is that yes it is the overall perception, of all mental contents but as a reflection of the total inclusive state of the self, while other perceptions are reflexes triggered by any set or subset of mental contents, feeling is the perception that pertains to all of it all together.

Anyway, the net valence from feeling is what I am getting at, and we are not in control about how we feel when confronted with a piece of art or anything.

The uneducated art appreciator is reacting based upon their feelings and that is a wonderful thing about art, i.e. it speaks to both the "informed" and the "illiterate" viewer.

A piece of art may have a different voice for each person, i.e. for an art critic it will excite based upon lineage and value to collectors. For an artist it may expand their own vision and teach or resolve issues they face in their own work. For an interior designer, the texture and color and maybe thematic content is important. And for the man in the street, it plays upon what they are already familiar with and feel is beautiful with some positive or negative valence and that is usually taken to be an emotional feeling.

More than this I cannot really say.

Jerry you said it all, thanks. I understand and fully agree. Your comment covered the intuition part of my question.

Though the ignorance part remains: The thing I can't understand is that most people usually don't say "I like this work". Instead, they say confidently that "this work is good", as if their opinion is THE TRUTH.

Such people seem to have no clue that their personal esthetic opinion is just their own subjective perspective, or that in the world of art, there is no clear-cut and solid "truth" or "point of reference", to begin with.

I think they mean It feels good, or I feel good looking at this.

there is no reason to question that. How often do people admit feeling good in an innocent way?

that makes it special I guess.

That makes sense Jerry.