> > Art is based on its intrinsic aesthetic properties and the kind of contemplative experience it elicits.

> Would that mean that you don’t recognise the existence of bad art? Because that seems to be the consequence of what you are saying.

To be honest, I can't think of anything that would constitute "bad art" in accordance with this view of art. It's an interesting question, and maybe it does exist, but right now I just can't think of anything that qualifies as such. To me, there's "art" and "not art", though I admit the line dividing the two is fuzzy. "Bad" would require some form of ranking, but it's hard to imagine an adequate criteria even before factoring in different art forms.

>> > or the "common sense" view

> Oh. Sorry. I didn’t know you are the resident common sense expert this week. Next time i will make sure to ask you what i should think before i think.

I went out of my way to say that it doesn't matter what I personally think, but rather the aesthetic properties of the artwork and the contemplative experiences it evokes on the receivers of the art in general. And the choice of the words "contemplative" and "experience" are not accidental. This feels like a bad faith rather than a charitable interpretation of my position.

My use of "common sense" (in quotes) was perhaps a poor attempt at saying that, if within a given social and cultural context there exists some moderately agreed upon view of what is and isn't "aesthetically interesting and a contemplative experience", then this may also be applied to a broad enough social and cultural group to arrive at a "common" view of what has artistic merit. Ask a million people if Vermeer is art. I can't imagine a significant number of them will say it isn't.

> > then the photos in the article have very little aesthetic value

> What you seems to be missing is that the photos here are not the art. This is not photography. The whole package together is what is art here. The story behind the photos, what they did and how they did it. This is a sort of performance art.

I'm saying it has very little artistic value even if it might have meaningfully political value. It can be a political performance. A form of protest, even. It's just not art, performance or otherwise, according to the model of artistic reality which I espouse.

> The photos are just an aspect of this performance art. Imagine that you would hear the sound recording of a dance performance. Shuffling feet, occasional stomping. Would it have an aesthetic value? It might or might not. But that doesn’t mean the dance wasn’t artistic. Similarly to this case the audio recording is not the art piece, just an imprint of it. Part of the whole package, but not the package itself.

That's a strawman. My argument goes way beyond claiming this isn't art because the photos aren't artistic enough. Even with the performance, the project, the bringing the people together, posting, getting reactions from people, it's all just a cool project with a political bent. It still doesn't qualify as aesthetically interesting.

> Lol. You are just wrong on that. I’m here contemplating the whole thing since half an hour at least. But you sure seems to like to just declare things.

It's quite remarkable how visceral of a reaction this causes on people. This whole response just reads like cognitive dissonance, but particularly this final bit. My arguments have generally been about art and aesthetics. I rarely used the words "you" or "your", except to point out what I perceived as less-than-adequate debate manners for the most part. It would be nice if others would extend me the same courtesy.