Musings on Aesthetics and Social Science

 

As other commentators before me have noted, some cartoon shows capture real life better than the television dramas or comedies starring real people. Take Beavis and Butthead, the title characters in Mike Judge's famous cartoon show Beavis and Butthead which ran on the music network turned drama and comedy network MTV. Beavis and Butthead represent a common "school" of "criticism" in the real world, the I like it or I don't like it "school" of "criticism". It is their type of "criticism" that dominates contemporary aesthetic discourse as one can see by taking a cursory glance at the "criticism" one finds on social media and on sites like Amazon about a host of phenomena including politics, economics, and culture. As Mike Judge, the creator of Beavis and Butthead points up again and again in the early years of the show, the characters Beavis and Butthead represent the lowest common denominator form of "criticism", a form of "criticism" that isn't refective, that doesn't ask why, economically, politically, culturally, demographically, and geographically, certain people like or value certain things. 

There is, of course, an entire intellectual and academic domain specialising in this question of beauty and value, aesthetics. Typically, as one is taught in introductory aesthetics classes, there have been and are two dominant schools in aesthetics; the beauty and value of something or someone is inherent in that something or someone and the beauty and value are in the eyes of the beholder school of aesthetics. The former school argues that the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Budweiser beer, or a painting by Van Gogh, for instance, are inherently beautiful or valuable. The latter school, on the other hand, argues that the beauty and value of Buffy, Bud, or Van Gogh are variably valued or considered beautiful.

I subscribe to the beauty and value is in the eyes of the beholder school because, empirically speaking, it is clear to the scientific observer that some people like Buffy, some people don't, that some people like Bud, others don't, and that some people like the paintings of Van Gogh, some of them with economic and cultural power and authority, some don't, and they, at least at the moment, have limited economic and cultural power to impact broader views about the beauty and value of the work of Van Gogh. It should be noted here that when Van Gogh was alive the opposite was true, most of the art establishment and most of the money men did not find the work of Van Gogh beautiful and did not see it as valuable.

This fact, that, empirically speaking, some people value and find beauty in some object or some person, points up the fact that the eye of the beholder, a title of a Twilight Zone episode on the very subject of nature of beauty, school of aesthetics is descriptively right. Value and beauty are in the eye of the beholder. That most people, such as Beavis and Butthead, don't think reflectively about the nature of beauty (and the beast), points up, just as Mike Judge intended, how limited the examined life is among the lowest common denominator masses. That most of the lowest common denominator masses, and some elites though for different reasons, still maintain that beauty and value are inherent in objects and people in spite of the clear empirical evidence that it isn't, points up the role ethnocentrism plays in human society and culture. Humans like to think that what they find beaufiful and value is what everybody should find beautiful and value. For them the normative determines the descriptive. That is not science and is not scientific, however.