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for (against?) the masses. Bense was, at the same time, clear about subjective ele-
ments in the building of an aesthetic judgement. But that was outside of scientific
investigation and research. It was purely private.
As a young man, I liked and loved this entire attitude. Everything in the world
would be rational, mathematical, objective. Everything else was absolutely without
interest.
I later adopted the view of aesthetics and sensual perception being tied together.
From there it is a short step to my position. Your beautiful hints to some other
times carry exactly the message that you summarise above. If some rule or law or
proportion or other statement is culturally important, ruling, governing, then—of
course—the individual sensual perception is, as always, largely determined by that
“objectively” (i.e. culturally) dominating fact.
Having responded to Harold, Frieder now returns to his original discussion on
developing algorithms for evaluation of aesthetics
.
We seek algorithmic methods of evaluation that might have bearings on individ-
ual subjective aesthetic judgement. Yes—some researchers or even critics and artists
want to find such measures, to define them, to construct instruments that tell us num-
bers on a scale. If we want to do this, if we neglect the deeply subjective character
of a value judgement, we will try and find or define such measures to replace (or at
least approximate) the subjective value. I am afraid, such heroic attempts will not
get them very far.
It might be necessary to recall G.D. Birkhoff's definitions of aesthetic measure in
the 1920s and 1930s. A lot of psychological work was done afterwards (in the form
of empirical measures) with the unceasing intention of scientists to explain complex
phenomena in an objective way.
The Birkhoff case is telling. He took up the old and popular idea of “order in
complexity” or “unit in complexity” (a clearly subjective value). He put in a formula:
M
O/C
(to me, this looks beautiful!). Here
M
is the aesthetic measure,
O
is the
measure for order,
C
is the measure for complexity.
See how this works? You translate the words with all their connotations into
variables. The variables stand for numbers, measured in appropriate units according
to a measuring schema. What was a subjective interpretation all of a sudden has
become reading scales. Great!
All that is left to do after this bold step is to “appropriately define” the measuring
procedure. When you read Birkhoff's examples, you will be appalled. I was not,
when I was young and did this (in the early 1960s). Birkhoff, as his famous example,
chose polygons as the class of shapes to measure aesthetically. Complexity was
for example the number of edges of the closed polygon. Order was, by and large,
the degree of symmetry (plus a few additional features). The square is the best.
7
Wonderful!
When in those days, as a young guy using computers for production of aesthetic
objects, I told people, small crowds perhaps, about this great measuring business,
=
7
By Birkhoff's formula, the square evaluates to the polygon with the highest aesthetic value.
