The promised second half.
If something is well-crafted enough to repay attention to its fine details, I think the result is much “better art”. This [depth] is a part of the “skill” category, above, which I think you shortchange somewhat; if anyone can do it, we are unlikely to find something nearly as impressive or interesting. Come to think of it, that speaks to the “rarity” issue as well.
In terms of skill, again I think it’s looking backwards to state that art is good because it was created by someone skilled. If anyone can do it, we are unlikely to remark on the person’s skill. Humans are quite skilled at walking, for instance, but hardly anyone cares to remark on it. But it doesn’t make us unskilled at it. Similarly, if anyone could create deep, aesthetically pleasing works of art, hardly anyone would care to remark on the ability. But if we removed the ability from 99% of the population, the few who retain the ability might become more interesting and impressive—but they would be exactly as skilled as they were when everyone had their abilities. So while it may be true that “if anyone can do it, we are unlikely to find something nearly as impressive or interesting,” I think this has more to do with rarity than it does with skill.
With respect to the issue of rarity, let us try a gedankenexperiment. Let’s imagine that a really amazing piece of art, full of level upon level of meaning, is something that is created only once a century. So after five hundred years, only five such works have been created. Then let us further imagine that, after these five hundred years have passed, something suddenly changes such that it’s trivial to create a piece of art just as full of content and depth as the previously-created five. After a year, a hundred more such works have been created, bringing the total to a hundred and five artistic works.
Has anything changed in the original five? Nothing intrinsic to them has changed. Assuming the new hundred are (as our gedankenexperiment states) exactly the same in terms of depth of meaning, for any person who has access to only a single piece of art, it doesn’t matter whether they have access to one of the original five or the latter hundred. In terms of intrinsic value, I believe they would all just as enjoyable for someone who has access to only one.
However, someone who has access to the entire collection (growing by hundreds every year) will likely not find any of the works as impressive or interesting, simply because they are more common. Familiarity breeds contempt.
I guess what I’m trying to say in terms of rarity is that the original five works aren’t intrinsically worth more than the other hundred simply because they were created during a time when such works were more rare. The issue of rarity can affect the aesthetic value of all hundred and five as a group, but if the original five are better or worse than the following hundreds, it is due to some issue apart from rarity.
Hence if works with detailed fonts are difficult to create because they must be each individually hand-lettered, then suddenly they become exponentially more common because computers make the gruntwork disappear, then so long as the attention to detail really is identical, the original difficult-to-create works are not any better artistically than the later easier-to-create works. We may remain in awe of the people who spent hour upon hour in painstaking work. We may have decreased aesthetic appreciation for both the new works and the old simply because we see them so often. But if we see some new piece, it seems foolish to me to ask, “Was this hand-lettered or computer-rendered?” before making a judgment as to its artistic merit. If you can’t tell by examining it, I don’t think it makes any difference.
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