We started our exploration of criteria by learning how Plato (a philosopher born in Greece around 423 B.C.E.) formulated his criteria for what makes good or bad art.
Plato had a worldview that he described by using the metaphor of a cave.
We are like people who have been strapped to chairs, unable to move. We are sitting inside a cave staring at the back wall. On the back wall we we see shadows, which we think are reality.
If we could free ourselves we would see that the shadows are actually cast by two-dimensional cutouts, and we would perceive these shapes as being reality and the shadows as only imitations. However, if we found our way of the cave, we would find the cutouts were themselves only imitations of real, three dimensional objects. We would find out that there are real tables, chairs, and cats, and that the shadows we had once thought were reality were actually only shadows of imitations.
It's kind of like in the "Holiday In Vince" episode of Rex the Runt when Rex, Wendy, and Bad Bob get into Vince's brain through his ear. Once there, they find Vince and get into his brain through his ear. At the end of the episode, Rex, Wendy and Bad Bob think they've returned to the real world, but are in fact, still inside Vince's brain. Therefore, everything they perceive has been filtered from outside reality through Vince's abnormal brain.Plato believed that outside the realm of our perception (or outside Vince's head) there is, in actuality, a reality that our earth is only an imitation of, like the cutouts. Outside our perception exist the ideals of objects and living things which Plato called "Forms." They are the perfect, ideal abstractions that our earth and everything we perceive on it, are only imitations of. Therefore, art is the shadows of the cutouts. So Plato wasn't too impressed with artists or poets. After all, they only made imitations of imitations.
To show why Plato may have believed in the world of the Forms, we talked about chairs.
We agreed that this was a chair. We defined a chair as having four legs, a place for your rear, and a back.
So is this a chair? It only has three legs. We decided it was a chair anyway and expanded our definition of chair to include three legs.
But what about this one? It has 10 legs. Still, everyone was willing to call this a chair because it met our criteria of having a place for your bum and a back. So we expanded our definition again to include ten legs.
But what about this one? Suddenly we have a chair with no feet. We're we still willing to call it a chair? Most of us were. After all, someone was sitting in it. Thus, we expanded our definition of chair yet further. It could now have between zero and ten legs.
This piece of furniture has a place to rest your bum. We're OK with it having no legs, but, it has no back. However, many of us were still willing to call it chair, thus expanding our definition yet again so that now a chair can have between zero and ten legs and have no back.
Therefore, this is a chair. It has a place for your bum, four legs and no back. The class usually protested calling this a chair. They claimed it was a television.
So I gave up and presented you with this chair. It has between zero and ten legs, a place for your bum and a back.
Plato leads us down this infuriating road to prove a point. When we talk about a chair, we're not talking about an actual object so much as chair-ness. When we define something as a chair, we're talking about how it fits on a scale of chair-like attributes. So the first picture of a chair would score high on the chair-ness scale, while the "television" and the contortionist would score lower on the scale, though they still have attributes of a chair.
The reason we recognize chair-like qualities in all these things is because, out there in the land of Forms, floats the abstract idealization of a chair which is embedded in our minds as a kind of memory. So when we see something chairish, we can discern its chair-like qualities.
So, according to Plato, we are all metaphorically strapped to chairs watching the shadow play on the wall. We do not know that the shadows are two steps removed from reality. But when we see something that stimulates our memory of a Form strongly, we call that good art.
Good art, therefore, is that shadow which most closely resembles the Form outside the cave.
