It is you who are playing semantics here, not me.
It is true, it is just that you do not really comprehend what I am saying. You are simply not following me. What I am saying here is that everything is related to everything else, not that everything is equal to everything else.
It is not a dog, that is true, but it is a kind of dog i.e. it can be related to a dog.
And I actually never said “everything is everything else” but “everything is a KIND of everything else” which simply means that everything is related to everything else not that everything is related to everything else IN THE SAME WAY.
Just as cats are dogs to some people, right? It is amazing to me that you can go from “a cat is not a dog” to “art is whatever you want to be art”. It is ridiculous.
Art is NOT what is aesthetically appealing. Aesthetical appeal may be a necessary condition, but it is not a sufficient condition. Girls are aesthetically pleasing, for example, but that does not make them art, even though I can convince myself they are, or relate them to art.
This is a solipsistic way of thinking at work. The goal here is to disconnect from the world, to conceive the world not as fundamentally interconnected but as fundamentally fragmented, as if individuals or parts of the world are existing, or can exist, in a vacuum (as if anything can exist in a vacuum.)
Everything is relative to the individual, OF COURSE, because everything exists in relation to something else (everything else), never on its own. But that does not mean that individuals cannot be related to each other and that a rank cannot be established. It does not mean that the universe is fundamentally fragmented. Solipsits (i.e. “relativists”) constantly yap relativism this and relativism that when in reality they are the main opponents of relativism (in the sense of relationalism.)
Just because you do not know what is better or worse DOES NOT MEAN that there is no better or worse. You are confusing your ignorance, your lack of knowledge, with non-existence of rank between tastes. It’s an extremely annoying way of thinking. The sole purpose of such thinking is to simply BAN any sort of desire to seek truth about what is better and what is worse art, what is art and what is not art. Employed by the weaklings who do not want their illusions to be shattered. THERE SIMPLY IS NO RANK, JUST STOP TELLING ME THAT I MAY BE INFERIOR TO YOU BECAUSE EVERYONE HAS HIS OWN QUALITIES AND EVERYONE HAS HIS OWN DEFICITS, AND NO WE ARE NOT EQUAL, IT’S JUST THAT THERE IS NO RANK, SO WE ARE NEITHER EQUAL NOR UNEQUAL, WE JUST SIMPLY ARE, WHY CAN’T WE JUST FORGET ABOUT IT ALL AND SIMPLY GET ALONG!? THE WORLD WOULD BE A MUCH BETTER PLACE BLAH BLAH BLAH.
Who cares what you found, dude? My ancestors didn’t find that Earth is round, so what!? Does that mean that Earth is not round? Aristotle thought that our heads contain sand and water for the purpose of cooling it. Does that mean that our heads really contain sand and water? The point is to pick your own position and pit it against mine. The trouble, however, is that you have no position. You fucking HATE positions and your position is that positions are stupid and that they should be annihilated – that’s your sole position and such a position, I am afraid, has nothing whatsoever to do with art theory or any theory (since theories are based on positions and anything that seeks to annihilate positions seeks to annihilate theorizing, thinking, intelligence, knowledge and all other mental goodness that separates humans from animals.)
According to my own “subjective standards” . . . for christsake, dude, just stop using that pretentious word that is nothing but a sheltering tactic, a way for weaklings to disconnect themselves from whatever thoughts they can’t deal with. Here’s an interesting trivia: we always access reality through our “subjective standards”. WE DO NOT HAVE DIRECT ACCESS TO REALITY. Our subjective models are maps of objective reality that is forever elusive (since knowing reality presupposes knowing the universe in its entirety, which is an impossibility.) A classic case of conflating map and territory. LOOK IT’S JUST YOUR MAP, YOU CREATED IT WITH YOUR HEAD, MEANING IT’S NOT A PERFECT MAP BUT AN IMPERFECT MAP, THAT SURELY MEANS I CAN EASILY IGNORE IT AND SIMPLY STICK TO MY OWN.
No desire to understand reality, no desire to build an all-encompassing model of reality, to consolidate all facts and all fragmented models into a unified model, no desire for fusion at all, only desire to separate oneself from the other, to run away and hide, somewhere, anywhere, as soon as possible, via any means whatsoever.
Nobody cares if people disagree. Just because people disagree does not mean they are all equally right, for christsake. ON THE CONTRARY, it SURELY means that a lot of them are dead wrong, for one reason or another.
Now, I did not want to be harsh to you, but that’s the only way I can deal with “arguments” like this (i.e. you have no arguments, you are merely trying to annihilate all positions, all theorizing, you are located OUTSIDE of the process of theorizing, not within it.) You are a poison, a deadly poison, perhaps not intentionally so, but that’s what you are with your ideas.