Sunday, April 26, 2015

A prophecy about Youtube music video comments...

I am glad to say that I have to a great extent kept out of all those disputes about taste which are called arguments about art, though they are not arguments about anything. A true argument begins with a first principle and ends with a final proof- or a final failure to prove. An artistic argument begins with somebody disliking something, and ends with his disliking everybody who happens to like it. A dispute about taste is never in any sense settled. But, as a fact, men for the most part vastly prefer to dispute about taste, because they do not want their disputes settled. You cannot prove in black and white the superiority of blue and green, but you can bang each other about the head and pretend to prove it in black and blue. Hence we always find that these illogical disputes are the most pugnacious and provocative. They produce a prodigious race of people swaggering and laying down the law. And they lay down the law because there is no law to be laid down. There is no disputing about tastes, and therefore there is always bragging, brawling, and rioting about tastes.
-December 17, 1927, Illustrated London News

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