[littlemanpoet]

Methinks, Kalessin, your essay is thoroughly postmodern; by this I intend no derogation, just a generaly accurate tag. A modern essay would have set up one straw man, calling it the objective standard, that another would knock down, then another that, until all would finally conclude that there can be no objective standard. Rather, you acknowledge the integrality of the subject as necessarily considered in an essay on art and aesthetics.

The bottom line of art is that it is created by humans - and therefore subject to human aesthetics.

This particular acknowledgment is one of the key correctives postmodern thought propounds over modernist.

Just nit-picking, but I think it would be more consistent to say that a chair or car has at least an artistic component; what is known in both industries as 'design'. That it is usually accomplished by a team does not lessen its standing as art. Or do you make an aesthetic distinction between art and craft?

I appreciate your apt wording that 'the poet records' the poem that seemed to come from nowhere.

"I like Mozart ; therefore to me Mozart is good ; other people don't like Mozart ; to them Mozart is not good ; why is Mozart good? ; if Mozart is good, why do some people not like Mozart? ; can you think Mozart is good if you don't like it?" - and so on. I do not believe there is a 'right' answer...

At this point I must take some exception. I agree that no mechanical system of perceptive evaluation will provide sufficient tools. However, "we" perceive aesthetics in remarkable accord, to some degree collectively, to a greater culturally, and most, cross-culturally. Whereas individual evaluation may be limited by experience, taste, knowledge, etc., and some collectives may be limited also by religious intolerance, and some cultures may be limited by taboo or what-have-you, nevertheless, cross-cultural aesthetics acknowledge quality of craft, depth of insight, thematic scope, and breadth of applicability that separate genius from giftedness, both from pedestrian, and all three from the mundane. Thus Beethoven and Mozart are both considered geniuses, as are Japanese Haikuists I cannot name but have heard of.