Jerry Saltz states that there is bad art at the Chelsea Galleries and the goes off on tangent as to why having “bad art” is not such a bad thing after all.  Using percentages he describes how much good art there is and how much bad art there is.  My question is:  How is it possible to measure what the general public feels about art if such a small part of the population that goes to view art is actually qualified to judge it as good or bad?

Henri Matisse said “It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color-not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression”(pg 49).  Why is it that an artist may not color for the purpose of being descriptive?  It is because he is not experienced enough to know how to use colors to represent something or is it that colors are more of a way to express one’s state of mind or emotion instead of using them technically for a purpose?

Shaw-  What struck me as interesting was the discovery part of the play.  If I may connect both readings, Sporre describes discovery as “the revelation of information about the characters” and this is precisely what happens when the Clandons discover that Mr.Crampton is their father at the lunch. I thought the play was going in a direction, prior to that lunch scene, more focused on the story of Valentine and his love interests and/or monetary situation with the landlord, and that the whole discussion about prying for information about their father from Mrs.Clandon was a supplement back-story to Valentine and his situation.  I found this interesting because it was a very quick change for me to see a discovery alter the trajectory of the plot completely.  So my question is did anyone else feel the plot go in a direction opposite where they thought it would go initially?

Sporre-  Sporre’s views on formal and contextual criticism intrigued me because I immediately thought of how different the view of a play must be to a critic and to the average person.  Sporre mentions several times that critics have a lot to consider when forming a critique, so in my mind formal and contextual criticism are different levels of critiquing in themselves.  Is that possible?  One would assume that solely looking at the artwork purely for its merit, which formal criticism asks us to do, will surely distance us from the motivations for said artwork.  However, this angle would be much simpler for an average play connoisseur to practice.  The contextual form of criticism is more complex because it uses the artwork itself as a basis for the interpretation of the writers’ intentions, the period in which the play was written and so on and so forth.  So is it possible that the two forms of criticism are at different degrees of difficulty or are they just two different ways any critic of any caliber can choose to approach writing their own critique?

How come art and its purpose are such a difficult concepts to understand?  With all of their relationships to different topics like science, religion, and history wouldn’t those relationships make them easier to grasp?