The Split Saber

Soren Stancliff — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 13:47:26 GMT

“Years later, when the prophet was writing his history, he had the revelation of the three glories copied into the record and commented on it with the enthusiasm of an author who has stumbled upon a bit of his early writing and marvels at its brilliance or stylistic beauty: “Every law, every commandment, every promise, every truth… witnesses the fact that the document is a transcript from the records of the eternal world. The sublimity of the ideas; the purity of the language; the scope for action… are so much beyond the narrow-minded-ness of men, that every honest man is constrained to exclaim” ‘It came from God.’”

-Fawn Brodie on Joseph Smith

On Objectivity/ Subjectivity in Art

Soren Stancliff — Thu, 16 May 2024 01:35:08 GMT

Oftentimes on the internet, I hear people use the word “objective” as hyperbole, saying a movie is “objectively the greatest but,” (for instance), “it’s slow and hard to understand and,” (again, oftentimes), “foreign”. In this case, they mean that to them, in their subjective point of view, art exists on a spectrum which at one end exists “perfection”.

To retort, people against this way of reading art commonly say, “art is subjective”. What they mean is the value of art is determined by the reader, but this argument presupposes that there is no possible objective quality to art, which I disagree with.

To me, art can be objectively good, bad, perfect, imperfect, but the determiner of this is the original artist of a piece of art. If an artist wholly believes in their own creation, it is objectively perfect, because the original artist is the most qualified critic.

As for subjectivity, I support the sentiment which those argue saying “art is subjective”. Art IS subjective, but only to the reader, not to the artist.

Because I believe in the objectivity of art according to the original artist, my subjective view of pieces of art is affected. This makes it so art about artists, specifically career retrospectives (an infamous sentiment amongst my friends), is my favourite “genre”.

I am still pondering whether or not morals and morality play into the objectivity of art. Surely, right? That is a post for another day.