Your post is just a typical arts-based response. Not rigorous, sloppy, with "No doubt", "might suggest", "my impression is", "interpersonal challenges". It's just a sloppy mess that can't be engaged with, quite deliberately.
Edit, if I sound frustrated I am. I'm trying to get a better handle on 'art' so I can understand what is there and what its genuinely worth to other people. It's rare to get anything other than gloop, from which I'm starting to wonder at the bona fides of people who say supportive things of art. Generative art is frankly amazing - how much input was from artists (any at all?), how much was from scientists/mathematicians? (and how much from the intersection of the two if that's not empty).
> "Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality"
I asked what is truth to you, and you regurgitate something from Wikipedia with no synthesis of your own. OK, now why don't you copy and paste the definitions for "fact" and "reality", and make sure they don't contain any synonyms for "true" or "real". We can keep iterating from there until one of us passes out from sheer boredom.
> can't be engaged with
Nonsense. You could, for instance, engage in showing me just how non-rigorous my statements are. You can start by proving that every single person who has ever seen Goodfellas came away from it with zero delta in their understanding of the Mafia or inspiration to learn about it. Including me. And then prove to me whether their understanding was "true" or not.
And then prove to me that I didn't think of new ways to deal with the problems I had between myself and some friends as I was reading Proust. And/or that I would've thought of those things if I never read Proust.
And then prove to me that science fiction has never inspired any scientist or mathematician in the history of science fiction.
And that there has never been a person that looked at Dali's melting clocks and wondered if time is more complicated than what they currently thought.
The problem is that it can take a long time to explain certain feelings or ideas you get from art (of any form), and even the attempt is a bit painful or downright impossible.
A very low-level example would be a Jackson Pollock or Mondrian painting. It's just a bunch of... stuff but it's extremely visually pleasing compared to just random blotches. There are theories as to why that might be[0] but overall, it would be nigh impossible to tell you why I personally find these pieces compelling because the reason is almost unconscious and tactile.
A medium level example would be a song that inspires a certain narrative in your mind. For instance, that intro song by the XX gives me all sorts of conflicting emotions that could be summarized as 'wanting to do more with my life', but the summary doesn't do it justice at all.
A higher-level example would be a piece of literature read at the right time in your life. It's a show-don't-tell type of exercise where the author exposes ideas to you about life or the world without spelling them out explicitly. Sometimes the ideas don't have much to do with the surface details of the narrative. In many ways, it is similar to experiences you actually lived yourself and that imparted ideas or lessons to you.
If you are not in the same headspace, this will seem like a con or pretentious nonsense. But what is really going on is that trying to explain it is often like trying to explain a joke or a subtle social interaction to someone who didn't get it.
My friend once tried to explain to me the beauty of the Carmack fast invert square root, and I didn't really get it because I lacked certain foundational ideas. But there was no doubt in my mind that he was seeing artistic worth in that moment, and that despite me being unable to understand it it was certainly not 'gloop'.
Trying to come at it with the combative Wikipedia-article-on-fallacies/STEM vs. art mindset is self-defeating, like interpreting the scientific method as a tool for prescriptive claims.
I don't have time to do this very good answer justice, I'm sorry. Let me try and be brief. Some people like Pollocks or Mondrians, some don't, and one thing I'm asking really is that people be honest and not pretend. Such honesty is a kind of rigour.
if we accept that certain kinds of art are liked by some people and not by others then questions have to be asked about what I some art is considered good generally (and goes in the gallery) and some isn't. To ask this question is also a kind of rigour.
Art I don't believe can be justified in any scientific sense, but I think the art may be judgeable in its own context, and I'm fine with that, provided we try. This too is a kind of rigour.
I perfectly understand the your fast inverse square root, or Euler's e/i/pi/-1 formuala are beautiful to some, they are not to you and me. Let's be careful with that, try and understand, and tolerate people's differences instead of saying "this is beautiful" and "this is not beautiful" (because that's an absolutist position). This is a kind of rigour.
I agree, scientific method is not appropriate, but something else is. Let's try to find it?
Anyway, that is an absolutely excellent answer and while it doesn't answer my questions, it does open up the hope that these questions can be answered or at least approached. For which, thank you!
Edit: somehow some just is bad, check out http://museumofbadart.org/collections/ I'd wear dark shades if I were you, some of this stuff blisters the eyes.
There are bound to be philosophers who have tackled these questions in detail. I can't make any recommendations here as I lack the requisite knowledge, but I do have a proposition that starts with the following question:
"What sort of knowledge and information do we rely on independently of the scientific method?"
We can't come up with an exhaustive answer, but what immediately comes to mind would be social skills, gut feelings, "common sense", familiarity with discursive and rhetorical styles, any understanding of the world that has no control group and can probably never benefit from one. Of course, there are plenty of counters to any of these elements. You could say that some people deploy the scientific method in some way with social skills and so on. Or point out the LessWrong community's daily use of Bayes' theorem as they live their lives. Overall, the vast majority of our daily decisions are non-scientific and driven by feelings and intuitions, even if you can apply a top-down conscious modification of your lifestyle to meet goals, better your conditions over the long term etc.
The main conclusion we are left with is that there is a plurality of understanding across human beings that is not quantifiable but decently predictable across an undefined range of subjects. You can make a joke in a certain setting, and expect people to laugh fairly reliably (assuming you are good at this of course). You can talk to HN users and have a strong intuitive sense of what sort of discussion they might want to engage in. A person who is naturally talented at humor will not be rigorous in an explicit sense, but their ability to be funny will be rigorous in its rate of success. That bad art website you linked to (correctly) assumes that there is a sense of what bad art is and that much of the population shares that natural-mixed-with-cultural intuition. They publish the website with the expectation of the audience understanding it.
So essentially, the 'something else' we are looking for can simply be to accept that when we talk about art, we talk about a predictable understanding that is self-hosted across multiple sentient serv... uh, sorry, minds we are likely to interact with, and that can also be reliably understood from scratch. Now, you probably let out a groan at this point because we seem to be essentially back to your initial frustration: a bunch of people whose intentions aren't clear talking about equally unclear things as if they were obvious to their listeners, and being slippery when questioned.
But! the key addition here is the "understandable from scratch". You can expect any human being to understand artistic value to some extent (unlike, say, Terence Tao level math which I am confident I'll never understand), but gaining that understanding will require social and cultural engagement over a period of time on their part. The rigour we seek is something we will have to demonstrate ourselves in the intensity of our efforts to engage with art and its context.
One reason that good art is often defined by its ability to stand the test of time, is because this indicates a solid reliability in getting people across very different eras and mental worlds to engage with it successfully and be willing to 'steelman' the artists' vision.
Your post is just a typical arts-based response. Not rigorous, sloppy, with "No doubt", "might suggest", "my impression is", "interpersonal challenges". It's just a sloppy mess that can't be engaged with, quite deliberately.
Edit, if I sound frustrated I am. I'm trying to get a better handle on 'art' so I can understand what is there and what its genuinely worth to other people. It's rare to get anything other than gloop, from which I'm starting to wonder at the bona fides of people who say supportive things of art. Generative art is frankly amazing - how much input was from artists (any at all?), how much was from scientists/mathematicians? (and how much from the intersection of the two if that's not empty).