Desert Island Books

Recently we have been discussing different ways to analyze texts, and this in turn sort of lead into a conversation of interpretation spanning art in general, but we limited it to our favorite books.
Dialogue has various different parts: matter, form, nature, soul, intellect, and good. Digging deeper into these various aspects of the dialogue, I started to wonder about typical reactions to art and how "art consciousness" has shifted greatly since the Neo Platonists and today.

Here comes the exposition!

I am a musician and I appreciate when people enjoy the music I make, who wouldn't? But one thing that I have noticed, when describing art--be it a book or song--people like to use the terms "interesting" or "boring" when asked their opinion. For some reason this really annoys me. I think describing a piece of art as interesting or boring lends itself to a naive approach towards/understanding of art.

Looking at the various parts of dialogue used by Proclus, the categories boring and interesting seem to be out of place;indeed, they are not even present. What does it mean for something to be boring or interesting? (Apparently Hegel thought it was not a compliment to call something interesting) How do we experience boredom or interest? It seems to me that the interesting and the boring are both presuppositions of one another; two psychological categories that rest in the emotions and not in any sort of objective. The vicissitudes of these feelings prove their solipsistic nature--surely bespeaking the solipsistic milieu of art. Also, these feelings seem to stand in for concepts such as "the beautiful" or "the ugly." The way we register the interesting or boring is also interesting (ha). An interesting/boring object finds itself in our attention, we take cognizance of the object and then just as easily we let it go passing it off as boring or interesting. The effect doesn't last any longer than it takes for me to perceive, it only lasts as long as I am subject to the interesting/boring object, and only in the sense that I am sitting in church bored, but once I leave church I never dwell on this boring experience again. The same thing can be said about an interesting experience. The notion of the interesting arises when our conception of truth is no longer connected to art. Nowadays we connect truth to science.

I will figure out some more stuff to say about this in the next few days. Gotta get started on that paper!