You know, Derek, I thought about prefacing my response to Mark's question with the following caveat:
[Nothing I say below should be read as being even remotely controversial (e.g., indicative of sufficiency, necessity, or as endorsing either implicitly or explicitly any particular art theoretical view or any specific position on the nature of aesthetic value, experience, properties, concepts, or attitudes].


Then I realized that doing so would be akin to placing a "DO NOT INGEST" warning label on razor blades. That is, anyone in possession of the appropriate concepts, the capacity for rational inference, and comprehension of basic conversational rules would easily arrive at the caveat themselves, and as such, explicitly stating it would only come across as needlessly paternalistic if not also outright intellectually insulting. My mistake.

Upon reflection I realized that the only reason I had for placing such a ridiculous disclaimer on my response was to forestall the inevitable wave of distorted, irrelevant, woefully under-informed knee-jerk lunacy that you call a reply. That's right, I felt the need to Derek-proof my response even though it neither addressed you nor directly concerned anything that you had said (I do, however, apologize for the Titian-Caravaggio mix up). Notice that this Derek-proofing isn't a compliment (at least anymore than a parent of teenager feeling the need to child-proof the electrical outlets should be taken as complimenting the teenager).

Of course, I suppose that my reply to Mark did concern you, thought albeit in a roundabout manner. That is, I felt extra motivation to attempt a helpful response to Mark when I noticed that his forum topic had adopted an all too familiar pattern:

Step One: Someone (usually someone outside aesthetics) would ask a perfectly reasonable question and expect more or less well-formed, informative, and on point replies, only to then be met with ill-formed, uninformative, and off-topic responses from you.

Step Two: That person would then quite respectfully respond with some wholly unnecessary clarification followed by a restatement of the initial perfectly reasonable question, only again to be met with more ill-formed and off-topic replies from you (usually of the following form "I know almost nothing about X but obviously the claim that X could be an F is absurd or at least is not as pressing a concern as whether Ys can be Gs")

Step Three: That person in the interest of charity and civility repeats Step Two but this time begins to show signs of frustration at having to do so. You respond by attacking some farcical distortion of the question the person asked in Step One, which is usually followed by some implicit insult or other (e.g., describing their interest or view as "pathetic", or accusing them of being philosophically ignorant or neglectful, etc.).

Step Four: That person, now exhausted, fully realizes the utter futility of the discussion, and promptly exits the forum never to return.

You aren't being helpful. You are instead actively driving folks away. While I would love to see the Aesthetics forum become a place for productive exchange (and, yes, this includes having heated, intense philosophical debates), as it currently stands, the forum threatens to be little more than an inhospitable wasteland littered with toxic Derek-Allan posts and occasional Christy-Mag-Uidhir invective. That sucks something fierce.

At the very least, I would greatly appreciate it if you did not respond to my posts. We are well past the point of the party where I have given you a host of social and conversational cues indicating that I'm not interested in what you have to say. If you want to jump on in with respect to someone else's posts, then tear it up; if they are likewise uninterested or take issue with your replies, then it's clearly up to them to let you know as much (I'll happily remain silent). But it should now be painfully clear that I do not want to philosophically engage with you at all whatsoever. You should respect that.