Yeah, but those are people who are nowhere near that level of excellence at all.
Gossip for those people is often just a mechanism to increase their self esteem in front of bigger than life artists who truly changed the world. It is a bit like music lovers who have strong opinions about everything, while not being able to play a single note on any instrument. For them comparing the great musicians on that level makes them feel important too – if they can't walk the walk they at least try to talk the talk. Meanwhile most actual musicians are usually far more tolerant about the types of music they would consider interesting, because for them everything new they hear is something that can be used as an influence for creation.
So if someone asks whether Bach or thee greates Jazz musicians on the height of their game were the greater artists, any musician with half a brain cell would reject the question, because the question doesn't even make sense. Both things are absolutely masterful within the ideas they tried to explore. And those were different ideas.
That would be like comparing a masterfully built modern bridge to gothic cathedral. They are from different times, have been created in different societies, with different goals in mind with a different knowledge base, etc. Any comparison that would be worth anything would have to account for all these different factors and then land at a result that would be highly subjective anyways (which is not a bad thing if you are interested in using that comparison to increase your own self worth in front of the architects who planned those – but futile otherwise).
> Yeah, but those are people who are nowhere near that level of excellence at all.
Why does this matter?
> That would be like comparing a masterfully built modern bridge to gothic cathedral.
That sounds really fun! Those two are both massive structures that need to support a lot of weight, they are more similar than you might think. I can see a video looking into that getting many millions of views.
I think you really underestimate how much fun people derive just from learning things from these discussions. It isn't about feeling superior to Bach or Gauss or Newton etc, its just fun discussions about the world.
I, as a practical person that does things have learned that very often that the layperson has a completely non-existent image of what any art or craft entails. They are then still allowed to have opinions, I just don't value them as much. My experience is also that the layperson is very often correct about their feelings, but rarely correct when they propose solutions to what they believe will fix it for them.
I agree that your proposed comparison would be interesting, and I whole-heartedly agree with your point about learning things feom discussions. However, we discussed comparing which is better, not how different things are made. I could imagine a ironic version of a "who is the best"-discussion to be quite entertaining, but we were talking about deadpan serious "who is better"-comparisons here.
Comparisons like these make sense if you compare similar things or if you try to compare them on the same merit, e.g. would an early top athlete in a sport be able to compete with a top athlete in the same sport today if they had the same training, material etc.
Gossip for those people is often just a mechanism to increase their self esteem in front of bigger than life artists who truly changed the world. It is a bit like music lovers who have strong opinions about everything, while not being able to play a single note on any instrument. For them comparing the great musicians on that level makes them feel important too – if they can't walk the walk they at least try to talk the talk. Meanwhile most actual musicians are usually far more tolerant about the types of music they would consider interesting, because for them everything new they hear is something that can be used as an influence for creation.
So if someone asks whether Bach or thee greates Jazz musicians on the height of their game were the greater artists, any musician with half a brain cell would reject the question, because the question doesn't even make sense. Both things are absolutely masterful within the ideas they tried to explore. And those were different ideas.
That would be like comparing a masterfully built modern bridge to gothic cathedral. They are from different times, have been created in different societies, with different goals in mind with a different knowledge base, etc. Any comparison that would be worth anything would have to account for all these different factors and then land at a result that would be highly subjective anyways (which is not a bad thing if you are interested in using that comparison to increase your own self worth in front of the architects who planned those – but futile otherwise).