Response to Natalie

                To be honest, I have no idea what a higher form of art even means. I suppose it could mean a few things. It could be another way of saying good art which is ambiguous by itself. It could be a way of saying art that is based on more than instinct. A higher art being roughly like saying a higher being to mean more evolved. Higher is used metaphorically and we often use it when we mean something is more than something else, like a higher price. In order to know if one work of art is more of something than another we would need to know what we are referring to. If the quality we are referring to is more unique then we might be able to make a case that performance art is a higher art, as Natalie suggests. In order for something to be higher it has to be in regards to something else. We could also say that non-performance art is higher if our standard is something like permanence. I agree that we could not say that a cellist is higher or lower than a composer because there are different standards at play. We could say that one cellist has a higher skill level than another cellist because we are comparing two things and using higher as a metaphor meaning more skilled.

In direct response to the question on art existing on a common plane, I do not know if everything in art could be said to exist on the same plane because I am not completely sure what plane is being referred to. Of course all art occurs on this plane of existence if we mean this world, but many forms of art require very different types of skills so we would not compare them directly. It seems odd to compare a cellist to an actor because the required abilities are different. If we delineate planes as groups of differing skills then different art is not on the same plane. Although, I think vastly different types of art would be more like parallel lines. They would be on the same plane, but they would not intersect. We would not talk about them together in conversation because they do not overlap each other, at least commonly. We can probably come up with a few qualities all art has, so the parallel line concept is by no means a perfect analogy, but it shows how something could be on the same plane without being directly related. We also use plane to refer to a state of consciousness or existence, mostly within religion, so I suppose if art all comes from the same aspects of consciousness it could be considered on the same plane. I think that different art requiring different skills would utilize different aspects of thought and so would not be considered on the same mental plane.

                When we refer to something as higher art, what are we really trying to say?