To make a new topic of a comment in another thread, I'd like to rehash a fun and difficult topic.LOL!
That stem is just right Dan...
Let's remember, that a commenting on things as athetics are 100% subjective, not to be confused with comments concerning things like gaps between stummel and stem, centering of draft hole, thickness of the bit, etc.
"the stem is too long" is like saying "I don't like that color" IMHO...
Of course, I get paid to point out others design mistakes, so maybe I'm bias.
I do not subscribe to the notion that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or that, "...aesthetics are 100% subjective". (I know I am in the minority on this.) Certainly we all have different tastes, but "liking" something is not the same thing as it being beautiful. I think we say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then behave in a different way. How the heck can we make any aesthetic comments on pipes if there is not some sense of "right" to attempt to achieve? Certainly this "right" can come with variety -- a woman and landscape can both be beautiful, but they don't look the same! There is something that distiguishes beautiful from plain and plain from ugly. There are priniciples that are involved in aesthetics that are not arbitrary -- they are variable -- but not arbitrary. Symmetry, harmony, protortion, the golden ratio, these are words and ideas that have a lot to do with aesthetics.
Of course there is not necessarily a perfect pipe, or more specifically a perfect blowfish or apple, but there are superior bowfish and apples. This could not be so if aesthetics were abitrary. These superior pipes are harmonized (and probably several other things) in ways that are beautiful. There can be many aesthetically good blowfish, in the same way that many landsacape are beautiful yet are different from one another, but that does not make ALL blowfish aesthetically good.
Yet we say that isn't so when we say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We are effectively saying all blowfish ARE equally aesthetically good, or at least have the potential to be. All any pipe needs to be beautiful is that one person to say so about it. Balderdash I say! Not all pipes are beautiful. In fact, I'd say very FEW pipes are beautiful. Heck, maybe NO pipe is beautiful, but some are much closer than others.
If we'll be honest, we don't behave as if beauty is arbitrary and in the eye of the beholder. When I have had pipemakers critique my work for my developmental benefit, phrases are regularly used like, "That's wrong," "This should be shorter," "This should be cut down more." The premise is that there is a "right" or at least some right principles to be pursued. I assert that that pursuit is one of the major aspects of the joy of pipe making.
FWIW, the why's and wherefore's of my comments are based upon my Theistic worldview. I assert that, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," is simply the same as the statement, "There are no absolutes," applied to the specific realm of aesthics. I reject the notion of no absolutes generally, and in the realm aesthetics specifically. I believe there are absolute principles for beauty just as I believe there are absolute truths.
I know not all of you share my worldview, nor my view on aesthetics, but I find this perhaps the most intriguing conversation in pipe-dom. Why is one pipe better than another? Why do I find a certain pipes rediculus, yet some will regularly pay $1000 for them? How can ANY pipe command $1000 for that matter? Why do some pipes look "wrong?" How is the Danish style observable and different from the Italian? Why does Crosby sell panties with his likeness on them? Ah, the mysteries!
Isn't this hobby fun?
Tyler