On 10/14/06, kasper salonen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> thanks Biloxi; more to respond to! :)
>
> "Now, this is a sad truth. Most people are artistically illiterate and
> don't care to be. Most peoplel fail to recognise good art. They follow
> their taste, and their taste is artistically illitearte. You don't
> need such people telling you what they think; their advice is bad.
> They're the type that buy all those trash popular cultures items.
> Poetry is sure to be like any other human interest; lots of uneducated
> tastes, lots of craft junkies, and very, very few artists."
>
> as far as I can tell, this is all fallacy. you want to separate taste
> & art; that would seem to be fine, since the realm of difficulty is
> then only in deciding whether something is good or bad art, not
> whether it's art in the first place. but when you assert that most
> people are 'artistically illiterate', you're also asserting that
> there's such a thing as 'artistic literacy', or a way in which to
> discern & appreciate not only what _is_ art, but also what is _good_
> art.
It's not something I made up (difference between art and taste). Not
only that there is "artistic literacy" but people do actual PhDs too.
Art has thousands of years behind it and it's a well-formalised
discipline. There are lots of books on it that tell of time-tested
elements of art, of what is art, and of what is good art. Art is now,
in fact, becoming a science with research departments.
> but taste (I prefer to call it opinion) is also present in discerning
> something as art/good art; a cow sawed in half displayed in a glass
> case. is it art? is it clever? is it pretentious? there is no one
> answer to these questions. you seem to see art with a capital 'A', as
> something immutable & definite; but this, in my view, is a way of
> seeing art that puts down its very principles of freedom & challenge.
Please differentiate Art as a discipline that's taught in universities
and has a body of knowledge that's thousands of years in age and
equivalent-size from the erroneous but unfortunately common usage of
word "art". Art is highly formalised and highly disciplined, whereas
too many people use the word "art" to mean something nonsensical or
something they did on a whim for no good reason (after all, they're
artistically illiterate, so no wonder they'd appreicate art with
nonsense), I can't think of an example at the moment but perhaps you
can. There's the same problem with Philosophy. Philosophy is a highly,
highly formalised discipline yet people use the word and have the
notion of it as something that any pothead would do.
Too many people seem to think they can do art or philosophy on a whim,
without any study, and that whatever they say is valid, but that has
nothing to do with Art or Philosophy. I think a better word to
describe what they do is "bullshit" since that's how they use those
two terms.
> if art could be defined in a paragraph, there would be no point
> whatsoever in producing any more of it.
The elements of art can be defined in a paragraph, even in just a
little list of words. That of course, would be a very general
definition.
Art is a tool. One reason we produce more of it is that it is a tool
that we use to comprehend life. Just because someone used a pencil
somewhere doesn't mean that we can't use pencils anymore. Likewise,
art is a tool, an abstract tool.
There are other reasons too that I won't detail or even mention for
the sake of brevity.
> the reason people go on
> creating art is that they, to themselves, _can_ describe it 'in a
> paragraph'; but the fact that their description differs from the
> descriptions of others is the core reason why they keep on
> perpetrating it. it's like a beautiful act of defiance, an argument
> like refracting light.
I don't think most people "go on creating art" so that they "describe"
art itself. Very few do, but most don't.
> these are dramatic terms, & even I personally
> can't claim to be conscious of them as principles all the time; that's
> the very point. to learn the principles, then to never need to recall
> them again.
>
> the conception that art can be objectively observed & defined is a
> very naïve one, to me;
No. It's not a naive one. To be naive is to be unable to describe what
it is you do or or what it is you like. Art provides with you those
means of description. A good test of whether a piece of "art" is
worthy of artistic consideration is whether you can write an essay
about it.
What about people who are "talented" or "gifted"? Well, they are still
clear about what they're doing and how they're doing and why, perhaps
even more so. They may not be able to put it in words, and that's an
issue of language, but they are still as clear about it as it gets.
> one that doesn't grasp the fact that the
> eternity in art & the Art in art comes from the very fact that it
> _can't_ be clearly identified. it isn't meant to be!
Like I said, art is a tool that people use for other purposes, one of
them is comprehending life, and only very, very few concern themselves
with its definition. There are others reasons to why people keep on
making art, but since you mention "eternity", I'll mention one to
paraphrase Benjamin Franklin; art is long and life is short. People
have short lives, and no one has the same life as another. .
p.s. It seems that I keep on replying to more or less the same point.
So I'll stop here.
> it reminds me
> very much of the concept of Tao: if it can be neatly asserted as being
> 'Like This or That', it isn't art. all we have is our senses & our
> capacity for abstract thought; the faculties of each in every human
> being are different. this doesn't mean that exhibit A is art & exhibit
> B is not.
>
> actually, I wrote an essay on this very subject in my senior year of
> high school. I came to the conclusion, as I recall, that art is
> defined mostly by purpose: if something is created on purpose to be
> art, it can almost certainly be called art. but this is all very dry &
> I hate to talk drily; it sounds like so much bullshit at the end of
> the day. :p
>
> to wrap up my comment on your paragraph cited above, Biloxi; I
> disagree that art is the territory of the mind of the educatee, or
> even the mind of the artist. "taide kuuluu kaikille" : art belongs to
> everyone. I will admit that I dislike the popularism that expression
> can be seen to imply. but it isn't that art cannot be popular, it's
> that art cannot be thought of as popular. millions of people have read
> & admired & thought about the work of writers such as Proust, Joyce,
> Calvino, Faulkner, García-Márquez &c.: that doesn't make them
> 'Popular', items of popularism.
> I know there are people who are not inclined towards enjoying art;
> I've met & spoken to many. they may not have the patience, the
> motivation, the readiness for it; but they all have the capacity for
> it. referring to these people with derogatory terms serves only the
> ego of the person who utters them; to place himself higher than them,
> more Human than them.
>
> "And we've already established that you could read about the basics of
> art in a week or so, but it could take you a lifetime to master if
> ever at all. You know what you need, you don't need anyone to tell you
> what it is after a little, it just, by its nature, takes a long time
> to get there. And that's a long time of practice. And that's mindful,
> meditative practice."
>
> this is a princpiple I ascribe to, definitely; with some exceptions.
> I don't believe that the 'basics' can be grasped in a week.
> art/literary history, - theory, canon are within the reach of study &
> memory, but they are not basics, they are trivia. the 'basics', as in
> the tools & the contexts through which are created works of 'art',
> constantly change as a writer progresses. the reason it takes a long
> time to get there is that one _never_ necessarily 'gets there'. one
> might be content with what they are doing, & may feel good about the
> scope of his tools; I do, & Patrick does. now I don't know about P,
> but I expect my tools to multiply & change shapes/sizes/functions, &
> my contexts to open more & more contexts. but I don't intend to
> meditate on any of this; meditation of that sort is dry & academic,
> it's something scholars do to attain definitions. I intend to just do
> what I think I do best, & what I want to do best, while gathering
> points of view along the way either to put them to use or, after
> thought, discard.
>
> here's the part I do ascribe to: after learning _a set_ of basics, or
> a number of sets (in other words, after establishing oneself in some
> context(s) where one feels comfortable & spacious), the techniques &
> the approaches & the tricks become automatic. they switch onto
> autopilot. all that happens after that is that the autopilot program
> is updated, now & again, with new technology. that's one analogy.
> another writer, whose talent & realism I appreciate, put it like this:
>
> "My daughter is about to turn 16 and for the past several months my
> wife and I have been teaching her how to drive. At some point, as we
> were tooling around the neighborhood, I realized my daughter was
> handling the wheel in an odd way when she turned the car. I thought,
> "There's something odd about that," but I couldn't sort out what it
> was until I got behind the wheel. She was executing the turn well
> enough but when she had completed the turn and was straightening the
> car out, she was physically turning the wheel back. That might be the
> proper procedure for truck driving, but not for a Mazda 626. Properly
> aligned wheels want to be pointing straight and will get that way on
> their own without the driver's assistance - you just release your grip
> on the wheel until the vehicle is pointing straight again then you
> re-assume control.
>
> Is it weird that little driving factoid didn't cross my mind when
> previously explaining to her how to drive? Not really. I've been
> driving for 23 years. I stopped having to think about it long ago. I
> just drive.
>
> Writing poetry is the same way. There is a lot to learn, and learn you
> must. Why? So you can forget it and write. The more you do it, the
> more you learn about it, the longer you work at it, the less you have
> to think about it. It becomes instinct."
>
>
> KS
>
--
Her Lust is Wiser is a book of verse by Biloxi Andersen and Ziad
Noureddine. It is part of ongoing diaries.
http://inkatthedevil.blogspot.com/
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