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Post by katycarl on Jun 14, 2007 15:22:09 GMT -5
The other day a friend of mine and my husband's, a painter, invited us to an art opening at a contemporary museum near our neighborhood. There we saw, among other things, a nine-foot-tall tree made of papier-mache garbage, wire and electrical tape; a series of "found continents" copied from the shapes of the artist's own chipped black nail polish; family portraits with everyone in underwear, or in convenience-store-robber headstockings, or without makeup, or in clothes not their own, or in clothes not from their own section of the department store, so on and so on.
Some of the photography, on the other hand, was really strong and striking: a brown stitched suitcase on a bare flowered mattress in a blue room; someone's father floating in dark textured water that symbolized the pressures of his life; a scene of a city, shot through dark glass, juxtaposed with the face of a sleeping man. I was amazed that the same postmodern cultural aesthetic, the same schools and backgrounds and training, produced such different work, some really substantive and compelling, the rest shallow and trite.
It all left me with just one question: why? Why are some things both ugly and shallow considered art and hung alongside things merely clever or facile, or murky and "ambiguous" (= confused), or "ambiguous" (= multiple-meaninged) and evocative, or evocative and (there's no other word for it) beautiful? After a whole semester's study of the philosophy of art, I'm still not sure how we came to the pass where a gallery curator's decision is allowed to define what is "art" and what is not. So I guess I'm asking lots of questions at once, but all encompassed in this: how and why did the culture get to this point, and what is to be done now that we're here?
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Post by cristina on Jun 15, 2007 0:35:20 GMT -5
THe "anything can be art" attitude that pervades the contemporary art scene reminds me of an article I encountered (I don't remember if I read the entire article) discussing whether there's such a thing as "animal art". It spoke a series of what looked like abstract paintings which were shown to different art critics. The critics all praised the paintings and one even theorized that the artist was a female who was fascinated with Asian calligraphy. In a way, the theory was correct: the paintings were"created" by a female Asian elephant with a paintbrush tied to its tail.
Does this mean that the notion of art as something human, something demanding rationality and deliberateness, has already become problematic?
My answer to my own question would be "no", because even what was claimed to be "animal" art in the article involved human intervention: it was a human being that attached the paintbrush to the elephant's tail and chose the colors, it was a human viewer that saw a certain order in the random strokes made by the elephant. So even so-called "found art" involves human intervention.
The problem is, some of the examples Katy described, do do make you wonder what, exactly, was going through the mind of the human being who created that art.
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Post by katycarl on Jun 15, 2007 12:45:28 GMT -5
Right, Cristina. I don't want to just arrive at "the culture is/people's minds are corrupt" and leave it at that. First of all, the culture isn't as totally corrupt as some people like to paint it; if it were, you literally couldn't walk outside your door without encountering some spiritual poison or other. (In fact, that is precisely the language that's often used. In defending themselves from what is actually bad, I think lots of Christians and even some Catholics miss out on what is good. Our recent conversation on music shows how easy that is to do, and how hard it is to know exactly where to draw the line.) Luckily, though, things have not gone quite that far yet. Nor will they, I think, unless all artists secular and religious just stop trying to do their work well in all senses of the word.
But in the art world, as elsewhere, there's a lot of silt you have to pan through to find the gold. While I find it hard to blame people who abdicate the task -- the silt is after all so very silty, and meanwhile you have to learn to live your life, which is messy enough by itself -- none of us here have abdicated it, nor do we get to. It's not the way we've chosen; for us artists and writers, it's a part of living our lives. "They shall strengthen the state of the world, and their minds shall be in the work of their craft."
I guess what I'm asking is how other people here, especially those who work in visual art, understand themselves as in relationship to the art world the way it is and the way they would like it to be. Is it a question of storming the battlements or of flying under the radar? Of playing the current game or inventing a new one? Of just ignoring all that and simply trying to do what one does, only better than one could last week or last month?
This may seem like a strange question because, as I understand it, the "art world" as such can be pretty far removed from mainstream culture. It's composed of those who are, or at least of those who consider themselves to be, the elite of the craft. But there is and must be some relationship to the wider culture, and I'm wondering what that looks like, too.
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Post by ampleforth on Jun 19, 2007 21:45:40 GMT -5
I take an Aristotelian approach to this. There is no abstract, disencarnate "theory" that explains the goodness of art. Let's see how people evaluate art -- let's see how people do art criticism. We can probably learn something from that. Probably the best literary critic writing today is James Wood. I've learned a lot about how to think about literature from his essays. Here is a recent example: www.powells.com/review/2007_05_17.htmlIt's wonderful how he always hones down the focus of his discourse towards the fundamental questions about what it means to be human. But he isn't exclusively philosophical -- he makes insightful probes into craft and aesthetics as well. Here is his Wiki entry: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Wood_%28critic%29And here he is reviewing poetry with Dana Gioia, who is a fine critic himself. This piece of writing is pure chocolate cake, man: www.slate.com/id/2000022/
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Post by ampleforth on Jun 19, 2007 21:47:46 GMT -5
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Post by pierregambotsky on Jun 20, 2007 12:21:55 GMT -5
Good stuff. At least the last one, which is the only one I've read so far. My one qualm with it is that I don't see the ideal novel as one that explores "what someone felt about something" so much as "how someone dealt with something." That includes feeling, of course, but it brings in the will and intellect as well, which I think is what can make a story particularly human.
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Post by ampleforth on Jun 20, 2007 14:14:08 GMT -5
Pierre, you make a very interesting comment and my initial reaction is to agree with you. The defense I would make is that Wood's notion of "feeling" includes rationality and intellect -- it is the entire reaction of the person before his or her circumstances. Not simply sentiment and feelings. And yet, your comment also reminded me of an essay I read a few months ago by another critic, Greg Wolfe of Image Journal: There is a saying that all politics is local, but perhaps another truth is that we all bring our private lives into the public realm. To say that art has a private address, as Eudora Welty did, is not to refuse a moral imperative; it is to remind us that both art and life begin in the immediacy and concreteness of the local. A whole book of essays has been published demonstrating how Miss Welty’s stories contain “responses to public political issues—political corruption, racial apartheid, poverty, McCarthyism, and the Rosenberg trials, violent resistance to the civil rights movement, and southern reverence for identities of the cultural past.” But our response to the great issues of the day begins with the way we cook meals, greet one another, do our jobs, and raise our families.
According to Welty, “great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean.”
It may sound like heresy, but I believe that religion is as much about how to feel as it is how to behave. In the end, the best antidote to moralism run amok is true religion, not secularism. About a year before his election to the papacy, Joseph Ratzinger gave the funeral homily for an Italian priest named Luigi Giussani, who had founded a lay movement that had nearly disintegrated in the political turmoil of the late 1960s. Ratzinger characterized Giussani’s vision—a vision that successfully moved beyond that upheaval—in this way: “Christianity is not an intellectual system, a packet of dogmas, a moralism, Christianity is rather an encounter, a love story; it is an event.” He went on to say:
It was the great temptation of that moment to transform Christianity into a moralism and moralism into politics, to substitute believing with doing. Because what does faith imply? We can say, “In this moment we have to do something.” And all the same, in this way, by substituting faith with moralism, believing with doing, we fall into particularisms, we lose most of all the criteria and the orientations, and in the end we don’t build, we divide.
In art, as in faith, the heart of the matter is not doing, but the wonder we experience—the way we feel—in the face of the encounter. And we are never more willing to change and to build than when we fall in love. (http://www.imagejournal.org/back/051/editorial.asp) At the risk of derailing the entire conversation, I propose those words for your pondering. However, we may need to move this to another thread.
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alaide
Junior Member
Posts: 14
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Post by alaide on Jun 22, 2007 12:22:26 GMT -5
so I've finally come to the forums... and this is going to be a humongous post: What is art? For me in order to answer that question we have to first answer “why do we create art?” I believe our desire to create art is part of our longing for God, our Origin and End. Even if we are not intellectually aware of our longing for God, there are certain characteristics of the human spirit that express this desire. Our desire for eternity , our natural “knowing” of the existence of a spiritual world, our longing for perfection of virtue and the most intense of all, our desire to love and be loved are all part of the common “human condition.” Even the person who has lost their intellectual faculties because of mental illness or disabilities reflects this longing through the needs of their body. They reflect their desire/need of love by their constant need of care, they reflect their desire for eternity because their bodies naturally fight diseases and death. I believe all our needs and desires, not only the emotional, spiritual and intellectual ones, but even the physical ones, reflect our longing for God. Now, all artist know about the “need” to create. That feeling wakes you up at night and makes you start painting or writing. The need to express, which is basically, the need to give of ourselves. I believe, in short that Art is one of the manifestations of the need to give of ourselves, This expression is used by those who have received the gift of artistic talent. Now the question is, what will we give? We are called by our Creator to give Him to the world. To give goodness, beauty, truth and justice since this are the only things that “are.” Their opposites are, in fact, not something, but the lack of the divine characteristic. Evil is just the lack of something. Darkness is the lack of Light. Light is an actual “something” (photons, energy, etc) darkness is the lack of it. I dare to say then, that “art” that glorifies or expresses the opposite of the divine characteristics explained above is actually a deformed version of what art should be. Just as lust is to love, or revenge to justice. It is not, art. It is not what Art is supposed to be. Now, I am not saying that all art should be “pretty.” Truth, one of the divine attributes, can be daunting and overwhelming. And sometimes in order for the bright colors to be meaningful you have to use some dark shades. But all in all, the clear message of the art should be one of the divine attributes. But to this we can say that what matter is the intention of the artist, that the artist is not obliged to make the meaning clear to the viewer. I digress. If art is the call to give of ourselves then it has to be given clearly. Its not about the artist, it about the viewer/reader. Clarity of meaning is not only portrayed through "realistic" art. I am no enemy of abstract art. The contrast of color and form can very well simply mean beauty. Period. In conclusion. I believe Art is one of the manifestations of the need to give of ourselves and it is only true to its nature when it expresses the divine attributes through nature, human experience, color and form. at least, that's my thinking.
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Post by cristina on Aug 24, 2007 1:30:37 GMT -5
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Post by firefolk on Aug 24, 2007 9:23:16 GMT -5
Now I don't normally hold with that there fancy new-fangled book-larnin', but that is an excellent article. I rather liked his apparently off-the-cuff definition of Art ("mastery of a craft in order to make objects that gratify and ennoble those who see them"), and his little [sic.] remark about the "intellectual" who confuses the meanings of "flaunt" and "flout" gave me no end of glee. But most of all, the description of modernist horrors masquerading as art is always useful as a contrast to help define what Art actually is. Alaide said it perfectly: It's not about the artist, it's about the viewer/reader. You can always sort of tell when someone is hoping to touch others with his work, and when he or she is hoping to receive praise as a "pioneer" or iconoclast (a peculiar term of praise for an artist in any event, it seems to me); and most particularly when the--well, let's just say, "artist" in question has used a medium that really requires no effort of mastery but only a few facile gimmicks. (Does anyone mind if I geek for a second here? "Is the Dark Side stronger?" "No--not stronger. Quicker, easier, more seductive." [And no, I'm not completely sure "geek" can be a verb.]) Er, where was I? Oh yes, rambling. Anyway! The thing that really struck me was the astoundingly obvious but somehow endlessly startling realization--once again--that only the Eternal can be fresh and new. It's a first premise for all of us here, and yet the reminder is always a bit of a shock: "Huh. Chesterton WAS right." In short, perhaps the best lesson to be learned from pretentious artsy people is that the fundamental virtue for any artist (as, indeed, for any person in any vocation) will always be humility. Easy enough to say, I know, if not so easily lived; but it bears constant repeating. Thanks, Cristina!
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Post by syme on Aug 24, 2007 12:28:51 GMT -5
Oh yes, that is very good article. I was thinking on it in relation to Katy Carl's essay about "Self-gift and the Literary Vocation." In that article, though she does mention political commitments that can ruin art, I feel like she spends most of the time exploring how utilitarianism may affect the particularly Christian artist or writer. While this makes perfect sense when most of the readers will presumably be Christians, I feel that politics and a general cultural smugness among the groups that seem to control today's "high" culture has done much to hurt art and literature. It is true, one goes to so many of these modern art exhibitions and one is BORED. On the contrary, so much of the older art, say from the impressionists back (though whatever Kimball says, I do like Dali), has the capacity to inspire wonder and awe. I look at some many of of those pieces and think "wow," while the best I can manage for most contemporary art is a rather smug "Ah, yes." In any case, I'd like to hear Katy's thoughts on the matter (and of course everyone else's as well.)
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Post by katycarl on Aug 24, 2007 15:51:24 GMT -5
On which matter? Y'all have brought up a lot of matters on this thread since I moved out East and dropped into a black hole as far as the forums were concerned, heh. Please aid me in climbing out.
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Post by firefolk on Aug 26, 2007 19:10:19 GMT -5
Katy, "to geek"--verb, or no?
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Post by ebdonlon on Aug 26, 2007 20:05:56 GMT -5
"Geek" can be used as a transitive verb, I believe. It is actually a rather puzzling word when one considers the fact that a "geek" was a carnival freak. Billed as a wild man, he was known for performing bizarre, barbaric acts, like biting off the head of a live chicken. There was Tyrone Power movie about carnivals, based on a very disturbing book called "Nightmare Alley," in which "geeks" played a prominent role. I don't recommend the movie, although I am generally a Tyrone Power fan.
Now what I want to know is--what is the connection between carnival freaks and the modern usage of the word? We can talk about the artistic quality of carnivals too, if anyone is interested...
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Post by katycarl on Aug 27, 2007 8:09:29 GMT -5
I'm more inclined to allow "to geek" as a verb than to allow "to gift." "Gifting" makes me bonkers, even though it's an established usage. But "geeking" is just cute. Inconsistent, I know.
Doesn't it seem as though the term "geek" started out with negative connotations and acquired positive ones as time went on and those stuck with the epithet embraced and reclaimed it?
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