Gads, you must have been a Grand Marquis Cardinal in the Inquisition in some former life. You have twisted my words and meanings to suit yourself. And now I stand accused of some unholy heresy and will be drwn and quartered, my tortured remains burned.
In mentioning Wollheim I was trying to suggest the importance of nuance in making judgments, of the sort that are always entangled in a particular experience and may not be transferable to another experience, an other work of art. Wollheim is good at that, that's all. His book, Painting as an Art is a classic in that respect. I have asked you to give reasons for your declarations that such and such is art and such and such is not art, period. So you must have some guide or template in mind. Again, what is it? I'm trying to claim that no such standard exists and only the most general statements can be made about a type or class of art, unless we are being hyperbolic for the fun of it, and that any judgment of a particular artwork is unique to that work by some means we've never identified fully but imagine to be so truthful that we are led to apply it to every work. I think we delude ourselves in the effort to identify universal standards. They are, to me, "never before and never again" even with the same artwork because we continually change and are thus different experiencers, even in recollection. One of us just doesn't have the usual brain wiring, Derek. From my perspective you are always playing scrabble with everyone's words and wiggling away from direct intellectual confrontation. I suppose you imagine my poor head to be filled with kapok. We need an ombudsman here. Maybe Cheerskep will rescue our faulty use of IS and such like and Frances will bring in a team of learned folks with healthy humanal brains and a Kitchen Aid blender to arrive at tentative, mushy Peircian truth. WC
