________________________________ From: Michael Brady <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, April 28, 2009 11:38:33 AM Subject: Re: Heidegger and Singularity-string
William wrote: > Michael makes the simple and common distinction between art that must serve a > separate function and that which has no separate function. I did not say art has no function. I said that utilitarian things are made *first* to have a function, and their looks are subordinate to that. Works of art are made *first* to have a certain appearance, and then perhaps to serve an explicit function, as a portrait, a religious icon, etc. How is a "certain appearance" not a function? The artist acts to please self perception and that's a function of the act. You also say, "The problem is we can't find the location of art." I believe that we have no trouble locating a given artifact or made thing if it's well within the borders of a category, say, in Kansas. But when the artifact is over near the edge, on the beach at low tide, on the border between art and nonart, then we have a difficult time, NOT locating the work, but locating the boundary. I was using a common figure of speech when I said "location" to mean the identity of a concept among other concepts, not the physical placement of an object. Are you ever puzzled when you encounter some thing and wonder, "Is that a work of art?" I suspect it happens as infrequently as not being able to tell whether the voice on the telephone is a man's or woman's, or if the long-haired person sitting in the row in front of you is a man or woman. What are the cues and qualities of each encounter that guide your first snap conclusion? Analogous to seeing something "as art" or not. You make a provisional scheme for deciding on the nature of what you are perceiving. Things that are well within the boundaries typically don't cause problems, but things at the edge--the contralto voice that could be a tenor, the long hair and indistinct shoulders that could be a man, the picture that could be merely a picture. <g> When I consciously adopt the attitude that my experiences are art experiences, then nearly everything is art, an aesthetic experience; if not, I'm not paying close attention to my experience as an aesthetic experience. I think when we are conscious the aesthetic realization is always more or less insistent. We choose to pay more or less attention to it. I can't experience what I am not already prepared to experience. An analogy might be that we are always prepared to breath and thus we are prepared to breath fresh air, or not so fresh air. My criterion--is the representation contingent on external verification--is a binary thing. Either it is (the map must conform to what it purports to represent or it's functionally useless) or it's not (the map is a imaginary diagram of a yet-to-be-discovered land of praeternatural bounty). The saint's image on the wall can be painted in any way, as long as certain attributes are shown--and the same saint looks different from one church to another. The accuracy of the likeness is an elastic standard, modified by the artist's skill and preference for various pictorial effects. Not so the driver's license photo. This is too mechanistic for me. I mean it's too conditioned by rules and the comforts they provide. If something purports to represent something, then it does, unless there is another previous representation ( or prescribed rules for that representation) that has been taken or insisted upon by some authority as true. Also, you know very well that the first thing people do when they see their new driver's license photo is judge whether or not it is an accurate likeness. That surely betrays the fact that a thousand photos of one person's face will show a thousand different faces (and that's why the most accurate digital proportional measuring can ID a person regardless of the varied appearances of that same person's photo images). The question remains: Where is art? With the artist? With the audience? A collaboration? With historical symbols, symbols of culture and its beliefs? I'm inclined to think that we all have an innate aesthetic buzz in our consciousness that we can tune up or down but never off. That buzz is always urging us to objectify it and when we do we say, Ah, there's art! Then, unhappily, we contaminate the awareness with explanations, but we are compelled to do so. WC | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady [email protected]
