The ingredients for art are in nature. We have to extract them and assemble to the different degree of success. Anything can be potentially art only on ingredients level. Not everything is art when assembled. Standard is: what is valued the longest and used the most in learning a given art. Boris Shoshensky To: [email protected] Subject: Re: "I regret that, in our attempt to establish some standards, we didn't make them stick. We couldn't find a way to pass them on to another generation, really." Date: Sat, 22 May 2010 23:01:11 -0700 (PDT)
For about 100 years it's been widely understood that anything can be art. Actually, that idea has been validated since the Renaissance when artists like Durer claimed that art is in nature. I quote him: "Verily, art is embedded in nature; he who can extract it has it" Thus if art already exists in anything and everything how can some things be excluded by standards? There are no standards. There are only choices, interests, and the wit, and skill or lack of skill, of those who can use them to extract art from anything. Cronkite was a decent patriarchal deep voiced unflappable man of his time. I was there too. But he was wrong about standards because, again, there really are no standards, just choices of you prefer, agreements, pacts, rituals, and not a single one of them can be guaranteed except by force, almost always very short lived when it is used. Cronkite's lament is only one of the last expressions of the mythic era of utopias. An imagined American utopia was the chief fantasy that has brought us to our current confusion and stuttering inability to cope with world reality in America and everywhere else: social class division and conflict, religious extremism, military adventurism, growing nationalism, gross economic unbalance, environmental disasters, and most of all, anarchistic, irresponsible and unaccountable capitalist exploitation. We need to escape that utopian myth. Let Cronkite have his peace in another mythic utopia, the one we dare not abandon. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sat, May 22, 2010 8:28:14 PM Subject: "I regret that, in our attempt to establish some standards, we didn't make them stick. We couldn't find a way to pass them on to another generation, really." Doesn''t what Cronkite said in 1996 about journalism also apply to art?
