Verity comes first and produces conventions? First the verity of art
as an abstraction and later the convention of abstract art?
kate Sullivan
I'm going to fall back on my favorite approach to causality: the Buddhist
notion of dependant co-arising, and say that verity and conventions should
probably be viewed as developing together in a unified system. Two
examples:
1) When painting a portrait of a person the prevailing approach
(convention) is to include the face as the primary or substantial focus.
But, the palm of our hands are as distinct as a face. Ask any palm reader!
It could be the case that portraits featured palms. Here I believe that
convention followed verity. I suspect that evolutionary psychology could
show that people have a highly developed ability to distinguish faces,
perhaps because they are usually more visible than palms, and have a lesser
ability to distinguish palm. The portrait convention followed the
psychological truth of how people go about distinguishing each other.
2) Given a shape in a painting known to represent water, the additional
marks in the shape of a sine wave are recognizable as a representation of
"waves" of water. This is more arbitrary. For instance the wave charts
from Micronesia are bent wood creations which represent the vector of the
waves rather then their amplitude. The fact that a squiggly line as a
representation of waves of water becomes memetically contagious to become
established as a convention is, I believe, explainable based on the
cognitive ease by which a person introduced to this convention can make the
mental substitution required by the representation. So, in this case I
would say that the viability of the convention is tied to the relationship
between the verity (perception of waves of water) and the convention
(squiggly lines). The developmental model is less about a formal logical
sequence between the two and more about the evolution within a single
cognitive system.
When I said, "reliable experience produces conventions", I was speaking,
somewhat cryptically, about the contagiousness of the meme. If a convention
is reliable, then it will take on the same verity as that which it
represents.
Mike Mallory
----- Original Message -----
From: <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2011 5:00 AM
Subject: Re: Pictorial Realism as Verity
Verity comes first and produces conventions? First the verity of art
as an abstraction and later the convention of abstract art?
kate Sullivan
-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Mallory <[email protected]>
To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]>
Sent: Mon, May 30, 2011 11:48 pm
Subject: Re: Pictorial Realism as Verity
----- Original Message -----
From: "William Conger" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, May 21, 2011 4:37 PM
Subject: Re: Pictorial Realism as Verity
Thus conventions produce verity. What produces the conventions?
_______________________________________________________
Pragmatic concerns. When an idea, perspective or mental construction
works
to explain or describe, conventions are adopted as a way of
institutionalizing our collective experience.
Thus, reliable experience produces conventions.
Mike Mallory
