This article is a clear example of why the current artworld is in steep decline.
I am convinced that the decline is due to the redundant and unexamined persistence of two ideas that have been exhausted. One of them is what I call the fallacy of 'significant form'. This is the idea formulated by Clive Bell that identified an inherent order of form -- visual form -- to be the marker of art and quality irrespective of subject matter or anything else. Just what the markers of significant form are is the subject of much debate in aesthetics. The problem is in finding universal, necessary and sufficient features of significant form that are objective and thus noticeable by all. Since none can be found the objectivity of significant form is falsified and this has led to the notion that anything at all can be art because anything at all can be claimed as having significant form (and the opposite ids also true). The fall-back is to rely on Kantian notions of involuntary aesthetic experience; generally meaning an unexplained and unpredicted emotional-feeling of aesthetic surprise, elation, etc. But these reactions are also so subjective as to be unreliably related to any objective cause, whatever claim is otherwise made. Nevertheless, the objective cause of this purely subjective experience is said to be "art" in an instance of significant form. Thus the other fallacy is the total subjectivity of the aesthetic experience and hence the identity of art being predicated on the 'objectivity' of significant form (the visual order regardless of subject and context). Simon de-Pury is only one of the majority of art world powers (critical and marketing) who subscribe to these twin fallacies. "All you need to do is look, look, look, and see, see, see" they say. He says he relies on that immediate and involuntary "hit" of aesthetic experience. He mimics Kant and more likely, Greenberg and his defunct formalist theory, to determine what a real artwork is. There is no "seeing" without a context. When we see something our brains instantly contextualize it with previous "mappings" which are flooded with all sorts of associative neuron firings and that includes language. The cliche "we see what we know" is almost 100% true. The uniqueness of every glimpse is simply the ever changing mappings in the brain (think of rubber-bands flexing and overlapping constantly) more of less different from previous similar experiences (combined with cultural bias). When de Purry and his privileged and unaccountable peers pronounce something as art they are merely exercising their authority and imposing their subjective maps onto others as if those maps were mirrors of objective "significant form". None of us can do any better since we too are subject to the twin fallacies and so we submit to power and authority (of critical acclaim and monetized quality) and the goofy game of art goes on and on. What I detest is the fakery of the critical establishment, now nearly identical with auction-house-dealer money) in continuing the twin fallacies of significant form and instant aesthetic experience as if they were measurable by objective necessary and sufficient features. If Pury and his cohorts were to say, "This is great art if I say so and because I have attained the marketing and institutional authority to say so", I would say OK. Otherwise they're full of BS. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]> Sent: Sun, June 19, 2011 9:44:41 PM Subject: "I am looking for quality first of all...It has to stir up your emotions and it has to have something which is timeless." http://blogs.wsj.com/scene/2011/05/27/what-simon-de-pury-looks-for-in-art/
