The time and value issue is very important to me. That is the very reason I stay with relatively unchanging forms in the Human anatomy or the use of colors as the base for expressing myself, knowing that even that, does not guaranties everlasting timeless value. The nude has endless possibilities for expression , as much as expressions with colors. I feel that the best expressions are those that express the present in a universal manor.
AB ________________________________ From: john m <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sunday, March 18, 2012 3:12 PM Subject: Re: defining "artworks" Dear William, I assure you I've read and understood everything you say here, and might even agree with a good part of it; I could point out several items that I can't agree with, OR could follow your line of argumentation and ask you to explain such debatable notions as "qualitative aesthetic value"; but I don't see that approach taking this conversation anywhere useful, so I will presently only answer the questions you posed: > I ask you to provide specific examples of artwork that fits your exclusionary > definition "intentionally made as an artwork" For general comprehensibility, I'll restrict myself here to obvious and clichid items that everyone's heard of: Moby-Dick, Crime and Punishment, Hamlet, Death of a Salesman, Beethoven's Ninth, Abbey Road, the Mona Lisa, the Black Square. By the way, you didn't name any individual works when I asked you a similar question... > and examples of things that don't qualify under that definition Looking around me, in no particular order: a clotheshorse, a roll of blotting paper, nine feet of audio cable, some pencils, an aspirin pill, a phone bill. Look, you can grind a box of aspirin into powder and pour in on a gallery floor, and then you'd have something that would fit into the first set of items, but if you can't understand how this pill on my table is not an artwork, I'm afraid I can't help you with that. And I'm afraid you can't help me realize how "anything in nature that strikes one as beautiful" is an artwork. I have zero interest in these kinds of theoretical exercises - I'm interested in empirical discussion of art and artists, and how people deal with them. If we want to discuss anything at all we have to agree on some definition. I can't refute Hume's guillotine, but I can't live my daily life in constant fear of the "laws of physics" turning upside down, or whatever. > And how do you deal with the time issue, I mean the change of values and > intentions and identities over time? I don't, and I don't propose to. Values don't interest me. If I'm discussing a work of art with you and we're discussing our respective a.e.'s and what we think makes the work tick, I don't see the relevance of any of this. I'll only add that I don't think polls and surveys are irrelevant to the approach I propose; I think they're generally accepted as pretty standard instruments of gathering sociological data. Furthermore I don't think the membership of this list qualifies as a "folk audience" - in the People's Choice projects I think the survey groups were across the whole population, whereas I presume our "audience" here has thought about these things more than your average Joe. Besides, as I said, I'm not looking for "philosophical truth" and I don't think I've suggested anything to that effect. If you find this contradicts something I've said before, I can only say that I've let myself be led too far into vacuous theorizing, away from my original empirical interests, to which I shall shortly try to return.
