In defense of ridiculous art

It is impossible to take so much as a passing glance at modern art without acknowledging that some of it is totally ridiculous. Unfortunately, I love ridiculous art. My favorite type of ridiculous art is visually impressive, huge, impractical installation art. Mass MoCA is pretty good at supplying it. Still, I think there are certain virtues to this type of art. They take a lot of work to compose and create. Merely setting up an exhibit like the "Afrofuturism" one currently on display took weeks if not months. There was an exploded pipe organ in it -- there's no way that didn't take some work.

 

I have to respect someone who can put this much work into an exhibit, regardless of whether or not they have a higher concept. 

Good versus bad art

I am too occupied with trying to figure out what makes art good or bad. I am trying to form my taste, but it's entirely based in what I like in the moment. I don't really think about wide terms. I don't look at a piece of pleasant abstract art and decide I now like abstract art. Rather, I have been trying to keep an open mind and find out more about myself and about art through a lot of fresh experiences. I like to see new art. Some modern art can be silly or even outright stupid, yes, but I enjoy a lot of it. Concept art can be pretty cool.
I always try to keep an open mind when I see a new art piece because so much of what you get out of a work of art is the energy and thought you are willing to put into viewing it. A lot of it depends on the artist, but a lazy viewer can ruin a painting for themselves just as easily as a bad artist, and an unregarded painting can have certain qualities of excellence that a really enthusiastic, interested viewer will bring to the surface.

Dickie -- Question

On page 431 in our book, Dickie claims that institutional formality and rules for art “would threaten the freshness and exuberance of art.” In what ways would rules and formalities do this? In what ways could these things promote and sharpen creativity? Is it possible to conceive of art without a certain set of rules and expectations? 

While there are definitely rules for art, and those rules are important, a person who can break them and get away with it ought to do so (which is what my 10th grade English teacher told me). We see this through all kinds of art, especially modern art. Good examples can be seen in poetry. Poetry and English in general follow a set of specific rules. The English language is governed by grammar. If a person writes a poem with unintentionally bad grammar, we do not appreciate the poem. It has been badly executed because the person writing it did not follow the rules and does not know how to write within them. However, we can't say that bad grammar is the mark of a bad poem. e.e. cummings is a Harvard-educated poet. His work is widely regarded as okay at the very least. He clearly knows how grammar works, and, knowing how the rules go, chooses to work outside of them. 

Buffalo Bill's
  defunct
         who used to
         ride a watersmooth-silver
                                  stallion
  and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
                                                   Jesus
  he was a handsome man
                       and what i want to know is
  how do you like your blueeyed boy
  Mister Death  

Maybe not anyone can break the rules. You have to first understand why the rules exist and how

 to operate inside them. Once you can do that, though, breaking them is fair game, and some of 

the most successful artists in history have been people skilled enough to do just that.  

Domesticity

On the subject of living artifacts, it really does make sense that a dog is an artifact of human civilization. They never would have come to exist without us, we breed them to be as useful as possible, and we have created more diversity through breeding in that gene pool than is seen in almost any other single animal on earth. An experiment was done in Siberia which really underscored how complex the process of breeding for domesticity is. The researchers were trying to create a domesticated fox that could be sold as a viable, safe pet. In order to do this, they had to capture a very large sample of foxes and choose the tamest, calmest, and most docile among them, then get those foxes to reproduce and go through the sorting process again with the kits. Even if they hit upon the tamest fox ever bred, nobody can say yet if they will be able to find the trait for domesticity, not just repressing the instinct to attack but actually wanting to be part of the family "pack" and take orders from an alpha.

Artifacts

The discussion in class really made me think about artifacts and what measure they can be defined by. I tend to think of artifacts as historical objects which are both created by and indicative of culture at a certain time period. Thinking of people as artifacts was interesting because that is really exactly what people are. Mostly, they are products of their environment. Meeting a child can tell you more about his parents than a painted vase could tell you about Sumer.
If we make our children into artifacts of ourselves, then many things are artifacts. We alter  the very water we drink, the genetics of plants and animals, every aspect of our environment. We've changed the world to suit us like breaking in a mattress.

Question

via braden: Carlson seems to imply that for each setting there is a "right" mindset to have and way to view the landscape/ flower/ summer afternoon. Is this true? Or is it possible that there are multiple "right" ways to view a natural environment? Or is there no "right" way and perhaps only shades of appreciation? 

I think there is a vague "right way" to view a natural environment. It's possible, but implausible, that someone would totally misdirect their attention when in a natural environment. However, I think there are probably a lot of ways to appreciate nature, and people tend to appreciate different aspects more than others. Maybe Carlson is  saying that we shouldn't focus in on one thing, but allow ourselves to absorb all of nature as a full experience. He quotes Yi-Fu Tuan on the ideal way to view nature, saying: 

"An adult must learn to be yielding and careless like a child if he were to enjoy nature polymorphously... feel free to stretch out on the hay beside the brook and bathe in a meld of physical sensations... Such an environment might break all the formal rules of euphony and aesthetics, substituting confusion for order, and yet be wholly satisfying." (543)

via braden: How does Clive Bell establish that the aesthetic world is a "world with emotions of its own" in which "the emotions of life find no place" (267)? Do you think he explains this fully? Can you think of reasons or examples as to why he is right/wrong?

Question 1

Does intentionality really have a say in whether something is art or not? 
In other words, is there such a thing as accidental art, free from meaning or subtext, purely based in unintentional aesthetics? I would say both yes and no -- Art can be created without intention, in the same way that anyone can stumble onto a good idea or accidentally invent penicillin. But just because it begins free of intention does not mean it stays that way, and as for things that are thought to go along with authorial intent -- theme, subtext, overarching idea -- they tend to worm their way into any work produced because they are often representative of the creator's personal views.
It is very difficult to picture art free from intention. How could you ever write a novel without first thinking that you would, at the very least, like to write a sentence, or a story? Even the decoration of a useful device, in which the point of the device is not specifically to look good but to do something, involves some aesthetic preference and planning. Art, at least, art created by a human being, requires some level of forethought.
The question of how to create art without intention still puzzles me. Yes, you could splash paint onto a canvas and realize you like the pattern. This could happen accidentally, or be observed, and so there would be no intention to create. However, if you wanted to improve on it, or maybe even label it as art, intention would instantly enter into the picture.
Maybe the problem lies with humans rather than with the concept of intent.

An experience versus experience

I found the differentiation between an experience and experience in general that Dewey talks about to be interesting. "Things are experienced  but not in such a way that they are composed into an experience." (305) Previous to this, I would have thought of an experience as a singular event, whereas experience would be a larger, more coherent, understanding. Someone may have had an experience of being on a single deep-sea diving trip, but I would prefer to go into the water with someone who had overall experience with deep sea diving, perhaps as a trainer or lifeguard. However, this definition makes more sense, because literally everything that we come across is necessarily experienced in some fashion. What qualifies one experience over another is the "an", whether it was truly notable or memorable in some way, rather than just the processing of information that all experience consists of. I really liked Dewey's metaphor: "When a flash of lightning illuminates a dark landscape, there is a momentary recognition of objects. But the recognition is not itself a mere point in time." (303) In order to recognize things exposed to you for a split second, you must first have an understanding of those objects to allow them to slot into place. Experience is necessary to build an experience.

Question 1

This week in my questions I decided to look at Hume's view of all sentiment being right versus a modern phrase that invokes something similar: Everyone is entitled to an opinion.

Nicole raised a very good point in class when she said that some opinions could be dangerous, or at least indicate that the person who held those views was dangerous. While it's impossible, outside of science fiction, to read or control a person's innermost thoughts, a person whose opinion was that women should be seen and not heard is not going to be able to keep that idea to themselves. This is absolutely true. We then moved on to a discussion of dark thoughts or urges, and what the appropriate reaction to them would be. This is very interesting to me at the moment because I am currently reading Shirley Jackson's short story collection Just an Ordinary Day, which follows Jackson's general ouvre in that it addresses the suffocation of the small-town housewife, random or seemingly uninspired violence, paranoia, and alienation. As you probably know, Shirley Jackson is the author of the famous short story The Lottery, which is about a small town where one person is selected anually by a random draw to be stoned to death. This story recieved some of the most vehement negative feedback in the history of The New Yorker, with many readers cancelling their subscriptions or writing hate mail to Jackson. Even her own mother criticized the story for its bleak take on small-town life. Now, it's considered a staple of American literature. This story closely examines the "dark urge". It is shocking because it asks us to put ourselves in the place of someone who would willingly, for the sake of tradition, kill their own neighbor in such a cro-magnon way as stoning. I read another story by her which illustrates the concept even better. It's called What A Thought, it is very short, and I think this quote says it all:

"She knew that if she asked her husband to take her to a movie, or out for a ride, or to play gin rummy, he would smile at her and agree; he was always willing to do things to please her, still, after ten years of marriage. An odd thought crossed her mind: She would pick up the heavy glass ashtray and smash her husband over the head with it... The idea of smashing the glass ashtray over her husband's head had never before occurred to Margaret, but now it would not leave her mind. She stirred uneasily in her chair, thinking: what a terrible thought to have, whatever made me think of such a thing?"

The story explores the dark urge as Margaret thinks about killing her husband in various ways, all while they are sitting at home and talking to each other in a very normal way. Not only can she not stop thinking about it, she actually becomes frightened of what she might do. While telling herself she loves her husband, she plans out specifics such as what she will say to the policeman, casting herself as a tragic figure and even thinking about how sad she will be once he's dead. It's almost like she has no control over the dark urge that comes upon her. Everything she looks at becomes a weapon, and even as she hates herself for doing it, she actually ultimately kills him.

response post

via braden: My question is, what if Homer's Iliad and Odyssey had been written not thousands of years ago, but in this day and age? Disregarding that literature would be very different because of it, and assuming they were written as exactly the same pieces, how would we react? How would we react according to Hume's logic?

Tolstoy questions

Is it enough for art to invoke sympathy, or should it really put the person in the artist's shoes and cause empathy?    

I wondered about this a lot after reading Tolstoy. 

em·pa·thy

1.
the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.

sym·pa·thy

1.
harmony of or agreement in feeling, as between persons or on the part of one person with respect to another.
2.
the harmony of feeling naturally existing between persons of like tastes or opinion or of congenial dispositions.
3.
the fact or power of sharing the feelings of another,especially in sorrow or trouble; fellow feeling, compassion,or commiseration.

In common usage, sympathy refers to feeling "for" someone, whereas empathy is more like feeling "with" someone. If your friend just went through a breakup and is very upset, you may be upset that she feels so sad and try to make her feel better. If you were feeling empathic towards her, though, you wouldn't be upset that she was sad, but angry at her boyfriend alongside her due to some understanding of why she felt that way. I feel that this difference is vital to Tolstoy's differentiation between what is and is not art. Sympathy is fairly easy to evoke because it really only involves understanding that something bad is happening to someone and you probably wouldn't want it to happen to you. Empathy is a much more complicated concept because it is very difficult to make someone truly understand an issue from your perspective. In the parable Tolstoy includes about the boy who is afraid of wolves, it would be possible to understand from an outside perspective that this person fears wolves and probably does not like to be around them or think about them while walking through a dark wood. This is sympathy -- feeling bad for his misfortune in fearing wolves. If the boy can tell a story that makes his audience fear wolves just as much as he does -- if he tells it so that when they go to sleep they can see eyes glowing in the darkest corner of the room and jump when they hear the neighbor's dog -- then they have truly absorbed his perspective, fully empathized, and the story is therefore art. 

Tolstoy

Via braden: But I had to wonder if art could be so easy? It seems there is a certain amount of human empathy which would have us feel the feelings of the boy no matter how he conveyed the story. And are newspapers then art?

I suppose my real question here is, how does artistic and creative quality figure in to Tolstoy's definition of art as a means to unite people and their emotions? 


In my opinion, accurately conveying an emotion to someone is immensely difficult. When you hear in the newspaper that someone's house burned down or there was an armed assault, you certainly pay attention. You may feel some pity for that person, or relief that it wasn't you, or even say, "Oh, I would have been terrified if that happened to me." However, it is altogether much rarer for someone to be reading the newspaper and suddenly break down into hysterical, panicked tears because they read about a mugging. When you read a really great book, it's not considered strange to feel so strongly for the characters that you get frightened when they're in danger or angry because something has happened to them. At one point when I was recently reading George R R Martin's A Storm of Swords, I got so angry that I threw the book clear across the room. I felt as if personal wrong had been done to me by the author and the characters, like a serious injustice had been committed. In the context of the book, it absolutely had. I felt that way because I had connected with the world and the characters and I am really invested in the outcome of the series. Now, if I had read a Wikipedia article relating to me how the entire book happened, I seriously doubt I would have tossed my laptop into a wall. It just wouldn't have effected me in the same way, because art forms a connection with the viewer. 

Question 2

My second question was, why is a painting of a couch worth so much less than a real couch in Plato's world? Isn't a picture of a couch more like the idea of a couch than an actual real couch would  be?

The answer to this question lies in the period when Plato was working. From a modern perspective, it seems like a strange statement, but in his time, the arts were not considered the same creative force that they are today. Painting was seen as purely observational and involved only in the surface of matters, rather than as something that could be used to change and comment on a subject. Because a painting of a couch would have to copy an existing couch at some point, it used an imitation of a form as a basis, making it an imitation of an imitation, just as Plato says.

While it can be helpful on some level to apply a modern sensibility to ancient philosophers, it doesn't make sense to continually toss the same criticisms at them, especially when based on their time in history, they are saying something accurate to the modern views of that time. Plato may have an outdated view of art, but no criticism or questioning will change that. Instead, his views on the world should be taken seriously, with the consideration that it was written in a very different time always held in mind.

Open post

We talked in class about the nature of evil and whether an evil person can be truly happy. First of all, there is a difference between an evil person and a person who commits evil actions. A person who feels remorse for an evil action is not as bad as a person who feels no remorse, but at the same time, some of the greatest atrocities in history have been committed by people who felt they were objectively doing no wrong, or even that they were being brave by doing the right thing, when we would today say that they were unquestionably evil. Take, for example, the Christian crusades, a particularly bloody period in our history when Christianity was forced on many people and those who would not accept it were killed. At the time, the knights on the crusade felt that they were doing something not only good but holy. They felt that they were saints and saviors, bringing people into enlightenment and saving them from the fires of hell. From an entirely objective standpoint, they were murderers, but the Pope absolved them of the murders on the basis that they were doing God's work. Was every knight involved necessarily unhappy, sadistic, or not in his right state of mind?  After all, they murdered people in cold blood. It's hard to ignore the reality that you are causing another human being pain when they're literally dying on your sword. Their belief that they served a higher calling cannot excuse what they did, only explain it. Would these knights, then, never be able to find true happiness, or would they feel that they had fulfilled a higher purpose through their objectively evil actions?

My Questions

1. On page 26, when he says that the painter may convince "children and silly people" that he has created a real carpenter, does Plato mean to say that the arts are deceptive, or just that they have the potential to deceive?
   
   
   Having discussed this in class, I feel that Plato means only to say that the arts have the potential to deceive. A good artist may create an accurate replica of something, but only someone silly would take it for reality. Does Plato also suggest that artists are silly or childish in the respect that they take images seriously -- that is, they see an image of something as something real? Perhaps, but Plato ignores in this the potential art has to bring unseen, unobserved things to light. He calls art a mirror, deriding it as shallow, but even that statement contains implicitly the possibility of reflection,  as in meditation or self-contemplation, and also as in a bad pun. 
   To finish answering my original question, to say that the arts are deceptive would be to ascribe malicious intent to all artists as a whole, which I think is far from Plato's intention. However, I think it is interesting that he believes artists live an unexamined life or a life of appearances, when it seems to me that good artists are constantly examining themselves, their lives, and the world around them. The ability to observe is essential to good art and good artists.

via braden: My question is, what about inventors? The person who came up with the couch, wheel, table, iPod? Does an "inventor" as such even exist?

Plato suggests that inventors and artisans pull the idea of an object, such as the couch, out of a world of ideals that exists on some other plane, or in the gods' world. In his philosophy, there would be no real invention. I think it would be more along the lines of divine inspiration, or even, to give humanity a little more credit, divine discovery. Instead of inventing, they tap into something greater. This doesn't necessarily devalue their talent. They're explorers instead of inventors, but the two are very close together in the first place. Both discover new things and bring people into new territory. An artisan has to hone his skill to get closer and closer to the goal of the best thing he can make, the divine form. Isn't this what all good artisans and creators do -- try to get better and better to create some kind of magnum opus?

Philosophy Toolkit

The section on informal fallacies was one of the most interesting in the entire Toolkit because so many of these fallacies are employed by people trying to sell us things, whether that's a political candidate or a brand of toothpaste. You only have to turn on the TV to hear about the latest slippery slope America's youth is on. Often, it's more fear marketing for the television station than an actual helpful piece of journalism. For example, the idea that using shorthand in texting is destroying the English skills of the average American teen is massively overblown. The way it's portrayed in the media, it seems like the language itself is about to come crashing down around our ears. Arguments against the person are also a clearly faulty tactic, but are used openly and obviously in the media. Smear campaigns that bring the personal lives of politicians into the political arena are not attacking the candidate's views or competency in the job, they are changing how voters see the candidate.

I also enjoyed the part about false dichotomies. My roommate and I have had a recurring argument over the course of the entire last semester, and I just realized her side of it is a false dichotomy.

Introduction

Hi, I'm an English major with a focus in creative writing. I am very interested in this class from an art perspective, but my experience with philosophy is limited. I hope to apply myself and learn to think about art in new ways, as well as give some more consideration to my personal philosophies and method of thinking. Outside of school, I am very interested in books, especially sci-fi and fantasy, which I am always happy to talk about. Currently, I'm reading House of Leaves. My goal this year is to read more and expand my experiences, so I hope to have a good time in class and get to know some people.