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?
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Sunday, February 19, 2012
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.
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.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
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.
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.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
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?
Sunday, February 5, 2012
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.
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.
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