Alexei,how about- roads to spirituality of beauty( image or thought), which is a destination of any lofty creative process, go through technical skills+taste until they are transforming into something non-material( in the masterpiece) and become soul of beauty- ART? Boris Shoshensky
-- "Alexei Procyshyn" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: I'm not sure what to say on that score. It's a live question for me, and I haven't made up my mind, one way or another. I'm pretty sure that I don't give much credence to the notion of Genius, of 'divine inspiration,' etc. But that doesn't reduce art to mere technical proficiency. I'm not an artist, so I can't say. If, however you ask me whether I think my 'discipline' (i.e. philosophy) is nothing other than a technical skill set, I would probably respond as follows: by and large most philosophy *is* nothing other than a series of technical skills. Problems and themee are handed down through the tradition and are taken up by each successive generation. Techniques are improved, problem-spaces refined, responses become more mannered or stylized. etc. But this is all taught (yes, one must have a head for it, like one must have an eye, say, for colour. but even much of this can be taught, if one is willing to learn it). It's a matter of technical skill. Philosophy, at least, is by and large a matter of technical skill. Whereas bad philosophy (perhaps like bad art) merely apes a technical vernacular, merely assumes the gestures of those who came before, merely combines willy-nilly what is at hand, unthinkingly follows, however passionately, half thought-out analogies between disparate fields, and takes for granted what's 'there,' while asking no questions -- let alone solving old ones along the way, Good philosophy is the product of finely honed skill. It can dexterously wield the knife of reason, it can produce delicate unities with the twist of a monad-baller, and can select the finest, sweetest meat from a concept. It's a skill set, which operates within pre-established -- traditional -- limits on pre-established material with pre-established tools. Great philosophy, however, somehow changes the subject, asks new or different questions and develops new/different technical capacities for thinking about them. But I wouldn't apply the term 'genius' to folks like Leibniz, Hegel, Kant, Heidegger (especially not Heidegger!), Adorno, etc. they were driven, I think, by something -- an inarticulate, inarticulable problem -- that didn't fit, didn't find a home in the prevalent modes of thinking. They changed the subject, created new techniques, and hence new philosophical potentials. And so they are great philosophers. For better or for worse, I tend to think of artists in the same way as i think of philosophers. Kandinsky is Great. Braque is great. Klimt is good. etc. But I can't simply say that only "great philosophy" is philosophy. bad philosophy is philosophy too. And then there's the middle ground between the great and the bad. What differentiates non-philosophy from philosophy is technical, what distinguishes good philosophy from the bad is technical; what differentiates the great from the good surpasses it. So there you have it, I suppose. But now it occurs to me: what are the limits of 'technique,' or technical skill? >>> "Derek Allan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 03/29/08 7:13 AM >>> Alexei So are you saying that art is nothing but technical skill of some kind? (My particular examples are not important. There are plenty of others.) DA -----Original Message----- From: Alexei Procyshyn [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, 29 March 2008 9:38 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: The Fate of The Image Derek, those are examples, not explanations. It's easy to point out examples of what one does not think is art, it's another thing altogether to put forward an argument to demonstrate that point. And anyway, although I'm not overly impressed by the work of either Cabanel or Bourgeureau, I'm not sure why one wouldn't call it art. There's something very Dutch about the images I've seen of their work. Moreover, a couple of not so impressive pieces hardly sanctions the claim that the 'artist as such' (e.g. Bougereau) isn't an artist, because some of his canvases aren't 'excellent'. Is his oeuvre "powerful," "expressive"? No. Is it Heroic, Romantic art? No. But is it art? I think so. So, is there something more than a couple of examples supporting your claim? Or does the obviousness of Ranciere's statement for you hinge on a handful of decontextualized works? May I ask for something more substantial? May I have something more? >>> "Derek Allan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 03/28/08 9:14 PM >>> Well, just that I imagine no one could seriously believe that mere technical skill was enough to make an artist. Eg Cabanel and Bougeureau were obviously technically skilled but for me at least what they produced was not art. Same goes for a skilled crime writer or writer of a pop song. DA -----Original Message----- From: Alexei Procyshyn [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, 29 March 2008 12:09 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: The Fate of The Image I guess I'm not sure that Ranciere's point is so obvious, really. I mean, Greenberg thought there was a connection (subtract everything that's inessential to the medium, etc). And his criticism is rather compelling. So I take it that this is in fact a rather unobvious point. But maybe that's just me. Care to explain why you think it's obvious? AP >>> "Derek Allan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 03/28/08 8:55 PM >>> Alexei I'm not sure I follow all this but if, as you say, it reduces to 'Simply put, technical elements do not exhaust the aesthetic concerns', it seems a long way around to establish something fairly obvious, doesn't it? Derek. -----Original Message----- From: Alexei Procyshyn [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, 29 March 2008 2:30 AM To: [email protected] Subject: The Fate of The Image Hopefully, all those who are interested in participating in the online reading of _Le destin de l'image_/_The future of the Image_, have managed to get their hands on a copy. As I've mentioned before, I'm working from the French Edition, which will present a few problems (pagination, and translation). I'll quote everythign in the original, and then offer a quick translation; where my translations wildly diverge from the english edition, perhaps folks could flag this, and we could figure out f I'm just translating badly, or if there's a point in the english verions that's wonky. I'll cite both the French edition's pagination, and the section + paragraph number in order to ensure that we're all roughly on the same page. So, here goes my opening salvo. In what follows, I'll take up the first subsection of the first Chapter (Fr. pp. 9-11, "The fate [or, i guess according to the english version, Future] of the image" to "From one regime of Imaging to another"). Anyway, in these three sections Ranciere attempts to characterize the notion of 'image' in a manner that neither falls into the contemporary 'traps' of representationality-cum-resemblance nor reduces the notion of 'image' to a technical, material, mode of presentation. An image, to pull out a distinction that's very much alive, -- at least for me, since I'm more familiar with German philosophy -- is not to be characterized as either Vorstellung (i.e. as a form of [re]presentation which can be subsumed by our conceptual, linguistic capactities -- think of Kant here: intuitions are subsumed by concepts in the form of propositional judgments; intuitions are roughly Vorstellungen) or Darstellung (i.e. a concrete, material presentation of content which is not subsumable by concepts). In fact, Ranciere will claim that the image is precisely that which skirts, or plays within this 'ecart' (gap, unbridgeable break or canyon) between the "sayable" ( i.e. representable in french, 'dicible,' perhaps awkwardly translated as 'articulable') and the
