On Sep 1, 2008, at 9:01 PM, William Conger wrote:
No one can intentionally make an artwork. One can make something that looks, sounds, reads like art or one can try to propose something as an artwork, but the naming of something as an bonafide artwork is a social approbation that can't be fully controlled or even predicted. Each real artwork is a once and never again event or experience, unique and inimitable. That's why it always fails when someone "imitates" art to supposedly achieve its same expressive quality. It's fine to imitate the structure or narrative but that in itself will not do the trick. This is the opposite of what Reynolds told his Royal Academy students. He said one should imitate the spirit, not the style.
I disagree with this, William, on two basic points. (1) The maker intentionally makes something that is, from the outset, formed as a work of art, that is, as a fictive thing that offers itself entirely as a probationary, propositional, conditional object. And (2) I believe the role the everyone else serves is to give it public acclaim or disregard, not to give it the status of a WOA. The prestige or stature and value accorded a WOA by the public is independent of its original status as a fiction, i.e., a work of art. Every work of art is a "bonafide" work of art, but they are not all of the same quality.
I've described what I mean by "fiction" before, so I won't go into it in any great length. But I just want to reiterate my central point that WOAs are constructed of parts that often represent something else (they're 'representational' or 'figurative'), and when they do, the maker can do whatever he wants with the components, can combine parts haphazardly, can color them any way at all and give them any kind of symbolic or denotational capacity ... or not. Because the signifying capacity and power is wielded freely, completely unanchored to any contingent connection to anything else. And 'nonrepresentational' works, i.e., 'abstract' works, are even more completely fictions, because they offer no signifying power and concomitantly no referents, and thus they aren't subject to any questions of truthfulness at all.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady [EMAIL PROTECTED]
