That is why I have always been careful to save every sketch of art.
They are more apt to
come from one's being. One never really knows how to evaluate one's
own work, until
some time passes.
mando
On Jan 3, 2009, at 3:01 PM, William Conger wrote:
Yeah, I suppose great art means "no reasonable doubt" or the
cliche, "suspension of disbelief."
I want to go back to Geoff and Cheerskep's search for the
attributes about talent and gift. Here's a sloppy off-the cuff
outlook and guessing.
I suspect that highly creative artists (as distinguished from non-
poetic creators like engineers and CEOs) have a brain quirk, some
glitch in their neural pathways that lead them to think a bit
differently from those who don't have the "defect". Further, these
individuals may have suffered emotional trauma as infants or
children, effectively hampering their ability to process and
express genuine well-being. Since learning and growing up to
function well in a society assumes a "well-being" these people
don't learn the same way and may develop differing brain "circuits"
for dealing with the stream of experience, opening them to odd or
strange assessments. Is this a form of madness? Maybe so, but if
the person is productively creative, then a type of actual
sublimation enables a new "sense of well being" that can be shared
and aids societal belonging. The creative artist finds well being
through sublimation.
The difference between the pure and total subjectivity of madness
and the odd subjectivity of the artist is that for the artist the
real world of actuality is always the guide to creativity. No
matter how novel the fantasy of subjectivity, it relies on
actuality and is always far simpler than even the most mundane real
thing. When I paint an abstract shape that looks like 250 things
(say) it is only different from one specific look-alike real thing
in its simplicity and generality. Any make-believe is a
simplification of actuality. (And any consciousness is a make-
believe of the raw stream of actual experience of a real world)
Creative artists usually don't fully realize their "gift" or
talent because it seems quite normal to them. Even if we restrict
ourselves to gift/talent as having special facility -- and I think
it goes well beyond that -- the creative artist may not understand
that his/her facility is difficult or impossible for others to attain.
I think it's best to think of the creative gift/talent as a sort of
apparatus, a machinery or set of tools. Artists tend to develop an
apparatus (medium, etc.) that enables them to fumble around the
hidden and protected innermost self, recognizing its need for "well-
being" and symbolizing it in the form that apparatus enables.
The obsessional work and "never-give-up" arrogance (an "I'll show
you!" attitude that aims to prove that the traumatized or "oddball"
and thus rejected self is worthy of well being and societal
affection) are indicative of the artist's need to create over and
over. The "hard work" is not regretted, but is the necessary labor
of sublimation, to release a symbol of the now worthy self (and one
which constitutes a surrogate for others, the essence of societal
approval and societal well-being).
When the marble rolls through the creative person's brain, it
follows different pathways than those rutted by the societal habits
of learning, interpreting, concluding, etc.
WC
--- On Sat, 1/3/09, armando baeza <[email protected]> wrote:
From: armando baeza <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Malcolm Gladwell and beliefs
To: [email protected]
Cc: "armando baeza" <[email protected]>
Date: Saturday, January 3, 2009, 3:52 PM
How fuzzy may "beyond all reasonable doubt be in
art"?
mando
On Jan 3, 2009, at 1:30 PM, William Conger wrote:
That is also why the rule is "legal truth =
beyond all reasonable
doubt"
WC
--- On Sat, 1/3/09, GEOFF CREALOCK
<[email protected]> wrote:
From: GEOFF CREALOCK
<[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Malcolm Gladwell and beliefs
To: [email protected]
Date: Saturday, January 3, 2009, 10:10 AM
Michael: I don't understand that the courts
are happy to
leave it to the
jury to sort through all the information. It seems
to me
that witnesses are
asked to be careful, if not scrupulous, in what
they
report. I agree that,
in the end, the jury (or judge) comes to a
conclusion about
the "truth" but
the hope is that it is based on each witness'
best
efforts to be truthful.
Which is it? You assume an either-or answer here.
Persons
differ. For some,
one answer may apply; for some the other.
Geoff C
From: Michael Brady
<[email protected]>
Reply-To: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Malcolm Gladwell and beliefs)
Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2009 10:00:20 -0500
On Dec 31, 2008, at 3:57 PM, GEOFF CREALOCK
wrote:
"... All memories are fiction" I
wonder
if you would feel constrained if
you were required to "tell the truth,
the
whole truth, and nothing but
the truth".
The truthfulness you allude to is a legal
concept. A
crucial part of this
use of "truth" is that it can be
verified, or
at least subjected to tests
of its veracity. Please note that in court,
when
testimony is given and
evidence adduced, all of the testimony and
much of the
evidence consist of
representations, which are fictions, they are
representation and reports
and replicas of some thing or event. The
crime scene
photographs, the eye
witness's description, the 911 tape
recording,
etc., all of them
constitute parts of a total view of the crime
being
prosecuted. After they
are presented, they are then tested. It is in
the
testing that the truth
of the representations are verified or
disproved. The
truth tests
determine for the jury whether the evidence
is
reliable. That's the truth
of the matter.
Presumably one fiction is as good, or
better than
