Yea!, That brings up the question,,, what if personal "freedom"?
Does it have self imposed boundries? I tend to question, as WC.
mando
On Apr 27, 2009, at 6:50 AM, William Conger wrote:
A worthy comment from Miller. But if some societal realities are
served by any freely chosen endeavor, so are some personal
desires. How can they be separated or even evaluated
independently? I say they can't; if so, then there's no reason to
try. Instead, examine the freedom of choosing. What does it
entail? To what extent is choice an exercise of freedom? That is,
how is "to will" different from "be willed"? Are we free agents or
not? I want to say yes, but it may be limited to belief, to a
delusion of freedom.
wc
________________________________
From: Chris Miller <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Monday, April 27, 2009 7:37:01 AM
Subject: Re: Heidegger and Singularity
When I proposed that "a typical Hollywood movie is carefully
crafted to pull
in a large audience.", Saul countered with: "And what makes you
think art was
ever anything other than a carefully crafted artifice meant to pull
in its
audience"
Several listers then took up his challenge - but please notice
that his query
omitted the adjective "large", the dominating importance of which
only
belongs to the last few centuries of modern society.
But even now, many artists are still addressing an audience that
is very
small but demanding -- including, it seems, most of the artists on
this list
(even Mando, when he's not making toys for a mass market)
And yes, some artists seem to be unconcerned with any audience
other than
themselves.
Here's an artist statement that I just copied off a gallery wall at
my art
club:
"Initiallly, I started to paint to allow myself a new creative outlet,
somewhere I could lose mlyself form the business of everyday life.
In the past
seven years, painting has now evolved to be a spiritual expression
of how I
view life - joyful."
This is not say that her painting (which I think is pretty good)
does not
"reflect the economic and social circumstances in which an artist
works and
breathes and reveals underlying cultural assumptions and normative
values." --
but that can be said of everything that people make from automobile
tires to
cigarette lighters, whether we wish to
distinguish it as art or not.
Nowadays, of course, plenty of work is made to "reflect the
economic and
social circumstances in which an artist works". That's the genre
in which
Saul is a specialist, and which he would like to privilege above
all others
I just saw an exhibit of such called "Big World - Recent Art from
China" The
curators even explicitly stated that the artists were selected for
their
"ability to portray diverse social realities" But the only social
reality I
could find portrayed was the contemporary artworld -- and whether
any of that
stuff ends up being distinguished as art in upcoming centuries --
well, who
knows? (most of it seemed to be typical MFA stuff, but some of the
painting
was just as good as that done by the woman from my art club)
I suppose we've wandered rather far from "Heidegger and
Singularity" - but
maybe not, because the "the economic and social circumstances in
which an
artist works" is a kind of singularity. Sure, it changes over time,
but at any
one moment, historicists like Saul (with the encouragement of
Heidegger) will
attempt to determine it, and then judge art by its proximity to
that perceived
truth.
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