Monetary and cultural value are not one in the same - artistic value - how a work may contribute to its discipline is not the same as its aesthetic worth, the list goes on - a work of art stops being a work of art when it stops having value as a work of art - that is when it no longer has a function within the cultural sphere - at which time it may become merely a an antique painting valued for period style or subject matter
On 4/29/09 9:51 AM, "William Conger" <[email protected]> wrote: ____________________________________________ Saul Ostrow | Visual Arts & Technologies Environment Chair, Sculpture Voice: 216-421-7927 | [email protected] | www.cia.edu<http://www.cia.edu/> The Cleveland Institute of Art | 11141 East Boulevard, Cleveland, OH 44106 ________________________________ From: Michael Brady <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2009 7:25:09 AM Subject: Re: Heidegger and Singularity-string William: > [Me] I did not say art has no function. I said that utilitarian things are made *first* to have a function, and their looks are subordinate to that. Works of art are made *first* to have a certain appearance, and then perhaps to serve an explicit function, as a portrait, a religious icon, etc. In my haste I propped open a door with a valuable work of art. Did the artwork become an ordinary doorstop and lose its art value? > > [William] How is a "certain appearance" not a function? The artist acts to please self perception and that's a function of the act. Aw, shit. Now you're making this into ambiguity and ambivalence. Seven types of them, even. Gotta mull this one over. > [Me] You also say, "The problem is we can't find the location of art." I believe that we have no trouble locating a given artifact or made thing if it's well within the borders of a category, say, in Kansas. But when the artifact is over near the edge, on the beach at low tide, on the border between art and nonart, then we have a difficult time, NOT locating the work, but locating the boundary. > > [William] I was using a common figure of speech when I said "location" to mean the identity of a concept among other concepts, not the physical placement of an object. Ah, but my answer was metaphorical. Some encounters seem to be very clear and unambiguous. "This looks like an X, and I feel comfortable responding to it in X-terms." Those things are "in Kansas," i.e., well within the limits of the category at hand. But other things are not so clear, they seem to hover on the edge between Y and Z, and we pause and ponder what to make of it. "Okay, I'll take it as Y, but if it seems to be more like Z as I get into it, I'll be willing to revise my interpretation." Don't revise, just include. As every scientist beginning with Descartes knows the fallacy of analogy or the impossibility of a thing being equivalent to the thing it is being likened to. Ambiguity is a good place to be and I'd suggest that if it's not ambiguous, it's not art. That implies that art can be functional or utilitarian and still retain its art identity > [Me] Are you ever puzzled when you encounter some thing and wonder, "Is that a work of art?" I suspect it happens as infrequently as not being able to tell whether the voice on the telephone is a man's or woman's, or if the long-haired person sitting in the row in front of you is a man or woman. What are the cues and qualities of each encounter that guide your first snap conclusion? Analogous to seeing something "as art" or not. You make a provisional scheme for deciding on the nature of what you are perceiving. Things that are well within the boundaries typically don't cause problems, but things at the edge--the contralto voice that could be a tenor, the long hair and indistinct shoulders that could be a man, the picture that could be merely a picture. <g> > > [William] When I consciously adopt the attitude that my experiences are art experiences, then nearly everything is art, an aesthetic experience; if not, I'm not paying close attention to my experience as an aesthetic experience. I think when we are conscious the aesthetic realization is always more or less insistent. We choose to pay more or less attention to it. I can't experience what I am not already prepared to experience. An analogy might be that we are always prepared to breath and thus we are prepared to breath fresh air, or not so fresh air. I agree with this, except for the first sentence. I can't calibrate my experiences to be art experiences, and I cannot, ergo, experience nearly everything as art. I can--and often do--pay attention to the "aesthetic" properties of things, such as the keyboard of this computer, and make observations about its aesthetic qualities. But that does not mean that the keyboard had been transmuted into a work of art. Why not? if you regard it as art, then it is one half art if you don't include the keyboard designer's art interest and it's all art if you loan your aesthetic regard to the absent keyboard designer or simply force it upon him or her. Your position falsely assumes that the keyboard designer had no aesthetic achievement (I've already tried to explain intention is irrelevant irrelevant. Achievement is not but it is impossible to"locate" as stemming from the designer or something more complex and paradoxical). > [Me] My criterion--is the representation contingent on external verification--is a binary thing. Either it is (the map must conform to what it purports to represent or it's functionally useless) or it's not (the map is a imaginary diagram of a yet-to-be-discovered land of praeternatural bounty). The saint's image on the wall can be painted in any way, as long as certain attributes are shown--and the same saint looks different from one church to another. The accuracy of the likeness is an elastic standard, modified by the artist's skill and preference for various pictorial effects. Not so the driver's license photo. > > [William] This is too mechanistic for me. I mean it's too conditioned by rules and the comforts they provide. If something purports to represent something, then it does, unless there is another previous representation ( or prescribed rules for that representation) that has been taken or insisted upon by some authority as true. I didn't assert this as a prescriptive rule, but as a general observation about perception and experience. I believe that at the fundamental level of encounters, we parse our sensory information first at a level of threat or non-threat, and then parse it again and again many times in rapid succession into personal and social categories, unknown and known, so that we prepare ourselves to engage the new thing. The old smarty-pants joke about the Dwayne Hanson sculpture in the gallery ("How do you know whether it's a statue or the guard?" "The statue has a square taped on the floor around it.") demonstrates my point: we react differently, based on how we expect to engage the object. Real guard, nod or speak; statue, pause and look. You can't resort to unreflective common experience -- call it naive realism -- to shake rather sophisticated reasoning. At this point in our conversation we should not be resorting to "general observation" always more or less faulty, to illustrate our arguments. I agree with the sentences re threat, etc. but what's your point other than clarifying that we do indeed fail to note reality correctly until more and more cues are processed...and those too may lead to faulty decisions. I will finish later. WC In fact, your statement above about consciously adopting an attitude about art experiences describes a condition similar to mine: you are applying a rule ("interpret as art experience") so that the characteristics of the encounter that best fit your expectations are most evident. > [William] Also, you know very well that the first thing people do when they see their new driver's license photo is judge whether or not it is an accurate likeness. That surely betrays the fact that a thousand photos of one person's face will show a thousand different faces (and that's why the most accurate digital proportional measuring can ID a person regardless of the varied appearances of that same person's photo images). I think either you missed my point, or I am missing yours. I meant to say that, while painted likenesses may or may not match the model--in fact, some, like pictures of Jesus, don't even claim to do be actual likenesses--we expect a degree of reliable correlation between the ID card photo and the bearer (allowing for the notoriously poor quality of such photos). > [William] The question remains: Where is art? With the artist? With the audience? A collaboration? > With historical symbols, symbols of culture and its beliefs? I'm inclined to think that we all have an innate aesthetic buzz in our consciousness that we can tune up or down but never off. That buzz is always urging us to objectify it and when we do we say, Ah, there's art! Then, unhappily, we contaminate the awareness with explanations, but we are compelled to do so. I understand this, but we part company at the "There's art" moment. My experience is that, like you, I have the buzzer constantly on, but when only when I see something that I rapidly *and provisionally* declare to be "art-qualified" do I apply "artistic criteria" to it. Aesthetic qualities can
