Fuzzy is alive and well... Is finally clearly stated,
mando
On Apr 29, 2009, at 8:22 AM, [email protected] wrote:
"I'll go out on a limb and say that the more clear the message in
art, the
less art it is".
WC
It is true. Most visual art is predictable, and the champion one is
desperation to shock with the "painful" social 'message'. Bores me to
death.
Boris Shoshensky
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Heidegger and Singularity-string
Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2009 06:21:00 -0700 (PDT)
________________________________
Under Saul's definition, I suppose the Constitution of the US would
qualify as
a work of art.
Or Mt. Rushmore. Or any one of a hundred mediocre statues gracing
the public
buildings, parks and plazas across America.
A good work of art is essentially empty, a container for all those
economic,
social, cultural values Saul mentions. You can dump any value you
choose into
a good work of art; in fact, the more you can dump in (project
into) the
better for the artwork with respect to content. Since in good art
nothing (no
content) can be easily excluded the only thing left to judge for
the sake of
discovering standards is formal nature of the work by means of
comparison and
contrast. This is why overtly propagandistic art -- that which
resists
projection of paradoxical societal values in favor of clearly
limited values
-- fails. All societies, all of their values, are always complex,
competing, paradoxical, contradictory and that's what you realize
in analysis
of great works of art. Great art solves no puzzles, preaches no
gospel, and
rejects simplification of human endeavors. It spills the guts of
humanity at
your feet. It invites analysis and re-experience of
the human struggle for knowledge and goodness. In fact, if you
want clear,
often precise, illustration of economic, social, and cultural
values in art,
look to the vast array of second-rate and mediocre art where such
one-dimensional aims are vivid and commonplace. Advertising and
popular
imagery are good places to start. No wonder that popular culture
imagery has
become so ubiquitous is serious contemporary art. No wonder that
almost none
of it is great art.
I'll go out on a limb and say that the more clear the message in
art, the less
art it is.
I believe it was art historian T.J. Clark who was the first to
bring scholarly
attention to the social, etc., content implications of early
modernist art.
It's been overdone. Until that time, John Rewald was the one who most
codified the formal approach to that same art, dismissing the latent
sociological evocations that Clark later emphasized. That was
overdone.
I realize that there were earlier "social art histories" going back to
Burkhardt's famous treatise re Renaissance culture and art, and
others. But
the standard approach to modernist art through the late 1960s,
generally, was
formal, a study of style. What is relevant now is a balanced
examination of
both formal and social content. A serious artist aims for the
whole tragic,
messy, stinking, hopeful, beautiful, enticing bag of human reality
presented
as something spiritual and therefore fundamentally noble. Try
putting that
into a Warhol or a Rembrandt portrait and see which work gags and
suffocates
and which swallows it all whole.
WC
Saul Ostrow said:
this ability to reflect something of the economic (the system by
which the
exchange of values is regulated, etc.), social(the relationship
that organize
a community,etc.) , and
cultural (common standards, criteria, traditions,etc.)
circumstances of its
audience is not a mark of its makers success -
but that of the successful work of art, and this can happen either
in the
time
of its making or after
--
____________________________________________
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
____________________________________________________________
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