Kate writes: "none."
Good answer. " I wasn't discussing anything but the marks made deliberately by artists on surfaces, preferably with some pigmented substance." Idiosyncratic answer, and, I'd guess not an answer shared completely by a single other lister. I'd say many listers would agree to restrict their notion of "marks" to deliberate products by humans. Some might balk at "artists". (E.g. technicians and craftsmen might be said by some to display a "mark". "The distinctive mark of Dr. Colm's amputation technique was speed." "The distinctive mark of Dr. Boehm's dentistry was the use of titanium." "The distinctive surface mark of the Macintosh is the Apple on the cover.") And those who would agree to restrict it to "artists" might, without denying what you say your "preference" is, celebrate the many non-pigment "marks' on the surface of works by sculptors. I observed that Michael's notion of a mark as "a distinctive visual artifact" seemed to clash with Miller's stipulation that, "A mark is whatever is done to a surface in a single uninteruppted touch." It clashed, I said, because most people would accept most completed paintings as artifacts, and I doubted many paintings were executed in a single uninterrupted touch. To which Kate responded: "No. Paintings are made up of marks, as plays are made of sentences. This is not adequate ridicule on Cheerskep's part." I'm unsure what has evoked Kate's charge of "inadequate ridicule". Could I perhaps save the day by saying, "Michael, you are the golldangest fool in all the Carolinas if you believe a damn dumb thing like that"? (By the way, I here call your attention to the archive where you will find me saying several times that it's a mistake to think of any "work of art" as a single work: It is always a bundle of innumerable "acts of art".) Finally Kate wrote: [Cheerskep said: The second half of my gripe was this: the thread is fruitless. Its would-be fruit is a compendium of the untenable and the obvious. Ah, they all say that.] I stick to my pop-guns: I ain't yet seen on this thread anything defensible that isn't old news. ************** Make your summer sizzle with fast and easy recipes for the grill. (http://food.aol.com/grilling?ncid=emlcntusfood00000006)
