"...it seems altogether intuitive that a stone has no inherent meaning and if that is so, neither does a painting."
It depends if a stone is manipulated to an art form or not. The word meaning could be looked from two points. One is human/utilitarian, dealing with the present moment's comfort of the body and mind. From this point meaning of art is not always much essential. If we think of total existence of substance and states of its orderly structure, art has a profound meaning even "nameless". Boris Shoshensky To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Reading Kivy - Chapter One: How we got here and why Date: Mon, 5 Oct 2009 07:19:25 -0700 (PDT) Miller is now suffering from illusions of grandeur when he characterizes Bell as "amusing or sad, poor" He doesn't understand that any object or sound or form is, in itself, without being experienced, meaningless. Meaning is what we project and is affected by how we use external reality, even the realities we ourselves make or manipulate like a painting or musical composition. I do wonder about the possible symmetry between the form of objects/sound/movement and brain cells evolved to respond to the stimulus of them in certain patterned ways, but aside from that vague curiosity, yet to be clearly affirmed by science, it seems altogether intuitive that a stone has no inherent meaning and if that is so, neither does a painting. However, and this is crucial, I believe, it is impossible for a conscious and "normal" functioning human to avoid associations when experiencing the world or anything in it. These may be numerous or few and often, the fewer the better, as, for example when a driver sees something dart before him, he's better off rejecting any association to an apparition or a harmless piece of paper and act as if it were something more solid, like a person or deer. Conversely, in some art, it's important to keep the field of associations as open as possible, to avoid eliciting one or another but to try to keep them all "in play" as it were. That is as true for the artist as it is for the viewer. In that sense the work is meaningless because it values no associative evocation above another even to the point of paradox and contradiction. That is a very difficult thing to do when an artist is working with images, shapes, form, color, etc., because so many precise associations have been attached to these elements over time. The task is to keep those rote associations at bay, to keep the inherent "namelessness" of anything in view. It is easier, maybe, to do this with music; perhaps almost impossible in language, although some good examples come to mind (symbolic poetry). Miller exploits the cheap trick of putting depreciating adjectives in front of his subject in order to stain that subject with weakness: "...poor, sad, amusing Bell". This journalistic trick belongs in the excitable sports pages and not in supposedly sober analysis. Further, Miller does not understand conceptual approaches to aesthetic experience. He does not understand the value of meaninglessness, the emptying of objects, releasing them from the parasitic nature of associative thinking, and returning them to a relative purity for new experience, and possibly new awareness of being alive. He makes fun of Bell and stretches Kivy to make him an ally for his own heavily biased and unexamined, "naive realist" philosophy. And listers call that "cogent" I say it fails on the first step by exposing a false interpretation based on pejorative adjectives before analysis. That is the opposite of cogent which means a forceful appeal to reason. WC ________________________________ From: Chris Miller <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, October 5, 2009 8:36:23 AM Subject: Re: Reading Kivy - Chapter One: How we got here and why >Haslick demonstrates simplistic flat thinking. Bell is more sophisticated. (Boris) The only difference is that Bell admits his occasional failure, as sometimes when he is "tired or perplexed", he let's "slip my sense of form". Presumably, at other times, he is is successful in keeping his attention riveted "simply and solely of forms and their artistic combination" It's amusing - or sad -- to think of that poor man trying so diligently to avoid any "ideas of life" while auditioning a concert - as it is to think of a painter who heroically strives to make his work appear meaningless. As Kivy writes, such formalism is a reductio ad absurdum of itself -- or, as I would say, a reductio ad absurdum of the observation that subject matter can be considered irrelevant to the distinction between good art and everything else. Such an observation could have been made at any time and place where one statue of the XXX is chosen over many others which are thrown out, even though their subject matter could be called identical. But it's especially unavoidable in modern times when visiting an encyclopedic art museum and enjoying a variety of images whose intended subject matter is sometimes not known and usually not important. (Do I really care if this is a statue of Mithros or not?) ____________________________________________________________ Save big on quality, name brand carpets. Click now! http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL2231/fc/BLSrjnxYPYXomvNN0LdksiHdf09c99 FvD7cgKjZC0oaWUNZRmXSCJqoJpM8/
