A correct perspective of "contemporary institutions of art" would reveal that every variety of art is to be seen in museums and public art venues from the bizarre to the most conventional and including a wide range of things that could be regarded as beautiful. Of course it is impossible to show that the bizarre is indeed the opposite of beautiful as the the two terms are expansive. We can only say with some little assurance that the bizarre is opposite of the conventional but we cannot say that the conventional is clearly the beautiful. We don't need to go all the way to medieval China to discover examples of the odd, strange, bizarre that have somehow come to be valued as conventionally normal years of centuries later. For some the conventional, especially the refined conventional is the beautiful.
We might even wonder if all extremes ultimately flatten to a normalized conventionality sooner or later. Maybe an analogy would be comparison to those stock charts that predict how stock's volatility in the early years of its offering finally evens out to a relative modest growth several years later. However, I do think it's evident across the spectrum of culture that in recent years there's been a steep dive into the bizarre, the horrid, the gross. the taboo, the degraded, the ugly, the defamed, the stupid, the insane, the vapid, the depressing, and every other negative form of dehumanizing idiocy -- all of it desperately aiming for some remarkably new insight into the perplexity of the human condition and reality, as if a negative adventure is the only route to truth. I think it is as doomed as the saccharine idealization of beauty in perfected, harmonious, "formal" composition. The trouble with conventionalized beauty is that it prefers a sort of resolution, a sense of the perfect. But life is not that way and no art that is distinct from life can last because anyone's personal experience exceeds the limitations of resolution. Such refinement or perfection or aspirational beauty is merely a brief escape from reality, I mean the reality of anyone's truthful self-awareness. But if this is true of beauty it is also true of the ugly for the very same reasons. I think the best quest for truth in art (by which I mean something metaphorically akin to human experience) is in the paradoxical and ill-resolved conjunction of beauty (the resolved, perfected and harmonious), and the ugly, (the degenerative, fearsome, disjointed, destructive). Thus I think the best sort of "harmony" or "beauty" is that which contradicts the famous phrase of Renaissance art theorist, Leon Alberti, who declared that "beauty is that in which nothing can be changed except for the worse". "Worse" in his sense would be anything out of character, out of proportional harmony, discordant, "bizarre" etc. I prefer the mix of things, the brinksmanship of being at the ambiguous point of either cohesive harmony or discordant, bizarre, dissolution. This can apply to both composition, the formal elements, or the content, singly or together. I suppose this assumes that the goal of any serious art, visual or otherwise, is to get at, lay bare, the actuality of human experience by some symbolic means that lifts one far from the narrowness of the topical and at the same time, paradoxically, immerses one in it. Several times I've referred to Goya's "2nd of May, 1808" as a good example of this. I suppose hundreds of other equally good examples are at our fingertips, from the Parthenon metopes to the nudes of Lucian Freud and the abstraction of Jasper Johns and many others in every mode. I think this is the sort of art that endures. It is the toughest and most risky to attempt. It offers thick, paradoxical substance in contrast to the one-slice bread of bizarre banality or sentimentalized idealism that merely mirrors the artifical, unlived, one-dimensional lying of popular culture. I would agree with Miller (with a grudging hesitation) that much of today's "bizarre" art is on a trip to a fictionalized hell as a cheap and easy alternative to the real goal for art. The truth will out, sooner or later and all the art of our era now filling the contemporary venues will be boiled down to a tiny fraction of that, just as always. Far better to at least aim for real art and be forgotten than to aim for the "one-dimensional" and be forgotten. While all oblivion might be the same, all lives lived in art are not equal. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Chris Miller <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sat, November 14, 2009 7:51:02 AM Subject: RE: If I say a thing is beautiful, how can I convince you that certai n p roperties of that thing are in fact beautiful? Did Peirce suggest how experts in the "science of phenomenology" might be selected? Historically, selection was done by birth, followed by a kind of anarchic status wrangling - like kids do in high school or adults do in corporations. The 10th C. novel, "Tale of Genji" exemplifies that process, with Prince Genji rising to the top of the Heian court as an expert in every kind of aesthetic practice: poetry, dancing, music, painting, and even perfumery. And overall, as we observe the results of this courtly behavior across cultures, whether in Benin, Kyoto, or Firenze, we might well conclude that the results were quite positive - i.e. beautiful rather than bizarre, which is the quality sought by contemporary institutions of art. But how can experts be selected in our modern world where status follows institutional resume rather than the direct personal regard of social peers? How can expertise be tested? When aesthetics finally recovers from its current fascination with interpretation, this is the question that it should be addressing .......................................................... Frances to William and others... In regard to the aesthetic beauty of an artistic work which property is sensed by a competent individual, and if this approach to the issue may be posed by a lurker in the wings, consider the Peircean pragmatist position on an expert doing the science of phenomenology by personally observing given phenomena and then expressing the feelings of whatever objective fleeting haze seems to be subjectively felt as posited by the given stuff. The expression of observation itself by the sole expert however is insufficient and inadequate to satisfy the pragmatist tenets of science. The expressions must be shared by some relevant collective community of similar experts who share such expressions of observations. It is this collection of expressions upon at least a tentative agreement that then goes to the scientific explanation and definition of the given phenomena. ____________________________________________________________ Weight Loss Program Best Weight Loss Program - Click Here! http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL2231/c?cp=1FBtylUBYcYQaFDuSWxeRAAAJz6c l_zTaptgNR5c8Mer1v9kAAYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEUgAAAAA=
