But if one is stupid or so affected by value-bias, is it then possible that the work expresses more than is experienced? Which faucet is bigger, the one of the work or the one in head? And how does a work "express" except by what is experienced? How can we say that what is expressed is at all different from what is experienced? Whatever is expressed might be the same thing as whatever is experienced. We continually experience our own expressions as if they were independent, modifying as needed in confrontation with the world, pretending that even a mute object "speaks" or expresses to us. wc
----- Original Message ---- From: Michael Brady <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sat, March 20, 2010 6:04:56 PM Subject: Re: Phenomenology of Signs Imago Asthetik wrote: > So would you say that an artwork depicting something real expresses less than what the artist feels or experiences? Yes. The range of feelings a person feels is multivariate, constantly in flux, and never definitive. On the other hand, the painting is fixed and stable. It "expresses" (a poor word to use here) what can be "expressed" *in paint and pictorial means*. Paintings are physical embodiments of some notion of the artist's that can only be rendered that way. Otherwise, the artist would tell you something or sing it or not. Pantings also evoke viewers' feelings in response, but they are beside the point. Furthermore, I suspect that the painting (song, sculpture, etc.) doesn't express/embody a preexisting feeling of the artist's. That feeling may well have been the inspiration and motive to start the painting, but I believe--based on my own experiences--that the final state of the painting "realizes" (as the French say about moviemaking) the initial feelings as they were modified in many ways, in fact, overtaken and commandeered by the feelings that are provoked during its making. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
