Cheerskep gave his reasons for not liking Red. His are valid reasons because they refer to quality standards form or I should say a set of conventions that have been long established even though they're recognized by an ever smaller group. That does not invalidate the play but it does say why Cheerskep cannot regard the whole work as aesthetically pleasing for him. Thierry deDuve speaks about this as the "pact" between the artist and his audience. When the artist breaks the pact then he loses that audience and must address another audience (and the one he breaks from may indeed becomes a candidate for a new pact). deDuve and others say tat contemporary art (modernist art) does not address any specific audience because anything can be art. Thus the process of art itself becomes the surrogate audience and becoming more and more reductive and negative (exclusionary) (leading to his complaint against Greenberg, essentially his only complaint).
The cautionary fear that any proscriptive judgment may imitate the philistine judgments in the 19C is unfounded because then there were solid conventions in place that had been agreed to by both artists and their audience (the "pact") and now there are no solid conventions because anything can be art. So we are left to choose one set of conventions or another from many at hand. Every form of art now has its little set of conventions and for each there is an audience and this plurality is far more real now than it was in the era of the Salons, official art, and the academies. That's why it's impossible to be avant garde today. There is no "front" to attack, no "leading edge" no shock to overturn set conventions. There are only different ways to address the past, to point to some practices, to extend them or to critique them. Those who think they are avant-garde are, according to deDuve and Greenberg, if I understand them, are involved in avant-gardism, a sort of psuedo re-enactment of the past-avant garde and that is the signal of kitsch. >From what I've read about Red, it is not avant-gardism and thus not kitsch >(despite the general audience largely unfamiliar with historical modernism and >saturated instead with kitsch tastes). The reason being that the play >symbolizes the interiority of the artist and the paradoxical-- paranoid, >frantic, bipolar -- subjective intellectual dialogue that underlies the >creative process. Rothko is a good choice for this interior investigation >because while an intellectual, a great traditionalist, an emotional wreck and >finally a suicide, he was not a delusional crazy drunk like Pollock, an >alcoholically altered state of mind that forever locks us out from the real >artist. In order for Cheerskep, or any of us, to have a genuine aesthetic experience he must first experience the work intuitively -- to have judged it intuitively, to be aware of liking in and of itself, without regard to utility, it before he recognizes why (according to Kant), but he can't do that unless its conventions (formal symbolic, etc.) conform, generally if not specifically, to his own. I think Thierry deDuve has done a lot to rescue the best of Greenberg, note his weaknesses, all the while revealing his own acute perceptions of theory, practice, and audience. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Michael Brady <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wed, April 7, 2010 3:21:37 PM Subject: Re: "What is happening during an 'a.e.'?" > But I felt RED as a play was bad, a narrative failure. It lacked almost all > the essential elements of storytelling. It was only ninety minutes, but it > seemed twenty minutes too long: an argument followed by a lecture followed > by an argument followed by lecture and so-not-so-forth. The characters were > vivid but not nearly three dimensional, there was no conflict, no hurdle to > be gotten over. Perhaps if one came to it with a passion for Rothko his angry > rants about the "dissonance" between the Appollonian and Dionysian impulse > would compel, but to me they felt like near-opaque hell-fire sermons by a > nasty guy on a pulpit. It was not what I go to theater for. I found this to be a telling remark, Cheerskep. Your complaint is that the play does not present things as you expected to find them. How does one go about determining whether the work is defective or that it is so outside the expected parameters that the paradigm one uses to frame and interpret the work fails or leads to a judgment like yours, that it is a failure? Is this a new kind of dramatic presentation, a new paradigm? or just a tendentious sermonizing by declaimers on stage? This reminds me of the criticism of early modern painting styles, which didn't follow the academic rules of depicting scenes. The artists replied to their critics: "Well, that's right. Our pictures do not depend on those criteria." | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
