This is one of the topics always under discussion. The problem with skills and recipes is that no threshold standards for determining art quality are recognized anymore. Now anything can be art and thus nothing is excluded as possible art. We need to go back to Kant to understand why. He argued that an aesthetic impression is intuitive, a-priori, and tacit. It affects how we experience the world and makes it possible to experience anything at all as aesthetic. So the objective world, including what we call art, is partially enabled and shaped by the subjective a-priori. The "we" is another problem, one that entails cultural, class, political, agreements, more or less explicated or undone from time to time. You are lamenting that public taste in saying it's all but absent anymore. I'm not so sure it's absent but it is being expanded to paradoxical extremes. And who is to say what a skill or recipe is? Every artist uses conventions -- ways of doing things -- and you might say that these are skills or recipes. The conventions are, however, always under scrutiny because redundancy, conventions that have lost their relevancy for both artists and culture, are dead and false. Any serious artist is forever testing his and his culture's conventions, in the medium, and in conceptual ways of shaping ideas about the world (and of experience). Furthermore, I think it's impossible to forego all "art" conventions or recipes because those that already exist are the only ones to copy, test, alter, destroy. In this way the artist is always addressing the past and whatever is proposed as a new or altered contention necessarily retains the echoes of its history (in other art or symbolic cultural endeavor). It is equally impossible to retain a past convention intact (or even from day to day) since one's way of experiencing the world, both in ordinary sensory and informational terms, and in (more correctly) metaphorical terms are undergoing constant change. You are not the same person from day to day in the most intimate experiential terms and thus you do not have the same a-priori sensations day to day and thus you construct your perception of reality different from day to day (meaning also moment to moment). If this is so, how much more is it true of something from a distant past (reconstructed also) and by different minds?
As usual, I need to bluntly reject the intent of your argument, with polite apologies. It lacks reflective substance. It pleads for authority only on the grounds of sentimentality of a particularly gooey sort. WC ----- Original Message ---- From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sat, April 24, 2010 6:24:32 PM Subject: "...The orchard used to produce a crop every year, which was made into cherry jam. But, as Firs informs us, now the recipe has been lost. It is thus a relic of the past, an artifact, of no present use to anyone except as a memorial to or symbol of th Concerning that comment about Chekhov's THE CHERRY ORCHARD, isn't there a parallel with the world of art today where young artists no longer can begin to hope to create works of art approaching the level of the masterpieces of the past because they no longer remember the recipe, i.e., that the skills and rules of the past have not been properly passed down to them?: http://www.sparknotes.com/drama/cherryorchard/themes.html
