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On 6/7/10 6:47 PM, "William Conger" <[email protected]> wrote: I am happy to agree with Cheerskep's interesting post about the problems concerning the same and the new. I suppose every artist want to keep on making something all new in the best sense of the term. The expectation of the modernist spirit is to do that, as Michael points out. I suppose the best recent example in the visual arts is Picasso, although I never had any trouble recognizing his work despite radical stylistic changes. Something inherent in his work was always the "same" even though it is hard to say just what that is. The same is true for all good artists. I've seen plenty of artists destroy themselves artistically trying to be up to date with the latest trend or trying to change their work into something that's just not natural for them. The fact is that all real artists, if they are very good and very lucky and very hard working, do express an aesthetic, or some unique sensibility that is both a product of and free from something already established. That's their idea, their aesthetic, their substance as an artist. If these artists are smart they will realize that a single lifetime, no matter how long and how free from distractions won't suffice to enable them to fully explore their idea. I've always believed that an artist is best off doing what he or she can do as well as possible. That's usually a very big challenge because it means discovering one's limitations. It also means of course that one is always testing one's idea, even subverting it and happily rediscovering its authenticity and vitality. The old slogan for the watch, "It takes a beating and keeps on ticking" is suitable for good art ideas too. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Mon, June 7, 2010 11:35:12 AM Subject: The "same" vs the "new". In a message dated 6/6/10 12:16:30 PM, [email protected] writes: > In the world of art and art writing, it's often heard that X's new show > was a > disappointment because he/she still seems to be doing the same thing since > the > previous big show three years earlier. Redundancy and its sidekick, > derivation, are held up as defects, flaws, or shortcomings in the artist's > insight or conception. Mere variation--the result of the simple fact that > one > cannot easily repeat the same work over and over without a bit of orbital > drift and change--is not sufficient. It has to be significant and *new*. > > As to the truly groundbreaking works, they rarely have any progeny. Joyce > wrote Ulysses and followed it with Finnegan's Wake, his last novel (of a > total > of 5 he wrote), and as far as I know, there have been very few successors > to > them of any great note. > High on my list of fuzzy words are 'same' and 'new'. Gottlob Frege is often said to have given birth to "philosophy of language" with his 1892 paper, 'Uber Sinn and Bedeutung', acceptably translated as 'Sense and Reference'. It's a profoundly confused piece that misled a legion of philosophers after him. My point in mentioning it: It began with his assertion that he intended in that essay to tackle the deeply puzzling notion of "the same". He was right to be puzzled. Not only is there there no "THE meaning of" 'same', but notions it occasions have always been muddled. Still, maybe we could agree to say that, though every succeeding play by Shakespeare was "new", none was "new" in the sense that Joyce's succeeding works were. I'm among those who feel that FINNEGANS WAKE's "newness" was a horrific fall-off -- not nearly so gratifying for me to read as his earlier works were. Shakespeare's "sameness" was exactly what I was hoping for as I went from one play to the next. I was James Herriot's publisher. The "jacket slogan" I put on the front cover of his first book (ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL) was "The warm and joyful memoirs of an animal doctor." It was an immense bestseller. As we were preparing to release the next volume by Herriot (ALL THINGS BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL"), another publisher heard that I planned to put on it the slogan, "The warm and joyful sequel to ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL". He called to warn me off. "Sequels are death!" he told me. I said I believed exactly opposite was true in Herriot's case. "His readers want want more of the same," I claimed. We published five volumes of memoirs by that Yorkshire veterinarian. Each volume sold more than the one before, and he ended up as the most widely-read English-language memoirist/storyteller of the 20th century. James could have come up with something "new", but the "new thing" would have had to have an appeal that equaled his memoirs, and there was no way he could find that. Joyce died deeply deeply disappointed by the reception to FINNEGANS WAKE. That, I think, is the only excuse/triumph in an artist's abandoning his "same" and going to a "new". Shakespeare, Bach, Beethoven, Dickinson, Austen, Dickens, Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, et al could find no "new" to match the appeal of their "same", and, assuming they enjoyed creating more of the "same", they were right to stick to it. ("Oh, but Shakespeare never wrote the same play twice. Austen never wrote the same novel twice!" "Same"? What do you have in mind when you say 'same'?) --
