The trouble I have with Berg's postings is that it keeps any discussion on the low end of journalistic populism. The people who write the stuff he reposts here are doing their jobs, writing slightly acerbic columns to a constituency of middle-brow readers. That's fine in context but it completely sidesteps the more fascinating intellectual issues that this list is supposed to be dealing with.
Bergs likes to cite articles and blogs that support his conservative and unreflective, opinions. He -- or she -- never examines any of those sources critically, adding, countering, analyzing, or otherwise commenting on them. No, Berg seems to interested only in gathering as big a pile of blather as possible to tilt the scale, making it obvious to one and all that contemporary art practice/ theory is a crazy affair. I want to know why we -- as humans -- always perceive any sense data as explainable, as representative of something just beyond the border of consciousness, as it were. Does consciousness create itself by continually engulfing what occurs as the explainable? In visual art are we compelled to explain any imagery as representative of something else? And is this also true of the other senses, considered alone or together? If so, then it would seem that it is impossible to be conscious without having an object in consciousness, without a metaphor, without an explanation, however fanciful or incomplete. By centering this on the case of art, it would seem impossible to consider "art for art's sake" or the fully "abstract", "non-objective" concepts. There can be nothing of consciousness until and unless there is some "object" for it to define itself by. No art image until we perceive it as if it were something else. Populist journalists, step forth. WC ----- Original Message ---- From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]> Sent: Mon, September 27, 2010 1:47:49 AM Subject: "I sense that in the long run there is a greater value for humanity in empowering folks to make and create than there is in teaching them the canon, the great works and the masterpieces." http://journal.davidbyrne.com/2009/12/121209-art-funding-or-arts-funding.html
