Kate wrote: > Rules don't apply to a lot of today's Western art,
Rules apply to everything, but they may not be widely held or honored rules, or even widely known. And rules apply principally to the production of the work. Rules govern how the work is made; viewers learn and adopt a similar or congruent set of rules to interpret and parse the works when they see them. > but even there you have to know the rules in order to ignore them. Only if you want to get credit for ignoring them! You can be blissfully ignorant of a given rule and just proceed as if it weren't there (which, when you think about it, is true). Works that break rules" still observe their own rules (or more precisely, the artist still follows his or her own rules of production). Sometimes artists induce a state of disorientation so they can begin a work without imposing any preconceived constraints (i.e., from canons or doctrines or "rules"). Breton and the Surrealists advocated such a strategy of inducing hallucinations by various means, and they also performed Exquisite Corpse exercises in order to disrupt the organized flow of a drawing or story. But in the end, all works are subordinated to the artist's own set of production rules, regardless of how idiosyncratic or wholly conventional those rules are. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
