Substance? What is that? If you posit style as something, what is that? I suppose you might get by with saying the traits of style can be identified as the peculiar conventions of shape and process, physical attributes of an artwork. But what is substance if not simply another name for style, a reference to physical attributes? Your sentence implies that substance is something else, something immaterial, something related to metaphysical content and the like. How can an inert physical thing have that sort of substance? If there is such a thing as art-substance it can't be anything more than the projected meanings from a viewer, or from an invented collective viewer, a invented consensus. In any case, it just ain't there, out there, like a material thing. So why bemoan the lack of art-substance? Bemoan the viewer, single or collective, who has no "substance" of thoughts or concepts or emotions or aspirations or fears or loves or life and death to metaphorically project to the thing called the artwork.
It's not such a difficult thing to recognize the separation of objects from that which is said about them. One is not the other. Why do you combine them and then note with alarm that one is actually missing? One is missing because it can't be in or of the other. Ever. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wed, November 17, 2010 3:15:49 AM Subject: Re: Can art exist without authority? On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 7:16 PM, joseph berg <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 2:08 PM, joseph berg <[email protected]> wrote: > >> - *Good art weathers* the ages because once in so often a man of >> intelligence commands the mass to adore it. >> >> *Ezra* Pound >> > > > Without authority, won't the bad eventually push out the good? > > Also, without authority to serve as gatekeepers, won't the field of hopeful wannabe's become so huge that it will become more important for them to do whatever it takes to stand out rather than to do quality work thereby making style more important than substance?
