Would I care to provide an example of 'good' psychedelic art? I can't for two basic reasons: The first is that I recognize that today in discursive terms "anything can be art" because the subjectivity side of the definition of art has won out over any objective efforts to define art. That can be said to have originated with Duchamp. Even saying there is a single source for the notion is part of the theatricality of art discourse by which particular events are said to have begun something as a trend or style or era when in fact everyone can easily figure out that the zeitgeist of a time has many sources. Thus even the worst case of psychedelic 'art' can be art in someone's subjective taste and of course for the same subjective reason another person can deny that it can be or ever was art. Put me in the latter category. The second reason is that the so-called genre of psychedelic art, mainly popular culture posters and the like, never confronts the big reasons for making art at all: the investigation of values and contradictions in human life. Why do good people do bad things? Why do humans continually fail to end brutality and exploitation when the alternatives are at hand and are usually more practical? And so on. The gist of the psychedelic era in popular culture (and I was present) glorified drugs, dropping out, hedonism, self-indulgence, vanity, shallowness, naivete, and every other anti-social self-abusive from of life, blind to the real issues confronting society and art. Granted, much of that stuff was well-designed and even had art historical roots in art nouveau and other late 19C 'aesthetic' movements. But while good design is usually a feature of good art it's not a necessary feature. To say that much good art is well-designed is not to say that much good design is also art. (Some brute animals are capable of attractive 'design'). I am not nor ever was a knee-jerk conservative or liberal in matters of aesthetic taste but I do reject naming something as art that so egregiously fails to even face -- let alone engage -- the most compelling human issue, to wit, being human in an existence that does not require it.
wc ----- Original Message ---- From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sun, March 11, 2012 5:30:02 AM Subject: Re: Psychedelic art Would you care to provide an example of "good" psychedelic art? On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 3:33 PM, William Conger <[email protected]>wrote: > KITSCH. AWFUL THEN, AWFUL NOW, AWFUL FOREVER. > wc > > > ----- Original Message ---- > From: joseph berg <[email protected]> > To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]> > Sent: Tue, March 6, 2012 5:26:58 PM > Subject: Psychedelic art > > >http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/03/8-gorgeous-works-of-psych_n_1316226.html >l
