All the artist needed to do was to paint a smirk or smile on Obama's face to 'convey' an intention mindful of social codes and habits of the group he wanted to address, and use this rhetorial convention to persuade others. wc
----- Original Message ---- From: Saul Ostrow <[email protected]> To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Sent: Tue, April 17, 2012 9:42:41 AM Subject: RE: "It's bad art because it does not create belief in the fiction that the artist has rendered. Instead, the artist's belief must be explained" There is a difference in the intimate relation of the maker to the made that of intention and desire, but embedded in the very relation of the thing to that which it comes to represent e.g. its characteristics relative to those that circumscribes the makers practice and to which both the maker and consumer jointly subscribe in the form of presumptions, assumptions, and conventions. Subsequently, the content of neither is self-determined and what sense can be made of it is always unstable in that this and still more come to bear on any and all interpretations, which rely on rhetoric or figurative (metaphorical) language and are therefore always ambiguous assemblages or constructs in which alternatives are also already present do to what Derrida identifies as Defference (a contraction between difference and deferral) the point where dissimilar terms come to be joined one to the other in a non-disclusionary/ non-inclusionary manner. This surplus of explanations be it binary, contradictory, or intrinsically bound together by other logics or systems of raises the question of how might this condition is taken as a given, used, resisted, or re-deployed to give representation to the economy of such indetermination in face of the need or desire to act in accordance with it - given these material conditions of consciousness and desire may not be willed away the problematic of this internalization of what might be thought to be a normative condition is the point from which analysis and self- reflection arises - for the question is not one of rightness but of what is sensical - that which permits us to proceed.
