Berg needs to recognize that when it comes to social practices and norms, habits, standards, beliefs, and the like, no predetermined requirements are absolute. People can apply whatever practice they want and then endure the consequences for better and worse.
It is possible, I suppose, for a culture to exist without any art at all in the usual sense. But is it still culture as a human condition? The trend away from traditional visual art practices has been going on for a long time, at least 150 years. Now the templates of those traditional practices are surrounded by the mist of a former time very much different from out own time. To restore the tradition would be to restore all the cultural values and practices, and technologies, that produced it. Not possible. So the real issue is what sorts of skills or traditions, what 'compliance' experiences are needed for artists in our own time. This is a very difficult issue. My answer, by no means proved, is that drawing, ordinary hand-mark-making, is the most fundamental and most human act that produces a physical trace of deliberate conscious communication. I choose that as the beginning point of art-making and in its most inclusive sense it includes music, dance, and other performative actions. My second answer, I mean what comes after drawing as a priority, is history. Man is the only animal we know of that keeps track of his own history and thus is able to pass on experiences and ideas to others who do not have the same experiences and ideas. To me, drawing (broadly defined) and history are fundamental and probably exclusively human. I can't imagine any art that does not confront what it is to be human. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tue, July 24, 2012 4:48:58 AM Subject: Re: is list dead? On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 8:30 AM, William Conger <[email protected]>wrote: > ...The visual arts are alone among the arts in degrading skills and > history of the > field to the vanishing point... Whenever I read things like that, I simply feel like a character out of a Franz Kafka novel--I just DON'T KNOW what's hitting me. Learning and mastering skills are supposed to be part of the 'compliance' aspect of art which is supposed to take place at the very start of training. I feel that young people are told prematurely to focus on self-expression, i.e., the 'performance' aspect of art which, as far as I am concerned, should only be attempted after the 'compliance' phase to prevent self-expression from quickly morphing into self-indulgence.
