Another incisive comment from Michael. However, I am thinking about his phrase, "content cannot be expressed in immaterial form". Exactly how is content expressed? And how, exactly, is content identified and comprehended? I don't know how to express content because no method seems assuredly accurate. This is where we come to Cheerskep's safety hatch, the 'occasion'. All we can do is try to employ a sufficient number of 'occasion' triggers and hope that one or another of them will give rise to a vaguely desired recognition or thought. In looking at artworks, the elusive golden ring of content is often buried under a cluster of vague, seemingly arbitrary, shapes, colors, textures, and the like: the material form. A specialty pursuit in art history is devoted to this problem of extracting content from from: iconology. It can be very daunting because as time passes and cultural habits and presumptions change, the symbolic ties between form and content dissolve. To reconnect them requires a very thorough analysis of form and also of 'forensic' cultural evidence of all kinds, from the ephemeral to the sacred. In the end, content is only, and always, what we think and judge it to be. It's an inextricably tangled mix of a re-imagined past -- no matter how much 'occasioned' by hints and presumptions -- and similarly complicated present, to say nothing of personal psychological impediments.
In another way, we already have notions of content when we view artworks, We take our presumptions of content to them and are chagrined or delighted by an imagined confirmation or denial. I was once struck by a comment I read somewhere by O. W. Holmes, the great judge, who said that people on a jury had already made up their minds about the case and the job of the lawyers was to make sure they had the right opinion through reasoned argument and evidence. Maybe the same is true when we look at artworks. We already have an 'immaterial' notion of its content. The artwork will 'occasion' some material correspondence for our opinion or not. I'm not sure there is a necessary connection between content and the material. Thoughts are immaterial (except for their neural origins) and they may be construed as content. Material things, like artworks, have nothing but their materiality. What links them? Expression? What assures that expression correctly links content to the material? Occasion? Vague, aimless occasion? wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Michael Brady <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sat, September 29, 2012 4:23:27 AM Subject: Re: Aesthetic Ideal On Sep 29, 2012, at 4:47 AM, joseph berg <[email protected]> wrote: > To keep style subordinate to substance, shouldn't an aesthetic ideal eschew > effects? What do you mean by "style"? "substance"? "effects"? Everything has "style," and just enough of it. (It's like the joke, "My, we've had a lot of weather this year.") And everythng has "substance" (a vague term). You are making an impractical dichotomy between the two. "Style" cannot exist without "substance," nor can "substance" be made manifest without "style." Moreover, why do you propose that style be subordinated to subtaance? As I use the term, an "aesthetic ideal" does embrace "effects," but maybe not the ones someone (you?) might prefer. Some effects may be judged as sedate or serene (classical Greek sculpture) and others as dramatic or exaggerated (Hellenistic sculpture). One viewer may prefer, say, the turbulence of the Mausoleum sculptures and find the sedate effects of the Panathenaic frieze to be tediously intrusive. Others may like Satie'sGymnopaedies and be put off by Mozart's bombastic scores. Note, btw, that the word "style" is derived from "stylus," a writing tool, and is now often used to indicate the distincitve qualities of a work that are typical of the maker, as handwriting is uniquely linked to one person. Stylistic analysis is a common technique in artistic study and is used to help ascertain the authorship of disputed works. I read you comment to suggest that the maker's characteristic decisions and approach should be subordinated to some other consideration--content, I suppose, which is a reasonable interpretation of "substance"--but I don't see how that is practical because content cannot be expressed in immaterial form, and when the artist forms the substances, he does so in his typical, normal manner, i.e., with his style, which (at least in his mind) conforms to the substance of the idea. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
