See Berg's comment below. It's one of his very rare personal comments, not a quote by some hapless corpse taken out of context. It's also a very important statement that raises questions about aesthetic experience. Do we engage more with art that seems to evoke a striving for something awkwardly out of reach or with art that evokes a satisfaction with refined resolution? Is it style or the lack of style that we respond to in art? I can think of good examples illustrating both sides of the questions. We admire antique Greek sculpture of the human figure because in retrospect we can trace the development of style and how it ultimately enabled artists to achieve a compelling naturalism before it began to decay with exaggerated, almost ludicrous , expressionism. But when we look at, say, masters like Raphael, or Velasquez, we are entranced, it seems by the sustaining imposition of style, it can soothe even as it seems to agitate the imagination, a paradoxical proof of the 'distancing' state of aesthetic contemplation. Perhaps it is a mainstay of the Western mind and of modernity in particular to be obsessed with 'problems and solutions' which lead to the implementation of systems, protocols, style. In modernity, it seems that everything is conceived as a puzzle to be solved and style is the method of of solving.
I am always intrigued by the ubiquity of images of arrows or pointing hands in our culture. Such images direct our attention to elsewhere, to someplace where we are not yet but ought to be. We never, or rarely, see Xs, as in X marks the spot. No, it's always go hither, go there, go ahead, or desire what you don't yet have: The future. Is that our aesthetic? Is our art experience merely the pursuit of it and once recognized, dissipated? I wish Berg would develop his view, on his own terms, and abandon his habit of digging up illustrious corpses and squeezing gaseous quotes from them. WC > > As far as I am concerned, once the technical problems have been "solved," then art becomes all about style over substance, i.e., the gilding of inspiration.
