Hi David
I agree with many of your definitions of bad, which basically boil
down to the following. Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Exploitation
of others is bad. Not taking responsibility for your own actions is
bad. I agree with you because, like you, I am socialised to agree that
these are shared values.
However, these are the elements of a moral framework which derives
from and informs a social system -- which is a set of contingencies.
My argument was that this system is not absolute. For example, animals
often do things which we would consider bad. They will exploit others
and pass the buck. They do this to survive. When they behave in a
manner that we consider "good" they do so because it benefits
themselves or members of their immediate community in a manner that
enhances their survival. They behave "badly" for the same reason. The
shared moral systems people have developed are also a survival
strategy. We can dress them up as "good" and "bad" - but we should be
honest about why we do what we do and have the values we have. It is
to survive, individually and collectively. It is not because the
social mores we share have intrinsic value. If you entertain that idea
then you are into the domain of faith.
Best
Simon
Simon Biggs
Research Professor
edinburgh college of art
s.bi...@eca.ac.uk
www.eca.ac.uk
*C*reative *I*nterdisciplinary *R*esearch into *C*o*L*laborative
*E*nvironments
CIRCLE research group
www.eca.ac.uk/circle/
si...@littlepig.org.uk
www.littlepig.org.uk
AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk
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*From: *davin heckman <davinheck...@gmail.com>
*Reply-To: *soft_skinned_space <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
*Date: *Wed, 6 Jan 2010 14:30:12 -0500
*To: *soft_skinned_space <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
*Subject: *Re: [-empyre-] poets patrons and the word academic
Sorry to take my time getting back to your question, Simon. I am
still mulling over David Chirot's comment, too (although I think that
the question of "dangerous" poetry hiding code is an interesting and
rare official admission that art is precisely about some of the very
things we have been talking about here. And that, we should reflect
on just why someone might be hasty to define a certain work as "bad."
I do think that outcomes matter. But there are many other aspects to
determining whether something is "good" or "bad." For instance, I
think that the level of ignorance under which a person acts could be
considered "bad," if the person shows no reasonable effort to figure
out whether or not what they are doing is in fact bad. In this sense,
carelessness could be a kind of badness (I certainly make many
mistakes in this way). If a person is employing a means that is
widely understood to be harmful, with predictably harmful effects.
Using another person in any way against their will (or without their
knowledge), especially if it is going to determine their future, is
something that is potentially really bad. Passing the buck....
letting someone else make a decision which you could have made
yourself is also a kind of badness. But at the end of all this, I
think that the key factor is the interval imposed on decision-making.
If we take decisions away from the automatic, impulsive, and assumed
responses, and pause to reflect upon them (the purpose for the action,
the means of acting, the presumed outcome, and the actual outcome) we
move from being thoughtless to being thoughtful, unreflective to
reflective.
On the other hand, we have, I think, lost our overall sense of what's
bad.... mainly because we cleave to imposed standards for moral
behavior. We (and I am speaking especially about the sort of
dumbed-down moral sensibilities that I know best.... the ones that
operate in the US) have a tendency to reach for the sort of shorthand
"values" that are defined in American political life (Do they prefer
one set of sexual behaviors over another? Do they prefer one set of
substances over another? Do they support certain types of killing and
oppose others?). You can take this shorthand even further, and just
boil it down to a handful of profiles (Are they white/other,
straight/other, christian/other, etc?) and then you don't even have to
worry about goodness and badness at all. If you fall in one camp, you
could be helping seniors cross the street, saving kittens from burning
buildings, changing tires for strangers stranded on the motorway... it
doesn't matter... you are generally going to be regarded as "bad" (or
at least "fishy") according to the shorthand. Conversely, if you fall
in the other camp.... you can get away with a lot of badness provided
you regard your privileged status with some respect. (Look at Tiger
Woods.... so he's a married guy who had sex outside of marriage....
that's a solid month of headlines and moral outrage. But, say, you're
a good ol' boy like David Vitter, and hire a prosititute dress you in
diapers behind your wife's back... you will remain in the senate.)
But if you put both of these things in the grand scheme of global
badness.... they are trivialities. They might be hurtful for the
particular families involved.... but they are not harmful in the same
way, that say, Monsanto might be, as the fight for a monopoly of the
world's food supply. What it means is that we have lost our ability
to even begin thinking about right and wrong.
To fold this back into a discussion of art, I think art can help us
introduce the interval back into daily life. It doesn't necessarily
tell us what to do with that interval, but it reminds us that there
can and should be interruptions in what otherwise might be a
monotonous, automatic flow of life. Even the various "movements" are
primarily concerned thinking about the various aspects of work (the
concept, the process, the materials, the product, the thinking about
art, etc). As "art" (artifice), art implies a tension with those
things that aren't art (the
What-would-have-happened-if-you-hadn't-made-art-or-hadn't-made-it-in-this-way).
It is always a conscious intervention into the non-conscious. To turn
to skating.... I think that skating would fit in this category as it
is introduces improvisational uses of places that are typically
prescribed. Going back many years, is the slogan, "Skateboarding is
not a crime." And I think this is a funny one.... because
skateboarding has historically been quasi-criminal. Not because it
intends to be criminal... but because it is defined by using ordinary
things in unordinary ways. Hackers do this with computers. Poets do
this with language. Artists make us think about the space, time, and
duration of the present... and I think we experience exhiliration in
this because it reminds us, at a deep level, of who we are, what we
really care about, that we can think, feel, imagine. And, as a
personal value statement, I like those works which inspire us to
think, feel, and imagine broadly about solidarity, interconnectivity,
and love. So, I don't care what form it takes, as long as it is there
to generate a social order outside of the imposed social order.... to
replace the false "social contract" (the one that is imposed and
enforced) and in its space to offer the possibility of an actual
social contract (produced by the desire to enter into relationships of
with others, and to commit to those relationships across differences,
to sacrifice to those relationships, to find happiness in them). In a
way, I guess I am saying that "good art" is "good," not in the
conventional moral sense, but because it tends to render its users
complicit with an alternate mode of acting... that it leads to
reflection, consciousness, awareness. And bad art tries to distract
from this mode of critical engagement, and preserves the recieved order.
But now that I am thinking about it.... it all strikes me as a lot of
flakiness. Maybe it's only an idea. Maybe I just want my artists to
be my heroes. But even if life is lived as the futile pursuit of a
desired ideal.... it seems, in the end, better than one which is
lived in psychological obedience to the managment.
In any case.... I hope you are having a good day.
Davin
On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 5:23 AM, Simon Biggs <s.bi...@eca.ac.uk> wrote:
One could argue that the primary value of art is not in its
outcomes, whether an artefact is good or bad, but in how it
operates as the "dark matter" that mediates our social contracts.
In this respect one can consider art as folded into creativity per
se and not privileged as it has traditionally been. Skateboarding
culture binds people together as much as the opera. The creative
forms that are skateboarding and opera are incidental to the
social operations executed as creativity.
In this context what is good or bad? Can one conceive of bad
social contracts?
Best
Simon
Simon Biggs
Research Professor
edinburgh college of art
s.bi...@eca.ac.uk <http://ac.uk>
www.eca.ac.uk <http://ac.uk>
*C*reative *I*nterdisciplinary *R*esearch into *C*o*L*laborative
*E*nvironments
CIRCLE research group
www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ <http://ac.uk/circle/>
si...@littlepig.org.uk <http://si...@littlepig.org.uk>
www.littlepig.org.uk <http://www.littlepig.org.uk>
AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From: *davin heckman <davinheck...@gmail.com
<http://davinheck...@gmail.com> >
*Reply-To: *soft_skinned_space <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
<http://empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au> >
*Date: *Mon, 4 Jan 2010 12:37:25 -0500
*To: *soft_skinned_space <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
<http://empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au> >
*Subject: *Re: [-empyre-] poets patrons and the word academic
Simon,
I agree with your post, wholeheartedly. But would add an extra
emphasis to your statement and suggest that it might be a "bad" idea
to deny the contingency of relative axes of value. Sometimes, there
is a tendency to push art into purely aesthetic or purely moral scales
of relation, and I think there is something important about evaluating
the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. It is find to impose
a separation between form and content, as long as people acknowledge
that this itself is a word-game. The beautiful and the grotesque are
never purely aesthetic, but they are expressions of ideas, social
relations, philosophies, etc. I think there is something great about
engaging and arguing over questions of values that can lead to
progress, provided, of course, there are certain values to which
people are going to accept (either willingly, by hammering out a
minimal sort of social contract, or through coercion, simply imposing
them). It is a hard-handed approach to social existence, but social
existence is what we make it, and if we don't make it widely
agreeable.... then it will be, as it is today in most parts of the
world, increasingly disagreeable (and even murderous). The disengaged
view (which says there is nothing to agree upon, so just worry about
yourself) is increasingly ugly. There might have been a time when
being venal and trivial was considered brilliantly clever.... but
today it just seems obvious. Early on these moves might have conveyed
an unpleasant truth about art's complicity... but I think this is
something that most people kind of understand (that artists, styles,
ideas are promoted by institutions in accordance with market logics).
And I think this is why you see such a bloom of great works that
convey such a strong desire for sketching out and cultivating a social
consciousness, that might start with a foot in the art world, and
might make use of those institutions, but which yearns for something
else (see, for instance,
http://vectors.usc.edu/index.php?page=7&projectId=57
<http://vectors.usc.edu/index.php?page=7&projectId=57>). In some
cases,
this desire for social existence is not even political in the
conventional sense (I recently sat in on a children's workshop
sponsored by the Minnesota Center for Book Arts
<http://www.mnbookarts.org/aboutmcba/aboutmcba.html> and spent some
time in the Robot Store in Michigan <http://www.826michigan.org/>,
both of which are examples of a wider interest in teaching communities
how to make... More importantly, they teach people that art is not
something you appreciate.... it's something you use.
Take care.
Davin
On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 5:06 AM, Simon Biggs <s.bi...@eca.ac.uk
<http://s.bi...@eca.ac.uk> > wrote:
> Good and bad are relative concepts, being the poles of an axis of
value.
> That axis might be personal or public but it is always
contingent. It does
> not exist as an absolute geometry but is variable, depending on
context.
> That context is prescribed by other values of equal contingency.
>
> Art is a relative concept. Some people consider something to be
art, others
> do not. There will rarely be agreement and it will not include
everyone. You
> cannot please all the people all the time.
>
> It is only a good idea to get into arguments about relative
concepts if you
> enjoy interminable word-play and the ultimate outcome of agreeing to
> disagree.
>
> Best
>
> Simon
>
>
> Simon Biggs
>
> Research Professor
> edinburgh college of art
> s.bi...@eca.ac.uk <http://s.bi...@eca.ac.uk>
> www.eca.ac.uk <http://www.eca.ac.uk>
>
> Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative Environments
> CIRCLE research group
> www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ <http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/>
>
> si...@littlepig.org.uk <http://si...@littlepig.org.uk>
> www.littlepig.org.uk <http://www.littlepig.org.uk>
> AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: davin heckman <davinheck...@gmail.com
<http://davinheck...@gmail.com> >
> Reply-To: soft_skinned_space <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
<http://empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au> >
> Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 19:13:43 -0600
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
<http://empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au> >
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] poets patrons and the word academic
>
> Maybe bad art is art that does a "bad" thing. There is art which
> tries to make a moral evil look like a moral good (take, for
instance,
> nature photography that is used to give a notorious polluter a
> positive reputation.... or, say, propaganda which seeks to convince
> people that a human rights abuser is a human rights defender.) Yet,
> even art which seeks to tell a lie, at least has the good sense to
> know that the fictional utopian world is preferable to the grim
> realities that they mask.
>
> Then there is the kind of badness is that which wants to wash its
> hands of ethical considerations, altogether. I would argue that
works
> that aestheticize violence might fit into this category. There are
> plenty of games, for example, which have no content beyond the
> representation of killing as fun. But I would also lump purely
> capitalistic "art" into this category.... think about high-concept
> movie merchandise (novelizations of films, picture book adaptations,
> direct to video sequels, coloring books, soundtrack theme songs,
> etc.). For every dozen crap trinkets, the manufacturer could
> concievably hire an actual artist to make something meaningful....
> but instead they choose to flood the world with garbage, made in
> sweatshops, that hurts the minds (and sometimes the bodies) of the
> people who consume them. (But you could argue that the mindless
> acquisition of tripe represents a different utopian impulse, working
> in an archival/d-base aesthetic).
>
> And then there are those works that are productively complicit....
> that exist in the zone between two worlds... the kinds of things
> which might fit into one system, but which create change in another.
> I think of the many movies that actually do make me think, but
without
> the heaviness that comes with message films... (I think that
Where the
> Wild Things Are, for instance, is a great movie that goes beyond
> simply cashing in on children's desire).
>
> As always, where somebody begins is an interesting thing. But where
> people are going, or trying to go, is much more so. It is always
> fascinating when someone betrays their narrow interests in favor of
> broader ones.... Or when someone unexpectedly questions their own
> biases. Even if people end up in the wrong place, there is something
> to be said for effort, intention, affect, etc.
>
> Happy New Year!
>
> Davin
>
> On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 8:40 AM, G.H. Hovagimyan <g...@thing.net
<http://g...@thing.net> > wrote:
>> gh comments below:
>>
>> On Jan 3, 2010, at 4:30 AM, Sally Jane Norman wrote:
>>
>>> where and how do/ can we draw the line between bad art and bad
causes?
>>
>> gh comments:
>> Bad art is an aesthetic decision that is subjective. I've seen
in my
>> lifetime art that was considered bad to become re-evaluated as good.
>> Actually I think the aesthetic kick is in playing with that
>> contradiction and skating close to the line of bad art and bad
taste.
>> Otherwise good taste and good art turn into so much decoration. I
>> don't know what you mean by bad causes but in terms of art I
would say
>> that when you make art as a political statement its propaganda
rather
>> than art. If you make art to make money it's commerce rather than
>> art. If you make art to illustrate a particular theory or piece
>> demonstrate a piece of software it's illustration. I think the only
>> proper cause for making art is to advance the art discourse or
>> critique it or expand the aesthetic milieu.
>>
>>
>> G.H. Hovagimyan
>> http://nujus.net/~gh <http://nujus.net/%7Egh>
<http://nujus.net/%7Egh>
>> http://artistsmeeting.org
>> http://turbulence.org/Works/plazaville
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>>
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