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
Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative Environments
CIRCLE research group
www.eca.ac.uk/circle/
si...@littlepig.org.uk
www.littlepig.org.uk
AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk
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>
Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative Environments
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). 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://artistsmeeting.org
>> http://turbulence.org/Works/plazaville
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>
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