Hi Ann,
Thanks for posting some great and thoughtful ideas.
Let me ask you this, if I were to show you two poems in Hindi (assuming you
don't know that language.)
Let's say one of them is the best poem in the entire Hindi language and the
other is the worst poem in the Hindi language. Would you be able to tell
the difference? I know I couldn't. Would that reflect the relative merits
of the two "pieces of art" (if you will)? Clearly not. All it would mean is
that you (or I) fail to understand what we were looking at.
Take a very obvious case, Van Gogh. All his life anyone casually
observing his art career could come to only one conclusion, that he was a
failure. And yet once people came along who understood his art, he was
raised to the height of a genius. He was a victim of an audience who didn't
understand him.
Art may not be sacred, but to reduce it to the level of ordinary
communication and define it in terms of "whether the audience gets it"
seems to me unreasonable.
In my mind, Art is anything the artist so designates.
Art is Art if I call it Art, so said the Supreme Court.
This is a debate that has raged for centuries. At almost every
point in time, some one or some ones set themselves up as the arbiters of
what passes as Art and what does not. When new artists come along and are
unable to "make the grade" based on these arbiters opinions, they revolted.
Again and again. I have traced this back some ways. In France in the mid to
late 19th Century there was an organization called, "Salon des
Independents" which put on exhibitions from time to time. If you were a
member, you were guaranteed display space for two paintings. The
overwhelming majority of the members were women. Because women were never
taken seriously as artists and so were never, ever shown. Good thing for us
they didn't all give up. Good thing for us they kept at it so that 150
years later, when we no longer have those prejudices (at least not as bad
as they did) we can now look on that work and say,
Sure, that's art from the 19th Century...
Smile,
Pedro
At 12:04 PM 5/28/01 -0700, you wrote:
>Josh:
>
>You know, the writer you quote wasn't saying that art is the only thing
>that has meaning; she was essentially saying that the meaning of
>art-intended gestures is inflected by their relationship to the
>art-meaning realm. Meaning is always dependent on the mutually agreed upon
>context in which a communication is made. If one person intends the
>communication to be made and understood in one context, and the other
>person doesn't know this or disagrees, then confusion results. Now, the
>thing that makes so many oddities happen w/art communications is this:
>artists, at least since
>1900 and maybe long before, tend to deliberately mess around with this
>context of understanding, sometimes with a view to enlarging the
>understood realm of meaning, and sometimes just for sheer mischievous
>cussedness. No doubt there are other reasons too.
> So anyway, intention (intending something as an artbased
> communication) places that end of the transaction in the artworld, but
> whether the entire communicative transaction occurs in the artworld
> depends upon others as well as the artist: the provider of the site of
> communication, such as the gallery or the museum (in the case of the
> street or other more neutral site other considerations apply--some
> streetcorners are "owned" by their denizens); the audience members;
> casual passers-by; critics talking about the event after the fact;
> historians even later; and on and on.
>Release some act into the realm of communication, and it ceases to be only
>yours, it becomes public property, and many others will have their way with it.
> Really, these questions should probably not be thought of as a
> special case of art communication, but be understood in terms of social
> communication in general. There's nothing sacred about art; it just has
> the potential to be the limit case of experimental meaning making. Lots
> of other meaning making works similarly.
>
>AK
>
>Josh Ronsen wrote:
>
> > jason pierce writes:
> > >
> > >i agree with everything josh says or will say on the issue
> > >of "anti art".
> >
> > I disagree with everything Jason says or will say on the issue of
> anti-art, including the above statement.
> >
> > I think Jason is making fun of me b/c I haven't (yet/recently) made any
> statements on the issue, just asking questions about what people think.
> >
> > About Born's comment about something has to be art to be
> "meaningful"... I really like thinking about the limits of art, or the
> perceptions of art. Perhaps before talking about anti-art, I should have
> asked what is art? Suppose I had an event score "Give $10 to a homeless
> person." I do this. Does the homeless person think it is art? Probably
> not. Is it meaningful? Probably so. Suppose I have an event score "Send a
> nasty letter to someone you don't know." I do this. the person reads the
> letter. Does he think it is art? Probably not. Does he find it
> meaningful? Probably so.
> >
> > This afternoon I spent hours going through boxes of tapes from hundreds
> or people around the world, really really bad noise music tapes, much of
> them existing seemingly for the sole purpose of using the word "shit" in
> the title. I am sure all of this was intended to be art. I view it as
> such. Did I find it meaningful? No I did not.
> >
> > Someone comes up to you and gives you a flower.
> >
> > Is it art?
> >
> > Is it meaningful?
> >
> > -Josh Ronsen
> > http://www.nd.org/jronsen
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > --== Sent via Deja.com ==--
> > http://www.deja.com/
