Maybe The Art you take is equal to the Art you make.
I've always had a bias for the performance arts, in that appreciation
there comes to mean making a piece developed possibly somewhere else
your own by performing it; making it manifest in your own unique
context. Sterling might say: Art catalyzing your history, to wake you up.
Renata floated a fine proposal today along these lines in which we would
read snippets of the great litrichar list and try to write a couple of
pages in the style, given our understanding of the original author's
perspective. Of course we confront similar issues in taiko, where
'respecting' the IP and lineage of a piece does not necessarily need to
mean leaving it be. There's a sort of 'collaborative ownership' which
is continuously being refined, a kind of jazz.
As to more (hmmm) tangible artifacts, I have held micaceous clay pots,
simple and complex at the same time, first attempts, sitting there on
the floor behind the driver's seat of a Taurus, still warm, that simply
stopped the mind and the day. They radiated that sincerity, that
'loyalty to one's moment' that comes in part from finding a way to make
remote techniques from the ancient gallery one's own. A community
thing (I knew the artist), more an offering of a restorative path to
that community (had we but the wit), less a timeless statement to some
idea of 'human nature'.
So the art here is something you participate in, show up for; it's a
conversation, concourse; necessarily complex and fluid (there's that zen
topology thing again). Good art, maybe great art is *accessible* to
those just downstream of the original in just that way. Maybe that's
why so many of us are science fiction fans - through the science the
fiction is accessible in a way much of the other canons are not - yet.
Pamela, I doubt that the commandants you describe were experiencing this
complexity (most of us are grateful to make a glimpse). Perhaps more
cargo-cult banal -- 'He consoles himself that he is cultured because he
can summon the works of Bach and Goethe from the vasty deep'. So can I,
and so can any one (given inclination and time), but does the commandant
show up for them? Big whup, he's got a Gramophone (or its 21st century
equivalent). How do you define appreciation? Does one converse with a
specific work or an art form to cultivate ones self into manifesting a
better person or because the form or the artifact is a Linji challenge
and you just have to?
Carl + ale
/"I was sitting in a chair in the patent office at Berne, when suddenly
a thought occurred to me, if a person falls freely, he would not feel
his own weight" - Einstein./
On 10/14/10 8:44 PM, Robert J. Cordingley wrote:
May be Art is a personality amplifier. If you have a great
personality Art makes it better. If you are as wicked as sin, through
Art you will become more so. A little like computers are productivity
amplifiers (but I don't know who said this first). If you are a time
waster... "there's an app for that!"
I've always thought that Art was never the picture on the wall, the
sculpture in the garden or the performance on the stage. It was the
personal experience you have when exposed to the Art phenomenon, what
ever it is. This makes the debate about what is good or bad art
irrelevant because it becomes personal and not societal. This seems
to fit with the personality amplifier idea too.
Thanks
Robert C
On 10/14/10 9:19 AM, Pamela McCorduck wrote:
1. Anyone who thinks that art of any kind makes you a better person
had better explain why concentration camp commandants could listen to
Bach at night--with great appreciation. (And, for all I know, read
Goethe and Schiller). Furthermore, surely museum guards, exposed to
art daily, must be among our better persons, right? Evidence?
No, literary art is the same: it is its own best excuse. To see how
an author spins a tale, presents a character, reveals a landscape, or
how a poet stops us short with a line that upends our thoughts, all
these using only the medium of words, the stuff in our mouths every
day, is simply to be made more sensitive to the act of observing.
Good enough, as far as I'm concerned. If it also helps you to
understand human nature a little better, in its contradictions and
inexplicable impulses, so much the better.
</snipped>
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
