As some MOQers may recall, Patrick Doorly of Oxford University is a major
league MOQer. He organized the MOQ Study Day at Oxford back in 2009. He has
written a book that's scheduled to be out this August. It's titled "The Truth
about Art: Reclaiming Quality".
http://www.zero-books.net/books/truth-about-art I imagine that Pirsig must be
pretty happy about this. Let the intellectual infiltration begin at the top,
right where Pirsig wants it to start! This is very exciting, eh?
Amazon says, "Patrick Doorly was educated at St John’s College, Oxford;
Stockholm University; and the Courtauld Institute of Art. For much of his
career he taught critical and theoretical studies to students on studio-based
courses in art and design. Since 2000 he and his wife have lived in Oxford,
where he divides his time between writing and teaching art history at the
university’s Department for Continuing Education."
"...The message that Doorly seeks to drive home, sometimes with almost
missionary zeal, is that Art and Truth are not facts of nature but constructs
with a cultural legacy, and that the word ‘art’ in particular has throughout
its history had changing meanings attached to it. His aim is systematically to
question, from first principles and without preconceived ideas, what it is that
distinguishes art from artefact or object. His approach to the half-jocular
question “but is it Art?” is deeply serious, and impatient of orthodoxies,
whether those of Kant or Winckelmann or of more recent critical theory; he has
a sharp eye for flawed argument, and takes a slightly schoolmasterly delight in
leading his class through the basic facts, the etymologies and semantics, the
evolution of ideas, so as to lay bare a long history of misapprehension. The
fundamental hypothesis that he proposes and proceeds to test is that art is
‘high quality endeavour’ (a hypothesis that tellingly only fails when
confronted with what he calls the ‘intellectual pranks’ of Duchamp), aiming to
show that significant artists have at all times sought to achieve excellence by
building on and improving or transcending the tradition that they have
inherited. Doorly concludes that Quality is of the essence, and that Pirsig’s
model of the interaction between the Dynamic Quality of the creative individual
and the Static Patterns of a culture is the most promising conceptual model of
artistic endeavour that he has encountered. Readers who delight in the works of
artists of all periods (other than the professionals of the art and
art-historical worlds, who may well not welcome this book on account of its
uncomfortable home truths) will find Doorly’s systematic demystification of the
critical apparatus surrounding these works enlightening. The obvious integrity
of his enquiry and the clarity with which it is conducted enrich our ability to
understand what it is that delights us, and give a further dimension to our
appreciation of the creative process." ~ Nicholas Mann, Director of the Warburg
Institute (1990–2001)
"Doorly has written a book that is full of interest, and he presents his thesis
in language that sparkles with clarity. I am in broad agreement with his
treatment of the Italian Renaissance, and with his views of virtue, quality,
and related topics. In areas where I have no expertise, I learned a lot about
artistic creation from his ideas and from the conclusions he draws from an
enormous amount of essential reading. The book deserves to be widely read." ~
John Woodhouse, Fiat-Serena Professor Emeritus of Italian, Oxford University
Moq_Discuss mailing list
Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
Archives:
http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
http://moq.org/md/archives.html
