[John] Maybe my problem with Pirsig's lack of intellectualizing about art is just this: Art shouldn't be intellectualized.
[Arlo] I'm not sure what you meant to say above, but this is contradictory. If "art shouldn't be intellectualized", why would Pirsig's "lack of intellectualizing about art" be a problem? This would make sense (logically) if you removed "lack of" from the statement, but then the only solution would be for Pirsig to have never written either book (assuming by "intellectualizing" you mean talking about it at all). Could Pirsig have written either ZMM or LILA without any intellectual treatment of art? Or Zen? Or Dynamic Quality? Obviously, trying to unite the S/O-duality of separating "classical" and "romantic" thinking required Pirsig to address both. And of course Pirsig was, himself, aware of the inherent degeneracy of a metaphysics with a central undefined term. But, again, the solution would be...? Would you have preferred he did not write the books? Nonetheless, I don't think Pirsig ever 'intellectualizes' art. What he does is bring the artistic impulse, the high-quality endeavor, back into the domain of everyday lived experience. He rescues 'art' from the museums and the walled gardens of elitism by showing how 'art' is lived Quality. In his essay "What is art?", Tolstoy writes: "Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them." Broadly, for Tolstoy, "art" is (high-quality), deliberate, communicative endeavor, but bear in mind that this endeavor is historical, becoming a "relationship both with him who produced, or is producing, the art, and with all those who, simultaneously, previously, or subsequently, receive the same artistic impression." Notice that for Tolstoy (as with Pirsig), the appreciation (or recognition of the 'art-act/object') is inherently personal, it is between the 'interlocutors' in the art-dialogue, it is not a 'stamp' placed on an object by a committee, nor is it restricted to certain domains of "external signs". And I think there is a world of difference between (1) intellectualizing art, (2) intellectualizing about art, (3) intellectualizing artfully (or maybe 'artisizing intellect'). The first reduces 'art' to an intellectual pattern. The second seeks to understand what we mean when we say 'art'. The third results from an understanding that 'intellectualizing' can be as artful as painting or dancing. In every case, though, its impossible to even use the term 'art' if it isn't "intellectualized" to some degree, no? If we use the word, we have to have at least a rudimentary shared understanding as to what the word means, don't we? Last point about Tolstoy's essay, which I think is still relevant today (and echoes, IMO, the central theme of ZMM): "Art, in our society, has been so perverted that not only has bad art come to be considered good, but even the very perception of what art really is has been lost. In order to be able to speak about the art of our society, it is, therefore, first of all necessary to distinguish art from counterfeit art." 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
