[Khaled] Museums. in a way have become like zoos. They take things from their element and put them in an enclosure and expect the visitor to enjoy the full experience. Watching a couple of zebras chew their cud is different tan being there and seeing a few thousands on the march.
[Arlo] Like Pirsig points out in ZMM, "A few square feet of grass, after Montana." :-) As Dewey points out, Art is a _Lived Experience_, a central theme for both Dewey and Pirsig (see Granger, Robert Pirsig, John Dewey and the Art of Living). Like you, museums have always made me feel like I feel when I see butterflys pinned to a board. Its like taking the beauty of experience and attempting to isolate it, and all it does is render (to paraphrase Pirsig) "the putrescence of something long ago killed." Worse than zebras in zoos, its like skeletons of animals in museums of natural history, neatly arranged to provoke response. Dead carcasses of what was once a vibrant, dynamic, living thing. Oh don't get me wrong. I think they have their place, but its not "to see art". For me its to see the dead remains of what was once living, breathing art. It can teach us a lot about ourselves and our world, but it can only carry us so far. Indeed, the value for me lies in imaging the hand that once moved, the heart that once loved and hurt and the eyes that saw the world in such a way as to try to represent it as such. Yes, maybe he should have stayed and played in the subway. By making "art" a commodity to be consumed and doled out to patrons in nice clothes for the price of admission, all sitting neatly like gentlemen and ladies in tailored clothes, acting all smug at their patronage of "the arts", we effectively kill it (Marx would argue, of course, that this is part and parcel of the commodity fetishism of capitalist societies). [Micah] Quality is in the individual viewing the performance, not in the performance. [Arlo] I think this view is still trapped in the S/O dualism we are struggling to overcome. "Quality" is neither "in" the individual or "in" the performance. Quality is the experience that brings "the individual" and "the performance" into awareness. This is precisely the benefit gained by considering art as "experience" rather than as "object". The value of that experience is determined only by the degree to which the experience shatters one's static barriers. As such, both the "individual" and the "object" play a role. The individual is not "passive" to the "art", which impacts her/him in un-mediated ways. Nor is the individual "active" in constructing the experience in solitude. Both play an active/negotiatatory role the experience, and experience which must always be remembered to be unavoidably contextual. 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.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
