Quoting Arlo Bensinger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > [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.
I love museums just as I love libraries. They are repositories of the best in art and thought. [Arlo] > 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). I also love concerts of world renowned orchestras and pianists playing Mozart, Beethoven and Rachmaninoff concertos. A live performance beats a recorded performance any day in "shattering one's static barriers." [Arlo] > "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. Excellent. I agree completely. Reason plays no part. It cannot tell the difference between a Raphael and a finger painting. The experience tells us more of reality than is written in all of the formulas of science. ------------------------------------------------- This mail sent through IMP: http://horde.org/imp/ 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/
