I'm very late coming to this, because I tend to let Netbehaviour posts pile up and then trawl through them a week or so at a time, but this has been a very absorbing thread, especially the exchange between Alan and Curt about significance in art, art-teaching, etc.
I'd just like to say a belated word in defence of manifestos. I'm quite anti-manifesto personally, in the sense that I don't personally want to get involved with one, or can't think of one with which I would want to get involved; but I can see that they sometimes serve their purpose. Radically new art sometimes has to create the critical framework from which it should be judged, and manifestos can help with this. Being a literary sort of person I'm thinking of things like the Imagist manifesto, George Eliot's lengthy remarks about realism in literature in Scenes from Clerical Life (or was it Adam Bede?) and Wordsworth and Coleridge's preface to The Lyrical Ballads, with its plea that poetry should be written in "language really used by men" instead of the highly-artificial diction favoured by the Augustans. Exciting ideas, and ideas which helped to alter the course of our literature. - Edward _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
