fuck art. let's kill.
vzaem
against the concept of "art"
quoted 141 lines -----Original Message-----
> -----Original Message-----
> From: setre . [mailto:drakt@hotmail.com]
> Sent: Friday, May 11, 2001 7:27 PM
> To: kromattik@aol.com; dreadik@tokyo.com; idm@hyperreal.org
> Subject: [idm] understanding art (and all the other crap we are always
> yapping about.)
>
>
>
>
> Here is a section of a book called Art Objects. Read it. learn something.
>
>
> Art takes time. To spend an hour looking at a painting is difficult. We
> are an odd people: we make it as difficult as possible for our artists to
> work honestly while they are alive; either we refuse them money
> or we ruin
> them with money; either we flatter them with unhelpful praise or
> wound them
> with unhelpful blame, and when they are too old or dead, or too beyond
> dispute to hinder anymore, we canonize them, so that what was
> wild is tamed,
> and what was objected, becomes authority. Canonizing pictures is
> one way of
> killing them. When the sense of familiarity becomes too great, history,
> popularity, association, all crowd in between the viewer and the
> picture and
> block it out. Not only pictures suffer like this, all the arts
> suffer like
> this.
>
> If the obvious direct emotional response is to have any meaning, the
> question "do I like this?" will have to be the opening question
> and not the
> final judgment. An examination of our own feelings will have to
> give way to
> an examination of the piece of work. This is fair to the work and it will
> help to clarify the nature of our own feelings; to reveal prejudice,
> opinion, anxiety, even the mood of the day. It is right to trust our
> feelings but right to test them too. If they are what we say they
> are, then
> they will stand the test, if not, we will at least be less insecure. But
> here we come back to the first hurdle of art, and it is a high
> one; it shows
> up.
> When you say "This work has nothing to do with me". when you say
> "this work
> is boring/pointless/silly/obscure/elitist etc.", you might be
> right, because
> you are looking at a fad, or you might be wrong, because the work
> falls so
> outside of the safety of youre own experience that in order to
> keep youre
> own world intact, you must deny the other world of the painting.
> This denial
> of imaginative experience happens at a deeper level than our
> affirmation of
> our daily world. Every day, in countless ways, you and I convince
> ourselves
> about ourselves. True art, when it happens to us, challenges the
> "I" that we
> are.
>
> A love-parallel would be just; falling in love challenges the
> reality to
> which we lay claim, part of the pleasure of love and part of its
> terror, is
> the world turned upside down. We want and we dont want, the
> cutting edge,
> the upset, the new views. Mostly we work hard at taming our emotional
> environment just as we work hard at taming our aesthetic environment. We
> already have tamed our physical environment. And are we happy
> with all this
> tameness? Are you?
>
>
> Art cannot be tamed, although our responses to it can be, and
> in relation
> to the Canon, our responses are conditioned from the moment we
> start school.
> The freshness which the everyday regular man or woman pride
> themselves upon;
> the untaught I know what I like approach, now encouraged by the
> media, is
> neither fresh nor untaught. It is the half-baked sterility of the
> classroom
> washed down with liberal doses of popular culture.
> The media ransacks the arts, in its images, in its adverts, in
> its copy,
> in its jingles, in its little tunes and journalists jargon, it
> continually
> offers up faint shadows of the form and invention of real music, real
> paintings, real words. All of us are subjected to this bombardment, which
> both deadens our sensibilities and makes us fear what is not instant,
> approachable, consumable. The solid presence of art demands from us
> significant effort, an effort anathema to popular culture. Effort
> of time,
> effort of money, effort of study, effort of humility, effort of
> imagination
> have each been packed by the artist into the art. Is it so
> unreasonable to
> expect a percentage of that from us in return? I worry that to ask for
> effort is to imply elitism, and the charge against art, that it
> is elitist,
> is to often the accusers defense against his or her own
> bafflement. It is
> quite close to the remark Why cant they all speak English? ,
> which may be
> why "elitist" is the favorite insult of the American and the British.
>
> But you may say, how can I know what is good and what is not
> good? I may
> wince at the cheap seascape over the mantelpiece but does that
> necessarily
> mean I should go to the Tate gallery and worship a floor full of
> dyed rice?
> Years ago, when I was living very briefly with a stockbroker who had a
> good cellar, I asked him how I could learn about wine.
> Drink it he said.
>
>
>
>
>
> piece,
> mike
>
> p.s. if you want to read the whole thing (which was way too long
> for me to
> type) look up the book.
>
>
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