Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 634014" data-attributes="member: 3887">Altin posted an interesting response to this already, but I'm now inspired by some good indie rock and several glasses of Maker's Mark, so I'll attempt to comment....That's not what I meant to convey {famous last words, eh?}. I certainly wasn't trying to romanticize the works some mythic past --which was a tired idea by the time of the Roman empire. There's a great quote, "Where are the snows of yesterday?" by a Roman author whose name escapes me now. I believe there is plenty of vital art being made today. I took you to be making an argument against personal expression in art, one in favor of a set of artistic representations that meant something to the greatest number of people. That is, an inherently false amalgam of popularly heald views in place of one individual's vision. It almost sounds as if your arguing for a kind of Communist state art. Denial of individual experience in favor of the collective view.[/B]</blockquote>Not neccessarily. I'm suggesting  that cute pictures of puppies usually --thought not neccessarily-- amount to a cynical attempt be an artist to provoke a response from an audience. A cheap but effective technique. Awwww, puppy. The equivalent of loading food down with salt or sugar. Or putting an attractive woman or child in jeopardy in a Lifetime made-for-tv-movie. The paradox is we all understand that art is manipulative --we ask for it, that art demand a response-- but we {usually} bristle at art that does so in such an overt manner. Its also that art which asks so singular a response is just dull. I want from art a response more complex, more interesting than what I get when the doctor whacks my knee with that little hammer....And also, purpose matters. No subject is inherently banal, just the use its put to. Look at Andy Warhol...Not at all. Both the hypothetical cute puppies and the hypothetical dead bodies are on equal footing with me. Cheap, uninteresting statements. Like saying "It sure is hot" on a 95 degree day... I'm arguing for art rooted in ambiguity, a multiplicity of interpretations. Not because its "deeper" or because I'm a raging elitist snob, but because its more accurate, a better representation of actually human experience, a better representational strategy. OK, now we are talking about my assumptions. Yes. You're a better artist if you encourage, or at least allow for, multiple interpretations of a given work. This isn't any kind of idealism, its pragmaticism. People don't usually operate as a series of binary states: its rare that you can reduce human response to either/or. Thus any attempt to accurately express/model/represent human experience is going to reflect this. Anything else is myth-making or propaganda...Sure. But let me try and state them clearly...Let me be clear. I think the fundemental purpose of art is to engage. I can't speak to ennobling acts or the elevation of the human spirt {people who know me can attest to this}. But if art isn't about showing me part of another individuals conscience, what's left? Why is seeing/hearing/reading from another's point of view an act of vanity? What's the alternative? Again, you seem to be doing Lenin proud; placing the values/experience of some hypothetical collective ahead of the individual. You're adding a political dimension here that has nothing to do with this subject. Firstly, what you're describing isn't Modernism. Secondly, it isn't even properly Postmoderism --which is largely a critique of "totalizing master narratives", a critique of power structures as applied to cultural meanings, argghh, head hurts, anyway... If you're railing against "the art of inclusion", against judging works according to who made them or their message, rather than their aesthetic merit, I'm with you 100%. Understand though, for a long time works of art where judged by what class/race/gender of person created them. And if you belonged to the wrong group, your work was not considered art. Ask Jackson Pollock's wife...  I'm not sure how you mean this, but its a great line. Art is always representation, never the thing itself. Naturalism or realism are always just styles...Look, I like popular art. Sandler makes me laugh and King is really underated. In a way, King is braver than a lot of more literary authors. Supernatural horror aside, King takes up the challenge of writing about Americans living in the places they actually live now. His books don't take place during the Civil War {I'm thinking Frazier's Cold Mountain} or during some symbolic nightmare of the Old West {I thinking Cormac McCarthy} or some zone of arty paranoia {hello Don Dellilo and Thomas Pynchon}. He writes pretty honestly about the world around him --monsters notwithstaning-- and that's always been an admirable goal.And Vonnegut is hardly fashionable anymore. Besides, the thing to take away from Vonnegut isn't his faux-child diction or ceaseless irony; its his compassion, his humanism. These traits have been trendy in Western Lit. since the Enlightenment. Have you read his Easter sermon? Its beautiful... This I just don't understand. Initially you claim you're advocating art that everyone can easily identify with, but here you indicate that you want a perspective reader to come away with your unique experience? Why in God'd name would any artist object to someone having a reponse to their work? You seem to operating from a paradigm that reduces art to the level of stereo instructions: a linear tramsmission of information with one correct desired result. When I hear a Patsy Cline song I feel heartbreaking sadness, but I'm fairly certain it's not the same heartbreaking sadness she felt...Lord, grant me that I have published work to be misread...Look, art gets interpreted. It ain't telepathy. Its all about what meaning gets created when the viewer encounters the work. That's crazy. It isn't a matter of clarity or skill, it has to do with different people having different experiences/knowledge which influence their perception {its about creating meaning. Different people have different materials from which to assemble it}. For example, how could a person who never lost a spouse to cancer have exactly the same response to a play about losing a spouse to cancer than someone who did?Let's not bash straw men. I'm hardly an advocate of what gets labelled PC. Good night.[/QUOTE]

Verification