It is a good thing we have each our own definitions of who a fool is; each man's genius is someone else's fool.
It is not necessary to assume that others judge us all the time just because they do.
God is not an infeasible hypothesis; He is just an expensive one.
Happiness and Sorrow: twin pricks destroying the mellow bubble of Life.
A lot of fun can be had on a full stomach and full pockets.
Two words, a smile, a kiss, two sighs, a few moans and an eternity of groans.
Art affords the ordinary person pleasure without the pangs and pain without the hurt.
Thomas Aquinas proved that God cannot make a man an ass.
Science for centuries has been about the removing of fleas from a dog's back.
It is not allowed to die of small-pox in this century; AIDS is OK.
The world will go berserk one person at a time.
Read this, this and this for people who inspired this post.
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7 comments:
"Art affords the ordinary person pleasure without the pangs and pain without the hurt."
I disagree.
the audience can empathize with the artist and his subject, and in that sense, can feel pleasure or pain, but it is only in the mind. but the hurt that was felt and attempted to be depicted in a Guernica for example is totally different. the physical experience is whole worlds removed from an aesthetic experience.
Are you talking of the artist or the audience?
Yes. It is true with the audience that they go through the pity, terror and catharsis without any physical pain. However the words "pangs" and "hurt" do not connote just the physical realm, right?
If you're uttering this thought,with reference to a particular work of art, then I may have to read it before I can comment.
Personally, I can be immensely hurt by some works of art and immensely heart-broken by pseudo-art. (if that counts..)
"he audience can empathize with the artist and his subject, and in that sense, can feel pleasure or pain, but it is only in the mind."
Where else is pleasure and pain in reality if not in the mind?
i am talking about the ordinary person and hence the audience, as the artist needs to be 'extra-ordinary' in some sense. the general audience is insulated from the artist whereas a few sensitive people might be able to feel or reduplicate for themselves what the artist felt.
pangs and hurt need not be only physical but are usually so. they are what the artist or the original actor of the piece had to undergo before the work of art is viewed by the audience. 'pangs' can be likened to the birth-pangs that a woman suffers while delivering a child - it yields pleasure in the end; while hurt is what a woman would feel if her child dies, for example - it yields pain. the pangs and the hurt are not just physical but they can be felt authentically only by the woman herself. the pleasure and the pain can be shared by other people too as they are purely states of mind. similarly for the artist as well as the original actor whom the artist imitates in his piece; the artist though is removed one step from the actor and the audience, one step further.
"art affords ...," i meant, in the sense that art allows people to invest their emotions in various activities without interfering with their everyday life.
as for art and pseudo-art, the distinction, i suppose, lies only in the aesthetic quality of the work and, as such, i am not worried about that here.
"I am talking about the ordinary person and hence the audience, as the artist needs to be 'extra-ordinary' in some sense." Really?
Critical theorist Roland Barthes in his essay "Death of the Author" says, "The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted." According to this, the author is of little consequence. The reader becomes the universal artist. He may not be extraordinary but sure creates a text everytime he reads or interprets it. This interpretation cannot be a "reduplication". It would only be another version of the text born in the mind of the reader, influenced by his own cultural and social inputs.
The point I am trying to make here is that the audience is no less an artist than the author. They have to create too. It is an equally painful process. I am sure you'll agree with me if you have read a difficult book.
What is everyday life? Is not watching a play everyday life? How is it far removed from my everyday life? I may be crying at a theatre, but it is my real life and not a piece of my life that floats away to make space for me to get into an illusion called art. During the play, the audience is certainly part of the process of creation and the whole process is part of the audience's time and space and reality.
The difference between art and pseudo-art to me does not lie so much in aesthetics (for aesthetics itself is debatable.) To me pseudo-art is something that is superficial, where the artist does not get completely involved in the evolution of the piece of art. The sole intention of this kind of art would be to find appreciation. The creation of such art is not an experience for the artist but a mere manipulation of the audience. If you have an eye for pseudos you get to have a good laugh quite often.
a few things:
i still claim that the artist is extra-ordinary. the final 'meaning' is always realised only with the audience but the reader, for example, in his attempt to become the artist, always tries to approximate the original artist. reduplication is of the essence as the artist tries to manipulate and challenge his reader to create meaning out of what he has presented. i dont mean to say the author is cleverer or more perspicacious but he initiates this exchange and so is 'extra-ordinary' . the process is completed to the reader's satisfaction, when he can understand and create a link, in his own mind, between what he has 'understood' and what he believes the author intended. finnegans wake means anything at all only when i read and attach meaning to it but joyce is more important than me surely in this process. this is because, confronted with a book, i am forced to interpret it(or i can ignore it) whereas the author had the choice not to create it at all. barthes, in destroying the author and in replacing him with a history-less, (almost)motive-less scriptor, has only mechanized the process of creation of art and placed the onus for meaning on the reader. i feel the interpretive process is more symbiotic and it is directed more by the scriptor's control over his reader and subject and though the process of interpretation (creation) be the same, the author still has a distinct advantage over the reader. this is what is reflected when we tell our friends something like,"you just don't get it about Mersault, do you?"
as for experiences in the theatre, ur claim contradicts with ur distinction of art and pseudo-art as the manipulation itself is an experience and the manipulator is presenting, in his own idea of form, the experience as art(pseudo-art). and barthes anyways precludes the possibility of the author ever identifying completely with his work except in the sense of being defined by it wholly. imo, experiences in the theatre differ from 'everyday' experience the same way dream experiences differ from reality - by our imposition of a definition of reality in judging these. when we forget ourselves, its either wilful suspension of disbelief or due to an innate urge to cross certain boundaries. and the meta-questions like an actor acting as an actor and which act is more real etc can of course be asked here but they are essentially unanswerable in this language. also, the only question that can be asked of a piece of art is regarding its aesthetic quality as questions of truth or goodness are questions to be answered by logic or ethics. as long as i see 2 watercolours(art and pseudo-art exhibits), i cant distinguish one from the other except by some aesthetic standards i prescribe for myself though knowing if one was more honest might enhance my appreciation of it from a different perspective. basically, i am trying to say that i have no right nor means to decide if an artist has been honest or not in his work.
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