This blog is a notebook for me to record statements around the issues:
is it art?
what is art?
if it is art, is it good art?
What is good art?
Why do people do things that we/they call artBecause it is my own blog and notebook, I reserve the right to be incoherent and disorganized. Having said that, I welcome comments that further the enquiry from people who can tolerate this.
listening to the podcast idea struck me about what happens when we communicate our experience of art – crudely: it seems to be a discourse which is outside normal rules of interaction ie relies much more on the specific experience of the interlocutor in order to make sense – ie it does not rely on true/false factual, falsifiable/ observable truth but relies on whether the interlocutor has had the same or comparable experience inside his/her head and not externalised as a sharable experience that can be talked about. ie the woman literary critic is talking about her experience of reading a book called ‘eat the buddha’ and she says: ‘WHEN I finished it, I did not know where I was for about five minutes, you know’ the other book critic on the programme says ‘I love that feeling’
she says this in the context of reviewing a book in the context of evaluating the book. she uses a very subjective experience she had as a sign of quality in the book. the other critic acknowledges not the book itself but the feeling she uses in order to assess whether the book is good or not. so he validates the criterion she uses. she goes on to say that it is not a common experience for her as a professional book reader who is always aware of themselves reading but in this case she completely submitted to the book. I think this is a very relevant exchange in terms of ‘how do we evaluate art – ie that the evaluation of art inevitably means exchanging opinions on the work to other people but those opinions arise from internal experiences that are not falsifiable objectively (ie we cannot say it is false) but only endorsed (not unendorsed) by people who have had the same experience. So art criticism is of its very nature exclusive of some people
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isitartdotco 