Author: Patricia Oxley

I was puzzled some time ago by the fact that we have one word ‘stone’ and yet of the billions/millions anyway a lot of stones on the earth, no two are identical.  How can this be?

what I remember of this puzzlement and question was its emotional heat.

what kind of question was this?  Should questions themselves have criteria for their existence?  How can questions have ’emotional colour or heat’?

is it a symptom of confused and confusing or is it a path on the way to finding something out?

But

today reading German Philosophy – a very short introduction by Andrew Bowie (online pdf) I found this

“Without ways of organizing evidence by identifying it in terms of concepts, one would be faced with endless chaotic particularity: what we perceive is always diffferent from moment to moment in some, however minimal, respect, and no two objects are absolutely identical. ”

so, words, concepts, are ways of talking about objects in the world using a constructed singularity for a non-constructed proliferation of ‘events’ in the world.

what is real, the construction or the real events?

well, one thing is that the talking has to be about the abstracted-from-the-real construction and can never be about the real events, except if one were to talk about ‘this stone and none other’. but what kind of restricted talking would that be?

Yippee someone else acknowledged my question

what does one do when in front of an ‘artwork’ that one does not see the point of and another person says, ‘isn’t it good’

what does one do

what are the options

1.  that one’s own power of appreciation is deficient
2. that the other person is somehow deluded
3. that one is just not ready to appreciate (same as 1)
4. to think that some works of art appeal to some people and not to others

this last point needs unpacking – I can imagine a piece of ‘art’ that I do not like but that I can still recognize as a piece of ‘art’ with some point (ok so what is ‘point’?)

I know there are some pieces of ‘art’ that I neither dislike nor like and that I do not recognize as having a ‘point’

that is okay but how does one deal then with other people’s evaluations of it as ‘good’

one is left with a feeling of inadequacy

or a suspicion that people’s judgements are easily manipulated

a wondering whether there are some definite criteria to judge art by

and a knowing that there definitely are functional criteria by which it is decided what pieces are praised, what artists are remunerated, what principles are passed on to students  and what of these three are not.

Taxi driver bollocks

This was a phrase used by Matthew Collings about John Carey’s book What Good are the Arts

for me the salient point is the social/economic implications of the relative statuses of the art critic and the taxi driver

Adam Gezcy says that the appreciation of art is  a learned thing

Elitist?

Was the taxi driver’s opinion swayed by thinking that the artists were making money in a much easier way than him?

same opinion expressed in (look up)

Is there a genuine issue here.

My tutor said that for art to be rated as art it had to communicate

what then of the glass of water and the acorn on a shelf?

I know it is easy to impress some people by using a big word that they don’t understand.

I have to get to grips with the critique of judgement

‘Kant falls victim to the same problem that touches everyone who tries to make general claims about art: the very concept of art has great historical fluidity so that we can never nail down for all time exactly what it is.’

quote from spark notes

autonomy and self inventing?

http://www.uri.edu/personal/szunjic/philos/critjudg.htm

I was once in a seminar when a young female student referred with some anger to ‘art whores’.

I don’t remember her developing this idea but do remember the emotional heat with which she said the words and the moral overtones of her use of the word ‘whore’.

It is probably trying to patronise her to say that I remember her very positively

I still find what she said  problematic and want to relate it to a bundle of ideas.

First is the moral stance adopted by some people I have met in art education and the moral significance given to certain art behaviours.

This is a very big topic and I can only think about it step by step and hope something comes out of it.

First is Kant’s idea of ‘disinterestedness’ in art –

I have got to read a Critique of Judgement again and figure it out

Adorno’s connection between art and politics

Berger’s aesthetic statement :

‘In 1960 Berger had defined his aesthetic criteria simply and confidently: ‘does this work help or encourage men to know and claim their social rights?’

Is a cognitive idea generator something that is morally judgeable (ie in the same way that one could ask whether dreams are morally judgeable) ie is art and or dreams in that set of things about which one can use moral judgements?

Another view of the elephant is Alfred Gell’s idea of art as to impress the enemy

I am getting confused and confusing – will stop now

While writing the last post re CIG, I remembered hearing something about how behaviours evolved.  The distinction was between traits that benefit the individual and traits that benefit the social group.

I  cannot exactly remember where I heard this – maybe it was the book ‘the man who couldn’t stop’ or whether it was on the radio.

the point I want to make is that given the nature of this enquiry (a bit like a dream with the relation between consecutive topics/ideas being one of similarity rather than logical sequence)

I must note the ideas as and when I come across them.

Otherwise I forget the reference and context of the idea.

Just finished listening to ‘The Man who Couldn’t Stop’ by David Adam

It is about what is known about OCD

and

an account of his own and others’ experience.

In it he mentions a theoretical construct called a Cognitive Idea Generator

This is apparently an idea from Salkovskis’s inflated responsibility model (of OCD)

What I find interesting about this is the idea that the brain/mind generates ideas (out of nowhere? blue sky ideas? creative ideas? ideas not related to reality???)

that this capacity of the brain evolved as it was adaptive – (return to the relevant part of the book)

ideas in OCD are narrative – to do with cause and effect to do with temporal sequence I believe

can I say something about the cognitive idea generator and the creation of art?  would it help to say something about that?

I should find out about Salkovskis and his model.

I think there is a related area about the moral outrage and blaming that fuels some peoples” discourse on art – see next posting

“I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.”

So far I find this way of writing suits me well.

Because to an extent, it is freer than, say, writing an essay at uni.

It seems to be a super-delux version of making notes preparatory to an essay.

but where the notes are ad-hoc

can be returned to

and edited

and all the things I say are paths I can take

an essay is to be written for a tutor and so lots of notes have to be discarded

this way I can keep the notes and that’s good because discarding means some ideas get lost

This way also allows me not to let ‘intelligence/education’ get in the way because there are fewer limits/strictures/demands on the way ideas are hierarchised.

and I think that might be useful for finding out

Because part of me bows in politeness to those I confuse and part of me wants to leave them behind.

both have narrative forms: characters, actions, dialogue, place, sequence of events (wish I could remember my dreams sufficiently to compare them to Barthes analysis of narrative – that would be fun)

both ‘make’? (unpack) images

dreams as abstract art???

I am not sure whether I can do the intensive reading necessary to make my comments worth anything at all.  I am listening to a podcast about Nietzsche – there is a remark about ‘pure appearance’ which is appreciated without regard to any other underlying reality.  How can I say anything about this?

the podcast is The Partially Examined Life, episode 119

appearance = illusion but an illusion which is to be taken seriously

they talk about dreaming

I am reminded of Tom Davis Unask:

http://www.unask.com/website/CurrentCourses/Freud/jung/junglecture.html

when he argues for the utter importance of dreaming (illusion, fiction?)

dreaming is amoral

but if we don’t dream, we die

does dreaming enable man to claim his rights (woman to claim her rights)

I  think I have to read the original Nietzsche and Kant closely

Is the process of making ‘art’ like dreaming in any way?

If so, how would Berger assess it?

ps I have to remember the essay? about connotations and references in language being boundless and …..

hope that jogs!  I know it will be on the other laptop in a folder -look

I once read a comment on talking about ‘language’.  The gist was that talking about language was comparable to several blindfolded people washing an elephant.  None of them could see the whole thing so one would say they were washing a big flappy thing that moved and was flexible (an ear); another would say that they were washing a solid round thing that moved up and down and had several distinctive harder parts (a foot). The point being that one could only talk about language in terms of one of its aspects, structure for example or usage but that it was impossible to talk about it ‘in the round’  cf the uncertainty principle.

Of course this ignores the fact that people being people would walk around the elephant and talk to other people washing it and hear what they said.

This scenario is pretty much what talking about ‘art’ is like.  Except that the word ‘elephant’ refers to an individual example of a physically existing set of things.  This set of things is ontologically stable (at least on the human time scale).  “Art’ on the other hand is a different kind of word.

More later.

Let me think about this.