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but also it’s a move of taking the non-art, the infra-art, and just moving it across a line... commerce becomes Culture, the mass produced aura-less product becomes the one-off, aura-full handcrafted object ready for the art market
Though overshadowed by Mary Cassatt and relatively unknown to museum-goers today, Beaux's craftsmanship and extraordinary output were highly regarded in her time.
It’s also true, as Eli Pariser has eloquently explained, that both the deliberate infrastructure of online information and the unintended practices arising from our collective use of it, is actively excluding or hiding some information through a progressively tighter series of feedback loops.
The conservative believes the excellent person is a kind of mountain climber, a moral athlete who is constantly overcoming or trying to overcome his limits, pushing himself ever higher and higher.
We come to love the look of a comic, and the feeling expands to a general one of enjoying the way comics are drawn and composed, and even of the ink and paper. We want to make one. And having made one we're not entirely happy with it. Let's say that we've taken a notion to introduce a naturalistic element. So we base our figures on people we know. But the problem is that the things they're saying and doing are not quite authentic. So let's base these aspects on actual situations that we have observed. And so by increments we've put ourselves in the work.
--eddie campbell (link). This really resonated with me. I often think of how writers/artists and readers/reviewers/critics often come to a work from opposite directions, and want different things from it, and read controlled by different habits of thought.
Could we have invented a way of living that is more phantasmagorical and absurd than the all-powerful cruelty of the gods, the caste of priests and princes ruling enslaved peoples, the obligation to work that is supposed to guarantee joy and substantiate the Stalinist paradise, the millenarianist Third Reich, the Maoist Cultural Revolution, the society of well-being (the Welfare state[4]), the totalitarianism of money beyond which there is neither individual no social safety, [and] finally the idea that survival is everything and life is nothing?
[...]The tornado of short-term profit destroys everything in its path; it sterilizes the earth and hardens life so as to extract useless benefits. Humanely conceived, life is incompatible with the economy that exploits man and the earth for lucrative ends. Unlike survival, life gives and gives itself.
–interview with Raoul Vaneigem, with comments by Bruce Sterling (link).
7 comments:
"I often think of how writers/artists and readers/reviewers/critics often come to a work from opposite directions, and want different things from it, and read controlled by different habits of thought."
If you have more to say about that, I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd be fascinated to read it.
Michael Avolio
loved that Campbell post so much I wrote an essay on criticism in response to it. It's funny when people read competing critical opinions more as a clash of testable theories -- stronger science versus weaker science -- than as a clash of personalities, personal histories ("habits of thought", as you said). Whereas when evaluating art, we're tempted immediately to jump to speculation about the artist himself ......
--mza.
In the interest of time (mine) I'll point to "It All Began With a Picture..." by C.S. Lewis. Some of what I'm thinking can be found there. I wish I had a non-C.S. Lewis example for you instead, but I don't.
I hadn't read the Lewis essay before.
"I don't know where the pictures came from. And I don't believe anyone knows exactly how he 'makes things up'. Making up is a very mysterious thing..."
He's talking about the Narnia books, which one would think began with theme or the spiritual metaphor. But instead, he says the first book "all began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself: 'Let's try to make a story about it'."
So, for the reader, they approach it story-first, meeting the characters and absorbing the themes, but for the author he approached it in different pieces. Is that what you're getting at? That sometimes you think of, say, a scene in the middle first, but of course the reader doesn't begin there?
Interesting stuff, thanks.
Oh! I'm so sorry. I meant "On Criticism" by Lewis. It directly follows "It all began" in "Of Other Worlds" and I thought they were the same essay. Sorry about that!!
here. It starts on page 43.
I just read it (or all but the last few pages, which is all Google would allow). Thanks. Very interesting thoughts on the assumptions some reviewers/readers make, and how they can bring their own expectations to a work that have nothing to do with the work itself.
Michael Avolio
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