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Notes -
Oh man, you drop this when I'm too busy for in-depth digging?
Some previous discussion here, for those interested.
(Primaprimaprima, you are not the "you" in the following.)
Lots of good comments in the thread too, but one of the impressions I'm getting is that the term "art" is fatally overloaded, to the point that people are turning obvious truths into mutual contradictions due simply to focus on different aspects of the process.
"There is good art and bad art."
"Art is inherently subjective, anything can be good art."
If you tell me there are art experts, you are telling me there is a standard. If there is a standard, I am entitled both to judge works by that standard and to judge the standard itself, and you don't get to retreat to abstraction if my judgement is other than you prefer. It seems obvious to me that a huge part of the conflict this conversation generates is due to influential people playing both sides of this divide to their immediate personal advantage.
"Art is important and powerful."
"Degenerate art does not exist."
...I don't think these two claims can be reconciled. "With great power comes great responsibility."
"Art is universal, appealing to core features of the human brain and raw neuro-kinematics."
"Art is all about social context."
If the former, than art that doesn't spark me is bad art from my perspective, and art that doesn't spark a lot of people is bad art from a lot of people's perspective, disagreements start looking like social conflict. If the latter, not all communication is good communication, not all social contexts should be encouraged or preserved, and again we converge on social conflict. And again, you don't get to create hierarchy and then argue that contrary opinions about hierarchy are invalid; "Angelus Novus is good" is conflict just as much as "Angelus Novus is bad".
...It seems to me that our current consensus understanding of "Art" is fatally poisoned. Judging by your summary of Scott's articles, it seems to me that Scott recognizes this and is trying to describe the problem.
Why should it start there? Bullshit political signaling seems obviously endemic. I believe I have personally observed it second-hand in an academic context, and it was one of the most embittering experiences I've ever had, generating an immediate "these people are my enemies for life, and I will never forgive them" response. Why would taste outweigh the social game in our estimation of the field, given that it seems obvious that the field has been deliberately engineered to ensure that social games outweigh taste in every possible context? Something doesn't need to be the only factor to be the overwhelmingly dominant factor.
Art shapes people, but some shapes are good and some are bad, and some ways of shaping are good and some are bad. Summitting Everest appears to be a shaping experience. Alpha Centauri's "Nerve Stapling" is also a shaping experience. I prefer one to the other, and I do not recognize diversity on this point as healthy or something to be encouraged. Neither does it seem to me that the art world actually believes in diversity being valuable in and of itself. They have, do and will police shapes and shaping methods ruthlessly to achieve their conception of the Good. It's just that their conception of the Good is obviously incompatible with mine, and their strategy for achieving it appears to involve a lot of lying and non-consensual blood-sucking.
In short, I think there's a lot of value in attempting to cleave "Art" at its many joints. A conversation of Art-as-human-universal is obviously going to go very differently than one of The-art-world-as-we-know-it. I can personally defend Angelus Novus in the former context; I'm pretty sure I won't in the latter.
Amusingly, I spent some time studying Angelus Novus in our last discussion, and so had a mental picture of the piece when arriving in this one. I checked the piece again, and the immediate impression was significantly worse that I remembered.
Because the alternative is to simply think, as you already said, that your opponents are your "enemies for life" and there's nothing to be done about it. Then the discussion is truly just reduced to nothing but political power struggles. Sounds a bit... postmodern, doesn't it?
I take Scott at his word that his immediate, honest experience of the Chesterton poems is that he experiences them as surpassingly beautiful. That doesn't mean that I think that someone's "immediate perceptual experience" should be taken as an unanalyzable, unquestionable primitive. We could then go further and ask why he has that experience, how he came to be the type of person who has that experience, how it stands in relation to his other beliefs and his other psychological traits, etc. And someone could of course perform a similar analysis on me to determine how I came to hold the views that I hold. But the important thing is that, on a certain level, I really do take Scott's word for it that he just likes the poems because he likes them. I'm not coming into it thinking that he's just saying that he likes those poems because he has a political angle. I think everyone should extend that same level of charity to everyone.
I think it's pretty clearly a good thing to have non-zero "enemies for life". I don't think you can have a functioning morality or conception of justice without this component of moral reasoning, and I think life without functioning morality or a conception of justice is not a good life.
I watched an employee of the state at a prestigious educational institution provide affirmation and encourage mutual validation to a series of young artists that their shit art was deep and meaningful because their output flattered their collective biases, and then watched her lead that same group collectively tearing down the one artist whose shit art did not flatter their collective biases. What conclusions would you draw from that experience?
To solve post-modernism, you have to take it seriously. Once you solve it, you have nothing more to fear from it.
I disagree specifically with the term everyone. I think it is possible to conclude from available evidence that some people are in fact just grifting, and that when you find enough grifters in sufficient concentration within a larger sociopolitical cluster, that cluster is reasonably described as a grift. For the art world, I think this recognition is immediately necessary; I perceive the art world has been deeply fucked up for a very long time. What I value about art can, I think, survive without it, and I think we would all be significantly better off if it did.
On the other hand, I also recognize that some and even many reactions to stimuli are genuine. I've experienced them myself. I can attempt to bridge the gap for people who don't perceive the resonance.
Either way, I find the discussion absolutely fascinating.
Conveniently, I was just thumbing through Nietzsche again due to my discussion with coffee_enjoyer:
Regarding the broader art world:
I don't deny that there's a great deal of grift, corruption, and political bickering in the "high art" world; but, I don't think anything in my post committed me to denying that either.
I have no particular attachment to the particular art institutions that we're stuck with now, and I agree with you that art could survive and flourish without them.
I would say that Game recognizes Game. Or does Neitzche "forget" the Last Men or the Tarantulas, in your view? Certainly he doesn't seem to mind making his own appeals to Justice, does he? Or am I reading him wrong?
I wouldn't think you'd deny it. I guess I'm trying to communicate why I think the problem is systemic, rather than anecdotal. It's one thing for there to be "a great deal of grift, corruption, and political bickering". Humans will inevitably human. But what the art world has done, what they are going to keep doing, is anti-human, and I will happily spend the rest of my life working to dismay them.
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