Bouguereau a Bugger Up
Booger Poo
merely a technician, an Ingres wannabe, a Luddite, a backward looking
anachronism, a reactionary with no ideas, out of sync with his time and age.
People like that are a dime a dozen. The earth is *infested* with
low-wattage IQ realist painters who offer nothing to broaden humanity's
vision. I'd pay to see them vaporized, if I could. First would be that prick
who paints saccharin cottages in sugary tones on an industrial scale, but
Buggerup would be in there somewhere too, if he were still alive.
I'm new to this group but I find it nauseating that the place is dominated
by this logorrheaic half-wit called "Mani's Delicatessen" or something and
his flapjaw claque. But that's typical Usenet, isn't it? The plebs always
rule.
Chris
"Dan Fox" <danf...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:20021220104739.622$U...@newsreader.com...
> Booger -
>
> There are actually a number of intelligent, interesting people who post
> here, and make it worth staying. They include:
>
> Nik Maack
> Marilyn
> Chris
Howd I git on this side?
> Erik Mattila
> Edward Nilges
> G*rd*n
>
> and others I can't think of offhand (apologies to them). On the down side,
> the nut faction has driven away many good people.
>
> Kill file or ignore:
>
> Mani (of course)
Disagree. The guy might be a bit repetitive, and maybe a bit out-dated with
respect to the art market (but I live in Halifax, so what do I know) but a
good deal is right on the money. And he can be quite funny (eg the chapter
on his site about bums...). I especially like his send ups of Cezanne
(despite the fact I also like Cezanne as a painter). Plus he doesn't mince
his words..
> William Palmer
> Andrew D.
Isn't this the hopeless tipyst that's always poking fun at Keith? I vote we
keep him :)
> Alison Raimes
> Richard
Richard is a student after my own heart - with more students like him (the
sort that both do their work & really piss you off) I would have stayed in
teaching. As it was, most of them just wanted to be babysat. and needed to
be shown how to suck their own thumbs....
> Edward Ng
> Keith O'Connor
Not until I see that love poem to Alison...
>
> If you want to laugh (or puke, depending on your mood), check out the 'Art
> Renewal' site the Boog folks keep talking abouty - don't know the url
> offhand, but do a search. It is priceless.
>
While you're there, make a donation (I do, at the "supporting member"
level), they could use the help. The story of rational, humanistic art isn't
completely written yet; it's just been down for a really long count. I think
these folks do a good job of bringing it back to public attention.
Cheers;
Chris
FWIW - it's actually probably worthwhile kill-filing anyone who posts more
than one note a year to USENET :)
William Palmer
> I checked out some of Buggerup's art. What's all the fuss about? The guy was
> merely a technician, an Ingres wannabe, a Luddite, a backward looking
> anachronism, a reactionary with no ideas,
Nonsense. Bouguereau's art abounds with ideas. Many
of those ideas are applied in his craft. What you are
really saying is that his art is not intellectual in the
sense that it represents abstract ideas. It does, though,
certainly as much as Norman Rockwell's art did. It is just
that Rockwell's art reflected ideas common to middle class
America, while the ideas in Bouguereau's art struck their
chords with the affluent, burgeoning upper middle classes
and the traditional upper classes of Europe.
out of sync with his time and age.
> People like that are a dime a dozen.
No, they are not. He was a man of exceptional talent.
On the contrary, I would have to say that people like
YOU are a "dime a dozen" in Usenet. Trolling under a
phony name, you post your vile attacks on the best
known posters in order to get the attention you
can't get with honest posting under your own name--
because you yourself are devoid of skill and ideas.
The earth is *infested* with
> low-wattage IQ realist painters who offer nothing to broaden humanity's
> vision.
As discussions in this group have shown, "realist painters"
is a very broad term. Most people like some art that could
be called "realist." The term is almost too broad to be
helpful.
I'd pay to see them vaporized, if I could. First would be that prick
> who paints saccharin cottages in sugary tones on an industrial scale,
I find Kincade boring, but to give him fair credit,
all he is doing is using 19th century ideas to make
a certain type of person contented and to earn a very
good living for himself. His vapid, middle-brow
stuff is not at all interesting to someone with my
preferences in art, but you have to give him credit for
being a canny self-promoter, and making people without
much tast in art happy. A person could do worse with
his mediocre skills.
but
> Buggerup would be in there somewhere too, if he were still alive.
>
> I'm new to this group but I find it nauseating that the place is dominated
> by this logorrheaic half-wit called "Mani's Delicatessen" or something and
> his flapjaw claque. But that's typical Usenet, isn't it? The plebs always
> rule.
Plebes? What on earth could be more COMMON than crawling
around under a fake name and trying to get a bit of
attention with shabby attacks on outstanding artists?
alt.genius.bill-palmer
(Temporary office: rec.arts.prose, upstairs)
wil...@ix.netcom.com)
keith o'connor (tinmangallery.com
k
Chris <n...@this.address> wrote in message
news:0PHM9.3773$A17.2...@ursa-nb00s0.nbnet.nb.ca...
Booger Poop
> Bouguereau's art abounds with ideas.
Such as? Please regale me. Can't wait.
> Many of those ideas are applied in his craft.
"Craft" is a very apposite choice of words.
> What you are really saying is that his art is
> not intellectual in the sense that it represents
> abstract ideas.
Nope. I'm saying that his work is regurgitation. It's an aping of the past.
It's a tired recapitulation. Da capo!
> It does, though, certainly as much as Norman
> Rockwell's art did.
You can't seriously call the stuff that Rockwell did "art", can you? Come
on, let's be clear: that man was nothing more than a sentimental
illustrator, the American fascination with him notwithstanding.
> because you yourself are devoid of skill and ideas.
Don't presume things about me, Bill.
> ... you have to give [Kincade] credit for
> being a canny self-promoter
No, I don't. His factories produce visual pollution. I wince and cringe
every time I see one of his "creations". It's a physically nauseating
sensation for me.
> Plebes? What on earth could be more COMMON than crawling
> around under a fake name and trying to get a bit of
> attention with shabby attacks on outstanding artists?
Fakk off, Bill. Anonymity is a Usenet tradition, so suck it down. Stop with
the ad hominem stuff.
keith o'connor (tinmangallery.com
reason to hate me - mainly because I am aware of your back door slanderous
games and we tend to fear who know even a little about our dark side.
This nut case will take up the challenge and question the authority of an
artist who paints black imitation oriental symbols and passes them off as
original. An artist who is so arrogant as to declare himself an avenging god
and then condom others to be shunned.
This ng is mainly populated with adults who are capable of forming their own
opinions and do not need to be guided by the great dan fox who thinks he is
the fox who was placed in charge of the hen house.
You little shit ass how dare you judge me!
keith
Dan Fox <danf...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:20021220104739.622$U...@newsreader.com...
> Booger -
>
> There are actually a number of intelligent, interesting people who post
> here, and make it worth staying. They include:
>
> Nik Maack
> Marilyn
> Chris
> Erik Mattila
> Edward Nilges
> G*rd*n
>
> and others I can't think of offhand (apologies to them). On the down side,
> the nut faction has driven away many good people.
>
> Kill file or ignore:
>
> Mani (of course)
> William Palmer
> Andrew D.
> Alison Raimes
> Richard
> Edward Ng
> Keith O'Connor
>
> If you want to laugh (or puke, depending on your mood), check out the 'Art
> Renewal' site the Boog folks keep talking abouty - don't know the url
> offhand, but do a search. It is priceless.
>
>
>
> --
> Dan
> http://www.danfoxart.com
keith o'connor (tinmangallery.com
Some artists of big B's time argued that art is not form but the expression
of form. Unfortunately big B discovered that he could make mountains of
money when he used his technical ability to create form. It could be said
that he made a pact with the devil: money or art and he chose money - much
like Dorian Grey chose never to grow old.
In our National Gallery there is a nude by Lord Leighton - a very competent
painter. I don't care for the passivity of the figure but I study it for the
subtle methods he uses to build form and integrated colour. Not too far away
is a portrait by de Kooning. Both of these artists build form but do it in
different ways. de Koonong forces you to search for the clues that allow the
form to be built in your eyes.
His is a perceptual process as opposed to an intellectual processes of
Lord Leighton and big B - yes they are intellectual painters. The
intellectual component in their work is very strong and out of balance with
the physical and emotional.
The basic problem you face is that your value system may be convergent -
dependent upon the existence of traditional rules of obedience and
behaviour. If that is so then you will be attracted to the traditional modes
of art for the remainder of your life. You will find some types of modern
abstract art appealing - those with a strong intellectual component.
But as Nik has informed me: you cannot teach a lilly how to buy
real-estate - fool as I am I keep trying.
keith
William Palmer <willia...@prodigy.net> wrote in message
news:cbc76035.02122...@posting.google.com...
Mani Deli
fuse.)
"Covered with diplomas and gold medals, he is regarded as the general
of conventionalalists. But he is a discredited general who still
inspires fear." S. Dali
Bouguereau continues to scare hell out of artzy fartzies. Little
wonder. Brilliant draftsmanship alone does this. Artzy fartzies can
never get past that alone.
"Picasso is afraid of Bouguereau." S. Dali
>I checked out some of Buggerup's art. What's all the fuss about? The guy was
>merely a technician, an Ingres wannabe, a Luddite, a backward looking
>anachronism, a reactionary with no ideas, out of sync with his time and age.
>People like that are a dime a dozen. The earth is *infested* with
>low-wattage IQ realist painters who offer nothing to broaden humanity's
>vision. I'd pay to see them vaporized, if I could. First would be that prick
>who paints saccharin cottages in sugary tones on an industrial scale, but
>Buggerup would be in there somewhere too, if he were still alive.
>
>I'm new to this group
I doubt it!
> but I find it nauseating that the place is dominated
>by this logorrheaic half-wit called "Mani's Delicatessen" or something and
>his flapjaw claque. But that's typical Usenet, isn't it? The plebs always
>rule.
...and low-life complains about it.
...no skill no art!
Want to get away from the indecipherable imbecilities and absurd pretensions of the modern art establishment?
Check out my web page http://www3.sympatico.ca/manideli/
Mani Deli
>Kill file or ignore:
>
>Mani (of course)
>William Palmer
>Andrew D.
>Alison Raimes
>Richard
>Edward Ng
>Keith O'Connor
My advice, peruse all messages.
I would never ignore an advanced Picassoholic like Fox (of course).
Fox,, better then anyone here epitomizes the depressed diploma
carrying vain Artzy Fartzy. He can't draw. His work is art student
garbage. He can't take criticism and hates humor. He never had an idea
in his life, he is an encyclopedia of misinformation and he is very
pompous.
I suggest all Modern Academic Art students take his messages extremely
seriously and try hard to follow in Fox's academic footsteps. This
will allow you to spend at least four years in order to pick up what
you could have learned in six weeks.
The more artists out there who don't know there craft, the more work
for those who do.
keith o'connor (tinmangallery.com
is.
With regard to your comments on dan that is a different matter. I did not
want to critique dan or his work because I know that it is very difficult
making a living at art. He is managing to do it so that is a plus for him.
But his declaration that I am not a nice person - especially when I have
gone out of my way to avoid a confrontation between us is an affront which
changes the dynamics.
You say Dan "
is pompous - I agree his attempt to present himself as a moderate statesman
of RAF is not reflected in his list of good people and bad people This is
not the behaviour of a peace maker.
can't draw - he can draw well enough to construct his large imitation
oriental characters the he manages to sell as art.
can't take criticism - we all have problems with criticism and react
differently
hates humour - he must laugh at something - thought I read a comment about
his laughing at something.
He never had an idea in his life - I will assume that you are referring to
artistic ideas and are including abstract compositions. I agree: his style
of compositions have appeared over the years in American Art Review. He is
definitely not creating leading edge modern art - more trailing edge.
For some reason he does not like Alison which is unfortunate because she is
much more creative than he - I would be speculating to assume the reason
behind his attitude towards her is jealousy over her creativity.
encyclopaedia of misinformation - I don't have enough information to comment
The bottom line: Dan knows all of this. He is afraid that he has burned out.
I agree with your conclusion that he is depressed. I think Dan knows he
can't get out and he is just swinging at people - any kind of action to make
it all go away.
keith
BMani Deli <ma...@sympatico.ca> wrote in message
news:mtf70vc375d7ej3r4...@4ax.com...
William Palmer
> "William Palmer" <willia...@prodigy.net> pontificated:
>
> > Bouguereau's art abounds with ideas.
>
> Such as? Please regale me. Can't wait.
>
> > Many of those ideas are applied in his craft.
>
> "Craft" is a very apposite choice of words.
Plainly, your ignorant, puerile "joke" depends on
reading my use of "craft" as in "arts and crafts."
scarcely think it is necessary to quote a different
sense of the word "craft" from any good dictionary,
so I will simply refer you to one.
>
> > What you are really saying is that his art is
> > not intellectual in the sense that it represents
> > abstract ideas.
>
> Nope. I'm saying that his work is regurgitation. It's an aping of the past.
> It's a tired recapitulation. Da capo!
That description is far more apt for all the "apers"
of Picasso, De Kooning, Kline, Rothko, etc., whose
rubbish currently infests so many galleries.
>
> > It does, though, certainly as much as Norman
> > Rockwell's art did.
>
> You can't seriously call the stuff that Rockwell did "art", can you?
Look, as I have said previously, I am no big Rockwell
fan. On the other hand, since he's the best-known
illustrator in the U. S. Twentieth century (and probably
today, too) it can be useful to refer to him. Personally,
though, I could name literally four-dozen illustrators
whose work I find far more interesting than Rockwell's.
Come
> on, let's be clear: that man was nothing more than a sentimental
> illustrator, the American fascination with him notwithstanding.
I can't quarrel with your "sentimental illustrator" charge,
but I also believe he was possessed with a great skill that
moved his pictures from illustration to genuine art. Again,
though, I have never bought a Rockwell repro. or a book of
Rockwell's illustrations and I would never go to an exhibition
of his work--not unless I was looking for a non-drug with
powerful soporific qualities.
>
> > because you yourself are devoid of skill and ideas.
>
> Don't presume things about me, Bill.
>
> > ... you have to give [Kincade] credit for
> > being a canny self-promoter
>
> No, I don't. His factories produce visual pollution. I wince and cringe
> every time I see one of his "creations". It's a physically nauseating
> sensation for me.
>
> > Plebes? What on earth could be more COMMON than crawling
> > around under a fake name and trying to get a bit of
> > attention with shabby attacks on outstanding artists?
>
> Fakk off, Bill. Anonymity is a Usenet tradition, so suck it down. Stop with
> the ad hominem stuff.
As someone who has, in the history of Usenet, made more
follow-up (and stand-alone) postings to alt.culture.usenet
than any other poster, I scarcely need your lecture on Usenet
culture. Yes, anonymous posting has an important place in
Usenet tradition, and I will defend posters' right to use
pseudonyms, under free speech principles. However, when
people strike me as using a false name for cowardly or
dishonest purposes, I will not hesitate to point that
out. THAT is the other side of the "free speech coin"
that people excercising their right to post anonymously
need to keep in mind. a.g.b-p
John Rune
Raimes) wrote:
....
>....rec.arse.find....
....
Which is somewhere between rec.arse.asskey and rec.arse.mangay.
Uh oh.
I see a pattern emerging.
And I do _not_ like it! <g>
Uncomfortable,
John the Red
William Palmer
> William:
> Some artists of big B's time argued that art is not form but the expression
> of form. Unfortunately big B discovered that he could make mountains of
> money when he used his technical ability to create form. It could be said
> that he made a pact with the devil: money or art and he chose money - much
> like Dorian Grey chose never to grow old.
I'm not so sure about that. Sometimes, in reading about
the lives of artists (and poets, too), it simply seems as
though--when you consider the best of the lot--some of them
have the good fortune to be inspired the sort of work that
brings them fortune, and some do not. For instance, can
we really say for certain that Bouguereau was any less
sincere than Modigliani (who WAS a starving artist) or
is it just that Bouguereau was inspired to the
art that struck the right chords with the people who
could pay lots of money for it, while Modiglianani
was not? (And, personally, I happen to think
Bouguereau was more talented anyway.) However,
Kincade, who does not have the talent that either
of those artists had in their small toes, is ALSO
making "Bouguereau bucks." It is a very complicated
matter, really. It is childish to take a "starving
artists good," "rich artists bad," approach.
>
> In our National Gallery there is a nude by Lord Leighton - a very competent
> painter. I don't care for the passivity of the figure but I study it for the
> subtle methods he uses to build form and integrated colour. Not too far away
> is a portrait by de Kooning. Both of these artists build form but do it in
> different ways. de Koonong forces you to search for the clues that allow the
> form to be built in your eyes.
>
Well, I am not really an "abstract art bad," sort of thinker.
In various museums, I have seen work by the best abstractionists,
and I have found some of it very impressive. However, what
annoys me is the way second, third, and fouth-rate imitations
of the great abstractionists gets fawned over by critics,
the same ones who would mock both Bouguereau (and my personal
favorite in unfairly neglected artists) Khnopff.
> His is a perceptual process as opposed to an intellectual processes of
> Lord Leighton and big B - yes they are intellectual painters. The
> intellectual component in their work is very strong and out of balance with
> the physical and emotional.
I find Fernand Khnopff (and Bocklin, too) far more
interesting than either of them, yet I don't find
either Bouguereau or Leighton boring, because there
is so much to admire about their artistic talents.
>
> The basic problem you face is that your value system may be convergent -
> dependent upon the existence of traditional rules of obedience and
> behaviour. If that is so then you will be attracted to the traditional modes
> of art for the remainder of your life. You will find some types of modern
> abstract art appealing - those with a strong intellectual component.
I have said before that I think Stuart Davis was a
superb artist. In fact, in my own view, he represents
the high point of U. S. abstract art--De Kooning, Rothko,
Kline, etc. represent steps downward from Davis--though
I certainly recognize that is not the conventional
way of looking at things.
>
> But as Nik has informed me: you cannot teach a lilly how to buy
> real-estate - fool as I am I keep trying.
Well, thanks much for sharing the thought-provoking
comments. a.g.b-p
>
> keith
>
Mani Deli
>William:
>Some artists of big B's time argued that art is not form but the expression
>of form. Unfortunately big B discovered that he could make mountains of
>money when he used his technical ability to create form. It could be said
>that he made a pact with the devil: money or art and he chose money - much
>like Dorian Grey chose never to grow old.
Successful impressionists also made tubs of money. However they
couldn't do form very well.
>In our National Gallery there is a nude by Lord Leighton - a very competent
>painter. I don't care for the passivity of the figure but I study it for the
>subtle methods he uses to build form and integrated colour. Not too far away
>is a portrait by de Kooning. Both of these artists build form but do it in
>different ways. de Koonong forces you to search for the clues that allow the
>form to be built in your eyes.
There ain't no form in de Kooning. The cat vomit he paints sits on a
flat floor.
>
>His is a perceptual process as opposed to an intellectual processes of
>Lord Leighton and big B - yes they are intellectual painters.
They were little more than double talking total morons. Nothing
intellectual ever left them.
> The
>intellectual component in their work is very strong and out of balance with
>the physical and emotional.
?
>The basic problem you face is that your value system may be convergent -
>dependent upon the existence of traditional rules of obedience and
>behaviour. If that is so then you will be attracted to the traditional modes
>of art for the remainder of your life. You will find some types of modern
>abstract art appealing - those with a strong intellectual component.
There is a far more intellectual component in an average bath towel.
r00d d00d
wrote:
>As someone who has, in the history of Usenet, made more
>follow-up (and stand-alone) postings to alt.culture.usenet
>than any other poster,
The record's stuck (pop) The record's stuck (pop) The record's stuck
(pop) The record's stuck (pop) The record's stuck (pop) The record's
stuck (pop) The record's stuck (pop) The record's stuck (pop) The
record's stuck (pop) ...
-=r00d d00d=-
Mani Deli
>You would have to look up <alt.brallen>
>and check out 'quo-vadis' a nym for the
>dym Alison. But it's not really worth the
>time. She spins out her malicious posts
>the same way she spins out her candy
>confections on canvas. She's a waste of time
>and a waste of materials.
They are no less stupid than the "candy
confections" by your daughter.
Mani Deli
> It is childish to take a "starving
>artists good," "rich artists bad," approach.
But its art school mythology.
>superb artist. In fact, in my own view, he represents
>the high point of U. S. abstract art--De Kooning, Rothko,
>Kline, etc. represent steps downward from Davis--though
>I certainly recognize that is not the conventional
>way of looking at things.
I'd say it was a step backwards into an uncovered sewer.
>>
>> But as Nik has informed me: you cannot teach a lilly how to buy
>> real-estate - fool as I am I keep trying.
>
I suspect Nik can't buy real estate.
Edward G. Nilges
> "keith o'connor (tinmangallery.com" <scot...@rogers.com> wrote in message news:<mBOM9.21137$yW.1...@news04.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com>...
> > William:
> > Some artists of big B's time argued that art is not form but the expression
> > of form. Unfortunately big B discovered that he could make mountains of
> > money when he used his technical ability to create form. It could be said
> > that he made a pact with the devil: money or art and he chose money - much
> > like Dorian Grey chose never to grow old.
>
> I'm not so sure about that. Sometimes, in reading about
> the lives of artists (and poets, too), it simply seems as
> though--when you consider the best of the lot--some of them
> have the good fortune to be inspired the sort of work that
> brings them fortune, and some do not. For instance, can
> we really say for certain that Bouguereau was any less
> sincere than Modigliani (who WAS a starving artist) or
> is it just that Bouguereau was inspired to the
> art that struck the right chords with the people who
> could pay lots of money for it, while Modiglianani
> was not? (And, personally, I happen to think
> Bouguereau was more talented anyway.) However,
> Kincade, who does not have the talent that either
> of those artists had in their small toes, is ALSO
> making "Bouguereau bucks." It is a very complicated
> matter, really. It is childish to take a "starving
> artists good," "rich artists bad," approach.
It is equally childish, and regressive, to ignore the ethical
component. This is because the distinction between an aesthetic and
an ethical response is a constructed distinction which must give way
if it generates paradox.
For example, it is at a minimum questionable whether the Nazi
commandant, who let us say in a thought-experiment, organizes a string
quartet manned by starving, soon-to-be-destroyed inmates, is having a
bonafide aesthetic experience when he listens, let us say, to
Beethoven's C# Minor quartet.
Only people who have deliberately suborned themselves to an artistic
ideology which PROCLAIMS the ability of art to be independent of
ethics to this extent would either enjoy being in the position of this
Nazi commandant, or say that his experience is one of music
appreciation.
The man in the street would probably deny that Commandant Klink here
is having a valid aesthetic experience and would probably find the
ethical component of having starving concentration camp inmates
perform him so repugnant as to render its aesthetic component
meaningless.
Now, this is "folk aesthetics" and cannot be taken at face value or as
definitive. At the same time, a more evolved aesthetic remains
responsible, as Kant felt himself responsible, to ordinary intuition
to some extent. For example, Kant found he needed to explain the new
European interest, in the Romantic era, in cataracts, ruined
cathedrals and battles, which the "folk" were beginning to find
beautiful, therefore Kant invented the concept of the sublime.
In the folk aesthetic it is, I think, thought that ethical work is
"lexically" prior to art appreciation. The ordinary person would not
be able to enjoy the opera if he had, prior to getting to the opera
house, chopped up his aging mother into little bits, and in
consequence, the ordinary person regards a person able to do so as a
monster.
"Monster" implies that Al Capone at the opera, or Hitler, is not human
as we understand him. The folk aesthetic, dealing with a nameless
Quality-of-experience, an *arete*, places ethical duty prior to
aesthetic appreciation.
The folk aesthetic has I concede produced much mischief in the form of
censorship. The problem is that its validity is never conceded by
people whose ethics-of-aesthetics include only one maxim: don't
"censor" any works, where to "censor" is interpreted so broadly as to
INCLUDE informed criticism.
I am thinking of the constant beating-of-a-dead-horse in magazines
like Film Comment, which continually return to the theme, that in the
1930s and 1940s, the American Roman Catholic Church tried to "censor"
films.
Of course, what the RC hierarchy actually tried to do was to instruct
the RC flock that certain films could be seen...but only under pain,
of placing the believer, in a state of mortal sin. In addition, the
Church funded think-tanks in which Roman Catholic intellectuals wrote
what in fact were informed and to this day readable critiques of films
which constituted *apologia* for classifying the film as "condemned",
or whatever.
For example, essays were written on Josef von Sternberg's film Die
Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) which pointed out that its dark and
despairing conclusion, in which Emil Janning's Professor is degraded
by Marlene Dietrich, actually questions whether it is possible to be
"civilized" at all.
The essays, written by anonymous Catholics, actually echoed Theodore
Adorno who at the same time was showing how modern civilization,
including the picture show, as dialectically reversing progress by
making people overly dependent on increasingly strong external stimuli
as a mechanism of capitalist competition. Among other things, Marlene
Dietrich's legs questioned the entire direction of pre-Nazi German
culture and civilization before WWI, because they foregrounded the
instinctual...which generations of German professors, starting
approximately with Kant, had tried, not to repress, but to place in
some sort of order.
The result was that the merely instinctual played a great part in the
Nazi era. The Hitler Youth despised the repressed, "shy" boy who
studied hard and adored his professors, and like modern media, Baldur
von Shirach's organization used picture magazines and the cinema to
excite lust and fear.
The result was that Europe's progress to the reasonably civilized
arrangements at least of the NATO zone was retarded between 1914 and
1989 by thugs, bullies, monsters and apparatchiks...all of whom
specialized on beating up on shy boys, queers, women, Romany folk, and
indeed anyone who was identifiably human, in the sense of adding
"repression" to nature. Hitler and Stalin defined the human one way
but the mathematics were unique: to define, as a totalitarian, what it
means to be human as Eine Volk, or one proletariat, is as good as
denying the human, which is ineradicably different.
This is, I should note, the real "secret history of the 20th century"
(Greil Marcus is wrong.) The reason why Phillip Roth got his ass
kicked in New Jersey by Polish kids, and indeed the reason why I got
into fights in Trenton, was not some naturalism of "boys will be
boys."
The Polish kids were simply responding, in 1948, to the behavior of
the adults in Poland, who wanted just as much as the Nazis to cleanse
Poland of Jews, or who later changed their stripes, and tried to
cleanse Poland of independent trade unions.
The induced feeling, that natural desires are meant to be followed
without criticism, was used (if Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is to be
credited) to encourage ordinary German soldiers to set aside their
"repression" when it came to a matter, not of jumping Inge or Grete in
the meadow, but of killing Jews.
Therefore, essays that at least questioned the direction Hollywood
followed up until the passage of the Hays code were in part
"censorship" and in part a healthy critique. The idea that repression
is always bad, after all, led to the misuse by men of other men for
sexual purposes in the 1970s gay "liberation" movement and in many
cases the deliberate infection of men by their "lovers" with a disease
in the name of liberation.
Of course, all this will be deliberately oversimplified, into the
Punch and Judy semiotics of what passes for debate, into the thesis
that I "hate gay people", a thesis which I find amusing not least
because I was gay-bashed in 1998 for wearing Speedos at the beach.
Art has ethical preconditions. Celine is an exception that proves the
rule, as is Mark Pauline's Survival Research Labs. For one needs only
to watch TV wrestling and its Fascist mobilization of anger and
contrast it with the intelligence in SRL to know that there is a
difference. It is not something so simple-minded as to say that Mark
Pauline's automated demolition derbies, in which programmed machines
scream in agony as they are destroyed by other machines, "teach" us by
showing the consequences of dehumanization: to even say this is lame
after being in the SRL audience.
But the fact is that in the SRL audience you are in some non-zero
sense in danger and this is a Good Thing. Whereas the audience in
professional wrestling is completely safe, as are the wrestlers (this
is ensured by lawyers.) Thus wrestling is a lie but SRL is not.
> >
> > In our National Gallery there is a nude by Lord Leighton - a very competent
> > painter. I don't care for the passivity of the figure but I study it for the
> > subtle methods he uses to build form and integrated colour. Not too far away
> > is a portrait by de Kooning. Both of these artists build form but do it in
> > different ways. de Koonong forces you to search for the clues that allow the
> > form to be built in your eyes.
> >
> Well, I am not really an "abstract art bad," sort of thinker.
> In various museums, I have seen work by the best abstractionists,
> and I have found some of it very impressive. However, what
> annoys me is the way second, third, and fouth-rate imitations
> of the great abstractionists gets fawned over by critics,
> the same ones who would mock both Bouguereau (and my personal
> favorite in unfairly neglected artists) Khnopff.
>
You and Mani have promulgated the Urban Legend that people like
Pollock and Picasso have "schools" in which "followers" produced
"second-rate knock-offs" of their work.
This is completely false and shows an ignorance of art history on
Mani's part.
The notion 'school of' and 'follower of' dates from the European
Renaissance and Baroque. Prior to this period, painting in a style
was enforced first by the mediaeval or Byzantine guild, and in
emergencies by the Church which had strict standards, amounting to
totalitarian censorship in modern terms, for iconography.
But during the rise of mercantile states, the middle class demanded,
in the absence of Rembrandt, ersatz paintings "like" Rembrandt.
However, when Picasso started to paint in the Cubist fashion, after
realizing what Cezanne was about, he in no way founded a school in
which little Picassos were expected to "paint like" Picasso, in the
sense the Simone Vouet was asked to paint like Poussin.
Georges Braque, for example, did not regard himself as a follower of
Picasso. he probably thought he was a better painter, more "French"
to Picasso's "Spanish", more composed, controlled and more Northern.
In the mercantile capitalism of 17th century Holland, it is likely
that Rembrandt or Ruisdael wannabes sucked up to the big man and tried
to emulate his moves. That is because the bourgeois demanded the
output of what they considered the top men, but at reduced prices.
The market resembled the third-tier "decorative" market you find in
shopping malls, where the art is subordinate to the furniture.
However, the twentieth century international *haute* bourgeois were
quite different from successful shipping magnates and black-birders of
Amsterdam, although, of course, they made their fortunes the same
basic way.
Peggy Guggenheim would never have been content with some imitation
Picasso, and that is why she chased after Pollock and De Kooning.
I was there, in New York in the 1960s, although rather young. It was
clear that the reason Abstract Expressionism had become popular in New
York in the 1940s was not because it was, in any way, an imitation of
Cubism or indeed ANY European art movement. Collectors and museums,
and possible the cultural wing of the CIA, like abstract expressionism
precisely because it was big, non-analytic, colorful and almost part
of nature.
Like Mt Rushmore, it was an American answer to the truly monstrous
distances and extreme weather of our country. No European has ever
really seen a Midwest snow-storm when it really gets going. American
and Canadian weather itself deconstructs the notion of physicality
whereas European weather, for the most part, is rather restrained.
You can, sort of, do a knock-off of Poussin (although the actual
imitators of Poussin failed to notice that his composition was deep
and not at all frieze-like: imitators, even including first rate
artists like David, seemed to not see that Poussin, like Claude
Lorraine, was interested in deep picture space.)
But what makes a work Modernist is the way in which it proclaims that
it has no school (other than a term identifying its style.) After the
portrait of the dealer Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler which hangs in Chicago,
there is really no need to paint anudder analytic-cubist work, and
even Picasso realized this. Following his analytic phase, his styles
morphed rapidly until the end of his career.
Indeed, Modernist art, music and literature proclaimed the death of
imitation and of schools in the same way parents of that era were
lousy parents. Part of Mani's rage may be explainable by Modernist
failure to provide a Modernist tradition.
Poussin could explore the consequences of his high severity in his
painting of Solomon's decision by showing how high severity fares in
the failing light of old age: for his late series The Four Seasons are
painted severely by a brave and trembling hand. This allowed David to
show how the Roman virtue of manly severity could be rescuscitated to
cause the ordinary men of the French revolution of base a society, not
on time out of mind, but the oath.
[It is popular in America to point to the French Revolution's Terror
and its excesses as if this shows the failure of the secular oath.
Our problem is that when we think that we have anything that can
replace our own oath of the Tennis Court in Philadelphia, we are
kidding ourselves, for we have no native tradition of political
arrangement based on tradition, other than let us say the used-car
dealer which has lasted let us say three generations, and let us say
that that is no big deal.]
In fine, there just isn't any Modernist school, only overworked
community college teachers who have to teach a canon that now includes
making the kiddies do an abstract painting. I'd hazard that the
kiddies find this hard for the SAME reason that doing an abstract
dance not expressive of one's surface feelings is hard.
If you kin draw gude, then in fact doing realistic work is the easy
way out. What is hard, and what scares poor Maniac's Delight to
death, is the path of accessing your unique gifts and making them
useful to somebunny else.
Jenny Holzer could have been an imitation Barb kruger and scrawled
angry feminist messages on canvas. Ho hum. But instead she buys time
on the display in Times Square and boom, gnomic feminism (PROTECT ME
FROM WHAT I WANT) appears to the scuttling masses in Nut Heaven who
are unconsciously inured to being bombarded with light that tells them
they want to be Joe Camel.
The beauty of the messages is inescapably ethical, for it was a brief
reminder that Joe Camel was not my friend, despite him being so cool
and everything.
I mean, the truth of the hell with art and down with goodness, the
Taoist truth is that these are the Monkey's names for the nameless
underlying.
> > His is a perceptual process as opposed to an intellectual processes of
> > Lord Leighton and big B - yes they are intellectual painters. The
> > intellectual component in their work is very strong and out of balance with
> > the physical and emotional.
>
> I find Fernand Khnopff (and Bocklin, too) far more
> interesting than either of them, yet I don't find
> either Bouguereau or Leighton boring, because there
> is so much to admire about their artistic talents.
> >
> > The basic problem you face is that your value system may be convergent -
> > dependent upon the existence of traditional rules of obedience and
> > behaviour. If that is so then you will be attracted to the traditional modes
> > of art for the remainder of your life. You will find some types of modern
> > abstract art appealing - those with a strong intellectual component.
>
> I have said before that I think Stuart Davis was a
> superb artist. In fact, in my own view, he represents
> the high point of U. S. abstract art--De Kooning, Rothko,
> Kline, etc. represent steps downward from Davis--though
> I certainly recognize that is not the conventional
> way of looking at things.
What ev er. I think you are being per verse. Stuart Davis happened
to be only an unconscious imitator of synthetic Cubism.
We forget that artists do not KNOW what art is being made at the same
time. Stuart Davis therefore is like the guy who invented the
computer in Iowa, interesting but too disconnected in any narrative
sense with other artists.
Peter H.M. Brooks
> Marilyn Yente Welch wrote:
> >You would have to look up <alt.brallen>
> >and check out 'quo-vadis' a nym for the
> >dym Alison. But it's not really worth the
> >time. She spins out her malicious posts
> >the same way she spins out her candy
> >confections on canvas. She's a waste of time
> >and a waste of materials.
>
> They are no less stupid than the "candy
> confections" by your daughter.
> ...no skill no art!
>
day that isn't that bad - why, even you might! Artists only can be said to
have failed once they die. Before that there is always hope, even if not
much.
--
I wish that baby Jesus had never been born - Samaritans
keith o'connor (tinmangallery.com
Dan's work was always kind. Yes I have attacked Dan personally in response
to his attack on me but I never seriously critiqued his art.
With regard to his large oriental calligraphy style paintings I mentioned
something to the effect that they had interesting textural traceries - and
it was a kind comment - it was the only kind thing I could say.
Not once did I mention that his work was old hat - regurgitations of other
artists work. If he wanted to pass his work off as leading edge that was ok
with me I wasn't going to destroy his dream.
It bewilders me why marlyn would praise his work as leading edge stuff . She
seems to have and art education yet she can't see that this is old stuff.
If I may digress - we have an old cat and it has bowel movement problems.
When it manages a movement my wife is there saying "good boy - good boy"
just like she is encouraging a baby - in fact it is the same voice she used
toilet training our daughter.
Marilyn seems to treat dan in the same fashion.
Your comment about this newcomer that dan addressed his remarks to. It is
interesting that dan has associated himself with a person who talks of
wasting an artist who's work he disagrees with.
I don't recall mani ever in his worst ramblings saying that he would kill a
modern artist because he didn't like his work.
For dan a modern artist to align himself with someone who promotes the death
of an artist just because he does not like his work - to me this is
astounding. Dan has definity lost his faculties.
The evidence appears to validate your conclusion that dan suffers from an
obsessive disorder of some type.
I have not observed dan in face to face conversations so I cannot make the
evaluation but there is the dry alcoholic syndrome. The non logical
irrational behaviour - ups and downs - is very similar to the alcoholic.
The recovery rate for this personality disorder is close to zero.
As for my really being pissed off. Yes I would agree. In my opinion there
was an unofficial truce between dan and I and he broke it. Yes it is
possible that I was treating him as Marilyn treats him - a broken child and
I didn't want to break him worse than he was.
It's probably all for the best.
take care: keith
Alison A Raimes <alison...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message
news:f6243c1f.02122...@posting.google.com...
> Gosh Keith, you sound really pissed off! Why?? In all honesty, we have
> all been here long enough to know that Dan Fox is a fraud - he
> admitted his games to us a couple of years back. I think Dan suffers
> from an obsessive disorder - possibly as a replacement for his
> alcholism - and rec.arse.find is one of the only places he can feel
> important! Do you really think, as he claims, that he gets all these
> emails from *students* - of course he doesn't! delusions of grandeur!!
> leave him alone or he will probably go out and shoot up a church full
> of innocent folks. As for his work, it doesn't take a genius to see
> that he is simply regurgitating other people's ideas for commercial
> gain. There is nothing in his work that hits you in the guts and says
> *yes, this guy is an artist*. He sounds bored and frustrated and I am
> sure that is because he has never found his artistic *voice*. His work
> lacks anything of substance and he has never once written here about
> it - nor do you see anything on his dreadful website to indicate that
> he actually is working on something he believes in.
>
> As for his site - what can I say? If he was, as he claims, a
> professional artist (and I have never believed his claims to making a
> living as an artist) then there is no way he would ever keep a site
> like that. The same work has been on it for two years and it still
> loads at the speed of a tortoise going backwards. If he was a
> professional artist he would do what others do and pay someone to
> design a site that represents him. Do you see Dan Fox anywhere else in
> cyber? On any of the professional art groups? of course not! I treat
> Dan Fox as an amusement - he makes me laugh! I'd hate to see
> rec.arse.find without him - half of the personas would disappear. Nah,
> this group needs idiots like him with loads of time on their hands.
>
> I'm delighted to be in the second part of his list - that means I have
> succeeded in getting through his thick skin - of course he is
> deperately jealous of me and that amuses me too. However, his list is
> for effect - the newcomer is most likely him or one of his mates - and
> he needed a way to assert his authority to the group. Let him be! Poor
> sod!
>
> cheers
> Alison
>
>
> "keith o'connor (tinmangallery.com" <scot...@rogers.com> wrote in
message news:<bfQM9.1013$E_...@news02.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com>...
Richard
Booger Poo <sh...@the.fuckup> wrote: ( who needs a brain )
> but I find it nauseating that the place is dominated
>by this logorrheaic half-wit called "Mani's Delicatessen" or something and
>his flapjaw claque. But that's typical Usenet, isn't it? The plebs always
>rule.
I find it nauseating that assholes like you complain about the most
beautiful art ever made and promote crap instead, like naked fat
women, cubism, expressionism, and anything that's ugly and people
can't relate to. You obviously don't really like art, so why don't you
fuck off and die. By the way, I would seriously like to know what
credentials an arrogant asshole like you has for being so snobbish. My
IQ is 140 and I have very mainstream tastes. I know 140 isn't the
highest, but I'm smarter than 98 percent of the people of the world.
It proves you don't have to be stupid to like mainstream entertainment
and art. I know there are lots of other intelligent people who have
mainstream tastes. My former (thank god) painting teacher was a
goddamned modern art advocate with the same attitude as you and she
didn't strike me as being particularly intelligent. I don't think she
could draw either. Can you?
-----= Posted via Newsfeed.Com, Uncensored Usenet News =-----
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G*rd*n
| ... Artists only can be said to
| have failed once they die. ...
That depends. We were discussing suicide as an art form a
few weeks back.
--
(<><>) /*/
}"{ G*rd*n }"{ g...@panix.com }"{
{ http://www.etaoin.com | latest new material 11/14/02 <-adv't
keith o'connor (tinmangallery.com
although not very well according to you - but still form.
I will assume that you know about the three principles of exaggeration
diminution and suppression. Then there are three principles which you
probably don't know about - intellectual emotional and physical.
In the work that you deem to be art the intellectual must be absolute
otherwise it is not art - in your estimation.
I can understand that and I think that most posters here can. That's your
position and that's it.
What most posters here have trouble with is your obsessive compulstiveness
about your position. Your insistance that everyone must be the same.
That is not a very different emotional position than dan with his smart
people stupid people list.
Let's see where we can agree. We both agree with regard to the
impressionists only for different reasons. You say their having little form
is a negative attribute.
I say they have diminished the intellectual and exagerated the physical and
emotional. We both agree but for different reasons.
de Kooning: you say he has no form. I say he has suppressed form but it is
still there - maybe not easily seen when you are not used to looking for it
but it is still there.
I will take it that your 'no form' and my suppressed form have equivalent
meanings.
The thing is that we may agree on some points but it may all boil down to
whether the glass is described as half full or half empty.
You may argue the position that the glass is half full and I may argue the
position that it is half empty and that I think is the level of our
discussion.
k
Mani Deli <ma...@sympatico.ca> wrote in message
news:qhr90v8b36ket9g6h...@4ax.com...
keith o'connor (tinmangallery.com
He's playing games - play it cool - watch out for assumptions he'll home in
on them. He can see you're on the serious end - he knows from experience
how to get your goat get you flustered then he moves in. His metaphor is:
argument is war: and yours is not the same.
keith
William Palmer <willia...@prodigy.net> wrote in message
news:cbc76035.02122...@posting.google.com...
keith o'connor (tinmangallery.com
We'll talk about this another time.
k
William Palmer <willia...@prodigy.net> wrote in message
news:cbc76035.02122...@posting.google.com...
G*rd*n
Marilyn Welch <mwe...@xxxislandnet.com>:
| And yet,
| the films are of Leni Riefenstahl are great innovative works in the history
| of filmmaking. Is it possible to watch them and marvel at her work
| and and yet still shudder at the glorification of the Nazis?
| ...
One needn't go as far as Leni. Most action, cowboy, spy, cop
and war movies (and TV shows) are built around the same set
of values which reached their historical apex in the Nazi
movement and share with it, not demonic evil, but the same
reassuring banality which it exemplified. It was not Satan
but bureaucrats who built death camps. Hence, in front of
the values, the movie requires _art_: the gun fight, the bar
brawl, the carpet-bombing, the Walpurgisnacht of unleashed
militarism, all must be _choreographed_ or they are intolerably
dull, as dull and deadly as a speech by a moron. (Turn on
your TV.)
_Other_things_could_be_choreographed._
But if they are not, we will have to watch Arnie and Sylvester.
"Hasta la vista, baby!"
keith o'connor (tinmangallery.com
studies on IQ - it is a very unreliable number. Psychotics can have very
high IQ's but they are useless to themselves and society. Read about
emotional IQ it might improve your interpersonal communication. I would
recommend the study of metaphor in every day communication - it will give
you new insights into how thinking is structured by language. You get into
stupid raving mode because you lack the ability to form chains of thoughts -
you become frustrated and act like an idiot - not in your own opinion.
k
Richard <cool_a...@z.com> wrote in message
news:85ra0v0pla5hq1me8...@4ax.com...
Nikolaus Maack
> Richard - your 140 it was 130 is meaningless - there have been dozens of
> studies on IQ - it is a very unreliable number.
Anyone who states in public that they have a high IQ is demonstrating
how profoundly stupid they are. While it's possible they have brute
smarts, they clearly lack the intelligence and sophistication to conceal it.
I think I might speak in nothing but aphorisms for the rest of my life.
It's like shooting a single arrow at the target and quickly walking
away. Someone please tell me if I hit anything.
G*rd*n
Marilyn Welch <mwe...@xxxislandnet.com>:
|>| And yet,
|>| the films are of Leni Riefenstahl are great innovative works in the history
|>| of filmmaking. Is it possible to watch them and marvel at her work
|>| and and yet still shudder at the glorification of the Nazis?
|>| ...
G*rd*n
|> One needn't go as far as Leni. Most action, cowboy, spy, cop
|> and war movies (and TV shows) are built around the same set
|> of values which reached their historical apex in the Nazi
|> movement and share with it, not demonic evil, but the same
|> reassuring banality which it exemplified. It was not Satan
|> but bureaucrats who built death camps. Hence, in front of
|> the values, the movie requires _art_: the gun fight, the bar
|> brawl, the carpet-bombing, the Walpurgisnacht of unleashed
|> militarism, all must be _choreographed_ or they are intolerably
|> dull, as dull and deadly as a speech by a moron. (Turn on
|> your TV.)
|>
|> _Other_things_could_be_choreographed._
|>
|> But if they are not, we will have to watch Arnie and Sylvester.
|> "Hasta la vista, baby!"
Marilyn Welch <mwe...@xxxislandnet.com>:
| Leni was a genius without equal.
| She did admit to some after the fact staging or choreography in
| her documentaries. My question was are we capable of enjoying
| only the art and not the propaganda. As I look back on the films,
| it is easy to be objective now but while seeing her Nuremberg rally
| it was like watching very fine creepy horror film.
|
| Then there's Kubric's "Eyes Wide Shut" I hated the story but loved the film as a work
| of art.
|
| I think I understand what you mean - the use of art as a lure to disseminate
| the propaganda.
To put what I said another way, I don't see the big moral
difference between _The_Triumph_Of_The_Will_ and the average
cop show. _TTOTW_ is just made better. The theme is _banal_:
the goodness and power of the authorities (or the would-be,
should-be authority). The art makes it interesting, and the
banality makes it reassuring. Thus sales and / or / equals
political power.
Peter H.M. Brooks
"G*rd*n" <g...@panix.com> wrote in message
news:au5ju0$fma$1...@panix1.panix.com...
> "Peter H.M. Brooks" <pe...@new.co.za>:
> | ... Artists only can be said to
> | have failed once they die. ...
>
> That depends. We were discussing suicide as an art form a
> few weeks back.
>
Andrew Werby
Subject: Re: Bouguereau a Bugger Up
Date: Sunday, December 22, 2002 9:17 PM
[Wow, Edward, you're covering a lot of ground quickly here. While I don't
have time right now to comment on Al Capone, the Catholic Legion of Decency,
Poussin, Picasso, Pro Wrestling, Phillip Roth, gay-bashing, Abstract
Expressionism in the 40s, Mark Pauline, and Stuart Davis, I did find your
initial comments on ethics versus aesthetics rather provocative. Let's
concentrate on that one for a bit, if we may.]
"Edward G. Nilges" <spino...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>> Wm Palmer wrote:
>>It is childish to take a "starving
> > artists good," "rich artists bad," approach.
>
> It is equally childish, and regressive, to ignore the ethical
> component. This is because the distinction between an aesthetic and
> an ethical response is a constructed distinction which must give way
> if it generates paradox.
[Many artists go out of their way to construct paradoxes. What's the matter
with that? What has to give way, when push comes to shove- ethics or
aesthetics? Just as reasonable persons can differ over aesthetic matters
(I'm sure you'll agree), can't they differ over ethical ones as well? Or do
you subscribe to a Categorical Imperative? Can't an artist who may be
morally repugnant- a drunkard like Sinclair Lewis, a drug addict like Jean
Cocteau, a slut like Tracy Emins, a brawler like Christopher Marlowe, a
misogynist like Picasso, or a lowlife thief like Jean Genet (examples are
legion) produce good art? Must we be privy to an artist's dark secrets
before we are able to evaluate his or her art? Must we first agree on all
outstanding ethical issues before allowing ourselves to enjoy someone's art?
It seems that this would considerably narrow the field for art appreciators.
Is the art of the good really the same as good art?]
>
> For example, it is at a minimum questionable whether the Nazi
> commandant, who let us say in a thought-experiment, organizes a string
> quartet manned by starving, soon-to-be-destroyed inmates, is having a
> bonafide aesthetic experience when he listens, let us say, to
> Beethoven's C# Minor quartet.
[Some accounts from the concentration camps portray concerts like this as
being among the very few bright spots in an otherwise horrific experience.
There were some excellent musicians there, after all. Leaving the commandant
aside for a moment, would you deny that the inmates themselves were capable
of having a "bonafide aesthetic experience" under these circumstances? They
certainly claimed that they did. As for the commandant- while few of us
might be able to enjoy such a concert, the Nazi era was a time that proved
Man's ability to compartmentalize experiences. These were the same people,
after all, that would come home after a hard day's work killing and
torturing, embrace the wife and kiddies, and get all maudlin over sappy
films, sweet music, and kitschy art. It doesn't seem so hard to picture the
commandant banishing his workaday woes while listening to his little
musicale.]
>
> Only people who have deliberately suborned themselves to an artistic
> ideology which PROCLAIMS the ability of art to be independent of
> ethics to this extent would either enjoy being in the position of this
> Nazi commandant, or say that his experience is one of music
> appreciation.
[Maybe I have, then. While I wouldn't want to take the place of anybody in
your little scenario, I don't see much relationship between ethics and
aesthetics; certainly I don't see aesthetic value excusing ethical lapses
any more than I see highminded ideals necessarily leading to excellent art.]
>
> The man in the street would probably deny that Commandant Klink here
> is having a valid aesthetic experience and would probably find the
> ethical component of having starving concentration camp inmates
> perform [for] him so repugnant as to render its aesthetic component
> meaningless.
[While I might agree that in the great scheme of things the absolute evilnes
s of Nazism trumps whatever aesthetic good they may have done incidentally
(which was very little), I'm not so sure that this leads us anywhere
particularly useful. The reign of Louis XIV, for instance, was not one that
causes ethicists to rise from their seats and cheer, but in the history of
furniture it marks a high point. This was directly related to its oppresive
nature- if the wealth had been spread around more evenly, the furniture
would not have been as good (although there may have been more of it). But
need art historians righteously shun the work proceeding from the
royally-patronized workshops as bearing a moral taint? Marxist estheticians
have asserted this sort of thing, but they were reasoning backwards from
prior committments. Doubtless the furniture produced by the Oneida community
(an early experiment in Right Living) is better in moral terms, but is it
more beautiful? What about the furniture of the Soviet era? I think it's
something people can legitimately disagree about, anyway.
To pose a more contemporary example- many people enjoy watching captive
dolphins perform aerial ballet at Marine World. To an animal-rights
activist, such spectacles are morally repugnant. Does the disapproval of
these moralists negate the seemingly genuine pleasure the rest of the people
feel in these performances? Can they no longer be said to be experiencing
"bonafide" aesthetic pleasure? Or must we wait until a majority of our
fellows agree that this sort of event is wrong? Do we now need to take a
poll before we can tell if the pleasure we feel is illicit or legitimate? To
take this one step further: we all, in the current era, are presiding over
the destruction of the world's ecosystems at an incredible rate. In the face
of this, won't moralists of the future, taking your cue, deny that we had
any aesthetic appreciation of nature whatever? Surely any positive feelings
toward it we may say we experience would be overshadowed by the extent of
the carnage we participate in. And yet, aren't these aesthetic yearnings all
that stands between us and the wholehearted devastation of the Earth?]
Andrew Werby
www.unitedartworks.com
Leo Papandreou
> Booger Poo <sh...@the.fuckup> wrote: ( who needs a brain )
>
> > but I find it nauseating that the place is dominated
> >by this logorrheaic half-wit called "Mani's Delicatessen" or something and
> >his flapjaw claque. But that's typical Usenet, isn't it? The plebs always
> >rule.
>
> I find it nauseating that assholes like you complain about the most
> beautiful art ever made and promote crap instead, like naked fat
> women, cubism, expressionism, and anything that's ugly and people
> can't relate to. You obviously don't really like art, so why don't you
> fuck off and die. By the way, I would seriously like to know what
> credentials an arrogant asshole like you has for being so snobbish. My
> IQ is 140 and I have very mainstream tastes. I know 140 isn't the
> highest, but I'm smarter than 98 percent of the people of the world.
> It proves you don't have to be stupid to like mainstream entertainment
> and art. I know there are lots of other intelligent people who have
> mainstream tastes. My former (thank god) painting teacher was a
> goddamned modern art advocate with the same attitude as you and she
> didn't strike me as being particularly intelligent. I don't think she
> could draw either. Can you?
>
Ha-ha! This stuff is priceless!
I admire your caricature of the crude uncouth ill-bred person lacking
culture and refinement. Keep up the good work.
OK, I said that wrong.
What I meant to say was I refuse to consider the existence of someone as
thick as you pretend to be, or seriously entertain the tragic possibility
that you are desperately lonely for the attention of disembodied voices
on the USENET. Both are clearly ridiculous propositions. Therefore, in the
manner of Euclidean geometry, you are here under false pretenses.
A strict deontologist pondering the ethics of communication would say that
trolling is morally wrong because it conflicts with what one believes to be
genuinely true. A situationist would object, giving the example of someone
trolling to save a friend's life. "What makes trolling right is its loving
purpose," he would patiently explain; but I do not think you have friends,
Richard, so the situationist exits stage.
The Bible lays out many commands and parables regarding the practice of
trolling. Although deception is occasionally acceptable and even praised in
the situationist sense, trolling is consistently portrayed as being a very
serious sin. The Ninth Commandment states, "You shall not bear false witness
against your neighbor." Generations of biblical scholars have interpreted
the Ninth Commandment as an injunction against devising and designing to
deceive our neighbor, dishonor God or prejudice our innocent readers by
influencing their opinions in advance of the distorted facts. Trolling makes
us like the Devil who is the father of lies. "Do not troll one another,"
Paul wrote to the church in Colossae (Colossians 3:9).
Christianity is not exceptional on the subject of trolling. Insignificant
religions from backward cultures also support the idea that guileless debate
undertaken in earnest is good, while trolling is wrong. According to an
ancient, condensed but memorable Hindu saying embodying an important fact of
experience taken as true by many people, "Sacrifice and the merit of alms
are obliterated by a troll." One recently unearthed Babylonian text promises
the fury that awaits trolls: "Whose mouth was full of Yea, in his heart full
of Nay, I command thou burn him to the ground." Homer wrote in the great
sodomy epic, The Iliad, "Hateful to me as are the gates of Hades is that man
who says one thing, and hides another in his heart."
Finally--and this is the worst of your calumny--USENET now has a strict no
trolling policy. (As I am sure you are aware, everything changed on Sept. 11.)
I strongly recommend you ponder the consequences of your contumacy and the
vulnerability of your moral person before the law. Please see
<http://www.darpa.mil/iao> if you have any questions about the latter point.
Love,
Leo Papandreou
Andrew D
<ma...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
>Dan Depressed Fox wrote:
>>Kill file or ignore:
>>Mani (of course)
>>William Palmer
>>Andrew D.
>>Alison Raimes
>>Richard
>>Edward Ng
>>Keith O'Connor
Hmmm, I missed this post. It appears Google chose to ignore it - either
that or the Google archive has Dan killfiled? ;).
But Gee, that's a fair variety of people to ignore. Basically it's anyone
who has ever challenged Dan to defend his dogmatic stand on any issue - or
told him where to jam his dogma.
>My advice, peruse all messages.
Well, all those that appear to be of interest - unless you've nothinhg
better to do.
My advice is that if you want to know only Dan's opinion on issues, email
him. If you're interested in a variety of opinions, some of which you'll
likely disagree with, stick around, post and read as much as you want to
and give to the group whatever you choose to give and take from the it
whatever you choose to take from it.
Andy D.
"I'm a great speller - but a hopless tpyist!"
Alison A Raimes
> Now, this is "folk aesthetics" and cannot be taken at face value or as
> definitive. At the same time, a more evolved aesthetic remains
> responsible, as Kant felt himself responsible, to ordinary intuition
> to some extent. For example, Kant found he needed to explain the new
> European interest, in the Romantic era, in cataracts, ruined
> cathedrals and battles, which the "folk" were beginning to find
> beautiful, therefore Kant invented the concept of the sublime.
Kant did not *invent* the concept of the sublime.
In approximately the first century, Longinus wrote _On the Sublime_
when he drew examples of the sublime from "grand conceptions and
inspiration of vehement emotion" and from art where proper
constructions of figure and thought and speech, the use of metaphor
and "dignified and elevated word arrangement". In 1756 Edmund Burke
wrote _Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of the Sublime and
Beautiful_ and wrote about the sublime as being that which is out of
scale and threatening. In response to Burke, Kant first wrote about
the sublime in his essay _Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful
and the Sublime_ 1763. He later dedicated sections 23-29 of the Third
Critique _The Critique of Judgement_ 1790 to the Sublime.
To say that Kant needed to explain the new European interest in the
Romantic Era is very misleading. The Romantic period is generally
accepted to be from 1790 to 1850. Kant's work on the sublime spanned
three decades finishing where the Romantic period started and rarely
referred to art. it would be more accurate to say that Kant influenced
the Romantic period, though it is argued that honour goes to Burke.
Kant's concerns centred around the bridging of what we know in the
world and what we imagine - but his focus was *always* on nature. In
fact, he went as far as to say that the sublime could never be found
in a work of art.
It was from this that artists like Turner and later Malevich started
to work on non representational art that eliminated reference to the
world and sought to express an inner fear which was pleasurable
because it was experienced from a position of safety.
One of the offsets of Kant's work was the idea of freedom that was
picked up by the existentialists - particularly Sartre and Camus - and
then, through their influences, by artists like Pollock and the Action
Painters of the mid 20th century.
Alison A Raimes
http://raimes.com
G*rd*n
| > Richard - your 140 it was 130 is meaningless - there have been dozens of
| > studies on IQ - it is a very unreliable number.
| Anyone who states in public that they have a high IQ is demonstrating
| how profoundly stupid they are. While it's possible they have brute
| smarts, they clearly lack the intelligence and sophistication to conceal it.
|
| I think I might speak in nothing but aphorisms for the rest of my life.
| It's like shooting a single arrow at the target and quickly walking
| away. Someone please tell me if I hit anything.
"Before the archer strikes the target with the arrow, he
has struck it with his mind. The arrow follows the mind.
If the mind is straight the arrow strikes the center."
-- some Zen Buddhist wise-ass or other
G*rd*n
| Keith: I think you are very kind to Dan - considering all. It's
| interesting to note your comments on why Marilyn treats Dan in the way
| she does and it does seem fitting. Perhaps Marilyn is also an
| alcholic? and knows that Dan needs his self esteem blowing up
| occassionally. After all, have you ever heard anyone else praise Dan's
| work here? ...
I will be glad to praise anyone's work, if anyone wants me
to. Please specify the particular work(s) to be praised, and
the degree, terms, and general conceptual set you would like it
praised in. You may also select random praise. No work
should go unpraised. God loves you.
Maniac Deli
> I find it nauseating that assholes like you complain about the most
> beautiful art ever made and promote crap instead, like naked fat
> women, cubism, expressionism, and anything that's ugly and people
> can't relate to.
I find a great deal of "modern art" very beautiful. See my sig for an
example. I also find ancient art beautiful, e.g. cycladic figurines. Beauty
is everywhere, Dick, not just in the soppy, vaguely paedophilic creations of
Boogeroo.
> You obviously don't really like art, so why don't you
> fuck off and die.
LOL! I LOVE art! It's amusing how you assume that because someone doesn't
share your (lack of) taste, they must not like art.
> By the way, I would seriously like to know what
> credentials an arrogant asshole like you has for being so snobbish. My
> IQ is 140 and I have very mainstream tastes.
Oh, so it's "50,000 Frenchmen can't be wrong" logic, eh? Relying on that as
an arbiter of quality shows your IQ is meaningless as a measure of
intelligence.
> I know 140 isn't the highest, but I'm smarter than
> 98 percent of the people of the world.
What a pathetic thing to claim, you insecure homunculus!
> It proves you don't have to be stupid to like mainstream
> entertainment and art.
I have a friend with an IQ of 182 who paints the most godawful, twee, gooey,
lovey-dovey pictures. I see absolutely no connection between IQ, which is
merely a measure of your ability to quickly spot patterns, and aesthetic
taste.
> I know there are lots of other intelligent people who have
> mainstream tastes. My former (thank god) painting teacher was a
> goddamned modern art advocate with the same attitude as you and she
> didn't strike me as being particularly intelligent. I don't think she
> could draw either. Can you?
I can draw extremely well, and I have won prizes for it.
http://www.geocities.com/yes2abstractart/myart.jpg
Your arguments, such as they are, stink.
...only Skill? No Art!
Look at a great abstract painting:
http://www.nga.gov/feature/pollock/lm1024.jpg
Mani Deli
>I can draw extremely well, and I have won prizes for it.
>http://www.geocities.com/yes2abstractart/myart.jpg
>
Booby prizes
> ...only Skill? No Art!
He has no skill and the only prize he got was in a box of candy.
keith o'connor (tinmangallery.com
k
G*rd*n <g...@panix.com> wrote in message
news:au7c5c$kl4$1...@panix3.panix.com...
keith o'connor (tinmangallery.com
list. As far as I am concerned keep it up.
k
Nikolaus Maack <nikm...@sympatico.ca> wrote in message
news:3E067DB7...@sympatico.ca...
keith o'connor (tinmangallery.com
k
G*rd*n <g...@panix.com> wrote in message
news:au7bpb$du9$1...@panix3.panix.com...
keith o'connor (tinmangallery.com
I agree the material covers a lot of ground so I will stick to a very narrow
range of aesthetics and ethics.
As recall I was taught that in relation to literary criticism the English
approach to critiquing a literary work did not require knowledge of the
artist's life style. The focus was purely on the literary content.
On the other hand the American approach to literary criticism required
extensive knowledge of the artist's personal life.
It could be argued that the American approach has its roots in Puritanism
but with the Americanisation of the western world this approach is spreading
into all aspects of criticism.
In my mind this approach results in confusion between artistic content and
morality or ethics.
The crux of the argument appears to be between those who judge art on the
basis pure aesthetics void of ethics and the other group who judge art as
aesthetics bound to ethics.
Looks like it's a battle of the nature - my god is better than your god,
which is why I say so much artistic discussion is religious in nature.
Keith
Andrew Werby <and...@computersculpture.com> wrote in message
news:aWwN9.472161$QZ.71972@sccrnsc02...
Andrew D
>| Anyone who states in public that they have a high IQ is demonstrating
>| how profoundly stupid they are.
Only the true Messiah denies his divinity.*
(*Monty Python's Life of Brian)
Edward G. Nilges
> spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges) wrote in message news:<f5dda427.02122...@posting.google.com>...
>
> > Now, this is "folk aesthetics" and cannot be taken at face value or as
> > definitive. At the same time, a more evolved aesthetic remains
> > responsible, as Kant felt himself responsible, to ordinary intuition
> > to some extent. For example, Kant found he needed to explain the new
> > European interest, in the Romantic era, in cataracts, ruined
> > cathedrals and battles, which the "folk" were beginning to find
> > beautiful, therefore Kant invented the concept of the sublime.
>
> Kant did not *invent* the concept of the sublime.
Thanks for your learned comments. I agree about Longinus but refuse
to credit Edmund Burke with any influence outside of England. Edmund
Burke was no philosopher, merely a phampleteer without original ideas.
Alison A Raimes
> Thanks for your learned comments.
No problem - I'm starting a doctrate next year on the Postmodern
Sublime so am happy to share my research if it helps to develop others
ideas on the sublime.
>I agree about Longinus but refuse
> to credit Edmund Burke with any influence outside of England. Edmund
> Burke was no philosopher, merely a phampleteer without original ideas.
The problem with dismissing Burke is that you deny his influence on
Kant (outside England) - a well documented fact that Kant wrote his
first thesis in response to Burke - and also the influence of that one
essay written by Burke on artists such as Turner who then influenced
artists across the world. It's dangerous to dismiss influences in this
way.
The American Sublime tradition largely grew out of landscape painting
which was very much influenced by Turner - it's unlikely that they had
even heard of Edmund Burke and philosophy is not an American
educational tradition (whereas it is in Europe and England) but the
indirect influence is apparent. The American Sublime tradition took on
its own course which became involved with educating and promoting
travel in America - it became a political tool, as such, and the
agenda was far from spiritual. The recent exhibition that started at
the Tate Britain - The American Sublime - has an interesting
publication associated with it that is worth getting hold of for
anyone researching.
Edward G. Nilges
>
> > Thanks for your learned comments.
>
> No problem - I'm starting a doctrate next year on the Postmodern
> Sublime so am happy to share my research if it helps to develop others
> ideas on the sublime.
>
> >I agree about Longinus but refuse
> > to credit Edmund Burke with any influence outside of England. Edmund
> > Burke was no philosopher, merely a phampleteer without original ideas.
>
> The problem with dismissing Burke is that you deny his influence on
> Kant (outside England) - a well documented fact that Kant wrote his
> first thesis in response to Burke - and also the influence of that one
> essay written by Burke on artists such as Turner who then influenced
> artists across the world. It's dangerous to dismiss influences in this
> way.
I really am not familiar enough with Edmund Burke not to defer to your
learning: but I would guess that Kant was less influenced by Burke, as
much as believing that Burke's ideas were primitive and in need of
development.
Burke like the Oyster developed his thought, such as it appears to me,
in response to the events in France. Sometimes the oyster develops a
pearl but as far as I know Burke only wrote in defense of Tradition,
like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof.
Burke developed no new ideas in response to Tom Paine, and I feel his
current popularity is owing to the neocons only.
Whereas Kant developed a complete philosophical system in which parts
of that system are attuned to other parts in a deep way. Of course,
English men say they are anti-systematic (except when convenient as in
developing systems for industrial discipline.)
Alison A Raimes
> I really am not familiar enough with Edmund Burke not to defer to your
> learning: but I would guess that Kant was less influenced by Burke, as
> much as believing that Burke's ideas were primitive and in need of
> development.
>
> Burke like the Oyster developed his thought, such as it appears to me,
> in response to the events in France. Sometimes the oyster develops a
> pearl but as far as I know Burke only wrote in defense of Tradition,
> like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof.
>
> Burke developed no new ideas in response to Tom Paine, and I feel his
> current popularity is owing to the neocons only.
>
> Whereas Kant developed a complete philosophical system in which parts
> of that system are attuned to other parts in a deep way. Of course,
> English men say they are anti-systematic (except when convenient as in
> developing systems for industrial discipline.)
Edward: the fact that you are not familiar enough with Burke is
abundantly clear here. Burke's ideas as *primitive*? Why make such an
uninformed statement without first researching? His work was way
ahead of his time - just as Kant's was - and the first development of
philosophy and psychology. Actually, reading your posts again, I now
realise that you are not a serious student as your facts and comments
are far off course. Do your homework! I found a link to start you off
- there are plenty more:
http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/burke.html
Mani Deli
>Well what do you know - you have admitted the impressionists could do form -
>although not very well according to you - but still form.
I regard them as artists but they are highly overrated.
>
>In the work that you deem to be art the intellectual must be absolute
>otherwise it is not art - in your estimation.
Why don't you try to write clearly and stop telling me what my opinion
is in you muddled verbiage.
>I can understand that and I think that most posters here can. That's your
>position and that's it.
I don't think you even know what you are talking about.
>
>What most posters here have trouble with is your obsessive compulstiveness
>about your position. Your insistance that everyone must be the same.
Where did I insist anything and am quite happy that all are different.
>That is not a very different emotional position than dan with his smart
>people stupid people list.
You don't know fuck-all about my emotions.
>
>Let's see where we can agree. We both agree with regard to the
>impressionists only for different reasons. You say their having little form
>is a negative attribute.
>
>I say they have diminished the intellectual and exagerated the physical and
>emotional. We both agree but for different reasons.
? Read at
http://www.artrenewal.org/articles/2002/Impressionism_Revisited/impressionism1.asp
>de Kooning: you say he has no form. I say he has suppressed form
What ever the label it amounts to no form.
> but it is
>still there - maybe not easily seen when you are not used to looking for it
>but it is still there.
Its still there but its invisible. Check the backs of his paintings
for more suppressed form. AE is flat as a board. Even Greenberg admits
it.
>I will take it that your 'no form' and my suppressed form have equivalent
>meanings.
Take it three times a day after meals.
>The thing is that we may agree on some points but it may all boil down to
>whether the glass is described as half full or half empty.
>You may argue the position that the glass is half full and I may argue the
>position that it is half empty and that I think is the level of our
>discussion.
I don't.
Edward G. Nilges
I'm afraid that Burke is a waste of time.
He approved of the American revolution only because (1) the Americans
had the good grace to be far away and (2) the Americans had the good
grace to appoint only men of property to office.
He completely lacked what Kant called purity of heart, because he sold
himself, as a thinker, to the middle classes of England who
simultaneously took advantage of an early revolution (the English
civil war and 1688) but were basically too selfish to share their
enrichment.
His "tradition" was the cheesy tourist's false consciousness.
Therefore in response to the aliterates who profess philosophy in
America and the UK, who refuse to teach or read Kant or Hegel, I am
going to reject this Burke character because life is short and I
haven't read enough Tom Paine.
I do so because I have seen first-hand how a constructed tradition
destroys people's lives, because it encourages them to sacrifice their
libidinal desires because of Oedipal guilt, as if (for example) Tom
Eliot could assuage his guilt about not following in his father's path
by being more Anglican than the Bishop of Canterbury.
I suggest that you haven't done your homework. Have you read any
Zinn?
Edward G. Nilges
> Hi Andrew:
> I agree the material covers a lot of ground so I will stick to a very narrow
> range of aesthetics and ethics.
>
> As recall I was taught that in relation to literary criticism the English
> approach to critiquing a literary work did not require knowledge of the
> artist's life style. The focus was purely on the literary content.
>
the 1950s, a discredited movement which was discredited in the 1960s
because while it pretended to focus merely on the text of the work to
the exclusion of biography and history, it actually allowed the
critic's ignorance to set the agenda.
For example, the feminists complained, rightly, that it forced a woman
to write like Hemingway rather from her situation as a woman.
> On the other hand the American approach to literary criticism required
> extensive knowledge of the artist's personal life.
>
> It could be argued that the American approach has its roots in Puritanism
> but with the Americanisation of the western world this approach is spreading
> into all aspects of criticism.
Complete nonsense. The only uniquely American school was New
Criticism which ignored biography.
You seem to be saying that curiosity about an artist's personal life
is Puritan and negative, and this is ridiculous.
As it happens, we need to know how the end of the slave trade
influenced the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. If we do not, it is a
childish and jingly bit of doggerel, a meaningless adventure story for
children. May as well read Edward Lear, and ignore in turn how Lear's
colonial service influenced his language.
The New Criticism was, to be brutal, a convenience for third-rate
English professors at third-tier cow colleges funded by the GI bill,
colleges which according to Fussell at Penn represent mail fraud in
that they do not, in the current economy, even accomplish the mission
of preparing their students for money making.
The New Criticism enabled an entire generation of barbarians to read
only the required texts, to grant sexual favors to their teachers for
grades, obtain advanced degrees and become the alienated faculty at
third-tier institutions who read professional journals and sports
pages, and who terrorize their intelligent students with
half-remembered BS from Shakespeare.
William Palmer
> alison...@yahoo.co.uk (Alison A Raimes) wrote in message news:<f6243c1f.02122...@posting.google.com>...
> > spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges) wrote in message news:<f5dda427.02122...@posting.google.com>...
> >
> > > I really am not familiar enough with Edmund Burke not to defer to your
> > > learning: but I would guess that Kant was less influenced by Burke, as
> > > much as believing that Burke's ideas were primitive and in need of
> > > development.
Say what you want to about Edmund Burke, he was genuinely
horrified by the way the French Revolution played itself
out. And well he should have been. Yes, as an American
I grew up with this naive notion that French Revolution
happened because the mean old king and queen where eating
cake and having a great time when the poor people were
starving. That is scarcely what it was all about. The
only reason the Revolution took place was that the
monarchy was creaky and ineffective. The result was
that a number of sub-ruling class groups such as the lawyers
and merchants, were just beginning to feel their muscle
and and felt that the monarchy was holding them back
regarding their ambitions and potential earnings. It
was more about thwarted ambition than hunger, in other
words. "The people," of course, suffered even more under
Robespierre and the others than they had under the King
and Queen, who really were pretty run-of-the-mill as far
as European royalty of the day were concerned. And
there is no doubt anymore that Marie Antoinette
was the reather pathetic victim of a very vicious
smear campaign. I mean, I don't see any need to
re-fight the French Revolution here in rec.arts.fine,
but it WAS a horrifying affair, and I think it was to
Burke's credit that he tried to cut through the b.s. put
out by French Revolutionary sympathizers in England,
and expose the counter-productive behavior of the
ruling revolutionaries for what it was. Oh, but
the Revolution brought penal reform, you argue?
Here is the penal reform of the Revolution. A bunch
of them took over a prision and told all the prisoners
that they were going to be sent to a new prison in
a different location. Now, these were not largely
murderers and rapists, as much as they were prostitutes
and very petty miscreants. Well, the Revolutionaries
instructed the prisoners to exit by a certain door
where there was supposed to be a conveyance waiting
to take them to the new prison. But, when the poor
devils stepped through the door, they found themselves
in a closed-off alley, where a murderous crowd of
ruffians were waiting with all sorts of lethal
implements to chop the prisoners to pieces. Now,
you see, this was the sort of thing that Burke was
aware of, and it bothered him. English law was
harsh and generally cruel, but it was law. That's
the difference. Those poor souls were not under
sentence of death, but the Revolutionaries had taken
it upon themselves to butcher petty miscreants.
Many of the Revolutionaries were hypocritical and
arrogant: They did a lot of blathering about public
morality, but their actions were murderous and done
without any benefit of law but their own. a.g.b-p
Alison A Raimes
> I suggest that you haven't done your homework. Have you read any
> Zinn?
Really? Ok, then please direct me to the works by Paine and Zinn that
deal with the Sublime and I will concede to you on this. I am always
interested in how politics and aesthetics cross over and why Burke's
essay on the Sublime became so influential across the years. There
might even be a parallel to draw in Jean Francois Lyotard's interest
in Kant's work on the Sublime, but I will be leaving that for my
research degree. So go ahead and provide me with the reading material
and I will go and do my homework.
Edward G. Nilges
>
> > I suggest that you haven't done your homework. Have you read any
> > Zinn?
>
> Really? Ok, then please direct me to the works by Paine and Zinn that
> deal with the Sublime and I will concede to you on this. I am always
Neither Paine nor Zinn were interested in the Sublime.
> interested in how politics and aesthetics cross over and why Burke's
> essay on the Sublime became so influential across the years. There
I have no information that Burke influenced Kant. You will have to
provide me with pointers to scholarship that shows is.
If Kant developed an aesthetic of the Sublime, independent of Burke,
the independence from Burke, combined with Kant's massive influence on
continental European philosophy, means that Kant is what would be
called in sports "world-class" whereas Burke is bush league.
I fear your admiration for Burke is a provincialism, found in many
English and American philosophy departments, in which a positive
failure to read or to teach Continental texts becomes a prerequisite
for advancement. This is I am afraid a politically motivated
provincialism which has been, more or less unconsciously, designed to
ensure that philosophy departments, in England and America, do their
part to ensure that nothing like European Social Democracy, which was
influenced by Kant, appears in either the US and the UK.
I find it morally wrong that philosophy departments participate in the
manufacture of what a Texas friend of mine calls "cradle to grave
minimum wage" in the US. This is why, given the reality of limited
time, I won't waste my time with Edmund Burke.
My stance resembles, but is different from, something that I have long
critiqued, and this is the administrative agenda-setting that refuses
to "waste time" with prolixity that is found in abundance in Hegel and
to an extent in Kant. Ultimately, the decision is a moral one. The
professor of philosophy who positively discourages his students from
reading Hegel does so because his administration has long decided that
Hegel makes no sense: he inherits the idea as part of conformity.
Whereas my street smarts tell me that it is immoral to restrict a
philosophical tradition to a Humean and Burkean empiricism that gives
no ground to calls for justice, and uses "skepticism" and "tradition"
incoherently, and in an alternating manner, to postpone calls for
simple decency.
Also, as Zinn points out, Burke was answered by Blake and William
Godwin (the lineal ancestor, by the way, of the Net's own Mike Godwin)
who showed that Burke's traditionalism was dishonest because it was
based on claims to land tenure that had been established by the
forceful and the fraudulent seizure by Henry VIII of monastic and
common land.
> might even be a parallel to draw in Jean Francois Lyotard's interest
> in Kant's work on the Sublime, but I will be leaving that for my
> research degree. So go ahead and provide me with the reading material
> and I will go and do my homework.
Zinn, Blake, Godwin. Marx, of course (who was an English philosopher
in an honorary sense because of his long residence in England.)
Today, Martha Nussbaum does a great job in a feminist response to the
resurgent "logic" of late capitalism by showing how "emotion" and
"logic" are constructed categories. I do read a hell a lot of Richard
A Posner, while holding my nose and writing responses to him as Amazon
book reviews. Posner writes, as far as I know, in the Burkean
tradition where his lawyer's respect for precedent is derived, as far
as I know, from Burke.
Burke disliked the French revolution and admired the American
revolution because in terms of precedence of land tenure and debt
service, the Americans were minimalist, whereas the French were
maximalist. The American revolution issued in the Treaty of Paris
which restored commercial relations between America and England but no
longer on England's unfavorable (towards America) mercantilist terms.
Whereas the French revolution resulted in Napoleon's Continental
System, which like the Comecon Communist trade barriers of the 1940s,
was a *casus belli* for the English in itself in that they could not
make money legally.
Posner is in the Burkean tradition because what is truly critical in
his thought is the foregrounding of economic efficiency defined as
free trade internationally, and weak labor and government
domestically.
Unlike Kant, Posner and I believe Burke fail to understand the
position of the proletariat, defined by Ernest Mandel as most of us,
for Mandel (in an introduction to his translation of Marx) defines the
proletariat as those people who depend on a pay check or unemployment
for raw existence.
I happen to believe that it is a combined moral and cognitive
requirement of philosophy that the philosopher displays purity of
heart in the sense of not allowing his class position to affect his
thought. A modern exponent is the late John Rawls, whose "veil of
ignorance" claim is that optimal liberal societies are in principle
created by people who disregard their own position in the class
system.
You are the expert on these matters and I the layman. However, this
does NOT decide the issue. My experience at Princeton was that for
long-suffering graduate students, their material deprivation (and, for
women, the sexism of the academe) creates ideological blinders.
Edward G. Nilges
> spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges) wrote in message news:<f5dda427.02122...@posting.google.com>...
> > alison...@yahoo.co.uk (Alison A Raimes) wrote in message news:<f6243c1f.02122...@posting.google.com>...
> > > spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges) wrote in message news:<f5dda427.02122...@posting.google.com>...
> > >
> > > > I really am not familiar enough with Edmund Burke not to defer to your
> > > > learning: but I would guess that Kant was less influenced by Burke, as
> > > > much as believing that Burke's ideas were primitive and in need of
> > > > development.
>
> Say what you want to about Edmund Burke, he was genuinely
> horrified by the way the French Revolution played itself
> out. And well he should have been. Yes, as an American
> I grew up with this naive notion that French Revolution
> happened because the mean old king and queen where eating
> cake and having a great time when the poor people were
> starving. That is scarcely what it was all about. The
In fact, the King and Queen WERE scarfing *gateau* and the poor WERE
starving to death. But this had obtained countless times before...in
the Middle Ages, when the harvest failed, later on, during the
frequent panics and crashes of the 17th and 18th century financial
systems.
The crisis came in 1789 because not only were the King and Queen
chowing down and the poor weren't, in addition, the bourgeois were not
getting their *gateau* invoices paid on time because of a new
financial crisis.
This caused the bourgeois of the Third Estate to ally themselves with
the poor, and most of the nobility and the clergy of the First and
Second Estates to ally themselves with the Third Estate. They did so
from a sense of self-preservation but also because, as Marx saw,
"nobility" and "clergy" was only a label. Many actual Dukes of Earl
and Bishops had by 1789 considerable commercial interests and
represented in fact combinations of the three Estates.
But despite the fact that I am aware of all this, having been taught
the history of the French Revolution in 1968 by the great professor
Leon Stein of Roosevelt University in the very month a second French
Revolution was occuring in the streets of Paris 1968, I do not think
it somehow an indicator of naivete to credit, at some level, the
encapsulation of the story as "let them eat cake."
Burke wanted the wealthy to have a tradition but failed to see that
the poor also have a tradition which does indeed include let them eat
cake. Hell's bells, Bush is telling the unemployed to buy houses
today.
"Let them eat cake" is a tradition which expresses a truth, which is
that Marie Antoinette did not give a good god damn about the poor
despite the fact that she could not pay the 18th century equivalent of
a Master Card bill.
> only reason the Revolution took place was that the
> monarchy was creaky and ineffective. The result was
Ineffective for whom? When it became ineffective at maintaining the
interests of the Estates, all of which increasingly had commercial
interests, it was given the heave-ho, with the Paris mob providing the
muscle.
> that a number of sub-ruling class groups such as the lawyers
> and merchants, were just beginning to feel their muscle
> and and felt that the monarchy was holding them back
> regarding their ambitions and potential earnings. It
True. But the mob rightfully felt that since it had risked its life,
it should have a say. In fact it did not know how to manage itself at
the time and instead had to learn. By 1870 it had learned and was
that much more difficult to put down. Today, the mob is nearly
identical to civil society in France, with exceptions.
> was more about thwarted ambition than hunger, in other
Without the bread shortages, the Third Estate would not have had the
muscle to mount an armed revolution.
> words. "The people," of course, suffered even more under
> Robespierre and the others than they had under the King
This isn't true. Very few of the actual *canaille* were important
enough for Robespierre to waste madame la guioulltine on them. In
Paris, they were fed on the State's dime. Their sons were given access
to service in a massively increased army and could remit their
earnings.
Now, you can, of course, point to the rural suffering that was caused
by feeding the Paris mob, for the revolutionaries, like Stalin in the
1930s, exacted the surplus from the farms. You can point also to the
suffering caused by Napoleon's armies.
But what you cannot maintain is that this was a bad deal for the
people who benefited: much of the rural peasantry and most of the
Paris *canaille*.
The prior system was based, like it or not, on their suffering in an
almost tautological way. To be *canaille*, to be a *sans-cullotte*
was DEFINED by economic deprivation. After 1789 this deprivation was
relieved and for years after the Napoleonic compromise (which kept the
bourgeois happy) *grognards* looked wistfully back to the day when
they could get a bellyful and send money home.
There is an absolute morality. But it is not quite the same thing as
trying to persuade someone that he did not in fact have a good deal
going.
> and Queen, who really were pretty run-of-the-mill as far
> as European royalty of the day were concerned. And
> there is no doubt anymore that Marie Antoinette
> was the reather pathetic victim of a very vicious
> smear campaign. I mean, I don't see any need to
> re-fight the French Revolution here in rec.arts.fine,
Why not? My kid scored 1560/1600 on his SATs and in France would have
gotten free higher education. Perhaps I need to refight the Cannonade
of Valmy on his behalf, by peaceful means.
When I was in Paris in 1991, French kids, who do not have much of a
sweet deal overall, shut down the subway because of complaints that
France was roaring about the Persian Gulf in preference to maintaining
and improving their educational facilities. The kids who failed their
*bacs* also deserve a square deal.
Today, France is thankfully staying out of our adventure in the Gulf,
but is fighting a war in the Cote d'Ivoire.
People like me persist in asking why the needs for USA military
adventure, or la Gloire, take front seats to my kids' needs.
> but it WAS a horrifying affair, and I think it was to
> Burke's credit that he tried to cut through the b.s. put
> out by French Revolutionary sympathizers in England,
William Blake was BS?
> and expose the counter-productive behavior of the
> ruling revolutionaries for what it was. Oh, but
> the Revolution brought penal reform, you argue?
> Here is the penal reform of the Revolution. A bunch
> of them took over a prision and told all the prisoners
> that they were going to be sent to a new prison in
> a different location. Now, these were not largely
> murderers and rapists, as much as they were prostitutes
> and very petty miscreants. Well, the Revolutionaries
> instructed the prisoners to exit by a certain door
> where there was supposed to be a conveyance waiting
> to take them to the new prison. But, when the poor
> devils stepped through the door, they found themselves
> in a closed-off alley, where a murderous crowd of
> ruffians were waiting with all sorts of lethal
> implements to chop the prisoners to pieces. Now,
What these children's tales ignore is that today, there are unused
channels for social change that simply did not exist in 1789.
In the Los Angeles riots of 1992, looters themselves were expropriated
when bigger guys took their swag. This is what happens when one
neglects the need for peaceful social change by saying (as we were
spozed to say under reagan) that our society is perfect and we need
not work for peaceful change.
> you see, this was the sort of thing that Burke was
> aware of, and it bothered him. English law was
> harsh and generally cruel, but it was law. That's
You have no idea. Even American law, even in 1863, was essentially as
harsh as English law of the 18th century. See Gangs of New York. It
is not an historical document but it was based on the facts.
> the difference. Those poor souls were not under
> sentence of death, but the Revolutionaries had taken
> it upon themselves to butcher petty miscreants.
They reserved capital measures for the aristos, and used them on small
men only when the depredations of small time men endangered the very
shaky bread supplies to the Paris unemployed. The Paris mob was in
agricultural terms a dead weight and could overthrow the
revolutionaries at any time. The brutal fact was that their needs
came first in a way that the much smaller Philadelphia and New York
mobs' needs did not.
> Many of the Revolutionaries were hypocritical and
> arrogant: They did a lot of blathering about public
> morality, but their actions were murderous and done
> without any benefit of law but their own. a.g.b-p
They were not murderous as revolutionary acts but mirrored the actual
violence of the time. In the 17th century, the Bourbons established
their authority by making public violence (such as the burning of
witches) a public spectacle. Even in culture, in what French men of
the 17th century called "the war of the buffoons" (where "buffoon"
meant "intellectual") stories such as the flaying of the satyr Marysas
were told which contained the threat of genuine torture and punishment
for buffoons who failed to write like Corneille, paint like Vouet, or
compose like Lully.
But in fact this was not different in kind from the execution, in
England under the Hanovers, of petty thieves, or their transportation
to a convenient Australia, a death sentence for many.
It was a consequence of the French Revolution that in Europe, there is
no death penalty today. Whereas our failed revolution has resulted in
the continuance of the death penalty and legal regression in recent
years...as where it was seriously proposed that executions be
televised.
America's social retardation resembles, I believe, what would have
occured had England won the Revolutionary war, for in fact there is
little enough difference between the contemporary domination of land
and of media in vast segments of rural America by small numbers of
families. Because we overempower, through the Senate, the
representation of underpopulated states, essentially, in terms of
reality, the Senate is a House of Lords with 18th century levels of
power. We may as well have a Duke of North Carolina...we had Jesse
Helms.
J Collier
> Therefore in response to the aliterates who profess philosophy in
> America and the UK, who refuse to teach or read Kant or Hegel,
Where ever you find them, I say that pithy philosophy-professing
professors are more aliterate than the nonprofessing kind.
(Dunno about Hegel. I am reminded of David Hilbert whose
colleagues at Goettingen would say of an obscure mathematical
proof, "It was like Hegel: it could mean anything." But
Kant was Hilbert's philosophical ideal and fellow Koenigsberger.)
Jim
Edward G. Nilges
> spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges) wrote in message news:<f5dda427.02122...@posting.google.com>...
>
>
This replaces discussion with the transformation I saw of the graduate
students at Princeton, in the absence of the unionization drive at
Harvard, into industrial workers with the psychology that anything
off-topic, or slightly outside their field as defined by an
all-powerful faculty member, was a waste of their time. This produces
junior faculty far more alienated than students.
Look, mate, YOU are responsible for your time and YOU choose to pay
attention to what I have said, or not. What part of "kill file" don't
you understand? As it happens nobody is paying you to pay attention to
me.
If you believe in some twisted, homoerotic fashion that I am going to
wilt in the lack of attention from you you have another think coming.
But if I am guilty of not studying Burke, any claim you make about
Zinn, unless of course you've read him, is of equal value.
Paine and Zinn lived in the era of interest in the sublime, and their
disinterest was an important fact with negative syntax. I am raising
the possibility that interest in the Sublime MAY have been restricted
to the upper clawsses, able to fund trips to cataracts and ruins.
If you are working on the damn Sublime this may be of interest UNLESS
of course the ordinary slob is not of interest any more to an academy
which has been corrupted by the big bucks.
Edward G. Nilges
Philosophers who say this either have not read Hegel, or misread him.
Let's take an example. It is Hegelian to say of contemporary society,
as did the Hegelian-influenced Marcuse, that it is rational, or rather
rationalized, and this rationalization is irrational.
What irritates aliterate professors of philosophy at third-tier
schools is the "verbosity" and the apparent contradiction.
The "verbosity" is supposed to be in saying first that modern society
is "rational or rather rationalized."
But what Marcuse, and in various contexts Hegel, was trying to draw
attention to were moving targets.
Marcuse's moving target was the only apparent rationality of
bureaucratic procedures in modern societies of which the primary
example is of course the digital computer, an apparently rational
engine *par excellence*.
Therefore he is careful to present in words a picture of the
transition to "rationalization" which is rationality as a forced
march. A practical example would be the way in which "rational"
computer systems are produced at such a pace in the presence of the
profit motive that the first release 1.0 is full of irrational bugs.
Therefore the NAME for this motion is "rationality, or rather
rationalization" and neither rationality (in which enough time would
be given for a bug free release) nor rationalization (which would be a
computer system akin to the Freudian use of the word
"rationalization", so transparent as to be useless.)
Marcuse felt as did Hegel the need to acknowledge the good intentions
of former times and the present but at the same time a need to show
where they may not be in time progressive.
The phrase "it could mean anything" as applied to Marcuse's Hegelian
thought is thought to mean that from my example, Marcuse is saying
that modern society is rational and irrational at the same time, and
from a contradiction anything can be derived.
Of course, when describing the Logical Postivist's favorite stuff
(patches of color) it is irrational to say that the patch is both red
and green.
But even here there is an unsolved problem, for the Logical
Positivist, when the patch is graded, and Marcuse is describing
something vastly more complex than patches which to him could NOT be
reduced to atomic events.
Nor could it for Hegel, who believed that reductionism was like the
popular phrenology of his day which ascribed specific characteristics,
to specific zones of the brain.
Nothing less can do justice as a philosophy of history even on strict
analytic terms.
>
> Jim
J Collier
> jimc...@pacbell.net (J Collier) wrote in message news:<53f082b3.02122...@posting.google.com>...
> > spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges) wrote in message
> >
> > > Therefore in response to the aliterates who profess philosophy in
> > > America and the UK, who refuse to teach or read Kant or Hegel,
> >
> > Where ever you find them, I say that pithy philosophy-professing
> > professors are more aliterate than the nonprofessing kind.
> >
> > (Dunno about Hegel. I am reminded of David Hilbert whose
> > colleagues at Goettingen would say of an obscure mathematical
> > proof, "It was like Hegel: it could mean anything." But
> > Kant was Hilbert's philosophical ideal and fellow Koenigsberger.)
>
> Philosophers who say this either have not read Hegel, or misread him.
Do you understand that I was making a pun on "alliterative" and
"aliterate", and further that I made no judgement regarding Hegel
except to point out accurately that his near contemporaries thought
he was messy?
> [Really good rant re: moving targets, Marcuse, and logical positivism.]
Jim
Edward G. Nilges
> spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges) wrote in message news:<f5dda427.02122...@posting.google.com>...
> > jimc...@pacbell.net (J Collier) wrote in message news:<53f082b3.02122...@posting.google.com>...
> > > spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges) wrote in message
> > >
> > > > Therefore in response to the aliterates who profess philosophy in
> > > > America and the UK, who refuse to teach or read Kant or Hegel,
> > >
> > > Where ever you find them, I say that pithy philosophy-professing
> > > professors are more aliterate than the nonprofessing kind.
> > >
> > > (Dunno about Hegel. I am reminded of David Hilbert whose
> > > colleagues at Goettingen would say of an obscure mathematical
> > > proof, "It was like Hegel: it could mean anything." But
> > > Kant was Hilbert's philosophical ideal and fellow Koenigsberger.)
> >
> > Philosophers who say this either have not read Hegel, or misread him.
>
> Do you understand that I was making a pun on "alliterative" and
> "aliterate", and further that I made no judgement regarding Hegel
> except to point out accurately that his near contemporaries thought
> he was messy?
I understand your amusing pun.
I would not describe Hegel as "messy." First of all this makes
philosophers into urchins, who blot or do not blot their copy-books,
with the messy ones receiving a poorer grade.
Secondly, Hegel did not regard himself as a slob. Indeed he felt that
he did justice in a way that he felt his contemporaries did not do
justice to da trooth. In workman's terms, in terms of the housewife
sweeping cobwebs, Hegel claimed to have made snug joints and to have
eradicated cobwebs and science projects in the philosophical ice-box
which he claimed other philosophers had missed.
Thirdly, Hegel's near-contemporaries such as Marx and Fichte did not
regard him as at all sloppy. The English and American taste for a
precision which apes that of science had not been developed at the
time, what with John Stuart Mill loose about the shop. This means
that "messiness" is anachronistic as applied to Hegel for if he was a
slob then so was John Stuart Mill, of whom the clerihew was written:
John Stuart Mill
Through a mighty effort of will
Overcame his natural bon-homme-ie
And wrote, Principles of Political Economy
[The clerihew is inserted as a complete irrevelance and does not move
the argument forward: as such it may be contrasted with the
Phenomenology of Mind, a property of which is paradoxically its
economy in the sense that if you fall asleep while listening to it
being read aloud, let us say by Charlton Heston on a commercial tape,
you will fail to understand it.]
David Hilbert, as a late nineteenth/early twentieth century
mathematician and philosopher of mathematics, was not a
near-contemporary of Hegel. And, he post-dates the foundations
revolution in mathematics which had introduced the very idea of
messiness and the contrasting idea of "mathematical elegance" which
had not been seen in first philosophy prior (Spinoza doesn't count for
in fact his *modo geometrico* lacks what analytics would call
elegance.)
We may say, then:
Hegel
Like the humble bagel
Gets around to it, eventually.
>
> > [Really good rant re: moving targets, Marcuse, and logical positivism.]
Thank you.
>
> Jim
Leo Papandreou
> jimc...@pacbell.net (J Collier) wrote in message news:<53f082b3.02122...@posting.google.com>...
> > spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges) wrote in message
> >
> > > Therefore in response to the aliterates who profess philosophy in
> > > America and the UK, who refuse to teach or read Kant or Hegel,
> >
> > Where ever you find them, I say that pithy philosophy-professing
> > professors are more aliterate than the nonprofessing kind.
> >
> > (Dunno about Hegel. I am reminded of David Hilbert whose
> > colleagues at Goettingen would say of an obscure mathematical
> > proof, "It was like Hegel: it could mean anything." But
> > Kant was Hilbert's philosophical ideal and fellow Koenigsberger.)
>
> Philosophers who say this either have not read Hegel, or misread him.
>
> Let's take an example. It is Hegelian to say of contemporary society,
> as did the Hegelian-influenced Marcuse, that it is rational, or rather
> rationalized, and this rationalization is irrational.
>
> What irritates aliterate professors of philosophy at third-tier
> schools is the "verbosity" and the apparent contradiction.
>
I like the fact that all Slavoj Zizek's texts contain contradictions,
because Zizek considers harmony unproductive. I'm not sure what your
not entirely fairly maligned provincial professors of philosophy think
of neo-Marxist Lacanian nationalists though.
> The "verbosity" is supposed to be in saying first that modern society
> is "rational or rather rationalized."
>
> But what Marcuse, and in various contexts Hegel, was trying to draw
> attention to were moving targets.
>
> Marcuse's moving target was the only apparent rationality of
> bureaucratic procedures in modern societies of which the primary
> example is of course the digital computer, an apparently rational
> engine *par excellence*.
>
Variations on this theme go back at least as far as Weber. From
<http://www2.pfeiffer.edu/~lridener/DSS/Weber/WEBERW8.HTML> and
<http://www2.pfeiffer.edu/~lridener/DSS/Weber/WEBERW9.HTML>:
Weber's interest in the nature of power and authority, as
well as his pervasive preoccupation with modern trends of
rationalization, led him to concern himself with the operation
of modern large-scale enterprises in the political, administrative,
and economic realm. Bureaucratic coordination of activities,
he argued, is the distinctive mark of the modern era.
Bureaucracies are organized according to rational principles.
Offices are ranked in a hierarchical order and their operations
are characterized by impersonal rules. Incumbents are governed
by methodical allocation of areas of jurisdiction and delimited
spheres of duty. Appointments are made according to specialized
qualifications rather than ascriptive criteria. This bureaucratic
coordination of the actions of large numbers of people has become
the dominant structural feature of modern forms of organization.
Only through this organizational device has large- scale planning,
both for the modern state and the modern economy, become possible.
...
[The calculability of decision-making] and with it its
appropriateness for capitalism . . [is] the more fully realized the
more bureaucracy "depersonalizes" itself, i.e., the more completely
it succeeds in achieving the exclusion of love, hatred, and every
purely personal, especially irrational and incalculable, feeling
from the execution of official tasks. In the place of the old-type
ruler who is moved by sympathy, favor, grace, and gratitude, modern
culture requires for its sustaining external apparatus the emotionally
detached, and hence rigorously "professional" expert.
...
The world of modernity, Weber stressed over and over again, has
been deserted by the gods. Man has chased them away and has
rationalized and made calculable and predictable what in an earlier
age had seemed governed by chance, but also by feeling, passion,
and commitment, by personal appeal and personal fealty, by grace
and by the ethics of charismatic heroes.
... [When] it came to the trends toward rationalization and
bureaucratization of modern society, Weber tended to throw much of
his usual analytic caution to the winds and to assert that the
chances were very great indeed that mankind would in the future be
imprisoned in an iron cage of its own making. In this respect, his
message is thus fundamentally at variance with that of most of his
nineteenth-century forebears. He is not a prophet of glad tidings
to come but a harbinger of doom and disaster.
Speaking of Bouguereau, if we assume the existence of somebody who believes
science is a special or better paradigm of rationality--let us call the body
Meani--then "rational art" might correspond to how nature looks. Rational art
would be "true" by Meani's Latin because truth, unsullied by subjective minds
(Meani's "artzy-fartzies"), corresponds to /objective/ robot vision. Rational
art can be calculated: it is the algorithmic application of projective
geometry.
Thus, art is a tidy logical argument.
"Just so. Logic + Number = projective geometry. No projective geometry,
no art!"
Yes, Meani, I see that you are on the case.
"Moreover, beauty inheres in rational art."
I do not know why that has to be true. Perhaps because if science is a
better paradigm of rationality, and reality is described by science, then
reality must be extra-super rational; and since reality is all there is,
beauty is only as beautiful as it is real. Hold on, there's more: since
science improves over time, sci-fi art is super-duper to the max beautiful.
"Irrational art is ugly. No physics, no art!"
I do not believe everything Weber wrote. However, if we cannot dispute
the bureaucratization and rationalization of modern society--and I do not
see how we can--then it's worth asking if "irrational" art in the cradle
of modern and post-Modern culture isn't a symptom of what Marx and Weber
called "alienation."
"I have no idea what that means, which makes two of us. Art has nothing
to do with 'alienation', you bafflegabbing dumb-ass. You speak as if art
required an audience. That is your fallacy. No skill particles suspended
in the hermetically individual, no art!"
--
Leo Papandreou
"No drugs, no art!"
G*rd*n
| > > Therefore in response to the aliterates who profess philosophy in
| > > America and the UK, who refuse to teach or read Kant or Hegel,
jimc...@pacbell.net (J Collier):
| > Where ever you find them, I say that pithy philosophy-professing
| > professors are more aliterate than the nonprofessing kind.
| >
| > (Dunno about Hegel. I am reminded of David Hilbert whose
| > colleagues at Goettingen would say of an obscure mathematical
| > proof, "It was like Hegel: it could mean anything." But
| > Kant was Hilbert's philosophical ideal and fellow Koenigsberger.)
spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges):
I can't say anything against Hegel because I find him
completely unreadable. Marcuse, however, I have read --
sort of. I don't know if your example is accurate, but let
me belabor the analogy. A good marksman hits a moving target
by "leading" it, not by firing off a lot of rounds in a variety
of directions, including, possibly, his own foot. In the
example you give above, Marcuse appears to be using the word
_rational_ and its derivatives in different ways, in a kind
of rhetorical legerdemain. That may work well in poetry or
humor, but it isn't very effective in describing a political
or cultural problem. A great many words must be emitted,
trampling on one another and getting in each other's way,
confusing, tiring, and ultimately boring the reader. For this
reason, I find that what Marcuse writes does not generally
add up to very much. I attribute the inept use of language
to a lack of effort on the writer's part to write clearly,
to be satisfied with profuse or arcane verbiage. Of course,
it might be something worse, like the sleazy trickery in
Plato's version of Socrates. If a target it moving or
ambiguous, if the situation is complex or confused, it's
all the more important not to compound the problem by
writing badly.
I suppose this is somewhat off the theme of this newsgroup,
but it might be applied to some art criticism. On the other
hand, I recently saw a puff piece for Newman in _Art_In_America_
which was such a magnificent piece of making a whole lot out
of a very little I was awestruck, and am still sorely tempted
to, well, contradict myself here. There was at least
entertainment value in the sheer effrontery of the exercise.
But I guess we could assign such things to the poetic realm
which I carefully exempted above.
Edward G. Nilges
This may be an oversimplified view.
Actual experience in actual organizations run along these lines shows
that what in Vienna was called *schlamperei* (loosely translatable as
"go along to get along" or "you scratch my back and I'll scratch
yours") may be marginal to the sociologist but is essential to the
operation of any bureaucratic machine, which itself undercuts its
claims to being rational.
>
> Speaking of Bouguereau, if we assume the existence of somebody who believes
> science is a special or better paradigm of rationality--let us call the body
> Meani--then "rational art" might correspond to how nature looks. Rational art
> would be "true" by Meani's Latin because truth, unsullied by subjective minds
> (Meani's "artzy-fartzies"), corresponds to /objective/ robot vision. Rational
> art can be calculated: it is the algorithmic application of projective
> geometry.
But this is no argument at all for making "realistic" art the favored
term.
This is because it assumes a prejudgement that projection of the image
on a two-dimensional plane according to projective algorithms is
"better than" let us say isometric projection, or a nonvisual data
base of the items in the visual field.
Projective geometry hides as much as it reveals and my view is that
isometric geometrical projection may have been favored by mediaeval
and folk artists because for them, it allowed a more accurate
enumeration of objects in a scene without accidental concealment.
They may not be less "skilled" than "realistic" artists, only having
different goals including the need to satisfy Church authorities, or
land-holders in the American colonies, to communicate a visual text to
a partly preliterate society. The American colonies were literate but
may have retained some vestigial desire to inventory land in this
manner.
I hasten to add that I am not a specialist on these matters and this
is speculation.
>
> Thus, art is a tidy logical argument.
>
> "Just so. Logic + Number = projective geometry. No projective geometry,
> no art!"
>
> Yes, Meani, I see that you are on the case.
>
> "Moreover, beauty inheres in rational art."
>
> I do not know why that has to be true. Perhaps because if science is a
> better paradigm of rationality, and reality is described by science, then
> reality must be extra-super rational; and since reality is all there is,
> beauty is only as beautiful as it is real. Hold on, there's more: since
> science improves over time, sci-fi art is super-duper to the max beautiful.
>
> "Irrational art is ugly. No physics, no art!"
>
> I do not believe everything Weber wrote. However, if we cannot dispute
> the bureaucratization and rationalization of modern society--and I do not
> see how we can--then it's worth asking if "irrational" art in the cradle
> of modern and post-Modern culture isn't a symptom of what Marx and Weber
> called "alienation."
>
> "I have no idea what that means, which makes two of us. Art has nothing
> to do with 'alienation', you bafflegabbing dumb-ass. You speak as if art
> required an audience. That is your fallacy. No skill particles suspended
> in the hermetically individual, no art!"
I see we are in large agreement about Mani's views.
Erik A. Mattila
> I suppose this is somewhat off the theme of this newsgroup,
> but it might be applied to some art criticism. On the other
> hand, I recently saw a puff piece for Newman in _Art_In_America_
> which was such a magnificent piece of making a whole lot out
> of a very little I was awestruck, and am still sorely tempted
> to, well, contradict myself here. There was at least
> entertainment value in the sheer effrontery of the exercise.
> But I guess we could assign such things to the poetic realm
> which I carefully exempted above.
Interesting angle..."entertainment." I think what you are describing is
langauage itself taken to wing, fast leaving its referents in its dust.
I remember group critiques in art school where every other presentor
said "I'm dealing with the ambiguity of space." "What in the hell is
that?" I thought. I'm sure there was an original to that statement, but
it seems to have caught-on by virtue to its sound/form, connotation
and...well, its intrinsic kewlness. The "why ask why?" slogan of the
art world?
Another example: Barthes noted something similar in "Teachers, Writers,
Intellectuals". The terms of semiology became fashion, or, as he says:
"a stock of phrases - catechistic declarations."
It seems to me that this "ability" of language to become "words for
word's sake" was less so in the days of Marx and Hegel, and less less so
by the days of the Frankfurt School, than it is today. We probably
should go back to Plato - particularly "Phaedrus" and reinterpret his
ideas on the difference between speaking and writing - at least for
starters. What I'm really curious about is if the packaging of language
as an object, especially via the auspices an entertainment system, may
have some ultimate virtue that we have not yet anticipated (or a virtue
forgotten, as it seems to be an ancient practice in some ways). I
honestly don't know - I'm just open to surprises. Your reading of the
Newman article was critical, I would think. But think of the thousand
"Art In America" readers who took it seriously, regardless of its lack
of content or, even, information. The very act of reading has some sort
of value - maybe a "cult value" or sorts, or a token of membership into
a certain art cabal. I hope you can see where I'm going with this. A
different function of language than we normally perceive - how do we
know what language culture speaks?
Erik
Edward G. Nilges
(Sigh.)
"Messiness" and now "marksman" are metaphors which set the agenda of
down-grading philosophy to filling in copy-books and now tramping
about the wilds like the jolly *jaeger*, blasting poor innocent
woodland creatures to smithereens in the manner of Kaiser Bill, or my
old school-fellow at Saint Viator, Ted Nugent.
I would like you to see how these metaphors, as used by philosophy
students and professors, really are self-defeating especially in rural
universities in Germany and the United States, for they surrender to a
local class of people who are really uninterested in philosophy.
Socrates himself knew not to use these metaphors, for he realized that
the excellence of philosophy is second-order and distinct from the
excellence of carpentry or hunting. His insight, that different
activities have different goals, is here replaced by a modern
*schlamperei* in which good engineers are forced to take boring
classes in corporations in "human relations" when in fact they might
have better people skills than some clown with an education degree
precisely because their work is basically more exacting and demands
more exacting interactions with others.
I can only speculate that this modern *schlamperei*, of dragging in
metaphors from inappropriate forms of life into the temple of wisdom,
like dead cats, has a material basis, and that is the strong
possibility that the philosophy department will be eliminated from
next year's budget, and its privat-dozents will indeed become
*jaegers*, or McDonald's employees.
Your metaphor presupposes that the truth is a poor, innocent doe or
buck in search only of its mate by der *heilige see*, and the
philosopher, a clueless Parzival, and like Gurnemanz I can only say,
you goose.
> example you give above, Marcuse appears to be using the word
> _rational_ and its derivatives in different ways, in a kind
> of rhetorical legerdemain. That may work well in poetry or
> humor, but it isn't very effective in describing a political
> or cultural problem. A great many words must be emitted,
> trampling on one another and getting in each other's way,
> confusing, tiring, and ultimately boring the reader. For this
See Adorno: for like the English historian Hobsbawm Adorno engages in
the necessary task of showing, by way of a material basis, our
naturalistic fallacies.
Thus our view of classical music (like Hobsbawm's version of the view
of the English for their monarchy) is viewed self-reflexively by us as
uninfluenced by modern culture. We think at a minimum that we are
accessing "the real thing" when we listen to The Ninth just as
tourists sigh about how oh-so-traditional Prince Charley is when in
full fig at Horse Guards, when in fact, the poor old sod is probably
itching to be a pair of rather more contemporary knickers.
Hobsbawm showed how the "traditions" and indeed baubles of the
monarchy were manufactured, and stolen from places like India, in the
nineteenth and twentieth century. Adorno shows how our antsiness at a
classical concert is manufactured by the junk food of later culture
and that we cannot recreate the excitement *tout* Vienna felt at the
first (and technically, very crude) performances of Beethoven.
I fear your critique of Marcuse is a false consciousness in which we
put ourselves temporarily in the role of the time-challenged and
aliterate executive at a presentation in which "we" must not be
"bored": for I have SHOWN already that Marcuse's transition from
rational to rationalized to irrationality is the only way of doing
justice (by the canons of readability alone) to the facts on the
ground.
Who is the reader? He sounds like one of those oppressive
abstractions which in totalitarian societies are used to beat REAL
readers over the head even as da Proletariat was used in Stalin's
Russia to whack ordinary slobs who were in fact proletariat.
C. S. Lewis' Tramp, attending a speech at the Belbury institute in his
late novel That Hideous Strength, doesn't understand a word of the
Director's speech but is happy to be there, because of the food and
the booze, and because he's rarely had a chance to hear a real toff
speak.
He raises the possibility that many intellectual tramps may have
started an intellectual journey at a more worthy Chatauqua in which
the speech was not the true nonsense spouted by the director but only
apparent BS, and I think Lewis would agree that some attention, which
does not wholly understand, may be on the surface a bored attention
but over time one that takes a second look.
Lewis shows that the Director's speech was indeed nonsense, but note
that the Director is of the SAME bureaucratic class which CLAIMS to
write simply...this class has never claimed to write in a complex
fashion. In Lewis' history of 15th century English literature we find
that for Lewis, only correspondence with the truth (whether high or
low) was critical to evaluating language. He therefore, for example,
granted William Dunbar license to switch, in Lament for the Makarys,
from English to Latin.
Boredom is a logical primitive in a privatized media:
"Bonnie Boredom says, collect Boredom Stamps, every day, for
stupid gifts, for work or play."
But it is also boring to floss our teeth or be faithful to our
spouses.
My view is that English and American society, under the rose of a
misunderstood political correctness, has abandoned liberalism and the
result is only competing demands which are resolved by silly and
formalistic criteria, such as simplicity.
> reason, I find that what Marcuse writes does not generally
> add up to very much. I attribute the inept use of language
Perhaps this is your unfamiliarity with a somewhat older use of
language not engineered to beguile you to buy some crap. With all due
respect, much language today is engineered to beguile us to buy more
crap. Since Marcuse had tenure he did not want the students of the
1960s to buy more crap.
> to a lack of effort on the writer's part to write clearly,
> to be satisfied with profuse or arcane verbiage. Of course,
One would think that the simpler expression takes less effort, despite
years of incompetent and TV-saturated English professors mystifying
the production of simple language. Hemingway may have achieved his
simplicity in later life because when one is systematically hung over
one tends, in my experience, to speak monosyllabically as in "me need
orange juice and vodka now, woman." Scottie Fitzgerald, on the other
hand, labored when sober to do more prolix justice to a place like
Princeton where for so many people, words fail.
> it might be something worse, like the sleazy trickery in
> Plato's version of Socrates. If a target it moving or
Lawd have mussy. You know, terrorism may be as defined in Lyotard, a
refusal to dialogue.
> ambiguous, if the situation is complex or confused, it's
> all the more important not to compound the problem by
> writing badly.
>
> I suppose this is somewhat off the theme of this newsgroup,
> but it might be applied to some art criticism. On the other
> hand, I recently saw a puff piece for Newman in _Art_In_America_
> which was such a magnificent piece of making a whole lot out
> of a very little I was awestruck, and am still sorely tempted
> to, well, contradict myself here. There was at least
> entertainment value in the sheer effrontery of the exercise.
Ah, now you are cooking with gas. Sheer effrontery is out of fashion
but one does what one can: see my article on the Total Information
Awareness program in comp.risks.
> But I guess we could assign such things to the poetic realm
> which I carefully exempted above.
Why? Even Socrates had living memory of no such split, Lucretius used
poetry, and where is it written that poets don't speak da truth?
Leo Papandreou
Post-modern criticism is intentionally abstruse and discursive, I
think. In the modern tradition [1], man's rapport in society can
be inferred from the proverbial "bottom of things," an intelligible,
unitary, structural a priori totality (whew!) that can be discovered
and manipulated by coherent sentences. In short, "the truth is out
there." If we write clearly, we can understand our place in the
universe and discover the optimal relations between our fellows.
The pomos contend the "bottom of things" is always surrounded by an
excess of meaning that we are unable to master with language and
reason. Thus, they reject the conception of society as a unitary and
intelligible object grounding its partial processes (instances of
rapport between men). However, if there is no priori "bottom of things"
then each of us is cast adrift in a meaningless sea of selfish,
masturbatory behavior, which many think is a good description of pomo
texts, cultural relativism, leftist politics and "modern" art. [2]
Perhaps many are correct. In any case, accusations of otiose or
"artzy-fartzy" art are faint praise if not an inversion, because if
the pomos seek to recognize our limitations, the prophets of rational
expectations rarely show such modesty.
In short, coherence is a bourgeois requirement :-)
[1] By modern tradition I mean that brand of philosophy inculcated in
the Western curriculum. Here is how Xrefer.com quotes the _Oxford
Companion to Philosophy_ on modernism:
On the longest view, modernism in philosophy starts out with
Descartes's quest for a knowledge self-evident to reason and
secured from all the demons of sceptical doubt. It is also
invoked - with a firmer sense of historical perspective - to
signify those currents of thought that emerged from Kant's
critical 'revolution' in the spheres of epistemology, ethics,
and aesthetic judgement. Thus 'modernity' and 'enlightenment'
tend to be used interchangeably, whether by thinkers (like
Habermas) who seek to sustain that project, or by those--the
post-modernist company--who consider it a closed chapter in
the history of ideas.
[2] Scare quotes to emphasize that much of what is called "modern" art
is one-hundred-year-old art. R.a.f. needs a new set of labels, one that
will throw its enemies into confusion.
Edward G. Nilges
Gee, details at eleven. One could argue with equal or greater force
that the modern tradition is formed by doubt and a breakage in a
mediaeval world-view.
Like Prince Hal, the modern tradition seems here to be merely trying
on the crown of certitude for size. But unlike Prince Hal, the modern
tradition does so in its dotage as a way of securing itself against
the SAME form of challenges it posed to the mediaeval world-view in
its youth.
It was only until the appearance of post-modernism that one heard
public intellectuals yapping, in religious terms, about how the modern
tradition is based on confidence in the ability to know.
Insofar as the modern tradition commenced in France with Descartes it
was based on doubt and not knowledge. The certainty of the cogito
necessarily placed itself in a form of doubt for in the mediaeval
world view, Descarte's fallen and sinful nature had the
epistemological implication that he may had been merely mistaken in
his reasoning, at any point.
Earlier than Descartes, Machiavelli's pragmatism and the thought of
Hobbes denied at least the pragmatic utility of certainty in the sense
of truths that nasty, brutish and size-challenged men would
predictably accept.
After Descartes, Kant showed that while a form of useful certain
knowledge existed in the form of the synthetic apriori, this knowledge
itself was a block to anything "higher."
In the modern period, man's rapport in society was NOT, you may be
assured, based on agreement or consensus about a knowable "bottom of
things." As early as the English Civil War, men saw clear enough that
it would not be possible to secure this kind of agreement.
But on Fox News and other unseemly venues, today, superannuated
Ancient Moderns are wheeled out with their colostomy bags and these
clowns announce that in the Modern era we had knowledge and indeed
agreement on core scientific and political truths. Furthermore, these
bozos assure us that it is now necessary for the children of the lower
middle class and poor to man the ramparts against paynim who either,
like John Walker Lindh, were raised in a permissive post-modernism, or
who believe too strongly in the wrong things.
> unitary, structural a priori totality (whew!) that can be discovered
> and manipulated by coherent sentences. In short, "the truth is out
> there." If we write clearly, we can understand our place in the
> universe and discover the optimal relations between our fellows.
But woe if such "clarity" tries to be adequate to reality. It is then
run through Microsoft Word and found to be "too complex".
>
> The pomos contend the "bottom of things" is always surrounded by an
> excess of meaning that we are unable to master with language and
> reason.
Which in its own way was discovered by St Augustine and Kant. Roman
Catholic theology, in both its Augustinian and its Aquinian
manifestations, emphasized that precisely because of our fallen
natures, our ability to "know" the certainties is thereby limited.
Through faith, the Roman Catholic completes the epistemological task
which is begun by reason but which can never be known to be complete
in a Godlike sense.
Phillip Caputo of Notre Dame has, I believe, found this strain
emergent in the thought of Derrida in books including The Prayers and
Tears of Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction in a Nutshell.
Indeed, the corruption of late modernism circa 1979 was precisely its
simultaneous need for certainty and its denial of its skeptical roots.
Precisely because there is no thing called language outside the world,
we can never understand in full the relation of language to the world.
Which does not mean that this form of humility cannot be used to
increase our understanding, or, far more important, our ability to get
along with each other. Deconstructive methods have been applied to
the understanding of the Balkan conflict and I have found that the
American software crisis is in part explained using these methods.
>Thus, they reject the conception of society as a unitary and
> intelligible object grounding its partial processes (instances of
> rapport between men). However, if there is no priori "bottom of things"
> then each of us is cast adrift in a meaningless sea of selfish,
> masturbatory behavior, which many think is a good description of pomo
How does it follow, that if language is part of the world and faith
must supplement reason, that it is ok to jerk off? It may be ok to
jerk off, or not, independent of modernism or post-modernism.
Furthermore, people arrogantly convinced that unlike everyone else,
their language somehow stands outside the world and indeed may be used
as a club tend to be jerkoffs of the first water.
Thomas Hobbes already put us into a leaky boat with ship's biscuits
and green water, because this modernist thinker stated the painful
truth.
Edward G. Nilges
> G*rd*n wrote:
>
> > I suppose this is somewhat off the theme of this newsgroup,
> > but it might be applied to some art criticism. On the other
> > hand, I recently saw a puff piece for Newman in _Art_In_America_
> > which was such a magnificent piece of making a whole lot out
> > of a very little I was awestruck, and am still sorely tempted
> > to, well, contradict myself here. There was at least
> > entertainment value in the sheer effrontery of the exercise.
> > But I guess we could assign such things to the poetic realm
> > which I carefully exempted above.
>
> Interesting angle..."entertainment." I think what you are describing is
> langauage itself taken to wing, fast leaving its referents in its dust.
> I remember group critiques in art school where every other presentor
> said "I'm dealing with the ambiguity of space." "What in the hell is
> that?" I thought. I'm sure there was an original to that statement, but
While I admit that SOME critical writing is hot air, I would have you
take another look...at the ambiguity of space.
You may feel this is a meaningless phrase. However, every painter
deals with multiple ways of representing space with only two examples
being vanishing-point perspective and isometric perspective.
"Space" is not in itself ambiguous (unless particle physics tells us
otherwise, as it may.) But in context an art student does not MEAN
the space of the physicist but instead art space which is art
discourse about space and the various, and inescapably ambiguous, ways
in which various artists interpret space.
It is a form of scientistic terrorism to force art students to talk in
a physical language which deconstructs itself at the level of
elementary particles and string theory. Indeed, it is a Fascist
gesture to force everyone to use a single language game.
I do not deny the misuse of the human right to create a language game.
However, far more prevelant in our time is the Fundamentalist
insistence that language is no damn game.
> it seems to have caught-on by virtue to its sound/form, connotation
> and...well, its intrinsic kewlness. The "why ask why?" slogan of the
> art world?
>
I don't know where anyone gets this idea that (x)[If x is an art
student=>x is interested only in kewlness]. Many more are like Mani
who react in favor of a tradition, which is of course misunderstood
and reified in his case.
> Another example: Barthes noted something similar in "Teachers, Writers,
> Intellectuals". The terms of semiology became fashion, or, as he says:
> "a stock of phrases - catechistic declarations."
>
Barthes was not writing exclusively about the kewl, the chi-chi, and
the au fait who are at a minimum at least aware of their utter
kewlness, their Carmen Miranda-esque chi-chi-ness, and the fact that
they are indeed au fait in a Racinean and doomed fashion.
Barthes was primarily writing about the systematic beguilement of the
much larger bourgeois of France by mainstream and indeed conservative
media who without irony use false, and broadly false, semiotics to set
background fashion in favor of home ownership and working 16 hours a
day.
After all, one of his early essays deconstructed a cover of Paris
Match which did not show anything chi chi, instead a soldier of the
Legion from Africa stiffly saluting the tricolor. Barthes' system
demonstrated how this systematically beguiled ordinary French slobs
into supporting an adventurist foreign policy (which still walks in
the Cote d'Ivoire.)
> It seems to me that this "ability" of language to become "words for
> word's sake" was less so in the days of Marx and Hegel, and less less so
> by the days of the Frankfurt School, than it is today. We probably
Alternatively there may be entire philosophical systems, such as that
of Hegel which do not exist at all outside the text.
Alternatively the rage amongst the half-educated for out-of-date
analytic approaches may be merely an insistence that the philosophical
system, as a text, be a supplement to the real goods in let us say an
entire system such as Principia Mathematica, Carnap's Der Logische
Aufbau der Welt, or Nelson Goodman's The Structure of Appearance.
There is a consumerist (and I mean that term advisedly) impatience
with a mere text which insists upon value for money in the form of a
CD-ROM which the consumer can own.
Whereas if Hegel had had a chance to put a Hegel game on CD-ROM he
would not since the only way to understand Hegel is to crack a damn
book.
This returns the contemporary reader to a time before developed
consumerism in which the reader felt himself subordinate-to or
equal-to the author, and not a owner of the author's labor-product.
Erik A. Mattila
> "Erik A. Mattila" <emat...@oco.net> wrote in message news:<3E0F3768...@oco.net>...
>
>>G*rd*n wrote:
>>
>>
>>>I suppose this is somewhat off the theme of this newsgroup,
>>>but it might be applied to some art criticism. On the other
>>>hand, I recently saw a puff piece for Newman in _Art_In_America_
>>>which was such a magnificent piece of making a whole lot out
>>>of a very little I was awestruck, and am still sorely tempted
>>>to, well, contradict myself here. There was at least
>>>entertainment value in the sheer effrontery of the exercise.
>>>But I guess we could assign such things to the poetic realm
>>>which I carefully exempted above.
>>
>>Interesting angle..."entertainment." I think what you are describing is
>>langauage itself taken to wing, fast leaving its referents in its dust.
>> I remember group critiques in art school where every other presentor
>>said "I'm dealing with the ambiguity of space." "What in the hell is
>>that?" I thought. I'm sure there was an original to that statement, but
>
> While I admit that SOME critical writing is hot air, I would have you
> take another look...at the ambiguity of space.
Why? "The ambiguity of space" is pretty obvious - and I did concede that
there was an original. You can see artists consciously drawing attention
to the flatness of the picture plane while using picture space...quite
ambiguously, from about 1850 on. A perfect example is Gauguin's
[Renaissance] foreshortened figures placed in a flat patterned environment.
> You may feel this is a meaningless phrase. However, every painter
> deals with multiple ways of representing space with only two examples
> being vanishing-point perspective and isometric perspective.
"Isometric" is a projection, as is linear perspective - but "isometric"
is not "perspective". At any rate, my comment was based on hearing half
or more presentors making such a claim about their work, regardless of
the strategies shown by the painting. But if you paid attention to my
post, I was saying that uttering the statement may in fact not be
meaningless, although the meaning comes from a metalanguage. Sort of
like Malinowski's "phatic communion."
> "Space" is not in itself ambiguous (unless particle physics tells us
> otherwise, as it may.) But in context an art student does not MEAN
> the space of the physicist but instead art space which is art
> discourse about space and the various, and inescapably ambiguous, ways
> in which various artists interpret space.
Yes, this is obvious. Artists usually talk about pictorial space.
> It is a form of scientistic terrorism to force art students to talk in
> a physical language which deconstructs itself at the level of
> elementary particles and string theory. Indeed, it is a Fascist
> gesture to force everyone to use a single language game.
You're losing me here - I suspect you're jumping off into your own
interests. I'm not sure how it relates to what I had written. To tell
you the truth, I haven't the faintest idea of what "a physical language"
is, in your usage. Do you mean a "natural language" such as humans
might speak? Also, how would a language "deconsruct" itself (thinking
that deconstruction results from an act of volition)? And how does this
relate to facism?
> I do not deny the misuse of the human right to create a language game.
> However, far more prevelant in our time is the Fundamentalist
> insistence that language is no damn game.
You've introduced "game" here, and I'm not sure what you mean by it. As
I understand the term, I can't see what it has to do with human rights.
Furthermore, what I am wondering is that if catechistic declarations
are a form of "misuse" at all.
>
>>it seems to have caught-on by virtue to its sound/form, connotation
>>and...well, its intrinsic kewlness. The "why ask why?" slogan of the
>>art world?
>>
> I don't know where anyone gets this idea that (x)[If x is an art
> student=>x is interested only in kewlness]. Many more are like Mani
> who react in favor of a tradition, which is of course misunderstood
> and reified in his case.
I doubt Mani is reifying anything, Ed. In fact, I think he often
champions the idea of +not+ making the abstract concrete-with a great
deal of vigor. Besides, if Mani was a strict traditionalist, he
wouldn't include Carl Barks, Mel Ramos and Vargas on his list of good
artists. Clearly, his argument is for self-evident virtuosity - within
that category, his tastes are very broad.
But to say that some art students utter phases for kewlness is not
saying that they are +only+ interested in kewlness. I think you're
building a strawman here, Ed.
>>Another example: Barthes noted something similar in "Teachers, Writers,
>>Intellectuals". The terms of semiology became fashion, or, as he says:
>>"a stock of phrases - catechistic declarations."
>>
> Barthes was not writing exclusively about the kewl, the chi-chi, and
> the au fait who are at a minimum at least aware of their utter
> kewlness, their Carmen Miranda-esque chi-chi-ness, and the fact that
> they are indeed au fait in a Racinean and doomed fashion.
Who said he was? In the essay I cited [incorrectly, BTW, as it was
"Change the Object Itself" in "Image-Music-Text], he was writing about
the fate of the terminology of semiology, which seems similar to me as
the fate of art writing. In the entire essay, he was revising his
previous work in "Mythologies" which you allude to below, on the basis
that we have better critical tools available for understand myth than we
had in 1957.
> Barthes was primarily writing about the systematic beguilement of the
> much larger bourgeois of France by mainstream and indeed conservative
> media who without irony use false, and broadly false, semiotics to set
> background fashion in favor of home ownership and working 16 hours a
> day.
Actually, in "Change the Object Itself" Barthes was on an opposite tack,
that is to extend the critique of French culture to Western Civilization.
> After all, one of his early essays deconstructed a cover of Paris
> Match which did not show anything chi chi, instead a soldier of the
> Legion from Africa stiffly saluting the tricolor. Barthes' system
> demonstrated how this systematically beguiled ordinary French slobs
> into supporting an adventurist foreign policy (which still walks in
> the Cote d'Ivoire.)
Oh, come on. He used this to illustrate how "myth" functions in
culture. Specifically, in the image you cite, the sign contained its
own signified which prevented semiosis. This could occur unless the
signified had already landed in the sign by way of mythology making.
>>It seems to me that this "ability" of language to become "words for
>>word's sake" was less so in the days of Marx and Hegel, and less less so
>>by the days of the Frankfurt School, than it is today. We probably
>
> Alternatively there may be entire philosophical systems, such as that
> of Hegel which do not exist at all outside the text.
That's a tricky sentence, Ed. There may be systems which do not exist
outside the text? Hmmmm.
> Alternatively the rage amongst the half-educated for out-of-date
> analytic approaches may be merely an insistence that the philosophical
> system, as a text, be a supplement to the real goods in let us say an
> entire system such as Principia Mathematica, Carnap's Der Logische
> Aufbau der Welt, or Nelson Goodman's The Structure of Appearance.
You've lost me here. What are you attempting to say?
> There is a consumerist (and I mean that term advisedly) impatience
> with a mere text which insists upon value for money in the form of a
> CD-ROM which the consumer can own.
Where are you going with this?
> Whereas if Hegel had had a chance to put a Hegel game on CD-ROM he
> would not since the only way to understand Hegel is to crack a damn
> book.
>
> This returns the contemporary reader to a time before developed
> consumerism in which the reader felt himself subordinate-to or
> equal-to the author, and not a owner of the author's labor-product.
You've lost me. But what the hell - it ain't the first time.
Erik
Lauri Levanto
> . The very act of reading has some sort
> of value - maybe a "cult value" or sorts, or a token of membership into
> a certain art cabal. I hope you can see where I'm going with this. A
> different function of language than we normally perceive - how do we
> know what language culture speaks?
>
> Erik
>
The very act of "reading" visual art - a different function of lookin at tha
we normally see.
You have given me a lot to think
-lauri
Edward G. Nilges
> Edward G. Nilges wrote:
> > "Erik A. Mattila" <emat...@oco.net> wrote in message news:<3E0F3768...@oco.net>...
> >
> >>G*rd*n wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>>I suppose this is somewhat off the theme of this newsgroup,
> >>>but it might be applied to some art criticism. On the other
> >>>hand, I recently saw a puff piece for Newman in _Art_In_America_
> >>>which was such a magnificent piece of making a whole lot out
> >>>of a very little I was awestruck, and am still sorely tempted
> >>>to, well, contradict myself here. There was at least
> >>>entertainment value in the sheer effrontery of the exercise.
> >>>But I guess we could assign such things to the poetic realm
> >>>which I carefully exempted above.
> >>
> >>Interesting angle..."entertainment." I think what you are describing is
> >>langauage itself taken to wing, fast leaving its referents in its dust.
> >> I remember group critiques in art school where every other presentor
> >>said "I'm dealing with the ambiguity of space." "What in the hell is
> >>that?" I thought. I'm sure there was an original to that statement, but
> >
> > While I admit that SOME critical writing is hot air, I would have you
> > take another look...at the ambiguity of space.
>
> Why? "The ambiguity of space" is pretty obvious - and I did concede that
> there was an original. You can see artists consciously drawing attention
> to the flatness of the picture plane while using picture space...quite
> ambiguously, from about 1850 on. A perfect example is Gauguin's
> [Renaissance] foreshortened figures placed in a flat patterned environment.
My minor issue was the assumption that the art students were just
passing gas. Some art students do pass gas but not all.
>
> > You may feel this is a meaningless phrase. However, every painter
> > deals with multiple ways of representing space with only two examples
> > being vanishing-point perspective and isometric perspective.
>
> "Isometric" is a projection, as is linear perspective - but "isometric"
> is not "perspective". At any rate, my comment was based on hearing half
No, my understanding is that isometric projection is a full
alternative to vanishing-point systems. It is used in engineering
drawing to convey information that vanishing-point systems cannot.
> or more presentors making such a claim about their work, regardless of
> the strategies shown by the painting. But if you paid attention to my
> post, I was saying that uttering the statement may in fact not be
> meaningless, although the meaning comes from a metalanguage. Sort of
> like Malinowski's "phatic communion."
>
You lost me for a change.
> > "Space" is not in itself ambiguous (unless particle physics tells us
> > otherwise, as it may.) But in context an art student does not MEAN
> > the space of the physicist but instead art space which is art
> > discourse about space and the various, and inescapably ambiguous, ways
> > in which various artists interpret space.
>
> Yes, this is obvious. Artists usually talk about pictorial space.
>
> > It is a form of scientistic terrorism to force art students to talk in
> > a physical language which deconstructs itself at the level of
> > elementary particles and string theory. Indeed, it is a Fascist
> > gesture to force everyone to use a single language game.
>
> You're losing me here - I suspect you're jumping off into your own
> interests. I'm not sure how it relates to what I had written. To tell
> you the truth, I haven't the faintest idea of what "a physical language"
> is, in your usage. Do you mean a "natural language" such as humans
> might speak? Also, how would a language "deconsruct" itself (thinking
> that deconstruction results from an act of volition)? And how does this
> relate to facism?
>
No, I mean the language of physics.
Language deconstructs itself because when you attempt to make it both
complete and free of contradiction, it breaks down.
> > I do not deny the misuse of the human right to create a language game.
> > However, far more prevelant in our time is the Fundamentalist
> > insistence that language is no damn game.
>
> You've introduced "game" here, and I'm not sure what you mean by it. As
> I understand the term, I can't see what it has to do with human rights.
I refer to the insistence, in Fascist and authoritarian societies,
that words must mean "one thing", and that intellectuals are fancy
Dans who use verbosity to deceive the Ordinary Joe. I also refer to
the literal-mindedness of authoritarian individuals.
> Furthermore, what I am wondering is that if catechistic declarations
> are a form of "misuse" at all.
> >
> >>it seems to have caught-on by virtue to its sound/form, connotation
> >>and...well, its intrinsic kewlness. The "why ask why?" slogan of the
> >>art world?
> >>
> > I don't know where anyone gets this idea that (x)[If x is an art
> > student=>x is interested only in kewlness]. Many more are like Mani
> > who react in favor of a tradition, which is of course misunderstood
> > and reified in his case.
>
> I doubt Mani is reifying anything, Ed. In fact, I think he often
> champions the idea of +not+ making the abstract concrete-with a great
> deal of vigor. Besides, if Mani was a strict traditionalist, he
> wouldn't include Carl Barks, Mel Ramos and Vargas on his list of good
> artists. Clearly, his argument is for self-evident virtuosity - within
> that category, his tastes are very broad.
>
I've shown that the fact that he includes Ramos et al. only means that
considered as a serious aesthetic, his theory is so self-contradictory
as to be more a reflection of inchoate taste.
I think he likes Mel Ramos and Vargas because they paint pretty girls.
I like looking at pretty girls but I don't confuse this biological,
indeed hydraulic, mechanism, with a philosophical aesthetic.
BTW, I was once in this lady's bed-room and there was an original
Vargas on the wall. She said she had been the model.
> But to say that some art students utter phases for kewlness is not
> saying that they are +only+ interested in kewlness. I think you're
> building a strawman here, Ed.
>
> >>Another example: Barthes noted something similar in "Teachers, Writers,
> >>Intellectuals". The terms of semiology became fashion, or, as he says:
> >>"a stock of phrases - catechistic declarations."
> >>
> > Barthes was not writing exclusively about the kewl, the chi-chi, and
> > the au fait who are at a minimum at least aware of their utter
> > kewlness, their Carmen Miranda-esque chi-chi-ness, and the fact that
> > they are indeed au fait in a Racinean and doomed fashion.
>
> Who said he was? In the essay I cited [incorrectly, BTW, as it was
> "Change the Object Itself" in "Image-Music-Text], he was writing about
> the fate of the terminology of semiology, which seems similar to me as
> the fate of art writing. In the entire essay, he was revising his
> previous work in "Mythologies" which you allude to below, on the basis
> that we have better critical tools available for understand myth than we
> had in 1957.
>
Perhaps I misunderstood, then.
> > Barthes was primarily writing about the systematic beguilement of the
> > much larger bourgeois of France by mainstream and indeed conservative
> > media who without irony use false, and broadly false, semiotics to set
> > background fashion in favor of home ownership and working 16 hours a
> > day.
>
> Actually, in "Change the Object Itself" Barthes was on an opposite tack,
> that is to extend the critique of French culture to Western Civilization.
>
I am astonished. You seem to have read more Barthes than I,
nonetheless you account him a critic of Western Civilization (whatever
that is) and not of modern Western media, which is not the same thing.
It is true that there is a continuity between Poussin, and the cover
of Paris Match. It is true that readers of Le Figaro and other
conservative Paris newspapers also probably admire Poussin.
Nonetheless, Barthes, in my limited understanding, was writing like
Adorno (with whom I am more familiar) a critique of contemporary
semiology. To me, the Western media's claim to represent the *same*
Western values as let us say, St Augustine, is part of the problem. I
dreamed I saw St Augustine, and he was fired by Fox News.
> > After all, one of his early essays deconstructed a cover of Paris
> > Match which did not show anything chi chi, instead a soldier of the
> > Legion from Africa stiffly saluting the tricolor. Barthes' system
> > demonstrated how this systematically beguiled ordinary French slobs
> > into supporting an adventurist foreign policy (which still walks in
> > the Cote d'Ivoire.)
>
> Oh, come on. He used this to illustrate how "myth" functions in
> culture. Specifically, in the image you cite, the sign contained its
> own signified which prevented semiosis. This could occur unless the
> signified had already landed in the sign by way of mythology making.
>
Again, you're the expert. But my understanding of the essay, which I
have read, is that it is about the way in which contemporary
societies, not just any old society, turn Enlightenment (in the form
of the "pure information" that magazines in such societies claim to
purvey) into a NEW form of myth which is so pervasive that we do not
see it.
This is not a myth we can stand outside-of: cf. Adorno's Introduction
to Sociology. We have to read it from the inside, and with all due
respect I think a mistake a lot of acamodemic pomos make is to fail to
see that this is necessary.
That's why people get mad at them, for INSIDE society they act as if
they are anthropologists from another culture, and jeer at poor
deluded fools sticking Garfield suction-cup toys on their car
windshields.
But the leading figures of pomo thought, especially Adorno, did not do
this.
> >>It seems to me that this "ability" of language to become "words for
> >>word's sake" was less so in the days of Marx and Hegel, and less less so
> >>by the days of the Frankfurt School, than it is today. We probably
> >
> > Alternatively there may be entire philosophical systems, such as that
> > of Hegel which do not exist at all outside the text.
>
> That's a tricky sentence, Ed. There may be systems which do not exist
> outside the text? Hmmmm.
>
Right-o. In the beginning was the Word.
Adorno forbid his auditors to even take notes (although it's dollars
to donuts some of his students drew Teddie getting laid for yocks in
the back of the class.)
That's because guys like Hegel and Adorno did not think they were just
flapping their gums. They thought every word critical precisely
because unlike Bertrand Russell, they could not write equations or
pictures on the board.
Even within the analytic tradition, the reifying idea that one could
"image" a system like Wittgenstein's Tractatus caused the Vienna
*kreis* to totally misunderstand him. They actually thought that
Wittgenstein's substance, which was a completely logical and thus
nonpictorial gunk closer to Spinoza than to Carnap, consisted of
primary colors and loud noises.
> > Alternatively the rage amongst the half-educated for out-of-date
> > analytic approaches may be merely an insistence that the philosophical
> > system, as a text, be a supplement to the real goods in let us say an
> > entire system such as Principia Mathematica, Carnap's Der Logische
> > Aufbau der Welt, or Nelson Goodman's The Structure of Appearance.
>
> You've lost me here. What are you attempting to say?
>
I mean it is a mistake in philosophy to do anything other than attend
to the text, and that attention instead to a pictorial model creates
misunderstanding.
For example, a good way to misunderstand Plato would be The World of
Forms and a better way would be to understand a Symposium to mean
"boy's night out" in which the boys get drunk and produce imageless
TEXTS. Plato did indeedy believe along with Socrates that forms have
a higher reality than material objects but the important feature of
his thought is the journey he makes, even if it is to the barfatorium.
> > There is a consumerist (and I mean that term advisedly) impatience
> > with a mere text which insists upon value for money in the form of a
> > CD-ROM which the consumer can own.
>
> Where are you going with this?
>
I believe that the perceived difficulty, and real unpopularity, of
philosophy is based on our search for a commodity, a system which we
can insert into a computer.
> > Whereas if Hegel had had a chance to put a Hegel game on CD-ROM he
> > would not since the only way to understand Hegel is to crack a damn
> > book.
> >
> > This returns the contemporary reader to a time before developed
> > consumerism in which the reader felt himself subordinate-to or
> > equal-to the author, and not a owner of the author's labor-product.
>
> You've lost me. But what the hell - it ain't the first time.
"You should have seen me reading Marx." - Allen Ginsberg, AMERICA
Derrida re-reads Plato every year and the Plato of the re-read, even
if he does it in the can, is far more lively than some Eurodisney
World of Forms. I think that we perceive intellectual production as
the production of commodities which can be transferred, exclusively,
or not, to buyers. But in the Zen relation of master and disciple,
this did not obtain. Nobody pays to get whacked.
It's possible that the young men of Athens were perceived as corrupted
by Socrates because the latter refused to participate fully in
exchange. There may have been a sort of cottage industry of BS which
Socrates wanted to escape as we see in the Sophist and his attempt may
have gotten him in trouble. Xanthippe may well have implored him to
wise up, and convey more palatable lessons to the guys.
Indeed, a modern Xanthippe, Martha Nussbaum, correctly points out that
the Socratic dream of "truth at all costs" may be itself false and
that there was a larger industry, productive of useful philosophical
commodities for living a happier life, in the Hellenic world.
Therefore I do no romanticise a Socratic, or Marxist, insistence that
philosophy be independent of the search for happiness including the
search for loose change. But we do need to be conscious of ways in
which we might take notes, or insist that Wittgenstein was talking
about color patches, that result from our life in contemporary market
society.
Peter H.M. Brooks
> complete and free of contradiction, it breaks down.
>
necessarily ambiguous, the contradictions are part of its essence. Trying to
make it free of contradiction is a silly exercise.
What do you mean for language to be 'complete' anyway? It doesn't seem to
make sense to me.
You aren't possibly meaning axiom systems here, not language, are you?
--
Nor do I believe that a civilisation which uses torture to defend itself is
a civilisation worth defending. It has already given away one of the core
principles of which its enemy wants to deprive it: a sense of honour and
decency in its actions, however desperate the straits. - Adam Nicholson,
Telegraph 17/12/02
Edward G. Nilges
> "Edward G. Nilges" <spino...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> >
> > Language deconstructs itself because when you attempt to make it both
> > complete and free of contradiction, it breaks down.
> >
> This is to misunderstand the nature and purpose of language. Language is
> necessarily ambiguous, the contradictions are part of its essence. Trying to
> make it free of contradiction is a silly exercise.
>
> What do you mean for language to be 'complete' anyway? It doesn't seem to
> make sense to me.
>
> You aren't possibly meaning axiom systems here, not language, are you?
The claim is Derrida's: I do not say that language "should" be a
mathematical calculus, consistent and complete. Instead, I say that
the claim, and its systematic denial, is part of Western metaphysics.
I understand that I may seem to be recommending that we replace
language with computer language, Principia Mathematica, or Carnap's
system of der Logische Aufbau der Welt by merely comparing actual
language, with its ineradicable contradiction, with these tools.
But in fact, I am saying that the pretense, that language can be
crystalline, is actually made by thinkers and ordinary people who at
one and the same time point to the ambiguity of language, while
holding language to an unambiguous ideal.
For example, a tax auditor may claim that the IRS code is crystal
clear on a point but when the person being audited, using the same
meta-rule, tries to show that a deduction in his favor is valid given
an equally strict interpretation of the rules, the auditor is likely
to shuttle over to the "ambiguous" view and say that "common sense"
denies the validity of the deduction.
A meta-rule about language is used conveniently, and the alternative
of producing a deeper argument is skirted. In my example, the
auditor, when confronted with a deduction for gym membership by an
accountant, who claims it as a business expense, should not merely
point to vagueness and common sense. Instead he should, in an ideal
world, show how this would create an overgeneral precedent by applying
the Kantian test: if anyone, in any profession outside of personal
training, could apply the new rule to gym expenses, then the tax code
would break down (this Kantian test was applied by the Tax Court judge
in the case I saw.)
Derrida's case is that the fact, that language is ineradicably
ambiguous, happens itself to have concrete results in metaphysics and
ethics.
For one thing, its failure in the legal sphere generates modern human
rights thinking outside of a regressive United States in which an
irreversible punishment (the death penalty) should not, as a matter of
moral certainty, be imposed for any crime whatsoever because of the
nonzero probability of linguistic and legal error.
Someone conscious of the artifices (such as symbolic logic and
computer software) by means of which language can be made apparently
precise becomes aware of the value and the limitations of these tools
in a way ordinary people, including "educated" people are not aware of
this precision, and as a result combine unrealistic demands with
*schlamperei* (such as the appointment of drunken public defenders to
death penalty cases) in a way that is morally offensive.
Peter H.M. Brooks
> "Peter H.M. Brooks" <pe...@new.co.za> wrote in message
news:<aur9fd$73j$1...@ctb-nnrp2.saix.net>...
> > "Edward G. Nilges" <spino...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> > >
> > > Language deconstructs itself because when you attempt to make it both
> > > complete and free of contradiction, it breaks down.
> > >
> > This is to misunderstand the nature and purpose of language. Language is
> > necessarily ambiguous, the contradictions are part of its essence.
Trying to
> > make it free of contradiction is a silly exercise.
> >
> > What do you mean for language to be 'complete' anyway? It doesn't seem
to
> > make sense to me.
> >
> > You aren't possibly meaning axiom systems here, not language, are you?
>
> The claim is Derrida's: I do not say that language "should" be a
> mathematical calculus, consistent and complete. Instead, I say that
> the claim, and its systematic denial, is part of Western metaphysics.
>
>
> Someone conscious of the artifices (such as symbolic logic and
> computer software) by means of which language can be made apparently
> precise becomes aware of the value and the limitations of these tools
> in a way ordinary people, including "educated" people are not aware of
> this precision, and as a result combine unrealistic demands with
> *schlamperei* (such as the appointment of drunken public defenders to
> death penalty cases) in a way that is morally offensive.
>
The point is that moral relativism, a la Derrida, leads to that sort of
offensive moral relativism.
It is not necessary to embrase the sort of a linguistic, a logical, a moral,
and a humanistic sort of crap that Derrida spouts to realise the moral
corruption that we suffer.
Nor is it necessary to appeal to that mindlessness and wordy bullshit to
appreciate aesthetics - unless you wish to apologise for a-aesthetic
rubbish. Mani and his ilk are unable to enter the debate. That is not a
reason to embrace the po-mo crap uncritically.
There is an aesthetic. There is a realm of judgement. This doesn't mean that
abstract art, or even found art, is crap, only that there is a strong
critical tradition to evaluate it.
What is not possible is for crap art ( modern, post modern, ancient or
naive - or anything else) to evade judgement. It is true that the judgement
of today might be differernt from the judgement of tomorrow. However this
doesn't mean that all crap today will be redeemed by the judgement of
tomorrow. Rather the reverse, the art that is esteemed today is mostly going
to be (like much Victorian art) seen as crap tomorrow. The limited examples
of art that is seen as good yesterday, good today and good tomorrow are
going to be the yardstick,
Beware the bullshit 'artists' who wish to claim that there is no yardstick.
It may be a variable yardstick, but it is there.
--
A goose is just for Christmas.
Peter H.M. Brooks
"Marilyn Welch" <mwe...@ixxxslandnet.com> wrote in message
> Peter, your aesthetic leaves out ephemeral art & installation
> art made purposely by artists to wither more quickly than the
> Art that supposedly stands the Test of Time.
>
It is a nice conceit that it is my aesthetic! It isn't.
Ephemera are, if they are honestly ephemera, ephemra, so, of their own
nature they have no test of time apart from their swift passing.
If it were otherwise they wouldn't be ephemera.
>
> >
> > Beware the bullshit 'artists' who wish to claim that there is no
yardstick.
> > It may be a variable yardstick, but it is there.
>
> You wish.
>
Silly me!
--
The grandeur of real art, on the contrary, . . . is to rediscover, grasp
again and lay before us that reality from which we become more and more
separated as the formal knowledge which we substitute for it grows in
thickness and imperviousness--that reality which there is grave danger we
might die without ever having known and yet which is simply our life, life
as it really is, life disclosed and made clear . . . .
- Vladimir Nabokov "Marcel Proust (1871-1922)"
Edward G. Nilges
Derrida is not a "moral relativist" insofar as that phrase has any
meaning.
A thoroughgoing moral relativist makes the claim the moral law is
relative to culture, or the economy, or politics, or another area
outside of morality. But unless he actually makes the claim that
morality is equivalent to a behavioral description of moral behavior,
and explained by the situation of the putative moral actor, the moral
relativist is less "thoroughgoing" than even he thought and may
instead be a mere situationalist who believes in right and wrong, but
believes that specific applications demand consideration of the
situation.
That is, there are probably only two types of moral relativists. The
first type denies that a separate moral facility, explainable only on
its own terms, exists and reduces behavior to mechanism. The second
type believes in moral choice and right and wrong but also insists on
changing his specific lists of moral rules depending on the situation.
If Derrida is a moral relativist he is of the second type for nowhere
does he express any sympathy for the reductionism of the first type.
The problem is that a person who simultaneously insists on right and
wrong, while also insisting in the nonvalidity of general rules such
as "don't have sex outside of heterosexual marriage", can be
consistently far more of an absolutist than ordinarily thought. For
once he makes a judgement about a moral situation he is consistent if
he insists, in a nonrelative way, on the truth of his specific
application.
If Derrida is a "moral relativist", then Kant was a "moral relativist"
because Kant believed that the only thing we can know, with certainty,
to be good is a good will.
Of course the connotation of moral relativism is that the moral
relativist might start stealing the silver. However, I have heard no
"Wittgenstein's Poker" fables about Derrida in which he knicks the
flatware or uses it to attack guest lecturers.
The problem is that the moral absolutist can use casuistry to modify
his position and justify (for example) killing in war while forbidding
the killing of the unborn, in bad faith.
To consistently abandon the supposed "moral relativism" of
contemporary *philosophes*, one CANNOT cleave unto a Western tradition
from Descartes to Kant, for these chaps ALSO used doubt as an
epistemological tool and they were also attacked as Godless wights who
were fomenting sedition in so doing.
Nor can one go back to St Augustine (I dreamed I saw St Augustine.)
This is because even traditional Christianity requires the believer to
apply the general moral law, consisting of the Mosaic commandments and
the law of the Church, to specific cases in the sacrament of
confession. The faithful are made, of necessity, into "moral
relativists" for ultimately only they can decide whether they have
sinned in a specific instance. Obedience to authority is stressed, of
course, in a way that became unfashionable (for the top men) in the
Modern era: but in contemporary times it reappears in the form of mere
listening to others.
Nor is Derrida a "moral relativist" in the sense of the merely lazy
sod who says to his disciples, do as thou wilt. Quite the contrary,
for he has been politically active in pressing a variety of causes.
If to avoid the charge of moral relativism, one must issue copy-book
maxims such as "don't beat off" then one isn't doing philosophy at
all.
>
> It is not necessary to embrase the sort of a linguistic, a logical, a moral,
> and a humanistic sort of crap that Derrida spouts to realise the moral
> corruption that we suffer.
>
Oh dear. In what might that corruption be constituted? In the way we
carry on on Saturday night? My dear fellow, people who carry on on
Saturday night do not need philosophical license to do so.
> Nor is it necessary to appeal to that mindlessness and wordy bullshit to
> appreciate aesthetics - unless you wish to apologise for a-aesthetic
> rubbish. Mani and his ilk are unable to enter the debate. That is not a
> reason to embrace the po-mo crap uncritically.
>
The po-mo does not asked to be groped, or embraced, uncritically.
> There is an aesthetic. There is a realm of judgement. This doesn't mean that
> abstract art, or even found art, is crap, only that there is a strong
> critical tradition to evaluate it.
>
> What is not possible is for crap art ( modern, post modern, ancient or
> naive - or anything else) to evade judgement. It is true that the judgement
> of today might be differernt from the judgement of tomorrow. However this
> doesn't mean that all crap today will be redeemed by the judgement of
> tomorrow. Rather the reverse, the art that is esteemed today is mostly going
> to be (like much Victorian art) seen as crap tomorrow. The limited examples
> of art that is seen as good yesterday, good today and good tomorrow are
> going to be the yardstick,
>
With all this talk of the judgement one senses a rather gloomy and
theological tone as if it is somehow *contra naturam* to make
paintings or dances.
If your test of "goodness" is "seen as good yesterday, today and
tomorrow" then NO art will 'scape whipping for ALL artists go through
these cycles of acceptance and desuetude.
> Beware the bullshit 'artists' who wish to claim that there is no yardstick.
> It may be a variable yardstick, but it is there.
Real artists have an internal yardstick and struggle to measure up to
this. Real artists are like to invite you to shove your yardstick
where the sun don't shine. They might adopt a traditional yardstick,
but in the spirit of freedom.
What part of freedom don't you understand?
And where, in this oh-so-free Internet, is anyone who does not proudly
rattle his mental fetters, and loudly demand that others be shackled
to the same row of mental slaves?
Mind-forg'd manacles.
Erik A. Mattila
>>Why? "The ambiguity of space" is pretty obvious - and I did concede that
>>there was an original. You can see artists consciously drawing attention
>>to the flatness of the picture plane while using picture space...quite
>>ambiguously, from about 1850 on. A perfect example is Gauguin's
>>[Renaissance] foreshortened figures placed in a flat patterned environment.
>
>
> My minor issue was the assumption that the art students were just
> passing gas. Some art students do pass gas but not all.
Agreed
>>"Isometric" is a projection, as is linear perspective - but "isometric"
>>is not "perspective". At any rate, my comment was based on hearing half
>
> No, my understanding is that isometric projection is a full
> alternative to vanishing-point systems. It is used in engineering
> drawing to convey information that vanishing-point systems cannot.
I was claiming that axiomatic projections and perspective projections
are different animals. Just a trivia thing.
>>or more presentors making such a claim about their work, regardless of
>>the strategies shown by the painting. But if you paid attention to my
>>post, I was saying that uttering the statement may in fact not be
>>meaningless, although the meaning comes from a metalanguage. Sort of
>>like Malinowski's "phatic communion."
>
> You lost me for a change.
Malinowski's "phatic communion" was...well, visit this URL for some
interesting background, including:
"Linguist David Crystal wrote, on page 10 of his Encyclopedia of
Language(Cambridge University press, 1987): "The anthropologist
Bronislaw Malinowski (19884-1942) coined the phrase 'phatic communion'
to refer to this social function of language, which arises out of the
basic human need to signal friendship - or, at least, lack of enmity""
(Leonor Santos)
http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/10/10-509.html
So if 5 out of nine students utter "I'm dealing with the ambiguity of
space" and there is no evidence of that in the work addressed, the
utterance may "mean" something else - in the social sphere - rather than
being 'gas.'
>>>It is a form of scientistic terrorism to force art students to talk in
>>>a physical language which deconstructs itself at the level of
>>>elementary particles and string theory. Indeed, it is a Fascist
>>>gesture to force everyone to use a single language game.
>>
>>You're losing me here - I suspect you're jumping off into your own
>>interests. I'm not sure how it relates to what I had written. To tell
>>you the truth, I haven't the faintest idea of what "a physical language"
>>is, in your usage. Do you mean a "natural language" such as humans
>>might speak? Also, how would a language "deconsruct" itself (thinking
>>that deconstruction results from an act of volition)? And how does this
>>relate to facism?
> No, I mean the language of physics.
>
> Language deconstructs itself because when you attempt to make it both
> complete and free of contradiction, it breaks down.
Well, this is where I'm having trouble understanding you, and it may be
that I have a different working def of "deconstruction." My
understanding is [in the context of Derrida, for example] that it means
multiple 'readings' of a text. So in the context of this discussion,
one could read "I'm dealing with the ambiguity of space" as "I am a
member of the art world."
>>You've introduced "game" here, and I'm not sure what you mean by it. As
>>I understand the term, I can't see what it has to do with human rights.
>
> I refer to the insistence, in Fascist and authoritarian societies,
> that words must mean "one thing", and that intellectuals are fancy
> Dans who use verbosity to deceive the Ordinary Joe. I also refer to
> the literal-mindedness of authoritarian individuals.
Ha! I'm skeptical about this, Ed. Let's see...when GWB says "we have the
evidence, but it is classified" he most likely means "we haven't any
credible evidence." Are you sure you don't want to qualify your
statement? (just kidding).
>>I doubt Mani is reifying anything, Ed. In fact, I think he often
>>champions the idea of +not+ making the abstract concrete-with a great
>>deal of vigor. Besides, if Mani was a strict traditionalist, he
>>wouldn't include Carl Barks, Mel Ramos and Vargas on his list of good
>>artists. Clearly, his argument is for self-evident virtuosity - within
>>that category, his tastes are very broad.
>>
> I've shown that the fact that he includes Ramos et al. only means that
> considered as a serious aesthetic, his theory is so self-contradictory
> as to be more a reflection of inchoate taste.
Yes, but the ostentatious display of skill and virtuosity isn't a great
grounding for aesthetics, is it? Subject matter aside, I think Ramos
and Vargas can make a good case for skill - but I would criticize both
on ground of being "formula painters."
> I think he likes Mel Ramos and Vargas because they paint pretty girls.
> I like looking at pretty girls but I don't confuse this biological,
> indeed hydraulic, mechanism, with a philosophical aesthetic.
I would have to study Mani's position on this, but what I remember is
that he is only claiming skill.
> BTW, I was once in this lady's bed-room and there was an original
> Vargas on the wall. She said she had been the model.
Well...do you think she was?
>>Actually, in "Change the Object Itself" Barthes was on an opposite tack,
>>that is to extend the critique of French culture to Western Civilization.
>>
> I am astonished. You seem to have read more Barthes than I,
> nonetheless you account him a critic of Western Civilization (whatever
> that is) and not of modern Western media, which is not the same thing.
Certainly in "Mythologies" Barthes used advertising as a theoretical
object. But his forte is literary criticism, which of course goes
beyond western media. By "Western civilization" I mean the range
covered by a course in "The History of Western Civilization." But it's
a good concept to question, like "whose west?" Here in California, it
could be Japan.
> It is true that there is a continuity between Poussin, and the cover
> of Paris Match. It is true that readers of Le Figaro and other
> conservative Paris newspapers also probably admire Poussin.
>
> Nonetheless, Barthes, in my limited understanding, was writing like
> Adorno (with whom I am more familiar) a critique of contemporary
> semiology. To me, the Western media's claim to represent the *same*
> Western values as let us say, St Augustine, is part of the problem. I
> dreamed I saw St Augustine, and he was fired by Fox News.
In my opinion it was not so much a "critique" of semiology, but rather
using semiology to critique....well, first French culture and later
"Western civilization."
>>Oh, come on. He used this to illustrate how "myth" functions in
>>culture. Specifically, in the image you cite, the sign contained its
>>own signified which prevented semiosis. This could occur unless the
>>signified had already landed in the sign by way of mythology making.
>>
> Again, you're the expert. But my understanding of the essay, which I
> have read, is that it is about the way in which contemporary
> societies, not just any old society, turn Enlightenment (in the form
> of the "pure information" that magazines in such societies claim to
> purvey) into a NEW form of myth which is so pervasive that we do not
> see it.
Well, look...we all pick and choose what we read - I can't really argue
what your read in Barthes as it is as legitimate as what i read
(especially under the deconstruction game.) So let's say that Barthes
has a very broad reach, and you and I select what is interesting and
relevant to us (or even comprehensible, for that matter). The only
reality check either of us has is to measure statements we might make
based on our selective readings against the whole body of work
attributable to Roland Barthes. On this basis, I would respectfully
disagree with your idea about "a NEW form of myth. I would have agreed
with you for a long period in the past, but I came to believe that
Barthes was in fact not talking about a "New" form at all. It was the
same old myth, "Oedipus" or "Soapsuds and Detergents." Certainly
Soapsuds is new, chronologically, but Barthes was talking about form, in
the sense of structure, and in this both myths are built the same way.
> This is not a myth we can stand outside-of: cf. Adorno's Introduction
> to Sociology. We have to read it from the inside, and with all due
> respect I think a mistake a lot of acamodemic pomos make is to fail to
> see that this is necessary.
But that's the basic premise of structuralism...that is, to develop a
system whereby on can escape the system by looking at how it is
assembled instead of its content.
> That's why people get mad at them, for INSIDE society they act as if
> they are anthropologists from another culture, and jeer at poor
> deluded fools sticking Garfield suction-cup toys on their car
> windshields.
Heck- vanity, conceit and elitism may not be symptons of post modernism.
> But the leading figures of pomo thought, especially Adorno, did not do
> this.
I've never felt comfortable reading Adorno, but one thing comes to mind.
I know that he did a lot of work after the Frankfurt school, but I
would like to comment that the work of the Frankfurt isn't post
modernism - maybe protopostmodern (ha ha ha).
>>> Alternatively there may be entire philosophical systems, such as that
>>>of Hegel which do not exist at all outside the text.
>>
>>That's a tricky sentence, Ed. There may be systems which do not exist
>>outside the text? Hmmmm.
>>
> Right-o. In the beginning was the Word.
Maybe I need to understand what you mean by "text" or "Text."
> Adorno forbid his auditors to even take notes (although it's dollars
> to donuts some of his students drew Teddie getting laid for yocks in
> the back of the class.)
>
> That's because guys like Hegel and Adorno did not think they were just
> flapping their gums. They thought every word critical precisely
> because unlike Bertrand Russell, they could not write equations or
> pictures on the board.
>
> Even within the analytic tradition, the reifying idea that one could
> "image" a system like Wittgenstein's Tractatus caused the Vienna
> *kreis* to totally misunderstand him. They actually thought that
> Wittgenstein's substance, which was a completely logical and thus
> nonpictorial gunk closer to Spinoza than to Carnap, consisted of
> primary colors and loud noises.
Take pity on your readers, Ed. I mean, if I wanted to understand the
above paragraph above I would have to do some serious research.
>>>There is a consumerist (and I mean that term advisedly) impatience
>>>with a mere text which insists upon value for money in the form of a
>>>CD-ROM which the consumer can own.
>>
>>Where are you going with this?
>>
> I believe that the perceived difficulty, and real unpopularity, of
> philosophy is based on our search for a commodity, a system which we
> can insert into a computer.
Here in the U.S. we get high marks of analytical thinking, and very low
marks in conceptual thinking. I suspect that this has a lot to do with
the unpopularity of philosophy. Until the impossible AI technology
bears fruit, philosophy has a snowball's chance in hell of being digitized.
> "You should have seen me reading Marx." - Allen Ginsberg, AMERICA
>
> Derrida re-reads Plato every year and the Plato of the re-read, even
> if he does it in the can, is far more lively than some Eurodisney
> World of Forms. I think that we perceive intellectual production as
> the production of commodities which can be transferred, exclusively,
> or not, to buyers. But in the Zen relation of master and disciple,
> this did not obtain. Nobody pays to get whacked.
Are you sure? Ain't wisdom what the Zen master's peddles?
Erik
Peter H.M. Brooks
>
> What part of freedom don't you understand?
>
A poet is free to write any sonnet he likes, but doesn't have the license to
produce one of twenty lines because that would not be a sonnet.
It's a very simple point but one rather widely misunderstood.
Peter H.M. Brooks
>
well.
Edward G. Nilges
> "Edward G. Nilges" <spino...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> >
> > [delightfully entertaining rant deleted]
> >
entertaining.
> > What part of freedom don't you understand?
> >
> Methinks that, like many, you confuse freedom with license.
"License" is a deliberately anachronistic word, for it more or less
presumes without argument that many people lack an inner ethical
motor, and misuse a permission only available from a sovereign during
carnival or festival times to boogie down in excess of the writ of the
license.
To use the word "license" is to appoint oneself to a clerisy, that
exists between the sovereign and the people, because actual people
will boogie down, or not, independent of whether they think they
should because of the presence of the sovereign's amnesty.
Only the clerisy is at all concerned with whether the people have
obtained their proper license to boogie down because of the material
fact that the sovereign depends on the clerisy to inspect driver's
licenses at the club entrance to verify that the young folks,
clamoring for entry, are of age. That is, in the frozen and
traditional picture, the clerisy is a form of bouncer.
I would suggest that it is the clerisy's task to abandon this
gate-keeping position in an era when it has become abundantly clear
that the ONLY type of valid ethics and morality is that which comes
from within.
Indeed, our era is one in which people have been abandoning, through
such diverse programs as alcohol and drug recovery, their assigned
task of partying down in excess of sovereign license, a task which
served the function of enabling the sovereign to increase police
power. An early example was Malcolm X's call to black men to act with
dignity, and today, community organizations in the inner city are
based solidly on "personal responsibility."
In the art sphere the corresponding phenomenon is the artist who (like
Jenny Holzer) decides to define a genre (in Ms Holzer's case, words as
pictures) and who then works harder than you may imagine (schlepping
down to the Soho Radio Shack at all hours and learning a good deal of
nerd electronics) following not someone else's vision but her own. It
is hard to imagine Ms Holzer here acting with any kind of
licentiousness.
>
> A poet is free to write any sonnet he likes, but doesn't have the license to
> produce one of twenty lines because that would not be a sonnet.
This is wrong, because it may be necessary for a poet, who indeed
would like to write a poem with the effect of a sonnet today but who
finds that the 14 line structure changes the message from that of a
sonnet to that of an anachronism.
That is, some slacker may have Shakespearean feelings about some cute
little old gal with a tummy ring. But he may find when he writes in a
traditional style, the feelings, which are genuine, do not come
across, and the gal thinks he's a total weirdo.
He may then devise a slacker sonnet which in terms of the overall
topos deserves to be called a sonnet, of type S.
If he is successful, English teachers thereafter will be forced to
say, there are TWO types of sonnets whose underlying theme is the
transmission of feelings of horniness that are so intense that they
become spiritual (this would require us to connect with that type of
adolescent horniness so intense, because checked, that it feels
otherworldly. Needless to say, TV and media in general have almost
destroyed this but it may still exist.)
His struggle with the new rules may be far more intense than mapping
the new feelings onto the old rules.
We find it difficult to write sonnets because material conditions have
changed, but my guess is that in the Earl of Southampton's country
home, guys sat around composing sonnets extempore and at speed, while
guzzling wine and waiting out the Plague. The rules were known and
probably did not need to be spelled out, and the boys probably
violated them when smashed in the spirit of poems where you expect a
rhyme and don't get one.
But to call some labored, anachronistic sonnet written by some swot
who has consciously mastered an out of date form art is just silly.
I mean, I sat down today to write me a sonnet
This was because I got me a bee in my bonnet
About impressing a girl at the mall
Who is quite beautiful and also tall.
>
> It's a very simple point but one rather widely misunderstood.
I am afraid that the misunderstanding is constituted in the implied
belief that (1) there is something "out there" called The Laws of
Sonnet Writing and (2) we have to obey them and (3) an artist who
devises his own constitution is not working just as hard, if not
harder, than some damn hack.
Peter H.M. Brooks
> "Peter H.M. Brooks" <pe...@new.co.za> wrote in message
news:<auubem$fld$1...@ctb-nnrp2.saix.net>...
> > "Edward G. Nilges" <spino...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> > >
>
> > >
> > Methinks that, like many, you confuse freedom with license.
>
> "License" is a deliberately anachronistic word, for it more or less
> presumes without argument that many people lack an inner ethical
> motor, and misuse a permission only available from a sovereign during
> carnival or festival times to boogie down in excess of the writ of the
> license.
>
currency in my conversation and that of people that I know.
License is also not just a legal term.
>
> To use the word "license" is to appoint oneself to a clerisy, that
> exists between the sovereign and the people, because actual people
> will boogie down, or not, independent of whether they think they
> should because of the presence of the sovereign's amnesty.
>
Now that is an anachronistic view of it!
>
> I would suggest that it is the clerisy's task to abandon this
> gate-keeping position in an era when it has become abundantly clear
> that the ONLY type of valid ethics and morality is that which comes
> from within.
>
> Indeed, our era is one in which people have been abandoning, through
> such diverse programs as alcohol and drug recovery, their assigned
> task of partying down in excess of sovereign license, a task which
> served the function of enabling the sovereign to increase police
> power. An early example was Malcolm X's call to black men to act with
> dignity, and today, community organizations in the inner city are
> based solidly on "personal responsibility."
>
I am as against the clerisy, the 'moral majority', the 'politically correct'
and other fascists as the next man (in this case you) are.
>
> In the art sphere the corresponding phenomenon is the artist who (like
> Jenny Holzer) decides to define a genre (in Ms Holzer's case, words as
> pictures) and who then works harder than you may imagine (schlepping
> down to the Soho Radio Shack at all hours and learning a good deal of
> nerd electronics) following not someone else's vision but her own. It
> is hard to imagine Ms Holzer here acting with any kind of
> licentiousness.
>
Licentiousness is not the opposite of license!
>
>
> >
> > A poet is free to write any sonnet he likes, but doesn't have the
license to
> > produce one of twenty lines because that would not be a sonnet.
>
> This is wrong, because it may be necessary for a poet, who indeed
> would like to write a poem with the effect of a sonnet today but who
> finds that the 14 line structure changes the message from that of a
> sonnet to that of an anachronism.
>
That would be a bad poet, one not capable of writing a sonnet.
>
> That is, some slacker may have Shakespearean feelings about some cute
> little old gal with a tummy ring. But he may find when he writes in a
> traditional style, the feelings, which are genuine, do not come
> across, and the gal thinks he's a total weirdo.
>
Fine, he can write some prose.
>
> He may then devise a slacker sonnet which in terms of the overall
> topos deserves to be called a sonnet, of type S.
>
>
> If he is successful, English teachers thereafter will be forced to
> say, there are TWO types of sonnets whose underlying theme is the
> transmission of feelings of horniness that are so intense that they
> become spiritual (this would require us to connect with that type of
> adolescent horniness so intense, because checked, that it feels
> otherworldly. Needless to say, TV and media in general have almost
> destroyed this but it may still exist.)
>
Nonsense.
>
> But to call some labored, anachronistic sonnet written by some swot
> who has consciously mastered an out of date form art is just silly.
>
You seem to have a bee in your bonnet about what you see as anachronisms. I
wonder why.
Obviously just because something has the form of a sonnet doesn't mean that
it is any good!
> >
> > It's a very simple point but one rather widely misunderstood.
>
> I am afraid that the misunderstanding is constituted in the implied
> belief that (1) there is something "out there" called The Laws of
> Sonnet Writing and (2) we have to obey them and (3) an artist who
> devises his own constitution is not working just as hard, if not
> harder, than some damn hack.
>
You miss the point competely. You are quite free to write anything you like
in a sonnet, but if you write something in another form, then it is not a
sonnet.
Peter H.M. Brooks
> belief that (1) there is something "out there" called The Laws of
> Sonnet Writing and (2) we have to obey them and (3) an artist who
> devises his own constitution is not working just as hard, if not
> harder, than some damn hack.
>
sonnet that constitutes the method of recognising that something is a sonnet
rather than an elephant or koan.
If you produce an elephant and claim it is a sonnet you are simply wrong,
and wrong in a not particularly interesting or useful manner.
An artist who not only devises art, but also its form (Gerard Manley
Hopkins, for example) has to work harder than one that works within an
existing form, this is true. The result can be exceptional (as in the case
of GMH, for example), or it can be a mess, that is not predicated upon how
hard the person works.
--
Naturally base, raised by imaginary and unrepeating, cyclic, aeternity, with
unity we are mere nothing! My six glyphic friends and I.
Edward G. Nilges
> Edward G. Nilges wrote:
>
> >>Why? "The ambiguity of space" is pretty obvious - and I did concede that
> >>there was an original. You can see artists consciously drawing attention
> >>to the flatness of the picture plane while using picture space...quite
> >>ambiguously, from about 1850 on. A perfect example is Gauguin's
> >>[Renaissance] foreshortened figures placed in a flat patterned environment.
> >
> >
> > My minor issue was the assumption that the art students were just
> > passing gas. Some art students do pass gas but not all.
>
> Agreed
>
> >>"Isometric" is a projection, as is linear perspective - but "isometric"
> >>is not "perspective". At any rate, my comment was based on hearing half
> >
> > No, my understanding is that isometric projection is a full
> > alternative to vanishing-point systems. It is used in engineering
> > drawing to convey information that vanishing-point systems cannot.
>
> I was claiming that axiomatic projections and perspective projections
> are different animals. Just a trivia thing.
"Isometric", not "axiomatic" (a trivial correction.)
Yes, they are.
However, a reading of the later Wittgenstein shows us a very
interesting point about the preference for isometric projection in art
versus vanishing point perspective.
It is that there is NO REASON, physically, for preferring the one to
the other.
In engineering drawing and CAD/CAM, an isometric drawing of a tool
actually conveys more information to the people on the shop floor who
must transform the drawing into a model. Vanishing-point perspective
HIDES information.
This may be why painters of the Gothic and Mediaeval era generally
favored isometric perspective, because their task according to the
Church authorities was illuminating the simple folk as to the
mysteries of the Church including let us say the story of Salome and
John Baptist.
Paintings of this popular tale often show Salome at different stages
in her moral collapse in the same pictorial space, with John Baptist
languishing in clink inches from Salome and she boogies down in front
of Herod, and in isometric perspective. This is because the painter
had to show a story which unfolded in time, more in the manner of a
comic strip than a Renaissance painting which had a more literate
audience of humanists.
Mani hypostatizes a magic link called "realism" in the successful use
of chiaroscuro and vanishing-point perspective. But this requires a
pre-existing "constitutional convention" in which a basic law is laid
down, that declares (without an argument that CANNOT BE MADE)
"successful use of chiaroscuro and vanishing point is the only valid
realismus."
Note that I do not phrase the artistic Constitution as "successful use
of *naturalistic* chiaroscuro and *naturalistic* perspective" because
the use of the word "naturalistic" presupposes what the constitutional
convention is trying to decide, in a manner that pulls the law up by
its own bootstraps.
We call vanishing point perspective "naturalistic" only because that
is what we've been told. In my engineering drawing example, isometric
is MORE naturalistic if nature includes the need to create a 3-d
model.
Wittgenstein continually raised these concerns in Philosophical
Investigations and asked why we hypostatize a magic link between
language (where painting is a language) and the world. Any klutz
working on a home project with tools has a Wittgensteinian moment when
he fails to remember WHICH WAY to turn a screw in order to tighten a
bolt, or fails to understand the directions.
>
> >>or more presentors making such a claim about their work, regardless of
> >>the strategies shown by the painting. But if you paid attention to my
> >>post, I was saying that uttering the statement may in fact not be
> >>meaningless, although the meaning comes from a metalanguage. Sort of
> >>like Malinowski's "phatic communion."
> >
> > You lost me for a change.
>
> Malinowski's "phatic communion" was...well, visit this URL for some
> interesting background, including:
>
> "Linguist David Crystal wrote, on page 10 of his Encyclopedia of
> Language(Cambridge University press, 1987): "The anthropologist
> Bronislaw Malinowski (19884-1942) coined the phrase 'phatic communion'
> to refer to this social function of language, which arises out of the
> basic human need to signal friendship - or, at least, lack of enmity""
> (Leonor Santos)
>
Interesting point, for then it reappears in Kant. This refutes the
value neutrality of post-Kantian theories of language, in which it is
a neutral way of communicating facts drained of evaluation. Kant then
is the survival of a basic asymettry in language for in Kant, a
discourse ethics makes us not only cogntively but also ethicall
responsible to (1) speak truly and (2) assume, until evidence appears
to the contrary, that our interlocutor is in good faith.
> http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/10/10-509.html
>
> So if 5 out of nine students utter "I'm dealing with the ambiguity of
> space" and there is no evidence of that in the work addressed, the
> utterance may "mean" something else - in the social sphere - rather than
> being 'gas.'
>
I am willing to admit that many students, to their long-term sorrow,
learn to repeat BS without understanding. They learn the instructor's
favorite code-words and learn to parrot them, and then drown their
sorrows (over this form of corruption) at spring break.
They then enter the corporation and repeat the pattern.
But there are those of us who take some BS quite seriously.
> >>>It is a form of scientistic terrorism to force art students to talk in
> >>>a physical language which deconstructs itself at the level of
> >>>elementary particles and string theory. Indeed, it is a Fascist
> >>>gesture to force everyone to use a single language game.
> >>
> >>You're losing me here - I suspect you're jumping off into your own
> >>interests. I'm not sure how it relates to what I had written. To tell
> >>you the truth, I haven't the faintest idea of what "a physical language"
> >>is, in your usage. Do you mean a "natural language" such as humans
> >>might speak? Also, how would a language "deconsruct" itself (thinking
> >>that deconstruction results from an act of volition)? And how does this
> >>relate to facism?
>
> > No, I mean the language of physics.
> >
> > Language deconstructs itself because when you attempt to make it both
> > complete and free of contradiction, it breaks down.
>
> Well, this is where I'm having trouble understanding you, and it may be
> that I have a different working def of "deconstruction." My
> understanding is [in the context of Derrida, for example] that it means
> multiple 'readings' of a text. So in the context of this discussion,
> one could read "I'm dealing with the ambiguity of space" as "I am a
> member of the art world."
>
This is a corrupt and self-defeating statement because even in basic
material terms, when the rubber hits the road in a down art market
(where superficial collectors who allow their interior decorator to
select art have left the market) the artist will be seen to be a fraud
by a REAL collector who is parting with his hard-earned cash.
Robert Scull, in Tom Wolfe's essay, made his money by operating a
fleet of cabs and was also a collector of moderns. He was clearly not
the sort of guy who artists could BS around with.
> >>You've introduced "game" here, and I'm not sure what you mean by it. As
> >>I understand the term, I can't see what it has to do with human rights.
> >
> > I refer to the insistence, in Fascist and authoritarian societies,
> > that words must mean "one thing", and that intellectuals are fancy
> > Dans who use verbosity to deceive the Ordinary Joe. I also refer to
> > the literal-mindedness of authoritarian individuals.
>
> Ha! I'm skeptical about this, Ed. Let's see...when GWB says "we have the
> evidence, but it is classified" he most likely means "we haven't any
> credible evidence." Are you sure you don't want to qualify your
> statement? (just kidding).
That's the paradox. The Nazis decried intellectual double talk, but
in their popular media (such as the magazine Signal) the Nazis used
simple coding systems that were simple enough for the ordinary
Heinrich.
For example, it now appears that later in the war, references to
resettlement of Jews in conquered lands did not mean "the Jews are
being resettled in conquered lands."
For the ordinary Inge and Heinrich they meant instead "ve no longer
haff to worry about zem pesky Juice, zey are being taken care of and
assk no more questions."
A simple minded encoding scheme close to computer language was used.
Like a computer language, this language of the Nazi media had "stop"
signals as in the case of any reference to U-Boat crews who (as seen
in the movie Das Boot were themselves brutalized while they
systematically brutalized, as seen in the movie, survivors of their
own attacks.) Inge and Heinrich, especially if they had a son in the
U-Boats, had some idea of what was going on but the "stop" signal was
constituted in using the image of the U-Boat crew, heroically
defending the Fatherland against English SOBs, to stop thought and
speech...even as ANY ordinary policeman, even when corrupt, became
nation-wide untouchable in public discourse owing to the genuine
sacrifice of SOME policemen at the World Trade Center...to the extent
that bullies have disrupted signings by author William Langeweische
merely because his book on the reconstruction of the trade center
mentioned some documented instances of misbehavior by cops and firemen
at the site.
A recent attempt was Sen. Trent Lott's FAILURE to use the
language...which like computer language is prone to the phenomenon of
the "bug."
This is because for years, Republican politicians have used "crime" to
mean "white racial superiority" but Lott was found, while running his
mouth in favor of Thurmond, to thereby question ALL civil rights
changes since 1948.
More skilled politicians, however, will continue to use racially coded
language to code "white" as "working for a living honestly."
The ordinary Joe knows that the conservative politician is encoding
his racial hatred and indeed watches the performance as he would
sports.
The ordinary Joe would also like not to have to sacrifice his sons and
daughters to military adventure and would like, like Inge and
Heinrich, not to hear too many details about international realities.
This is why, for example, the Bush team in the 2000 elections was able
to defeat Sen. McCain.
Senator McCain, for whom I have qualified admiration, brought home the
reality of the 1960s as seen in Ollie Stone's pic Born on the Fourth
of July: for just as Tom Cruise's Dad could not deal with the reality
of an injured, pill-popping Marine son who had done his damn duty, the
Bush team knew that the ordinary Joe would not be able to deal with
the possibility that Sen. McCain might have an explosive temper as a
result of his POW service (for what it is worth, the same sorts of
things were said about Charles DeGaulle, who was a POW in WWI.)
This encoding is still literal-mindedness for the encoding is so easy
to understand as a spectator sport, if hard to do as a technical
matter.
>
> >>I doubt Mani is reifying anything, Ed. In fact, I think he often
> >>champions the idea of +not+ making the abstract concrete-with a great
> >>deal of vigor. Besides, if Mani was a strict traditionalist, he
> >>wouldn't include Carl Barks, Mel Ramos and Vargas on his list of good
> >>artists. Clearly, his argument is for self-evident virtuosity - within
> >>that category, his tastes are very broad.
> >>
> > I've shown that the fact that he includes Ramos et al. only means that
> > considered as a serious aesthetic, his theory is so self-contradictory
> > as to be more a reflection of inchoate taste.
>
> Yes, but the ostentatious display of skill and virtuosity isn't a great
> grounding for aesthetics, is it? Subject matter aside, I think Ramos
> and Vargas can make a good case for skill - but I would criticize both
> on ground of being "formula painters."
>
We are in agreement.
> > I think he likes Mel Ramos and Vargas because they paint pretty girls.
> > I like looking at pretty girls but I don't confuse this biological,
> > indeed hydraulic, mechanism, with a philosophical aesthetic.
>
> I would have to study Mani's position on this, but what I remember is
> that he is only claiming skill.
>
Not so. His claim, repeated thousands of times is "no skill no art."
> > BTW, I was once in this lady's bed-room and there was an original
> > Vargas on the wall. She said she had been the model.
>
> Well...do you think she was?
>
She'd worked as a Bunny in the 1970s and was friends with several rock
stars. It's possible.
> >>Actually, in "Change the Object Itself" Barthes was on an opposite tack,
> >>that is to extend the critique of French culture to Western Civilization.
> >>
> > I am astonished. You seem to have read more Barthes than I,
> > nonetheless you account him a critic of Western Civilization (whatever
> > that is) and not of modern Western media, which is not the same thing.
>
> Certainly in "Mythologies" Barthes used advertising as a theoretical
> object. But his forte is literary criticism, which of course goes
> beyond western media. By "Western civilization" I mean the range
> covered by a course in "The History of Western Civilization." But it's
> a good concept to question, like "whose west?" Here in California, it
> could be Japan.
>
> > It is true that there is a continuity between Poussin, and the cover
> > of Paris Match. It is true that readers of Le Figaro and other
> > conservative Paris newspapers also probably admire Poussin.
> >
> > Nonetheless, Barthes, in my limited understanding, was writing like
> > Adorno (with whom I am more familiar) a critique of contemporary
> > semiology. To me, the Western media's claim to represent the *same*
> > Western values as let us say, St Augustine, is part of the problem. I
> > dreamed I saw St Augustine, and he was fired by Fox News.
>
> In my opinion it was not so much a "critique" of semiology, but rather
> using semiology to critique....well, first French culture and later
> "Western civilization."
>
I am chiefly interested in it as a way of showing that modern media
cannot convey anything resembling "civilization." It is a carrier
wave for addicting people in underdeveloped lands to Marlboro
cigarettes and American beer.
> >>Oh, come on. He used this to illustrate how "myth" functions in
> >>culture. Specifically, in the image you cite, the sign contained its
> >>own signified which prevented semiosis. This could occur unless the
> >>signified had already landed in the sign by way of mythology making.
> >>
> > Again, you're the expert. But my understanding of the essay, which I
> > have read, is that it is about the way in which contemporary
> > societies, not just any old society, turn Enlightenment (in the form
> > of the "pure information" that magazines in such societies claim to
> > purvey) into a NEW form of myth which is so pervasive that we do not
> > see it.
>
> Well, look...we all pick and choose what we read - I can't really argue
> what your read in Barthes as it is as legitimate as what i read
> (especially under the deconstruction game.) So let's say that Barthes
> has a very broad reach, and you and I select what is interesting and
> relevant to us (or even comprehensible, for that matter). The only
> reality check either of us has is to measure statements we might make
> based on our selective readings against the whole body of work
> attributable to Roland Barthes. On this basis, I would respectfully
> disagree with your idea about "a NEW form of myth. I would have agreed
> with you for a long period in the past, but I came to believe that
> Barthes was in fact not talking about a "New" form at all. It was the
> same old myth, "Oedipus" or "Soapsuds and Detergents." Certainly
> Soapsuds is new, chronologically, but Barthes was talking about form, in
> the sense of structure, and in this both myths are built the same way.
This is a pessimistic denial of both Western and non-Western thinkers
of recent times, from Marx to Ho Chi Minh, who believed that mankind
had progressed beyond the need for myths to encode social mores and
could instead, like the followers of Malcolm X, internalize ethical
standards of their own choosing.
>
> > This is not a myth we can stand outside-of: cf. Adorno's Introduction
> > to Sociology. We have to read it from the inside, and with all due
> > respect I think a mistake a lot of acamodemic pomos make is to fail to
> > see that this is necessary.
>
> But that's the basic premise of structuralism...that is, to develop a
> system whereby on can escape the system by looking at how it is
> assembled instead of its content.
>
You cannot do this from the inside without serious problems of bias.
For example, Derrida would ask the American academic to examine his
tenure system.
Unfortunately this would transform the po mo academic BACK into the
1960s activist because it is a feature of the world outside Utopia
that to understand it is to want to fix it.
No mercy. I am merely reversing the way in which senior people in
academia deny marginal input based on lack of homework. I happen to
think that no po mo can claim to be one unless he has read
Wittgenstein and Hegel.
Indeed, only in American universities do you find the absurd
specialization in which a senior, tenured faculty member will have
significant gaps in his reading.
I respect Noam Chomsky. Nonetheless, I was appalled to discover in an
Internet conference that Chomsky failed to have read Hegel,
apparently, and furthermore wanted to deny me the right to read Hegel
based on Hegel's racism. It appeared to me that Chomsky, at best, had
a Philosophy 101 survey course understanding of Hegel dating from the
1940s in which Hegel was presented, in English and American
universities as a proto-Nazi.
In American graduate schools, graudate students who have been
underserved by the relative lack of depth on the part of their
undergraduate teachers are encouraged to overspecialized in a silly
aping of science. They thus select the world-shattering task of
discovering new but useless factoids about Jane Austen.
Then, later on, when some genuinely first-class person makes an
interesting comment about Jane Austen's relationship to the slave
trade, these second-rate hacks write articles saying that "Western
Civilization is doomed" because as it happens they don't read outside
their fields, and know absolutely diddly about just how lively a topic
the slave trade was in Austen's time, a time in which British naval
officers actually did some good.
I can only contrast the French model. Derrida re-reads Plato,
probably in the can. Foucault went to the library every day of his
life. Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir fought to retain philosophy in
French high schools and as a result of this France and some
Francophone countries are the only places where philosophy is taught
in high school.
Edward Said, the Palestinian activist and critic, was able to relate
Orientalism to art and the opera because he read outside of his field.
A depressingly frequent occurence in American universities is the
academic put-down of the attempt to introduce material predefined as
marginal. It appears to me today, based on my experience with Chomsky
(who asked Mike Albert to turn my access off after my Hegel question)
that many senior people in the American university are first and
foremost afraid. In Chomsky's case, I think the fear understandable
for in fact the now defunct Z BBS was deluged with insane garbage by
wounded nut-cases and it is likely that Chomsky is quite afraid of
threats based on his left politics.
But in the case of a Stanley Fish or Harold Bloom I can think of no
excuse for their narrowness. Shakespeare and the Invention of the
Human is an entire book based on the systematic dismissal of recent
feminist and text-based scholarship on Shakespeare, which has
generated important insight, in favor of a pompous and unoriginal
reading.
Edward Said, speaking in 1998 at the Art Institute of Chicago, replied
with a courtesy missing for the most part in these type of meetings.
There are disruptive questions, there are political speeches phrased
as questions, and their are irritating autodidacts (like me.)
Unfortunately, however, the survival of a mediaevalism in the form of
the university in a market society generates cruelty and perversion
for probably the same reason Catholic priests got away so long with
abuse.
> >>>There is a consumerist (and I mean that term advisedly) impatience
> >>>with a mere text which insists upon value for money in the form of a
> >>>CD-ROM which the consumer can own.
> >>
> >>Where are you going with this?
> >>
> > I believe that the perceived difficulty, and real unpopularity, of
> > philosophy is based on our search for a commodity, a system which we
> > can insert into a computer.
>
> Here in the U.S. we get high marks of analytical thinking, and very low
> marks in conceptual thinking. I suspect that this has a lot to do with
> the unpopularity of philosophy. Until the impossible AI technology
> bears fruit, philosophy has a snowball's chance in hell of being digitized.
>
Computers can only free up graduate students from scut work (part of
my early interest in the computer was caused by the fact that I had to
create the bibliography for the late E. D. Klemke's book Essays on
Wittgenstein.)
But this would end the game of abusing graduate students. E. D.
Klemke was a most kind mentor, and quite unlike some of today's senior
faculty: I was fortunate.
> > "You should have seen me reading Marx." - Allen Ginsberg, AMERICA
> >
> > Derrida re-reads Plato every year and the Plato of the re-read, even
> > if he does it in the can, is far more lively than some Eurodisney
> > World of Forms. I think that we perceive intellectual production as
> > the production of commodities which can be transferred, exclusively,
> > or not, to buyers. But in the Zen relation of master and disciple,
> > this did not obtain. Nobody pays to get whacked.
>
> Are you sure? Ain't wisdom what the Zen master's peddles?
Not if the student sees him as PRIMARILY self-interested. I do agree
with Spinoza: a market of individual producers of "wisdom" in the form
of philosophers who form their own schools, is probably the ideal.
In this connection, I caught an aging Anthony Robbins, a self-help
guru of the 1980s, being interviewed in Venice, Calif, and he was
still conveying his Hellenistic message that we can make ourselves a
better life. Before mocking such people we should read a genuine
scholar, Martha Nussbaum, who shows how Greek philosophy emphasised,
like modern American self-help people, our responsibility for our own
happiness.
Once the Master's market motivation grows beyond a certain point, the
student should question whether he has his interests at heart. I
could move to Venice tomorrow and start yapping on corners for
peanuts, but I could not in conscience set up a chain of wisdom shops.
>
> Erik
Peter H.M. Brooks
> Internet conference that Chomsky failed to have read Hegel,
> apparently, and furthermore wanted to deny me the right to read Hegel
> based on Hegel's racism. It appeared to me that Chomsky, at best, had
> a Philosophy 101 survey course understanding of Hegel dating from the
> 1940s in which Hegel was presented, in English and American
> universities as a proto-Nazi.
>
about the Nazi propaganda methods - early, and more transparent,
practitioners of the 'manufacturing of consent' that Chomsky describes so
well. The irony of Chomsky having the same blindness within his own world
view is not surprising, but quite profound.
Mind you the Hegelian trivialisation of thought into the simplistic
'thesis - antithesis' dichotomy is at the base of a number of unfortunate
developments. The CEO of a large computer company was exposed to Hegel with
disasterous results, to mention just one example. For people whose brains
hurt when they think and lips move when they read the black and white world
of Hegel is too obviously appealing.
So, though I would be against banning Hegel, I think it would be important
to encourage reading other less dangerous philosophers.
Since you mention Wittgenstein, I wonder if anybody has taken Tractatus
2.172 [A picture cannot, however, depict its pictorial form: it displays it]
as a challenge rather than a fact.
Mani Deli
>>
>> I respect Noam Chomsky. Nonetheless, I was appalled to discover in an
>> Internet conference that Chomsky failed to have read Hegel,
>> apparently, and furthermore wanted to deny me the right to read Hegel
>> based on Hegel's racism. It appeared to me that Chomsky, at best, had
>> a Philosophy 101 survey course understanding of Hegel dating from the
>> 1940s in which Hegel was presented, in English and American
>> universities as a proto-Nazi.
Perhaps he read Russell who after doing a splendid job demolishing
Hagel concluded that it was "nonsense."
...no skill no art!
Want to get away from the indecipherable imbecilities and absurd pretensions of the modern art establishment?
Check out my web page http://www3.sympatico.ca/manideli/
Peter H.M. Brooks
"Mani Deli" <ma...@sympatico.ca> wrote in message
news:asn61vo5dkfus4gn4...@4ax.com...
> >"Edward G. Nilges" <spino...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> >>
> >> I respect Noam Chomsky. Nonetheless, I was appalled to discover in an
> >> Internet conference that Chomsky failed to have read Hegel,
> >> apparently, and furthermore wanted to deny me the right to read Hegel
> >> based on Hegel's racism. It appeared to me that Chomsky, at best, had
> >> a Philosophy 101 survey course understanding of Hegel dating from the
> >> 1940s in which Hegel was presented, in English and American
> >> universities as a proto-Nazi.
>
> Perhaps he read Russell who after doing a splendid job demolishing
> Hagel concluded that it was "nonsense."
>
doesn't excuse you from reading the original to make sure that Russell
hadn't made a mistake.
Edward G. Nilges
> >>
> >> I respect Noam Chomsky. Nonetheless, I was appalled to discover in an
> >> Internet conference that Chomsky failed to have read Hegel,
> >> apparently, and furthermore wanted to deny me the right to read Hegel
> >> based on Hegel's racism. It appeared to me that Chomsky, at best, had
> >> a Philosophy 101 survey course understanding of Hegel dating from the
> >> 1940s in which Hegel was presented, in English and American
> >> universities as a proto-Nazi.
>
> Perhaps he read Russell who after doing a splendid job demolishing
> Hagel concluded that it was "nonsense."
That probably was the problem. Russell's chapter on Hegel in his
history of philosophy is amusing and well-written, but Russell
completely failed to understand dialectical logic or its relationship
to Aristotelean and modern logic.
Russell probably thought that Hegel wanted to replace Aristotelean and
modern logic with the dialectic. He failed to realize that dialectic
is completely consistent with his logic but is far more applicable to
any sphere containing intelligent agents who respond to each other's
proposals.
To my knowledge, no game theorist, including John Nash, has fully
accounted for history and sociology in which the actors cannot be
fully mapped onto interest-maximizing monads, yet a dialectic
appreciation yields understanding.
Erik A. Mattila
>>I was claiming that axiomatic projections and perspective projections
>>are different animals. Just a trivia thing.
>
>
> "Isometric", not "axiomatic" (a trivial correction.)
A trivial rejoinder: "axiomatic" is any projection that uses axes, like
the 30/60/90 degree axes of an isometric projection.
> Yes, they are.
>
> However, a reading of the later Wittgenstein shows us a very
> interesting point about the preference for isometric projection in art
> versus vanishing point perspective.
Giotto would certainly agree. I use isometric quite a bit, and I like
it. But it looks distorted measured against natural vision. If a
representation of natural vision is sought, I think perspective
projection is closer.
> It is that there is NO REASON, physically, for preferring the one to
> the other.
>
> In engineering drawing and CAD/CAM, an isometric drawing of a tool
> actually conveys more information to the people on the shop floor who
> must transform the drawing into a model. Vanishing-point perspective
> HIDES information.
Yep. And it's very difficult to dimension a one,two,three point
perspective drawing.
> This may be why painters of the Gothic and Mediaeval era generally
> favored isometric perspective, because their task according to the
> Church authorities was illuminating the simple folk as to the
> mysteries of the Church including let us say the story of Salome and
> John Baptist.
Well, linear perspective hadn't been invented at that time.
Bruneleschi's contribution was based on a need for a handy way to show
clients what a building would look like.
> Paintings of this popular tale often show Salome at different stages
> in her moral collapse in the same pictorial space, with John Baptist
> languishing in clink inches from Salome and she boogies down in front
> of Herod, and in isometric perspective. This is because the painter
> had to show a story which unfolded in time, more in the manner of a
> comic strip than a Renaissance painting which had a more literate
> audience of humanists.
But non-narrative paintings of this period used a isometric like
projection also.
> Mani hypostatizes a magic link called "realism" in the successful use
> of chiaroscuro and vanishing-point perspective. But this requires a
> pre-existing "constitutional convention" in which a basic law is laid
> down, that declares (without an argument that CANNOT BE MADE)
> "successful use of chiaroscuro and vanishing point is the only valid
> realismus."
Yet I've seen a Turner, "Lands End" if my memory serves me, that you
could fall into and smell the rotting kelp. It was done with color and
paint gobs - no evidence of vanishing points or chiaroscuro at all. So
I would disagree with Mani on this.
> Note that I do not phrase the artistic Constitution as "successful use
> of *naturalistic* chiaroscuro and *naturalistic* perspective" because
> the use of the word "naturalistic" presupposes what the constitutional
> convention is trying to decide, in a manner that pulls the law up by
> its own bootstraps.
Well, the little machine that Dürer used to map out forshortening and
perspective with strings and a wire grid picture plane at least shows
that perspective is closer to the vision of a one-eyed person than is
isometric. But vision itself has its ideological roots. But it is
difficult to notice all the things one doesn't "see" even though it's
right there in front of you.
> We call vanishing point perspective "naturalistic" only because that
> is what we've been told. In my engineering drawing example, isometric
> is MORE naturalistic if nature includes the need to create a 3-d
> model.
A big "if".
> Wittgenstein continually raised these concerns in Philosophical
> Investigations and asked why we hypostatize a magic link between
> language (where painting is a language) and the world. Any klutz
> working on a home project with tools has a Wittgensteinian moment when
> he fails to remember WHICH WAY to turn a screw in order to tighten a
> bolt, or fails to understand the directions.
Especially if the directions call for a left-handed thread.
>>>>or more presentors making such a claim about their work, regardless of
>>>>the strategies shown by the painting. But if you paid attention to my
>>>>post, I was saying that uttering the statement may in fact not be
>>>>meaningless, although the meaning comes from a metalanguage. Sort of
>>>>like Malinowski's "phatic communion."
>>>
>>>You lost me for a change.
>>
>>Malinowski's "phatic communion" was...well, visit this URL for some
>>interesting background, including:
>>
>>"Linguist David Crystal wrote, on page 10 of his Encyclopedia of
>>Language(Cambridge University press, 1987): "The anthropologist
>>Bronislaw Malinowski (19884-1942) coined the phrase 'phatic communion'
>>to refer to this social function of language, which arises out of the
>>basic human need to signal friendship - or, at least, lack of enmity""
>>(Leonor Santos)
>>
>
> Interesting point, for then it reappears in Kant. This refutes the
> value neutrality of post-Kantian theories of language, in which it is
> a neutral way of communicating facts drained of evaluation. Kant then
> is the survival of a basic asymettry in language for in Kant, a
> discourse ethics makes us not only cogntively but also ethicall
> responsible to (1) speak truly and (2) assume, until evidence appears
> to the contrary, that our interlocutor is in good faith.
It's difficult to write without evaluative claims. I remember
struggling with such an problem in a creative writing class. It takes
some dicipline, but it can be done.
>>http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/10/10-509.html
>>
>>So if 5 out of nine students utter "I'm dealing with the ambiguity of
>>space" and there is no evidence of that in the work addressed, the
>>utterance may "mean" something else - in the social sphere - rather than
>>being 'gas.'
>>
> I am willing to admit that many students, to their long-term sorrow,
> learn to repeat BS without understanding. They learn the instructor's
> favorite code-words and learn to parrot them, and then drown their
> sorrows (over this form of corruption) at spring break.
>
> They then enter the corporation and repeat the pattern.
>
> But there are those of us who take some BS quite seriously.
But that's my observation, or question, actually: Uttering a coded
statement to claim membership of a sub-culture or unique group, like
"Artist", is serious.
I doubt if that is true. Collectors buy membership into the art world
by engaging the same semantic fashion system as artists. It's a
discourse, after all.
>
> Robert Scull, in Tom Wolfe's essay, made his money by operating a
> fleet of cabs and was also a collector of moderns. He was clearly not
> the sort of guy who artists could BS around with.
>
>
>>>>You've introduced "game" here, and I'm not sure what you mean by it. As
>>>>I understand the term, I can't see what it has to do with human rights.
>>>
>>>I refer to the insistence, in Fascist and authoritarian societies,
>>>that words must mean "one thing", and that intellectuals are fancy
>>>Dans who use verbosity to deceive the Ordinary Joe. I also refer to
>>>the literal-mindedness of authoritarian individuals.
>>
>>Ha! I'm skeptical about this, Ed. Let's see...when GWB says "we have the
>>evidence, but it is classified" he most likely means "we haven't any
>>credible evidence." Are you sure you don't want to qualify your
>>statement? (just kidding).
>
>
> That's the paradox. The Nazis decried intellectual double talk, but
> in their popular media (such as the magazine Signal) the Nazis used
> simple coding systems that were simple enough for the ordinary
> Heinrich.
Wasn't it you, a month or two back, who cited Klaus Theweleit's "Male
Fantasies?" Never refering to a woman by name, only by a possesive (my
wife, my mother, my sister) yet always calling your dog or horse by its
name, seems to be the sort of coding you're talking about. Do you agree?
>>In my opinion it was not so much a "critique" of semiology, but rather
>>using semiology to critique....well, first French culture and later
>>"Western civilization."
>>
> I am chiefly interested in it as a way of showing that modern media
> cannot convey anything resembling "civilization." It is a carrier
> wave for addicting people in underdeveloped lands to Marlboro
> cigarettes and American beer.
I think it's a worthy tool for that. But I think that its usefulness
increases if you (one, not specifically "you") abandon the idea of a
victimized public and an abusive agent we might call "media." That's
because it's a fraternity - the advertisor and advertisee.
Co-participation. So we generally like advertisment because we already
understand the advertising message before it is spoken. That's the
power of myth, or signifieds embedded in signs.
>>Well, look...we all pick and choose what we read - I can't really argue
>>what your read in Barthes as it is as legitimate as what i read
>>(especially under the deconstruction game.) So let's say that Barthes
>>has a very broad reach, and you and I select what is interesting and
>>relevant to us (or even comprehensible, for that matter). The only
>>reality check either of us has is to measure statements we might make
>>based on our selective readings against the whole body of work
>>attributable to Roland Barthes. On this basis, I would respectfully
>>disagree with your idea about "a NEW form of myth. I would have agreed
>>with you for a long period in the past, but I came to believe that
>>Barthes was in fact not talking about a "New" form at all. It was the
>>same old myth, "Oedipus" or "Soapsuds and Detergents." Certainly
>>Soapsuds is new, chronologically, but Barthes was talking about form, in
>>the sense of structure, and in this both myths are built the same way.
>
>
> This is a pessimistic denial of both Western and non-Western thinkers
> of recent times, from Marx to Ho Chi Minh, who believed that mankind
> had progressed beyond the need for myths to encode social mores and
> could instead, like the followers of Malcolm X, internalize ethical
> standards of their own choosing.
I've studied mythology fairly thoroughly, and I can see no reason to
believe that myths "encode social mores." Maybe that's the reason that
you should at least consider that Barthes wasn't differenciating between
classical mythology and advertising mythology: He thought that
mythological thinking was some sort of impediment, and recommended
working against myth, or defeating myth. The 'function' of mythology in
human societies is well debated, and there's no final word. One of the
arguments is that mythology has no more profundity than any other good
story, extremely popular because the reader already knows the story.
>>>This is not a myth we can stand outside-of: cf. Adorno's Introduction
>>>to Sociology. We have to read it from the inside, and with all due
>>>respect I think a mistake a lot of acamodemic pomos make is to fail to
>>>see that this is necessary.
>>
>>But that's the basic premise of structuralism...that is, to develop a
>>system whereby on can escape the system by looking at how it is
>>assembled instead of its content.
>>
> You cannot do this from the inside without serious problems of bias.
> For example, Derrida would ask the American academic to examine his
> tenure system.
Which is precisely why hermeneutics carries so much weight with post
modernists.
> Unfortunately this would transform the po mo academic BACK into the
> 1960s activist because it is a feature of the world outside Utopia
> that to understand it is to want to fix it.
Ed, you previously claimed that totalitarian linguistics was fascism.
Now your making a very rigid consequencial statement about a situation
which actually coule plan out in a broad range of responses - time
travel to the 60s notwithstanding.
>>Take pity on your readers, Ed. I mean, if I wanted to understand the
>>above paragraph above I would have to do some serious research.
>>
> No mercy. I am merely reversing the way in which senior people in
> academia deny marginal input based on lack of homework. I happen to
> think that no po mo can claim to be one unless he has read
> Wittgenstein and Hegel.
Nonsense. Complete idiots often claim this. Why are you so "rule-bound"?
> Indeed, only in American universities do you find the absurd
> specialization in which a senior, tenured faculty member will have
> significant gaps in his reading.
In graduate school my Critical Theory professor advised me to read a
first chapter and a last chapter, and figure out what went on between.
It's a survival tactic, for it is a physical impossibility to read all
of the 40 pounds of papers and 16 feet of books assigned each 10 week
quarter. And she was educated in Israel, Great Britain and Germany.
> I respect Noam Chomsky. Nonetheless, I was appalled to discover in an
> Internet conference that Chomsky failed to have read Hegel,
> apparently, and furthermore wanted to deny me the right to read Hegel
> based on Hegel's racism. It appeared to me that Chomsky, at best, had
> a Philosophy 101 survey course understanding of Hegel dating from the
> 1940s in which Hegel was presented, in English and American
> universities as a proto-Nazi.
But that's superficial. You respect him anyway - so what if he hasn't
read Hegel? Your assumption that he did not read Hegel because of
political tainting is spurrious. On the other hand, if you like Hegel,
more power to you.
> In American graduate schools, graudate students who have been
> underserved by the relative lack of depth on the part of their
> undergraduate teachers are encouraged to overspecialized in a silly
> aping of science. They thus select the world-shattering task of
> discovering new but useless factoids about Jane Austen.
What grad school are you talking about?
> Then, later on, when some genuinely first-class person makes an
> interesting comment about Jane Austen's relationship to the slave
> trade, these second-rate hacks write articles saying that "Western
> Civilization is doomed" because as it happens they don't read outside
> their fields, and know absolutely diddly about just how lively a topic
> the slave trade was in Austen's time, a time in which British naval
> officers actually did some good.
You do know what synecdoche is? The part stands for the whole. You're
making some very broad rhetorical claims here. For example, how many
"hacks" have written the "Civilization if doomed" essay - 3? 5?
> I can only contrast the French model. Derrida re-reads Plato,
> probably in the can. Foucault went to the library every day of his
> life. Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir fought to retain philosophy in
> French high schools and as a result of this France and some
> Francophone countries are the only places where philosophy is taught
> in high school.
Thats true in my experience. I was amazed that a French Algerian I once
knew was conversant in all the philosophers I was reading while in
graduate school. He told me he had studied them in high school.
> Edward Said, the Palestinian activist and critic, was able to relate
> Orientalism to art and the opera because he read outside of his field.
Yes, and Said was educated at Princeton and Harvard - which blows a few
holes in your theory.
> A depressingly frequent occurence in American universities is the
> academic put-down of the attempt to introduce material predefined as
> marginal. It appears to me today, based on my experience with Chomsky
> (who asked Mike Albert to turn my access off after my Hegel question)
> that many senior people in the American university are first and
> foremost afraid. In Chomsky's case, I think the fear understandable
> for in fact the now defunct Z BBS was deluged with insane garbage by
> wounded nut-cases and it is likely that Chomsky is quite afraid of
> threats based on his left politics.
>
> But in the case of a Stanley Fish or Harold Bloom I can think of no
> excuse for their narrowness. Shakespeare and the Invention of the
> Human is an entire book based on the systematic dismissal of recent
> feminist and text-based scholarship on Shakespeare, which has
> generated important insight, in favor of a pompous and unoriginal
> reading.
>
> Edward Said, speaking in 1998 at the Art Institute of Chicago, replied
> with a courtesy missing for the most part in these type of meetings.
> There are disruptive questions, there are political speeches phrased
> as questions, and their are irritating autodidacts (like me.)
>
> Unfortunately, however, the survival of a mediaevalism in the form of
> the university in a market society generates cruelty and perversion
> for probably the same reason Catholic priests got away so long with
> abuse.
What can I say? There are culture wars going on in US universities. I
am a casualty, btw. I was planing my Master's Thesis on Underground
Comix/Critical Theory in a History of Art program, and the
anal-contingent didn't like this at all. They won-they had the power.
Erik
Lauri Levanto
"Erik A. Mattila" wrote:
>
>
> Giotto would certainly agree. I use isometric quite a bit, and I like
> it. But it looks distorted measured against natural vision. If a
> representation of natural vision is sought, I think perspective
> projection is closer.
>
> Of all the people why You, Erik? Isn't there enough antroposophical
evidence that perspective projection is "natural" and useful for
only those who live in open space with rectilinear houses.
People who live round huts scattered in bushes, never experience perspective.
The constancy of size is a stronger experience than perspective.
That is why perspective is a bit tricky to draw.
So unnatural that Mani has reified it to s SKILL
>
> Well, linear perspective hadn't been invented at that time.
> Bruneleschi's contribution was based on a need for a handy way to show
> clients what a building would look like.
>
The Egyptians had all the necessary knowledge of the descriptive geometry.
They painted schematically and sculpted naturalistic.
They had no use for perspective.
Perspective rendering was used in Pompeii, also in many
hellenistic mosaics ( paintings have not survived).
The geometry was explained first time by Romans,
a millenium or more before Brunelleschi and Masacchio.
>
> But non-narrative paintings of this period used a isometric like
> projection also.
>
As do many modern cartoons. The value perspective, where important characters
are depicted proportional to their importance, lives in Donald Duck,
ofter depicted in human size.
-lauri
G*rd*n
| >>I was claiming that axiomatic projections and perspective projections
| >>are different animals. Just a trivia thing.
| >
| >
| > "Isometric", not "axiomatic" (a trivial correction.)
| A trivial rejoinder: "axiomatic" is any projection that uses axes, like
| the 30/60/90 degree axes of an isometric projection.
You mean _axiometric_, I think. With all the dark clouds of
philosophy floating about you want to be careful about
putting up anything that looks like a lightning rod.
--
(<><>) /*/
}"{ G*rd*n }"{ g...@panix.com }"{
{ http://www.etaoin.com | latest new material 11/14/02 <-adv't
Chris
"G*rd*n" <g...@panix.com> wrote in message
news:av1stb$hr5$1...@panix3.panix.com...
> Edward G. Nilges wrote:
> | >>I was claiming that axiomatic projections and perspective projections
> | >>are different animals. Just a trivia thing.
> | >
> | >
> | > "Isometric", not "axiomatic" (a trivial correction.)
>
> emat...@oco.net:
> | A trivial rejoinder: "axiomatic" is any projection that uses axes, like
> | the 30/60/90 degree axes of an isometric projection.
>
> You mean _axiometric_, I think. With all the dark clouds of
> philosophy floating about you want to be careful about
> putting up anything that looks like a lightning rod.
>
> --
I dunno, as a mathematician, I'm quite enjoying this misuse of vocabulary on
all sides. Back when my daughter was a pre-schooler, she'd walk around
babbling away. When asked what she was doing, she said she was speaking
French. This coinversation has much the same flavour.
Cheers;;
Chris
Edward G. Nilges
> Edward G. Nilges wrote:
>
> >>I was claiming that axiomatic projections and perspective projections
> >>are different animals. Just a trivia thing.
> >
> >
> > "Isometric", not "axiomatic" (a trivial correction.)
>
> A trivial rejoinder: "axiomatic" is any projection that uses axes, like
> the 30/60/90 degree axes of an isometric projection.
>
> > Yes, they are.
> >
> > However, a reading of the later Wittgenstein shows us a very
> > interesting point about the preference for isometric projection in art
> > versus vanishing point perspective.
>
> Giotto would certainly agree. I use isometric quite a bit, and I like
> it. But it looks distorted measured against natural vision. If a
> representation of natural vision is sought, I think perspective
> projection is closer.
There is nothing "natural" about natural vision. It presumes a
motionless observer on a clear day, like September 11 was according to
aviators, of infinite visibility.
The naturalistic claim that vanishing point perspective is "better" is
based on a Renaissance humanism that for the purposes of argumentative
simplicity, REDUCED experience to the experience, normed without
argument, of one hypothetical dead white male.
The fact that Renaissance textbooks would illustrate the principles of
vanishing point perspective with an illustration of a male of a
particular social class in many instances was no accident, for the
reader could not be presumed to understand the implicit and unargued
claim, that "correct" vision consisted in the right sort of person
with a clear field of view and, as needed fire (the relation of the
subject of optics to fire control of the new weaponry was an important
issue.)
The later Wittgenstein would I believe point out that I have no
apriori way of determining whether another mind does not see things
isometrically. And, the fact that machines seem to favor vanishing
point is a pure accident caused by our prejudice for vanishing point.
It would be simple for embedded software to use sonar to detect the
complete image (including the parts hidden in the vanishing point
projection) and create, not a VP projection but instead an isometric
transformation.
>
> > It is that there is NO REASON, physically, for preferring the one to
> > the other.
> >
> > In engineering drawing and CAD/CAM, an isometric drawing of a tool
> > actually conveys more information to the people on the shop floor who
> > must transform the drawing into a model. Vanishing-point perspective
> > HIDES information.
>
> Yep. And it's very difficult to dimension a one,two,three point
> perspective drawing.
>
> > This may be why painters of the Gothic and Mediaeval era generally
> > favored isometric perspective, because their task according to the
> > Church authorities was illuminating the simple folk as to the
> > mysteries of the Church including let us say the story of Salome and
> > John Baptist.
>
> Well, linear perspective hadn't been invented at that time.
C. S. Lewis has some interesting things to say in the popular view
that the Renaissance "invented" new things when in fact they destroyed
as much as they created. The Renaissance "invented" the slaughter and
imprisonment of the peoples of the Western hemisphere.
Optics and linear perspective were indeed invented but in response to
a change in material needs, in which written records replaced
isometric visual pictures of land tenure and in which it was newly
necessary for Europeans to have clear fields of fire, so they could
whack the lower sorts at home and abroad.
> Bruneleschi's contribution was based on a need for a handy way to show
> clients what a building would look like.
>
> > Paintings of this popular tale often show Salome at different stages
> > in her moral collapse in the same pictorial space, with John Baptist
> > languishing in clink inches from Salome and she boogies down in front
> > of Herod, and in isometric perspective. This is because the painter
> > had to show a story which unfolded in time, more in the manner of a
> > comic strip than a Renaissance painting which had a more literate
> > audience of humanists.
>
> But non-narrative paintings of this period used a isometric like
> projection also.
>
...because it was felt to be natural...
> > Mani hypostatizes a magic link called "realism" in the successful use
> > of chiaroscuro and vanishing-point perspective. But this requires a
> > pre-existing "constitutional convention" in which a basic law is laid
> > down, that declares (without an argument that CANNOT BE MADE)
> > "successful use of chiaroscuro and vanishing point is the only valid
> > realismus."
>
> Yet I've seen a Turner, "Lands End" if my memory serves me, that you
> could fall into and smell the rotting kelp. It was done with color and
> paint gobs - no evidence of vanishing points or chiaroscuro at all. So
> I would disagree with Mani on this.
>
Turner indeed showed 19th century artists a way out of the academic
dreary trap of perspective and brown soup.
> > Note that I do not phrase the artistic Constitution as "successful use
> > of *naturalistic* chiaroscuro and *naturalistic* perspective" because
> > the use of the word "naturalistic" presupposes what the constitutional
> > convention is trying to decide, in a manner that pulls the law up by
> > its own bootstraps.
>
> Well, the little machine that Dürer used to map out forshortening and
> perspective with strings and a wire grid picture plane at least shows
> that perspective is closer to the vision of a one-eyed person than is
> isometric. But vision itself has its ideological roots. But it is
> difficult to notice all the things one doesn't "see" even though it's
> right there in front of you.
>
I agree. Durer's machine LIMITS vision as well as expanding it.\
I've worked for a serious collector and while he was delighted to
schmooze with members of the New York art scene, his main goal was not
to waste his limited art budget.
The very idea that artists and collectors want PRIMARILY to be a part
of a mad, gay, abandoned Art Scene, guzzling Martini cock-tails with
the Beautiful People, takes a natural, but marginal, instinct, and
makes it central when in fact collecting and making art are serious
activities.
Artists laboring anhedonically in the hinterlands secretly yearn to
escape the strictures of working to pay the rent at Fashion Bug or
Wal-Mart. But the mere size of the American steppe, and the lack in
many rural communities of any transportation outside of the car or the
Greyhound bus, teaches the soul that its yearning to get out of Dodge
City will never be satisfied.
Thus the artist supposes that the MAIN focus of the art scene is the
reverse of Anhedonia Station, TX, and consists as seen in the recent
film Pollock of getting drunk and lucky (which even in the movie is
associated with a decline in Pollock's work.)
> >
> > Robert Scull, in Tom Wolfe's essay, made his money by operating a
> > fleet of cabs and was also a collector of moderns. He was clearly not
> > the sort of guy who artists could BS around with.
> >
> >
> >>>>You've introduced "game" here, and I'm not sure what you mean by it. As
> >>>>I understand the term, I can't see what it has to do with human rights.
> >>>
> >>>I refer to the insistence, in Fascist and authoritarian societies,
> >>>that words must mean "one thing", and that intellectuals are fancy
> >>>Dans who use verbosity to deceive the Ordinary Joe. I also refer to
> >>>the literal-mindedness of authoritarian individuals.
> >>
> >>Ha! I'm skeptical about this, Ed. Let's see...when GWB says "we have the
> >>evidence, but it is classified" he most likely means "we haven't any
> >>credible evidence." Are you sure you don't want to qualify your
> >>statement? (just kidding).
> >
> >
> > That's the paradox. The Nazis decried intellectual double talk, but
> > in their popular media (such as the magazine Signal) the Nazis used
> > simple coding systems that were simple enough for the ordinary
> > Heinrich.
>
> Wasn't it you, a month or two back, who cited Klaus Theweleit's "Male
> Fantasies?" Never refering to a woman by name, only by a possesive (my
> wife, my mother, my sister) yet always calling your dog or horse by its
> name, seems to be the sort of coding you're talking about. Do you agree?
>
Uh, yes. But I am not sure where I have sinned. When I am in a
relationship I call the lucky lady a series of names which I generate
in a benign form of Tourette's syndrome: sweety baby cookie honey
lovebucket bunnypie.
> >>In my opinion it was not so much a "critique" of semiology, but rather
> >>using semiology to critique....well, first French culture and later
> >>"Western civilization."
> >>
> > I am chiefly interested in it as a way of showing that modern media
> > cannot convey anything resembling "civilization." It is a carrier
> > wave for addicting people in underdeveloped lands to Marlboro
> > cigarettes and American beer.
>
> I think it's a worthy tool for that. But I think that its usefulness
> increases if you (one, not specifically "you") abandon the idea of a
> victimized public and an abusive agent we might call "media." That's
> because it's a fraternity - the advertisor and advertisee.
> Co-participation. So we generally like advertisment because we already
> understand the advertising message before it is spoken. That's the
> power of myth, or signifieds embedded in signs.
>
Nonsense, for it assumes an equality of power which in the American
economy has forced consumers and employees into an exhausting race
with daemonic, constructed entities, treated by law as their formal
equivalent.
To continue to make inferences is not "totalitarian."
>
> >>Take pity on your readers, Ed. I mean, if I wanted to understand the
> >>above paragraph above I would have to do some serious research.
> >>
> > No mercy. I am merely reversing the way in which senior people in
> > academia deny marginal input based on lack of homework. I happen to
> > think that no po mo can claim to be one unless he has read
> > Wittgenstein and Hegel.
>
> Nonsense. Complete idiots often claim this. Why are you so "rule-bound"?
Oh dear. Rule-bound. Let's see, we must never make pronouncements
but instead should dick around with ideas. We have no RIGHT to lay
down the law because of Adolf Hitler.
When an ordinary slob makes a rule, such as mine, he does so from a
position drained of physical power. The name for this is liberation:
not the absence of rules but ideally the ordinary slob making and
following his own rules which he shares or not with the community.
When the rules conflict they are resolved so nobunny gets hurt.
But in a reversal of enlightenment, the good lack all conviction while
the worst are filled with a passionate intensity. The good are
deluded into following the meta-rule that it is BAD to make evaluative
statements and ultimately follow the Taoist path into the monastery
outside of which the genocide continues.
>
> > Indeed, only in American universities do you find the absurd
> > specialization in which a senior, tenured faculty member will have
> > significant gaps in his reading.
>
> In graduate school my Critical Theory professor advised me to read a
> first chapter and a last chapter, and figure out what went on between.
> It's a survival tactic, for it is a physical impossibility to read all
> of the 40 pounds of papers and 16 feet of books assigned each 10 week
> quarter. And she was educated in Israel, Great Britain and Germany.
This is precisely the sort of academic CORRUPTION of which I speak.
Furthermore, Israeli universities have cafeterias named after Frank
Sinatra which demonstrate how American influence and money have
lowered the high cultural level of the Ben-Gurion era.
This professor should be fired.
What of the student who is so naive as to want to learn, as opposed to
passing examinations and getting tenure? The student who reads the
entire book becomes a form of intellectual terrorist who "makes us
look bad" because she does more than the minimum.
She did not study in France, and I know of NO good critical theory
coming out of Israel and very little coming out of GB or Germany.
It is NOT a physical impossibility to read this much. Take public
transportation and instead of staring slackly out the window, read all
of Of Grammatology and all of Rawls as I did on the train from
Princeton Junction to New York. Or make like my Princeton friend Ray
Chen who would read when walking to Stevenson hall down Prospect
street.
Read on the can. Read while chowing down at Quizno's.
But thanks for the anecdote. It explains why American and to an
extent British po mos sometimes so hilariously fail to understand the
leading thinkers.
>
> > I respect Noam Chomsky. Nonetheless, I was appalled to discover in an
> > Internet conference that Chomsky failed to have read Hegel,
> > apparently, and furthermore wanted to deny me the right to read Hegel
> > based on Hegel's racism. It appeared to me that Chomsky, at best, had
> > a Philosophy 101 survey course understanding of Hegel dating from the
> > 1940s in which Hegel was presented, in English and American
> > universities as a proto-Nazi.
>
> But that's superficial. You respect him anyway - so what if he hasn't
> read Hegel? Your assumption that he did not read Hegel because of
> political tainting is spurrious. On the other hand, if you like Hegel,
> more power to you.
>
Noam was busy working for his uncle at 72nd and Broadway in a
newsstand and preferred, I think, Lancelot Hogben's Mathematics for
the Million. More power to him. He's done first-rate work in
mathematical linguistics and politics.
However, his work sometimes exhibits a dangerous naivety in which
favored movements are presented as the Good Guys and US sponsored
movements the Bad Guys. This shows a failure to understand how the
mere fact that political movements are comprised of intelligent, and
thus changeable, agents, makes a dialectic understanding less naive.
There are for example progressive elements in Israel who have become
supportive of Sharon due to the suicide attacks. Chomsky, I think,
finds it hard to reach out to these people, and a dialectical approach
would show how Sharon's policies fail to protect the ordinary person
while he, Sharon, is protected.
> > In American graduate schools, graudate students who have been
> > underserved by the relative lack of depth on the part of their
> > undergraduate teachers are encouraged to overspecialized in a silly
> > aping of science. They thus select the world-shattering task of
> > discovering new but useless factoids about Jane Austen.
>
> What grad school are you talking about?
Loyola in Chicago, which recently closed its classics department.
>
> > Then, later on, when some genuinely first-class person makes an
> > interesting comment about Jane Austen's relationship to the slave
> > trade, these second-rate hacks write articles saying that "Western
> > Civilization is doomed" because as it happens they don't read outside
> > their fields, and know absolutely diddly about just how lively a topic
> > the slave trade was in Austen's time, a time in which British naval
> > officers actually did some good.
>
> You do know what synecdoche is? The part stands for the whole. You're
> making some very broad rhetorical claims here. For example, how many
> "hacks" have written the "Civilization if doomed" essay - 3? 5?
Part of the advantage to not being a graduate student is that you get
to make wild and irresponsible claims which have a higher truth.
>
> > I can only contrast the French model. Derrida re-reads Plato,
> > probably in the can. Foucault went to the library every day of his
> > life. Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir fought to retain philosophy in
> > French high schools and as a result of this France and some
> > Francophone countries are the only places where philosophy is taught
> > in high school.
>
> Thats true in my experience. I was amazed that a French Algerian I once
> knew was conversant in all the philosophers I was reading while in
> graduate school. He told me he had studied them in high school.
>
> > Edward Said, the Palestinian activist and critic, was able to relate
> > Orientalism to art and the opera because he read outside of his field.
>
> Yes, and Said was educated at Princeton and Harvard - which blows a few
> holes in your theory.
Not at all. Those schools do a first-rate job. I was privileged to
study at the former to some extent. They made me read all of A Theory
of Justice.
I am referring to lower tiers in which the students are encouraged to
read the first and last chapters of books, dammit.
Robert Crumb is one of the most important figures in American art and
letters but merely mentioning his name in the academy is to code
oneself as an odious Mister Snoid who hates women.
> Erik
Andrew D
wrote:
>"Erik A. Mattila" wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Giotto would certainly agree. I use isometric quite a bit, and I like
>> it. But it looks distorted measured against natural vision. If a
>> representation of natural vision is sought, I think perspective
>> projection is closer.
>>
>> Of all the people why You, Erik? Isn't there enough antroposophical
>
>evidence that perspective projection is "natural" and useful for
>only those who live in open space with rectilinear houses.
>People who live round huts scattered in bushes, never experience perspective.
Never? People don't look shorter the further away they get unless
buildings are rectilinear? I never realised the influence building codes
can have on reality. ;)
>The constancy of size is a stronger experience than perspective.
>That is why perspective is a bit tricky to draw.
It isn't tricky if you understand it. *One block twice as far away as
another block of the same size appears half the size of the closer block.*
Once I learned that simple rule I even sat down and wrote a simple qbasic
program that maps 3d points and allows a 3d wireframe object to be rotated
in "space" - something I'd struggled to do whilst trying all sorts of
complicated exponential formulas.... and guesswork.
Andy D.
"I'm a great speller - but a hopless tpyist!"
Andrew D
spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges) wrote:
> And, the fact that machines seem to favor vanishing
>point is a pure accident caused by our prejudice for vanishing point.
>It would be simple for embedded software to use sonar to detect the
>complete image (including the parts hidden in the vanishing point
>projection) and create, not a VP projection but instead an isometric
>transformation.
Ahhh, so if we can just teach gallery visitors to use their sonar
capabilities rather than their eyes, we can all use isometric projection
with wild abandon! ??!!?
Erik A. Mattila
G*rd*n wrote:
> Edward G. Nilges wrote:
> | >>I was claiming that axiomatic projections and perspective projections
> | >>are different animals. Just a trivia thing.
> | > | > | > "Isometric", not "axiomatic" (a trivial correction.)
>
> emat...@oco.net:
> | A trivial rejoinder: "axiomatic" is any projection that uses axes, like
> | the 30/60/90 degree axes of an isometric projection.
>
> You mean _axiometric_, I think. With all the dark clouds of
> philosophy floating about you want to be careful about
> putting up anything that looks like a lightning rod.
Egad. You're right.
E
Edward G. Nilges
> "Erik A. Mattila" wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > Giotto would certainly agree. I use isometric quite a bit, and I like
> > it. But it looks distorted measured against natural vision. If a
> > representation of natural vision is sought, I think perspective
> > projection is closer.
> >
> > Of all the people why You, Erik? Isn't there enough antroposophical
>
> evidence that perspective projection is "natural" and useful for
> only those who live in open space with rectilinear houses.
> People who live round huts scattered in bushes, never experience perspective.
Thanks most awfully, Lauri, for this excellent bit of thinking.
I have spent time in the bush with Outward Bound and one feature of
the experience is the emphasis on the circle and not the square. We
would "circle up" to discuss our experiences and goals and my
experience was that this avoided a common problem in the wilderness:
the Lord of the Flies formation of cliques and strongmen.
The art of the Pacific Northwest is far more naturalistic than the
drawings and paintings of European visitors to the Straits of Juan de
Fuca and Puget Sound.
The drawings and paintings made of this area by Europeans show a wild,
forbidding coast with no sensible structure, as far as good old
Captain Vancouver thought until Chief Sealth took him in hand. Bays
and inlets were given names like "Useless Bay" which reflect the
mariner's irritation with the way, north of modern-day Seattle, the
coast and islets just meander along.
Indeed, the sunny, New Age perception of wilderness lands was
completely absent in European explorers precisely because they could
not make rectilinear sense of the North American land-mass. Names
like "Devil's Tower", "Jornada del Muerte" and Dead-eye Gulch
memorialize a simple irritation at the absence of mileposts and
taverns in the wilds. Of course, the explorers knew that these things
did not exist, but the emotional impact of the vast emptiness
(memorialized say by Mark Twain, in Roughing It) was a different
kettle of fish.
But the paintings and sculpture of the Northwest natives are far more
"realistic" precisely because they teach the sojourner in Puget Sound
to look under the surface of the grim and cloudy "land so wild and
shingly."
What you thought was "woods" in your operational damn Western way (as
Ron Reagan said, seen one tree, seen 'em all) are on second glance the
land of the rearing bear and waters filled with fish, and sudden
sunlight, providing all things needful as long as you don't start a
software firm, or something.
>
> The constancy of size is a stronger experience than perspective.
> That is why perspective is a bit tricky to draw.
> So unnatural that Mani has reified it to s SKILL
Spot on, Lauri.
The key fact about vanishing point perspective is that there is
nothing but air between you, and all points shown on the picture
plane.
Nothing is hidden.
This is a demand that the people of the marshes (like the folk in the
Persian gulf most cruelly relocated, and murdered, by Saddam Hussein,
who the United States installed) git out of hiding and show themselves
we won't hurt you we Federales (yeah, right.)
Isometric perspective, on the other hand, is more realistic insofar as
it acknowledges the possibility of two different experiences in places
that are hidden from each other: Salome dances for Herod while John
Baptist languishes in clink.
>
> >
> > Well, linear perspective hadn't been invented at that time.
> > Bruneleschi's contribution was based on a need for a handy way to show
> > clients what a building would look like.
> >
>
> The Egyptians had all the necessary knowledge of the descriptive geometry.
> They painted schematically and sculpted naturalistic.
> They had no use for perspective.
Right. The goal was to show that old Pharoah was a kind of Big Daddy
whose power and strength would ensure that the Nile would flood on
time, and everybody would live another year. Therefore Egyptian
painting informs us about how old Pharaoh had him lots of slaves and
dancing girls. Him Great Bull whose semen gives life to universe,
etcetera. Not bad work if you can get it, or, like Saddam Hussein,
have the United States install you in preference to trouble-makers,
poets, and trade unionists.
>
> Perspective rendering was used in Pompeii, also in many
> hellenistic mosaics ( paintings have not survived).
> The geometry was explained first time by Romans,
> a millenium or more before Brunelleschi and Masacchio.
>
Roman military tactics, like those of the Renaissance, required the
enemy to show himself so he could get whacked. As the British
(self-conscious followers of Roman military theory) found to their
sorrow in the dense forests near Saratoga, any shy enemy, who like
Persian marsh people, Indians, or Viet Cong refuses to come out of de
bush and fight "like a man" can defeat a more powerful force.
Artists were deliberately enlisted beginning in the Renaissance to
help the soldiers by sketching fortifications, designing
strong-points, and using linear perspective to make manuals, showing
the idiot generals of the Thirty Years War how to arrange German
peasants so they could die like flies for the Holy Roman Empire.
> >
> > But non-narrative paintings of this period used a isometric like
> > projection also.
> >
>
> As do many modern cartoons. The value perspective, where important characters
> are depicted proportional to their importance, lives in Donald Duck,
> ofter depicted in human size.
>
Whether or not old Pharaoh was bigger than his wife, it was probably
so important to him to be so portrayed that he probably felt that ANY
painting or sculpture showing the little lady as like to whip his ass
was "unrealistic."
See Haynes Johnson's book The Culture of Make Believe. Artists who
yap about "no skill no art" have "issues" that have to do with the
subordination of the little guy that constitutes the boneyard that is
labeled culture.
Of what are they afraid?
Of being weak. Of being people who doodle and sketch and daub, and
produce something that does not "look like" the model and that is
laughed at.
This is the male *persona* who weepeth sore in the night: who cannot
keep his shirt-tail tucked in: and who has the Hitler cowlick, that
straight white boy hair that resists Brylcreem.
Who is raped in prison at Pelican Bay (a modern high tech prison in
California housing for the most part nonviolent stoners and druggies)
while the warden ignores his cries.
Who was once a helpless little boy and who has vowed never to go back
to being one.
That's the image. That's the pain. There, like Lear or eyeless
Gloucester set upon by bullies, I've smelt 'em out.
And here is the next image.
It is a water color.
It is by William Blake...who never mastered the human figure in the
manner to delight maniacs.
Who always painted the human form rather conventionally: many of his
figures could be tavern signs for sailors.
But, it is a water color, and an illustration of "a little boy found."
In it a conventional and not-so-well drawn male figure is fully grown
and being fully grown has nothing better to do than carry his little
boy (his little boy, his son) upon his shoulders in the manner for
which little boys clamor when their father is home at last from work,
or war, or desolation itself.
skill + x => art ??
Blake's vision teaches us that all that matters is x.
Thank you for your attention in these matters. And thank you for your
very wise comments.
> -lauri
Edward G. Nilges
> "G*rd*n" <g...@panix.com> wrote in message
> news:av1stb$hr5$1...@panix3.panix.com...
> > Edward G. Nilges wrote:
> > | >>I was claiming that axiomatic projections and perspective projections
> > | >>are different animals. Just a trivia thing.
> > | >
> > | >
> > | > "Isometric", not "axiomatic" (a trivial correction.)
> >
> > emat...@oco.net:
> > | A trivial rejoinder: "axiomatic" is any projection that uses axes, like
> > | the 30/60/90 degree axes of an isometric projection.
> >
> > You mean _axiometric_, I think. With all the dark clouds of
> > philosophy floating about you want to be careful about
> > putting up anything that looks like a lightning rod.
> >
> > --
>
> I dunno, as a mathematician, I'm quite enjoying this misuse of vocabulary on
Human beings don't misuse vocabulary. They create it.
> all sides. Back when my daughter was a pre-schooler, she'd walk around
> babbling away. When asked what she was doing, she said she was speaking
> French. This coinversation has much the same flavour.
As a mathematician, there is a non-zero probability that you lack the
cultural literacy to understand the discussion, and the humility to
admit it.
But all the best to you and your daughter. My son developed an entire
language of the gods just before he began to speak comprehensibly, and
invented entire new words, and complex thoughts that he claims now
embedded a proof for the Riemannian Hypothesis in "Chunkle! Bugna.
Rug fanorkly roo. Ugna chankly: wang."
The assumption that speech, not immediately understood, is without
meaning to the speaker is a form of cultural colonialism in which we
think of the speaker as spouting nonsense that HE fails to understand.
Of course, real colonialists, like Davy Crockett, soon learned that
"ugh bug" might very well mean "hey, white bossman, there is a grizzly
bear like to chew your ass."
But back in Philadelphia and London, intellectuals were busy
manufacturing the perception that anything other than the King's
English was "nonsense" not only to the auditor but also to the
speaker, who was spikkin de Coast lingo in order only to impress the
ship's master.
This colonialism survives in the neocon's knee-jerk demand that
English professors, unlike mathematics professors, spik a simplified
patois.
>
> Cheers;;
> Chris