Is A PHD Art Expert Here?

[Ms. Morrow]

Hello,

On the internet was a disgruntled student about a professors paper.
This has meant the motley and artistically ignorant arrived on a link,
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Parliament/3273/water.html, to read
simply out of curiosity this "controversial paper." I don't think any
of us agree with the disgruntled student but now the motley and
artistically ignorant are left to ponder art for arts sake rather like
an itch.

Can anyone explain that papers contents in slightly less esoterics?
Is David Waterman explaining that art for arts sake is a rather late
process in the evolution of ourselves? That this required a primordial
soup per se for art for arts sake to emerge from? Have I grasped that
correctly?

The reason I decided to stop and ponder this a bit is because to my
horror I learned that the Roman citizens were carrying home glasses with
a favorite gladiator image from the Coliseum, and knowing that caused me
to have to rearrange my whole perception of humans during that time
period. Thus, I am asking am I about to rearrange my perception of a
people in a time and place again? As "we" walked about with souvenirs
from the Coliseum were we still in a sense not evolved as beings and
rather stunted? A lack of cognition and awareness that haunted us until
well over a 1000 years from then?

[myfan...@my-deja.com]

In article <38AB43A8...@pacbell.net>,
chow...@pacbell.net wrote:
> Hello,

> On the internet was a disgruntled student about a professors
paper.
> This has meant the motley and artistically ignorant arrived on a link,

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^?

Well you have loaded the question. Are you the professor?

> http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Parliament/3273/water.html, to
read
> simply out of curiosity this "controversial paper." I don't think any
> of us agree with the disgruntled student but now the motley and
> artistically ignorant are left to ponder art for arts sake rather like
> an itch.

"Art for Arts Sake" is simply a nominal concept. Forcing a person
to philosophies about "AFAS" violates the concept but I imagine
that "AFAS" has almost always nearly existed. I think that the
Idea of art for arts sake' originally was introduced to reduce
the amount of 'talk for talks sake' that uses art as its
excuse.

Myfanwy4812

Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.

[John Haber]

I'll be honest and say I didn't come anywhere near finishing the
paper. Reading 40 single-spaced pages is a truly serious investment
indeed, even in the art history one admires, and I reluctantly decided
after a few of them that I wasn't going to make it. It also takes up
the topic of Buddha sculpture, which I don't have the background to
take on.

It'd therefore be totally wrong for me to judge it or argue with it,
and all I can do is suggest why I didn't continue. Perhaps that will
at least indicate why it's "controversial." That word sounds like a
euphemism for the marginal stuff that thrives on the Internet, doesn't
it? Indeed, that wasn't all that far from my reaction.

I felt he was putting down axioms like the ten commandments: you may
find them distasteful, but you better not think of arguing with them.
The first one defined "frame" so loosely that the axiom became
tautological, I felt, making its use to justify a special religious
world and religious sensibility for art impossible.

The central one, on art for arts sake, was justified by a religious
parable! It amounted to saying that you have an intuition, don't you,
so why can't you just get all the intellectual crap out of your head?
Well, maybe one does, and maybe one doesn't. Maybe it's independent
of what one thinks one knows, or maybe it isn't. Maybe it's a good
guide, or maybe it isn't. Maybe it's guidance is best before one
starts to use one's head, or maybe it isn't.

The last amounted to more of this mix of, on the one hand, enough
vagueness to make distinctions vanish and, on the other, dogmatic
denial. Science hardly making the awesome mystery of nature
disappear, it's a religion, and so any particular methodologies can be
set aside. I won't touch that one.

It's perhaps symptomatic of the vagueness that he's co-opted a term
with some historical roots, some interest, and some limitations (arts
for arts sake) in the service of something else again (art as the
intuition of a higher power). So the Buddha must be smiling at all of
this, and I wasn't motivated to read further to see what happens when
he gets to the godhead in question and his representation!

Hope that, despite my limits and my own obvious dogmatism in reply, it
helps you pin down what I'm guessing is that intuition of your own
you're trying to explain -- why this all feels awfully funny! Good
luck.

John
jha...@haberarts.com

[Jennifer Eiserman]

...and as a way to justify a break with representational art.
Terry

[Erik A. Mattila]

But did you look at the rest of the author's web pages, John? It is
really a pretty tragic event.

The paper was pretty poorly written, in my opinion -- full of hyperbole
and misapplied concepts. But on the other hand, it was emotionally
driven and was addressing an inanity - a professor stating that Asian's
had no concept of beauty.

So the 'art for art's sake' tack isn't that bad -- even though it could
have been argued in a few pages. The problem is that it takes a pretty
specific, time-bound concept, Greenberg's 'art for art sakes' and
attempts to extrapolate it across a long history. Very bad form. If the
student is studying Art History, surely he must have run across the
disciplinary caveat against projecting contemporary ideas back across
time. (At least Foucault would have said nix to this.)

It's just if you consider the iconic value of Buddhist art, or any
relegious art, for that matter, you see all that is required to get the
concept across are a collection of elements that 'mean' the message it is
supposed to mean in order to be functional. Often those elements are
assembled with no aesthetic trajectory, just a collection. So the next
step is to ponder why iconic and symbolic elements are assembled in a way
that is lovely to look at. It's not necessary on a functional level, so
it implies the people who created the images have a purely aesthetic
concern as well as a symbolic concern. On that basis I think the
professor this student was challenging was dead wrong. Of course there
is a very powerful 'aesthetic of beauty' generally running through Asian
religious art.

So the student got dinged on a grade, allegedly because the professor's
ego was threatened by the challenge, and went on to file a civil right
complaint. Apparently the University white-washed the complaint, and at
one point the student, believing that he was in a 'confidential hearing'
uttered some language that could be construed as a death-threat, and is
subsequently being prosecuted for it -- perhaps facing a prison term.

Wow. Academia can be rotten, brutal and lethal.

Erik

[Ms. Morrow]

Thank you all.

[Luke]

My two cents:

I read portions, not all, of the paper. Not well written, it seemed to
me--full of pretentious and strained "I shalls," and other nonsense. A
lot of arcane roping-in of various authors and texts to do the job that
ought to have been done by a clear thesis and substantive argument. No
really helpful exegesis of what the Buddha (much less the Buddha-image)
was/is all about.

"Art for Art's sake," it strikes me, is a highly contextualized notion
that hasn't been around for all that long (post-enlightenment). This
wording of it is even more recent, a la Greenberg, and to an extent,
Adorno. I'd like to know more about the circumances of the paper and it's
bad marks, but I didn't think it was very good. Long, and full of a lot
of stuff, but not good.

Luke

[god...@my-deja.com]

In article <38AC5457...@ucalgary.ca>,

Jennifer Eiserman <jrei...@ucalgary.ca> wrote:
> ...and as a way to justify a break with representational art.
> Terry

i ASSUME THAT originally this was correct but considering how much
is +written+written+written+ about MAAA?

Without speaking about art we cannot say if it is representational
or not! -Which is how it should be>>>

>
> myfan...@my-deja.com wrote:
>
> > "Art for Arts Sake" is simply a nominal concept. Forcing a person
> > to philosophies about "AFAS" violates the concept but I imagine
> > that "AFAS" has almost always nearly existed. I think that the
> > Idea of art for arts sake' originally was introduced to reduce
> > the amount of 'talk for talks sake' that uses art as its
> > excuse.

Bryn Ayers