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by orpheus » Sat May 12, 2012 2:39 pm
A) The cosmos, beautiful though it is, is not art. We can appreciate it aesthetically, sure. But "art" is related to the word "artifice" for a reason. I have a fascinating book that has reproductions of Cezanne's landscape paintings, and on facing pages photographs of the actual landscapes themselves. Often both are beautiful, but in their own ways. You can see that he was trying to make something quite different than an attempt at a literal reproduction. That's not to denigrate the real, but to say that it's "art" is the same sort of vocabulary distortion as saying (pace Spinoza) the universe is god.
B) In these arguments people always seem to pull out examples like Duchamp's urinal or (in music) Cage's "4:33" - example that do stretch the definitions of what art is. That's fine. But then they sweep the entirety of modern art into that category. And that, quite frankly, is an incorrect generalization. Maybe it's due to ignorance, maybe to hostility. I don't know, but it's wrong. Contemporary artists are up to many different things; by no means are all of them attempts to push that particular envelope in those ways. Look up paintings by decade or composers by decade I'm Wikipedia for a tiny idea of the range.
Edited: clarity
Edited again to override my iPhone's evidently astronomy-savvy autocorrect, and change its suggestion "Enceladus" back to my intended "envelope". Weird.
Last edited by
orpheus on Sat May 12, 2012 2:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I think that language has a lot to do with interfering in our relationship to direct experience. A simple thing like metaphor will allows you to go to a place and say 'this is like that'. Well, this isn't like that. This is like this.
—Richard Serra
