He should ask WolfLarsen.
He should ask WolfLarsen.
“As Kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame . . .”
Why disqualify the rush? I'm tabled. I'm tabled.
I know what you meant; I was just horsin' around.Yes, I too would like Omega to expound on this particular means of judgment as well. I was assuming that she meant transcendant language and thought. Such an idea seems very relevant to this thread.
Originally Posted by Virgil
Of course, all the great ones do.
Hmm. Wild Apple does have a good point.
Yeah, were's WolfLarsen when we need an author's opinion?
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
James Joyce, the pirate.Why don't you write books people can read? -Nora Barnacle
Insupportable claim: Reading my stories will make you a better person. Do your best to prove me right.
So how does one go beyond language? Beyond form? If you understand that, please describe explain.
LET THERE BE LIGHT
"Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena
My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/
Eeek, this reminds me of my Econ prof, "Before you answer a question or write down anything, define your terms"
Ok, lemme see if I *do* have an idea of what I'm talking about.
By transcendent, I don't mean subject matter. There's only a handful of subject matter one can write on: love, death, loss, et cetera. However, there are myriad ways to approach it, much like one can, in theory, scale up a mountain from an infinite number from trails. Now some of these trails have been trodden so much that we are sick of it. The mountain is the same mountain. It hasn't changed. But we've gone up the same number of trails far too often that we see the exact same things: at this turn is a boulder, at that turn a fir tree, three turns later and we are on there.
A transcendent work, I think, is one that takes us up a hitherto non-existent trail. It has transcended the limits of existent modes of expression, which are limits we observe in our daily writing and even our daily life. It will be, clearly, more difficult and more demanding of the reader, but it's also more exciting because we don't know what to expect. We see different trees and boulders on the way up. We might discover new species animals that we never thought were present in this mountain. And when we reach the summit, we might discover that the place all previous trails take us is not really a summit (I don't know if this is technically possible as my hiking experiences have told me that summits are usually quite well-defined, but whatever it's an imperfect analogy.)--the actual summit is much higher. Even if we do end up on the same plane, if all the previous paths do indeed lead us to a summit, we still look down at the rest of the mountain in a very different light because we have taken a completely different trail and seen completely different things coming up it.
So to summarize, what I meant by transcending the limits of language and thoughts is
- using an original mode of expression which
- still reflects the subject matter (i.e. does go up the mountain) but does so in a wholy different way, such that
- new aspects of it are revealed
The first two points are for form, the second for content.
Reading works like this gives me great aesthetic pleasure, which is why I call it art.
One problem I can think of right off the bat is the haziness of the idea of "an original mode of expression". But that's altogether a different topic.
I'm wondering the same thing. In writing, it's language that does everthing. If it isn't language, then it isn't writing.
Ok, so you [Omega] basically mean original.
LET THERE BE LIGHT
"Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena
My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/
Point well-made. Would it be clearer if I said "limits in language and thoughts"? Clearly no writing can transcend the limits of language itself.
In a very roundabout way, yes
That is a modern (or more accuractly, recent to the last couple of hundred years) view. In classical, medevil and even early reaissance the greater value was placed on being able to emulate great works. So Virgil's Aeneid was an emulation of Homer.In a very roundabout way, yes
LET THERE BE LIGHT
"Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena
My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/
I have not yet read Virgil, so I definitely can't judge how well he has done his job, although I would imagine that anyone setting out to purely emulate Homer must either forfeit the objective or be driven insane by Homer's accomplishments.
However, I do find it interesting that you bring up the medieval time. If I am not mistaken, Homer was not widely read during that time. Chaucer refers to him constantly in Troylus and Criseyde, but all biographical and textual evidence points to the fact that he has never read The Iliad. The medieval interpretation of the Trojan War is also vastly different (and inferior, IMHO) from that of Homer or three Greek dramatist. They have appeared to have failed miserably in emulating great works.
Quote:
SLG- All art is a form of "self expression", indeed. To be otherwise is impossible. All self-expression, however, is not art (a baby crying, a teenager's diaries). Or perhaps, since the question of what art is has been broached, I should say that all self-expression is not good art. If the work lacks an aesthetic "beauty"... and this may include everything from the traditional "beauty" of a Raphael madonna, a Petrarchan sonnet, or a Mozart sonata as well as the sublime beauty of fear, horror, and tragedy found in Oedipus Rex, Beethoven, Goya, or Motherwell's Elegies to the Spanish Republic.
I would contend that the teenager's diary is art, as much as Oedipus Rex is. All art is self-expression, but what differentiates it from the baby's cry is consciousness of the expression, the thought that goes behind the expression. If nothing is expressed, then there is no art.
SLG- As I initially stated, you might indeed term the teenager's writings or the baby's cry as "Art"... but I greatly doubt it would qualify as "good" art. I would beg to differ with your assertion that that the expression... what is being conveyed is the basis for judging good or poor art. Firstly, I would suggest that all art expresses something... art ABOUT nothing (even if its only about art) is an impossibility. Secondly, I would suggest that the notion that certain ideas/feelings/concepts will inherently lead to a greater work of art is something of an outdated notion. In visual art... especially painting... it referred to a heirarchy which assumed that any mythological or religious narrative painting (an "histoire") was inherently greater than a portrait, which was inherently greater than a landscape, etc... What Mark Rothko could convey with mere bands of color or what Cezanne achieved with simple still lifes put this notion to rest. It is the art that makes the work good or bad, not the subject or expression.
Quote:
SLG- I would certainly agree with you here. All artists cannot help but have ethical, political, religious, moral sympathies and these most certainly present themselves in the work. On the other hand, I don't see these sympathies as a valid standard by which to judge the success of the art. To do such adds up to a rejection of all art that does not meet our current sympathies (ie. Shakespeare and Wagner are anti-Semitic so their art is bad) and leads to an expectation that an artist give form to only that which is communaly agreed upon and not that which is is felt/believed/thought by the unique individual.
I believe that people can validly judge art, of any kind, by the content, if they wish to. I understand why others might disagree with that. Without the content, there is no art. Is the form, the expression itself, better or worse for the content? I say that the form is inconsequential without the content.
SLG- Certainly, the audience may reject a work of art for any reason imagineable: the lead actress reminds you of your hated mother-in-law, you can't stand that color of green, the tale questions your firmly held religious beliefs, etc... It would seem possible... and preferable... however, for one to be able to differentiate personal taste from aesthetic valuation. There are certainly artistic works in any number of genre in which the subject... what is conveyed... is unattractive to me... and yet I can appreciate the artistry through which it was conveyed. I certainly don't follow the notion that form is everything... yet I would suggest that while a subject may not be inconsequential without being given the proper artistic form, a work of art which attempts to convey something about this subject would certainly be inconsequential without being given a successful form.
It appears that you define art by some aestetic standard. I don't know your standard, so I can't judge that, but people have been trying for millenia to define art and beauty, and related matters. There are quite a few books about it, but I don't think that a real definition has been discovered.
SLG- Undoubtedly, every artist needs to have some sort of idea as to what he or she imagines good art and beauty consists of whether it's based upon the ideas of Burke, Shelley, Keats, Wilde, Pater, Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Ruskin, one's Uncle Chuck... or a combination of all of these and more.
Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain
My Blog: Of Delicious Recoil
http://stlukesguild.tumblr.com/
"differentiate personal taste from aesthetic valuation" I think that's the heart of what you have been saying. It appears that you think that there are objective standards of aesthetic valuation. I think that many people would like for such objective standards to exist, but they don't. In writing the closest thing to objective standards are syntax, grammar, spelling and definitions. It is a pleasure to read something in which the words have been strung together according to the rules (cultural standards) of syntax and logic (grammar), and for appropriate words be used and spelled accoding to the generally accepted spelling. When someone writes without breaking any of the rules of good writing and expresses something that addresses a universal interestm the writing probably is pretty good. Alas, none of the rules are absolute.
Quote:
I've been meaning to contribute to this discussion. So here goes. Several points.
Another point I wish to make is that one must not confuse the notion that specific art forms are a craft that requires the manipulation of a particular medium. Some have argued that you can’t string together words randomly that sound beautiful but have no meaning. I agree but perhaps for different reasons. But the basis of your argument is that art in general requires meaning. That it needs to have some philosophic/moral/intellectual point. But literature (poetry, novels, short stories) is a form that uses words as the medium for creativity, the building blocks if you will. Their very nature requires meaning to be present. As a parallel, the building block of pottery is clay. You can’t make a work of pottery out of paper, and still be called a work of pottery. Words/sentences/paragrapghs are the clay of literary art forms. In order to create a literary art form it must be created within the context of meaning. It’s not that art requires significance, it’s because the medium itself is built up of meaning. Fine art is the art of arranging shapes and images; music is the art of arranging sound. That is why it is clear that they don’t require the same need for intellectual content as literature, which is the art of arranging language (at it’s most general definition).
I can't agree with you more there, Virgil. The fact that literature employs words, rather than colour or music notes, makes it impossible to extricate literature from culture. Words have nothing to do with reality.
SLG- I get where you are coming from, although I would suggest that certain words surely evolved from something mimetic... imitating the "sound" of the concept conveyed: "whisper", "kiss", etc... I would also note that in a pictographic language, such as Chinese (although this has certainly evolved over the years) there is something of simplified visual representation of the concept involved.
A-P-P-L-E does not have any intrinsic connection to the thing I'm munching right now. It's only by the endorsement of the dictionary and a couple of centuries of tradition do we agree that an "apple" refers to an apple.
SLG- Yet the same might hold true for most works of visual art. Most animals and very young children do not respond to a picture at all as an adult might. For example, we might have no problem seeing a human face in such an image:
and yet certainly this image is completely symbolic and demands that we be able to read these various lines an hatches as somehow representing a face.
Language is also a site of cultural discourse. Each word is laden with additional layers of meanings invested by the culture. An "apple" is just an apple, but we may be counted on to sniff for traces of Genesis as soon as we encouter the word "apple" in a poem. Context matters. I would never read the "apple" my 5-year-old niece scribbled down beside her stencil sketch of an apple the same way as I read the "apple" that Lolita carries around in front of Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's book.
SLG- And again the same applies to a work of visual art (or undoubtedly, music). For example, when looking at this painting by the same artist (Max Beckmann)... an image of a reclining, muscular male figure:
I cannot help but think of Michelangelo's similar figures:
or while looking at this lovely Bonnard:
I cannot help but think of so many lovely images of Venus or Bathsheba from throughout art history including any number of ancient Greek images of Venus bathing or rising from the sea. As such, I agree that the "meaning" in art is not something solely found within the form. Context and culture certainly play a role. At the same time, a work may certainly exhibit a wealth of cultural references (as many pendantic works by scholarly artists do) and yet still flop as art.
"When [Christ] says, 'Forgive your enemies,' it is not for the sake of the enemy, but for one's own sake that he says so, and because love is more beautiful than hate. In his own entreaty to the young man, 'Sell all that thou hast and give to the poor,' it is not of the state of the poor that he is thinking but of the soul of the young man, the soul that wealth was marring."
SLG- Intriguing words. And perhaps we might infer that Wilde did not merely imagine beauty as having only a self-indulgent, hedonistic worth... perhaps, as William Morris and others suggested, beauty itself had a moral value. Certainly I cannot help but imagine that rather than criticizing Matisse or Bonnard for continuing to create works of sheer beauty during the dark days of WWII, one should respect them for bravely insisting that the beautiful would endure... that these times would pass. Or as Faulkner put it in the closing lines of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech:
"It is (the writer's) privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."
To me, Wilde has inverted the relationship between morality and beauty. A thing is not beautiful because it's moral. A thing is not beautiful because it's amoral. Rather, a thing is moral because it's beautiful; beauty comes before morality in the creation of things.
SLG- Indeed.
This idea is beautiful but problematic to the highest point. What defines beauty then? Wilde would suggest sorrow, based on the first quote there. Thus we should go to Iraq and tell the people whose arms have been bombed off and whose houses are razed to the ground that their lives are beautiful and good. Poof. Are the lampshades of the ***** of Belsen beautiful then? Sure they are original. I heard they look quite good, and there is plenty of sorrow in them. They pass the beauty test--so they are moral? Gimme a break Oscar
SLG- Certainly, this idea IS problematic. But then let us take the opposite view. If we place morality before beauty is there truly any absolute moral standard any more than a standard of beauty upon which to base our judgments? Who was morally correct... the Americans cowering in fear of McCarthyism and the spread of communism... or the Soviets seeking to build one great communal collective? Are such considerations important when deciding whether Rothko and Pollack were greater than any work of Soviet social realism? And how do we deal with the fact that the Nazis were sophisticated lovers of art and music? Hitler admired the brilliant singer Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, the composers Wagner and Richard Strauss, and the conductors Furtwangler and Karajan. Should we thus reject them all as morally corrupt or tainted? What of the fact the J.L. David and Ingres were both supported by the Napoleonic regime? What of the fact that the brutal De Medicis, Orsini, Barberini, and Borgias were all highly cultivated lovers and supporters of art? What of the fabulous castles and ornate carvings and sensuous embroidered clothings and grand operas that were all produced for a class of aristocracy that lived off the labor of underpaid and underfed peasants? Do we take Mao's notion that Beethoven and Bach must be rejected as products of an elitist system and only support that art which meets the current democratic/egalitarian values of the masses. In a word, what exactly is the alternative to judging art as art?
Last edited by stlukesguild; 12-22-2006 at 12:15 AM.
Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain
My Blog: Of Delicious Recoil
http://stlukesguild.tumblr.com/
I didn't mean to say that there is an alternative. I agree with you, 100%, as to the ridiculousness of frowning upon Beethoven's music because it endorses "bourgeosis" values. However, I am more for Peter's argument that objective aesthetic standards are hard to come by.
I think I've used feminine beauty as an example in my previous post. I'll bring that up again since it seems to serve the purpose here. Feminine beauty is, I think, more concrete than the beauty of, say, literary works, and yet we'd be hard pressed to find any standard that applies to every person in every culture at every time period. Slimness of figure? The Tang Dynasty of China is famous for admiring large women. Large breasts? Ancient Chinese tend to like small, delicate breasts. 99% of Chinese would tell you that Lucy Liu is ugly. "Times" obviously does not think so, as it has listed her as one of the world's 100 most attractive people.
If we can't even find objective standards for a woman's looks, how can we hope to find any for literature or art?
art for art's sake is simply a notion that, unlike children who are to be guided by their hands every step of the way, adults may and should walk free without a cicerone, chaperone or whatever the case may be. i wish this were true, but it would seem to me that a great deal of adults have some growing up to do, that what they take for art is in fact so devoid of art that it's necessary to shock and offend them to their senses lest they think every stray random thought of theirs warrants our critical acclaim.I'm sorry, godhelpme, I can't actually make out what is being said there. I wouldn't take it as offensive. I don't know how to take it, but surely not offensive. Perhaps Chase could rephrase it for us.
Now, Virgil, it seems unnecessary to decry an oxymoron as though it were meant in earnest. I'm sure you can give Omega a small license for figures of speech.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
