Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

“Doing anything when you're bored is very very boring. Anyway, doing nothing is the point of being bored. The pleasure of being bored is mooning about and doing nothing. ”
― Aidan Chambers, This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn

“The door', replied Maimie, 'will always, always be open, and mother will always be waiting at it for me.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens

“When people say "it's always the last place you look". Of course it is. Why would you keep looking after you've found it?”
― Billy Connolly

Some art does not have a story that wants to be told.  

"I don't know why people expect art to make sense when they accept the fact that life doesn't make sense."

"Absurdity is what I like most in life, and there’s humor in struggling in ignorance."

― David Lynch

(May 17, 2018 12:19 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: [ -> ]Some art does not have a story that wants to be told.

Good POV, especially regarding the last half of the 20th century; and still applicable despite all these declarations of our being in a "post-post modernism" era.

Still, for any _X_ work there will probably be a specific, dominant interpretation (outputted by an art slash literature critic, historian, connoisseur, etc) that will muscle its way into an arts&lit student textbook, about _X_, and become a standardized significance for the latter. The need for that in textbooks would be similar to what museums continue to do with postmodern art, in order to stay commercially alive.

Crispin Sartwell: . . . Postmodernism in the arts repudiated many of the basic teachings of modernism: the myth of individual genius, for example, and the concept of originality. Yet arts institutions continued to operate [...] as though that critique never happened. [...] Why is that? [...] First of all, modernist ideology is extremely effective commercially. Once you jettison ideas like originality and genius, there is no justification for prices in the millions.

It is quite plausible to assert that, unlike most modernist masterpieces, a decent reproduction of a Warhol is as a good as an “original,” or for that matter is just as original. In virtue of what, precisely, would you distinguish them aesthetically? Is it that the original was brushed at a distance of some miles by Andy Warhol’s awareness?

Warhols are, to put it in Walter Benjamin’s terms, “works of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.” Benjamin famously asserted that, in a situation in which images could be copied cheaply and en masse, works of art were losing their “aura”: the sense of mystery and transcendent value that attended them. But aura is associated with rarity and preciousness: it limits supply and hence enhances or exponentially increases price. So, for those who stand to profit from postmodern art, the aura has to be imposed, invented, or (dis)simulated.

[...] The institutional economics of art — public or private — depends on what the postmodern art theorist Rosalind Krauss called “the originality of the avant-garde and other modernist myths.” It doesn’t matter what you do: if you are an “important artist,” arts institutions will portray you and market you as an original genius and your work as the high-water mark of human transcendence, which not incidentally increases its price. https://www.scivillage.com/thread-102-po...tml#pid310

Despite all the copies, authentication of something Andy Warhol had his hands on still counts as financially venerable. Warhol's "piss paintings" included arbitrary contributions to the works (the urine qualities varying from person to person), so there certainly weren't organizing concepts in terms of meaning underlying their creation. As Warhol himself said all one needs to know about his work is already there "on the surface.". The value of the experience itself, no allegorical reasoning or inference applied.

But he did have those overarching themes collectively subsuming the particular creations, like the factory-like reproduction and something of value being mass-distributed rather than hanging singularly in a gallery. (Also a property of books since the invention of the printing press; where the uniqueness slash value is the information content, not necessarily the concrete object multiply realizing it). Warhol: "A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it." ----The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

~

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
― Leon C. Megginson

(May 17, 2018 05:05 PM)C C Wrote: [ -> ]Good POV, especially regarding the last half of the 20th century; and still applicable despite all these declarations of our being in a "post-post modernism" era.

Interesting.  I wasn't aware of the piss paintings.  

I was thinking more about Tarkovsky's work when I posted that quote.

"What do his movies mean? Tarkovsky hailed from the school of thought that art couldn’t be explain from a purely intellectual perspective. The thing about perception in Tarkovsky’s films is that people think they’re difficult to understand, and try to decipher what everything means, but Tarkovsky’s films are mostly assembled through intuition.  The notion of order in life is an abstract one and this is reflected in his cinematic streams of consciousness.  His films don’t come with prepackaged deductions.  In there lies a truth, but one that must remain unknown to the audience and artists alike.

Contrary to popular belief, Tarkovsky avoided symbolism in his work. Using a symbol in a film, means that you’ve created a definite meaning, but art should be left to interpretation.  Tarkovsky’s aim was to have the audience discover meaning for themselves, and when the methods of a director remain a mystery to the audience, they’re inclined to find significance in that reality. We think further on that, which we don’t understand.

It’s the ambiguity that allow the audience to develop their own meanings based on their own perceptions. So the elements that appear to carry some grandiose suggestions aren’t symbolic, they’re purely atmospheric.  

We’ve been taught to search answers but sometimes a scene is what it is. The question isn’t why does something happen but what does it mean to the character. Tarkovsky isn’t asking us to find a definite answer is his work.  He asks that we embrace the emotions that the subjects feel. Rain doesn’t mean anything but it might to the character."

Andrei Tarkovsky - Poetic Harmony

"Existence is a mystery, and one should accept it as a mystery and not pretend to have any explanation. No, explanation is not needed - only exclamation, a wondering heart, awakened, surprised, feeling the mystery of life each moment. Then, and only then, you know what truth is. And truth liberates."
~ Osho

“Oh! This'll impress you - I'm actually in the Abnormal Psychology textbook. Obviously my family is so proud. Keep in mind though, I'm a PEZ dispenser and I'm in the abnormal Psychology textbook. Who says you can't have it all?”
― Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking

“Maimed, mad, and sexually different people were believed to possess supernatural powers by primal cultures' magico-religious thinking. For them, abnormality was the price a person had to pay for her or his extraordinary gift.”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa