A respite from the IEDiocy

[rutgers!uwvax!astroatc!gtaylor (Mais, ou sont les neiges d'antan?)]

In the interests of avoiding miles of pain and heartbreak to the
scads and wads of you who have so patiently and calmly sat through
the "whatisart" bit before, I'll keep it short. I'm adding this mostly
to congratulate Doug for finally adopting what I think is a pretty
well-thought-out opinion, and to point him toward the *next* logical
area of consideration for his aesthetic. Then I'll go back to my real
work....

>I would agree that a work of art cannot be separated from its cultural
>context and still understood, but I maintain that there are geniuses
>who are able to absorb something from their culture and then using
>what they have absorbed are able to synthesize something that is
>emotionally or intellectually powerful to a significant portion of
>their culture.


I tend to shy away from the term "genius" at all. While it's etymologically
pretty harmless (it appears initially to refer to a peculiar or 
identifying characteristic without all the baggage added to it
in the Romantic aesthetic-which might be thought of as a modification
of the old Religiously-oriented notion that one was specially talented
or chosen by [insert diety here] as a distinctive channel for X in
an era which replaced the Divine with the Rational, and Chosenness
with Genius), but the excess baggage tends to suggest that genius
X would be recognized as a genius *out* of their cultural context.
that this act of synthesis is somehow very personal (both in content
and reception of a work) and relatively unconstrained by the factors
that Doug alludes to earlier as "context."

What I'd add to Doug's view is that the notion of "synthesis" suggests
to me that Doug believes that the "rules" by which the status of artists,
the relative importance ascribed to various kinds of human work in
a cultural context, and the mutability and continuity/discontinuity of
the critical and cultural concensus from age to age somehow allow us
to confidently point out a genius with something approaching relative
certainty. I disagree on this point: I believe that the *best* you can
hope for is the broadest concensus possible (remembering that that
concensus itself represents a large number of compromises among the
agreeing parties rather than a monolithic value judgement), and to
combine that with an admission that admits the provisionality of
such a concensus. The collection of that concensus over time (the
institution of Art. The ones who like Mozart, Brahms, Howlin' Wolf, 
and early Todd Rundgren) provides a rich field for investigation of
the way in which a group of persons thought/think about themselves and
the links they forge with their past and their presence (cf Foucalt's
"the Archaelogy of Knowledge"), but I don't think it can be said to
constitute anything other than a provisional concensus. Further, I
think that the only persons/groups who would characteristically claim
an "objective" basis for those same judgements are serving some other
agenda-which they are free to pursue implicitly or explicitly. It is
the *claim* of objectivity that is the warning flag. Such claims tend
in my experience to bunch together with other very non-aesthetic claims.
That clump of value judgements shared among a group can become the 
currency of power-as such, they are used to buy guns and buy drinks all
around.

There. I finished this whole mass of stuff off with a non sequitur. So
I'm not all that serious after all. Sorry if I bothered the lot of you,
but this is important stuff to me. There's *my* bias.

-- 
i'm not alive in the darkness/more like a shadow on the lungs/i'll balance
here on the edge of anger/standing here with an empty page/sooner or later
i'll start receiving/i've been standing here for days/we shake it up/and
we break it down.  Gregory Taylor/ ...{nicmad or uwvax}!astroatc!gtaylor