What is Art? etc. etc. etc.

Here the attempt will be to find just what Art is, what goes into the making of it, and sometimes, yes, just sometimes what it isn't.

A start:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m47A0AmqxQE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTSfBj8R3xI&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maGN8--MhIQ&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahDWiS-X_nM&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Wdc7DQv3RA&feature=related

Being married to an artist, I hear a lot of "what defines art," and so forth.

The following is my own opinion:

Art is something created or fabricated. It does not occur naturally in nature (redundant?). A frozen waterfall may be beautiful, but it is not art. A painting of it may be, but the waterfall itself is not. This, however, is something confused with art called "aestheticism." Things that appeal to one or more of our senses are aesthetic, and at the same time, they may also be artistic, but that does not mean that all aesthetic things are artistic. Things that engage more than one sense are psychosomatic, but now, I'm just throwing around big words...

I think, also, though, that art is not artificially produced. Thus, no matter how much you spend on a computer/camera/photoshop/etc., it's not ART if the TOOL is doing all the WORK. YOU, the ARTIST, need to be using the TOOL to HELP you generate a final product. If you plug in some data and hit GO, you're not making art. You're making a computer create output based on mathematical algorithms. At best, you are making simulacra.

Art, though, should have form greater than or equal to function. This separates artistic sculpture from furniture. It also must have some level of appeal to someone. Also, I think art should be intentionally created.

Finally, just because something is making a statement, it's not art. Ignorant yokels with poster board and tempera paints, by that reasoning, are artists.

So, is a dog making refuse art? According to me, no. It happens in nature. Not art.

How about a photograph? Nope. You're just pointing and clicking. Congratulations, serendipity put you in a place where you had a camera and a pooping dog; you're still not an artist. The only case I would even consider art involving cameras and defecating animals would be the clever arranging of scenery and properties around the animal so as to get more out of the situation than just you pointing and clicking. But then, I wouldn't consider the photograph art, just capturing an artistic event. Maybe if you did some post-processing, but again, you'd have to be the one controlling it, and not just using all the filters in Photoshop ("Look at the lens flare!").

From there, paintings and such of squatting dogs would be closer and closer to art.

AC I admire your dogged pursuit of the question. And not coming to conclusions too swiftly. You are as trenchant as ever, especially as to what art isn't.

heh. dogged.

Well, but someone had to program the algorithm. Isn't that art by this standard? I guess my own definition would just be anything that has aesthetic value independent of direct functional value is art. Which makes it subjective and affective, but I think that's how it should be.

Interview with W H Auden on Poetry

http://www.parisreview.com/viewinterview.php/prmMID/3970

Thus vanely thinking

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YLhu_f4Pwg&feature=relatedhttp://www.youtube...

All sciences comprise a single knowledge of a single subject - Being; art like science, is a consciousness of being but in another form.

Belinsky 1840s

Seems Leo Tolstoy considered this question too, poor-ious, What Is Art?.
I see, polutropos, that you own this work. Have you read it? Anybody else familiar with Tolstoy's view on this topic?

Yes EF I have a copy, and have read it carefully. More later. I'm pretty sure that TCM is familiar with Old Leo's argument. Doesn't cotton to it if memory serves. TCM along with that old Barbarian Turgenev felt that Leo should have stuck with what came naturally to him. Telling stories about wars and peace, Anna Karenyenyas, & co. & co, rather than the insipid stuff he got up to before running out on's family and coming a cropper at the railroad station. But boys will be boys, TNH knows this only too well.

Yes, indeed.

Tolstoy believed that the purpose of art was to create a 'community of feeling'. Art should express feelings by means of symbols and 'infect' the audience with those same feelings, thus creating a community of feeling. The moral worth of art depends on the kind and degree of those feelings.

For T the highest art comes from the people and includes everyday objects used by the people -folk art, folk tales, folk songs etc because these are the best at creating community. This art is simple, morally unambiguous, didactic, the symbols easily create feelings because everyone understands them (in the same way). Degenerate art is the product of elite groups which can only be understood by the members of those groups: formalism, decadence etc in which artistic questions take precedence over moral ones.

T's views on art must be seen in the context of the wider debate between the Utilitarian view of art and the art-for-art-sake which was hotly debated in the second half of the the 19th century in Russia. In fact the community idea comes from Belinsky, and the ideal of simplistic, morally unambigious art comes from Chernyashevsky, so T was not being as original as he thought he was. His views on art are misleading if one takes them as standing for all time, I think. "What is Art?" was written in the second half of his life when he had become very fanatical and moralistic. Interestingly, the art he produced in the early part of his life did not fulfil the demands he made of art in the second, which is why he repudiated it.

My objections to this, as Poor mentioned, are twofold: first the primacy of feelings. I think art can also embody ideas or concepts which can create community. Restricting it to feelings runs the risk of producing cheap sentimentality or superficial excitement (think of your Hollywood blockbuster). For me, great art always embodies an idea expressed by a fusion of form and content. Second, if we rely on 'the people' to produce art, what are we left with? Reality TV, warm beer and dog racing. (yes, I am a terrible snob.)

AC, great comments in 3. your distinction between aesthetics and art is something that concerned Kant in his distinction of the sublime and the beautiful. I find that some photography is art (see below) but I do see your point.

I strongly recommend a most brilliant essay by Saint Iris Murdoch on this topic, especially for a lucid explanation and critique of Kantian aesthetics. The essay is called "The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited" and it can be found in Existentialists and Mystics.

Photo:Eugene Atget 1925
(Thanks to Zeno for introducing me to this fantastic photographer)

Hm.

Now that I think about it, the photograph can be seen as embodying (commenting? contradicting?) much of what AC said: art is symbolised in the (ghostly) form of the gothic Cathedral in the background, with the branches of the tree in the foreground symbolising the beauty of nature. Both are equally beautiful, the (apparently) fragile gothic stonework echoing the tracery of the winter branches. The art comes in the vision of the photographer in putting these two together and making us see the architecture and the tree in a new way. The branches shed new light on the architecture, and vice versa.

I'm rambling, I fear. Shoot me

No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Nobody is going to tell me that Cartier-Bresson didn't make art. Irving Penn. The best shudderbugs make art, they can't help themselves. Gadszooks, Peter Fonda & Beau Bridges have snapped some darn good pictures in their time.
Now we know there's trouble when you start comparing the art of Photographers with, say, Michelangelo's Pieta, not a good idea. It's a lesser form , certainly. The photographers never work and sweat and bleed as hard as old Michelangelo said he did in's sonnets. That's for sure.


Enough, enough, enough! Say no more! Lump the whole thing! say that the creator made Italy from designs by Michael Angelo!

MarkTwain, INNOCENTS ABROAD

Iris Murdoch is a man, baby!

An amusing letter wherein photographers are discussed without testiness:

Dear Alfred

Thank you for your letter of June 7th. Everybody seems to like the Karsh pictyre, but me. I think it looks like a Y.M. C. A. secretary at a fancy dress ball, and greatly prefer the picture by Geenhill, which you have. The POST commissioned that picture for its exclusive use, but Karsh has other portraits of me and would, I am sure, be glad to make one available if you wanted to use it.
I do not know whether you have ever had your portrait taken by Yousuf Karsh; if not I would be delighted to describe the experience when we next meet. Personally I find the unceasing flow of reminiscence about popes, emperors and celebrated adulterers who have been photographed somewhat depressing; I begin to feel that I am unworthy of so experienced a lens. I begin to wonder if a snapshot of a very small potato would not do just as well. This is not Mr. Karsh's intention. He wants me to feel that I have made the grade, but some twist in my nature produces exactly the opposite effect. I like Greenhill's picture, which I think makes me look like a man who can read a book without moving his lips and occasionally licking his thumb. However, if you like Karsh's pictures - and their publicity value is undeniable - he has one of me taken in the same posture as his famous photograph of Bernard Shaw, in which I look like a sort of road company Shaw. There are also others in which I am doing fancy things with my hands which I would never dream of doing except under the spell of this extraordinary magician. Would you like me to send you a few samples? With good wishes I am
Yours sincerely,
Rob

of course it's Robertson Davies writing to his publisher Alfred Knopf

I am promiscuous in what I like and consider art, perhaps. I think the only definition that really works sets up art as the products of human endeavor as opposed to those naturally occuring. Once you get into defining which products it gets dicey because you are fiat-ing your highly personal view over what anyone else considers art. You could legitimately look at what different societies have considered admirable as art and admitted into their pantheon of worthy art and that is what most people seem to be talking about when they are trying to define art and include some things and exclude others.

I thought about this, and came up with a little haiku:

It's not art!

I paint a picture.
Without skill, it is Ug-Ly -
Unlike Scholar’s stones.

Of course its totally legitimate to argue the merits of any particular work, but I don't see how you can ever establish a definition that is going to classify good art and separate it out from the bad.

Exactly. My ugly picture is art but the beautiful scholar's stone isn't. So what good is art?

Ugly art abounds -
Look seriously and learn.
I'll walk in the sun.

Wery a-musing.

But could art be in the eye of the beholder, regardless of who produced it and how?

Those who collected scholar's stones for the last five thousand years would be on board with this, wouldn't they?

If I remove an abstract sculpture from the museum and place a scholar's stone on its pedestal, have I sinned against art? Does it matter if no one notices my deceipt? Couldn't I have said this in a haiku?

Okay, poor-ious, I watched the first three links of Murdoch and I cant take it anymore. Overall, she was banal. I found it surprising she couldnt admit that some writers use philosophical ideas to structure their novels. And I found it astonishing that she said no philosopher has written well about art. Really? the interviewer called her out on both items and she had nothing to say....

Very good, semckibbin. I put those Murdoch clips there to stimulate discussion. I hold no brief for her views. The discussion never ends, does it. I wish that I could make amends for your time wasted on the first 3 clips.
She must have meant that, for her, no philosopher has written well on art. I can't agree with her. Wm. Irwin Thompson, a philosopher as far as I am concerned wrote some fine things on art.
You must know more about Murdoch's intentions, I have no issues with that.

poor-ious, dont get me wrong, I appreciate the stimulation! Please point me to something by Thompson.

To be fair to Murdoch, philosophy, art and literature are pretty complex subjects and one has to have a very powerful mind or at least recently written an essay about them, in order to organize one's thoughts about them. So I was probably too critical in post 24.

And maybe she is only talking about analytic philosophers (Frege, Carnap, Ayer and that lot); because Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Dewey, Benjamin and Heidegger all wrote at length about art.

A great study by WIT is - THE TIME FALLING BODIES TAKE TO LIGHT. Everyone of his books is an education. You can find some you tube stuff too.

the whole thing is there if you find it interesting

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdQwS2ZHkUA

Started watching the Thompson video and I realized I have his At the Edge of History on my shelves. I read it probably 25 years ago, and I am sure I was too stupid then to see his point. Anyway, I dont remember anything besides the title.

>26 semckibbin: yes but Plato and Ari had no understanding of art at all.

i) Aristotle held that art is an 'imitation' of nature. From this starting point, everything else he says is very shaky. Far too crude a conception of art.

ii) He laid down rules as to what (good) art should be, thus starting a long line of critics who have sought to restrict art with rules. This shows no understanding of art, which usually follows its own rules.

Plato at least understood the power art has for subverting authority, which is why he sought to ban it.

old Derek gets a little confused now and then

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCzKjKS9p-c&feature=related

Tell me about it.

Would you like it in Chinese? Perhaps we might understand each other better in that language.

Georgie Jessel knew from art: when they were paying for tickets they were laughing already, ie. at Al Jolsen's comedy act. Art is when the thing rises well above the level of the cartoon. obama is a cartoon character and Vidal is the thing obama and his merry band of bankers pretend to be.

obama is a cartoon character and Vidal is the thing obama and his merry band of bankers pretend to be.

Le Salon Litteraire venturing into polemical debate! I like it!

Dick Cavett's "The Art of Television" - a classic polemical debate (since we're referencing Vidal, why not Mailer too!): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8m9vDRe8fw

oh why not this one too from Vidal, on what amounts to "The Art of Media Politics": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJMoZTN0n1I&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxLry57sdss&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RL6H2G9YTE&feature=related

Watched all 5 Thompson links. He is like 20 years ahead of Kurzweil.

I couldnt tell if he endorsed the view that "Evil is the newly emerging level of societal organization". And the opening yourself up to multi-dimensionality so you can create your own destiny is interesting, although I have to admit I am not sure how I would go about doing that.

Great stuff Vidal

so it seems. I have never read anything by him. Which of his books should be given a try ?

Creation!!!! Though I know that tomcat and lola, from my lurking around, know his work far better than I do.

I would track down all his collections of essays. Truly a liberal education. But you really can't go wrong with anything by this great man of letters.

Myra Breckinridge/Myron: the funniest and most searching analysis of gender relations ever written. This is probably the book that cost GV his Nobel: it's consistently and utterly outrageous on every page.

Julian is also excellent. More later.

Art comes in all forms

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Qrjtr_uFac

If you like William Irwin Thompson, you might be interested in his son, Evan Timothy Thompson:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dtv-zoVkdNg&feature=PlayList&p=C0F731E8A0...

Warning: prior familiarity with Buddhism and Neuroscience helps

oh very interesting! thank you for that link!

>6 MeditationesMartini:.

Being a programmer, I would say no. I've written at least four different computer programs that automatically generate aesthetic material (one automatically generates webcomics, another generates an x by y grid of connected line characters, e.g., ╣╦╩╗, another made an x by y grid of colors in which each pixel was withing some tolerable closeness to its neighbors, and a fourth program rearranged the pixels of an image such that each pixel was next to a pixel of the same color as its previous neighbor: an aesthetic scrambler). I don't consider myself an artist by this right, nor the output of these programs art.

The reason why is the same reason against calling most photography "art." Anybody can run the program, and thus, anybody can generate aesthetic output. Does that make them an artist? Not really. But by your argument, one of the creators of the camera (or new revolutionaries in the field of photography) should be considered the true artists over the photographer.

>12 QuentinTom:.

I do agree that some photography can be considered art, but that it is a very difficult thing to achieve to be true art. In fact, I think that more classic photography has a better chance of being truer art than more modern photography due to the in-depth processing that needed to be done in order to develop the film (such as burning or dodging, and whatnot). The old-school photographer had more control over the end result than the mid-school photographer (and the new-school photographer does similar work artificially with Photoshop). Your cited example, while aesthetic, I would not consider art if it were possible for a person to stand in the exact same place with (or without) a camera, and see the exact same thing.

except that a person would see it in colour.....

>47 QuentinTom:.

oh! I forgot that you humans see in COLOR.

Nevermind.

But, as an argument, if you were to stand in the exact same spot with a b/w camera and take a picture, how similar would it look to the original picture?

The original is not a picture, it is a three dimensional object. Light, angle, the way the lens refracts, and the limitations of the recording media will all change the appearance of the image. If you take a picture of Cyrano de Bergerac from 6 inches away, you'll get quite a nose. If you take it with a wide angle lens, it will be even more prominent. If you take it from 100 yards away looking dead on, you may not notice the nose. (Thanks to http://photo.net/learn/making-photographs/lens for the example). Indeed, a good artist working with paints can get you an image that you would feel "looks" at least as much and likely more like the object than a photograph.

So if you can't tell the difference between a painting and a photographic image, which is art? Do we need to have evidence of how it is produced before we canonize an object as art?

Of course, the original is not a picture (though, there is such a thing as an original picture, depending on your point of reference). With respect to the "original," it is a combination of sculpture, architecture, and nature, which may be considered art. But the angle of a fixed object and the placement of a natural light source wouldn't even get you a strong copyright in America, so it's not a matter of the difference in the appearance of the image that makes it art. It may be aesthetic, but if it's something that any idiot with a camera can duplicate, it's not art.

Would an electron microscope image of Cy's nose be art? Who would the artist be? Any idiot with access to that electron microscope can snap that particular shot.

Being married to a painter (the artist kind), I see the difference daily between paintings of real objects and painting of photographs.

Likewise, a photorealistic painting actually takes talent, which would put it leaps and bounds above the photograph.

Do we need to have evidence of how it is produced before we canonize an object as art?

No, you just need to be able to identify the media, and respect the quality of the work that went into it. I have learned to tell the difference between oils and acrylics and watercolors, and even if I was presented with a photorealistic painting or drawing, I could tell you the traditional media used. I don't need to have any extra evidence of production other than the finished work to determine its merit as art.

I think that if you're unable to realize the talent of a given work, you cannot truly make the distinction between simple aesthetics and art.

It's like comparing a pop diva who uses a vocoder to a traditional singer who doesn't need one. Some people can't tell the difference, but one of them is actually talented, and is, therefore, creating art.

The art of the letter:

Dear Mr. Thompson

Many thanks for the Saki galleys; I have been going through them with pleasure in every spare moment since they arrived. As it is sometime since I read him, he comes to me freshly.
A queer genius. I use the word advisedly, because nobody else is quite like him, he has had no successful imitators, and he imitated no one. Nevertheless Saki stands in the succession of English wit between the last enchantments of Oscar Wilde and the mature flowering of Wodehouse. Nor is he wholly English; he puts out a delicate root-system toward the wells from which Proust drew sustenance. His writing is the perfection of high-bred malice - a malice without ugliness. And of course these qualities do not arise from a trivial man; it takes a spirit of considerable depth to make the appearance of triviality so delightful, without ever dropping into the boredom of real triviality.
I do not know whether anything in the preceding paragraph is of any use to you. If not, let me try again. I am nothing if not obliging, and nobody wants to praise Saki in terms that would have drawn Saki's deadly fire.
With good wishes,
Robertson Davies

I call attention to the last sentence. I think it says something important.

AC, you argue most passionately and eloquently, if not altogether coherently, I'm afraid. I see a number of problems with your arguments.

1....wouldn't even get you a strong copyright in America...
I'm not sure that American copyright lawyers, Lords and Masters of the Universe as they undoubtedly are, would be the best judges of what is art in this or any case.

2.but if it's something that any idiot with a camera can duplicate, it's not art.
I see a confusion here between the initial work (Atget's original), and the possibility of a subsequent work, or copy. Atgets' initial act of seeing and recording is artistic in its originality: he saw first what no one else did and recorded it. It seems to me this may be thought of as art, regardless of the technical medium of the recording. Oils, water colour, marble, wood, chemicals and lenses: whatever the medium is, this does not effect the argument of calling the initial act of seeing and recording art.

3. distinction between simple aesthetics and art
I'm not sure about your distinction between art and aesthetics here. I think this may be a false dichotomy. If it's aesthetic (i.e: 'created according to a theory of aesthetics', even if this theory is only a personal one held by the artist alone and perhaps not even articulated very well), then it must be art.

4. It's like comparing a pop diva who uses a vocoder to a traditional singer who doesn't need one. Some people can't tell the difference, but one of them is actually talented, and is, therefore, creating art.
This is irrelevant to the argument: what is art. Of course one can argue about the relative merits of a piece of art: high, low, good, bad, noble, kitsch etc, but this is a different argument: The merits of art forms, the quality of a specific piece of art, questions of personal or conventional taste are different arguments from the argument of what is art.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I'd like to offer a definition of art here:

Art is an original act of seeing and recording.

'original' covers things which are not copies of other artworks, like your idiot with the camera taking the same shot as Atget's.

'seeing' can be extended to cover not only visual acts, but also mental, conceptual, aural, tactile: the 'idea' which the artist conceives of in their mind. This idea might be prompted by external stimuli, or by internal stimuli, but it is an act of beholding, or becoming aware of something that did not exist before.

'recording' covers the act of creation, the act of recreating in a medium the original 'idea' conceived of by the artist. It also covers the media of creation: it must be permanent, or at least recoverable as in the case of music or performance art.

My definition deliberately leaves out questions of taste, quality and merit as separate issues.

Nice quote on Saki, Porius.

Art, one definition of it anyway, is the lifting of the scales from the seers (not a mystic seer) eyes. Like Gloucester or old Lear himself, they begin to "see feelingly." They begin to see with the 'Double Vision' of Shakespeare, Blake, Yeats, or any great Poets who can see life in all its tragic-comedy.

TCM,

1. I wasn't trying to say that US Copyright Lawyers are the end-all for determining art. I was simply juxtaposing the concept that something copyrightable must exhibit some level of creativity, to the concept of creativity/talent exhibited in an artistic work.

2. I think some of my other arguments may have strayed into What is Copyrighted land, as that's where my passion lies more than in What is Art land. At times, I blur the line, as (as I mentioned above) both require some level of creativity. To me, both artistically and from a copyright sense, a photograph has most always been a simulacrum of what was being taken. Atget may have an artistic (and aesthetic) eye, but I wouldn't automatically consider the photograph as a photograph art. I did (I think) mention classical photography's ability of being more artistic (If you've ever used a manual camera and developed the film, you'd know why), so maybe Atget's photograph is art, as he used the camera more as a tool, and retained more control over his subjects than most people do these days with their auto-focus and auto-everythingelse and the de-suck/lens flare filter on PhotoShop.

3. When I use the word aesthetic, I use it to pertain to the study of beauty, natural or otherwise. Visualize a Venn diagram in which aesthetics and art are two overlapping circles. This allows for aesthetic (beautiful) non-artistic things, and artistic non-aesthetic (ugly) things. Actual diagram left to the reader. Sorry for not being clearer with my definitions.

4. This was in response to #49's statement regarding photorealism/etc. I find it to be a relevant analogy to the difference between a modern photograph and a traditional painting. Sorry, again, for not indicating to whom my response was.

Of course, thinking about art in general, I doubt there are any hard and fast, universal, absolute, fail safe rules on what is art. I mean, up until recently, the University of Houston gave people BFAs in Interior Design. So Christopher Lowell is a fine artist?

Maybe art is more personal: What I see as art, you might not (does anybody else think The Flaming Lips are artistic?), and what you see as art, I might not.

So, uh, we're all right? Is art Unitarian? Is there really such a thing as universal art (and I don't mean those paintings I see in the halls of Johnson Space Center)?

I think "art" is a word that forms a scale in people's eyes, through which they try to engage in and to judge others on original acts of seeing and recording.

I like Tom Cat's definition, as long as we all remember it's still just a word, not a thing.

A thing? A word? A musing?

Babcock looked amused by this speech; Einstein was solemn. The silence stretched out until Joyce spoke again.
"Mr William Butler Yeats and his friends." Joyce said simply, " live in Araby. It is real to them. More real than their servants, certainly. We go forth each day into the world of experience but we do not go mentally naked like Adam in Eden. We bring certain fixed ideas along whether we go to the corner pub, to a fair called Araby, or to the South Pole with Amundsen, I dare say. If a pickpocket enters this room he will see pockets to be picked; if Socrates were to ushered in by the fair Mileva" - he bowed chivalrously toward the kitchen, where Mrs. Einstein could be heard puttering - Socrates would see minds to be probed with annoying questions. If Mr. Yeats were here, he would see mere material shadows of the Eternal Spiritual Ideas known as Science," indicating Einstein, "Art," indicating himself ironically, "and mysticism," indicating Sir John. "I see three people with different life histories," he concluded abruptly.
"All of which," Einstein asked drily, "is your way of saying that the Golden Dawn people seem no more mad to you than anybody else."
"I am saying," Joyce replied, "that I can see the world as Yeats and the occultists do - as a spiritual adventure full of Omens and Symbols. I can also see it , if I choose, as the Jesuits taught me to see it in youth: as a vale of tears and a web of sin. Or I can see it as a Homeric epic, or a depressing naturalistic novel by Zola." I am interested in seeing it in all its facets."
Sir John leaned forward, suddenly interested. I think I begin to understand you a bit," he said. "You are saying that I am living in a Gothic novel, while you prefer to live in a Zola novel."
"Not that at all," Joyce said. "The Zola school is one dimensional, I am seeking multi-dimensional vision. I wish to see deeply into Gothic novels, Zola novels and all other masquerades, and then beyond them."
"Fascinating," said Einstein. "Fascinating."

more from THE MASKS OF THE ILLUMINATI by Robert Anton Wilson

If there is one thing I clearly lack it's a muse.

Which is too bad, because another good definition of art might be that which is inspired by a muse. A human creation with a touch of the divine.

So, Orpheus and Linus are art? (Assuming, of course, that they're the children of Oeagrus, and not Apollo. Maury, help us!)

"Inspired by a muse?" Freud would have a lot of fun with that one. Some people believe that we can enter a "Creative State" where our minds are more open to ideas. Some have tried to achieve this state with drugs LSSD, alcohol, ect. But when you read a poem, look at a picture, hear a piece of music, how do you know that it was inspired by anything at all?
A defination of art I agree with is the transfer of emotion from one person to another . If something "moves" me, I consider it art.

Is The Octopus art?

>60 semckibbin: hahaha

Golly, I absolutely have to read that Wilson book!

AC, yes, I think art can be Unitarian, in that we all agree there is something called art, but that we disagree as to what that thing/word might be. As MarianV (and Tolstoy and Belinsky for that matter) say: a shared response to art unites us all.

But what these SEVASTOPOL SKETCHES, including the third installment, "Sevastopol in August," achieved was to prove once and for all, if proof were needed, that Tolstoy was a born writer whose eyesight, to quote George Moore, "exceeds all eyesight before or since," He had published nothing yet to show that he could write a great novel; but the reportage of SSketches, taken together with his earlier autobiographical work, was enough to show that he was equipped , as far as surface vision and the power to communicate that vision were concerned, as no novelist had ever been equipped. I have recorded his own comment: "The interest with which I observe the soldiers around me, and the ways of making war, is so rewarding." It was indeed. That cool, dispassionate eye went on seeing and recording amid scenes of carnage and destruction, even in crises of personal peril, with the same atomizing and clinical precision with which the boy had regarded the mourners, including himself, at Kazan U.; the Cossacks, as well as himself, in his Caucasian outpost; the gamblers, including himself, at the pool-room in Tiflis. He watched everything and everyone around him - their behavior under fire, the faces of the dying, the desperate, untiring work of the surgeons in the dressing station, the moans and shrieks and agonized heroism of men held down while their limbs were cut off without anaesthetic.
He was glad, indeed, to have gone through all that. Without it much of WAR AND PEACE could never have been written The scene in which Prince Andrew, mortally wounded at Borodino, watches through his own daze of pain the surgeons removing Anatole Kuragin's leg, that "plump white leg," and holding it up, still in its boot, for poor Anatole to see, was a memory from Sevastopol.

This records the budding of an artist. The ability to see what is in front of him with disinterest. Without, compassion, Maybe. Tolstoy didn't go to his brother's funeral, he said he wasn't that moved by the death. An artist must have no more compassion than a tiger. Just ask Shaw's Devil. You can find him in the DON JUAN IN HELL section of MAN AND SUPERMAN.
Tolstoy, also, was a born artist. Now everyone has a right to their own opinion but I feel that most of those the wor ld calls artist, are born that way. Those of us who were not born so, can at least appreciate, according to our lights, the fruits of the great artists' labor.

the Tolstoy bit was taken from Edward Crankshaw's fine study: TOLSTOY: The Making of a Novelist. Viking Press NY 1967.
It has many fine photos of LT and friends.

another on the TBR pile. Excellent.

And I agree with you about artists being born. Dickens as another such.

In many ways Tolstoy and The 'Inimitable' were kindred spirits. Both were largely self-taught. Both were driven half nuts by the worm of conscience.
Both were cool under fire, T. in battle, and D. in the great train wreck and his many nocturnal strolls through the more unpleasant parts of London and environs. They each sired large families. They had tempestuous relations with their wives. Dickens left Catherine. Tolstoy stayed pretty much to the end with Sonia, though it might have been better for all concerned if he had left and lived in the peasant huts and chopped wood and cobbled and spent his evenings in bovine contemplation. Well that isn't quite fair to our great man, let's just say he took the peasant thing a little too far. Suffice it to say, that it is very hard to imagine the dandy Dickens all done up in a peasant outfit.
They were born great artists. Not all the writing workshops in the world could make a Dickens or a Tolstoy. Though I'm always open to suggestions

and not all the style guides in the world could ever make you write as well them either.

We are sluggards by comparison.

worms

A little scmaltzie but this Swedish singer is Tolstoy's great-grand daughter?!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfDU3zOCTas&feature=related

Yes, I can see the resemblance: all that hair!!!!!!

(The song is soooooo bad it's almost good!) is it art?

The Swedish cat on the trombone is pretty damn good. Though all the cool people take an attitude towards ABBA. Me, if I can find something good about the thing, I'm ok with it. I even liked these guys

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5udpASWmVY&feature=related

Who could forget the fabulous Sir Douglas Quintet from the Lone Star State

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XboE3_7KZ3Y&feature=related

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I always liked Abba!

Abba is art! Yes.

Another telling bit about that Tolstoy fella:

This is not the moment to relate these incidents to Tolstoy's view and conduct of life after his self-styled conversion in 1878. We are concerned immediately with the nature of the man who, without knowing it, was incubating WAR AND PEACE. And it seems to me important to an understanding of the limitations of this masterpiece that the introverted egotism - revealed in the diaries and in his relations with his peasants and with individuals as far apart as Valerya Arsenev and Turgenev - conditioned also the most fleeting and spontaneous actions. Of the incident with the beggar Rebecca West in her remarkable introduction to the story POLIKUSHKA quite justly said: "There is from start to finish no thought of the beggar. He might just as well have been brought into existence just for the moment when he held out his palm to Tolstoy. Not one second's consideration is given to the question of exactly what it is that the beggar most needs and how it could best be given to him from the point of view of his own and the general well-being. Tolstoy saw him purely as a means to his own salvation, and cared not a jot what happened to him otherwise.

This isn't quite fair to the more than generous Count. When asked why he pressed pennies into the hands of beggars, Dr. Johnson replied, "to allow them to beg on." Well Tolstoy knew that he couldn't on the spot relieve the peasants penury; and there is some truth to what RW says, I just feel that West spent probably more time watching others give up their coins to the needy.

quote from Edward Crankshaw's TOLSTOY The Making of a Novelist.

LT

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/tolstoy/leo/tolstoy.jpg

Porius,

Found this tiny gem today - http://www.librarything.com/work/226498/52374602 - in my weekend rounds. David Patterson, in his intro, summarizes Tolstoy's despair like this:

"In the Fall of 1879 the fifty-one-year old author of War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877) came to believe that he had accomplished nothing in life and that his life was meaningless. Either of these works would have assured him a permanent place in the annals of world literature; both testified to the depth of his genius and creativity. If artistic achievement of this magnitude cannot instill life with meaning, then where is meaning to be found?"

"If artistic achievement of this magnitude cannot instill life with meaning, then where is meaning to be found?"

Anyone care to attempt an answer?

Well EF, that's a tuff one. Tolstoy thought it lied in the direction of a back-to-nature Rousseau sort of thing replete with peasnat threads and the wholw 9 yards. By all reports this didn't work for the Count. Like Bobby Bittman's retirement to the country: "I ruined a lot of good shoe out there, dammit."
Seriously, Tolstoy might have taken old Turgenev's advice, but LT always treated IT like a step-child - nothing doing there. Though Tolstoy felt pretty low after the well meaning barbarian finally cashed in his chips.
In the OUTSIDER Colin Wilson saw LT as reaching a dead end. He saw more hope in Dostoyevsky's pathetic insect-men. They were gathering strength with each story, they strove for more and more abundant life. Don't know how far along FD might have gotten? Wilson could only see Tolstoys rustication as a dead end.
Tolstoy tried to escape himself in Many ways. The symptom was always self-hatred, a desire to escape ones self. In all the cases , the escape is achieved by seizing on oneself. Other people are a means to this end: but the end is still to escape oneself. If the end became to love other people and practical charity, its result could easily be a new form of self-love.

Of course this doesn't answer that very tough question, but it will have to do for now.
En-REE-kay Free-KAY

Tolstoy and the soul?!

The great paradox of WAR AND PEACE is that this immense canvas, which appears to include the whole of life, is in fact steeped in the spirit of exclusion. Mystery is out. George Moore, in one of those brilliantly perceptive essays (wise even in their sometimes tiresome flippancy) which have temporarily been forgotten, put it very well: "Tolstoy is lord over what is actual and passing; he can tell better than anybody how the snipe rise out of the marsh, and the feelings of a young man as he looks at a young girl and desires her, but his mind rarely reaches a clear conception of a human soul as a distinct entity; his knowledge of the soul, except in the case of Pierre, is relative and episodic.

Edward Crankshaw

For what is form in a complete work of art but the line drawn by the artist to demarcate the outer limits of his own experience and understanding? "Within these limits," he is saying in effect, "I am at home; and where I am at home is on ground won hardly from the immense unknown. I believe (I can do nothing else) that this territory, this novel, this painting, this arrangement of sounds which I have created must in someway reflect, however dimly, hesitantly and imperfectly, at least some small aspect of universal truth, of what is commonly called the underlying reality governing all things and all men. And my task is to shape and burnish the reflecting surface, and so to light it, that the reflection is as complete and true I can make it." The complete and perfect work of art, then, is inseparable from its form, which thus acknowledges its limitations while transcending them. There are not many complete and perfect works of this kind, but there are many that aspire to such completeness and perfection, even though the artist himself may be, at best, only faintly or intermittently aware of the force that drives him on.
But what happens when, as with Tolstoy, the artist does not know the meaning of humility? What happens when he refuses to acknowledge the validity of what he cannot understand? What happens when he says, in effect, I recognize only what I see, I acknowledge only what I can prove by reason; all else is delusion, at best a sentimental dream, more probably a fraud? What happens, with the best will in the world, is that his creation, which cannot comprehend the totality of all things seen, is bound to be episodic, is bound to sprawl.

Edward Crankshaw, TOLSTOY, The Making of a Novelist

And finally:

George Moore, who knew less about Tolstoy's early life than we know now, gets to the heart of the matter but makes a joke of it: " . . . The reader must be a very casual reader indeed if he fails to ask himself if it were Tolstoy's intention to transcribe the whole of life. His intention seems certainly to have been to include all the different scenes that come to pass in civilized life, and no doubt he ran them over in his mind, for a scene of ladies in a drawing-room taking tea is followed by a scene in a ballroom with ladies dancing, and this is followed by a scene in a barrack-room with a quarrel among the officers. Scene after scene! . . . We turn the pages; but alas, there are more pictures, and curiosity taking the place of the pleasure of art, we ask ourselves how it was that Tolstoy forgot to include the description of a yacht race. . . For no writer ever tried harder to compete with Nature than Tolstoy. Yet he was a clever man and must have known he would be defeated in the end; but he is one of those men to whom everything is plain and explicit except the obvious, and WAR AND PEACE is so plainly the work of a man with a bee in his bonnet that, despite the talent manifested in every description, we cannot help comparing him to a swimmer in a canal challenging a train to a race."

This, of course, is not the whole of it. (Far from it) For Tolstoy, violently as he rejected the unknown, was divided against himself. And very soon, in ANNA KARENINA, he was to display the depth of that division.

from Edward Crankshaws's TOLSTOY, The Making of a Novelist

As you can see, Crankshaw is not shy about ruffling the feathers of the great man. He takes Tolstoy to task, mainly for his refusal to see beyond the surface of things. That is, he dwelt very little with the soul.

The Art of Reading

The Inward Voice

Certainly it is not my purpose to suggest that we should return to all this reading aloud, creating in every library a hubbub like that which one hears when walking through the corridors of a conservatory of music. But we are not foolish to give up that inward voice in which books can speak to us? And in pursuit of speed of all things! What has speed to do with literary appreciation? Speed, unless some real, defensible good is achieved by it, is nothing but end-gaining, which is the death of all the enjoyment of the arts. Not ENDS, but MEANS bring delight and fulfillment to the reader, and his means of reading is listening to the inward, reading voice.
What is that voice like? Its quality depends on your ear. If you have a good ear and some talent for mimicry, you can read to yourself in any voice, or as many voices as you please. You have seen Sir Laurence Olivier's film of RICHARD 3? Very well, can you hear him again when you read the play? If you can, and if you are a playgoer and a filmgoer, you should be able to find voices for all the characters in the books you read. James Agate, the English theatre critic, amused himself by casting the novels of Dickens, in which he delighted, with the actors whom it was his professional duty to watch; his favorite Mr. Dombey was Sir John Gielgud.
This is a game, and a very good game, but it asks for a good ear, and makes heavy imaginative demands on the reader. You may not be able to play it; perhaps you have no desire to do so; it is not for all temperaments. Your taste may be more austere. Besides, it only works with novels and plays. What about reading history or poetry?
The inner voice is of your own choosing, of your own development. It may differ greatly from the voice in which you speak. To read Trollope in the tones of Kansas, or Joyce in the cadences of Alabama, is as barbarous as to read HUCK FINN with a Yorkshire accent, or Edith Wharton in the voice of Glasgow. One of the most dismaying experiences of my college days was to hear the whole of HAMLET read by a professor whose voice was strongly nasal, and whose vocal range was well within one octave. Did he, I wondered, read to himself in that voice? Or did he hear, inside himself, a full, rich, copious, nobly modulated sound unlike the dispirited drone which came out of his mouth? There are, one presumes, utterly tone-deaf readers.

from A VOICE IN THE ATTIC by Robertson Davies.
A fine study with a call to the 'clerisy' to take back literature, etc. from the universities and professional book chatters.

I woke up last night thinking about this question. I have a new, better, response.

Art is a creative product intended to be consumed by the senses. I want to add, but am not sure if this is a cultural thing, its utility must be primarily (or perhaps almost solely) to serve the function of being so consumed. That is why we can frame something that was not art and make it art - the classic example being Duchamp's urinal. That also explains why some things that have great utility can have artful aspects, the design of an automobile, for instance, and why things that occur naturally (beautiful sunset, mathmatical relationships) or whose sole intended function is utility (harder to think of an example - because even a paper clip has design elements that are not purely functional - maybe I am wrong on this point) can still provoke a response as if they were art.

To put it less analytically - it is created by the ghost in the machine to feed the ghost in the machine.

>80 slickdpdx:.

Machine ghost food. Hmm.

Art is a haiku

Set out in two lines.

I wanted to come up with something erudite and pithy...but i am tired from Home Renovating....so...wasn't it Neil Young who said, sometime in the bad old '70s...."Art is just a dog on my porch"? i'll stick with that for now....

that qualifies as pithy, I think.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy8G0kvMCxw&feature=related

Yes, but maybe Mr. Young's dog was named "Art." I'm naming my next dog Vanity so I can say...

>85 slickdpdx:

good one!!! Vanity trumps Art at every turn.

>84 Porius:

Pithy is as Pithy does...unless one has a lisp, no?

i think i like this Group
J

I think Neil Young was referring to Mr. Garfunkle looking to make time at a garden party he threw, that has nothing to do with painting and music and stuff.

>87 A_musing:

very good one, that!!!

Arty on the make has nothing to do with painting and music and stuff? VERY amu-sing!

Art could act, songwrite and sing. Could he paint?

http://www.artgarfunkel.com/bio.html

He was an art history major, which suggests the answer is NO. However he IS a writer of prose and poetry and prose poems.

And you just reminded me, slick, art can also read! He's kept track of everything he has read since 1968.

http://www.artgarfunkel.com/library.html

How awesome is that! Someone send him an LT invitation.

Holy shite! That is an impressive reading list and catalog.

Tell me about it! He doesn't read chaff. I'd suggest someone here in LT take him on as a Legacy Library project but... he's not deceased... and that might be perceived as rude. A "Living Library" project?

I am convinced. Art is ... Art.

TOO MUCH, TOO FAST

Graham Green makes me feel foolish. I admire his work and read everything he writes, but always with the uncomfortable sense that I am a google-eyed youth listening to the wisdom of a being vastly more mature, more penetrating in his view of life, than I ever can be. I think I know his secret: his dogmatic religious belief diminishes those who have small appetite for dogma, and his conviction that life is a dreary swindle makes those of us who have frequent spells of cheerfulness feel naive. I know what it is about his work that makes me feel like a fool, but the trick works every time.

Consider his essay "The Lost Childhood," in which he talks about reading. "Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives," he begins, and goes on to say that the books which had most influenced him were those he read before he was 14. This is directly contrary to my own experience and makes me feel that I am rather a hick to enjoy reading so much at my advanced age. But then I do not believe, as Mr. G. does, that life grows more intolerable the more you know about it. And I recall that Sean O'Casey described G's attitude to life as "a snot-sodden whinge."

The books I read before I was 14 were influential, in some cases. One of them was PICKWICK PAPERS, which I read at 12; it took me about 10 weeks, as I remember, and much of it was weary work. But after 14 I really got into high gear. THE OLD WIVE'S TALE was a revelation, and so was MADEMOISELLE de MAUPIN, both of which I read as a schoolboy. Ay 17 I discovered ANTIC HAY and rushed on to POINT COUNTER POINT; they, too, were landmarks for me. I read most of Shaw at school, which won me a quite unmerited reputation as a dangerous thinker; it was the plays and jokes I liked, not the political argument. THE WAY OF ALL FLESH was another explosion in my life. Up to 20 life was certainly not runing downhill for me.

Nor did it take a downward turn between 20 and 30. I had my defeats as a reader. I could never get through all of WAR AND PEACE, though I hope to have another tussle with it in a few years. I never read a novel by Dostoyevsky until I was 35, and then CRIME AND PUNISHMENT opened up a new world of sensation and introspection. People who write about what they read in youth rarely fail to put me to shame, because they seem to have read so much, so young. But like most of the world's population, I had a living to earn, and a life to lead, and my reading was eager but spotty.

What I really liked was gnawing away through all the works of a single author. I am one of the not very large group of people not engaged in psychoanalysis who have read the whole of Sigmund Freud's collected works; it was amply worth while, if only for the astonishment I feel when people attribute ideas to F. which he never expressed, or catagorically dismissed. I am chewing my way now through all of C.G. Jung, whom I find a more congenial thinker, but a less engaging writer, than Freud. I have read all of Dickens - much of his work many times - and am amazed at the people who express extravagant admiration or condemnation without having taken this elementary step.

There is no writer within my experience who responds so well to this treatment as Shakespeare. To read his complete works, in the order in which he wrote them, seems a small tribute to pay the greatest of all dramatists, but many people shrink from it. Reading Shakespeare, of course, is hard work - not because it is difficult to understand, but because it is so emotionally demanding. Not brilliant intellect, but profound feeling, is demanded.

It would grieve me to think that my best reading was already over - not to speak of having lost one's delight in it at 14. People who have read enormously in youth do not call forth my envy; I have heard them talk about the masterpiece they gobbled at 18, and it is clear that they brought an 18 year old understanding to the work of mature giants. So often they have missed the point. A great book- or just a good book - contains some of the best of a perceptive, sensitive, perhaps inspired writer's life. It cannot be encompassed by a hasty reading.

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight. We all read too much, too fast. I am taking the summer off to work slowly through several books that are due for a second reading.

from the PETERBOROUGH EXAMINER, 16 June 1962
Robertson Davies

R.D. was just about 50 when this newspaper article was written.

P! Wrong thread?

http://www.librarything.com/topic/75682

"You know exactly as I do what art is: it is nothing more than a rhythm. But if that is so, I shan't bother myself with imitation or the soul, but purely and simply produce rhythms with whatever takes my fancy: tramways, oil paints, wooden blocks..."

K Schwitters

it's no doubt better over there - Sl:

i am a huge backer of rhythm in any form, evonne goolagong, the old aussie tennis star had a wonderful rhythm to her game. -zenomax. i think goolagong meant, something water by tall trees.

#95
Another reason to not like Mr. Green is he made all that money from The power & the Glory & then went around complaining about how he didn't like Mexico & it was so uncomfortable living there ect.ect.

Well I like Mexico, have many good friends over the years from there. Nothing like Mexican nights, food, and Mexican breezes. Am enchanted,if that is the right word, by Diego Rivera's art, not to mention his wife's art. And I still like old Greene , I loved TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT, and I sort of liked A SORT OF LIFE. I'm a big fan of one of his periodic cronies, Norman Douglas. ND's autobiography is one of the most eccentric on record, I think. I wish Norman Douglas, Compton Mackenzie, and Stephen McKenna were more widely known. Mackenzies BUTTERCUPS AND DAISIES is right up there with a great deal of "Plums" funniest stuff. I am in the middle of his THE FOUR WINDS OF LOVE, east, south, west, north, and I'm thinking he should be right up there with the centuries best. Scott Fitzgerald is a gnat by comparison, IMO. I love DHL but he always has a hatchet in's hands. Of course, CM wrote in what Rob Davies would call the "Plain Style" but this shouldn't be held against him, should it? One of my favorite bookmen of the first part of the 20th C. loved old Mackenzie (Mackenzies parents were famous actors, father being Edward Compton) - he was SPB Mais. I really enjoy reading Mais, Robert Lynd, Alice Meynell, and Arthur Waugh. Just a lot of good talk about books and life without the relentless analysis.
Once in a while I get to gabbing, can't help it. Like merriment it breaks through without warning.

Aahhh yes. Goolagong.



An art form?

I don't know, but Yvonne Goolagong is one of the best real names of all time.

Another favorite, maybe my very favorite is Virginia Wade. I can still recall when she beat Betty Stove, the Dutch giantess, at the 1976 Wimbledon. I saw her play in person way back when the Virginia Slims was alive and well. She cut a most elegant figure in her canary yellow Adidas warm-up outfit. It was an intimate setting, inside of Cobo Hall, you could just about go up and start talking to the contestants. She's never photographed any too well, but I thought her a stunning beauty in the flesh. What they used to call a handsome woman, certainly.

http://www.daylife.com/topic/Virginia_Wade

see her play her v. a relative of the great cellist.

#100 "Once in a while I get to gabbing, can't help it. Like merriment it breaks through without warning."

LOL And I am so glad you share your gabbing with us. I am prone to stultifying depression rather than merriment without warning, but oh, how the merriment thrills me.

And damn it, your quotations from Davies may just force me to return to him. I was a huge fan. Read pretty well all he wrote. Taught the Deptford trilogy too many times. But seeing him walking around the university campus, carrying himself as the Great Sage, all theatre, and sneering, or at least seeming to sneer, at mere mortals, really soured me on him. I have turned my back. But recently someone told me that dismissing the work of an author because of an acquaintance with him, is like dismissing goose pate because of an acquaintance with the goose. Rather apt, I think.

Many of the Davies quotes you have been posting I have grudgingly admired, but the one above is particularly good. I will have to return to him, damn it.

Robertson Davies in 2011!

Pol - I only saw RD at several lectures, mostly at Stratford. Sure he had a magisterial bearing but if you read his letters you will find a man always willing to lend a hand. Of course he was no favorer of Democracy. At this point I'm having trouble understanding just what that concept means myself. I possess a kind letter from the great man that is one of my favorite things. He had so much going at one time that I am almost certain that under the off-putting exterior was a man at work. When you think about his years as a paperman, a teacher, an administrator, father of 3 daughters, and throw in the plays, the novels, the essays, the book-chat, the reviews, etc. etc. etc. - then you have a full life, indeed.
And if not for RD I might have missed out reading Gwyn Thomas, Mervyn Peake, JC Powys and many more.

not too mention those ungentlemanly Canadian geese. Those can be some angry birds.

#105 'Rique: Ooh, I agree!

I'd be on board for Davies too. Even if he sounds like an arse, a lot of the writers I like seem to be great arses.

. . . Berenson believes that representational art is the only art worthy of the name, and he believes that in the vast field the most important factor is the representation of the human nude, with landscape a second-best. During the past 50 years he feels that art has dealt in "confusion, struttings, blusterings, solemn puerilities," but he has words of comfort: "in past ages, art has sunk as low, although probably with no such smirking self-adulation, as it has today"; and he thinks that we shall pull through, though we may take a couple of centuries to do so. How? According to Berenson, art is a history of refreshment by genius, derivation and copying of that genius and then refreshment by new genius. The last genius to appear, in his view, was Cezanne, and there has been no one to refresh and revivify art since his day. Only a succession of brilliant tricksters, of whom Picasso is the most gifted and perverse. Thus Berenson. . .

. . . Let me, greatly daring, attempt a simplification. Let us suppose that Berenson and Malraux are confronted by a picture, the work of an unknown artist. B. will form his opinion solely on how well the artist has succeeded in conveying his ideas about the subject, by means of drawing and color; he will take into account the artists intention, but it will be his achievement which will fix the final judgement. M., standing before the same picture, will give weight to the artist's intention, to his religion, to the spirit of the age in which he lived, to his politics, to anything and everything which could possibly have had a bearing on the conception and execution of the picture, and in his final judgement the excellence of its execution may not weigh very heavily. B. regards art as a means of communication and wants it to be reasonably comprehensible to the world: M. regards it principally as the artist's personal statement, for the world to understand it if it can. In short, B.'s view is classical, and M.'s is romantic.

This cleavage between them is amply clear in their prose. B. strips his writing down to the bones. There is no ambiguity anywhere; his Yea is his Yea, and his Nay, his Nay. Wisdom and insight are everywhere to be found in his books, distilled and expressed with economical beauty. M. writes a beautiful prose, also, but with a difference!

Like all romantics, he cannot resist the full palette, and while this makes for passages of great beauty, it also makes for pages of muddle. With hair-raising abandon, he brings literature and music to his aid when he is talking about painting and sculpture, and though this is sometimes illuminating it is just as often like dropping a bottle of ink into a bathtub of clear water. His book is heavily charged with pity for the fate of man, and pity is a treacherous emotion; it can be noble at one moment and maudlin the next. Nor, it must be said, is everyone so convinced that the life of man is a vale of tears as is Andre Malraux; to feel greatly is a very fine thing, but it is also part of man's fate to think, and it is often astonishing how a fairly short period of thought can brighten a gloomy prospect.

Yet I would not for the world disparage this book, which has filled me with admiration and provided me with illumination which I sorely need. It is a very important book, in that it contains the deep convictions of a man of great knowledge, sensibility and literary skill. It is the book above all others that I would give to a young man or woman caught up in the greatness and mystery of painting and sculpture; it is not a youthful book, in any sense of being immature or insufficient, but it is addressed to the youthful spirit; it is a book for those who are discovering life, and it is a fine chart for such discovery. Berenson's book is for minds which are harder, clearer, less patient with surges of feeling, romantic aspiration - and that which the 19th century implied in the words "poesy and buzzem." Berenson provides you with a glass of very finely distilled wisdom from which to sip. Malraux provides you with a glorious tank in which you may be submerged and from which, years later, you may never wring yourself dry. As to which is the better, I know my own choice, but as for making a public judgement between them - well, that isn't for the likes of me.

SATURDAY NIGHT, 20 March 1954

SEEING AND KNOWING/THE VOICES OF SILENCE
from THE ENTHUSIASMS OF ROBERTSON DAVIES
Penguin Books 1991

It steamrolls when it comes steamrollin time.

AN AWAKENED CLERISY

Obviously a revived or awakened clerisy is not going to be the one which fell asleep in the middle of the 19th century. We are the spiritual great-great-grandchildren of those people. Their world is not ours, nor have we their classical education or their Biblical culture; we do not live in a society so frankly class-conscious as theirs. Where they had one new book to read, we have a 1000. Where they had a splendid certainty of their own taste and learning - one recalls the Victorian clergyman who replied to a young lady who observed that his pronunciation of a particular word did not agree with the dictionary: "My dear, dictionaries exist to record the pronunciations of people of education, like myself" - we defer to the opinions of journalistic critics who are, in their turn, reflections of academic critics. We live in a world where bulk is often equated with quality, and though we know that the best-seller is not therefor the best book, we can be awed by impressive sales. Nevertheless, we of the clerisy exist; we are not fools; we can make our existences felt by authors, publishers, and critics simply but recognizing that we exist as a class which cuts across all classes, and by making our opinions better known, verbally,in public, by correspondence, and by other means which present themselves in the course of daily life. We are people to be reckoned with. Courteously but firmly we must refuse the outsider role, the layman label, which we have allowed the world of publishers and critics to foist upon us. By our own sheepishness we incurred this loss of our right; by our intelligence we shall reclaim it. We are not ashamed to reverse the words of Nathaniel in LOVE'S LABORS LOST: we HAVE fed on the dainties that are bred in a book; we HAVE eat paper and drunk ink; our intellect is replenished.

Davies wrote this more than 50 years ago and I think it is still fresh for us today. The book is called A VOICE IN THE ATTIC: Essays on the Art of Reading. I've been dipping into it for nearly as long and I can think of very few books on the subject that are better. David Cecil is good. And to go back a bit, SPB Mais, and Robert Lynd are also good. Of the Americans, Stanley Edgar Hyman and Louise Bogan are also very good.
Hyman's book, THE CRITIC'S CREDENTIALS: Essays and Reviews, ed. by Phoebe Petingill, NY, Atheneum, 1978.

Anthony Quayle is the best Falstaff, no?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKTUfH9xQss&feature=related

Honor?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3SxxhSpLrY&feature=relatedhttp://www.youtube...

Wisdom cries out in the streets and no man regards it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1MgjQOR_JA&feature=related

AUDEN AT SIXTY

Auden's work and career are like no one else's, and have helped us all. He has been very responsible and ambitious in his poetry and criticism, costantly writing deeply on the big subjects, and keeping something wayward, eccentric, idiosyncratic, charming, and his own. Much hard, ingenious, correct toil has gone into inconspicuous things; introductions, anthologies, and translations. When one looks at them closely, one is astonished at how well they have been done.
In his 20's, he was already one of our best and most original poets. For long years, it has lived with that genius, never betraying it, but always adding and varying, a discoverer and a sustainer. His inspiration seems almost as versatile as his styles and his metrical forms, yet I am most grateful for 3 or 4 supreme things: the sad Anglo-Saxon alliteration of his beginnings, his prophesies that seemed the closest voice to our disaster, then the marvelous crackle of his light verse and broadside forms, small fires made into great in his hands, and finally for a kind of formal poem that combines a breezy baroque grandeur with a sophisticated Horatian simplicity.
Last winter, John Crowe Ransom said to me that we had made an even exchange when we lost Eliot to England and later gained Auden. Both poets have been kind to the lands of their exile, and brought gifts the natives could never have conceived of.

1967
Robert Lowell

"In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this dark world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it."

~ David Foster Wallace (in an interview w/ Larry McCaffery)

Without reference to literary sources. I propose that:

The problem 'What is Art?' only arises if you think that 'art' is in some way sui generis - in some way 'art' is a term that picks out a distinct aspect or kind of things or activities - and therefore apt for definition apart from everything else. One reason to think this might be the fear that by allowing that 'art' is not really distinctive in this way we are stuck with an 'anything goes' attitude. I think that fear is mistaken. If we abandon the idea of 'art' we don't suddenly lose the whole tradition, whatever it may have been or continue to be. Car-maintainance handbooks do not suddenly become works of literature equivalent to Ulysses, and we can still pick out those things that compel us to take intense interest in them for whatever reason. The only thing a definition of 'art' is likely to do is to codeify the art market, to the advantage of that market rather than the art consumer, and to further restrict the interests of those who are interested in whatever 'art' is rather than being interested 'simple'.

113

I will shamefacedly confess to not having yet read DFW, even though so many friends and various literati have been praising him to the skies. Perhaps over the Christmas break I can rectify that.

His quote above I absolutely love. Art illuminates. YES!

P, join the group read of Infinite Jest in the Salon next year!

Re DFW:

But DFW seems to be making evaluative judgments about art a moral issue, which I find worrying. Aside from that, claiming that great art illuminates seems either trivially true or just too vague to actually 'shed any light' on the issue... Does anyone know what he means by 'illuminates' here? He seems to imply, by contrast with 'darkness' that the 'possibilities of being alive and human' just are morally good. I can't agree with that - a realy excellent artwork can be both utterly dark and completely hopeless, critical, ironic, pessimistic, and not necessarily positive about the possibility of being human in any way. And if he means anything like 'explores the human condition' then it's just the usual platitude, in effect a cliche.

Perhaps someone can explain DFW a little further, in case I'm misinterpreting the quote.

I'm pretty certain that Dave did indeed think writing good books was a good thing.

You missed the point. He seems to be defining good art/books as those which are morally good, rather than good art being good in itself, which I'd have no problem with. I'm quite happy for art to be utterly pointless, if not downright evil, I just happen to find enjoyment in it, but that's obviously subjective.

No, I do indeed think he thought writing "good" books was a good thing.

If someone wants to write a good bad book, well, I don't think Dave would have enjoyed it.

Fair enough. I guess I'm not gonna be a fan.

Welcome to LibraryThing, Third_cheek! How did you find Le Salon so fast?

DFW deplored nihilism in literature. As I understand DFWs literary philosophy, he loathed lit. that merely expounded on evil events - like a reporter - without offering commentary as to why or how such evil occured.

You must understand that when DWF arrived on the scene, the "Brat Pack" of young writers were then en vogue. And he loathed these writers he was first grouped with when his debut novel arrived in '87, your Bret Ellis', Jay McInerney's, Tama Janowitz's, who dispatched dispassionate novels about characters leading their empty, selfish, drug addicted lives of constant ennui and "Oh woe is me!" DFW hated that.

So I'm sure his view of art in literature was somewhat of a personal reaction and wanting to distance himself from those he was most closely associated with early on; whom, in fact, he really had nothing in common literary-wise.

He clearly adored Dostoyevski who also wrote about evil and darkness - and went pretty deep darkwise, no? - so I think, Third_cheek, you might be premature in assessing that this DFW is not for you. Give him a chance.

Third_cheek,

So you like bad books?

'Rique,

I think you've hit the nail on the head. When you get into the essays, he is constantly struggling with himself about goodness and evil, and not making assumptions (e.g, how about porn? what's that about?). Part of it is seeing the good where society is missing it, because they're all lost in the Great Ohio Desert.

He even had a youthful phase experimenting with John McCain, but he got over it.

If you told Cotswold man to build you a house, this is how he built it. He knew- thank God - no other way of building houses. This tradition has lasted until our own time. There are still some old Cotswold masons who work in that tradition and could work in no other. In their hands the stone flowers naturally into those mullions. They can see Cotswold houses already stirring in the very quarries. I say these men still exist, but there are not many of them and they grow old and feeble.
I was introduced to old George, a Cotswold mason. He is in his 70's but still at it. When I met him he was engaged in the almost lost art of dry-walling, pulling down some remarkable old walls and converting their materials into smooth solid ramparts. He was a little man, with a dusty puckered face and an immense upper lip so that he looked like a wise old monkey; and he had spent all his life among stones. There were bits of some all over him. He handled the stones about him, some of which he showed us, at once easily and lovingly, as women handle their babies. He was like a being that had been created out of stone, a quarry gnome. He was a pious man, this old George, and when he was not talking about stone and walls, he talked in a very quiet though evangelical strain about his religious beliefs, which were old and simple. Being a real craftsman, knowing that he could do something better than you and I could do it, he obviously enjoyed his work, which was not so much toil exchanged for so many shillings but the full expression of himself, his sign that he was old George the mason and still at it. Bad walls, not of his building, were coming down, and good walls were going up. The stones in them fitted squarely and smoothly and were a delight to the eye and a great contentment to the mind, so weary of shoddy and rubbish. I have never done anything in my life so thoroughly and truly as that old mason did his building. If I could write this book, or any other book, as well as he can build walls, honest dry walls, I should be the proudest and happiest man alive. Old George has always been a mason, and his father and grandfather were masons before him; they were all masons these Georges; they built the whole Cotswolds: men of their hands, men with a trade, craftsmen. I do not know for what pittance they worked, or how narrow and frugal their lives must have been,but I do know that they were not unhappy men; they knew what they could do and they were allowed to do it; they were not taught algebra and chemistry and then flung into a world that did not even want their casual labor; they were not robbed of all the dignity and sweetness of real work; They did not find themselves lost and hopeless in a world that neither they nor anyone else could understand; they did not feel themselves to be tiny cogs in a vast machine that was running down; they had a good trade in their fingers. solid work to do, and when it was done- and there it was, with no mistake about it, ready to outlast whole dynasties - they could take their wages and go home and be content. I am glad I met old George and saw him at work. And if ever we do build Jerusalem in this green and pleasant land, I hope he will be there, doing the dry-walling.

from J.B. Priestley's ENGLISH JOURNEY

A great little bit to go with this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkddEkM7FQw&feature=related

Thanks all, for clarifying DFW for me. Sounds interesting, even if I don't agree with his approach.

"But once on a Greyhound bus from Calexico to Los Angeles I met a Mexican-American man whose best friend had lost three sisters, ages sixteen, fourteen and thirteen. It happened right on the eastern border of Imperial, in Yuma, Arizona, and the reason that the man told me his friend's story was that fourteen more pollos* had just died of thirst when their coyote abandoned them in the very same spot; so it must have been 2001 when I heard the story, which took place about fifteen years earlier; and you already know the ending. They'd paid their big money, then waited and waited, after which forensicists identified the decomposed bodies of those three young girls. They never found the coyote. The mother went crazy. And the man told this steadily and so softly that I thought that only I could hear, but when he had finished, everyone on the bus fell silent. How could it be right to make art out of this? (emphasis mine). And yet of course it would be right to make a poem or a song, a painting or a novel about it, if doing so would help anyone to feel. Steinbeck might have been able to do it. Maybe someday I will attempt to do it. At the moment, I cannot presume to do anything with this story except to show it to you, tiptoe around it, and walk away."

~William T. Vollmann, touching on why he turned Imperial - from which this excerpt is taken - into a documentary rather than the originally intended work of fiction he'd set out to create and spent ten years researching.

"*Pollo -- Someone who tries to cross the border illegally. Often guided by someone who is derogatorily referred to as a coyote. (A.k.a. pollista or pollero.)"

I've travelled much of the area. Its always been a fascinating place, or places for me. And I'm looking forward to reading Vollman's book. I have some friends that grew up in San Diego who know the place very well.

3> As a collector of fine-art and photography, and having spent many years as a fine-art broker, I would tend to disagree with you on many levels, although I do agree with your analysis of the current plethora of garbage being posted to the net by anyone who has a digital camera.

There are photographers who have created magnificent art, and I do agree with you that the artist must have a hand in the creation of any work, and not rely on the darkroom and PhotoShop to fix it up. That is the reason I will never own a Giclee print and all of the photographs in my collection are from slides and negatives only.

As for the necessity of art having a function: it's function is to capture the spirit of someone, for whom the work was created. The sole purpose of the art on my walls is to remind me of what is truly beautiful.

130> I partially agree with you K.J. I've been using an RZ67 for the last couple of years having decided that something was definitely missing in the digital experience. I think that was entirely subjective though, and that digital photography has been a great step towards the accessiblity of art practice. Many of my friends who previously had little experience of photography or art practice generally are now avid photographers and have very quickly developed skills and undertstanding that they might not otherwise have had. I'm more surprised by how many really good photographs there are online, rather than how much garbage there is (it is mainly garbage though).

Nonetheless we agree that ruling photography out as not 'art' is absurd. There are different kind's of photographers, and those interested only in advancing their technical skill with the process are arguably not engaged in art, but that might just be a prejudice.

As you probably guessed from previous posts, I don't think art needs to have a function - at least it needn't be intended that way - unless you take function in the broadest possible sense of somehow being engaged in human communicative practices, i.e. having communicative potential. But that wouldn't get us anywhere near a definition, or clarify anything, which is fine by me!

131> I sense that we are on the same page, although digital photography is still relegated to the computer only, and not my collection. I even admit to using digital myself, but not for artistic purposes.

I would also agree with your non-definition of art, for it is much like a spiritual thing for me, akin to one's belief in God - a purely personal and private experience. Hell, I even consider the fender on a 1937 Rolls Royce to be art, and the maker of that fender was surely a great sculptor, who created with his hands.

By the way, I have to disagree with the claims about Aristotle at 29 and 31>

I'd have thought that the statement "art is imitation of nature" would be the least plausible of Aristotle's claims, not least because it misrepresents his view when taken out of context. That relatively simplistic view would be better attributed to Plato. Imitation (specifically 'mimesis') in Aristotle's writing can apply to different things in different ways, and Aristotle, whose main writings on art are about Greek theatre and epic poetry, also stated that art is the imitation of human actions or humans as agents. His analysis of the various elements of Greek tragedy and comedy remains required reading for experts in those fields, and much of what he has to say in the 'Poetics' remains good advice for writers today, when applied to the relevant literature, especially narrative fiction. Also, in his 'Rhetoric', his analysis of metaphor remains the foundation of most modern analyses. Hardly a philosopher who knew little about art.

Sorry.

#9 "All sciences comprise a single knowledge of a single subject - Being; art like science, is a consciousness of being but in another form."

As both a scientist and artist this statement resonates strongly with me.