As said - this blog is a day to day account of working through my PhD. To procrastinate the procrastination as my art teacher once told me. To log in thoughts, readings and musings. To encourage a mellifluous process. I will post dry boring things, pieces of inspirational art, complaints about bus fare prices and the fact that I don't want to buy a Go Card. I will post it all. It will track me through my PhD - it will be an interesting and all encompassing journey. Welcome to my mind.
Today I started reading Art as Experience by John Dewey. This caught me:
"In order to understand the meaning of artistic products, we have to forget them from time to time, to turn aside from them and have recourse to the ordinary forces and conditions of experience that we do not usually regard as esthetic. We must arrive at the theory of art by means of a detour. For theory is concerned with understanding, insight, not without exclamations of admiration and stimulation of that emotional outburst often called appreciation." pg 4 (REFERENCE THIS).
To me this means that you have to forget about thinking too much about what the art means to really get art. To, for a moment, disengage the intellectual brain that we are taught to view things with and just go with the feeling. That is where true understanding and appreciation for art lie. Dewey also discusses the idea of the cult status of art - the idea that once something is considered a masterpiece - let's take the Mona Lisa for example, then one stops appreciating it for the sudden emotional outburst of appreciation from a feeling sense, and instead engages with it in a cultural "oh! It's the real Mona Lisa!" And hence the appreciation is then not in the true feeling and emotional response to the ACTUAL art, but rather the discourse that surrounds it. That is my reading anyway. I just want to preface that (well i guess post - face that as it is after) with the note that I haven't even finished reading the intro. I may be totally wrong about this man's ideas on art.
He did invent the Dewey decimal system. Anything is possible. I am actually his sworn enemy. I hate the system of codification of library books. It is like a secret society for librarians. Many late nights on too much coffee trying to find books in a library with not enough sleep and a looming deadline.
And now for something completely different - art that inspires me
The cult status of art... You spoke my mind. I have often pondered on this very thing, albeit from a slightly different angle. I am thinking about the curious silence/unanimity within the art establishment as regards the ideas communicated by art.
ReplyDeleteHow can it be that art is seen as a medium for free expression (aesthetic, philosophical, moral, even political) and yet the ideas expressed receive hardly any critical attention within the art establishment? Technique is analysed to no end, but where is the discussion on ideas?
Isn't one of the stock expressions of modern artists that they want to raise discussion and debate in society on the subject of their work? So where is it? All you see is people nodding with wine glasses in their hands. There is a sphere of sacredness around art which prevents the very dialogue that art is supposed to provoke.