Re: <documenta X><blast> home
Morgan Garwood (mgarwood@inch.com)
Fri, 15 Aug 1997 15:56:02 -0400
At 03:19 PM 8/15/97 -0400, Alan wrote:
>
>On Fri, 15 Aug 1997, Morgan Garwood wrote:
>
>> art too is a mapping problem... "good" art is good because it maps
>> something, perhaps that something is extremely hard to articulate in
>> ordinary language (another class of maps, language) but when we recognize
>> that it has doon a good job of mapping, we like it. Bad art is bad mapping.
>>
>This I don't agree with; the rest I do. I don't see art, first of all, as
>a "problem" that then has or doesn't have an equitable solution. I wonder
>also about the "job" of mapping.
>
>In fact, I see art, if at all, as a family of usages in the Wittgenstein-
>ian sense - I don't feel there is any particular attractor one can assign
>to the field in its entirety. Mapping holds up in some cases, not in
>others. I'm not even sure that there's a signified at work here, in spite
>of, for example, the attempts made to locate one even for abstract paint-
>ing within the ikonic.
>
>Alan
O.K., it has seemed to me that one of the underlying "must have" conditions
of art is that it is about something. To be art, it has to have
"aboutness". That's a bit different from what philosophers call an "only
and every" condition. Nobody (that I'm aware of, at least) would insist
that only art, and every example of art, has "aboutness". Science has a
high "aboutness" quotient as well. Do any of W.'s family of usages violate
"aboutness"?
The second, non-exclusive condition that is central to art is the idea
of Quality, which is extremely distinct from Preciousness. But these too
are no exclusive concepts. Something may be precious as all hell, and still
have awe inspiring quality, and be great art, like some renaissance
silverwork... we may, in fact, be highly sympathetic to some of the values
expressed in such a piece, and simultaneously disgusted by other values
expressed by the same work.
But, the spectrum of goodness to badness of Quality is one of the
central keys in coming to terms with the work. What is it about, and how
well does it work at being about what it is about ? Did you ever see Martin
Scorcese's movie , The King Of Comedy, with Robert DeNiro and Jerry
Lewis... it's about making this distinction, and about what happens to the
mind that loses to capacity to make the distinction. On one level, a very
sophisticated work, about "aboutness". Aboutness is another way of saying
Mapping, just from a different linguistic quirk-angle.
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