Michael Catolico wrote:
>
> i'm not trying to denigrate efforts at sustainablilty, just trying to
> create dialogue about [CLIP]
> 3) how ideology masquerades as art. regarding the last point, if we
> don't have objective categories for addressing the nature of and
> qualities of art, then we have no way of combating ideological half- and
> non-truths. the mca exhibit is not merely an instance of "bad art"; it
> is a legitimating showcase of "non-art" pretending to be art.
I'll have to think quite a bit before giving any developed response to this, but a few observations (or dogmatic statements which I'll try later to develop).
1. The purpose of art is to embody ideology, and thereby make ideology visible. To divide art from ideology is to kill art and make ideology impervious to analysis.
2. There are objective categories for "for addressing the nature of and qualities of art" -- as long as one does not equate such "addressing" with binding judgments of art.
3. No one has ever yet proposed a satisfactory criterion for distinguishing art from non-art. All the criteria that have been urged succeed only in making it impossible to distinguish good art from bad art.
4. The only criterion for judging literary art is decorum -- but the standards of decorum are subject to continuous change. (The classic debate that illustrates this is the exchange between Donne & Jonson on Donne'sd Anniversary poems.)
Carrol
P.S. Has anyone on this list read Gertrude Stein? I had never read her until a few weeks ago when I plunged in. So far I've read "A Novel of Thank You," "Q.E.D.," "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas," "The World Is Round" (a children's book I guess), and am now nearly finished with "Ida." Stein grows on one. I couldn't make any sense of A Novel of Thank You, but it has some wonderful sentences, e.g.,
"Once upon a time there came to be left altogether to himself the one who came to see him too and very likely they did exchange saying who could have been made to look as well and as often as they had occasionally wished it to be by themselves." (Chapter CLXXI, p. 147 Dalkey edition) How could anyone not joy in that?