[lbo-talk] To be objective about art: admit the lie

boddi satva lbo.boddi at gmail.com
Mon Oct 2 15:23:43 PDT 2006


Because art - like magic - is an illusion, we can show a lot about how an artist creates the illusions she creates. We can look into the text and see how words that are slightly out of place are snuck in to move the reader's attention towards a feeling or conclusion. We can see how tricks of light, color and direction of done on a canvas. And we can say how one artist succeeds and another artist fails at roughly the same trick.

It's only when we get into very general statements that we get into trouble. Obvioulsy Faulkner isn't a bad writer. He communicates with the written word and he's very successful - popular and evocative. Personally I don't like Nabokov - his work just doesn't move me much. But of course I'm willing to admit that I may have missed something. Nabokov may be quite right when he suggests that Faulkner is inelegant. You can look at Faulkner's illusions and see that they are done kind of roughly, compared with other artist/illusionists. By the same token, you can say quite correctly that Jackson Pollock rendered his illusions with sloppy roughness compared to the way Caravaggio created his illusions.

And I think if we talk about art and truth we are definitely in trouble. It's insane to talk about one made-up story's being more "true" than another made-up story. But we can say that the illusion is more successful or deftly manipulated.

There is one statement I'll make about art and truth - if it's funny, it's true. Something either is or is not funny, but almost nothing that is funny is, in fact, true. Indeed, the most persuasive theory of comedy I know about suggests that comedy must have an implicit absurdity at the cognitive level to be funny - that the difference between something that sounds like a funny joke and something that actually is funny is some absurdity woven into the joke.

The entire purpose of art is illusion - how a few lines that look nothing at all like a cat can make us "see" a cat in our minds.

Boddi



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