Maybe I should just keep this to myself, but this art thread and the one on science are from my perspective completely wrong headed, ill conceived, and can not illuminate either art or science.
Part of the problem with the art thread is, it begins with a misguided idea of what art is. Art is anything, anybody wants to say is art. Art isn't a fixed object, rather it has a social-psychological function and is integral to everyone's psycho-social development in their cultural milieu---whatever that is. All the sights, sounds, colors, forms, words, rhythms, cadences, patterns, smells, tastes, and the vast repertoire of emotion, feelings, thoughts, and reflections have some interior base, but these rather formless and spontaneously occurring phenomenon are given expressive form in the cultural reality that surrounds us all---that is to say, the arts. This is true of the half crazed homeless guy mulling over his aluminum can collection headed to the recycling center, all the way up the ladder to the fucking high brow painting curator at the Met headed for another power-lunch with the endowment big-wigs.
And this functional understanding of art is not a fixed state, but one that originates somewhere in the symbolic capacity of the mind at its earliest roots and doesn't end until probably death. What you enjoyed watching as child, might be boring as a teenager, only to be re-discovered through your own children and enjoyed from an entirely different perspective.
As an example, notice that the opening passage of James Joyce's Portrait of an Artist begins with the baby talk rhyme, Once there was a Mo-cow, Mo-cow. The novella ends with the phrase, I want to forge in the smithy of my soul, the uncreated conscious of my race, or words something like that. In other words the book is about the development of the sensibility of a writer and it starts with childhood rhymes and ends with a grandly romantic ideal. This constitutes a spectrum of experiences, sentence structures, literary allusions, and discoveries that shape the flow of the way the narrative voice is given form, literally as a written technique and as a metaphor for the changing view and understanding of the character. The beginning is vague, mystical, indefinite, told in rather short plain sentences, in other words child like. Somewhere in the middle the narrative reaches a kind of realism, or narrative naturalism--a kind of clarity that many kids just before puberty seem to achieve as they begin to struggle with moral issues of right and wrong, fairness, cheating, and so forth, and finally toward the end at the height of a very young romantic, it begins to blur again into a stream of conscious flow.
Anybody who was self-conscious enough about their own developing mind and its limitations and liberations will recognize some kind of progressive passage similar or related to the arch or transformation that Stephan undergoes. In effect, you get to re-grow up with this novel. In the later sections, notice that the paragraphs become very long and the thoughts wind around an idea and seem to work their way though long stretches of the imaginative narration. Many people forget there was a time when they could not follow a paragraph from its beginning all the way to its end. They got lost. Their mind simply could not extend its temporal reach long enough to finish such a paragraph.
Writers like Herman Melville or Thomas Mann can task even the most experienced reader as they take a minor thought and open out its multi-dimensional facets, like one of those complicated three dimensional greeting cards that folds out to display a little scene as if on a stage set. Almost the entire sweep of Marcel Proust is composed of a vast landscape of such complex sets which are unveiled one after another, not in a temporal order, but in their lyric point, counterpoint, returning endlessly to only half understood themes as if in music. We can not conceive the theme until the end, and then, we can only barely remember where it has taken us, so we have to return to the beginning and look again. In this sense A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, is an endless return which you enter unknowingly for the first time, as if you expect to read it and be done as with all other novels. Guess again mon amie.
The functions of art reach far beyond the mere propagandistic support or reactions to the power elites who propagate the more refined and sophisticated versions that do indeed empower them as the cultural elite to match their fortunes and power---celebrating their stature and signifying their great rectitude with the cosmic order, the status quo---ultimately identifying them as tantamount to the gods---not really all that far removed from Chefren in 2500 BC.
Which reminds me to mention a statue that I first saw at twelve in a National Geographic magazine. It is Chefren, from Giza at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. It's made of a dark green diorite. The Pharaoh is seated on a throne, and behind his head is a small falcon whose wings are spread to embrace the formal head scarf. The falcon is the consciousness of Pharaoh, his connection to some netherworld in eternity. Of course it is a symbol of divine power, but it is also a metaphor for reflection and guidance. In some completely unconscious way I understood this sculpture at twelve in the same way I do now. It opened my mind to the idea that there was an entire universe beyond my own imagination. It was like reading a science fiction story.
Whether people believe it or not, the arts structure their minds, perceptions, and sensibilities---including the movements of their bodies, their gestures, poses, walk and the reaches of their imaginations just as Whorf claimed for language, thought and reality. We are completely acculturated by these symbolic systems to such an extent that it is almost ridiculous to make claims of good art and bad art.
How do those abstract appraisals have any meaning at all, except to reflect the rectitude and status of our social hierarchies, give our social system of economic classes the signature of cosmic authenticity? Do you really think that my contemplation of a scratchy, old blues record has any more or less greatness, participates in human experience any more or less than my contemplation of the falcon who guides Pharaoh? Well, of course you may. But I don't. These are differing dimension of the soul, which has a vast capacity to embrace just about anything human.
Jerry notes that art helps us to invent meaning to deceive ourselves...but that history has no narrative meaning. Are we all that certain? I don't think so. In fact, I think that narrative drama derives from the reversals of narrative history, in fact forms drama out of the apparently irrational reversals of history. In Greek and later Roman iconograph the falcon of Chefren, is transformed into the owl of Minerva and you can revisit an intimately related reflection from Hegel, that I think takes on a far more haunting reality when contemplate from Chephren at Giza.
``One word more about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy is in any case always come on the scene too late to give it. As the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality is already there cut and dried after its process of formation has been completed. The teaching of the concept, which is also history's inescapable lesson, is that it is only when actuality is matures that the ideal first appears over against the real and that the ideal apprehends this same ideal world in its substance and builds it up for itself into the shape of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints grey in grey, then has shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuventated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk. '' (POTR, 13p.)
Well, can you imagine a greater wisdom whispered by the falcon to the Pharaoh in Giza? I don't think so.
C