Joanna
--------------
What saved me was a combination that had to be woven into a life. The beach, the discovery of books especially European literature, and the lucky find of CSUN which back then had some intellectual refugees in art, anthropology, and music. And some other little things, like finding a great little Italian deli working next door to a supermarket. There were a couple of my stepfather's paintings and a world of memories. And the fm radio. In that period an all jazz station had started. I could work at the desk I built and listen to all the giants, because the station disc jockies knew them and all the background. And my mainstay girlfriend was her own sort of art refugee, as was her father a studio musician and her stepmother a club singer.
Anyway, the whole discussion got off track and I fell right in place. It's interesting that the arts have their own evaluation system, within their own `logic'. The problem is that we are so influenced by the enlightenment philosophies, that we forget the arts don't actually function in the same realm.
Let's go back to the LA Philharmonic, Walt Disney Concert Hall. I mean consider the name Disney Concert Hall. When I was a kid I loved Walt Disney, partly because his cartoons which were fantastic drawings that did have an arty something---not that I knew what that was. Then there were the adaptations of classical (late romantic, early modern) music like Fantasia. Somebody else did some 78s I remember for Peter and the Wolf to explain the parts of the orchestra. I was glued to these simple performances and started me to listen to the `parts' of an orchestra. I mean Disney represented some kind of arty class against the load mouth low life Looney Tunes gang. I sure liked Roger Rabbit.
Cutting to the point, a `cultural' sensibility is constructed and this sensibility is not fixed but changes over and over as people moved from childhood to adolesence, to young adults to middle years and it isn't over with the social security check. It's a life component of the mind. So, then, it seems to me that often the so-called value judgements are mistakes, in that they evaluate a prior state by a current one and forget those moments when the former was a present state.
I wrote a long post on Frank Gehry, automatic drawing, surrealism and Wilhem de Kooning. Here is a much better view:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Image-Disney_Concert_Hall_by_Carol_Highsmith_edit.jpg
So I changed my mind. But this is among Gehry very best. A lot of his other work is postmod at its worst, like the melted Dusseldorf apartments.
CG
