Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Tycho on Art

I don’t think I’ve ever read a definition for art that wasn’t stupid. Generally speaking, when a person constructs a thought-machine of this kind, what they’re actually trying to do is determine what isn’t art. I have always been white trash, and will never cease to be so; what that means is that I was raised with an inherent distrust in the Hoity and a base and brutal urge to dismantle the Toity. This is sometimes termed anti-intellectualism, usually by intellectuals, when what it is in truth is an opposition to intellect for intellect’s sake. The reality is that what “is” and “isn’t art” is something we can determine with a slider in our prefrontal cortex.

If this thought-machine had any purpose other than to create a world with less art, I could cut it some slack. But it doesn’t. Its entire purpose is to rarify art, controlling expression thereby. The aperture must be cinched, and quickly, before someone creates a cultural product without elite imprimatur. Its effete and its fucking disgusting.

Source

5 comments:

_J_ said...

I'm not sure that I'm on board with the idea that the definition of art is related to "controlling expression". But I'm totally on board with definitions of 'art' being fucking stupid, insofar as ‘art’ is a vacuous, hollow term.

Set 1:
"X is art."
"Y is not-art."

Set 2:
"X is chocolaty."
"Y is not chocolaty."

I understand what set 2 is telling me. Fuck if I know what set 1 takes itself to be denoting.

Which is, basically, why I can't take aesthetics seriously as a field of study. It's primarily focused upon the study of something that isn't there.

Roscoe said...

Or, it's simply not there to a subset of people.

I mean, chocolaty and not chocolaty demand a tongue to taste with, and the proper buds upon that tongue.

I point to Cilantro here.

_J_ said...

"I mean, chocolaty and not chocolaty demand a tongue to taste with, and the proper buds upon that tongue."

So a Hershey bar is only chocolaty when it is being tasted, and when it is sitting in a box it is not chocolaty?

Andrew said...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/02/saatchi-hideousness-art-world
this is such a great commentary on the state of the art world from someone who has been a large part it

Andrew said...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/02/saatchi-hideousness-art-world
this is such a great commentary on the state of the art world from someone who has been a large part it