John Cage's 4'33"

The "what is art?" question is a question about why it is important for us to call some entities 'mere thing' and others 'work of art'

What is art? (Aesthetic-mediated-perception)

Reading:

(18) 3/31 Metaphysics of art objects
• Arthur Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Ch. 1

(19) 4/2 Content
• Transfiguration, TBA

20) 4/7 Closer look at mimesis
• Transfiguration, TBA

21) 4/9 Interpretation
• Transfiguration cont, TBA

22) 4/14 Modernist concepts of beauty and design
• Handout on Kant’s and Duchamp’s aesthetics

23) 4/16 Holonic theory of art
• Ken Wilber, The Eye of Spirit, “Integral Art and Literary Theory”

Realism is the most mysterious style of art

Ten Concepts of Representational Realism

These are ten different, but related ways of understanding or measuring what it means to be ‘realistic.’ Can all of these be true? Can they be fit into a general theory of realism, or are they mutually inconsistent? Is realism ‘just a style’ or are some styles more realistic than others?

1. Depiction realism: All pictorial representations are realistic, in contrast to non-pictorial or linguistic kinds of representations. Pictures are realistic as pictures, vs. sentences, which represent but not pictorially. A picture represents how things are in the world by having a similar structure to the thing pictured. The general form of a picture is: “This is how things stand.”

2. Evolving realism: A picture which is realistic will only appear to be realistic when we acquire understanding of the object or state of affairs pictured by the representation. Realism depends on what you know as reality.

3. Content realism: Realism comes in degrees. In each image/style, one can distinguish parts of the picture which represent objective features of reality vs. elements which are part of the design. Some pictures are more realistic than others because they have a larger ratio of representational to design elements.

4. Lifelike (naturalistic) realism: An image is more realistic than another if it has features which reflect what it is like to encounter the object itself in ‘real life’. Realism distinguishes things which are actually real from what is unreal.

5. Hyperrealism (Uncanny realism): Images which, although representing objects or situations which are unexperienced in ordinary life, use features which make them seem real.

6. Illusionistic realism: A picture is realistic if it can be confused with what it is representing. The only kind of representation which is truly realistic which be a full-scale replica of the thing.

7. Information realism: A representation is realistic if it offers accurate information about the things it represents.

8. Relevance realism: A representation is realistic if it offers not only information that is accurate, but also relevant, relative to one’s cognitive interests.

9. Revelatory realism: A representation is realistic to the extent that it reveals a non-trivial aspect of reality.

10. Idolic realism: Something is realistic if it is taken as a vehicle for capturing truth. Realism is not a property of pictures, but of how the picture is taken by the spectator.

John Cage on Listening

"Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?" --John Cage

Is realism just a style?

3/26 WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE "REALISTIC"?

Reading: Catherine Abell, "Realism and the Riddle of Style"

Narcissus Narcosis Project

If you want to see some Narcissus Narcosis Self-Portraits from last year CLICK HERE.

Plato's Challenge to All Future Artists, Or: What is realism?

In Plato’s still radical book Republic, the first work of systematic political science and one of the greatest works of philosophy every conceived, Plato articulates a scientific-rationalist and political critique of the arts that still holds sway over popular cultural and institutional beliefs about the cognitive and ethical shortcomings of art and the artistic life. In fact, Plato offers a challenge to all future artists in that argument, to justify themselves as a form of human culture. A contemporary artist struggling to make sense of the value of her creativity could do worse than trying to articulate a response to the most incessant and powerful of all dead white males. The following excepted dialogue is a conversation between Socrates and Glaucon from Plato’s Republic, Book 10 where Plato states his case against artistic perception and creativity.

•

Of he many excellences which I perceive in the order of our State, there is none which upon reflection pleases me better than the rule about poetry.

To what do you refer?

To the rejection of imitative poetry, which certainly ought not to be received; as I see far more clearly now that the parts of the soul have been distinguished.

What do you mean?

Speaking in confidence, for I should not like to have my words repeated to the tragedians and the rest of the imitative tribe --but I do not mind saying to you, that all poetical imitations are ruinous to the understanding of the hearers, and that the knowledge of their true nature is the only antidote to them…


You may look at a bed from different points of view, obliquely or directly or from any other point of view, and the bed will appear different, but there is no difference in reality. And the same of all things.
Yes, the difference is only apparent.

Now let me ask you another question: Which is the art of painting designed to be --an imitation of things as they are, or as they appear --of appearance or of reality?

Of appearance.

Then the imitator, I said, is a long way off the truth, and can do all things because he lightly touches on a small part of them, and that part an image. For example: A painter will paint a cobbler, carpenter, or any other artist, though he knows nothing of their arts; and, if he is a good artist, he may deceive children or simple persons, when he shows them his picture of a carpenter from a distance, and they will fancy that they are looking at a real carpenter…


And the same object appears straight when looked at out of the water, and crooked when in the water; and the concave becomes convex, owing to the illusion about colours to which the sight is liable. Thus every sort of confusion is revealed within us; and this is that weakness of the human mind on which the art of conjuring and of deceiving by light and shadow and other ingenious devices imposes, having an effect upon us like magic.

True.

And the arts of measuring and numbering and weighing come to the rescue of the human understanding-there is the beauty of them --and the apparent greater or less, or more or heavier, no longer have the mastery over us, but give way before calculation and measure and weight?

Most true.

And this, surely, must be the work of the calculating and rational principle in the soul…


But we have not yet brought forward the heaviest count in our accusation: --the power which poetry has of harming even the good (and there are very few who are not harmed), is surely an awful thing?

Yes, certainly, if the effect is what you say.

Hear and judge: The best of us, as I conceive, when we listen to a passage of Homer, or one of the tragedians, in which he represents some pitiful hero who is drawling out his sorrows in a long oration, or weeping, and smiting his breast --the best of us, you know, delight in giving way to sympathy, and are in raptures at the excellence of the poet who stirs our feelings most.

Yes, of course I know.

But when any sorrow of our own happens to us, then you may observe that we pride ourselves on the opposite quality --we would fain be quiet and patient; this is the manly part, and the other which delighted us in the recitation is now deemed to be the part of a woman.

Very true, he said.

Now can we be right in praising and admiring another who is doing that which any one of us would abominate and be ashamed of in his own person?

No, he said, that is certainly not reasonable.

And the same may be said of lust and anger and all the other affections, of desire and pain and pleasure, which are held to be inseparable from every action ---in all of them poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up; she lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled, if mankind are ever to increase in happiness and virtue…


And now since we have reverted to the subject of poetry, let this our defense serve to show the reasonableness of our former judgment in sending away out of our State an art having the tendencies which we have described; for reason constrained us. But that she may impute to us any harshness or want of politeness, let us tell her that there is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry; of which there are many proofs, such as the saying of 'the yelping hound howling at her lord,' or of one 'mighty in the vain talk of fools,' and 'the mob of sages circumventing Zeus,' and the 'subtle thinkers who are beggars after all'; and there are innumerable other signs of ancient enmity between them. Notwithstanding this, let us assure our sweet friend and the sister arts of imitation that if she will only prove her title to exist in a well-ordered State we shall be delighted to receive her --we are very conscious of her charms; but we may not on that account betray the truth. I dare say, Glaucon, that you are as much charmed by her as I am, especially when she appears in Homer?

Yes, indeed, I am greatly charmed.

Reversal of the Overheated Medium

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN INFORMATION AND REALITY?

Wed 3/5 Kinds of information

Reading: Albert Borgmann, Holding On to Reality, pp. 1-37.

Spring break

Mon 3/17 Cultural meaning and the sociological imagination

Reading: Holding On to Reality cont.

Wed 3/19 Technological information

Reading: Holding On to Reality cont.

Mon 3/24 Narcissus narcosis project due

Reading: Holding On to Reality cont.

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The following is from John Zerzan's book "Running on Emptiness":

"There has been a wholesale revision in scholarly ideas, in the past 20 or 30 years, of what life outside of civilization really was. One of the basic ideological foundations for civilization, for religion, the state, police, armies, everything else, is that you've got a pretty bloodthirsty, awful, subhuman condition before civilization. It has to be tamed and tutored and so on. It's Hobbes. It's that famous idea that the pre-civilized life was nasty, brutish and short, and so to rescue or enable humanity away from fear and superstitition, from this horrible condition into the light of civilization, you have to do that. You have to have what Freud called the 'forcible renunciation of instinctual freedom.' You just have to. That's the price.

"Anyway, that turns out to be completely wrong. Since the early '70s, we have a starkly different picture of what life was like in the two million or so years before civilization, a period that ended about 10,000 years ago, almost no time at all. Prehistory is now characterized more by intelligence, egalitarianism and sharing, leisure time, a great deal of sexual equality, robusticity and health, with no evidence at all of organized violence. I mean, that's just staggering. It's virtually a wholescale revision. We're still living, of course, with the cartoonish images, the caveman pulling the woman into the cave, Neanderthal meaningt someone who is a complete brute and subhuman, and so on. But the real picture has been wholly revised."
______________________

Could things actually have been easier back in the stone age before agriculture and civilization?!!!

According to the conventional Story of Progress, pre-modern or indigenous peoples not on the path to western-style development are living in an evolutionary backwater, still preoccupied with survival, and not able to evolve to their truly human potentialities. But new anthropological information, and new ecological histories of civilization, suggest that the truth may in fact be the opposite: that so-called ‘civilization’ is a form of spiritual captivity that generates scarcity out of abundance, nihilism out of meaningfulness, alienation out of belonging, and inevitable economic expansionism implying an endless series of resource wars. Is there any evidence to back up this shocking verdict?

The famous economic anthropologist Marshall Sahlins looked into this very question in his book "Stone Age Economics", an anthropological study of the economic systems of hunter-gatherer societies. He uncovered overwhelming evidence to support it. Here are some excerpts from the first chapter in that book, called “The Original Affluent Society”:

“Almost universally committed to the proposition that life was hard in the Paleolithic, our textbooks compete to convey a sense of impending doom, leaving one to wonder not only how hunters managed to live, but whether, after all, this was living? The specter of starvation stalks the stalker through these pages. His technical incompetence is said to enjoin continuous work just to survive, affording him neither respite nor surplus, hence not even the ‘leisure’ to ‘build culture.’…

“In fact, this was, when you come to examine it, the original affluent society. Paradoxical, that phrasing leads to another useful and unexpected conclusion. By the common understanding, an affluent society is one in which all the people’s material wants are easily satisfied. To assert that the hunters are affluent is to deny that the human condition is an ordained tragedy, with man the prisoner at hard labor of a perpetual disparity between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means…

“For there are two possible courses to affluence. Wants may be “easily satisfied” either by producing much or desiring little. The familiar conception… makes assumptions peculiarly appropriate to market economics: that man’s wants are great, not to say, infinite, whereas his means are limited, although improveable: thus, the gap between means and ends can be narrowed by industrial productivity, at least to the point that ‘urgent goods’ become plentiful. But there is also a Zen road to affluence: that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting the Zen strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty – with a low standard of living. That, I think, describes the hunters…

“Consumption is a double tragedy: what begins in inadequacy will end in deprivation. Bringing together an international division of labor [i.e. globalization], the market makes available a dazzling array of products: all these Good Things within a man’s reach – but never all within his grasp. Worse, in this game of consumer free choice, every acquisition is simultaneously a deprivation, for every purchase of something is a foregoing of something else, in general only marginally less desirable, and in some particulars more desirable, that could have been had instead…

“When Herskovits was writing his ‘Economic Anthropology’ (1958), it was common anthropological practice to take the [Kalahari] Bushmen or the native Australians as ‘a classic illustration of a people whose economic resources are of the scantiest,’ so precariously situated that ‘only the most intense application makes survivial possible.’ Today the classic understanding can be fairly reversed – on evidence largely from these two groups. A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society…

“Reports on hunters and gatherers of the ethnological present – specifically on those in marginal environments – suggest a mean of three to five hours per adult worker per day in food production. Hunters keep banker’s hours, notably less than modern industrial workers who would surely settle for a 21-35 hour week…

“One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture…

“This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstance an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production, all the people’s material wants usually can be easily satisfied…

“The world’s most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization…"

Narcissus Narcosis Project

DUE: March 24th

This project is has three parts:

(1) Choose a technology/medium, or a combination thereof, that you use, on a daily basis and that is important to you. DO WITHOUT the use of that medium for a period of 100 hours (approx. 4 days). Some examples of media: email, cellphone, instant messenger, video games, tv, cars, clothing.

(2) Write a 4 page (min) essay • What is Marshall McLuhan’s theory of media and the artist? (What are the implications of his analysis of media for how we understand the role of the artist? USE AT LEAST ONE IDEA ABOUT PERCEPTION FROM YOUR FIRST PROJECT – RELATE IT TO HOW TECHNOLOGY SHAPES PERCEPTION.

(3) Create, in any medium, a self-portrait (of the artist) – that is, of you – as a user of a McLuhan medium? (e.g. car, cellphone, internet, IM, MySpace, television, etc. ) Your self-portrait MUST SHOW THE SENSE IN WHICH THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE.

If you are confused about the second part, do the first part first before you think about it.

Some things that Marshall Mcluhan says about ART:

1. The ARTIST is the person who
invents the means to bridge the
gap between biological inheritance
and the environments created by
technological innovation.

2. The ARTIST is a person who is
especially aware of the challenge
and dangers of new environments.
Whereas the ordinary person seeks
security by numbing his
perceptions against the impact of
new experience, the artist delights
in this novelty and instinctively
creates situations that both
reveal it and compensate for it.

3. The ARTIST studies the distortion of
sensory life produced by new environmental
programming and tends to create artistic
situations that correct the sensory bias
and derangement brought about by the new form.

4. ART at its most significant is a Distant Early
Warning System that can always be relied
on to tell the old culture what is beginning
to happen to it.

5. As the unity of the modern world becomes
increasingly a technological rather than a
social affair, the techniques of the ARTS
provide the most valuable means of insight
into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

6. The audience, as ground, shapes
and controls the work of ART, as figure.

7. Without the ARTIST’s intervention, man
merely adapts to his technologies and
becomes their servo-mechanism. He whorships
the Idols of the Tribe, of the Cave, and of the Market.

8. We become what we behold.
We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.

9. No society has ever known enough about its actions
to have developed immunity to its new extensions
or technologies. Today we have begun to sense that
ART may be able to provide such immunity.

10. In the electric age there is not longer any sense in
talking about the ARTIST's being ahead of his time. Our
technology is also ahead of its time.

11. The ARTIST can correct the sense ratios before
the blow of new technology has numbed conscious
procedures. He can correct them before numbness and
subliminal groping and reaction begin.

12. ART holds out the potential for communicating exact
information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order
to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties.

Extending the Nervous System

The Outsourced Brain

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: New York Times, October 26, 2007

The gurus seek bliss amidst mountaintop solitude and serenity in the meditative trance, but I, grasshopper, have achieved the oneness with the universe that is known as pure externalization.

I have melded my mind with the heavens, communed with the universal consciousness, and experienced the inner calm that externalization brings, and it all started because I bought a car with a G.P.S.

Like many men, I quickly established a romantic attachment to my G.P.S. I found comfort in her tranquil and slightly Anglophilic voice. I felt warm and safe following her thin blue line. More than once I experienced her mercy, for each of my transgressions would be greeted by nothing worse than a gentle, “Make a U-turn if possible.”

After a few weeks, it occurred to me that I could no longer get anywhere without her. Any trip slightly out of the ordinary had me typing the address into her system and then blissfully following her satellite-fed commands. I found that I was quickly shedding all vestiges of geographic knowledge.

It was unnerving at first, but then a relief. Since the dawn of humanity, people have had to worry about how to get from here to there. Precious brainpower has been used storing directions, and memorizing turns. I myself have been trapped at dinner parties at which conversation was devoted exclusively to the topic of commuter routes.

My G.P.S. goddess liberated me from this drudgery. She enabled me to externalize geographic information from my own brain to a satellite brain, and you know how it felt? It felt like nirvana.

Through that experience I discovered the Sacred Order of the External Mind. I realized I could outsource those mental tasks I didn’t want to perform. Life is a math problem, and I had a calculator.

Until that moment, I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants — silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.

Musical taste? I have externalized it. Now I just log on to iTunes and it tells me what I like.

I click on its recommendations, sample 30 seconds of each song, and download the ones that appeal. I look on my iPod playlist and realize I’ve never heard of most of the artists I listen to. I was once one of those people with developed opinions about the Ramones, but now I’ve shed all that knowledge and blindly submit to a mishmash of anonymous groups like the Reindeer Section — a disturbing number of which seem to have had their music featured on the soundtrack of “The O.C.”

Memory? I’ve externalized it. I am one of those baby boomers who are making this the “It’s on the Tip of My Tongue Decade.” But now I no longer need to have a memory, for I have Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia. Now if I need to know some fact about the world, I tap a few keys and reap the blessings of the external mind.

Personal information? I’ve externalized it. I’m no longer clear on where I end and my BlackBerry begins. When I want to look up my passwords or contact my friends I just hit a name on my directory. I read in a piece by Clive Thompson in Wired that a third of the people under 30 can’t remember their own phone number. Their smartphones are smart, so they don’t need to be. Today’s young people are forgoing memory before they even have a chance to lose it.

Now, you may wonder if in the process of outsourcing my thinking I am losing my individuality. Not so. My preferences are more narrow and individualistic than ever. It’s merely my autonomy that I’m losing.

I have relinquished control over my decisions to the universal mind. I have fused with the knowledge of the cybersphere, and entered the bliss of a higher metaphysic. As John Steinbeck nearly wrote, a fella ain’t got a mind of his own, just a little piece of the big mind — one mind that belongs to everybody. Then it don’t matter, Ma. I’ll be everywhere, around in the dark. Wherever there is a network, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a TiVo machine making a sitcom recommendation based on past preferences, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a Times reader selecting articles based on the most e-mailed list, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way Amazon links purchasing Dostoyevsky to purchasing garden furniture. And when memes are spreading, and humiliation videos are shared on Facebook — I’ll be there, too.

I am one with the external mind. Om.