From: Katharine Thayer (kthayer@pacifier.com)
Date: 08/13/02-03:03:41 PM Z
Kris Erickson wrote:
While I would strongly doubt that any
> specific interest could tie directly and summarily to a single image, I
> think one would be hard-pressed to argue that that specific interest could
> not, in some way, be related to the impulse and drive that created that
> image in the first place; among a tangle of other interests, often more
> relevant of course, but AMONG that tangle nonetheless.
>
Since we've been talking about clarity, I'm back to refine my earlier
answer in the interest of this elusive quality. I stand by my assertion
that no meaningful or useful connection could be made between my art and
my intellectual interests. However, taking a strictly literal re-reading
of your paragraph, I have to agree that I would be hard-pressed to argue
that an unthinking person could not relate, in some superficial and
meaningless way, any interest to any image or the forces that created
it; in fact I wouldn't dream of arguing that, since I know well that
people do exactly that, all the time. One of the strongest and most
durable findings in psychology is that people have an astonishing
ability to relate absolutely anything to absolutely anything else, by
means of the most trivial and superficial associations, and thereby to
"explain" any piece of data using any other piece of data. So, yeah,
they do that. WE do that. But when we do, we need to learn to look
deeper for the real causes for things rather than settling for trivial
explanations that "make sense" given the trivial associations we've
made, but are not supported by data and don't add anything meaningful to
our understanding of people, art, the world, anything. Sometimes, in
fact at least 99% of the time, a cigar is just a cigar.
kt
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