From: Sharon Steele (slowart@oz.net)
Date: 01/09/03-08:21:03 AM Z
Since I am new to this list and new to alternative photo processes, I have
found your discussions very interesting. These processes have opened up a
new world to me that I am looking forward to exploring. Regarding the
subject of "What is art?", I have a quote from another source that I find
revelant to the topic. It is from an interview with the physist John
Wheeler of Princeton (father of the Black Hole, by the way):
"It was enormously impressive to me to see Bohr's courage in facing
up to what the great questions were. I can vividly
remember him saying to me:
'I must always seem to you like an amateur. But I am always
an amateur.'
Of course, that is a very modest way of saying that one is a
pioneer, an explorer. If you are working on something new,
then you are necessarily an amateur."
I found this quote to be reassuring.
Sharon S.
----- Original Message -----
From: Michael Healy <mjhealy@kcnet.com>
To: <alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca>
Sent: Wednesday, January 08, 2003 2:53 PM
Subject: Re: what is art yet again?...tired (was: outsider art)
> >----- Original Message -----
> >From: "Galina Manikova" <galina@online.no>
> >To: <alt-photo-process-l@skyway.usask.ca>
> >Sent: Wednesday, January 08, 2003 1:53 PM
> >Subject: RE: what is art yet again?...tired (was: outsider art)
>
> <snipped>
> >Art should be always ahead of it's time. Otherwise it will be a replica,
a
> >reproduction, a comment, a homage.
> <snipped>
>
>
> Joseph Brodsky spoke about this in his Nobel acceptance speech (quoted
from
> The New Republic 04Jan88). Apropos of writers and literature, but in my
> opinion transferrable to other artistic media as well, he said:
>
> "Art is a recoilless weapon, and its development is determined not by the
> individuality of the artist, but by the dynamics and the logic of the
> material itself, by the previous fate of the means that each time demand
(or
> suggest) a qualitatively new aesthetic solution. Possessing its own
> genealogy, dynamics, logic, and future, art is not synonymous with, but at
> best parallel to, history; and the manner by which it exists is by
> continually creating a new aesthetic reality. That is why it is often
found
> 'ahead of progress,' ahead of history, whose main instrument is -- should
we
> not, once more, improve upon Marx -- precisely the cliche.
>
> "Nowadays there exists a rather widely held view, postulating that in his
> work a writer, in particular a poet, should make use of the language of
the
> street, the language of the crowd. For all its democratic appearance, and
> its palpable advantages for a writer, this assertion is quite absurd, and
> represents an attempt to subordinate art, in this case literature, to
> history. It is only if we have resolved that it is time for Homo sapiens
to
> come to a halt in his development that literature should speak the
language
> of the people. Otherwise it is the people who should speak the language of
> literature."
>
>
> Which, while I'm at it, helps me to a better understanding of what it is
> that repulses me about the so-called work of Thomas K. Call it
> (legitimately) marketing skills. It's just another term for pandering. Who
> panders by accident? It probably is not even possible to pander w/o first
> possessing a clear understanding of the cliches we carry inside us,
yearning
> to be played by someone. As Galena noted (perhaps too graciously...),
> there's really only one alternative to originality in the arts:
replication.
>
> Mike Healy
>
>
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