i like how the art-experts here arguing for 'arts purpose' are also those that will say 'all art is subjective'.
so how do you reconcile this antinomy? how can something have an implicit and definite purpose, if everyone receives it differently? some of the artists or songs that mentally unstable people listen to as 'music therapy' could very well trigger me to break down crying, because it triggers a bad memory, or because the notes strike me empathetically in a different way, and elicit a different response. some people find wagner awe-inspiring and thrilling; others find him terrifying; some find him melodramatic and comical. so is wagner's music's purpose to be awe-inspiring or to be laughably melodramatic? hmm. seems to me that to talk of a certain 'purpose' in art is rather foolish. as i said, largely beyond entertainment/intellectual contemplation, art is useless. its germane and 'message'-like qualities could all be distilled down, free of the stylization, the formalism, the decoration and adornment, to something simpler. that which elevates these simple messages or 'this happened to this person' to art, is the extraneous and unnecessary detail: it's the difference between a news-story and a great novel. aesthetic autonomy is the sine qua non of art.
also discussing the 'purpose' of something to instill a contemplative/emotional response is a very wide definition of 'purpose' and hence 'use'. use and function to me means actually doing something, practically, in the outside world. making someone feel a certain way is hardly building a bridge. and, if you want to 'do' something in art or song, 'instruct' something', to be didactic or moral, there's ALWAYS a better way to do that than art. if you want to instruct someone in how to behave, you give them a catechism, a call-and-response, or a simple order. not a 1,000 line symbolist poem, with no clear meaning, that takes weeks of reading to understand- and even gives you a different message/understanding when you come back to read it, from a different perspective, years later, or whatever. art is almost always and invariably the worst way to try and 'get something done', if that's your main purpose. not saying it can't have any benefits or can't give you anything more, but there's the basic question: why did Dickens write novels about victorian poverty, rather than newspaper polemics? or non-fiction histories, reports? or become a politician? it's because literature - and art - revels in the grey-area, and loves ambiguity. this is why hamlet is one of the greatest plays ever written, and why people go back time and time again to the theatre to see characters like aaron or iago. it has what has kept people guessing over the mona lisa's expression for 400 years. it's not black and white. does engineering love grey-areas and ambiguity? not sure it checks out with health and safety regulations, m80.
and "my boy le corbusier"? i have no affection for le corbusier's work or aesthetic. i just said to you, months ago, that he's a giant figure of modernism, and was by all accounts a visionary. you tried to ridicule him because his high-rise buildings didn't work out well as social experiments. i just maintained that his actual art - as art, without USE - was a bold new utopian vision of the future. i don't know how that makes him "my boy". i'd defend spanish baroque painters without having to be a committed catholic, you know.
anyway, i'd love for someone at some point to close the parenthesis opened by my final ONE sentence at the end of a post, and get back to the business of how 'engineering is an art', or, even better, dilbert's point about humanities leaders being disastrous, and engineering being the master-race (
). i'd love to debate/lecture anyone via PM on the 'aesthetic autonomy' debate, away from my twice-hourly ration.
Last edited by aynrandroolz (2013-01-22 07:43:58)
