Pretentiousness comes from modern art comes from Plato · 4:33am May 2nd, 2018
MrNumbers just posted a great essay, Annihilation -- on Pretentiousness in Media. I feel like he's saved me a blog post; I would've had to have written something similar eventually.
It's on his Patreon site, but if I'm reading the tags right, it's free to read. Some excerpts:
... if being entertaining was the primary objective of media, The Room would be a fantastic movie. We can say that The Room is a terrible movie while also being entertained by it, so we need to understand what other criteria we are thinking about when we call a movie ‘good’ or ‘bad’. ... The danger is that when your meaning isn’t clear, when your story isn’t well delivered, the criticism doesn’t get directed at the work. ...
A symptom of this is, strangely, a certain style of debate about the analysis of your movie. In a well-constructed movie, ideas about what something means are tied back to elements of the movie as evidence. [Analyzing?] Movies that fall into the pitfall of pretension — or the kind I have roughly laid out in my mind — are more about explaining what a scene had to mean by tying ideas to it. Think about the debate about the spinning top in Inception; they focus on trying to debate what scenes were actually trying to say first before they can work out what they actually meant.
In other words: If you're spending more effort trying to figure out what the story said than you are re-evaluating your beliefs in light of what the story said, the story may be pretentious. If the story is difficult because the subject matter is difficult, that's legit, but if it's difficult because the author didn't try to make it clear, or deliberately made it unclear, that's pretentious.
(I'm okay with the spinning top in Inception, because the question left unanswered, as to whether the final world is real or not, is a question the characters are themselves asking. It's not something you have to answer to interpret the story; it's part of the story.)
MrNumbers' essay elaborates on this. He doesn't, however, explain where this trend over the past century for "great" art to be pretentious came from. It's actually deliberate.
Persian Flaws
There's supposedly an old Persian tradition that every carpet made must have a deliberate flaw in it, because "only Allah makes things perfectly, and therefore to weave a perfect rug or carpet would be an offence to Allah."
Hopefully you see the flaw in the reasoning: If only Allah makes things perfectly, you don't have to worry about creating something perfect. This alleged tradition has always struck me as tremendously arrogant--an artist supposing she or he could create a perfect work.
Modern (20th-century) art and literature suffers the same arrogance. We see this first in the great stress that modern artists and modernist writers placed on reminding the viewer or reader that their art was not reality, but just a picture of reality.
Caption: "This is not a pipe"
The most-common justification for this obsession was the idea that art was a tool of the bourgoisie, used to suppress the proletariat by showing them false images of reality. Creating revolutionary consciousness required first making people aware that the paintings they looked at weren't actually real things, and that the novels they read weren't true life stories. You can find examples of this argument in Bertolt Brecht's director's notes for The Threepenny Opera (1928), in Lennard Davis' 1987 book Resisting Novels, and an especially paranoid lunatic version of it in Theodor Adorno's 1944 "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception".
So many modernist writers add deliberate "flaws" to their works, disruptive elements to break the reader's immersion and keep the reader detached and at a distance. In The Threepenny Opera, Brecht broke up the play's continuity and immersiveness by having actors intersperse narration with raised billboards, of the type that separated scenes in silent films, by using these billboards to break dramatic tension by telling the spectator what was going to happen, and by directing the actors to act in a manner meant to break the fourth wall. "In drama, too, we should introduce footnotes and the practice of thumbing through and checking up… Thinking about the flow of the play is more important than thinking from within the flow of the play," he wrote. "The spectator must not be misled along the path of empathy."
In other modernist literature, breaking the reader's immersion is done by breaking up and re-arranging the story in ways that confuse the reader and destroy rather than heighten drama, such as the tedious circling about the actual story, bouncing back and forth between past and future, in Arundhati Roy's 1997 Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things, or the way David Mitchell split all his stories in two and inserted the pieces inside each other in his critically-acclaimed Cloud Atlas (2004). You would be hard-pressed to find a critically-acclaimed novel from the past 20 years that told a straightforward story using a traditional structure that was meant to heighten rather than dispel drama. Chapter 1 of Annie Dillard's 1982 Living By Fiction, "Fiction in Bits", is about this phenomenon, as is much of "A Reader's Manifesto" (2001).
One modernist technique for breaking immersion and creating distance is ambiguity.
Ambiguity
I'm not complaining about the kind of ambiguity where you can't decide whether an artwork's message is right or wrong, or the kind where the subject is difficult, or the kind where the subject is ambiguity itself. I mean ambiguity that is added to the story to obstruct your attempts to figure it out. That's the kind of ambiguity MrNumbers is calling pretentious: ambiguity that makes you argue over what a work of art is trying to say, rather than about the thing it's saying. The claim that this sort of ambiguity is good comes from modernist philosophy.
The informational content of a work of art, like the information in a sentence, comes more from how its parts are combined than from the meanings of the individual parts, e.g., "the dog bit the man" doesn't mean the same thing as "the man bit the dog".
But Modernism is based on ancient Platonist metaphysics, which claims that meaning exists only in the essences of individual things, not in how those things are combined. So modernists have difficulty conceiving of the information content of a representational work of art as being significant. They tend to think the significance of a representation is just the sum of the significances of the things represented. A representational work of art only shows you a collection of things you've seen before; therefore, it contains no new essences, and (they would argue) you can learn nothing from it.
This is why modernists imagine they could produce perfect art if they wanted to; they're blind to the art part of a work of art, and see only the technique. They're reverting to the medieval and ancient Greek conception of "art", which meant about the same as our "craft" or "technical skill". (You can read a post-modernist whining about how the Enlightenment led people to invent the artificial concept of "Art" in Larry Shiner's 2001 The Invention of Art.)
To make a work challenging or interesting, dedicated modernists believe it must do one of these things:
- It must give us new views of essences. This means either giving direct access to transcendental essences never perceived before, or depicting essences more truly than they have been depicted before. Either option requires not using a realistic style. This is the primary purpose of modern art. You can find this spelled out in, for instance, various writings by Cubist painters circa ~1920, e.g. (Gleizes & Metzinger 1912 p. 195). The description of cubism in ancient and primitive art in (Boas 1927 p. 351) gives the same explanation.
- It must use a new style or technique.
- The challenge can't lie in the meaning of a work of art, but it can lie in the challenge of discovering that meaning. That is, art can't lie in the interpretation of a work of art--an interpretation merely spells out what is being represented--but it can lie in the difficulty of discovering an interpretation. Nothing the artist has to say can be very interesting, but figuring out what the artist is saying--or producing your own meaning from a Rorschach-blot-like work of art--can be fun and interesting.
The Alleged Insufficiency of Language
Another theme of modern literature and philosophy is that language is incapable of communicating meaning, and actually serves to mislead people more than to enlighten them. You find this, for example, in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, in which he said that "Language disguises […] thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized." You also find it in Derrida's "infinite chain of deferral of meaning" (Derrida 1967). This belief comes not from any actual failure of language, but, again, from Platonist metaphysics, which says that meaning resides in a transcendent realm which words can never reach.
In modernist literature, this sometimes results in authors trying to prove that language can't communicate meaning by writing stories which fail to communicate clearly.
William Faulkner is a good example. Just today I heard a lecturer (David Thorburn, Masterworks of Early 20th-Century Literature, lecture 21, "Faulkner's World--Our Frantic Steeplechase") say that one of Faulkner's themes was "the treacherous limitations of language as an instrument for describing and understanding experience."
But Faulkner never demonstrated this legitimately, by showing a failure of language. He deliberately obscured his meaning, for instance, by using phony stream-of-consciousness in which he imagines that the interior thoughts of a mentally subnormal person, or of a child, are simply the things that person or child might say out loud if asked about his thoughts. Or, in many instances in As I Lay Dying, by again using stream-of-consciousness dishonestly, having a character's interior monologue not say things that the character already knew--always the most crucial elements in figuring out what that character was thinking about--to give the impression that true inner experience was incommunicable.
A survey of modernist literature would turn up more instances of stories written in a deliberately obscure style specifically to prove that language is incapable of communicating meaning. I've given at least one example in a previous blog post, but I don't remember what it was right now.
Conclusion: Blame Plato
So ambiguity of interpretation--what MrNumbers calls "pretentiousness"--came to be seen as inherently good, because people can argue over the meaning of an ambiguous work of art, and because ambiguity "proves" that language can't communicate meaning and that we need to find a transcendent source of meaning. It's deliberately cultivated by modernists, as a consequence of their belief that representational content is unimportant and the real (physical) world is unimportant, as a consequence of their Platonist metaphysics.
Franz Boas, 1927. Primitive Art. Oslo: H. Aschehoug & Co. Page numbers reported from Dover 1955 reprint.
Bertold Brecht, 1928, transl. Eric Bentley 1949, exigesis Eric Bentley. The Threepenny Opera. First performed in Berlin. New York: Grove Press.
Lennard Davis, 1987. Resisting Novels: Ideology & Fiction. Methuen, Inc., NYC NY.
Jacques Derrida, 1967, transl. 1976. Of Grammatology. Extracts in Leitch 2010 p. 1688-1697.
Annie Dillard, 1982. Living By Fiction. NYC: Harper & Row.
Albert Gleizes & Jean Metzinger, 1912. "Cubism." In Harrison & Wood 1992, p. 187-196.
Charles Harrison & Paul Wood, eds., 1992. Art in Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno 1944, transl. 2002. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” In Dialectics of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, Stanford U. Press, 2002.
Vincent Leitch et al., eds. 2nd ed. 2010, The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism. New York: Norton.
B. R. Meyers, 2001. "A Reader's Manifesto". The Atlantic, July/Aug 2001.
Larry Shiner, 1990. The Invention of Art: A Cultural History. U. of Chicago Press.
So how does one use ambiguity well, instead of destructively?
4851995
I've always taken it to mean to write open-endedly and allow for multiple valid interpretations. It's like looking at a muddy, watercolor painting. Your mind makes it out to what it wants when it can't see every fine detail. I actually have done something like that a few times with some stories. For example, in The Kiss, the only dialogue is not tagged, and it's told from an ambiguous point of view, leaving much of it open to interpretation. That in my mind is how you use ambiguity constructively in order to make a story's inherrent lack of absolute clarity into an asset and not a liability by actively promoting and celebrating what can be interpreted instead of hammering down on what must be accepted dogmatically.
I guess some of what I write is pretentious crap, then.
Honestly, I really don't agree with this definition of 'pretentious = abstruseness'. Pretentious things aren't pretentious because they're hard to understand. They're pretentious because they're self-indulgent. "Manos" The Hands of Fate is extremely pretentious because it takes its narrow premise so seriously; it's a bad movie because there are long parts where nothing happens, and the cinematography is terrible, and the dialogue is unrealistic; and yet it isn't abstruse in the slightest. These are all different things.
This looks interesting, and I'll have to read it when I'm not getting ready for work.
But I did want to mention this from the start:
This is a myth; you'll find the same "fact" referenced about Amish quilts, and Quaker, and Greek statues, and Jewish houses, and just about any kind of art associated with a religious culture. Ironically, it's so widespread a myth that some people have almost certainly done it in the belief that they are supposed to, not recognizing the obvious irony that you highlight (not to mention the arrogance of assuming they could create something as good as God can if they wanted to!), but the likely origin is some eastern traders trying to drive up the price on second-hand rugs they were hawking to naive foreigners.
4852064
I'm not making myself clear. MrNumbers goes into more details trying to separate difficulty in general, from difficulty added for no artistic purpose, out of the misconception that art inheres in making things difficult rather than in tackling difficult subjects.
So, yeah, I think being abstruse (deliberate concealment) is usually pretentious, but being difficult is not.
4851995 I've tried to write a blog post about that, but it's difficult!
I think one kind of ambiguity is when the ambiguity is part of the story, or part of the point of the story, like the spinning top at the end of Inception. The characters are wondering whether they're in "reality" or not, and the viewer is supposed to also wonder. The short story "The Lady and the Tiger" is another case where the ending is not revealed, because the purpose of the story is to get the reader to think about all of the conflicting emotions in the mind of the princess to guess whether the lady or the tiger is behind the door that she points to.
I could defend the non-ending of William Faulkner's short story "That Evening Sun", where you don't find out whether Nancy is murdered or not, by saying that if you found out that she was murdered, it would focus the reader's empathy on that tragedy, whereas if you found out that she wasn't, it would make the reader dismiss the whole story as unimportant. The point of the story is in what happens before the ending--the ending (you find out in The Sound and the Fury that she was murdered) is not what the story is about. It's about how the Compson family treats Nancy. Wrapping up the plot would distract the reader from the story.
In some cases the ambiguity is itself the point of the story.
cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/6c550c251a6fa4a15acc5a3890081b6e
Rashomon is the classic example of a movie which is about the inability to know what happened. This is a modernist theme, but I think it's legit in Rashomon because the story is carefully made plausible and psychologically realistic. The problem is when ambiguity itself is the dogma that is "hammered down".
MrNumbers' complaint about Annihilation is that you can't figure out the basic sequence of events, and there doesn't seem to be any reason for obscuring that.
4852076 Can you give a citation? I can't find any claim online that it's a myth.
I don't think most of the Modernists were being pretentious, as much as they were engaged in exploring the limits of the medium itself, often to the detriment of the story, in conveying meaning. "The map is not the territory," and any medium will necessarily be limited in what and how much meaning it can convey. Obviously there were some who took it too far, and did become pretentious, but I don't see that as necessarily the case in the majority of examples.
I think where pretentiousness, being clever for the sake of being clever, really became a serious problem was with the Postmodernists, who essentially denied even the possibility of meaning and communication. Works which were essentially devoid of any attempt at conveying meaning. Modernists saw the attempt to convey meaning as difficult, as a problem to be solved, and their works reflected that, the effort needed to dig down through the layers of obfuscation to tease out the real meaning and message of the work. Postmodernists saw it as impossible, as an insurmountable barrier, and therefore abandoned the attempt to convey meaning. No matter how you try, you'll never encounter any real meaning it it, because there is none there except what you bring to it. That is where pretentiousness truly overcomes communication and becomes a barrier to understanding.
4852023
If you're not tagging your dialogue, then your story isn't inherently ambiguous--you've deliberately made it ambiguous.
I don't know what "celebrating what can be interpreted" means. If you wrote the story to have some specific and contradictory intended interpretations, that's one thing--I probably wouldn't try to pull that off, because it would be too hard, but congrats if you can do it. But if you're giving the reader a Rorschach test, that's not storytelling. If you want to play a game with the reader or give her a puzzle, like figuring out all the references in a TS Eliot poem, that's a legit thing to do, but again, it's not storytelling, and should be considered a different art form.
In my experience, saying anything at all is so difficult that I can only do it if I carefully design the entire story to say one thing, and eliminate ambiguity, because accidental, unintended readings of a story are nearly always stupid or uninteresting. In fact, readers come up with interesting alternative readings only when I've tried to eliminate alternative readings. I think this is because a truly interesting alternative reading needs to be one which picks out some principle or regularity in how things happen, which is regular enough to be more than a random correspondence. Trying to eliminate ambiguity means closing off all the readings that arise by chance, but this might not close off readings that arise from the same constraints of reality that the author has used to support his intended meaning. In mathematical terms, a story should have more equations than unknowns. This means it may have a single unique solution. It may have other solutions, but if it does, that will be because all of these solutions are allowed by a correlation / logical structure within the story which the author was not aware of. That logical structure will be what makes them interesting.
"Hammering a message" isn't the same as trying to control what the message is. "Hammering" is IMHO when an author tries to make a point in a lazy, unrealistic fashion, without earning it. If a story's point is important and "correct", then it's appropriate to make it strongly and precisely.
4852116 I did over-generalize (speak as if all modernists were pretentious). I also deliberately didn't distinguish between modernism and post-modernism, partly because that distinction is artificial (many of the earliest modernists, like the Dadaists, or Gertrude Stein, were IMHO more like post-modernists than like other modernists), mostly because my points apply to both. You're right that post-modernism went further, but modernists had already articulated the desirability of detachment, breaking immersion, and introducing uncertainty as a dogma.
You could go further back in time, and say it was the neo-classicists who first articulated the desirability of detachment from art, although I don't think this would be useful since they believed detachment was entirely the job of the viewer. You could even go back to Enlightenment rationalists such as Descartes who first claimed that logic and meaning should be confined to rationalist disciplines modeled on geometry, and the arts should concern themselves only with style. Again, though, that's mostly at odds with what modernists & post-modernists are doing.
My response got big, so I put it on my blog: Why the Apple Matters.
I agree with your analysis, but there is a subtle difference between modernist and postmodernist thought. I hope this works as a clarifying agent.
4852159
Even modernists and postmodernists can't agree that there is a clear distinction between the two. Anyway, they are just imperfect human labels. [takes off the hat that could be labelled as "postmodernist" if postmodernist thought allowed for such labels]
4852160 You're right that there's a distinction, but I ignored it, because this distinction doesn't have a chronological boundary, and because I just didn't want to get into it. See 4852116 and 4852159.
4852159
While I agree that there is overlap between the Modernists and Postmodernists, and it can be difficult to differentiate them due to the similar devices used by both (not to mention the chronological fuzziness), I still think it's important to make the distinction, because of the vastly different aims and results. Intent is crucial, and an honest attempt to address the difficulty of conveying meaning may be erroneously read as pretentious deliberate abstruseness (which may be as much due to lack of mastery of the technique); while using the same techniques with the intent of destroying or denying meaning certainly is pretentious, on multiple levels.
I think much of what is derided as pretension on the part of the Modernists is more an example of failed experimentation.
Huh. It seems that the more I learn about (post)modernism and/or Plato, the more I dislike them. Proof does not work that way! "Proof by example" is not a thing! And what's the point of art that doesn't communicate anything to the viewer?
4852235
Sorry, I meant proofs of "for all" statements rather than "there exists" statements, since they seemed to be talking about proving something true for all attempts at communication. My point was meant to be that trying to prove that all attempts at communication are meaningless by providing examples of meaningless communication is as logically flawed as trying to prove that all odd numbers are prime by listing a few prime odd numbers off the top of your head while ignoring any and all non-prime odds.
I'd alter my original comment to reflect this, but I don't like the idea of fundamentally altering a comment that's already been replied to.
Ahhh, the return of your nerd blogs! I’ve missed them.
4852184
Intention is important. A long long time ago, when I was a student a poem was being discussed in class. The poet, who was big on transcendence and meditation, wrote a poem that was so abstruse and internal that none of the other students understood a thing. The teacher, no stranger to this behavior, wrote a poem on the chalkboard. In huge letters, smack in the middle of the board, he wrote, “NO”. In the corner, in tiny letters, he wrote, “yes”. In the other corner, he wrote, “Ha ha ha”.
“Do you like my poem?”
Of course, the transcendental poet loved it, because readers do not matter to such prats. For those of us who want readers, the poem is obvious garbage. That, to me, was the clearest rebuttal of postmodernism I have yet seen.
4852105
it sounds a bit like a myth, since it apparently only applies to their artwork. Unless all the Islamic mathematicians deliberately included errors in their calculations and proofs out of respect to the divine. Maybe they viewed irrational numbers as intentionally flawed, seeing how the Greeks hated using those for the same reason. (hrmm...)
examining the geometric flaws shows that some appear consistently intentional, while others are inconsistent enough to possibly be accidents. For the latter, it seems highly likely that the saying is a cheeky sales technique. But for the former, I strongly doubt that it's god-fearing, and instead an acceptance that imperfection IS beauty. In practice, Japanese wabi-sabi is the exact same thing, just with different intent/justification.
By their own standards, it's not that difficult to make a "perfect" geometric pattern (perfect as in design, not atomic arrangement), or a teacup, or cathedral ceiling. The flaws are simple enough to point out and correct. So it seems hypocritical to accuse this of "arrogance" when you yourself believe that perfection is impossible.
4852268
I see your point! Though I don't think I was being hypocritical--I think perfection is impossible, not possible (more accurately, I think the concept of "perfection" outside of logic and geometry is unhealthy).
Fascinating stuff about the designs, and about wabi-sabi.
4852258
media1.tenor.com/images/604b151af7261a5707cf2ef30f97c08d/tenor.gif?itemid=5458141
Darn you for making me flash back to the God of Small Things, that wasted a month out of my summer in high school.
4852105
"Ask any Amish quilter about that one and watch them cringe" would be a good place to start for the Amish quilt version (if you don't live in an area with a significant Amish population, this may be less convenient). And of course, the fact that it's applied to all sorts of different cultures whose only connecting thread is a religious otherness is a pretty strong piece of circumstantial evidence. There was a book about Amish quilting that I read once which specifically debunked it, though I can't remember the title offhand; if I come up with it, I'll post it.
I have to admit, though, that I haven't been able to find any definitive evidence (at least, not in a few minutes of googling) that definitively disproves the persian rug variation of this legend.
I did find some more groups to whom this story is attached, though! Navajo weavers (to be fair, they are "supposed" to leave a path out from the center of their weavings so that evil spirits don't get trapped inside; it's easy to see how that translated to the more common deliberate imperfection trope), Aran Islands sweaters, Japanese architecture, medieval scribes--I'm not even including all the deliberate imperfections results that aren't specifically cited as having been done so as to avoid offending God! So whatever the case (whether it's a true myth, a myth made real by peoples' belief in it, or a practice borne of anything other than recreating a myth), it's universal, not limited to to Persian rugmakers!
(For what it's worth, the earliest references these guys found to the persian rug stuff only go back to the beginning of last century, though I'm sure they're much older--for goodness sake, this is basically the myth of Arachne, and that takes us back over two millennia!)
4852104
I think it's an important topic to explore, so as we do not throw out the Rashomon baby with the ambiguous bathwater. I get a little worried people will get the wrong message, and turn towards excessive prose instead.
I read today this essay on Impressionism, which argues against the theory that it had anything in common with Modernism, because they had polar opposite goals. Which probably says more about the Modernist critics, that they take credit for any hint of NOVELTY rather than having a clear idea of their own art. But anyway, I think this is a good metaphor for how I see the dividing line of ambiguousness.... sure it's abstracted reality, and the notion that we perceive light and colors instead of reality, but it's still about reality rather than ideas and art forms.
And I do think there's some gems of value within post-modernism, but I don't have the passion to defend it all by Sturgeon's Revelation. At least the 90% of cruddy sci-fi has some idea of what it's trying to be, while all the bad postmodernism seems completely directionless. Like they're on to some clever ideas... e.g. language can be baffling sometimes! There's interesting research in how differences in linguistics lead to differences in thinking, and George Orwell's whole thing was about how policing language can be used to manipulate minds. Yet most ambiguous writing about language itself seems like a kneejerk reaction, to doubt everything rather than find interesting uses for this.
I wrote some essays over the past year exploring this topic, though I referred to it as "subtlety", which most people think means just putting a tiny detail in the corner and hoping people find it, rather than directing the audience's attention toward discovering it. I think there's a lot of power in making an audience use their imaginations to fill in details, just that this by itself is useless without the right tools. It's common in horror (I dunno if this is a universal opinion, but I know many people who believe the first half of Alien is the strongest, with its creepy mysteries and unanswered questions; the second half is just a typical rubber-suit-monster chase) and recently I've started thinking it applies to comedy too. And there's some essays I've been wanting to write about using fragmentation in art, particularly in haiku, but I haven't written them yet.
But if I had to sum up that idea briefly, it's that a careful understanding of the audience can create intentional effects on the audience, rather than confused interpretations. The pretentious artists just mumble to themselves, with zero regard to the audience.
You might enjoy this.
Just after posting it, I've gotten a job as director of photography for a rewritten piece of Samuel Beckett's called "Quad".
Have fun reading the "interpretation" page on Wikipedia attached to it. It's honestly quite possibly the most offensive thing my personal philosophies have ever witnessed.
Ambiguity in writing is like a puzzle, and reading and understanding* the writing is like assembling the puzzle. If it's too simple, there's no satisfaction in seeing the picture. If it's too difficult, it's not worth dealing with.
When you're deep, deep down the puzzle rabbit hole, you buy a 10,000 piece puzzle with no edges that's just blank white and which actually has an extra 100 superfluous pieces in the box. Everything possible to increase the challenge of the puzzle, because normal puzzles are boring. Meanwhile, normal people look at that puzzle and ask what in god's name could possibly be the point.
In a world where crazy puzzle people run many puzzle manufacturers, give out awards to their favorite puzzles, and have outsized sway over which puzzles are offered to retailers, the puzzle market starts to look weird in a very familiar way.
*To whatever degree it is possible to understand it, or to understand that it can't be understood, etc.
4852543 Thanks for the link to that article on Impressionism! I'm working on my own post arguing that Impressionism was realist, and not a precursor to modernism, but didn't have any of that material in it. I might take issue with the notion that Impressionists were about emotion rather than ideas. Many Impressionist paintings have interesting interpretations as commentaries on social realities and changes. But OTOH, those interpretations were come up with long after the paintings were made, when people knew they were supposed to come up with intellectual / social / political interpretations of paintings. It might be they just painted things that struck them as interesting.
I agree. The idea of intent is unfortunately out of fashion. The ideas of Freud (action is controlled by the unconscious) and Marx (ideas are determined by the economic system) were applied to art to argue that artists have no agency at all, and agency (and originality) resides only in the cultural system the artist is trapped in. Reader response theory is just a part of this, and a bit obsolete--in Stanley Fish's later work, even the reader has no power; only the community as a whole can make an interpretation (which is the act which he says actually creates a story).
And, since Foucault, the community's thoughts and actions aren't things the community chooses itself, or that enable people to cooperate to meet their needs. Society is a prison, an entirely negative entity designed by those in power to shape the community to keep them in power. So art as a whole is dismal and sad, a futile thrashing about forced upon us by malicious impersonal forces designed to exploit us and to make us complicit in that exploitation. That view is why literary theory is now dominated by people who want not to enjoy literature, but to destroy it, and why the techniques recommended by literary theorists are ones that weaken rather than strengthen literature. That is their intent.
4852597 I liked the (unironic) comparison of Quad to The Teletubbies. The video+music is kind of hypnotic, so it's not artless--but it is basically the answer to the question, "How can we get adults to watch The Teletubbies?
4853156
to me the impressionists seem empathetic towards slices of life around them, though without any political goal or statement in mind. they did borrow a lot from Japanese aesthetics, from where this type of art was produced for centuries for the middle-class, and social revolution took a while to catch on.
Looking further on the (other) Impressionism essay's website, it turns out that writer has many more (hundreds of) angry rants about modern art. It's too much to read all of them, but this one seemed very relevant here. Coincidentally, he briefly mentions Plato near the end (making me wonder if you're secretly him)
maybe it's all just an elaborate scam
4853268 That is relevant. Unfortunately, I'm neither as educated at art, nor as good with words, as he (or she--the writer says he/she has several pseudonyms) is. But the point about modern art being a quest to escape the taint of the world and the physical body, and reach Plato's transcendent world of forms, is a point I also want to make about modern art, and to link up with the disastrous consequences of Platonism throughout history, in art, politics, religion, science, and everyday life.
But nearly everything I want to say has already been said. There are already devastating critiques of modern art, post-modern thought, and other totalitarian systems, but it has no effect. A common trait of totalitarian systems is that they focus on getting exclusive control of educating the young, because they must start with the young to indoctrinate them. Debate among adults is of little interest to them except to trick their opponents into wasting time on it.