Edward Feser´s Art and meta-art

[Anonymous No.15295291]

>As Roger Scruton has emphasized in An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture, aesthetic modernism was driven in large part by a desire to avoid kitsch, the banality and sentimentality that so often attends the mass-produced culture of modern, secularized consumerist society. Accordingly, Scruton tells us, “the first effect of modernism was to make high-culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition” (p. 85). Old forms came to be seen as exhausted, no longer capable of expressing genuine feeling; new forms had to be created (so the argument went) so that truly high art could once again be possible, forms the very understanding of which required such intellectual effort that none but the serious aesthete could appreciate them. Hence the modernist poetry of Eliot, the atonal music of Schoenberg, and the trend toward abstraction in painting.

>The consequences of this were many, and (to say the least) mixed; consult Scruton for a useful analysis. The particular consequence that concerns us here, though, is that the nature of art became itself a subject of art in a way it had not been before. Modernist works were as much statements about what art is and what it could be as they were statements about their purported subject matter – religion, everyday experience, and other traditional themes – and as experimentation with new forms progressed, the former theme started to crowd out the latter ones. The manic self-referentiality of post-modernism was the inevitable sequel. Art was transformed thereby into meta-art – it became, in effect, philosophy of art expressed in colors and sounds rather than academic prose.

[Anonymous No.15295295]

>Now there is certainly nothing inherently wrong with a writer, painter, or musician making literature, painting or music themselves subjects of artistic exploration. But a novel about the novelist’s life or even a song about the making of song is a very different sort of thing from Art about Music or Fiction or Painting, all considered as abstractions. The more such reflection on art qua art takes center stage, the more difficult it is for this sort of thing to avoid falling into self-parody, cliché, and indeed the very banality that modernism was supposed to enable us to avoid – what in a choice phrase Scruton has called the “preemptive kitsch” of post-modernism. We can allow that a Duchamp (for instance) may have had something of interest to say. But it need be said only once, and its interest is in any event less aesthetic than theoretical, a “lecture” to be thought through rather than a thing of beauty to be savored and continually re-experienced. And even then the lecture seems interesting primarily as a reductio ad absurdum of the premises that led to it.

>This, it seems to me, is why the music of Coleman – an application to jazz of the self-conscious, experimentalist spirit of modernism – fails aesthetically even if some might find it interesting and even enjoyable. The interest and enjoyment could only ever be bloodlessly intellectual, a kind of philosophical pleasure which is taken in the act of meditating along with Coleman and his sidemen on the theme of what jazz is or could be, rather than in the music per se. There is something faintly absurd, indeed perverse, in the making of such navel-gazing the theme of art. It is like watching Julie and Julia instead of having dinner, or spending one’s wedding night reading aloud passages from Love and Responsibility – all well and good in another context, but not quite what is called for under the circumstances.

[Anonymous No.15295303]

source: http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2010/09/art-and-meta-art.html

[Anonymous No.15295305]

I thought Feser was an artist who did the OP pic, you might want to add an 'on' in there next time to avoid confusion.

[Anonymous No.15295311]

>Edward Eser's Fart and meta-fart

[Anonymous No.15295313]

>>15295305

[Anonymous No.15295526]

>>15295291
>>15295295
Boring and oversimplified take, I've seen stuff like this a million times already and could've come up with it myself
>consult Scruton for a useful analysis
fucking lmao

[Anonymous No.15295550]

>>15295526
tell that to him, i´m just the messenger, pussy

[Anonymous No.15295564]

>>15295550
So why did you post it here, huh, cunt? What did you expect, how should people respond to your shit thread?

[Anonymous No.15295566]

>>15295526
he has a comments blog he always responds to, go dress him down :)

or try to

[Anonymous No.15295576]

>>15295564
>So why did you post it here, huh, cunt?

i don´t know which alternative would´ve been better

>>15295564
>how should people respond to your shit thread?

just wanted to hear different opinions on this and let some debate going on

[Anonymous No.15295638]

>>15295566
Oh, lmao, it's the guy who wrote the "Five Proofs"
It's, sadly, probably useless to talk to such people. The problem isn't that he's dumb, but that he's a philosopher, and obviously not terribly interested in modern art. If he were, he wouldn't call Scruton's analysis useful, and would stop treating a complex event such as modernism as this caricature that he talks about. Only exposing oneself to more art would cancel out these banal misconceptions, and one could finally lead us a more productive discourse.

>>15295576
>i don´t know which alternative would´ve been better
Depends on your goal...
>just wanted to hear different opinions on this and let some debate going on
So why did you tell me to "tell that to him"? That would literally be a contradiction of your goal.

[Anonymous No.15295669]

>>15295638
>So why did you tell me to "tell that to him"? That would literally be a contradiction of your goal.

because you were throwing a hissy fit, that´s why

[Anonymous No.15295685]

>>15295669
>a standard three-line shitpost
>"a hissy fit"
wew, no need to be so touchy, it was just an offhanded comment

[Anonymous No.15295719]

>>15295291
Isn't complaining about "difficult art" like complaining about having to learn more difficult ideas at the frontiers of math or physics? It's just music, words, lines etc. at the end of the day. Can't be THAT difficult.

[Anonymous No.15295751]

>>15295526
> Who can think of stupid things or clever, That past ages didn’t, long ago, understand.

[Anonymous No.15295768]

>>15295719
The difficulty does not appear to be the result of an earnest pursuit, but rather of a cold cynicism who cannot value simplicity.

[Anonymous No.15295773]

>>15295751
uh-huh

[Anonymous No.15295778]

>>15295768
What's not simple about Duchamp's Fountain or Rothko's paintings?

[Anonymous No.15295850]

>>15295778
That you have to engage in cognition to get anything from them, whereas the best art is revelatory and simple as the dawn.

[Anonymous No.15295862]

Would anyone like Rothko's paintings or Duchamp's Fountain etc. if they didn't know they were supposed to like them because they were avant-garde?

[Anonymous No.15295918]

>>15295850
That is such a nonsensical statement it's pretty much not worthy of arguing against. There is no reasoning behind it and its application to art analysis will quickly turn out to be fruitless. A folk tale will momentarily dethrone Shakespeare and Goethe in this system of art values. Also, art absolutely requires cognition in every case, like every perceived object external to a human being.

>>15295862
Quite possibly. There are various sorts of people out there with the most wildly different opinions and judgements. I personally enjoyed abstract art that is obviously not avant-garde.

[Anonymous No.15296110]

>>15295295
how dare this fucking child speak about Ornette like that, this person must hate art, the shape of Jazz to come is the opposite of overly intellectual

[Anonymous No.15296168]

>>15295291
This seems a little deaf to contemporary art history which talks about an inclusive 'modernism' or 'modernisms' rather than the exclusive, distinctly American Greenbergian 'Modernism' (a formalism which excludes Duchamp, mind you) from which we get the notion of 'kitsch'. And this analysis, for whatever reason, seems to avoid the actual 'philosophy of art' behind many of the modern movements (in their manifestoes, artist writings, interviews, etc.) that give great emphasis to the universality of certain art forms, or a desire to appeal to the average human subject for the purposes of revolution or reform. Connoisseurship has been the staple of art appreciation since theory overtook material as the source of value for art in the Renaissance, hence why there was such debate over exhibiting Academic works to the public in the first place (back in the 18th century). Modernism brought down any wall of erudition. Why else would the Guggenheim display so much modern art publicly? To save the citizen from the banality of culture with a shock from the primal, natural and the universal, and not just the artist. He is making the art for an audience, after all.

In my view, art becomes a subject of modernist art because a) there is increased awareness and study of other cultures, languages, codes, economies of meaning, etc. that decenters the 'universality' of beauty in Western art; b) this same awareness highlights the arbitrariness of certain conventions of representation, so art has to become more adequately 'true' to the subject that is irreducible to art - itself - to stay a worthwhile metaphysical exercise; and c) the Academic hierarchy of genres, for various reasons, could no longer support history painting as the grandest of the genres, and it soon lost ground to landscapes because of the appeal of a universal Rousseauist nature (the organic 'nation'), which in turn became the progression of history in general -through- art, when it became less traditionally metaphysical (e.g. religious) and instead became part of the economy of secular, nationalist 'politics,' i.e. self-organising society of rational individual subjects.

[Anonymous No.15296248]

>>15295564
I liked this take and thought it was interesting, fuck right off

[Anonymous No.15296550]

>>15296248
Then you're new as fuck. I'm dead serious when I say it: a slightly more articulate /lit/izen could've written the same thing in a thread about modern art, we get one every week or so (I think, at least, I haven't been regular here for months). Just pretend you totally understand something art historians have analyzed for decades, use fucking Scrotum as your source, pepper it with random personal opinions (but they're totally objective guys!), and viola, here's your "art philosophy".