Someone once said (and it was a person who said this out of the bitterness of a life full of mistakes), that destiny is what one tries to avoid and still can't. This sprung to mind when I was eating some vegetables stew while imagining what the new press of our days should look like. In my mind I was already putting together a weekly publication and almost wrote an illustrious article... then I remembered. I remembered that I do not have the time, money or energy to waste my life with long dissertations. What if the press nowadays is big club of copy-paste with no personal contributions along the line? What if I have just read a robotic, meaningless article about a subject that could have aroused an interesting debate? The tendency is to go shorter and shorter and forget about explanations and arguments, to go to the core, to write just a few words and letters and impose one's opinion like this. So, the utopia revival of argumentation belongs exactly where I left it: in my mind, for a flash, for a few minutes... If it has some meaning in it, it will come back, to me or to some other member of humanity, more endowed to put it into practice.
From here to the title... well, there are sooo many creative debauches nowadays. That is because the once positive encouragement to enjoy our creative impulses has been turned into a way of life for soo many mediocre creators, who are more enjoying themselves than giving the opportunity to the others to bask in some art. Every little thing someone does, folding napkins, building stuff with matches, writing so and so poems now it can become art by the means of some "investment". Well, it is not. It is just a way to blur the lines between art and hobby and maybe even crap. Art is changing, but it is not going back or fragmenting itself. Craft is also a relative of art that is confronted with the same situation. There is a clear feeling that makes the difference between dilettantish and art or craft. And it is not in the eye of the viewer, it is or should be in the eye of the educated public opinion... well, as long as such a group still exists.
As for the one seeking to produce some authentic maybe-art, perhaps not being too eager to create could get one on the right path. Does the wish to create haunt you? Push it back, postpone it, refuse it. If is shows up again and again, then give it a try, it might be genuine, and not induced by a trend from a self-help book shelf, calculated to please one and and all and to score big sales.
And a few examples of misplaced creativity: http://craftastrophe.net/
Some of these slowly might become "cult" or "chic" or "fun" because of the unintended celebrity given to them not via creative intention, but via "it's so ugly that is becomes nice".
As for art, the many many critics have already stated that taste is a personal matter, and that it is not allowed to point the finger to bad art and call it so, for fear of being named obtuse or uneducated. I just might add that I would rather admire a piece of street art or some kinetic sculptures than the static contents of an art museum, but of course - beware the TASTE!
And I do not stand for any piece of art to torment the already gloomy human existence - art better make one feel good and sublim-ish during or at the end of an artistic experience... beware the soft-heartiness!
Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
Tuesday, 20 November 2012
Monday, 3 September 2012
Really, now...
Really, now... this is the after-taste that comes to my mind reading the last post, the one in Romanian, the one about not feeling that special sensation of "right man in the right place", the one about the weird perception of some things as being phony.
Wrong or right, these previous thoughts sprung from a real reaction to something. Uh-oh, the righteous indignation... very old fashioned and frowned upon nowadays.
I still stand by my views. It is though useful and truthful to add that probably in an open conversation with an opposite thinker I would avoid exposing them, as I fear I would make a poor job as a defender of some ideas that have their own life and have the right to a more clever defender/exposer.
A book that answered my inner opinions was The Tree by John Fowles. It cheered me up after trying in vain to read and appreciate various modern writers and "free thinkers". After declaring myself obviously stupid for not being able to force such readings into my own time, and preferring to do nothing at all, I read in one breath this entire book and it felt like a breeze of fresh air.
Let's ...quote:)
“Older and less planned quarters of cities and towns are profoundly woodlike, and especially in this matter of the mode of their passage through us, the way they unreel, disorientate, open, close, surprise, please. The stupidest mistake of all the many stupid mistakes of twentieth-century architecture has been to forget this ancient model in the more grandiose town-planning. Geometric, linear cities make geometric, linear people; wood cities make human beings.”
John Fowles
The Tree (New York: Ecco, 1983), 61.
via Kevin Lippert
via Quotenik
“The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity.”
John Fowles, The Tree via goodreads
and a new one, from another book, nice one:
“Being a poet, divining beauty, is like divining nature—a gift. It does not matter if one does not create. It is enough to have the poetic vision. To see the beauty hidden. As I did tonight, hearing someone whistle in the distance as I stood by an open window. I felt all kinds of moods of streets at night, of walking with loved women, of the dark blue and whiteness, and the strange, magical desertion of streets at night. I felt it all exactly in a moment, such a rush of impressions that they can hardly be seized. Algernon Blackwood: ‘To feel like a poet is not to be a poet.’ True, yet, poetry making is not necessarily the printing of words. It is a philosophical outlook, an epicureanism, a hedonism.”
source: entry dated September 24, 1949, in The Journals: Volume One 1949–1965 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 4. via Quotenik
“we shall never full understand nature (or ourselves), and certainly never respect it, until we dissociate the wild from the notion of usability.” (39-40)
via http://tomthompsonnews.blogspot.ro/2012/01/green-chaos-or-wood.html
"No art is truly teachable in its essence. All the knowledge in the world of its techniques can provide in itself no more than imitations or replicas of previous art "
It is very difficult to grasp this book in a description and this is only natural. One either absorbs it or thinks of it as drivel.
But it is honest.
Wrong or right, these previous thoughts sprung from a real reaction to something. Uh-oh, the righteous indignation... very old fashioned and frowned upon nowadays.
I still stand by my views. It is though useful and truthful to add that probably in an open conversation with an opposite thinker I would avoid exposing them, as I fear I would make a poor job as a defender of some ideas that have their own life and have the right to a more clever defender/exposer.
A book that answered my inner opinions was The Tree by John Fowles. It cheered me up after trying in vain to read and appreciate various modern writers and "free thinkers". After declaring myself obviously stupid for not being able to force such readings into my own time, and preferring to do nothing at all, I read in one breath this entire book and it felt like a breeze of fresh air.
Let's ...quote:)
“Older and less planned quarters of cities and towns are profoundly woodlike, and especially in this matter of the mode of their passage through us, the way they unreel, disorientate, open, close, surprise, please. The stupidest mistake of all the many stupid mistakes of twentieth-century architecture has been to forget this ancient model in the more grandiose town-planning. Geometric, linear cities make geometric, linear people; wood cities make human beings.”
John Fowles
The Tree (New York: Ecco, 1983), 61.
via Kevin Lippert
via Quotenik
“The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity.”
John Fowles, The Tree via goodreads
and a new one, from another book, nice one:
“Being a poet, divining beauty, is like divining nature—a gift. It does not matter if one does not create. It is enough to have the poetic vision. To see the beauty hidden. As I did tonight, hearing someone whistle in the distance as I stood by an open window. I felt all kinds of moods of streets at night, of walking with loved women, of the dark blue and whiteness, and the strange, magical desertion of streets at night. I felt it all exactly in a moment, such a rush of impressions that they can hardly be seized. Algernon Blackwood: ‘To feel like a poet is not to be a poet.’ True, yet, poetry making is not necessarily the printing of words. It is a philosophical outlook, an epicureanism, a hedonism.”
source: entry dated September 24, 1949, in The Journals: Volume One 1949–1965 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 4. via Quotenik
“we shall never full understand nature (or ourselves), and certainly never respect it, until we dissociate the wild from the notion of usability.” (39-40)
via http://tomthompsonnews.blogspot.ro/2012/01/green-chaos-or-wood.html
"No art is truly teachable in its essence. All the knowledge in the world of its techniques can provide in itself no more than imitations or replicas of previous art "
It is very difficult to grasp this book in a description and this is only natural. One either absorbs it or thinks of it as drivel.
But it is honest.
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