Belinda wrote:How is it possible to be a formalist in art appreciation? I mean, forms themselves acquire meanings for any living humans from the moment of birth, if not in the womb. The form of the human face for instance is known to be have great meaning for babies as soon as they can see. This fact is probably related to what Gombrich(I think with reference to tribal art) points out about how the visible pair- formation immediately transforms a previously uninteresting form into a face; emoticons make use of this.
I wonder if belief in formalism in art appreciation is similar to belief in those putatively meaning-free perceptions that we call qualia. Context is inevitably perceptible to any being that is a meaning-maker. Everything relates to everything else.
Faces are a huge part of an infant's world. The world is huge, incomprehensible and scary and faces, and what they bring, are our only comfort at that time. This harks back to the point made earlier that we are attracted to the healthful. We find green fields and blue skies beautiful, just as we may find blue fields with green skies disorienting - yet that disorientation has its own attraction. Again the attraction is health-based - enjoyment of challenge facilitates survival and wellbeing. Our tastes are at least initially shaped by evolution.
In both art and music I look for form over content. I love Picasso's flow and design sensibilities, Dali's distorted realism, Roussou's and Gaugin's colours, shapes and forms. I usually don't have the slightest interest in "unpacking" the art. I mostly just absorb the forms and colours as one might enjoy a landscape or watch a sunset. I tend towards instrumental music and frequently ignore lyrics of songs too. IMO a lack of content is preferable to banal content, which pointlessly distracts from the form.
I came across an interesting article the other day, The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond:
philosophynow.org/issues/58/The_Death_o ... And_Beyond which talks about the shift to what the author calls pseudo-modernism, which involves the shift towards audience involvement:
Postmodernism conceived of contemporary culture as a spectacle before which the individual sat powerless, and within which questions of the real were problematised. It therefore emphasised the television or the cinema screen. Its successor, which I will call pseudo-modernism, makes the individual’s action the necessary condition of the cultural product. Pseudo-modernism includes all television or radio programmes or parts of programmes, all ‘texts’, whose content and dynamics are invented or directed by the participating viewer or listener (although these latter terms, with their passivity and emphasis on reception, are obsolete: whatever a telephoning Big Brother voter or a telephoning 6-0-6 football fan are doing, they are not simply viewing or listening).
The author goes on the add:
The cultural products of pseudo-modernism are also exceptionally banal, as I’ve hinted. The content of pseudo-modern films tends to be solely the acts which beget and which end life. This puerile primitivism of the script stands in stark contrast to the sophistication of contemporary cinema’s technical effects. Much text messaging and emailing is vapid in comparison with what people of all educational levels used to put into letters. A triteness, a shallowness dominates all. The pseudo-modern era, at least so far, is a cultural desert. Although we may grow so used to the new terms that we can adapt them for meaningful artistic expression (and then the pejorative label I have given pseudo-modernism may no longer be appropriate), for now we are confronted by a storm of human activity producing almost nothing of any lasting or even reproducible cultural value – anything which human beings might look at again and appreciate in fifty or two hundred years time.
-- Updated 13 Dec 2015, 20:32 to add the following --
Greta wrote:On drum forums there is always a great deal of controversy about Meg White, the drummer in the White Stripes duo, masterminded by her exceptionally talented ex-husband, Jack White. At the time the pair wanted to apply a De Stijl style minimalism approach to rock music, drawing inspiration from garage rock and punk rock groups of the past. To this end, Jack wanted Meg to never practice or take lessons so she would always be at beginner level. He didn't want her learning the licks and tricks that almost all drummers pick up.
Unsurprisingly, many in the drum community were frustrated and annoyed that a drummer (and a woman at that!) who was only capable of playing the simplest lines had become famous and wealthy. Why should she perform dream gigs to huge audiences while those who had had paid their dues for decades around the traps, with lessons, practice, dedication and passion - are only playing low rent club dates? Talent unrecognised, ignored, unwanted. So it goes.
3uGH7D4MLj wrote:There are drummers who will stage a solo that goes through everything they ever learned... then there are drummers who can actually kick, and who can lay down an irresistible animal groove. Guess which I prefer.
At one end of the spectrum you have technical masters - astonishing virtuosos pushing techniques to the next level, like athletes breaking world records year after year. Musicians who can play ever more precisely and quickly. Painters capable of photo realism and jarringly realistic sculpted works. That's one direction of artistic evolution.
Another stream is similarly moving towards technical expertise - skill in the use of technology. Digital art and programmed music, which don't necessarily require physical skills or knowledge of theory at all. More exactly, they draw on a different body of knowledge, or they create their own naive forms.
Art echoes religion in that "the message" is handed down by messiahs - be it Renoir, Picasso, Coltrane or Madonna - after which a plethora of less original artists do their best to copy the elements they liked in the works of the icons. It's a curious tendency - if somebody says something that resonates with you, the tendency is to parrot it. Enough parrotings adds up to a movement, after which critics decide whose parroting is accurate and whose parroting falls. Artists are required to "ticks the boxes" as supplication to "the giants on whose shoulders we stand" before peers and patrons will be prepared to take them seriously - "you have to know the rules before you break them". To fail to follow the prescribed script is to be irrational, to "reinvent the wheel". Anti-education.
Yet sometimes we tire of all the parroting and seek authenticity and honest expression, even if flawed.
3uGH7D4MLj wrote:The funny thing about this is that I worked at Fleetwood Studios for a while in my youth. I don't remember the Shaggs but they would fit in with the stuff Fleetwood was recording.
Ha! That job must have been a treat for your ears ;)