This doesn't mean, behind the obvious flippancy, that art comprises a range or total of beautiful items, or a factory for the production of beauty. Each is added neatly to the canon.
Important works of art,however, have been and will continue to be stark, outrageous, gruesome and conscience-grabbing.
The chicken or the egg? When people faced with an unusual or unconventional painting, sculpture or poem (for example), ask pointedly "But is it art?", they are clearly implying that there are narrowly defined paths art must follow, locations where it can be visited, forms it can take. The gallery, the theatre, concert hall, anthology. There is implicitly an ideal or model work, the original or prototypical novel, symphony or cartoon, to which all later members of that "genre" must conform and be inferior or subservient.
I see it the other way around. Ezra Pound exhorted authors (poets) to "Make it new!" Nobody wants to be merely conventional, after all, and produce predictable artefacts, documents, items, processes, etc. Or if they do, their goal is not artistic but "crafty". Of course, even this precept can be shattered by redoing the Mona Lisa (with a moustache and a different title), or repeating an image or chant over and over. Only dullness can kill art, according to Robin Skelton. Rightly, I feel.
Rediscovery follows discovery, and can be different each time. Panta rei (everything is flowing). Rhythm is the breathing of the meaning, Van Wyk Louw reminds us. Particular; the only way to the universal, we think.
Important works of art,however, have been and will continue to be stark, outrageous, gruesome and conscience-grabbing.
The chicken or the egg? When people faced with an unusual or unconventional painting, sculpture or poem (for example), ask pointedly "But is it art?", they are clearly implying that there are narrowly defined paths art must follow, locations where it can be visited, forms it can take. The gallery, the theatre, concert hall, anthology. There is implicitly an ideal or model work, the original or prototypical novel, symphony or cartoon, to which all later members of that "genre" must conform and be inferior or subservient.
I see it the other way around. Ezra Pound exhorted authors (poets) to "Make it new!" Nobody wants to be merely conventional, after all, and produce predictable artefacts, documents, items, processes, etc. Or if they do, their goal is not artistic but "crafty". Of course, even this precept can be shattered by redoing the Mona Lisa (with a moustache and a different title), or repeating an image or chant over and over. Only dullness can kill art, according to Robin Skelton. Rightly, I feel.
Rediscovery follows discovery, and can be different each time. Panta rei (everything is flowing). Rhythm is the breathing of the meaning, Van Wyk Louw reminds us. Particular; the only way to the universal, we think.
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