[MD] Defining Art (was Churning Point)

[Arlo J. Bensinger]

[Platt]
So smoking peyote or imbibing in LSD is art? Thanks, but I think your 
definition needs refinement. I define art in a number of ways, but perhaps the
best definition follows Pirsig's definition of Quality, here expressed by
George Santayana:

"Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means
can never be said. To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we
come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried
by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more,
a great deal more than any science can hope to be."

[Arlo]
First, your (Santayana's) definition could also easily include smoking peyote.
What words in that definition do you feel preclude it?

Second, of course "art" is a cultural word, usually describing visual (moving or
stationary) and auditory sensory experience, but at times including culinary
and kinasthetic-tactile sensory experience as well.

So, while Yogic mediatation, live burial, peyote and electroshock are also means
to shatter static patterns, our use of the word "art" excludes these, but its
exclusion of them is not "natural" but categorizational. That is, as you seem
to suggest, "art" is a subset of experience which points "out". Some consider
"dance" art, some consider mime art, some consider yoga art. Some consider
poetry art. Some consider archery an art. The Sophists used rhetoric, which
would mean our English Composition courses are actually "art courses". And,
Pirsig's thesis in ZMM was that building a rotisserie, and maintaining your
motorcycle, was in effect "art".

In all these cases, "art" is a metaphorical representation of Quality that
transcends its representation by pointing the viewer beyond its confined
pattern to that which can never be confined in patterns. 

"How it points" is a cultural question. "What it points towards" is a universal
question. "Does it succeed" is all that matters.

I just end for now with Pirsig's definition, "Art is high-quality endeavor. That
is all that really needs to be said. Or, if something more high-sounding is
demanded: Art is the Godhead as revealed in the works of man." 

If you (Platt) can find me one aspect of that definition that can serve to
support your statement that neither digiderooing nor drumming are "art", please
do so.

Arlo