[MD] Defining Art (was Churning Point)

[Arlo J. Bensinger]

Greetings SA (and All),

I wanted to consolidated some thoughts, and answer your question about "how much
freedom is granted to the art student" vis a vis "art teacher influence". I'll
do that first.

Pirsig answered this, at least in part, in ZMM, when he recounts his time as a
composition instructor in Bozeman. His job was to teach rhetoric (art) by
strict adherence to the "rules of good writing". He remembers, " The students
seldom achieved anything, as a result of this calculated mimicry, that was
remotely close to the models he’d given them. More often their writing got
worse."

Pirsig admits that "what he really thought was that the rule was pasted on to
the writing after the writing was all done. It was post hoc, after the fact,
instead of prior to the fact. And he became convinced that all the writers the
students were supposed to mimic wrote without rules, putting down whatever
sounded right, then going back to see if it still sounded right and changing it
if it didn’t." And also, "that no writer ever learned to write by this
squarish, by-the-numbers, objective, methodical approach."

In addition, rhetoric suffered under "prescriptive rhetoric, which supposedly
had been done away with but was still around. This was the old
slap-on-the-fingers- if-your-modifiers-were-caught-dangling stuff. Correct
spelling, correct punctuation, correct grammar. Hundreds of rules for
itsy-bitsy people. No one could remember all that stuff and concentrate on what
he was trying to write about."

Finally, after convincing his students that THEY were capable of seeing Quality,
"Their question now was "All right, we know what Quality is. How do we get it?"
Now, at last, the standard rhetoric texts came into their own. The principles
expounded in them were no longer rules to rebel against, not ultimates in
themselves, but just techniques, gimmicks, for producing what really counted
and stood independently of the techniques...Quality." ... "He singled out
aspects of Quality such as unity, vividness, authority, economy, sensitivity,
clarity, emphasis, flow, suspense, brilliance, precision, proportion, depth and
so on; kept each of these as poorly defined as Quality itself, but demonstrated
them by the same class reading techniques."

I'm quoting Pirsig a lot here, but I think its part of his writings that often
gets omitted when we talk about the MOQ. Anyways, there is a balance here
between "using the rules" and "breaking the rules". One can do neither
exclusively and have success. It is the same balance that Pirsig would later
call "static" and "dynamic". There is always danger in teaching, as Pirsig
noted well, on focusing on the static, "the rules". But I have also seen the
danger when professors err in the other direction, and give A's in a sort of
"anything goes" free for all where attacking the rules is all that matters.

Now, let me take a moment to clarify some thoughts, and expand on this a bit.
First, for an art object (be it music, painting, theatre, text, dance, etc.) to
function it has to meet one and only one objective. It has to take the
viewer/participant/creator out of the static patterns of her/his life. This is
defined at the moment of the event by the individual engaging with the object.
As such, I'll call it Art. Culturally then, we can look at patterns of success,
see which objects have succeeded historically and with what profoundness, and
call those patterns "art". That is, there are two things that should be
disambiguated when talking about art. The moment of Art as defined by the
individual, and the use of cultural trends to label as "art" that which has had
cultural success.

What we also learn from looking at those cultural patterns of success is what
types of "cues", or as Pirsig calls it, "aspects of Quality" may imbue an
object with greater potentiality to be art within a culture. That is, if art is
a roadmap out of the mythos, it will have greater success "for you" if you are
able to recognize the markings.

Culture, however, is not a walled city. The "markings" that you, as an
individual with the gift of culture, recognize are echoed in a culture that
spans back in time and across civilizations recorded in the voices of your
culture. In this sense, there are (as Pirsig ZMM thesis demonstrated) strong
influences of Ancient Greek culture in our voices. There are also Native
American voices (as Pirsig noted in Lila) that strongly influence our culture.

If you look at these like concentric circles, beginning with the innermost rings
being very localized cultural values radiating out towards historical and
assimilated cultural values, with the outmost rings bordering on the
"monomyth", one finds that as the "art object" uses cues from the outmost
rings, the value of the art increases. Let me explain.

Someone suggested (David M?) that although The Clash produce art, if one had to
choose between Mozart and The Clash, one would choose Mozart. The reason (and I
agree) with this assessment is that Mozart uses "markings" in his roadmap out
of the mythos that give his creations potentiality "vertically" (spans
historical time) and "horizontally" (across larger cultural groups).

The Ultimate Art Object (which exists as an object only hypothetically for this
is really just a synonym for Quality) would be one that for all people, in all
times, and in all cultures, always succeeds in shattering static patterns of
perception for the viewer/participant/creator. As objects move outwards on the
concentric circles of culture, one moves broadly and deeply, and as one learns
to manipulate the markers that resonate on these outer rings, one produces
"art" that is closer to the Ultimate Art Object.

Now, let me end with this thought. This is not to say that the outmore rings
bring more potentiality simply in terms of popular success. I believe that the
outmore rings also have greater potentiality in profoundity of experience (if
that's a word). That is, when one builds a roadmap from cues moving outward
through cultural circles, the potentiality for deeper, more revelatory
experience goes up.

Because Mozart's "cues" are from more outer cultural rings, it has a greater
potential not only to succeed as "art" for more individuals (through time and
assimilated cultures) but to cause the "art event" to be deeper and more
profound for the viewer/participant/creator.

Oddly, this is sometimes why familiarity with "art" tends to minimize impact.
That is, those "circles" aren't static. As cultural values become "habituated",
they move inward through the concentric circles. Pirsig mentions this in Lila,
about a song on the radio, "imagine that you walk down a street past, say, a
car where someone has the radio on and it plays a tune you've never heard
before but which is so fantastically good it just stops you in your tracks. You
listen until it's done. Days later you remember exactly what that street looked
like when you heard that music. You remember what was in the store window you
stood in front of. You remember what the colors of the cars in the street were,
where the clouds were in the sky above the buildings across the street, and it
all comes back so vividly".

Later, after you have listened to the song more and more, the "depth" of the
experience of listening to the song changes. "the same kind of division between
Dynamic Quality and static quality that exists in the field of morals also
exists in the field of art. The first good, that made you want to buy the
record, was Dynamic Quality. Dynamic Quality comes as a sort of surprise. What
the record did was weaken for a moment your existing static patterns in such a
way that the Dynamic Quality all around you shone through. It was free, without
static forms. The second good, the kind that made you want to recommend it to a
friend, even when you had lost your own enthusiasm for it, is static quality.
Static quality is what you normally expect."

And this gets right back to "obeying the rules and "breaking the rules", and why
"art" needs to be continual fresh. Those concentric circles are not "static",
what was an outermore ring value, can easily become an innermore ring value,
and thus lose its potentiality for depth. Mozart's works are high Quality art,
but if the individual limited their "art experiences" with this and similar art
objects, one (I believe) dangerously diminishes the potential for deep and
profound experience via "Art".

I'll end with this. This is why I personally found didgeridooing (I'll spell it
correctly today) to be a High Quality experience. Because the roadmap out that
it provided was unlike any I had used before, and because I was able to
recognize some of the markers on that map (the music I listened to, I'd argue,
does contain markers on the outermost rings of cultural value) the experience
was glorious, and deeper I'd argue than my listening Bach's "The Art of the
Fugue" for the umpteenth time.

And so it gets back too to "a sign is a sign only when it is recognized as
such". Generally speaking, we are very aware of what is a sign on the innermore
circles of culture. We tend to "forget" (symbolically), although it is always
there in echoes, the signs on the outermore circles. Sometimes the art object
is powerful enough that the signs make immediate impact, sometimes one has to
stop and think and figure out the signs on her/his own (this is the reason for
"music appreciation" classes). At any rate, it is balance, balance between
breaking and obeying the rules, balance between dynamic and static experience,
balance between localized cultural values and historical-monomythical cultural
values, balance between new and habituated roadmaps.

Arlo