[MD] Art as Experience

[pholden at davtv.com]

Quoting Arlo Bensinger <ajb102 at psu.edu>:

> [Khaled]
> Museums. in a way have become like zoos. They take things from their 
> element and put them in an enclosure and expect the visitor to enjoy 
> the full experience. Watching a couple of zebras chew their cud is 
> different tan being there and seeing a few thousands on the march.
> 
> [Arlo]
> Like Pirsig points out in ZMM, "A few square feet of grass, after 
> Montana."  As Dewey points out, Art is a _Lived Experience_, a 
> central theme for both Dewey and Pirsig (see Granger, Robert Pirsig, 
> John Dewey and the Art of Living). Like you, museums have always made 
> me feel like I feel when I see butterflys pinned to a board. Its like 
> taking the beauty of experience and attempting to isolate it, and all 
> it does is render (to paraphrase Pirsig) "the putrescence of 
> something long ago killed." Worse than zebras in zoos, its like 
> skeletons of animals in museums of natural history, neatly arranged 
> to provoke response. Dead carcasses of what was once a vibrant, 
> dynamic, living thing.
> 
> Oh don't get me wrong. I think they have their place, but its not "to 
> see art". For me its to see the dead remains of what was once living, 
> breathing art. It can teach us a lot about ourselves and our world, 
> but it can only carry us so far. Indeed, the value for me lies in 
> imaging the hand that once moved, the heart that once loved and hurt 
> and the eyes that saw the world in such a way as to try to represent 
> it as such.

I love museums just as I love libraries. They are repositories of the best
in art and thought. 

[Arlo]
> Yes, maybe he should have stayed and played in the subway. By making 
> "art" a commodity to be consumed and doled out to patrons in nice 
> clothes for the price of admission, all sitting neatly like gentlemen 
> and ladies in tailored clothes, acting all smug at their patronage of 
> "the arts", we effectively kill it (Marx would argue, of course, that 
> this is part and parcel of the commodity fetishism of capitalist societies).

I also love concerts of world renowned orchestras and pianists playing Mozart,
Beethoven and Rachmaninoff concertos. A live performance beats a recorded
performance any day in "shattering one's static barriers."

[Arlo]
> "Quality" is neither "in" the individual or 
> "in" the performance. Quality is the experience that brings "the 
> individual" and "the performance" into awareness. This is precisely 
> the benefit gained by considering art as "experience" rather than as 
> "object". The value of that experience is determined only by the 
> degree to which the experience shatters one's static barriers. 

Excellent. I agree completely. Reason plays no part. It cannot tell the 
difference between a Raphael and a finger painting. The experience tells
us more of reality than is written in all of the formulas of science.





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