[MD] Tracey Emins take on what is Art

[John Carl]

KO, Ian, Platt and Lu,
I thought it best to stay out of this one because I can sense getting into
trouble.  I already did a little bit.  Remember the part in ZAMM when
DeWeese really wanted the Narrator to condemn those rotisserie instruction
manual?  But he couldn't?  It was a bit like that yesterday when Lu looked
up this woman's art on her web page and went off on her.  "Look at this,
this isn't art."

But I liked it.  I didn't spend more than a few cursory glances but some of
those were highly evocative and moving.  Simple lines can be so expressive
sometimes and I like the juxtaposition of text and image in moving ways.

Some stuff did look fairly slapdash, but I intuit a social force at work in
the career of an artist, wherein with a bit of fame and popularity her
paintings sell for the same reason autographed pictures sell - reputation
and celebrity convey a social value beyond the merely artistic.
And is this not also a species of good?  For it financially helps a worthy
artist who has scaled the peak.  Lu is always jealous of artistic success
that lacks a certain craftsmanship.

And that distinction between art and craftsmanship was what lured me back to
the dialogue like a fat man to his fridge when he knows there is beer in
there.   Lu said she remembered the dialogue with Arlo, but thought we
concluded that art and craftsmanship are the same.  I said, no, Arlo says
that but I disagree.

There is such a plain difference to me between faithful representation
through craft, and intellectual creation using craft - it's like static
quality and dynamic quality standing in such sharp juxtaposition that we can
almost see the labels popping out of their differing molecular structures.
 This is even more obvious to me after reading Schlain's Art and Physics and
seeing how dynamic intellect has historically evolved in art - that is,
non-linguistic conceptualization of truth - prior to the more formal
symbolic logic of math and words.  This is fascinating to me because it puts
art in a whole different category than mere aesthetic appreciation.  It also
fascinates me in contemplating that this pre-linguistic conceptualization
might be a key to our differing interpretations of "pure experience".  But
that's a completely different thread.

John