luka

Well-known member
And yet it was people who fit this description who delivered us so many high reaching art works throughout history. The more society pushes out these pathologies the more boring and tame the world of art becomes. Talk about catch 22.

At the start of the thread I had an 'artistic temperament', two pages in and it's a pathology. I don't like the direction this thread is headed in...
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
At the start of the thread I had an 'artistic temperament', two pages in and it's a pathology. I don't like the direction this thread is headed in...

But you're not like that in real life - you're not a monologist. At least not the times we have hung out!

I was just thinking that what works well in a book, an article, and to an extent online - blogs certainly; forums like this to a degree - doesn't actually work so well in everyday socializing.

It's that sort of Richard Rorty idea of incommensurate discourses. Different language-games I think is how he puts. The language of art is illiberal, powered by energies that would actually be too disruptive or too dominating in everyday life. He thinks that it's daft and unrealistic to imagine you could have a value-set that operated the same in the world of art as in the world of politics or everyday socialisation. You have different rules, different norms. That's the way he gets around the problem of liking art or writing that is tyrannical, anti-social etc (Nietzche, Bataille, Celine etc) but actually being a wishy-washy liberal and moderate in life itself. Nasty and uncompromising in one realm; nice and considerate in the other.
 
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mvuent

Void Dweller
funny, I'd have put it completely the other way around. critics are the ones obsessed with setting aside doubt and branding things as THE GREATEST or WORST. Artists might do that as far as it helps them narrow down a path for their own work (hence the Nabokov quote?), but just look at where each group expends energy: artists don't spend their time telling the world which art should and shouldn't be appreciated.

I know he's not exactly the most, uh, authoritative critic, but Piero Scaruffi has a quote that describes what seems like a common belief of critics (even if they wouldn't say it outright):
The value of art depends on the values of the art critic.
Most art is born as imitation, not innovation.
The critic, not the artist, is the one who defines innovation, and rates it.
The artist is merely a vehicle for the aesthetic/ideology of the critic.
The critic is the real artist.
but of course now no one is a fundamentalist in this sense anyways, so it's hard to compare. idk, maybe I'm missing your point by focusing on judgments of other people's works instead of self-belief. but to me there's a difference between discarding things that don't interest you and being a fundamentalist.
 
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pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
At the start of the thread I had an 'artistic temperament', two pages in and it's a pathology. I don't like the direction this thread is headed in...

None of this in my eyes is pathology. Its eccentricity. I'm pretty lenient. It was more from the perspective of the neutered modern perspective. Meant to put the word in italics.

I'd take James Brown and all his shenanigans over any well behaved modern musician in a heartbeat. Sjw/pc culture is the end.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
funny, I'd have put it completely the other way around. critics are the ones obsessed with setting aside doubt and branding things as THE GREATEST or WORST. Artists might do that as far as it helps them narrow down a path for their own work (hence the Nabokov quote?), but just look at where each group expends energy: artists don't spend their time telling the world which art should and shouldn't be appreciated.

I know he's not exactly the most, uh, authoritative critic, but Piero Scaruffi has a quote that describes what seems like a common belief of critics (even if they wouldn't say it outright):

but of course now no one is a fundamentalist in this sense anyways, so it's hard to compare. idk, maybe I'm missing your point by focusing on judgments of other people's works instead of self-belief. but to me there's a difference between discarding things that don't interest you and being a fundamentalist.

i dunno about that

Lot of artists / musicians / novelists have also been theorists, critics, pushers of a particular way of doing things

Eno has expressed strong views of what's good and what's not, or what is a forward path and what's not

Green from Scritti ditto

Nick Cave in the Birthday Party

Mark E Smith

They've all been scathing about what they think is wrongheaded or worthless or feebleminded music.

And I really like this quote from the improviser John Butcher, from the Wire, 2008

“This music is here in opposition to other music. It doesn't all co-exist together nicely. The fact that I have chosen to do this implies that I don't value what you're doing over there. My activity calls into questions the value of your activity. This is what informs our musical thinking and decision making."

Certainly not the case with all practitioners but many - certainly the 'militant modernist' / nihilation crew to use K-punk's term - have been pugnacious, 'this is the way to do it' types, rather than genial 'each to their own'
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
i dunno about that

Lot of artists / musicians / novelists have also been theorists, critics, pushers of a particular way of doing things
seems pretty consistent with what I was saying that artists who take fundamentalist stances would tend to do so as critics/theorists. I was more thinking of them as roles—not really with specific people in mind.

was going to elaborate but fuck it, the Butcher quote is more interesting than anywhere I was going. would you (or does anyone else) agree with Butcher? even if only partially?
 
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mvuent

Void Dweller
...kind of figured that no one would want to answer that directly. I’ll say what I think it might mean and maybe someone can correct me if they get more out of it

“This music is here in opposition to other music. It doesn't all co-exist together nicely. The fact that I have chosen to do this implies that I don't value what you're doing over there. My activity calls into questions the value of your activity. This is what informs our musical thinking and decision making."
if you make music through free improvisation, your music completely disregards any conventional pre-arranged structure, but obviously there are other forms where that sort of structure is of the upmost importance—so free improvisation is in some sense a ‘fuck you’ to sonata form, fugues, pop songs etc., an enactment of the belief that their valued games of expectation are worthless. maybe a more obvious example is DIY punk type stuff: that you would do things that way implies that you think conventional production value is a waste of time, or even actively musically bad. maybe making IDM implies that you don’t care about collective experiences, a broader subculture, etc.
 

version

Well-known member
I was going to make a point along those lines last night, that artists tell the world what is and isn't good by what they choose to create themselves and that plenty of art is at least partly a rebuttal to or rejection of something else.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
you think so too eh? I'm still not quite convinced, even after trying to interpret that quote.

it's obviously true that some artists take fundamentalist stances in justifying their work. I guess I can see how taking a fundamentalist stance as a critic/theorist would necessitate that you do things a certain way as an artist. but I just don't think the converse (inverse? reverse?) is true: that making a certain kind of art binds you to thinking that art done in a different way is inherently bad.

interviewers will often ask what blissblogger might call "weirdy-beardy" type artists what they think about dance music, and why they don't follow its 'rules', if its because dance music is too dumb and unoriginal for them or something. But (well apart from Squarepusher) those artists often won't go that route. they'll often say that they respect dance music, but think it's being done well by plenty of other people, and that what they do is just 'fill in the gaps' between that and other music they're interested in. they can be very reverent of what other people are doing, but want to do something that isn't quite covered by the other music they like.

I think if you have that attitude you can easily make free improv without hating the beatles.
 
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version

Well-known member
I think your position and the one Reynolds put forward co-exist, it just varies from person to person.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
I said that last page, yeah. more thinking about Corpsey's original post and the Butcher quote.
 
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blissblogger

Well-known member
I was going to make a point along those lines last night, that artists tell the world what is and isn't good by what they choose to create themselves and that plenty of art is at least partly a rebuttal to or rejection of something else.

it's the idea of art /music /etc as "active criticism"

the whole history of art at least in the 20th Century is motored by this kind of thing - you do one thing, it is fairly explicitly a repudiation of the other thing.

a lot of extreme rock, noise, thrash / crust / death / black metal, industrial etc is at least partly reactively defined against pop or play-safe middlebrow rock or wimpy indie

so the artists and the critics who line up to celebrate them are very much singing from the same hymn book
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
if anything, artists are more fanatical in their stances, cos in most cases they do one thing in exclusion of all others

whereas a lot of critics are eclectic, they switch their aesthetic criteria, praise one kind of music in one set of terms, then celebrate another in a different set
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
as far as the history of 20th century music, here's a composer (I mean, sure he's no titan of 20th century music like improviser John Butcher, but still) saying essentially what I was trying to say above @ 6:06. (the whole interview is pretty funny.)

 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
“When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.”
Pablo Picasso

“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. ”
Susan Sontag
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear father murder'd,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words,
And fall a-cursing, like a very drab,
A scullion!
- Hamlet
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I was going to make a point along those lines last night, that artists tell the world what is and isn't good by what they choose to create themselves and that plenty of art is at least partly a rebuttal to or rejection of something else.

Might a critic's most honourable response to hating something be to make something diametrically opposed to it? (Or point out where the reader can find the already existing, diametrically opposed things)
 
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