From: Erin N. (enoonan@kent.edu)
Date: Fri Mar 28 2003 - 20:16:16 GMT
Here is a chapter from
Kurt Vonnegut “Timequake”
Question: What is the white stuff in bird poop?
Answer: That is bird poop, too.
(black and white blobblish picture with question art or not?)
My big brother Bernie, who can’t draw for sour apples, and who athis most
objectionable used to say he didn’t like paintings because they didn’t do
anything, just hung there year after year, has this summer become an artist!
I shit you not! This PhD physica
Chemist from MIT is now the poor man’s Jackson Pollock! He sqoozles glurp of
various colors and consistencies between two flat sheets of impermeable
materials, such as windowpanes or bathroom tiles. He pulls them apart, et
voila! (snip) ………… The message he sent me along with the Xeroxes though wasn’t
about unexpected happiness. It was an unreconstructed technocrat’s challenge
to the artsy-fartsy of which I was a prime exemplar “is this art or not?” he
asked. (snip)……. He would not sign his pictures, he said or admit publicly
that he made them, or describe how they were made. He plainly expected up
critics to sweat bullets and excrete sizable chunks of masonry when trying to
answer his cunningly innocent question “Art or not?”.
I was pleased to reply with an epistle which was frankly vengeful since
He and father had screwed me out of a liberal arts college education:
“Dear Brother: This is almost like telling you about the birds and the bees,”
I began. “There are many good people who are beneficially stimulated by some
but on
All manmade arrangements of colors and shapes on flat surfaces, essentially
nonsense.
“You yourself are gratified by some music, arrangements of noises, and again
essentially nonsense. If I were to kick a bucket down the cellar stairs, and
then say to you that the racket I had made was philosophically on a par with
The Magic Flute, this would
be not be the beginning of a long and upsetting debate. An utterly satifactory
and complete response on your part would be, “I like what Mozart did, and I
hate what the bucket did.”
“Contemplating a purported work of art is a social activity. Either you have
a rewarding time, or you don’t. You don’t have to say why afterward. You
don’t have to say anything.
“You are a justly revered experimetnalist, dear Brother. If you
really want to know whether your pictures are, as you say, ‘art or not’ you
must display them in a public place somewhere, and see if strangers like to
look at them.
That is the way the game is played. Let me know what happens.”
I went on: “People capable of liking some paintings or prints or whatever can
rearely do so without knowing something about the artist. Again, the
situation is social rather than scientific. Any work of art is half of a
conversation between two human beings, and it helps a lot to know who is
talking at you. Does he or she have a repuation for seriousness for
religiosity, for suffering for concupiscence, for rebellion, for sincerity for
jokes?
“There are virtually no respected painting made by persons about whom we know
zilch. We can even surmise quite a bit about the lives of whoever did the
paintings in the caverns underneath Lascaux, France. “
I dare you to suggest that no picture can attract serious without a particular
sort of human being attached to it in the viewer’s mind. If you are unwilling
to claim credit for your pictures, and to say why you hoped others might find
them worth examining, there goies the ball game.
Pictures are famous for their humanness, and not for their pictureness.”
I went on: “There is also the matter of craftsmanship. Real picture lovers
like to play along, so to speak, to look closely at the surfaces to see how
the illusion was created.
If you are unwilling to say how you made your pictures, there goes the ball
game a second time.”
Good luck and love as always” I wrote. And signed my name.
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