From: Debicki Krzysztof (Kdebicki@mac.com)
Date: Thu Sep 04 2003 - 16:57:46 BST
Hello all,
To take this as far off-topic as it can go...
Platt wrote:
> Clement Greenberg, a famous art critic once said:
>
> "Esthetic judgments are immediate, intuitive, undeliberate and
> involuntary and leave no room for conscious application of standards,
> criteria, rules or precepts."
>
> If that isn't a good description of Dynamic Quality I don't know what
> is.
>
> If we all would witness our experiences as being within a continuum of
> beauty, how much richer might our lives might be?
Squonk:
> I like your Clement Greenberg quote. Excellent.
> However, now and again, i see a vision of what the world might be like
> if our children learned to value beauty from an early age? It is a
> shining vision - illuminating in its freedom. Freedom?
> Yes! Freedom!
> Those who value beauty - Quality, above all, are indeed free don't you
> think?
...and later (re: beauty):
...Experience of the work of masters would be a good thing. The
teaching is done through experience.
Krzys:
So here's my dilemma: On one hand, Clement's Quality (esthetic
judgement) is immediate and on the other Squonk's Quality (beauty) is
"learned" through experience.
I haven't got Pirsig in front of me (lent out, doing seemingly endless
rounds among friends and friends of theirs), so could someone please
help me out with this? How can this "cutting edge of experience"
Quality be the same as Quality that's acquired through experience? In
the world of art, it's experiencing a multitude of things that have and
don't have Quality in order to distinguish between the two; I'd heard
it said that in order to recognize a good painting one must have seen
1,000,000 (both good and bad). I can buy this, and I can see how it
could apply to any other field/discipline. Presumably, many of you
waded through a fair quantity of philosophical quagmire in order to
recognize the Quality-with-a-capital-Q in MOQ, no?
This "cutting edge" of experience as a measure of Quality, in the world
of art, as far as I'm concerned, is a load of hooey. Take the average
Joe or Jane Citizen off the street and they wouldn't know art from a
collector spoon set, whether they see it for nanoseconds or stare at it
for the 30 or 40 seconds of mental masturbation that the average,
ignorant museumgoer devotes to what their guidebook (or the museum)
says is art. An even better proof is to take the art out of the museum
and see what becomes of it. Someone who's seen a million paintings may
give a particular piece a second, third, fourth perusal, since that
intuitive reaction isn't often to be trusted. Or then again, you can
do as Steve Martin does in my favorite scene of one of my favorite
movies, "L.A. Story", and breeze through a museum on rollerskates,
because that's all the time you need (didn't that appear in Vonnegut
somewhere?).
But now we're in the world of subjectivity - opinions - and once you
get here, you get into an even more tortuous problems than you can
shake a Futurist sculpture at.
I'm sorry if I've made semantic blunders - I'm not terribly familiar
with the linguistic territory here. All I'm looking for is a little
help, a little clarity. Am I misinterpreting Quality or am I guilty of
trying to define it?
Thanks,
Krzys.
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