From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Fri Sep 05 2003 - 14:56:19 BST
Hi 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?
Before reading ZMM and Lila, for example, I never considered Quality
(reality) as direct experience. ZMM and Lila "educated" me to recognize
Quality. Further, the more I learn about Quality through the excellent
posts presented here, the more "educated" about Quality I become. Same
with being exposed over time to good art.
>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?
While it helps to see a million paintings to sharpen your ability to
discern "good" art from kitsch, that's not the point. The point is you
know good art when you see it--good for you that is. You'll rarely find
universal agreement on what constitutes good art. But there is
universal agreement that some art works are better than others without
being specific.
>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?).
You've expressed well your cutting edge of Quality. Your value judgments
as to the low quality of the arts and general public's relation to them
are shining examples of how we all evaluate our experience first and
verbalize afterwards. (Actually, experience and aesthetic evaluation
are synonyms; there's no separation or difference between them. Reality
is aesthetic preference.)
> 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.
We're always in a world of our opinions based on our experiences. A
good example is your "load of hooey" remark above. The same goes for
this post that I've written in response to your questions.
As they advise in AA, "Take what you want and leave the rest." :-)
Platt
"Everyone wants to understand painting. Why is there no attempt to
understand the song of birds?" -- Picasso
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