Mixed media on paper 2021-12

 

 

 Mixed media on paper [© W. Kirchmeir] Water colour and collage over laser print.

Why art?

 

 Why Art?

I came across this quote of Jack Chambers after I’d written everything following it. I think Chambers is right: the desire to share one’s delight in the world is fundamental. I think that we make art for the same reason we do science: We want to make sense of the world. We want to perceive meaning. With both science and art we attempt to organise our experience into shapes that feel orderly and significant, which is a pompous way of saying we want to account for the unaccountable fact that we perceive beauty and truth. Keats equates beauty with truth. That’s also what mathematicians claim. Anyone who makes or performs any kind of art knows that it’s true. All art on this page made by me.

“The artist may hope to redeem man’s reality by showing him the world as it looks when it is loved.” (Jack Chambers, ca. 1978)

Why art? Many years ago, I took a course in the philosophy of art, and that was one of many questions that it didn’t answer. Psychology and anthropology note that the making of art is species-specific, and that it figures in everything from attracting a mate to shaping religious ritual to asserting social status. Does that mean that art has only such utilitarian functions, or is there something more to it?

Another question was the value of expertise. Does it or does it not increase one’s pleasure? Is there such a thing as educated taste? After all, how do you differentiate the pleasure derived from educated taste from that of untutored delight? As the man-in-the-street is supposed to have said, “I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like.” And why should the taste of the person knowledgeable in the history of some art determine what’s worth looking at or reading or listening to? Isn’t educated taste just someone else’s taste that for some reason one deems superior to one’s own? Besides, educated taste looks suspiciously like the taste of people who can pay more for art than you can afford. What do rarity and price have to do with the value of art? Isn’t a lot of great art simply that which the privileged classes patronise?

What’s a classic? Isn’t it just some old work that has found admirers many years or centuries after its first audience has died off? Or maybe it’s just what the sons and daughters of privileged families have read during their expensive university education, and which now functions as a signal of belonging to that class of people.

Besides, aren’t popular literature, painting, theatre and music popular precisely because most people haven’t benefitted from the training in taste and insight their social betters have received?

As you can see, these questions all implicitly assume some answer to the question, Why art?

2021-12-13

 

Remembrance Day 2021: 100 years of poppies.

 

On Remembrance Day, I'll post this link to a song about war.

This year is the 100th anniversary of the poppy a symbol of remembrance.

Perils on a Nile Cruise: Night Train to Memphis (Peters)

 

Elizabeth Peters. Night Train to Memphis (1994) Vicki Bliss (PH.D.) yields to entreaties to go undercover as an expert on Islamic Art in order to catch a thief. She thinks the thief is her occasional lover and opponent Sir John Smythe (one of his aliases). She’s wrong of course, but it takes a heap of complications, numerous villains, a psychopathic female, misunderstandings, hair’s-breadth escapes, etc, before she discovers and faces the truth, which is that she truly, truly loves him (obvious from the  beginning, so telling you that isn’t a spoiler).
     Fun, a nicely done mix of entertainment and education in Egyptian archaeology. Snappy writing, dialogue that moves the story along at a brisk pace, and of course enough soppy romance to satisfy fans of that genre. The dust cover shows an American diesel engine, not an Egyptian one. The train doesn’t actually figure except as a background means of getting a character to a crucial place and time. Above average of its type. **½

Friends and foes (Lapham's Quarterly VIII-1 and XIV-2)

 

Lapham’s Quarterly VIII-1: Foreigners. (2015) Humans are possibly the most social animals in existence. We nurture each other from cradle to grave. Very few other animals behave similarly, chimpanzees and elephants being both the most well known and almost the only ones. We have strong instincts for bonding with each other. The complement is an equally strong instinct to distrust whoever is not of our group. Hence “foreigners”. Just as all human groups have customs and rules shaping behaviour towards fellow group members, all human groups have customs and rules about how to behave towards outsiders. The fact that these differ in detail doesn’t disguise the fact that the distinction between Us and Them is common to all social animals.
     Unlike other animals, we talk about what matters to us. Lapham and his team have assembled what looks like a representative collection of past and present writings and pictures about the Foreigner. One thing stands out to me: to enable any kind of non-violent interaction with foreigners, they are, at least temporarily, made members of the group. The distinction between Us and Them is not forgotten, but is firmly pushed into second place. A guest is one of us while they are with us. If a foreigner becomes a permanent guest, the some more or less formal ceremony acknowledges that they are now one of us.
     A tangential thought: we humans mark changes in social status. For example, a child becomes an adult. The initiation rites that mark this change are like the rites that mark the change from foreigner to insider.
     Personal note: I have felt like an outsider wherever I have lived.
     A good collection, as always. **** 

 

               
Lapham’s Quarterly XIV-2: Friendship. (2021) C. S. Lewis calls Friendship one of the Four Loves. He sees a common feature: Care and concern for some other person’s welfare. In Friendship, that begins with the awareness that the friend shares come source of joy or delight. The concern is then that the friend may enjoy that common delight as much as one does oneself. Hence a concern that they have the same resources, and hence a willingness to share. That willingness can widen to sharing anything and everything one has, which implies that Charity is next to Friendship. Lewis goes on to discuss Eros and Agape. His book is worth reading more than once.

    This collection doesn’t distinguish between friendship and charity, except perhaps in the sense that friendship may be charity focused on the few people we call our friends. Nevertheless, we read many testimonies to the power of friendship, and how for many people it was more important than family, or social or political alliance. We also read how, when mixed with social or political allowances, it can become corrupted, and an occasion for betrayal. The unkindness of a treacherous friend stings as sharp as the serpent’s tooth.

     Another good collection. ****

Grimes experiments with poetry (Send Bygraves!)

 

 

Martha Grimes. Send Bygraves (1989) A tour de force: a series of poems that tell the story of a murder and the involvement of Bygraves, an elusive detective. Each segment experiments with a different verse form. The result is a series of sketches or set pieces that together provide a handful of way-stations on the road from suspicion to moderate certainty. I started reading this some years ago, and couldn’t get past the first few pages. This time I managed to persevere to the end. What kept me reading wasn’t the story, but curiosity about how Grimes would fit her tale to each set of poetical conventions and restraints. Her experiments are generally successful. I still don’t know exactly what the story was about, or how Bygraves did or did not solve the puzzle. I did suss that Bygraves is called but never answers.            
     A nicely made book, with an illustrated hardcover, interesting illustrations (which may elucidate the tale, but I’d have to re-read to figure out whether and how), and deckle-edged pages of excellent paper. A gift item suitable for Grimes fans, I suppose. Not a keeper. **

Two by L'Amour: A soft-spoken hero, and a tarnished knight.

 

Louis L’Amour. Guns of the Timberlands (1955) Jud Devitt, a man used to getting what he wants, arrives at Tinkerville. He aims to get at the timber upstream of Clay Bell’s ranch. The plot is complicated by a local man with a hidden agenda, Devitt’s fiancee Colleen Riley, and a motley crew of lumberjacks, outlaws, upstanding citizens, cowhands with dubious pasts, and so on. L’Amour allows himself editorial comments on the need for law, order, and fair dealing. Bell is good with his fists as well as his guns. He wins, of course, and gets the girl, too. A good entertainment, made into a movie in 1960. **½

Louis L’Amour. The Quick and the Dead. (1975). Duncan McKaskel and his family are travelling west. A passel of bandits want the loot in McKaskel’s wagon, and his wife Susanna. Con Valian meets up with them, tells them they will need to fight to preserve their lives and their possessions. McKaskel believes in negotiations with reasonable people. He’s wrong, and the story tells of his unwilling acceptance of the facts of life on the lawless frontier. Valian sticks around, despite himself.
     The reluctant knight in tarnished armour is a common figure in L’Amour’s novels, as is the Easterner endangered by his blithe assumptions of safety. L’Amour’s great skill is varying the stories, enough that I’m never bored reading them. This was also made into a movie, starring Sam Elliot. I’ve watched it, see my review elsewhere on this blog. ***