P A N

in my opinion, aestheticism is the first experience the viewer or reader has with a finished piece of art. based on this, i would say that it is not necessary or even perfunctory for the creator of said art to concern themselves with the many facets of what popular opinion says is or isn't art, in that it is not the artists responsibility to create a world-view that people will adopt and implement as art is driven by impulse, and impulse is biological.

so, in my opinion, chinua achebe can shove it, because artists generally have control over a couple of rooms and some utensils. if someone wants to bitch about art, get them to turn the f*cking tv on and see what our politicians are creating.

cardboard adolescent

I guess the reason my post seems contradictory is because an author might believe they are carrying out their ethical responsibility while a reader would disagree. To take an extreme case, we could consider a neo-nazi who writes in a glorifying manner about a group of neo-nazis killing a jewish kid. As a reader, I would believe that that author has failed at fulfilling his ethical responsibility as an artist, and the piece would strike me more as trash than art. However, if the author genuinely believes that Jews are evil and the deed was heroic, from their standpoint they have fulfilled their ethical responsibility.

So, to piggy-back on what you were saying about the kid in the writing group, a piece could present this situation, of the neo-nazis killing a jewish kid, but for me to consider the piece artistic it would have to present the situation in a negative light, or at least in a way that highlights the tragedy and senselessness of the deed rather than glorifying it.

It's up to the reader to determine whether a work succeeds in its ethical responsibility, and can be considered art, but I think the author should always keep ethical considerations in mind when composing their work. In most cases this is pretty simple, since it just means staying away from glorifying violence and hate. It gets more complicated if you have an author who is deliberately composing situations which are extremely morally ambiguous, since that's their perogative, and such situations are probably interesting, but at the same time it's unclear why you would want to present an audience with them. If, as an author, you can't figure out the morality of the situations you yourself have drafted I think maybe you should stay away from them, because presenting them seems somewhat irresponsible. I guess that's a bit general though, so it would be easier for me to consider a specific example of that.

I don't think Conrad was a failed writer, because for me, as a reader, the ethical considerations of Heart of Darkness are pretty clear and I can appreciate the message. The racist aspects are easy enough for me to ignore and attribute to ignorance, and I don't feel like they encourage me to believe that black people are evil, but simply that environments exist which breed evil and which can pull men very deep into an abyss.

Inuzuka Skysword

I don't quite understand this question. Why does art need to have an ethical responsibility in order to have a point, (I am assuming, by point, that you mean the purpose)?

You are arguing whether it is good for art to have an ethical responsibility, not whether it actually has one in reality. Those are completely different questions, and one does have supremacy over the other, namely the latter.

How is this a "responsibility" though? If anything, the standard you give has absolutely nothing to do with "responsibility" and everything to do with what the outcome will do to you. Look at your reason for not talking all the time.

cardboard adolescent

It's not that I don't talk for the sake of talking all the time because I would feel bad, but because I would be bringing suffering to others. Because of the person I am, bringing suffering to others would also bring suffering to me, which is not to say that not bringing suffering to others is automatically going to make me feel good.

I believe art needs to have an ethical responsibility to have a point because art presents its audience with some portion of reality. Why? Even if the reason is "because it's pretty," for me at least, that pretiness has to do with presenting a standard of harmony and order, or tension and the course to its resolution. Or even, in some cases, a sustained tension that leads us gradually to stop perceiving it as tension, which is a way of finding inner peace. But if we're considering something like literature I think the main point of describing situations and narratives would be to show how they can be resolved or avoided or at least to point them out so that people can understand and learn to deal with their gravity. Anything that neglects all these ideals strikes me as masturbatory, or, worse, pointlessly provocative.

Inuzuka Skysword

Ultimately, the primary motive is for your own benefit. In this case, you wish to avoid pain.

I completely agree that it is necessary that art have some underlying ethical theme at the bottom of it, even if it is hidden in something as simple as harmony and order.

Art is required by definition to have some sort of ethical theme. I don't think that art has to communicate any certain ethical themes by virtue of what it is. Art can communicate the most vile ethical themes and still be art. I would say that art that does communicate the evil would be bad art, but I wouldn't deny that it is art.

I think the word responsibility is the main problem I have with it. A phrasing such as "art has an ethical responsibility" makes it seems like art must convey my ethics, or rather the ethics, in order for it to be art. The idea of "responsibility" has gone down the drain these days, anyways. The only responsibilities one can have are responsibilities that one has by virtue of what they are, and the responsibilities that one has based on what they will be. These days, "responsibilities" are just actions that you must do because of a certain social norm. I guess I took the OPs question to be less metaphysical, and instead as one that was concerned more with an ethical standard.

boo boo

I don't really make distinctions between "art" and "not art" anymore.

If art HAS to have some ethical/moral purpose than I'm not an art person because both visually and musically I value the aesthetic results more than the cause or inspiration for the work itself, if that means I'm not treating it the way art is meant to be treated than that's too bad. I'm a low culture dumbass.

It doesn't mean I don't think about the themes being explored in a work of art and I do highly value art that sparks the imagination. But usually I judge art in a very subjective way as in you will never be able to see a work the way the artist truly saw it when he made it even if you do a ridiculous amount of study on the subject, you could get a good idea but you wouldn't really know quite how these images came to his mind.

And so I think judging art is all about how you interpret it instead of trying to study it as much as possible to understand what the artist's point of view was, unless it's your academic field of interest. I don't feel like you need to go to art school to validate your opinions about everything.

Not saying you shouldn't get information about the things you are interested in when they can give you more insight about it.

It would be pretty stupid for example if someone were to write off a painting and not even know what movement the artist was from and what period it was made.

Overall I find terms like "art" and "kitsch" to be pretty useless and everything is how you percieve it.

Sorry I'm going off topic here. I simply think great art is great art, it doesn't have to have a "message". And while I won't deny that stuff like conceptual art is art, because the aesthetics aren't valued it doesn't appeal to me and it's not because I refuse to think about things, I think about real life issues all the time. It's just that conceptual pieces that I've seen usually try to make some kind of point that is so simple and obvious that I actually find it condscending.

Like you can take a chair, a picture of a chair and a dictionary definition of chair and group these things together, call it "one and three chairs" and exhibit it in an art gallery, and it IS art, but I don't have to like it, or be impressed by wordplay that a 5 year old could come up with.

Self referential art (or art for art's sake) was great when Duchamp did it because it was groundbreaking at that time but now it's such a stupid overused gimmick. "Look I know what art is, see how witty I am". Like people are getting too lazy to make actual art so they would rather just make pieces that preach to you about what art is.

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Inuzuka Skysword

I think that you do make certain distinctions, but you just don't recognize it. I doubt that you try to interpret the nearest stop sign as if it were art, though photography has made it more likely that you may do so. In order for anything to be defined as art, there must be a definition of art, which means that there is a limit to what is art and what is not. That stop sign can be considered art when you look at it from a certain angle with a certain intention, but when you are driving down the road looking at street signs, and look at the stop sign, you do not observe it as art.

The thing is, what are you appreciating in the art and why is it that you appreciate such a thing. You may not consciously realize that it is your brain that strives for order that appreciates some sort of formation or color scheme.

cardboard adolescent

i believe in the world as love and art: love is the paradox of the self-sprung which is more than itself, and art are all its representations, which is the totality of everything we know. that's exactly why i think art has an ethical responsibility, because i think existence has an ethical responsibility to reflect its source, which is love.

Inuzuka Skysword

I don't quite understand what you are saying. Are you saying that the privation of love does not exist? If it does exist, cannot art represent this privation by definition. Therefore, art would not have an ethical responsibility by virtue of what it is. If it did have a responsibility, it would be a responsibility that is imposed on it by something else.

cardboard adolescent

love is all, all is love