[kid cue]

Originally Posted by Strangelet

Like I said above you say tomato I say worldview. YOu argued for "extension of self" as more important than worldview as something the artist communicates. I think i clearly argued that it in't worth the time to argue the differences.

the difference is worth the time when the entire point of everything i'm writing is about attempting to outline a paradigm that is completely different from your paradigm. you keep repeating the things i am saying under the terms that you have presented, which i have been arguing all along are not the same as my terms. for example, i did not argue that "extension of self" was "more important" than "worldview". when i said that i consider Pollock's splatter technique to be authentic to his "self", i was not at all saying that was the ultimate virtue, much less the point, of the work. in fact that's contradictory to everything i've been arguing--which is that when thinking about the quality of the work, it has and should have total autonomy from the author. if i were saying that "extension of self" were the most important quality, i'd be saying that the degree to which some concept of the artist-as-person/soul/whatever shows through is what i cared most about. that's much closer to what you're saying.

Anyway, are you able to explain his results? Are you able enumerate the qualities and properties of the visual, emotional, physical, and especially intellectual results? And what's your criteria for proving that there's an objective reason for your response? Especially when you agree there's nothing he intends to communicate? This is the sunset thing i mentioned. You can find visual, emotional, physical, intellectual responses from nature. it wasn't intended. intention is the creative spark of art. Without it, its just the audience making shit up.

are you serious? when you say Pollock is pretentious, are you able to quantify the degree to which he fails to "communicate" his worldview with his paint? or any other criteria you've presented in your own framework? how can you quantify the degree to which an artwork is a lie? (further, how can you even compare Britney lying that she was a virgin to Pollock somehow not sufficiently communicating some presumed 'worldview' by painting in too obscure a manner?)

let's be clear about this: the only objective marker in Pollock's work is the object. i will never pretend to be making an "objective" argument about the nature of that work. however, i will argue with you when you try to project other notions of objectivity--these notions of truth, statement, idea, theme, language (syntax?), communication (as in, "talking" an idea to a "listening" audience)--onto that object. to put it simply, i largely don't find Pollock's work pretentious because it makes no pretense to being a hoity-toity abstract vehicle (language) for conveying any of these ideas that you have suggested. only when you suggest that it does, and then fails, does it become pretentious.

i also can't agree that "intention is the creative spark of art". not one good artist i know can actually tell you, before making something, what exactly he or she intends to do, in anything more than extremely general & vague (for a reason!) terms. (sometimes they pretend they do, which means that it seems like a good idea to them, and they hope it maybe works, but really they just want to feel like they know exactly what they're doing. a normal human impulse, but it's too rational for art.) the entire process of art-making is so much more abstract and left to chance than that. creativity is the creative spark of art. one of the most common feelings in making any kind of art is ending up someplace where you never expected to be when you started. considering that, how can you even take seriously an objective framework for judging art whereby the artist's original intents are successfully or unsuccessfully communicated in their results?

intention isn't even necessarily the creative spark of procreation (hormones are). intention is the creative spark of science and engineering.

tangentially? you just said above that it was a perfect reflection of his methods and thus his results

refer to beginning of post.

who care's about the painting medium? that's like saying I can throw a bunch of words together and call it a serious exploration in the literary medium, and say its up to the audience's fluency to "get it".

you are going to have to deal with thinking about the painting medium, if you're going to think about modernist painting, which was totally about how to change people's preconceptions of that medium (such as, the idea that painting, or art in general, is meant to "show" or convey some image or theme--as opposed to being a purely visual phenomenon. purely visual, NOTHING ELSE.)

if any art is 100% inherently abstract then all artforms are. I mean seriously, its all sense data being processed by our brains.

okay, all art functions in some context. but music is the least physical, the least burdened by (again) preconceived ideas, thus the most direct. at least, that's what many artists and critics believe. it's really a whole other can of worms.....

\Right brained? wtf? please explain this? Because to me its just reasonable and devoid of elitism. I'm not saying you're being elitist or unreasonable. I am saying that I really can't follow a lot of your arguments because this really doesn't need to be so complicated. Art as communication doesn't seem right brained. It seems common sensical and lacking any elitist notions of fluency.

no ... it seems reasonable and devoid of elitism because it seems practical and simple to think of Art as being a literal vehicle for conveying idea-bodies from one mind to another. i didn't say i disagreed with the idea of art-as-communication-of-ideas, but i've been saying that the nature of that "communication" and those "ideas", as exemplified in Pollock's abstract expressionist work, which is less about transmitting some ideas from Pollock's brain to our brain than about the paintings-as-objects being the ideas in and of themselves, is NOT limited to (what i perceived to be) your more literal definition of what art is.

Its very tempting to point out that calling splatters of paint conflicted and ambitious is no better or worse than calling drums and chanting in animal collective's music religious. Seems like that could be just as painfully obvious if not cloying.

again, I AM NOT SAYING each splatter embodies some "conflicted" or "ambitious" emotion straight from Jackson Pollock, like a language. i am saying my very general, subjective, emotional reaction to his best paintings, and his work as a whole, comprises some of these feelings. if you want me to go into a much more rigorous, in-depth formal analysis of one of these paintings and why exactly i think the whole thing makes me feel those feelings, i could probably try, but i'm not sure i have the time right now.

why is she so viscerally hated by like everyone now that she's older, a mother, fatter and bald? Possibly because the suspension of disbelief has been popped like a balloon and no one likes to have their disbeliefs all of a sudden unsuspended?

i think we can all agree not many of us were made surprised by the sight of fat bald Britney as much as we were made disinterested. she looks ugly AND she isn't making music anymore. she can't be the vehicle for our self-centered fantasies anymore. as a celebrity, she's been shifted into the loser pile. this one REALLY isn't that complicated.