here and there

Over the last few days I've been hashing out some ideas about formal quality and artistic value over at Franklin Einspruch's Artblog.net. See this post and this one. Unless you want to read nearly 200 (not necessarily relevant or readable) comments, I particularly recommend those by me, Franklin, and Opie. I'm working on a more lengthy response post, but I wanted to direct people to the discussion in the meantime. The argument appears pretty much closed, which is all the better for dissection.

To summarize in the crudest and most misleading of terms, while I am not a conceptualist and I value strictly formal appeal as central and necessary to visual art, I also consider myself a pluralist and want to remain as open as possible to the multiple forms of value that art can and does provide. I strongly suspect that hard-line formalist world-view that characterizes the culture of Franklin's site does not do this adequately. And while I value my interactions with Franklin himself very much, I'm afraid the responses of his readership leave much to be desired. In particular, there has been an an inordinate amount of harping over my choice of words. This approach is not conducive the free exchange of ideas.

This is also being discussed here.

a worm chewing its own tail

Theodoros Pelecanos, 1478

L'art pour l'art. The fight against purpose in art is always a fight against the moralizing tendency in art, against its subordination to morality. L'art pour l'art means: "The devil take morality!" But even this hostility still betrays the overpowering force of the prejudice. When the purpose of moral preaching and of improving man has been excluded from art, it still does not follow by any means that art is altogether purposeless, aimless, senseless—in short, l'art pour l'art, a worm chewing its own tail. "Rather no purpose at all than a moral purpose!"—that is the talk of mere passion. A psychologist, on the other hand, asks: what does all art do? does it not praise? glorify? choose? prefer? With all this it strengthens or weakens certain valuations. Is this merely a "moreover"? an accident? something in which the artist's instinct had no share? Or is it not the very presupposition of the artist's ability? Does his basic instinct aim at art, or rather at the sense of art, at life? at a desirability of life? Art is the great stimulant to life: how could one understand it as purposeless, as aimless, as l'art pour l'art?

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols