if art is just supposed to simply produce feelings, and the more feelings the better, why do we even need it? what if i can get the same feeling from gardening or trimming my toe nails?

does trimming your toe nails help you understand yourself more?

it doesn't. but "helps you understand yourself more" isn't the same as what you were gesturing at before, when you wrote "affects more people".

i think my general point remains -- why do we need art to understand ourselves more, when sociology, therapy, meditation, history, anthropology, psychology, religion, etc. are available to us?

i just think it's a mistake to prioritize the effects -- feelings, self-understanding -- art has on a viewer, because we end up losing sight of the things that make art discrete from other modes of representation/expression/etc. and because those same effects can be got from other places. in this view, art is itself arbitrary or incidental

Then what's the priority?

I thought you were making a different point. I was more thinking about the tenancy to compare, like when someone says such and such is bad because it didn't do what the other similar movie that I like did. That's something that I resist. The piece should be judged by what it is not what it isn't. Especially if the "isn't" was never part of the intention.

I see the point you're actually making. But bringing this all back to subjectivity I'm not sure the above point totally jibes with what you said about subjectivity earlier that started this great discussion.

Maybe I don't fully understand what you mean.

claims i'm making re: a work of art

1. works of art require intentionality
2. an art work's meaning is synonymous with the intention of the artist.
3. works of art are indifferent to their viewers, their meaning is not contingent on the subjective position of those viewers
4. works of art are legible as art because they exist, to greater or lesser degrees, within a set of agreed upon rules. those rules are the historical conventions of a particular art form. those rules & conventions are always being contested & fucked with.

here is an example of the comparison between works of art i'm advocating for: it makes sense to think about Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang as one piece of the detective genre in film. a critic can arrive at certain judgments based on the formal elements of Kiss Kiss and their interrelation, as well as how those formal elements respond to other films in the detective genre, as well as any films in any other traditions that Kiss Kiss invokes.

a side note: when you make a serious work of art, embedded in the work is a kind of self-defense for it's existence. one way to marshal that self-defense is to counterpose the work with all previous works in whatever tradition it occupies. from that vantage, comparison is impossible to avoid.

my favorite micahel fried quote is something along the lines of, when you hang two paintings next to each other in a gallery, one kills the other.

Strength and cunning

aesthetics

Ah. Here we profoundly stay disagree

I need to think about all of this but I think I disagree. But again I need to time with it.

no need to agree. i just wanted to clarify my points and resolve any possible contradictions in my previous posts

1. Yes
2. No
3. Yes and No
4. Yes

I didn't read the rest of this thread but I did read that Nicholas Brown book. Anyway. Movie looks dope. Also Boogie Nights is an absolutely essential movie and a stunning rendering of the decline of American empire.

yeah, this is all brown, michaels and fried, or, as i sometimes think of it, the nonsite argument

Essential *because* it's a stunning rendering of...

Or are those separate points?

Where the fuck have you been, Mickey?

Mickey is back!



This is going to get good now.

fall term started?

I've transcended such febrile notions as "term"