The Philosophy Discussion Forum

Nick_A wrote:Pluto you wrote:

Maybe for something to be really considered as art in today's world it has to be ethical in some way. House an ethical dimension.

I would agree. Today's art often has a moral perspective. (what to do) However would you consider the Sphinx to be a work of art? Is it constructed in such a way that a viewer capable of deeper experience can "feel" in a new way? If true, rather than telling you what to do the Sphinx reminds us emotionally of what we are in the context of a human conscious perspective which remains our being potential.

The Sphinx is maybe more about power and its symbols. A religious construction that gave form to Egyptian mythology. In what way can the Sphinx remind us of what we are?

Pluto: The Sphinx is maybe more about power and its symbols. A religious construction that gave form to Egyptian mythology. In what way can the Sphinx remind us of what we are?

I've heard from several who were within its presence that they felt their "nothingness." It aroused a deep feeling of humility. This is what WE ARE. In the context of the potential for human "being," we are nothing.

Nick_A wrote:This is what WE ARE. In the context of the potential for human "being," we are nothing.

We must be something.

This is art.

Are you sure he’s a minister?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzDy3byWrQY

Nick_A wrote:

Pluto: The Sphinx is maybe more about power and its symbols. A religious construction that gave form to Egyptian mythology. In what way can the Sphinx remind us of what we are?

I've heard from several who were within its presence that they felt their "nothingness." It aroused a deep feeling of humility. This is what WE ARE. In the context of the potential for human "being," we are nothing.

The human being is potentiality incarnate. I think 'nothing' a bit extreme, we are something rather than nothing. An artwork or whatever when looked at or being in its presence, if it renders the viewer small and insignificant, a nothing compared to this great work, that's a problem for me. If I see the Sphinx up close, I say wow, to think that was made so long ago, by slaves no doubt. If a work puts the viewer in the shade, it's not art, for me. The artwork knows the potential of the viewer and is rather in awe. The artwork wants to be of assistance to the viewer, in the struggle against life.

I was looking at the painting 'Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?' by Paul Gauguin. Great title, and we still can't answer convincingly.

Pluto wrote: I was looking at the painting 'Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?' by Paul Gauguin. Great title, and we still can't answer convincingly.

Pluto, do you believe that the value of philosophy and religion, if you are a believer, comes from experiencing questions or providing answers based on opinion? Gauguin offers a question. How are we to ponder it? Society as a whole seem to have discarded this ancient practice as useless and getting in the way of arguing more important superficial opinions. Suppose what we ARE cannot be defined by expressions of the external life process we all go through. It may be what we are by societal standards but surely not by objective standards since the cycle of life is always in change. What we ARE as I understand it, if it does exist is what lies behind the life cycle so the cycle is really an expression of our origin. We normally live attached to the life cycle. What we hold as important and the center of life is different at twenty than and forty, at sixty, and at eighty. The quality of consciousness connecting them doesn’t exist for us. This is what is meant by experiencing our nothingness.

Shakespeare presents the same question. It is easy to ridicule as is often done on philosophy sites as religious nonsense and since there is no proof, why bother? Yet there are some who respect the question even though there is no scientific proof of what we are behind the life cycle. How should we respect people who contemplate, open to, these questions without immediately believing or denying what has already been said? How do we respect those who contemplate philosophical and religious questions which art worthy of the name intensifies within us? Maybe we should just concentrate on what can be measured by science such as the dimensions of Kim Kardashian’s behind? Who knows at this point? Perhaps Hillary is right to say “what difference at this point does it make?" I may be in the minority but I’ll stick with the value of art for our emotional intelligence. It’s not that I have anything against Kim Kardashian’s behind but there is a time and place for everything.

As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII [All the world’s a stage]

William Shakespeare, 1564 - 1616
.
Jaques to Duke Senior

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Yes I think I see what you're saying, an opinion, a questioning. I'm putting together a show of my work and looking at them together I saw questions. The paintings were kind of questions, to be discussed. Linked to reality a simple illustration of the twin towers, the planes, and building seven, are presented in a non-sensational, non_dramatic way, so that we are only left with the structure of the problem, or thing to be thought about. The foundation of the event without the noise. Then can we better see what it is that we must discuss, what we must question. Recently I've been making paintings of planes, very simple, not clear, as though they're in a fog, no colour. These are kind of questions too. What is it with all the planes going missing, being shot out the sky, used as missiles, smashed into mountains.

Maybe this is or isn't connected, but I'll share it anyway. Today I saw at a second-hand market here, a garden figure (a boy hands in pockets) white, a little weather-beaten, about a foot high. Wonderful really, it's head was knocked off and lay at its feet. The image of it stopped me and made me consider what it was that intrigued me. I continued walking, coming back I saw it had gone, someone had bought it. I realised that I had missed out on, to my thinking, a great piece of art. I wanted to present the figure with head on the floor as sculpture, why. Like the picture of 911 or pictures of planes, the severed head triggers our collective unconscious knowledge of isis head choppers, I thought. But it would do it in a domestic non threatening way, so that we can actually discuss or come to terms with it. Like a form of therapy. Maybe it's bullshit, but I like the idea of it.

The poem is fantastic, I've never read the whole thing but having done so I can see that Shakespeare was a first-class poet.

Pluto, I'm glad you feel the value of art to allow us to question in a new way rather than descend back into the normal superficial expressions of conditioned opinions. One of my ancestors was a rather well known artist skilled in the creation and use of light within his paintings. I remember being at an exhibition that included one of his paintings and I was contemplating it. Two Sufis noticed my study and asked if I understood it. I said that I think I do by heredity. They told me of their interest in the sprituality of light and invited me to lunch. It seemed odd as I was enjoying lunch that far away people were killing each other and I'm having lunch with two sufis discussing a subject only a few would be open to. Art made it possible.

Yeah, this the world, you've got wonderful things and the horrific side by side.

I was reading this from Boris Groys:

On the question of inclusion/exclusion, Groys also wonders, What would happen if all art created within market structures were to be judged as morally suspect in the same way as the art produced in totalitarian societies? What would the history of twentiethcentury art look like under such altered conditions?

I then I saw a review of his book Art Power, which has an interesting passage;

He bores relentlessly into the ideological circuits that link art, war, and religion in "the global political reality of our time," arguing that we have witnessed a transformation in the historical significance oiradicality, iconoclasm, and iconophilia. According to the author, the radical behavior of the avantgardes of the early twentieth century has been taken up most aggressively in recent times not by artists, but by terrorists and antiterrorist warriors. Yet contrary to the popular media narrative, today`s terrorist/ warrior does not practice iconoclastic, avant-gardist negation. As Groys points out, it would be more accurate to describe this figure as an iconophile, a determined producer of "strong images" designed to shock the viewer into submission through their literal representations of extreme violence. "The terrorist, the warrior is radical, " Groys writes, "but he is not radical in the same sense as the artist is radical. He does not practice iconoclasm. Rather, he wants to reinforce belief in the image, to reinforce the iconophilic seduction, the iconophilic desire." In this way, the artist, as the radical embodiment of contemporary iconoclasm, functions as a counterproducer who critically analyzes and challenges "the claims of the media-driven Zeitgeist." Thus, in the pages of Art Power, the artist is no longer a maker of images, but an expert in their unmaking.

As you know Pluto, art is one of those words which have been rendered meaningless. For example:

“How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an enemy”. Friedrich Nietzsche

Would you call bad music and bad ideas which possess and diminish the human psyche artistic? I know many who would and insist that inspiration is the purpose of art. I think this is why Plato didn’t want art in the Republic.

https://www.college.columbia.edu/core/lectures/fall1999

One of those reasons, which is also a main reason the Republic has disturbed so many people over the centuries, is supposed to be the fact that the ideal city will contain no art. Plato, on this picture, believes that art perverts and corrupts: being simply "imitation", it makes us attached to the wrong things - things of this world rather than eternal Forms - and depicts vile and immoral behavior on the part of the gods and humans as if it were normal or admirable. It implants the wrong values; its power is itself a reason we find the Republic repugnant today: if our souls were free of Homer's heroes, we would realize that the work's depressing austerity is really transcendent harmony.

So what I call real art has the ability to contain the attraction to the eternal within a work of art as it depicts the subjective earthly expressions. Some call it awe Not an easy subject to discuss.

Art is a form of communication which attempts to make the ordinary appear to be more than it is.

Harbal wrote: Art is a form of communication which attempts to make the ordinary appear to be more than it is.

That is a good description of advertising but advertising isn't art.

Just because Art do it, it doesn't mean that Ad's can't.

And Art is not so far from Ad's either. People making fancy stuff to earn some money.

Harbal wrote:Art is a form of communication which attempts to make the ordinary appear to be more than it is.

Is it not the other way round, the art attempts and fails to communicate the magnificent. Art is an attempt using man and world to create a third thing.

Pluto wrote: Is it not the other way round, the art attempts and fails to communicate the magnificent.

I don't agree. Art attempts to deceive us into seeing magnificence where there is non. It does the same with glory, heroism, valour, divinity and God knows what else.