Australian Politics Forum

Soren

Gold Member

Offline

Posts: 25654
Gender: male

Re: Roger Scruton
Reply #30 - Nov 16^th, 2011 at 5:40pm

Grey wrote on Nov 16^th, 2011 at 3:17pm:

Soren wrote on Nov 16^th, 2011 at 1:25pm:

The idea of elite in the context of art is no longer about birth, if it ever was. After all, very few of the greatest artists were themselves of high birth.

Elite - or excellence or greatness - in art, literature, music means the dedication and effort that has been put into learning how to make it but also the dedication and effort and schooling and cultivation that is required for 'accessing' it, understanding it. The sun shines on us all equally, the night sky is equally starry for all of us, yet only very few can claim to be astronomers.

Uncultured, uncultivated, unschooled humanity will carry one only so far in the comprehension of art, music and literature, even if one is by nature sensitive.

Popular art, music, literature are called popular precisely because they are accessible without any effort, by anyone. It is for people who self-select not to put in the effort and the self-cultivation because they most probably do not see the point of it. Only a few - the elite - do and they are the ones who keep high, elite culture going. It has always been so. But birth has nothing to do with it, not even social class.

This is not the way Scrotum sees it. He and his ilk care nothing for the artist except by way of reference. I'm sure those that commissioned Michelangelo doubted he had the wit to appreciate his own work as much as they did. They have no more regard for the artists than they do for the bodies they walk over to loot or the burglars they pay to knick it.

Beauty is everything. They wish to surround themselves with it to claim the beauty as theirs, bathe in the reflected glory, elevate their status. Artists have always had to prostitute themselves by painting the elite with flattery. Of course they want art that questions, rages, leads the vanguard for change, like they want a hole in the head. Goya painted them for them, but he painted the other for himself.

It is the Pieta not David that brings tears, because the Pieta is more than beauty. I am deeply moved too by Picasso's Guernica and works by Tracy Emin. Are the elites moved by Guernica? They cover it for shame when talking of the necessity for war. But they don't 'get it' if they did they'd call the wars off.

For the Conservative beauty is all. The left get beauty, but they get intellectualsim as well. It is the right whose art bank is lacking. Give me Arundhati Roy over Wordsworth .

The usual stridently ignorant, complacent, conceited and smug nonsense I have come to expect from you.

Back to top

« Last Edit: Nov 16^th, 2011 at 10:27pm by Soren »

IP Logged

Grey Gold Member Offline Australian Politics Posts: 5341 Gender:	Re: Roger Scruton Reply #31 - Nov 16^th, 2011 at 7:02pm Quote: The usual stridently ignorant, complecent, smug nonsense I have come to expect from you. With you as lead detractor Soren, nobody could blame me for complacency.
Back to top	"It is in the shelter of each other that the people live" - Irish Proverb IP Logged

Annie Anthrax

Gold Member

Offline

Take the plan, spin it
sideways

Posts: 7057
Gender: female

Re: Roger Scruton
Reply #32 - Nov 16^th, 2011 at 7:10pm

Grey wrote on Nov 16^th, 2011 at 3:17pm:

Soren wrote on Nov 16^th, 2011 at 1:25pm:

The idea of elite in the context of art is no longer about birth, if it ever was. After all, very few of the greatest artists were themselves of high birth.

Elite - or excellence or greatness - in art, literature, music means the dedication and effort that has been put into learning how to make it but also the dedication and effort and schooling and cultivation that is required for 'accessing' it, understanding it. The sun shines on us all equally, the night sky is equally starry for all of us, yet only very few can claim to be astronomers.

Uncultured, uncultivated, unschooled humanity will carry one only so far in the comprehension of art, music and literature, even if one is by nature sensitive.

Popular art, music, literature are called popular precisely because they are accessible without any effort, by anyone. It is for people who self-select not to put in the effort and the self-cultivation because they most probably do not see the point of it. Only a few - the elite - do and they are the ones who keep high, elite culture going. It has always been so. But birth has nothing to do with it, not even social class.

This is not the way Scrotum sees it. He and his ilk care nothing for the artist except by way of reference. I'm sure those that commissioned Michelangelo doubted he had the wit to appreciate his own work as much as they did. They have no more regard for the artists than they do for the bodies they walk over to loot or the burglars they pay to knick it.

Beauty is everything. They wish to surround themselves with it to claim the beauty as theirs, bathe in the reflected glory, elevate their status. Artists have always had to prostitute themselves by painting the elite with flattery. Of course they want art that questions, rages, leads the vanguard for change, like they want a hole in the head. Goya painted them for them, but he painted the other for himself.

It is the Pieta not David that brings tears, because the Pieta is more than beauty. I am deeply moved too by Picasso's Guernica and works by Tracy Emin. Are the elites moved by Guernica? They cover it for shame when talking of the necessity for war. But they don't 'get it' if they did they'd call the wars off.

For the Conservative beauty is all. The left get beauty, but they get intellectualsim as well. It is the right whose art bank is lacking. Give me Arundhati Roy over Wordsworth .

The Pieta is beauty. Purity and grace created from something so hard and cold.

What is it you're seeing in Emin? What I've seen of her art is absolutely awful, but I'm interested to see if I'm missing something.

Do you like photography? Colbert's Ashes and Snow holds a real power for me; it's... noble. Magnificent, as well as beautiful.

Back to top

I can't do this, but I'm doing it anyway.

IP Logged

Soren

Gold Member

Offline

Posts: 25654
Gender: male

Re: Roger Scruton
Reply #33 - Nov 16^th, 2011 at 10:25pm

Roger Scruton
Beauty and Desecration
We must rescue art from the modern intoxication with ugliness.

The West’s great landscape painters, like the eighteenth-century Italian Francesco Guardi, capture the intimations of the eternal in the transient.At any time between 1750 and 1930, if you had asked an educated person to describe the goal of poetry, art, or music, “beauty” would have been the answer. And if you had asked what the point of that was, you would have learned that beauty is a value, as important in its way as truth and goodness, and indeed hardly distinguishable from them. Philosophers of the Enlightenment saw beauty as a way in which lasting moral and spiritual values acquire sensuous form. And no Romantic painter, musician, or writer would have denied that beauty was the final purpose of his art.

At some time during the aftermath of modernism, beauty ceased to receive those tributes. Art increasingly aimed to disturb, subvert, or transgress moral certainties, and it was not beauty but originality—however achieved and at whatever moral cost—that won the prizes. Indeed, there arose a widespread suspicion of beauty as next in line to kitsch—something too sweet and inoffensive for the serious modern artist to pursue. In a seminal essay—“Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” published in Partisan Review in 1939—critic Clement Greenberg starkly contrasted the avant-garde of his day with the figurative painting that competed with it, dismissing the latter (not just Norman Rockwell, but greats like Edward Hopper) as derivative and without lasting significance. The avant-garde, for Greenberg, promoted the disturbing and the provocative over the soothing and the decorative, and that was why we should admire it.

The rest at http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_2_beauty.html

The starting point is that beauty has been and still is a moral as well as an aesthetic and spiritual category. For a far longer time than not, these things went together. Their artrificial, modernist/modernistic, politicised separation (aka Marxist aesthtics and the obcession with an Ur-ideology, in Marx's case, the economy) is a recent invention and not an insight.

Back to top

IP Logged

Grey

Gold Member

Offline

Australian Politics

Posts: 5341
Gender: male

Re: Roger Scruton
Reply #34 - Nov 16^th, 2011 at 10:32pm

Tracey makes me grin. She makes minimalist drawing that say powerful thiings and works like 'Tent', (everyone I ever slept with) that encourage reflection on your own life. Tracey is the artwork and it's a guile free area. I don't think a male could do it. I don't think I'd be accepting of it from a male. She's a kind of post-feminism Marilyn Munroe and I think Norma Jean was a brilliant artist. She turned herself into a parody of mens desires and it sold well; but she never got the respect as an artist that she rightly earned. Norma Jean's art was an increasingly sad spectacle.

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/marilyn_monroe.html

Tracey has done the opposite, she's exposed the real. She's turned the hopeless and vulnerable into the secure and confident. She's an icon of empowerment. But make no mistake, she's worked hard.

Back to top

"It is in the shelter of each other that the people live" - Irish Proverb

IP Logged

Soren

Gold Member

Offline

Posts: 25654
Gender: male

Re: Roger Scruton
Reply #35 - Nov 16^th, 2011 at 10:55pm

Grey wrote on Nov 16^th, 2011 at 10:32pm:

Tracey makes me grin. She makes minimalist drawing that say powerful thiings and works like 'Tent', (everyone I ever slept with) that encourage reflection on your own life. Tracey is the artwork and it's a guile free area. I don't think a male could do it. I don't think I'd be accepting of it from a male. She's a kind of post-feminism Marilyn Munroe and I think Norma Jean was a brilliant artist. She turned herself into a parody of mens desires and it sold well; but she never got the respect as an artist that she rightly earned. Norma Jean's art was an increasingly sad spectacle.

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/marilyn_monroe.html

Tracey has done the opposite, she's exposed the real. She's turned the hopeless and vulnerable into the secure and confident. She's an icon of empowerment. But make no mistake, she's worked hard.

You are trying to imitate what you believe to be 'intelletualising' but you have neither the intellect nor the learning, nor the natural disposition or even the common sense to pull it off. You are 'intellectualising' banal and ostentatious pseudo-transgression, borne of sentimentality and displayed in cheaply bought cliches.

You are the self-parody of the man who needs a 'Tent' helpfully subtitled 'everyone I slept with' for you to be "encouraged to reflect on your life" (a massive kitchy cliche there but of course you think in cliches and, like all who do so, you are completely oblivious to it).

What else do you know?

Back to top

IP Logged

Postmodern Trendoid III

Gold Member

Offline

Posts: 10266
Gender: male

Re: Roger Scruton
Reply #36 - Nov 17^th, 2011 at 10:40am

Quote:

Grey wrote
The timeline for crimes committed by women against men would be all but nonexistent. That is the fact your denial of feminism rails against.

At no time would it have been legal to kill women for no reason. They, along with many more men, would have been executed or punished because they transgressed a law of some description.
Supply me with evidence that women as a specie were hunted and killed for just being a women and not transgressing a law.

Quote:

Grey wrote
It is authority that is the illusion. What is 'authority'? It is respect demanded, paid for, and coerced from. A feeble thing compared to that respect which is freely given to those deserving of it. I know authority. I've lived with it all my life, but what do you know about Anarchism? Nothing! Let me tell you a few things. Anarchism stands against the faux rightness of authority. We do not accept 'good leaders' because there's never been a good leader in all human history. There's been those who've been right sometimes, those who've been lucky most of the time and those who've been unmitigated disasters all of the time. Anarchists accept good ideas and if in our consensus we accept a bad idea because 'it seemed like a good idea at the time' we don't have ownership of it and can change direction instantly.

Show me anywhere were one can live free of coercion, whether that coercion be violent or subtle.
What of babies and children? They not know how to make informed decisions. They need parental authority to guide them.
And what is a "good idea"? You're purposely vague I bet because you don't really know. It sounds nice, but it has no substance.
Even if this so-called free society of so-called free individuals were to come about, its numbers would be tiny and I bet it could only sustain itself for a period of a few months. Hell, even many families can't agree on how to run a family, numbering 4 or maybe 5 people, how on earth would you get millions to operate under "good ideas" free of coercion? After a few months man's so-called cooperative nature would cease. Lying beneath the surface of man's consciousness are multiple aggressive instincts, you may try and keep these at bay with "good ideas," but the ID cannot be contained for long. Eventually its demands rise to the surface and then man can only then be contained through coercion. Here, again, the anarchist fantasy gets exposed for what it is, a fantasy, an illusion.
And what of all the goods and services you use that have been produced under "authority"? The fridge, freezer, sewage system, transport, computer, bed, roads, healthcare, food, housing, clothing etc. etc. etc. You hate authority but will use the objects that have been produced under its direction. If you were an honest anarchist (supposing that is even possible) you would live in the bush away from all the benefits produced by civilization. But you don't.

Yet all this really is a side issue to the main point: The anarchists soul is an ugly one. His hate for authority of all descriptions says more about his own irrationality than it does any authority. He carries this distrust, suspicion and anger toward authority, toward life, wherever he goes, it is no wonder his art is ugly. Ugly thoughts will produce ugly art. Beautiful thoughts will produce beautiful art.

Quote:

Grey wrote
Scientific method is Anarchic method. Nobody used penicillin because Fleming thought it was a good idea and he was the leader. We respect, good dictionaries, No dictionaries have any intrinsic authority to control language, but we are happy to refer and defer to the opinion of work that has by and large been compiled by consensus.

Rubbish. Scientific method genealogically comes from natural philosophy, which in turn came comes theology.
There's nothing anarchic about it. Scientific method occurs in an extremely controlled environment. Observation, data collection, experiment, conclusion, which is then peer reviewed. Sounds like a lot of authority going on there.

Quote:

Grey wrote
Anarchism is a belief in chaos theory. Leadership is a belief in the foretelling of the eventual patterns of coloured water while you are still pissing in the bowl and pressing flush
The best of human knowledge is structured along anarchic lines.

Nice warm words, but they have no substance.

All this brings me to the point of: What purpose does the anarchist serve in the ongoing advent of culture and civilization?
It contributes nothing positive to culture, in fact, it hates culture. It is actually a parasite on culture. Parasites have always been considered the lowest specie; living off the host, sucking the life out of the host, while killing the host in the process. Why should those who believe in an ongoing advent of culture and civilization tolerate those who are trying to destroy it?

Back to top

IP Logged

Grey Gold Member Offline Australian Politics Posts: 5341 Gender:	Re: Roger Scruton Reply #37 - Nov 17^th, 2011 at 1:40pm Thanks Bolshie I enjoyed that immensley. I'll answer it later, I've a lot to get done today.
Back to top	"It is in the shelter of each other that the people live" - Irish Proverb IP Logged

Dsmithy70

Gold Member

Offline

ire futuis vobismetipsis

Posts: 13147
Newy
Gender: male

Re: Roger Scruton
Reply #38 - Nov 18^th, 2011 at 12:30pm

Well only knowing Scruton through the prism of the show Soren posted, he won that argument for me.
Funnily enough it was the sculptor he interviewed towards the end that sealed my agreement.
If you saw the unmade bed in or next to a dumpster you think it belongs & take no notice whereas if a classical piece of art was in one you would at least give it a 2nd look if not rescue it.

As a side note, the used condom in Tracy's piece????? how drunk would you have to be?

Back to top

REBELLION is not what most people think it is.
REBELLION is when you turn off the TV & start educating & thinking for yourself.
Gavin Nascimento

IP Logged

Grey

Gold Member

Offline

Australian Politics

Posts: 5341
Gender: male

Re: Roger Scruton
Reply #39 - Nov 18^th, 2011 at 2:33pm

Quote:

At no time would it have been legal to kill women for no reason. They, along with many more men, would have been executed
or punished because they transgressed a law of some description.
Supply me with evidence that women as a specie were hunted and killed for just being a women and not transgressing a law.

Even an authoritarian conservative should be able to see that the fact the law was made only by men, and was selective and
oppressive of women, is of some relevance.

Quote:

Show me anywhere were one can live free of coercion, whether that coercion be violent or subtle.

Quaker communities perhaps?

Quote:

What of babies and children? They not know how to make informed decisions. They need parental authority to guide them.
And what is a "good idea"? You're purposely vague I bet because you don't really know. It sounds nice, but it has no
substance.
Even if this so-called free society of so-called free individuals were to come about, its numbers would be tiny and I bet it
could only sustain itself for a period of a few months. Hell, even many families can't agree on how to run a family,
numbering 4 or maybe 5 people, how on earth would you get millions to operate under "good ideas" free of coercion? After a
few months man's so-called cooperative nature would cease. Lying beneath the surface of man's consciousness are multiple
aggressive instincts, you may try and keep these at bay with "good ideas," but the ID cannot be contained for long.
Eventually its demands rise to the surface and then man can only then be contained through coercion. Here, again, the
anarchist fantasy gets exposed for what it is, a fantasy, an illusion.
And what of all the goods and services you use that have been produced under "authority"? The fridge, freezer, sewage
system, transport, computer, bed, roads, healthcare, food, housing, clothing etc. etc. etc. You hate authority but will use
the objects that have been produced under its direction. If you were an honest anarchist (supposing that is even possible)
you would live in the bush away from all the benefits produced by civilization. But you don't.

You're right I cannot conceive a situation absolutely free of coercion anymore than you can conceive being happy under
absolute authority, (you can't can you?).

There's nothing vague about the phrase 'A good idea'. You're just ranting. A 'good idea' is one that works, this is obvious.Anarchism has worked many times until stopped by violent means from outside.
Only once has a democratically elected government been denied the means to defend itself, Anarchist Spain. The structure of
Swiss society is (ironically enough) built largely along Anarchist lines. The Cuban emigres in Florida were originally Anarchists purged by the Bolshevik regime of Castro. José Figueres Ferrer of Costa Rica, one of the most enlightened politicians to ever grace a stage, was not an Anarchist. But it is no coincidence that his Catalan parents were. You
would do well to study the heroic defence of the Ukraine by the Black Army against Bolshevism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makhnovism

Anarchism can work. Maybe not the way you understand it to be. Maybe not the way it has been tried in the past. Anarchism is
the individual over the totatalitarian. There is no fundamental difference between the 'right wing anarchism' of free
market libertarians in America and the left wing Anarchism of Europe. Anarchism is the organising of individuals to collaborate for the
common good. Both left and right get to sit at the table in true Anarchism.The political evolution of Hu's is the history
of the devolution of power, Anarchism is merely the next overdue step. The organic computer we call brain has one thing in
common with its mechanical counterpart, rubbish in, rubbish out. Better programming changes everything.

Quote:

Yet all this really is a side issue to the main point: The anarchists soul is an ugly one. His hate for authority of all
descriptions says more about his own irrationality than it does any authority. He carries this distrust, suspicion and anger
toward authority, toward life, wherever he goes, it is no wonder his art is ugly. Ugly thoughts will produce ugly art.
Beautiful thoughts will produce beautiful art.

No the opposite is true. The Anarchist's is a joyful energy. You can see the anger in your writing, not in mine. What do
you know of LIFE? The control and domination of all things is what drives the Bolshevist and the Fascist and like frustrated children when things don't turn out the way you expect you get angry. Our art isn't angry, it's fun. We like to shake you up a bit and hope that something will shock you enough to make you actually think for yourself.

Tracey Emin puts a 'used condom'by her bed, but there's no cum in it, that would dry out, so she squirts in some silicon. You poor
regimented souls, you're so predictable. It IS funny, but also sad. Snap out of it, THINK, is this really how you want to live your life? Playing MONOPOLYtm? Looking at repro reality and saying 'isn't it beautiful'? Well really, whoodda thunk? Take a walk in the park at midnight, Tear up some red tap... Look, You've inspired me

I have to go be creative.

One last thing. Scientific method is all about observation. It's more about meditation than control. It doesn't matter how things turn out, you learn anyway.

Back to top

"It is in the shelter of each other that the people live" - Irish Proverb

IP Logged

Soren

Gold Member

Offline

Posts: 25654
Gender: male

Re: Roger Scruton
Reply #40 - Nov 18^th, 2011 at 6:43pm

Grey wrote on Nov 18^th, 2011 at 2:33pm:

Tracey Emin puts a 'used condom'by her bed, but there's no cum in it, that would dry out, so she squirts in some silicon. You poor
regimented souls, you're so predictable. It IS funny, but also sad. Snap out of it, THINK, is this really how you want to live your life? Playing MONOPOLYtm? Looking at repro reality and saying 'isn't it beautiful'? Well really, whoodda thunk? Take a walk in the park at midnight, Tear up some red tap... Look, You've inspired me

I have to go be creative.

But to people like you, this nevertheless is something "that encourage reflection on your own life" as you put it in an earlier post, in your customary cliched, kitchy way of thinking.

Emin's unmade bed is just an unmade bed in an art gallery, just as the pissoire signed by Duchamp in a gallery is nothing but a pissoire signed by Duchamp in a gallery. No amount of verbal wanking - the meaning of the bed and the pissoire are exhausted by the verbal wank of words expnded on them - will give them any further meaning worth looking for, let alone expecting to be a trigger for "reflection on your own life".
Unless of course the meaning of your life is encomapessed by pissoires and unmade beds with fake semen - a life where even the semen is fake. In other words, even your wanking is fake.

Back to top

« Last Edit: Nov 18^th, 2011 at 9:13pm by Soren »

IP Logged

Annie Anthrax

Gold Member

Offline

Take the plan, spin it
sideways

Posts: 7057
Gender: female

Re: Roger Scruton
Reply #41 - Nov 18^th, 2011 at 11:52pm

Grey, I've read a bit more about Emin and her work still evokes the same feeling as Serrano's.

On the one hand, Scruton's words resonated with me. I had difficulty with his references to Wilde in bith the video and the book 'Beauty' (which I'm stll reading) - going by De Profundis, Wilde seemed to regret his dedication to the pursuit of beauty as superficial and destructive.

I just deleted a whole paragraph which tells me I need to sleep. I'll come back and finish this post tomorrow.

Back to top

I can't do this, but I'm doing it anyway.

IP Logged

Sappho Gold Member Offline OzPolitic Posts: 1406 Gender:	Re: Roger Scruton Reply #42 - Nov 19^th, 2011 at 1:18am Why must Art strive in beauty only? Cannot the ugly also inspire as worthy of pursuit. Bosch very rarely strove in the pursuit of beauty... yet he is no less an artist because of it.
Back to top	"Love is a cunning weaver of fantasies and fables." IP Logged

Grey

Gold Member

Offline

Australian Politics

Posts: 5341
Gender: male

Re: Roger Scruton
Reply #43 - Nov 19^th, 2011 at 9:00am

Annie Anthrax wrote on Nov 18^th, 2011 at 11:52pm:

Grey, I've read a bit more about Emin and her work still evokes the same feeling as Serrano's.

On the one hand, Scruton's words resonated with me. I had difficulty with his references to Wilde in bith the video and the book 'Beauty' (which I'm stll reading) - going by De Profundis, Wilde seemed to regret his dedication to the pursuit of beauty as superficial and destructive.

I just deleted a whole paragraph which tells me I need to sleep. I'll come back and finish this post tomorrow.

Y'know you have to throw a dog a bone now and then to keep them interested. Tracy is here because she's a challenge to defend. Yet still too much challenge for the right to tackle head on before you and Smithy weighed in. You'd better not mention Goya because Soren and Bolshie will Bolt from that challenge.

'Everyone I ever slept with' her first large work and the one that launched her career took her six months of sewing to create. Frankly I prefer her simple pencil drawings and neon signs. I"m not big on geometry in art. But for me the artist is the work. She's Amy Winehouse run backwards. That's an enormously difficult and original piece to construct. For me 'I'm drunk and out of here'

is as valid a piece as 'bed' or anything else. Tracy is part of my cultural milieu; a very joyful part. I'n very glad she's out of the gutter she started off in and voting Conservative. With luck she'll get a peerage one day and take a seat in the lords as the Duchess of Margate Grin

Back to top

"It is in the shelter of each other that the people live" - Irish Proverb

IP Logged

NorthOfNorth Gold Member Offline OzPolitic Posts: 17258 Gender:	Re: Roger Scruton Reply #44 - Nov 19^th, 2011 at 11:07am Grey wrote on Nov 19^th, 2011 at 9:00am: Reminded me of Charles Bukowski's performance on the French TV programme. 'Apostrophes'... After it aired in France, the French fell in love with him When he walked into a restaurant during his visit to France after the show, the restaurant staff bowed to him
Back to top	Conviction is the art of being certain IP Logged