Is This Art?

[The Hierophant]

Originally posted by Luvian: 911 stired lots of people? Was it art?

To some, sure.
Look, I'm not interested in appealing to your chosen moral code. You have your worldviews, I have mine. I am simply expressing my thoughts, nothing more. Pay as much or as little heed as you like.

[Luvian]

Originally posted by The Hierophant: quote: Originally posted by Luvian: 911 stired lots of people? Was it art?

To some, sure.
Look, I'm not interested in appealing to your chosen moral code. You have your worldviews, I have mine. I am simply expressing my thoughts, nothing more. Pay as much or as little heed as you like. [/QUOTE]Well... according to your worldview, rape, murder and bombing are the greatest art ever...

[The Hierophant]

Originally posted by Aerich: I agree with you on an abstract level, Hierophant, but (re: the hypocrisy comment) it's just as easy to say that brutality and gratuitous torture are hypocritically masquerading as art.

Heh heh, and again it boils down to your beliefs of what art is. Indeed, it boils down to what you perceive to be 'brutality' and 'gratuity'.

Furthermore, even if we accept the savagery of life in its totality and accept our role as predators and world-dominators at the top of the food chain, that doesn't mean we have to explicitly or implicitly support inhumane behavior against "lower creatures."

Of course not. From what I gather of you Aerich you are by all means intelligent enough to make up your own mind on how to view the world.

However, it is still reprehensible to torture and kill something just because we can, and often do. I won't call it Art.

Excellent! [img]graemlins/thumbsup.gif[/img]


ps: I'm really sorry about all this post dissection. I've been picking up bad habits lately. But it's just so much easier to respond point by point. I think the points in your paragraphs were separate enough to justify isolated responses.

[The Hierophant]

Originally posted by Luvian: Well... according to your worldview, rape, murder and bombing are the greatest art ever...

Don't tell me what I think Luvian.

[Luvian]

I'm not telling you what you are thinking, I'm repeating what you said.

[The Hierophant]

Originally posted by Luvian: I'm not telling you what you are thinking, I'm repeating what you said.

I beg to differ. Read what I said again then. Closely.

[Luvian]

If you want...

For me, the more an image or series of images stirs people (to either pleasure or pain) the more artful it is. The muses care not for delicate moral sensibilities, but revel in the raw expression of emotion.

There, I re-read it very closely.

[The Hierophant]

Originally posted by Luvian: If you want... quote: For me, the more an image or series of images stirs people (to either pleasure or pain) the more artful it is. The muses care not for delicate moral sensibilities, but revel in the raw expression of emotion.

There, I re-read it very closely. [/QUOTE]Right. So, does 'rape, murder and bombing' happen to stir you?

[Luvian]

Yes, as it does happen to stir about 99.9% of the human race.

What about you?

[The Hierophant]

Originally posted by Luvian: Yes, as it does happen to stir about 99.9% of the human race.

Then it is artful, to some degree. Not necessarily 'the greatest art ever' as you put it. But the muses certainly find abode in suffering.

And yes, I am stirred by open conflict, as an organism I have evolved to be. However, conflict does not trouble me, being perpetually transitory as it is. Rather, it excites the fleshly, adrenal 'ecstatic' instinct in me and sets my blood coarsing. And that, for me, is the essence of art. Indeed, it is the essence of life itself: as 'life', as an ecological entity, is to my eyes a work of art to which I am inseperably bound.

As it sheds its own blood and makes love with itself, so life generates the force and power of art.

[ 09-15-2004, 04:25 AM: Message edited by: The Hierophant ]