Do an artist's intentions matter?

[Jac@stafford.net]

[...]
And there is an entire branch referred to as the perform ing arts
When that term came into being I don't know
But some one must have pushed for theater to be included in the arts
Why
Why not sports
Just because a score is kept
Didn't prove the athletes aren't artists
And of the highest order

Yes! Why not sports as art? It is not as if the athletes are using a mechanical/electronic instrument to make images and call it art and even blind artists make images with the same machines.

But once again are we not elevating art to a position of unrealistic heightened status?

An aside: professional American football - aren't the players all college graduates?

[Old-N-Feeble]

Waiting for someone to go nuts over how the hell a popular tv show can be brought up in this thread about artistic intentions

[Tin Can]

SOS, your poetry is nearly impenetrable and I attempt similar occasionally and I know I am misunderstood.

I suppose most make Art because they have to. It is a sickness, which I enjoy, despite non recognition among peers?

[Peter Lewin]

All of which raises the question
of whether responding to
blank
verse accomplishes anything
except generating
more

[sun of sand]

Yes! Why not sports as art? It is not as if the athletes are using a mechanical/electronic instrument to make images and call it art and even blind artists make images with the same machines.

But once again are we not elevating art to a position of unrealistic heightened status?

An aside: professional American football - aren't the players all college graduates?

I have some elephant art
Most believe their 3yr olds in poopy diapers can produce a pollock

Yet an athlete who interacts with an object in ways
And sometimes with an object with another object with such perfection that that level of control seems incomprehensible to most anyone watching

Just gets some oohs


But a somwhat decent novel out of thoudands of other decent ones within the same year could become a hit
A bestseller
Talk show
Game show
Popular

Culture


But the athlete
The best play of the year
All time besties type

...
Mostly forgotton about after the news highlights

Why
Because that level of competency is everywhere in the leagues
Its expected
Commonplace
It is almost impossible to celebrate

But a book
Its permanent

And perhaps other more average wannabe high order cultural elite artists cant ecactly pull off an amazing display of athletic brilliance as easily as one could merely cut and paste and rearrange into a seemingly
Novel idea

[mcherry]

I guess when you boil it down this is my (cynical) view.

You have these academic departments at universities. As the years go by the science departments start making amazing progress, getting all sorts of attention (and money, and facailities, and stature). Physics departments are the home of the gods. Biology departments want to be like physics departments. Economics departments dream of being like the hard sciences. Political Science departments dream of being like Economics departments.

So you have these English departments. They look sort of lame next to the other departments. One department just detonated a hydrogen bomb and ended a war, the other, what?, wrote a sonnet? So you bring in Freud, you bring in French philosophers, etc. You jazz up the syllabus. Make it harder. Try to make it more political, make it have something more to do with society, with the social tensions. Some of this stuff, like Freud, starts off in the sciences and is adopted by the English department but stays on after the sciences no longer refer much to Freud. Marx lives on as well, past its due date.

The author doesn't matter anymore because you are not really studying books anymore. You are studying society. Books are texts. Texts are just inputs that perturb the system and your analysis is key. Author's intension doesn't matter because you are studying what *is* not what the author wanted. If they overlap so what? The professor moves to the center here, the one who perceives patterns, the who who decodes the texts and discerns hidden meanings, makes connections, and reveals the social and political underpinnings of society as revealed through the texts. This is the kind of stuff you can talk about with a straight face in multi-department academic meetings. This is the kind of stuff you can publish in academic journals.

The rest is all "connoisseurship." Ugh.

Meanwhile, the academics lead themselves into absolute irrelevance outside their insular echo chamber. It's not that what they do is oh so hard to figure out. It is just that what they do doesn't matter. Deep down doesn't matter.

And art departments? They dream of being English departments.

--Darin

The sciences can teach us how to build (and detonate) a hydrogen bomb, yes, but it is the humanities that teach us why we shouldn't....

[Peter De Smidt]

The sciences can teach us how to build (and detonate) a hydrogen bomb, yes, but it is the humanities that teach us why we shouldn't....

If we need the humanities for that, then we're in serious trouble.

[Greg Miller]

The Artists Statements of the Old Masters: http://hyperallergic.com/227007/the-artist-statements-of-the-old-masters/

[John Kasaian]

IIRC my Classical Studies, Poetry is (was) one of the Sciences.

[Drew Wiley]

Well, the experts have spoken! That "Artist's Statement" link pretty much sums it all up. I presume each given statement was taken from their NEA grant application.