good grief.
i'm suggesting it's possible to have the intellectual rigor to separate judgement from understanding.
judge all you want. condemn all you want. it if it makes you feel noble and righteous, so much the better. but guess what? it's pretty easy to do. and you're not likely to learn anything while you're doing it.
these condemnations remind me of a kid in a literature class i took, who couldn't fathom why we were wasting our time reading Crime and Punishment. "Raskolikov's just a murderer, a total worm! They should just lock him up!" Our professor couldn't convince him that Dostoyevski indeed wouldn't have written the story if there was nothing more to it than that.
why would i bother getting into what's interesting to me in Witkin's work? would you honestly care, or are you just waiting tell me that whatever i say is bullshit? and Jorge, yes, I already know you think i'm hallucinating when I say that I see something. your blanket opinion has been duly noted, so I won't bother.
it would be more interesting to let you answer the question for yourselves. Do you really think this man spent decades of his life doing this incredibly difficult work (time consuming, expensive, full of beaurocratic hassles and the constant need to persuade collaborators and get permission, laborious sculpture making and prop building, working under endless scrutiny of a judgemental public condemning him as a deviant) if his goals and his commitment were superficial ones? And if indeed he's up to something substantial, isn't possible that there's something interesting there?
Again, I wouldn't expect everyone to like the work. And i don't think it's a stretch to think that ethically, he should not have made some of it or even much of it. But neither of these conclusions have any bearing on whether or not there's something there worth looking at.
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