Why do we create art?

Yeah, you contributed that same thorough deconstruction the last time it was mentioned. I couldn't disagree more, and I suspect the criticism has more to do with its unconventionality than any genuine flaw. The insights are just as brilliant as the writing; they just take a bit more effort and curiosity than most.

All of Chesterton's work is like that. It is often carelessly dismissed as nonsense because it charges headlong into every seeming paradox, but you'll get out of it what you put in. If you put it in the dock, you'll find it guilty. If you greet it as an equal, it has a lot to offer.

I don't believe he is seriously arguing running the train on time is art.

He is having fun with taking an unconventional approach to a philosophical discussion.

I can do that also, like:

The secret to understanding Nazism is Hitler was an artist and he made Germany and ultimately the world his canvas. Nazism was his artistic vision and politics became his instrument because of his failure to express his art through painting pictures. He became in essence the first conceptual artist and the greatest of them all because everything he did was to serve his artistic vision.

I just thought of some more things to add to this baloney like an artist shapes his art to create his vision of the world and Hitler did the next logical thing, make the world become his art.

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I have no idea how Chesterton address what we're talking about, but I just feel sorry for Will who dismisses people so easily.

This is so vague... virtues... collide... what? Order and chaos are intensities on a single measure of difference. They are just characters stopping over along the road up into infinite difference and away from the One. You talk like each is some kind of unique force. Similarly, Socrates/Plato saw the separate virtues as stopovers along the road to wisdom. They just divisions of a single movement.

And yeah, I'm seriously proposing that you ought to speak the way I do, because I think it's closer to how things are.

This is uncanny. It's the classic individualist story of creation. As if each moment of creation is a singularity that is assembled all on its own without past or influence. It places the entirety of the work into the hands of the artist, and the artist is master over his work. He has, let's just say it out loud, full ownership over his property.

The truth of the matter is -- and we can discuss this -- art is fundamentally dependent on a preexisting order. Art is always in history and through time. There is no art freed from past or present. No art freed from culture, from language, from the subject. One definition I presented in the past that you seemed to like was that art is whenever an object is freed from its utilitarian use. But how can we define art in terms of a freeing from if it was not first bound?

Art is meaningless without context. It is fundamentally context. And the movement it make through that context is not one of increasing order, not one of reaffirming the existing order (that is utility) but changing that order. Freeing itself from any known use. Creating newness, difference, chaos.

Totally wrong. This is not something that can be relativized. Chaos is not some thing you hold in your hand. There is chaos and there is more chaos. There is infinite chaos potential. You simply increase the chaos. The previous chaos was the order. That's the only way to even think coherently about it. It's not like once you make it to this place called chaos there's no place to go but back...

The only actual definition of entropy (order/disorder) is difference. Order is the most probable state. Disorder is the least probable state. Art has to be new, unexpected, different. It can't be the same old. The same old stuff isn't art. It takes on a different form. That's why art can only be thought through history.

What the hell... give me an example of how this is even true metaphorically.

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Why am I even debating this? A: I have a vested interest in this language. It is fully developed by thinkers like Deleuze, and I'm not sure there's much reason to prefer the opposite notion. If art is suddenly the proliferation of order, then art isn't creativity, and that's just crazy.

I also just think your definition of the direction of art (towards order? wtf) makes zero sense.

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I wasn't dismissing Chesterton. I was dismissing the notion he was expressing a serious philosophical point instead of what he was really doing, using whimsy and humor to challenge conventional thoughts. He may have been expressing some ideas of his, but his tongue was so obviously in his cheek in the way it was presented you can't take what he said in the quoted passage to be a serious argument.

I just looked up the novel in wikipedia and Chesterton said the novel is seen through the central character's perspective, so the views expressed by him are not necessarily the actual literal views of Chesterton.

Chesterton is a real fiction writer unlike Ayn Rand whose novels are literal extensions of her objectivist philosophy.

He didn't say it was art, he said it was poetical. Which it is. He's talking about the inherent beauty of order. Not only is this not an unreasonable argument, but it's not even an uncommon one.

Eek. I was initially hesitant to suggest, based on how vague your complaint was, that you didn't "get" the book. But that's definitely my conclusion now. If you think Chesterton was just toying around with some hokey "all the world's a stage"/"everything is art" idea, then we have wildly different opinions of it.

He is definitely having fun with philosophy, but even his most obviously serious philosophizing has this quality. The fact that he enjoys wordplay and paradox doesn't mean his thoughts are not serious, valid, or insightful.

He says that things going right is far more beautiful and poetical than random things. That chaos is ugly and easy, and order beautiful and difficult. You genuinely don't see how this relates to our discussion?

Yeah, not to pile on him or anything, but Chesterton is about the last dude in the world I'd recommend to will. If I were ever somehow compelled to recommend books to will, that is.

That's precisely what I'm saying: true virtue never needs to be compromised at the expense of some other virtue. The degree to which it seems like they do is the degree to which we misunderstand one or more of them.

Well heck, now you sound like I did when we last discussed the nature of language. Aren't you suppressing the beautiful flow and evolution of language by telling me I should use words the way you use them?

Nothing I said about art in any way implies that human creation is an isolated event devoid of context, and I don't believe it is.

Nothing I'm saying presupposes that chaos is an item, or that you can achieve some perfect level of it. Nothing at all. I only presuppose that things can be more or less chaotic relative to some other thing. For example, a pile of rocks is more chaotic than those same rocks assembled into a wall.

When you say "There is chaos and there is more chaos," you've already conceded that chaos can be relative because there can't be such a thing as more chaos unless there is also such a thing as less chaos.

I think I see the problem. You're focusing on the homogeneity of entropy, but I think it's a mistake to call this homoegeneity "order." Order and sameness are not synonyms; the concept of order also contains intent and purpose. Something is orderly insofar as it conforms to some goal; mere homogeneity, unaccompanied by any structure, is not order. You might notice, for example, that all of the dictionary definitions of the word "order" presuppose some kind of intent. Order requires an orderer.

I also don't think it'll do to think of creativity only in terms of probability. Being technically able to paint anything is not more creative than actually painting one thing, even if that one thing was chosen from a much narrower set of choices and possibilities.

But you've already agreed with it. If entropy is sameness and predictability, and art is emphatically neither of these things, then art is the opposite of entropy. You might not agree with my related conclusions about order, but you've already agreed with this idea by itself.

It would be, if that's what I was saying. But my problem lies with that middle part of the syllogism where you simply equate disorder with creativity. According to that principle, flailing about wildly without purpose is somehow "more art" than, say, painting a portrait, because it is less predictable, less common, and less constrained by preexisting parameters.

If you think order and sameness are the same thing, then it's not surprising you would think it makes zero sense.

The mere fact that an artist will sometimes step back and look at their work, and decide to modify it, proves that they are judging the work against some specification. Whether that specification is reality ("I am painting this to look like that actual landscape") or an idea ("I am trying to create something that conveys a feeling I have"), the artist is still creating to a specification. This is true if the art is rigidly planned out in advanced or created ad hoc.

It also occurs to me that you're approaching the issue from an entirely different perspective: I'm talking about what art fundamentally is, and you're talking about which kinds of art are more valuable. Your approach is rather like that of an art critic, I think: you try to place it into the context of other art so that you can measure how "new" or "different" it is. But it's art even before you've done this; measuring how new it is is just one way to decide how much you like it. It is already fundamentally an act of order with a purpose, whether you find it groundbreaking or trite.

I don't believe you can actually say that. Why? A wall of rocks actually is just another chaotic form. Just because the rocks became a wall doesn't mean it's better. If you seal all those rocks together, you can't use the individual rocks easily. What if you need to throw the rocks at somebody? Say at Planet News, perhaps. Your rocks have become a wall and you can't use them. Thus, the wall is chaotic, too. It laughs at you and your need to throw rocks or maybe even just to make a piece of rock art while it lounges back as a rock wall. You'd have to reinvent the rock wall back into something else. Something you create will also take away the options for what you could have created instead. That's why you look at something and think, "How could I improve this? What could be done to it that'll make it better?" The rocks by themselves, without having turned into a wall, were fine -- but of course it's a good thing to turn it into a wall, or to turn anything into something else. But I can see how it can all be chaotic.

I like the idea of art being chaotic. I get that there's order, but there's also chaos -- when a fashion model (picture Grace Jones) waltzes down a runway in a show-stopping outfit, she is being chaotic. She is brazenly, fiercely changing the order of things around her. She is making people breathless, appalled, hungry, desirous, envious, jealous, shocked, seized, or maybe even disgusted. Art is a new chaos.

I didn't say the wall of rocks was better (though I think it usually is, anyway), I said it was more orderly/less chaotic. Utility is a separate question.

VS.



More orderly? Definitely. Less chaotic?

Yeah, I guess it is. Bye.

This is true especially of musicians. Their most popular stuff is, a lot of the time, their most bland, so it's appeal has a wider span. It's less compartmentalized.

A case in point, one of my all time favorite bands, Aerosmith, is actually two different bands. The Aerosmith I know and love, were a ragged edged, gritty, homegrown bar band that didn't give a rat's a** what people thought. They played crunchy guitar riffs and Steven Tyler was unapologetically raw with his slick lyrics loaded with double entendre and tongue in cheek references to the almighty sex, drugs & rock and roll.



(Hey, that's not too bad, for off the top of my head)

That Aerosmith did:

Movin' Out
Mama Kin
Rats In The Cellar
Seasons Of Wither
I Wanna Know Why
Lick And A Promise

However, there's another Aerosmith. The MTV Aerosmith that did

Dude Looks Like A Lady
Crazy
Don't Wanna Miss A Thing
Angel
Rag Doll

Top 40 MTV castrated pap. Not my Aerosmith, but far more popular because of the harmless, bland nature of these songs.

The thing is, on the cds, between these turds, are some real Aerosmith songs.

I think the thing that offends me most is Steven Tyler actually turning into a cartoon of himself. it's not art anymore. It's all done with the market in mind.

That being said, and sorry it took me so long to say it, art is a person, or persons, expessing an emotion, or a vision. True art comes when a person has such a full feeling that their heart, or mind, or soul, can't contain it any longer, and they have to get it out, or they'll burst.




Angst, joy, confusion, love, hate, etc. All valid emotions. An artist's need to express should be, first and foremost, for themselves. If not, then it's not true art. It's something less. To me anyway.

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