Art and Taste

So Kant says Taste is what you bring with you and judgment is what you learn to use if you're a fair observer. So perhaps I don't like sculpture as much as painting (this is correct). Even so, I should be able to recognize the brilliance, beauty of David or The Thinker or whatever sculpture that I'm culturally unaware of.

Well, then Pierre Bourdieu writes, responding to Kant, that judgment is a product of economic structures, i.e., if you want to live in a grad school program there are things you need to learn to like - such as hummus.

Now, I am admittedly hypocritical. On the record I will say things like taste is subjective and it's hard to argue and lots of crap that sounds logically true but soulfully stillborn. However, after say drink 4 where moments of wonderful honesty happen, I don't seem to believe that at all. I think if you like Nickelback then you're just wrong. If you don't get why Nas is a better lyricist than Kanye or why Danny Gatton's guitar playing could make me believe in God then you're just not getting it.

So, at this point I get confused. The question is getting very close to a question that I despise: what is art? I hate this question because it never produces anything resembling a real answer.

A few posts ago I commented that music was better before it tried to be avant-garde - now I love weird - I am a huge fan of late Coltrane, Captain Beefheart, 70% of Zappa, and 100% of Tom Waits. But these guys are not atonal musicians - in fact they are usually complicating a form - they believe in form-without-boundaries.

So what is the relationship between form and content? where are the boundaries? are their any absolute boundaries? Is the separation of the two concepts really possible?

I'd say something like 1) it resembles a quilt. 2) the boundaries are actually coming from the center, but they look like they're on the margins. 3) Stupid question. 4) Probably not.

The question I'm trying to get to organically, but don't seem to be able to, is the nature of art that destroys boundaries, calls attention to itself, becomes what us academic-types call "meta." Is it more interesting to call attention to the form through the content? Well, see that's a bad question - because it seems to desire a principle and that's what we don't want, basically ever - principles don't have any dirt under their fingernails - they don't come out of the ground; they come out of the sky, the ether.

When I was living in Boone, undergrad and M.A. years, I used to frequent this amazing video store (I have much to say about redbox and Netflix, just not yet) that actually had a large portion of the store organized by directors. During these years I watched tons of films by the guys you learn about when you're first learning about cinema - assuming you already know the basics. So I'm thinking of people like Truffaut, Goddard, Lars Von Treer, Billy Wilder, Bruneul, Kurasawa, and De Sica to just name a few. So people that are not quite obscure, but if you are talking to someone who just sort of goes to the theater it's not weird for them to have never heard of any of these guys.

What I found is that I tended to like films that I would put in the category Existential more than Postmodern. Now, this is a important admission: I think using categories like these too often. But in my head, I get the difference. One's more concerned with the human. The other's more concerned with the nature of art.

So Bergman makes a film about man facing death. Godard makes this wonderfully weird film about the Rolling Stones recording Symphony For The Devil, mixed in with other shots of political scenes. Now, it's easier to talk about the latter in my opinion. But the first is actually a more complex piece of art in my opinion.

But if I take the same logic I seem to be carving out and apply it to painting, I will start to contradict myself - except with Cezanne who is the phenomenological painter.

So can this possibly be brought together into some kind of sensible point? Yes, I think it can. I hope so anyways. The point is this - this essay is the wrong thing to do. There is no way to theorize about art. All we can do is talk about our relationship with a particular piece of art. Any time I try to go further, I end up needing a truckload of footnotes to make amends for exceptions. Art is a singular relationship bound by time. Movies I liked, books I loved, when I was a kid, I now find trite at times - or even better, I know find brilliant.

All we have, it seems to me, is affect - the interaction between person and art, bound by time, endlessly transformative.

I think I'll stop here - this is by far the hardest post I've tried to write. It feels like a snake eating it's tail.