I listen to music on the bus, an otherwise dreary place. It's like a drug. Music is a drug. Some of the best lyrics, powerfully delivered, are the ideal presentation/celebration of poetic insight.

Novels and good TV, at their best, are at least as important as much of philosophy when it comes to wisdom or worldview formation. Tropic of Cancer woke me up to the notion that literature didn't have to be a "wine and cheese" affair. I sometimes see a sort of snobbery about good TV or good rap that to me is just silly prejudice, an idolatry of yesterday's forms. When I think of the Stones or the Doors at their best, it's just obviously a fuller and more heroic personality that the solemn quasi-scientific pose toward life. So art addresses the entire animal, perhaps. Whitman, for krissake!

Actually I loved Nausea, too. I reread it recently and half of it was still great. Brave New World, 1984, Lolita, The Possessed, Catch 22, Immortality, Blood Meridian, Portnoy's Complaint... Personality in full, in context.

Beethoven and Tchaikovsky helped me through the sturm und drang of my adolescence.

Joni Mitchell helped Emma Thompson cope with the realisation that the gorgeous, expensive necklace that she thought her partner Alan Rickman had bought her for Christmas, was actually for his secretary.

For me, it's Tarkovsky that does it, really does it. Watching Stalker or Andrei Rublev, stoned, in an enclosed and warm-lit setting - it's very hard to describe. It's a peacefulness that bristles with meaning, but what it means is just what it is, which is a peacefulness bristling with meaning. It's kind of like an emotional massage, all these tense blocked-up emotions are released into an open space which, though open, is structured perfectly to accomodate all of them. All sorts of conflicting and contradictory feelings which usually war with one another for dominance, shaming the losing feelings into hiding - suddenly they're all in a kind of warm, drowsy balance. It's simple and solemn and incredibly calming. But it's very rare I get to experience this, once a year if I'm lucky.

It sounds very cloying, but there's a scene in Andrei Rublev that gets me every time - There's this peasant stable in which are gathered a group of people laughing at a jester. The stable is established as a fully 3 dimensional space, through some brilliant camerawork, as a sort of spiritual zone, hard to put it. But then the main character is forced to go out in the rain, for some reason, and the scene is shot from within the stable looking out at him, through a door. He's outside, alone, yet being-alone, and outside, is made to feel like a mode of being-inside, though he clearly cannot understand that. All very sappy, sure, but the way that it's done places it a million miles from, say, the sentimentality of chaplin's tramp looking through a window at a new years gathering.

But maybe the idea that "Fine Art" is a balm in Gilead, or maybe it's baloney. — Bitter Crank

Isn't great art meant to make you think? Isn't it meant to unsettle rather than soothe? Isn't it there to stir to action as well as calm the nerves? Isn't it meant to lift us to refined intellectually while, at other times, reduce us to primal intensity?

In other words, art is a cultural tool for extremising the variety in our emotional and intellectual responses. It offers social viewpoints that constrain everyday experience in a way that seems to tap into some aesthetic essence.

That and it is provides something even more important to a social animal - an arena for status display.

Anyone can aspire to money or power these days. But taste and refinement are much rarer commodities precisely because they are invented rather than real. Snobbery is about staying a step ahead of the game in dreaming up new kinds of social distinction.

So art is something to be consumed just because it is fun. We like being pulled in directions that take us out of the ordinary, or extract its essence.

And art is a status game that is especially attractive to those not winning status in more traditional ways, like money and power.

What does fine art do for you? — Bitter Crank

It acts as a cathartic release of tension and a way of focusing myself when I feel anxious or uneasy. I mostly limit myself to music, however. I listen to rap before I go running. I listen to classical music when I read philosophy. I listen to English indie and electro-synthwave when I'm trying to chill. It all depends on what I'm doing and how I'm feeling - art (in this case music) complements my experiences in the same way a movie score complements its scenes.

I think it's hard to to say "Good art is meant to x" Different types of art serve different functions. Some art unsettles, some soothes. Though I think you always need to be a bit unsettled in order to be truly soothed. And to be open to true (aesthetic) unsettling, you often have to be soothed a bit first.

The scene that most stuns me from his films is the ending of Zerkalo. I don't feel at all apt to describe it, but how would you do it?

I think it's hard to to say "Good art is meant to x" — csalisbury

Yep. It is hard to assign it a specific purpose or even a general one. The question becomes why would we even want to separate it out as an aspect of human existence. In a traditional culture, art permeates everything and is something everyone is involved in.

So what I highlighted are two ways that art has been pulled out of the ordinary in modern life - first as a product to consume, and second as a new ground for status games.

So this betokens perhaps meta-art, a new level of self-consciousness that we humans "are creatures characterised by doing art". And in being self-conscious, the note of falseness and artificiality intrudes. Suddenly we also become aware of art that is just unthinking participation in human symbolic culture and then art as something we individually can have control over as consumers and purveyors.

Thus I am right with you regarding Tarkovsky and the skill with which it both unsettles and soothes. It has the subtlest intensity. But I am not saying we can pull even Tarkovsky out as a noble exemplar of what defines good art in some Platonic sense. Although I am sympathetic to the argument that the ability to truly appreciate Tarkovsky would be highly correlated with intelligence and visual imagination. :)

What does fine art do for you? — Bitter Crank

I have a preference for good sentimental songs and instrumental music and dark/tragic fiction. When I listen/watch, I feel like connecting to the inner world of the composer/author in one way or another. It feels like he/she is conveying to the world his/her deepest frustrations and how he/she have chosen to deal with it.

It sort of tells me "you are not alone".

Fo the record, Nausea is a hilarious book that deserves a read. Lines like the one in the OP aren't at all uncommon. I pretty much agree with the sentiment and think the spiritualization and sentimentalization of music can get a little gaudy, even in philosophers.

I've had very specific pieces of art console me in my life, though, which have very specific meanings for me that are probably irrecoverable. In general, I think religious works are superior to both those of art and philosophy at providing concrete consolation, and the power of the latter is overstated. I think this becomes especially true as time goes on and I feel everything less powerfully – downs don't seem so important, and ups don't seem so exciting. Squiggles in your ear can't uplift the human condition at the end of the day. Nothing, not even the most delicate or powerful mass, comes close to Job or Ecclesiastes, and as for something as tepid as a Vivaldi concerto or whatever, forget it. This was one reason in my youth I found religious sentiments so plausible – the proof was in the pudding, mankind's works apparently impotent compared to the sheer and obvious power of the divinely inspired that Scripture seemed to provide. Although that impulse has dimmed as I've come to realize that some other works, such as the Illiad, strike me as similarly inspired. It may be that truly great art cannot be 'fine,' but must be deeply traditional, rooted in mankind's old and painful memories, that tug at deeper wells than an individual author is capable of channeling, no matter how well-educated or clever or passionate. I feel that at the end of the day, the best modern subjectivistic or academic literature or music can do is distract, though that distraction may be sensuously powerful or mentally occupying, even exhausting. True consolation needs to come from edification, not mere impression.

Here are some pieces of music that hit me below the belt:

For me music is effective in enhancing the emotions, or for setting a mood. For example while cooking, driving, painting, I will put on a piece of music which I played over and over during a meaningful point in my life and the mood, or feeling will be evoked. Yesterday I heard a piece of music on the radio which I haven't heard for many years, it marked an important emotional event in my childhood, the experience flooded back even before my mind realised what was going on. It was as though time had stood still.

This is an important piece of music for me Allegri Miserere, performed by Tallis Scholars.

http://youtu.be/YDOENZediM8

I pretty much agree with the sentiment and think the spiritualization and sentimentalization of music can get a little gaudy, even in philosophers. — The Great Whatever

Lester Bangs interviewed Dick Clark once and Dick Clark called rock and roll "hamburgers and hotdogs." That's always stuck with me.

Nothing, not even the most delicate or powerful mass, comes close to Job or Ecclesiastes, and as for something as tepid as a Vivaldi concerto or whatever, forget it. This was one reason in my youth I found religious sentiments so plausible – the proof was in the pudding, mankind's works apparently impotent compared to the sheer and obvious power of the divinely inspired that Scripture seemed to provide. — The Great Whatever

Yes, Job and Ecclesiastes. Hell yes. But also the spiritual visions of the more relevant-to-life philosophers.

True consolation needs to come from edification, not mere impression. — The Great Whatever

Indeed.

So what I highlighted are two ways that art has been pulled out of the ordinary in modern life - first as a product to consume, and second as a new ground for status games. — apokrisis

Yes, but there's some art out there that tries to express the highest feelings and insights. I get that from old religious paintings sometimes. At it's best its point is to exceed the ordinary and represent the rare but possible. Or steer an entire culture toward a new image of virtue. Spengler surely influenced me on this. A culture dies into civilization with its art, perhaps.

Amongst the questions seldom asked by philosophers is, "what are tools for?"
One does not expect much of an answer beyond "tools are for doing things."

Art is for feeling things.

A hammer is for hitting things, and various hammers are for hitting particular things. But nothing prevents one from using a rock hammer on a nail with more or less success.

One of the operational principles of music in particular is to draw the attention away from the inner monologue. This makes it particularly fruitless to bang on about what it is doing and how clever or idiotic one is for being affected.

I don't know what fine art does for me. I only know that I'm drawn to it.

Art is something of a basic category. It need not do anything for me to be pursued -- so I may walk away from an exhibit thinking that the exhibit was neither technically good nor personally evocative, but said time was not wasted all the same. It may have done nothing for me, but it was good to go all the same.


I'd also note that I'm rather uncertain of the distinction between fine art and art, simpliciter. I know what fits into the category, but I do not generally like what the distinction is supposed to mark -- namely, that art which should be given more respect vs. the lesser "folk" arts. That isn't to say there are not better or worse art, but I would not draw that distinction at the level of kinds, but only the particular art of work itself.

Art with a capital A is what was regarded as the loftiest kind of artistic appreciation by the artistic establishment, such as the Royal Society of Artists. This was principally with reference to painting and sculpture, with a pinnacle in the area of oil paint, bronze or marble.

It is now a rather outdated distinction following the rise of modern and post modern art and the creative arts. So now all forms of artistic expression are equal. Well it's supposed to be equal, but it isn't, rather it has been replaced by another establishment which embraces post modern art etc and the creative arts, but still picks and chooses a new high art by predudice of various kinds.

Anyway, the distinction is rather meaningless now, other than in reference to historical art and periods.

Oh I forgot to mention that in the art and antique market Fine Art is high quality, in terms of artistic and creative appraisal, works of monetary value.

What does fine art do for you? — Bitter Crank

Not at all a fan of "high art"/"low art", "fine art"/whatever-the-opposite-would-be type distinctions, first off.

What does art do for me? Provides a living for one. Also provides endless aesthetic pleasure. Provides emotional catalysts (including but not limited to uniquely aesthetic emotions). Provides conversational fodder, leisure activities . . . all sorts of things.

I feel similarly - when a movie or piece of music works for me, it dies so in a concrete way which is probably forever after irretrievable. The pure emotion is interwoven with complex but precise sensualized reflections about where I am (spiritually? emotionally? in relation to people I care about? hard to say). That said, there's something that unifies those experiences, disparate as they are. The best I can say is that it's a movement of opening up - both in the cathartic sense of releasing things I've concealed from myself and in the sense of being able to freely look around (whereas normally I feel this deep constraint, a need to be focusing on something in particular while restricting my awareness of everything else) Maybe this comes off as the gaudy spiritualization you mention, but its also true and something I value a whole lot. The problem might be that its quite literally ineffable, so talk about it is necessarily clumsy and impotent - like trying to describe a dream to someone.

I love The Mirror too (especially that tracking shot with the burning cottage in the rain), but it's been a long time since I've seen it, and - probably because of its fragmentary time-hopping structure - I can't remember what the final scene is.

I don't like the phrase 'fine art', it belongs to a way of enjoying art that strikes me as snobby.

There are many forms of art that make the world more intelligible for me, in profounder ways than philosophy can. I particularly love Euripides; I've sought out all sorts of performances all my life and there's always something new and interesting in the dialectic between modern interpretation and the way he put things. Now that I find I'm enjoying Aristotle late in life (just reading the Rhetoric), I enjoy the contrast between them: that Euripides journeys beyond where rational inquiry can take us, into richer and darker places. Aristotle is however constantly quoting the poets and dramatists, suffused with their work himself.

...art ...Provides conversational fodder, leisure activities . . . all sorts of things. — Terrapin Station

A room full of large, fine oil paintings with heavy wooden frames could be broken up and fed into the fire, keeping away the chill. Adding the original hand-written scores of Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, and the Beatles to the fire might allow one to heat up a large kettle of bath water, provided one had had the good sense to first rip up some silk tapestries to plug the holes in the wall first. Pieces of the Bayeux Tapestry would make a nice wash cloth, bath towel, and bathroom mat set.

Just Joking he said.

Art is for feeling things. — unenlightened

Nice.
I'll use that.

Beethoven's Grosse Fuge is mind-opening - better than drugs for that purpose. Music is a higher revelation than philosophy.

Also, I think that metal is art:

A room full of large, fine oil paintings with heavy wooden frames could be broken up and fed into the fire, — Bitter Crank

. . . I can't say I understand this as a response to my post, but okay.

. . . I can't say I understand this as a response to my post, but okay. — Terrapin Station

I didn't mean to offend. Or confuse, either.

I was in a flippant mood and felt like saying something disparaging about "fine art". Actually, if I were very chilly (not in danger of freezing), there are still works by masters (I guess they are masters) that I would burn rather than shiver. I'm thinking of paintings with lots of fat little wingéd cupids, maidens in ecstasy (or severe pain -- hard to tell, sometimes), nauseating pastel colors, insipid angels, etc. I'd save a second rate Jackson Pollock over those.

And then there are works by masters for which it might be better to die in the cold than burn. Actually, there are quite a few of those works.

Beethoven's Grosse Fuge is mind-opening — Pneumenon

Maybe I heard this before, don't remember. But I fetched it up on YouTube. It's "hard music" -- one has to attend to it; hear it several times. Think about it.

For this piece, I think it helps to see what they are doing. Video #1 is the Alban Berg Quartet



Video 2 is a recording with an animated score -- it's an impression of the score, not a rolling copy of the printed work. I thought the animation added something -- something to look at, for sure. I tried following the actual score, but this was a bit over my head for that. Might not be for you. The recording is maybe not so hot--think of this version as a 'study' experience.

I don't know what we're supposed to be arguing about in this thread. Assuming I provide an honest response to the OP, can I be wrong?

Ah--thanks for the explanation. I was getting more at "it's all just art to me," but yeah, that would be another way of dismantling "fine" art, so to speak.

I don't know what we're supposed to be arguing about in this thread. Assuming I provide an honest response to the OP, can I be wrong? — Hanover

"The Internet confuses me if we're not arguing."



(just kidding by the way, although sometimes it seems like that's what most people think)