That's cool. Definitely hear the influence.

I never really got into the Cardiacs--I think the vocals put me off--but I do like one of the bands that came out of the Cardiacs, called Knifeworld.

Ok. I defer to your better judgment — Agent Smith

I don’t want your deference. Go read some philosophy.

You've then missed the point of solipsism — Agent Smith

No, I'm guessing you just misinterpreted my use of the phrase "our existence", by which I meant the existence of me, Pie, 180, and everyone else aside from you.

If you really don't see it, then maybe you're not aware of how certain you actually are of our existence. We don't need proof for the things we're most certain of. That's pretty much what certainty is.

I for one am glad that I'm not trapped in your head.

Isn't it quite clear that, in line with solipsism, the only thing we can be certain about is our own self — Agent Smith

So the following wasn't a joke?

if we want absolute 100% certainty, we'll all havta be solipsists — Agent Smith

Great post.

But at least we can trust Tolkien — Cuthbert

Yes, I live in the heart of Mordor so I know it's all true.

I'm having a similar experience right now. I'm reading The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe, in which Wolfe claims that the narrative contained within is his translation of a manuscript that reached him by means of time travel from tens or hundreds of thousands of years in the future, but as far as I can tell there is no evidence for this. Nowhere has he given details about how he found the manuscript, and I can't find any reports about it. I'm forced to conclude that Wolfe made the whole thing up, which surely casts doubt on his reputation.

Agreed.

You can have a smaller or larger slice of the pie, but when it gets to half the pie and beyond, you basically have the pie, minus a slice or two. A slice has to have 2 cut sides and the slice between them. — unenlightened

If buns were pies, rather than small loafs, I'd admit defeat here.

*loaves?

Half a bun is not a slice of bread — unenlightened

Your logic is valid but this premise makes it unsound.

:up:

The worst faulty idea about trade unions is that they are a socialist endeavour promoting socialism.

They aren't, actually. They are just a common sense way to deal with your employer. — ssu

Obviously they can be and have been both.

In 2022 we view it as extravagant, but doubtless it wasn't viewed as such 2,000+ years ago. — Noble Dust

Starting with the Presocratics, Greek philosophers were very sceptical of mythology. Plato (and probably Socrates) thought the ideal republic ought to curtail the teaching of myths.

But maybe I don't know what is meant here by "extravagant".

And no, the idea that it shows us metaphors is just us projecting our modern concepts of poetry and literature unto the past. The metaphor didn't even exist at the time. — Noble Dust

You seem certain of this, but it's a striking claim that doesn't fit with my knowledge. Aristotle wrote about metaphor, and you only have to read the Odyssey to see lots of them. On top of that, it seems that they're deeply ingrained in all languages, hence are not modern.

If you mean metaphor more generally, something more like allegory or symbolism, then I can see that it's much more difficult to disentangle any allegorical interpretation from our own points of reference, but as far as I know it's reasonable to think that allegory played a role, especially because there are obvious examples of explicit allegory in 2,000+ year old texts (the allegory of the cave).

Im surprised its not an unspoken rule. — Yohan

It is. As far as I can tell, Xtrix avoided, or tried to avoid, modding in that thread for this exact reason, but there were no other mods around at the time.

Just on the subject of colour...

I've been reading Color Realism and Color Science and Color Properties and Color Ascriptions: A Relationalist Manifesto. The first one is a good overview of colour realism and its discontents.

The crucial question for me, which I don't think is answered in them, is whether colour relationism implies that perceived objects are not coloured. I think not necessarily, although I can see why some would think so.

Intuitive first step: my brother is a brother despite brother or being a brother being a relational property. The tomato is red despite its colour being a property of the relation between an object and a particular kind of perceiver.

Okay, but I don’t quite see how it follows that it is less susceptible to supremacism than Christianity or Islam. Christianity at least has an anti-supremacist doctrine that can potentially be used to oppose the excesses of the powerful, whereas Shinto’s avoidance of doctrine allows it to go along with anything that respects ritual.

I rather being in Shinto or Asian philosophy side. At least they tend to find an equilibrium or inner peace with nature without impositions. — javi2541997

In the early twentieth century and right up to the 1940s, Shinto apparently did no better than Christianity or Islam in opposing supremacism, ultranationalism, divine dictatorship, and atrocity. It seems like it was part of the whole nasty enterprise.

@ssu attempted to mention @Christoffer but got the wrong username. I wouldn't get involved in this discussion if I were you!

Coming from someone I'm with, just about any kind of request to refrain from smoking would work on me. Coming from a stranger in public, it would depend on the situation. If I were outside I might refuse, but a polite and friendly request would be most likely to work.

I usually vape these days, but people even complain about that sometimes.

:up:

I moved this to where it might elicit more responses. Feel free to move it back to the Lounge if you prefer.

I think of sentimentality as akin to regret but distinguished from regret in that instead of wishing you could travel back in the past to change your errors, you wish you could travel back and relive the romanticized perfection of what once was. It shares with regret the impossibility of correction and so a melancholy. — Hanover

:cry:

That comment sent my mind on a journey in which I explored the role of storytelling in relationships and noted the difficulty in creating satisfying endings in life.

And they both lived happily ever after. The end.

The characters live on in my imagination so I would actually like to read through to the end.

Now I think about it, there was a point when I just stopped reading for a month, from around February 24. Mason & Dixon may well have been the book I was reading at the time. So, blame Putin.

Ah, you never said if you enjoyed Mason & Dixon, did you finish it? — Manuel

It’s an odd thing what happened. I loved it, was totally into it, totally involved and swept up, but with around a hundred pages to go I don’t know what happened, I just dropped it. It was like okay, that was a lot of fun, but it’s boring now and I don’t need to read on.

I’ll likely go back and finish it some time soon though.

The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. Just finished the first volume.

I didn’t like it when I read it 20 years ago, but now I do. Many people go on about how deep and difficult it is, and fail to convey how beautiful, engrossing and enjoyable it is.

In contrast, I recently read Lord Valentine’s Castle by Robert Silverberg, having been impressed by some of his earlier books. Like the Wolfe, it has an SF-tinged fantasy setting, but it’s embarrassing, the kind of stuff that gives fantasy fiction a bad name.

"Video unavailable".

I take it it's Porcupine Tree. I noticed there was a new album. I shall listen.

OK; so it was an act of mercy (no sarcasm intended) — Bitter Crank

I don't know what you mean.

He asked to be banned? Odd, but maybe that was a self-intervention he needed. — Bitter Crank

Streetlight did not ask to be banned. That was someone else.

By the way, Ornette's harsh tone has always been a stumbling block for me — Noble Dust

He certainly made the most of the tone of the Grafton plastic sax, and I can understand why people dislike it. I really hated it myself when I first heard his music (hated everything about it actually), but he won me over in the end.

evidently an ole timer, and not a word was spoken about it by anyone. From multiple posts everyday, this fella suddenly stopped. Naturally one will wonder. — skyblack

I can confirm that this member asked to be banned.

I don't necessarily disagree with either of you, at least broadly, but the Collingwood quote I put in the OP set me thinking. According to him, some of the greatest art ever made isn't art at all, or at least was not considered such by those who made it. Here's more from Collingwood:

If people have no word for a certain kind of thing, it is because they are not aware of it as a distinct kind. Admiring as we do the art of the ancient Greeks, we naturally suppose that they admired it in the same kind of spirit as ourselves. But we admire it as a kind of art, where the word ‘art’ carries with it all the subtle and elaborate implications of the modern European aesthetic consciousness. We can be perfectly certain that the Greeks did not admire it in any such way.

The bold is mine. So how does that change things. Perhaps it doesn't for you, but I think it at least puts some strain on Jamal's distinction between craft as work product and craft as skill. — T Clark

But isn't Collingwood saying that we admire a work product as art precisely because we are so far removed from the practical use of the object?

In any case, I think it's wrong to break it down in the way that @Pinprick has done. As you've shown with your examples, and as I mentioned in passing myself, it's often precisely the perfect functionality of an object that makes it aesthetically pleasing. This distinction between function and prettiness is, to me, obviously a fruitless way of looking at it.

My question is can you have good art without good skill, craft, technique. Or maybe which matters more. — T Clark

I think maybe you sort of can, when the originality or beauty of a work outweighs the techincal flaws. I'd put this into two categories, (a) works by great artists who were nevertheless technically bad in some ways, and (b) accidentally good or interesting art made by people who are entirely unskilled and talentless.

(a) Don Quixote is full of mistakes, inconsistencies, continuity errors, boring bits, and yet it's been massively influential and loved by millions. Similarly, Henri Rousseau was a self-taught painter, clearly lacking in technical training, but was quickly considered a great and original artist by others in the art world. And his paintings are great. Crucially though, there is some kind of skill, craft, and technique going on here, just different.

(b) Outsider music is not always made by unskilled people, but the Shaggs surely is. The girls were pretty much forced to do it by their father. But the thing about this sort of thing is that, precisely because there is no conventional skill on show, it can sound refreshing, sonically interesting and arresting, etc., and it can be influential, meaning that it has a place in the world of art.

The question raised by (a) is what makes these great artists great, if it's not total technical competence? I wouldn't say it's meaning, though I wouldn't rule that out. Off the top of my head I think there can be great artistry in following a path of one's own, because doing so can produce unconventional, fascinating, and beautiful things--things that would not be the same if the artist possessed an all-round competence. So I think it comes down to a single-minded creativity and confidence in certain, sometimes narrow, directions.

If we discount (b) for the moment, maybe the proper answer is no, you can't have good art without some kind of technique, craft, or skill.

Or maybe put it like this: technique or craft is almost always required, but not necessarily the technique and craft that is traditionally handed down in formal training; certain individuals invent their own technique because they don't know any better. I just thought of another example: Ornette Coleman, the free jazz saxophonist, learned to play based on a total misconception of the notes he was playing, and his music is brilliant no doubt partly because of this:

When he learned to play the saxophone — at first using an alto saxophone his mother gave him when he was around 14 — he had not yet understood that, because of transposition between instruments, a C in the piano’s “concert key” was an A on his instrument. When he learned the truth, he said, he developed a lifelong suspicion of the rules of Western harmony and musical notation.

In essence, Mr. Coleman believed that all people had their own tonal centers. He often used the word “unison” — though not always in its more common musical-theory sense — to describe a group of people playing together harmoniously, even if in different keys.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/12/arts/music/ornette-coleman-jazz-saxophonist-dies-at-85-obituary.html



The way he freely shifts key in the solo starting at 1:46 is likely not something he'd have come up with if his training had gone more smoothly.

I wouldn’t call this separation “ill-conceived”, I would simply tend to regard the result as commercial art, or art produced with the intent of making money, promoting some cause, or whatever. The ‘conceptual artist’ in this case is the capitalist or boss and in this way does hold a higher status position, and reaps the lion-share of profits. It’s not just artistic concepts though, like any business it’s having access to resources that the talent lacks. — praxis

Yes, I agree. I suppose I meant rather that the separation is not the way it has to be.

Any names? — Noble Dust

Damien Hirst. Now, I know he has changed over the years but some time around 10 or 15 years ago he was asked (I can't find it online so I'm going from memory here) if skill was important to art, and his answer was something like, "no, because otherwise you might as well be doing macramé", and I remember being irritated by this dismissive attitude to skill. This and the fact that many of his works were (are?) actually produced by his employees.

As I say, he may have changed. I do know, for instance, that he does or has done his own paintings.

I'm trying to suggest that skill and creativity cannot be separated, that this is what some conceptual artists have tried to do.

What is an alternative role for the artist if she's not a creator? — Noble Dust

I didn't want to suggest that an artist is not, or should not be, a creator. Rather, I meant that artists might have been artificially elevated as practitioners of pure creativity, meaning something higher than a creativity tied to the physical aspects of making a work of art.

I wouldn't want to say that art = [craft, skill, and technique] + [vision, emotional investment, imagination], because it seems simplistic and reductive, but it might be a way of looking at it. For instance, some conceptual artists have the second addend, and the first is applied by the employees of the artist. And what does this say about conceptual art? — Jamal

Answering myself here...

What it might say is that conceptual art is a mistaken or ill-conceived separation of the two, that it's the exemplar of a belief in the false equation, art = [craft, skill, and technique] + [vision, emotional investment, imagination]. And this belief could be the result of the inflated status of the artist as creator, which is an ecomonic and sociological phenomenon.

I know people that love beautiful glassware, cabinetry, motorcycles, etc — Noble Dust

Many restaurants and homes have what I consider to be badly designed forks. I was in an Italian restaurant yesterday and ordered tagliatelle, but was shocked (shocked!) to see that my fork had short tines. Some might say that it was beautiful to look at, but if a tool is not fit for purpose, any beauty it might have is empty. Its eye-pleasing shape was superficial; for any tool, an important element in its beauty must be its functionality (and how it feels in the hand etc).

I sometimes stop to wonder why this is my favourite mug or t-shirt or sword.