The OM Festival

[meggo]

and meggo...you can make assum,ptions abotu taste, but judging taste really is only a misnomer for a comparison against your own taste. creates a negative vibe i think.

i am in complete agreement, o robb-o. exactly the point i was trying to make. ::

[kung]

Meggo yours and scotties question is a valid one and I was trying to answer it in a roundabout way at least by mocking my kind of I guess essentialism (whatever I say is the shit is essential). I do this both as a living breathing self-parody and stone faced serious. But to take the question beyond just taste it then becomes a question of what is art and what is not and who decides which is a far more interesting question. I came across this which is admittedly dense but yields good fruit:

I. Art & Artworks

What is art? What is the artwork? Who is the artist?

Should it matter if the creator is human?

Should it matter if the object is an "exemplar" of its type?

Does it matter if the creator of the object intended it to be received as art?

Must the object have an audience?

Essentialist theories: These are usually traced back to the Greek philosopher Plato, who contended that essences of particular things--from beds to beauty to art--are discoverable by a process of careful philosophical reflection. Essentialist theories lead to closed concepts of art. For example, the early twentieth century art critic Clive Bell wrote:

Either all works of . . . art have some common quality, or when we speak of "works of art" we gibber. Everyone speaks of "art," making a mental classification by which he [sic] distinguishes the class "works of art" from all other classes. What is the justification of this classification? What is the quality common and peculiar to all members of this class?

Tartarkiewicz's disjunctive definition of art also is an essentialist theory, even though it broadens the definition of what can be art to three possible characterizations:

Art is either:

a) a reproduction of things

a construction of forms, or

c) an expression of experiences such that it is capable of evoking delight, emotion, or shock (Puzzles, 17)

Antiessentialists content that Plato was wrong: for a good number of important terms, including art, there is no one feature or set of features that is common to all memebers of the group sharing the name. Ludwig Wittengenstein is best known for working in this tradition. He contended that for any definition one might propose of these terms (he used "game"), there are counterexamples and proposed overlapping features, "family resemblances." No single definition or characteristic can always be found in all examples where the term "game" is used.

Paul Ziff & Morris Weitz applied to art Wittengenstein's idea of "family resemblances." Ziff observed: "so long as there are artistic revolutions, the phrase 'work of art,' will continue to be used in many ways." Weitz proposed the "open concept of art." The conditions of application are always emendable and corrigible.

The most famous example of an anti-antiessentialist theory of art is the Institutional theory, developed by George Dickie. He argued that "art is not indefinable after all. His definition originally went like this:

A work of art in the classificatory sense (1) is an artifact

(2) a set of aspects of which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld).

He later revised this definition into five deliberately circular definitions that he says reveal the "inflected" nature of art:

1. an artist is a person who participates with understanding in the making of a work of art.

2. a work of art is an artifact of a kind created to be presented to an artworld public.

3. A public is a set of persons the members of which are prepared in some degree to understand an object which is presented to them.

4. The artworld is the totality of all artworld systems.

5. An artworld system is a framework for the presentation of a work of art by an artist to an artworld public.

The point is that the artworld is a dynamic social institution, not static,and that this institution defines art.

Sample art and artwork puzzles include "Ruby the Elephant "and "Betsy the Chimpanzee," "Erased DeKooning," and Duchamp's Fountain.

[meggo]

thanks kung... still kinda fuzzy but good food for thought.

[bradm]

I tend to get my definition of "art" from Frank Zappa, who said that art is what the artist says it is. Take some "stuff", put a "frame" around it, and say, "This is my art," and you've created a work of art.

In music, this jibes well with the "music is organized sound" definition (which I like): the composer takes some sounds, which could be anything from a full symphony orchestra (e.g., Wagner) to ambient noises in a room (e.g., John Cage's "4:33"), applies/specifies some organization (e.g., fully scored symphony, or "just let it happen"), and calls it a piece of music.

I get bugged when I hear people ask of modern art (e.g., the works that have appeared in recent years at the Tate Gallery in London), "Is it art?" Of course it's art; it's art because the artist says it is. Whether it's good art or not depends on the viewier.

kung, I read your "dense" quotation, and I think the second (5-point) part is compatible with the above, but I'm not really sure; any thoughts?

Aloha,

Brad

[LionLocks]

Nice BradM. Man, Im getting sick of all wannabe highclass music critics out there. Especialy the ones getting high of themselves. Lol. Glad someone actually quoted Zappa. This is getting ridicules... Oh and Rob..., who was talking about Caution Jam? heahea.

[AdamH]

Lionlocks...are you really an English teacher?

[SaggyBalls]

nobody was talking about caution jam, but to me a band that has a sound that's suprisingly like another band (like wassabi to rusted root and cavern to phish) i've gotta make a comparison.

it's a fun show but it's totally suited to OM. there are gonna be so many 'beats hippies' that'll dig their schtick. they'll eat that vibe up. I think this board has a huge range of people that post but i don't get the 'love everything' vibe that i'd expect from a wassabi board.

jeff...i'm not suprised at all that you like wassabi. i'd be very suprised to see you buying a tortoise album. you're gonna have the best time of your life if you go to OM.

that's one of the reasons I like this board. so many different tastes. that's also the reason i loved OM...at any given time at night you can find drum n bass, goa, house, ambient, electroacoustics, trance, and pretty much any sort of underground dance music to hit it to. ther are even bands. new venue this year (i loved it last year. fave venue. all it needed was the ocean but it was already a better time than evolve)

serious.

hit it up if you can.

[LionLocks]

Post deleted by LionLocks

[kung]

Brah I really hope you aren't in fact an english teacher- that's just ridicules. Didn't mean to get too far afield on the OM discussion, I agree with everything Beats has said, though I've never been I like the idea of not having to rush around from stage to stage to catch this or that, the workshops, vibe, food and setting. And yes Wassabi will SO fit in with that vibe although again I wouldn't describe them as IDM (Intelligent Dance Music) maybe Inebriated Dance Music or Indecisive Dance Music. Just buy a fucking Tortoise record alright.

To your question I guess some of those non-essentialist ideas work with either what Zappa was saying or John Cage was doing and the Tate gallery examples are on point. In Canada the Order of Canada was just given to Istvan Kantor who many would question as 'art' or award worthy- so I guess Canada's pretty hip to the breeze.

[AdamH]

Let me axe you something...

If I used the word razore in a sentanse and calt myself an english teacher, wooden you wonder what in the fack I was alla bout?