![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Dec. 28th, 2008 03:39 amHow is it possible that art/literature can capture what things are like? Because it is not merely an emptying out of the mind into an element alien to it in which its structure is lost--following a similar operation of the world's incoherently emptying itself into the mind--but an emptying out of the mind into an element alien to it in which its structure is lost that is observed by the mind itself. Some things go less wrong than others, the artist perceives. This ability to compare by feel, hence self-correct, + time -> the inevitability that what things are like will get into notes, strokes, words to the point we need them to do so. To the extent the writer needs them to, anyway--and to the extent we meet her needs when she meets ours (aided by her likely needing what she's finding just as much as we do), enough artists working over enough time will get us what we want, what we're like.
(This probably helps explain why traditions are needed, but also why art goes downhill so fast after some peak figure or generation appears. Mediocrities, wonders, con-men are permitted because the needs have been met (as much as they plausibly could along that particular line, at least) while the artistic role, because of our gratitude, is treated as sacred, as needing to remain filled. And we hardly knew what hit us, after all--it wasn't us that did it, it was the few artists, the one artist. Maybe there's more where that came from, if the approach is changed slightly, we think, thereby putting Scheherezade off the hook and on retainer. We barely let the real ones subsist, because we didn't yet know what they could do, what what they could do really was, but those who followed we throw money at, love at, titles--and then a generation later we forget them all, unless the government should fund the dying art for reasons of national pride, or the young should demand to have something new just for them.
No one asks for Super-Shakespeare after reading Shakespeare--no one asks for Super-Michelangelo, Super-Mozart. The honor of their profession rises in their wake just as expectations fall--because who cares? You have the thing, or at least far more of it than you dreamed possible. Hence the obsession with changing how it's done, among latecoming artists--your one hope is to break some new genre out of an older one, if you care about being remembered rather than merely paid. And every new genre follows the same curve, doesn't it?)
(This probably helps explain why traditions are needed, but also why art goes downhill so fast after some peak figure or generation appears. Mediocrities, wonders, con-men are permitted because the needs have been met (as much as they plausibly could along that particular line, at least) while the artistic role, because of our gratitude, is treated as sacred, as needing to remain filled. And we hardly knew what hit us, after all--it wasn't us that did it, it was the few artists, the one artist. Maybe there's more where that came from, if the approach is changed slightly, we think, thereby putting Scheherezade off the hook and on retainer. We barely let the real ones subsist, because we didn't yet know what they could do, what what they could do really was, but those who followed we throw money at, love at, titles--and then a generation later we forget them all, unless the government should fund the dying art for reasons of national pride, or the young should demand to have something new just for them.
No one asks for Super-Shakespeare after reading Shakespeare--no one asks for Super-Michelangelo, Super-Mozart. The honor of their profession rises in their wake just as expectations fall--because who cares? You have the thing, or at least far more of it than you dreamed possible. Hence the obsession with changing how it's done, among latecoming artists--your one hope is to break some new genre out of an older one, if you care about being remembered rather than merely paid. And every new genre follows the same curve, doesn't it?)
