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| lady wakasa |
 Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 12:57 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
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Location: Beyond the Blue Horizon
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 3:25 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: Houston
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yambu wrote: Joe Vitus wrote: yambu wrote: BABEL Art's highest achievement is to teach us empathy, and this film does it in every frame.
Do you really believe this, or were you just emotionally overwhelmed by a great movie? In everything - EVERYTHING - that I remember about it, yes.
My point is, do you really think art's hightest achievement it to teach us empathy? I just don't see how, for instance, the Mona Lisa teaches us empathy. |
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| tirebiter |
| Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 3:41 pm |
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Art's highest achievement is to bring us closer to God.
Art's highest achievement is to make us horny.
Art's highest achievement is to allow us to transcend the quotidian bonds of existence.
Art's highest achievement is to undermine our preconceptions.
Art's highest achievement is to immanentize the Eschaton.
Art's highest achievement is to show us what it means to be human.
Art's highest achievement is to lessen gas pains in the very young.
Art's highest achievement is to mock the po-faced cretins who want to tell us what art is. |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 7:09 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: Houston
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| Like you just tried to tell us? |
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| Nancy |
| Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 7:12 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 4607
Location: Norman, OK
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Befade wrote: As to Ghandi......I will see Ben Kingsley in anything.
After seeing him in Bloodrayne, I won't. |
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"All in all, it's just another feather in the fan."
Isaacism, 2009 |
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| Rod |
| Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 7:24 pm |
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Location: Lithgow, Australia
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The Slate review beautifully concords with my own feelings about Gandhi the film.
http://www.slate.com/id/2162547/entry/2162381?nav=ais |
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A long time ago, but somehow in the future...It is a period of civil war and renegade paragraphs floating through space. |
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| Ghulam |
| Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 8:56 pm |
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| The Slate review is honest and recaptures the variegated response to the movie many of us experienced. |
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| yambu |
| Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 9:53 pm |
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Joe Vitus wrote: My point is, do you really think art's hightest achievement it to teach us empathy? I just don't see how, for instance, the Mona Lisa teaches us empathy. |
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That was great for you. How was it for me? |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2007 12:16 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: Houston
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| Fair enough. |
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You've got a great brain. You should keep it in your head.
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| tirebiter |
| Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2007 12:22 am |
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| Still waiting for Joe to weigh in: what is art's highest achievement? |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2007 1:51 am |
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Location: Houston
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I don't think we can talk about art's "highest achievement" because I don't think we can generalize. To me, that's too reductive, as if there is a goal towards which all art apires, that some works get closer to than others. Different works, different artists, have different goals. I'm more intersested in the aim of any particular work of art, the extent to which it does or does not fulfill its own intentions, than I am in generalizing.
By the way, that's one of the reasons I don't often participate in the Blanches or in list making. So many movies have such different goals, putting them in competition, out of which will emerge the "best" seems futile.
What struck me about Yambu's statement is exactly what I commented on: I don't see any empathy expressed by the Mona Lisa, yet it is clearly one of the world's great art pieces. I have trouble with making emotional or value judgements intrinsic to a definition of art, which strikes me as middle class reductivism: art as a tool to improve humanity. Nonsense. Art, to me, is an end in itself, not a functional mechanism. Art doesn't necessarily "do" anything. It is. Now, if someone wants to say "I only appreciate or feel a sense of completion when a work of art expresses empathy and serves to connect people to each other," I can totally accept that. Again, I can think of works of art I like that don't do that, but in most cases I'd probably agree.
Of course, "empathy" is a tricky word because it can be stretched to mean anything. Empathy is clearly the goal in a work that stresses our common humanity, but it also operates in a work of harsh, unforgiving satire...in the latter, what we are expected to empathize with is not "humanity" but the artist's singular response to it. But when the word "empathy" can be stretched this far, it really becomes useless in terms of identifying a greatest achievement. And I'm pretty sure that's not what Yambu was going for, anyway (and I mean to compliment him by saying that).
If I were going to generalize about what I think constitutes a work of art (which, obviously, is not the same as according it a highest achievement), I'd say it is a man made thing, intentionally created, that expresses some world view or idea (even if that idea is simply "there's no idea here") and has some sort of distance that marks it off from the world around it: a frame, a proscenium, a binding, something that keeps us apart from it, and by which we contemplate it in its entirety. |
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You've got a great brain. You should keep it in your head.
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| jeremy |
| Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2007 3:51 am |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 6794
Location: Derby, England and Hamilton, New Zealand (yes they are about 12,000 miles apart)
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| A guy in Jackass jumps out of a tree in his underpants. They are fastened to a branch by straps a metre or so long. Fist time round the underpants rip in to two. With his second attempt he succeeds in givng himself the mother of all wedgies. Why did he do it? To see what it felt like, to entertain his friends, to affrim his existance, to share an experience, to create a moment that would live on in the memories of others, as a commentary on the nature of modern society, as part of an ongoing artistic discourse, to test Andy Warhol's dictum, to shout "look at me", for money...I suspect he did it for the same reasons that all art gets made. |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2007 4:43 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: Houston
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| I don't really disagree with you. |
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You've got a great brain. You should keep it in your head.
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| Rod |
| Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2007 5:11 am |
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Joined: 21 Dec 2004
Posts: 2944
Location: Lithgow, Australia
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| I do. |
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A long time ago, but somehow in the future...It is a period of civil war and renegade paragraphs floating through space. |
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| tirebiter |
| Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2007 6:39 am |
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Posts: 4011
Location: not far away
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It's all just a flying fuck at a rolling donut, as Marlon says to Maria in Last Tango.
"Art is significant deformity," someone once said. Sounds good to me. |
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