by Gimpei | 23:21 in Rant |
Damn Nabokov is cool. He reminds me of the mental image I had of Pnin when I was reading Pnin. I also love how he declines to ascribe any overarching meaning to the book, and asks that it simply speak for itself.Its so much better than all the awful conceptual art we have these days, which is incapable of standing on its own, and instead justifies its existence by "challenging preconceptions." Often these challenges come in the form rehashed and outdated continental philosophy (e.g. making us aware of the limits of our language games through the use of the sublime) or else epiphanies akin to an undergraduate psych thesis (e.g. when Douglas Huebler asked museum visitors to write down one authentic secret and then collected them in an 1800 page book. Guess what? Most of the secrets are the same! Oh my God!).I've always found the underpinnings of conceptual art to be profoundly stupid. If the point of conceptual art is to challenge preconceptions, doesn't that presuppose that the artist has some privileged perspective on the world that is inaccessible to the rest of us normal people? Of all people in the world who I'd look to for a new perspective, the last person would be some self-absorbed coke snorting "artiste" whose closest connection to the outside world is Queens. I suppose you could use some sort of marxist/freudian argument divorcing artistic intent from effect, but seriously you'd still have to rely upon the same pompous, talentless, drug-addled hack as your medium. *Cough* Tracey Emin *Cough*.What makes the act of artistic creation so special that it can get around the Duhem-Quine problem that is so problematic for scientific enquiry? Magic? Cocaine? Magical cocaine? Discuss amongst yourselves.
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