{"id":1282,"date":"2009-07-17T05:32:40","date_gmt":"2009-07-17T05:32:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/?p=1282"},"modified":"2009-07-17T05:33:21","modified_gmt":"2009-07-17T05:33:21","slug":"1282","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/2009\/07\/17\/1282\/","title":{"rendered":"Some keys to understanding artistry"},"content":{"rendered":"

…the words “problem” and “solution” as commonly \t\tused, belong to the analytic approach to phenomena, and not to the creative. \t\tThough it has become a commonplace of platform rhetoric that we can only “solve \t\tour problems” by dealing with them “in a creative way”, those phrases betray, \t\teither that the speaker has repeated a popular cliche without bothering to \t\tthink what it means, or that he is quite ignorant of the nature of \t\tcreativeness.<\/p>\n

-Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, Ch.11<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And a lot more. Bear with me here:<\/p>\n

Yet the common man, obsessed by the practice of a mathematical and \t\tscientific period, is nevertheless obscurely aware that that enigmatic figure, \t\tthe creative artist, possesses some power of interpretation which he has not, \t\tsome access to the hidden things behind that baffling curtain of phenomena \t\twhich he cannot penetrate<\/strong>. Sometimes he merely resents this, as men do often \t\tresent an inexplicable and incommunicable superiority. Sometimes he dismisses \t\tit: “He is a dreamer; let us leave him. Pass.” But at other times-especially \t\twhen the disharmonies of contemporary existence force themselves on his \t\tattention with an urgency that cannot be ignored, he will lay hold of the \t\tartist and demand to be let into his secret. “Here, you!” he will cry, “you \t\thave some trick, some pass-word, some magic formula that unlocks the puzzle of \t\tthe universe. Apply it for us. Give us the solution to the problems of \t\tcivilisation.”<\/p>\n

This, though excusable, is scarcely fair, since the artist does not see \t\tlife as a problem to be solved, but as a medium for creation. He is asked to \t\tsettle the common man’s affairs for him; but he is well aware that creation \t\tsettles nothing. The thing that is settled is finished and dead, and his \t\tconcern is not with death but with life: “that ye may have life and have it \t\tmore abundantly”. True, the artist can, out of his own experience, tell the \t\tcommon man a great deal about the fulfilment of man’s nature in living; but he \t\tcan only produce the most unsatisfactory kind of reply if he is persistently \t\tasked the wrong question<\/strong>. And, as I have (perhaps somewhat heatedly) maintained \t\tin my preface, an incapacity for asking the right question has grown, in our \t\ttime and country, to the proportions of an endemic disease.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yes yes yes. This really gets to the heart of what art is really about (and what it’s not about). This also deep into the root of why people who only ask propositions and demand propositional answers don’t get it, especially when it comes to describing God. Here is why when fundamentalists produce art, it sucks so bad. Those who demand that a song be about something very specific and ONLY about that thing are the worst of audiences (and songwriters).<\/p>\n

Yes, the unstable artist, the dreamer, is a threat to orthodoxy, but without him, you have no hope of achieving a robust orthodoxy. You hear that? None whatsoever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…the words “problem” and “solution” as commonly used, belong to the analytic approach to phenomena, and not to the creative. Though it has become a commonplace of platform rhetoric that we can only “solve our problems” by dealing with them “in a creative way”, those phrases betray, either that the speaker has repeated a popular … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Some keys to understanding artistry”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1282"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1285,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1282\/revisions\/1285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}