“Art Is Whatever You Can Get Away With”(Marshall McLuhan)

(From discussion of a photo called “Honeydew”.)

Uh-oh. Kyle M. objects: “‘I’m an ithyphallic reductionist with a hard-on for physics.’ Well you are only cutting yourself off at the knees. You have successfully ‘reduced’ a cultured object to superficial sterile image of correctness.” Given the ithyphallic metonymy, let’s be thankful that unkind cut comes at the knees. :-) Anyway, Kyle, are we talking about the same “reductionism”? Handy definition: reductionism posits that all human experience derives from biological processes explicable by the laws of chemistry and physics. (For a more generous view see Edward O. Wilson’s recent book Consilience.) An argument or a person can be reductionist, but not a photo. This photo’s simply a still life, for which the French have (naturally) a franker name: nature morte. I didn’t say it, they did.

“‘By me, art can deliver new points of view but not new knowledge.’ That is really sad to hear. The choice to deny any possible knowledge that may come from art is my definition of ignorance.” Yo, I’ll take knowledge wherever I can find it, but the “knowledge” that comes from art is, to be kind, illusory – to be less kind, it’s propaganda. With that great American C.S. Peirce, I believe that knowledge is a public matter – if you can’t test it or even agree on it, it ain’t knowledge.

As to ignorance, well of course. Calling any human person ignorant is mere rhetoric, like saying that women are effeminate. Ignorance is the human condition.

“Some people are less ignorant and more persistent and determined and eventually break free from that proverbial cage, they are called professional artists.” Nonsense: professional artists are by definition folks who live by selling their art – wedding photographers, for example. Most of them are sweet guys, but I never met one who said he’d achieved satori.

Matt S. adds: “Before jumping all over Leslie for his statement, I’d want to know what he means by ‘knowledge.’” (Hey, pile on, that’s what I’m here for.) “Clearly, a photograph or other work can impart raw ‘knowledge’: a picture of two sloths mating can impart on me knowledge of how two sloths mate. A picture (artistically composed and exposed) of a sign that says ‘The distance between the earth and the sun is 93 million miles’ can impart that knowledge too.”

Well... A camera, like our eyes, can deliver information that’s new to us, if only as a photocopy of an informative text. But we were speaking about art, not photography.

“What makes ‘art’ special is the facility with which more subtle forms of ‘knowledge,’ like ‘points of view,’ can be transmitted.”

Close, and I appreciate the sentiment, but I won’t concede that a point of view is “knowledge” – note that even Matt uses quotation marks.

But nobody quoted my next paragraph, which says why I think art is such hot, such necessary stuff: We’re just out of the trees, and full of bush devils who will destroy us if we don’t give them something to do with their hands. Art keeps our demons from tearing us to rags. Whatever comes after us will have no demons and no art. I stand by that.