With Bill Beckley, artist, I edited a book, Uncontrollable Beauty, with my favorite essays on aesthetic values. Alfred, this anthology contains a long debate on value between the head of Moma, Bill Rubin, and the great classicist Tom McEvilley. I also put in some of my favorite essays by Meyer Schapiro, Hubert Damisch, etc. And each essay points to a thousand other texts from Kant to Hegel or contemporary philosophers and artists (even poems on Beauty.) While this anthology is not as suddenly sensible as Pounds ABC, it was meant to be a very plural beginning for someone interested in relativism and taste and value. Its not that there are no books on the subject of value, theres almost nothing that is more discussed. TSEliot was asked by a member of an audience whether there could be a firm sense of aesthetics without a belief in God, and Eliot presumably murmured thats he was in agreement. However, there are a hundred other perspectives. East and West,too.The famously dense essay on Style by Meyer Schapiro years ago is a good place for any art or poetry student to begin. Or backwards from Leo Steinberg against formalism and Greenberg to young philosophers like David Carrier, There are tens of thousands of essays and books on the subject--for example, Merleauy-Pontys essay on Cezanne or Meyer on perfection. Barney Newman wrote beautifully on the idea of value in abstract art. One of the best new books on the lyric is Sappho by McEvilley, recently dead. David Hume suggests that there is a startling amount of agreement in the arts, not the reverse. Kermode has a book on the exact opposite idea--how recent the love of Botticelli is. Shakespeares reputation(s) go up and down--the French hated our Bard until the beginning of romanticism. Jakobsons harping on repetition is useful, and the work of Kristeva is not fuitless either.Each page of Pasternak and Mayakovsky is about values in art. We are all condemned to values-see Peirce and our latest pragmatists Cavell and Gass and others. Platos hatred of the best art of his time is instructive, or all those false debates between Brahms and Wagner (see Hanslick)_. Theory like beauty is uncontrollable. And one doesn;t need the word beauty--there are synonyms. If you think that the institutional theory is wise--that we rise in contexts of power and powerlessness--it is also useful to have what I call anti-inastitutional theory--that raft de-defines. Forgive my typos--Parkinson produces its own hare-raising rabbit hunts. A theory of values can be as moving and beautiful as anything--as in Aristotle or Boileau or Ponge. Imagine Borges without his love of theory. Not everyone wants to become a student of philosophy, but it is hard to avoid. Thats why I wanted an anthology (edited with an artist) that would be useful in initiating debate. The worst fallacies can also be dissolved by knowing something about true argument and thought. One can learn ton dismiss the appeal to authority, the appeal to pity, the appeal even, to force. By the way, our book on beauty was utterly misinterpreted by different critics! It was regarded as a return to archaic values of beauty when it was actually a pluralist palette of perspectives. Sad that thje philosophy bookstore downtown is closed. Richard Kuhns has a good anthology on values.I myself am a vicious relativist and pluralist. Like a good neo-Nietzschean I am unaware of a stable sense of values--just cross from culture to culture. I love the restlessness of Meyer Schapiros most radiant adjustments--he loved figurative AND abstract work. Guston is a sublime example, with Picasso, of fierce intimate changes. It was said that a show of Picasso was always a group show.
Posted on: Thu, 17 Oct 2013 14:26:14 +0000
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