Here's a pretty big one, focused on fiction. As a DtF seed, it grew out of discussions at the FTL and greenery posts, and ties in with this past Dtf. For more reading you could try this article on V for Vendetta and the one last time on progress.
To try and fasten any responsibility on art as the cause of life seems to me to put the case the wrong way around. Art consists of reshaping life but it does not create life, nor cause life.
Can this really be true? Do ideas not lead us on?
7 comments:
I think Kubrick's right. Obviously, life exists sans art. But as he suggests but does not say directly art is one of the things that imbues life with meaning. The "reshaping" he's talking about is contextualization and interpretation, I think.
Art is just another way of speaking to convey what cannot be said..a bit like using your hands to emphasise a word or sentence.
Cheers
paul
PS...I´ve thought about what you said about putting my ideas down...a book may be in the offing. :-D
@ Trey - That understanding makes sense to me. He was quoted in the context of potential for violence inspired by A Clockwork Orange, and I read it as an attempted ward against the accusations. Still, contextualisation and interpretation introduce subjectivity, and could then reflect biases and deep-seated needs, and might be expected to have an audience. We can ask what the message is in that reshaping of life, and how it's received. What effect does it have on the receiver? If there can be an effect, art would seem able to create or cause life.
@ Paul's Bods - Well, there are quite a few hand signals out there that can very much create and cause life, in the sense of a high level of animation..! I'm chuffed there could be a book - the idea of settling down with that makes me happy.
I had the feeling that this would be about Clockwork Orange. That's a theme that hits a nerve with me, as a Goth and Metal fan I've more than familiar with the suggestion/accusation that music, art in general, makes people aggressive, suicidal and whatnot.
Art, movies, literature music ect. can definitely suggest new ideas for us, can change the way we think. So I do think that it can "create life", as Kubrick puts it.
I see myself most certainly shaped by the books I have read, the movies I watched ect. Those are seeds, so to speak, but I do think that the choice to let them grow is mine alone, also the decision into what shape I allowed them to grow.
I can see the influence works have had on me too, and I'd like to believe that we have a free choice in the shaping. Then again, to extend the metaphor, the seeds could be growing up as the plants of a tight-knit hedgerow, each plant competing for space and light against the others, shaping each other without our control. We'd naturally prefer the understanding that when the plants of our better nature thrive, it was because of our own cultivation, but it might only be the luck of the fall, the prevailing conditions and individual dramas in the landscape. Bleak it may sound, but there's still some comfort in the idea if true.
You're right, the shape of the landscape our mind's garden grows in can be beyond our control. Society, parents, peers will have influences on it that may not even come into our conscious mind. But I still believe in having a choice.
Me too. And however true it may or may not be, even that belief seems a very precious thing.
Post a Comment