Date: Mon, 26 Jan 1998 08:40:43 -0500
From: Reg Lilly <rlilly-AT-scott.skidmore.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Anyone get Gass?


David Langston wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 20 Jan 1998, Reg Lilly wrote:
> 
> >       This sounds like a version of Dickie's Institutional Theory of Art,
> > which I've always found silly and question begging.  So something can
> > not be art (driftwood) and become art be becoming a "candidate for
> > appreication" as a work of art,
> 
> and then he wrote....
> 
> > Art is not just a thing, but a history, a  tradition, and that's just a
> > beginning.  It's also a 'working' which can be  analyzed as such, as I
> > think Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty correctly point out.
> 
> (I'm only getting to my e-mail because the bobsled run called "first week
> of class" just ended...)

	... two runs, the one mentioned, then the snow-day for me.


> 
> I don't see any substantive contradiction between Reg's first and second
> statements.  Art can "work" and have a "history" precisely because it
> belongs to a socially-sanctioned discourse (roughly: "an institutional
> theory of art").  Both the history and the conditions by which art "works"
> its magic belong to that discursive set.  "Art" as social process
> sanctions a division between "art" and "criticism," and it makes
> possible the creation of "art" out of found objects like driftwood.  It
> also allows for modifying or revolutionizing what we think of as art.


	I guess I have to agree with you so far, but; Merleau-Ponty and Dickie would
agree on one point, that art is not without it's tradition.  However, the thrust
I get from Dickie is his obsessino with authority, authorization, and even
certification.  Of course the most difficult thing that a status quo thinker
like Dickie has in explaining (beyond the central point of 'how does an
institution become an institution') is how artworks and movements can arrive
that rupture the institutionalized notion of art; change is a a rather difficult
thing for Dickie.  Merleau-Ponty focusses on describing how art 'works', and its
historical working is only a part (and I'm not sure an essential part) of that
working.

> 
> That old modernist parable (by Kafka? I think...) about leopards who
> break into the sacred precincts and drink from the sacred bowls so often
> that their violation is made part of the sacred ceremonies seems apt.
> 
> To some degree, the founding, creation, and criticism of art is a circular
> process -- not a circular argument -- because the theory of art and
> specific art objects/projects work to define each other.

	Yeah, I'm pretty much with Heidegger on this, the circle of art, artist,
artwork (and, left out by Heidegger, art critic).



> 
> I don't understand why this position would be incompatible with
> Merleau-Ponty....or, for that matter (once allowances are made for a more
> open-ended historical process) why it would be very distant from T.S.
> Eliot's position in "Tradition and the Individual Talent."

	I'm sympathetic with Eliot and think he's more on the side of
Merleau-Ponty/Heidegger than Dickie.

Ciao,
Reg


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