I’m not convinced though, that thoughts are necessarily just the activities of the brain. Leaving aside the role of the whole human body in the course of thought, this could be something like assuming that you can tap into the wifi with a transistor radio or power your car with crude oil. How do we know that the neural event isn’t just a carrier for another phenomenon that the neurons can interpret as a collective, but which would be opaque to an MRI or PET scan?
Read MoreThis isn’t innovative. What might be somewhat new is that, at least to me, it seems that for a work of art to be “successful” it is far more important to use the chosen symbolic language effectively than to say anything terribly innovative. A novel message presented without artifice would not be as effective as a trite message presented skillfully.
Read MorePerversity is what might be called “ectopic play” or “ectopic sovereignty” – sovereign authority deployed in a limited fashion without permission and in a place where it isn’t considered to belong. In some contexts this might be criminal or stupid. In others, it can be genius. This juxtaposition is what makes perversity so interesting to me. It is the willingness to creatively misuse a given system.
Read MoreThis is part of what led me to consider this question further after hearing it brought up on that podcast: how is such a large segment of the population – a plurality, if not a majority – so incapable of producing noteworthy art? And what might this have to do with the culture war that never actually seems to stop?
Read MoreThe art work is, however, an act – it is an action, performed by an artist, that persists through time, the medium of its transmission into the future as a vehicle for the artwork. They are the means by which it becomes accessible to other people, and the vector along which it travels through time.
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