The Purpose of Art

By -
To believe that art exists for
a purpose is to be confused.
For those who do not see this,
I would ask you to ask yourself,
"What is the purpose of a landscape painting?"

And your inventing mind might invent a legitimate purpose
for that painting:
It could alleviate melancholy.
Maybe enchant the cubicled mind.

But to all these legitimate purposes we could add another:
our rectangular painting could serve as a dinner plate.

If you say that being a dinner plate is very different than being art,
I rest my case. For it is something like a prose article,
mascarading as a poem.

Comments

  1. Unknown7:40 AM

    Reading this reminded me of when I , in a roundabout way, asked a visitng artist to our college gallery how she responds when people say her work looks like vomit.

    One mans vomit is another mans dinner plate.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Josiah Neeley8:11 AM

    If art doesn't have a purpose then
    how can you tell good art from bad?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nathan Conroy1:18 AM

      What is better in art is what is more beautiful; that's how!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more