[-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology

Wed Jul 7 00:35:09 EST 2010

Hi All,

I find myself confused between lenses so far. If we start from the individual,
we get some kinds of data; if we start from society, we get another. So,
perhaps, Simon is correct in asserting that "art" is only a couple of hundred
years old although that ties "art" to specific social arrangements in the
Western World. But even then, we generally think og Rubens, say, as making
"art" but any knowledge of his actual practice would have to include knowledge
that he ran a huge workshop, that "his" works were the product of many 
hands --
and, that far from being confined to a garret, he was a diplomat and a spy for
his country while, among other things, being rtesident in the Spanish royal
court where he taught Velasquez. Any trip through a major Museum (say the
Metropolitan in NYC) makes it clear that objects we call ART have been 
made for
thousands of years. Likewise, any reader of art history finds appeals to
"schools", student/teacher relationships, ideas about who could have 
seen what,
etc. So even stuff that is called "art" is placed in a context of influence
between people and generations. It seems to me that the "art" world has been
global for a long time now, with educated artists drawing from
foreign/ancient/anthropoligical influences. So as one who does not 
practice her
art on the web per se, I will ask -- what is distinctive about aesthetic
expression that depends upon the tools that the web enables?

With regard to the cognitive issues, I thought the dominance of the verbal was
laid to rest a long time ago. There is "thinking" that is purely visual. What
the verbal can do is make a "translation" (with subsequent loss of information
parallel, perhaps, to compression in the digital) that allows us to 
communicate
with each other about our perceptual experience. See Lakoff and Johnson,
Philosphy in the Flesh.

Christina

Quoting Simon Biggs <s.biggs at eca.ac.uk>:

> Perhaps there is a distinction to be made between creativity (a trait most,
> if not all, humans seem to possess) and art (an activity that emerged a
> couple of hundred years ago that places value upon a specific socially
> defined mode of creative activity).
>
> As for art being akin to language and both being somehow hard-wired into the
> brain...this is contentious territory. This Chomskian view, popular in
> neuroscience and other empirical domains, that regards language (and thus
> many aspects of self) as determined by cerebral biology is in direct
> contradistinction to a view that would regard language and self as emerging
> from the social. It is basically the old nature/nurture debate re-hashed.
>
> Do we want to go there?
>
> Best
>
> Simon
>
>
> Simon Biggs
> s.biggs at eca.ac.uk  simon at littlepig.org.uk
> Skype: simonbiggsuk
> http://www.littlepig.org.uk/
>
> Research Professor  edinburgh college of art
> http://www.eca.ac.uk/
> Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative Environments
> http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/
> Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice
> http://www.elmcip.net/
> Centre for Film, Performance and Media Arts
> http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/film-performance-media-arts
>
>
>> From: "G.H. Hovagimyan" <ghh at thing.net>
>> Reply-To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
>> Date: Mon, 5 Jul 2010 09:55:24 -0400
>> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
>> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology
>>
>> gh comments:
>> I believe that all art is based in the language function of the
>> brain.   I also think that the cognitive sciences are having a
>> profound effect on our understanding of art.  As a corollary I think
>> that the form of religion, the creation of the god myths throughout
>> the world comes from two separate survival instincts in humans. One is
>> the ability to believe that something is there even though we can't
>> see it. This is pretty handy when tracking animals on a hunt or
>> hearing a noise in the trees and understanding it might be an animal
>> about to attack you.  The other part of the brain that is reasoning
>> always attaches a causal relationship to events even if one is not
>> there.   God exists even though we can't see him/her.  Anyway,  Art
>> and aesthetics are abstract functions of language. They are "word
>> games" ala Wittgenstein on a certain level.  BUt I also believe that
>> artists are experimenters. They make things and do things because they
>> want to see what will happen.  An artist usually doesn't know the
>> outcome of their creative process. They try to surprise themselves.
>> This surprise is the basis of creativity.   It's quite different from
>> craft or design where the outcome is known and the process is one of
>> advancing to the already known outcome.  This is one of the basic
>> problems with art in a capitalist society.  Commodities have to be
>> known, fixed and quantifiable  in order to be given value so they can
>> be bought and sold.  The more there is a fixed outcome for an artwork
>> the easier to attach a value to it but the less creative
>> experimentation is involved in the process.
>> Considering the topic of art as a social process and a group/community
>> effort that point of view and process, engages the language function
>> and also spurs on creative experimentation for members of the group.
>> I always find that group collaborations strecth my point of view and
>> open up news ways of perceiving things and methods of making art.  By
>> the way, the other discussion of art as a part of religion is bogus.
>> religions go to artists and architects and ask them to come up with a
>> language or composition that somehow expresses the unknowable of their
>> religious dogma. Art is external to religion it doesn't come from
>> religion or a religious impulse.
>> On Jul 4, 2010, at 9:36 PM, Yunzi Li wrote:
>>
>>> or him, everything is translation, which is closely related to his
>>> view that seeing actions as manipulation in "Grammars of creation".
>>> Isn't it?
>>
>> G.H. Hovagimyan
>> http://nujus.net/~gh
>> http://artistsmeeting.org
>> http://turbulence.org/Works/plazaville
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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