quality and art 2: hype, fiction, pirsig & page rank continued

(ok where was i. my problem with a blog like this one is that i cannot begin to write as fast as what my thoughts should like for speed, and also i cannot write for any spells due to rsi. so i have to cut it up in pieces, but then the train of thought becomes one of those public transportation misadventures...)

so if i cannot determine quality (even restricted to art) consistently even for myself, how should i be able to communicate to others what i mean by it? does it even have some sort of meaning or ... are we all just fooling ourselves and each other? is quality just fiction? [just justifying the mystifying title of these blogposts explicitly]

i can however look at the mechanisms which cause some science, art, music, cars, bridges, food,... to be given the predicate `quality' by ... `experts' - and from the experts the general public soon follows / or by the general public - and from the general public the `experts' soon follow...

in the end what it boils down to, in my not so humble opinion (imnsho), is that we humans have not got a better `objective' concept of quality than what i would call generalized page rank. consider each human to be like a web page, having some page rank. consider some humans to be expert, these get a high generalized page rank (gpr). then see what kind of buzz (=gpr) a certain subject (for instance an art work, or an artist) generates to determine its `objective' quality.

[i apologize to those readers who do not know how google calculates page rank, but the web overflows with info on this]

obviously, there are many snags behind this way of determining quality. it yet is the current practice in almost all disciplines i know of. one obvious snag is that this gpr-business leads to hypes: things that create a buzz because they create a buzz because everyone is busy buzzing about it...until the hype moves on and people wonder: why was anybody ever truly interested in this for longer than five days?

and this is where i believe pirsigs approach is valuable, on the personal level. because if i drop the prerequisite that i should be able to communicate objectively what quality is, then i can explore quality on the personal, probably non-verbal level.

as an artist, i feel this is what i should do - disregarding gpr- mechanisms and especially hype-like buzzing. to be continued.

quality and art: hype, fiction, pirsig & page rank

many things. many things i've been thinking, about quality. quality being half of my current life motto, the other half being love. (is there any real difference between the two? spiritual love can be seen as quality in human relations, quality can be seen as love of what is good. but what is good? what is spiritual love?)

this weekend i visited the rijksmuseum in amsterdam. took my children there to see some art treasures, only to find...that even on a personal level i cannot consistently experience let alone define quality.

the paintings that i was especially looking forward to enjoy: rembrandt's de staalmeesters and the jewish bride and the milkmaid by johannes vermeer. in de staalmeesters i was happy to find once more my admiration for the red tablecloth: a true and wonderful abstract painting hidden in a group portrait. but the jewish bride left me less thrilled than on earlier visits. and the milkmaid didn't hardly touch me at all.

rembrandt, de staalmeesters

a self-portrait by rembrandt on the other hand i enjoyed for something perhaps strange; it gave me the following feeling: a man looks at me, knowing i will look at him-on-canvas when he is long gone and also knowing that he is a master far ahead of his contemporaries - not per se in skill alone, but especially in vision, in artistic feeling and experiencing reality, and therefore also in rendering reality - and knowing that i will appreciate this where most of his contemporaries lack the necessary depth of development of visual/philosophical issues.

rembrandt, self-portrait as the apostle paul

ok, i've hardly begun touching on what i want to say, but this post is long enough, will be continued.

quality open source threatens existing elites

sorry to harp on just a litle more. but last week there was some kind of media coverage in the netherlands on wikipedia. the strange thing was that it was largely negative publicity, allegedly stemming from questionable quality, as determined by `experts'.

i'm actually quite in favour of recognizing expertise. as a visual artist, i'm confronted an awful lot with people who do not recognize even the occasional need for expertise - let alone the expertise itself.

however, ever since i discovered wikipedia, i have been very enthusiastic about it (notwithstanding that in certain (limited!)areas of my own knowledge i can see it does leave room for improvement, but this is the case for any subject that one knows more than the superficial about).

one can look up all the arts and their artists - even contemporary-animals, history, science, well, actually it is staggering what wikipedia contains and it is MUCH more effective than the paper encyclopedias in terms of spreading of knowledge. it is open source, rendered freely by individuals who like to contribute to this spreading of knowledge.

in most (99%) cases i find the quality of the articles very very high. especially considering that anyone can change articles, so `vandalism' also has to be corrected. it proves to me that this community-like building does really work. rather than saying that therefore we don't need experts anylonger, i would think: experts, please join the effort and share your knowledge on wikipedia.

this can be difficult at times however, since how to recognize the expertise of the one and the non-expertise of the other? (this is a problem in all the sciences as well - usually resolved by peer reviews (of articles), which also mostly are anonymous, also for obvious reasons but since the authors of articles are not anonymous, this can give strange effects.)

so wikipedia struggles with the same problem that google struggles with, and the arts, and the sciences: quality. i remember from long ago that i was absolutely charmed by robert m pirsigs book zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. (please read these linked articles from .... wikipedia. isn't it absolutely marvelous that i can immediately refer you to a good source describing what i mean? i read the book three times, and reading the wikipedia article i see that it doesn't cover the book as well as it could, but it doesn't do it injustice either.)



robert m. pirsig, zen & the art of motorcycle maintenance

however, i also remember finding pirsigs concept of quality ... vague in its definition. but the very fact that he devoted his thinking to its importance was what touched me and still touches me. stuff for the next post.

art & generalized open source (2)

king, 1982-2001

just having written about images being publicly available, i was contacted by an image research studio, working for a major educational publisher. they want to use a picture of the above sculpture in a textbook on art for secondary school, in a paragraph where chess-pieces-as-works-of-art are examined.

so this touches immediately on the current discussion. however, (especially since the sculpture has not yet been sold) i think few will disagree that in order for artists to pay their bills, they should ask for some (pecuniary) recompensation for the use of their art work, at least for commercial use.

still, wouldn't one want to give everybody the opportunity to see any (worthwile) work of art, even be it only a reproduction? a less elegant solution is to make available freely (and still restricted by copyright- the necessity of which i will comment on later) only low-res images. this is widely practiced, see most artists websites. better in my eyes would be to have generalized open source: high quality images available freely to the non-commercial public. but then the artists would somehow need to be assured of income in some other sense.

actually, a similar situation occurs in university science - or does it? well, at least university scientists generally are employed by government(-funded institution). their income therefore is mostly reasonably assured. and in this way much of science is paid for out of the public's pocket. but nonetheless, most current science results are not really freely accessible. scientific publishers like kluwer, springer, elsevier etc. charge quite highly for access to scientific articles. but they don't pay scientific authors a dime (really). scientists are supposed to be happy when their article is accepted for publication, since this gives (peer) ranking. as anyone who follows the news can gather, the profits of these companies are often staggering. universities pay heavily to have subscriptions (both for their libraries and for electronic access for individual researchers). the general public wishing to access scientific results which it already paid for, is left with a significant financial barrier.

the moral of this to me seems that closed source gives power to a small number of people (in this sense usually some sort of elite) who are naturally extremely reluctant to `open up'.

and, letting some art cat out of my bag as promised: this seems to describe to me extremely well the situation with modern art and its curators, be it museal or gallerial or institutional.

is generalized open source the future?

can one envisage a world society in which generalized open source is standard practice?

perhaps i should first explain what i mean with generalized open source. it's a (suitably vague) generalization of the open source approach in software, the interpretation of which is already disputed...;-) . (recognize the tower of babel theme from my starting posts?)

to me `generalized open source' means that knowledge (broadly interpreted) is shared freely. this means that the (knowledge) source of things/products/... is open to all. so in a world with total generalized open source, music is freely downloadable just as art, books, videos, plays, performances, dance, all science, technical designs, software, etc. etc.

time for a long list of objections to such a world? yes probably, but ... does not the idea merit some consideration? how many objections are really insurmountable?

but let me turn to art first -in my next post- , otherwise one might feel cheated in having been attracted to an art blog only to find it's just another philosophy rag... ;-)

open source & images & david hockney

just to not forget that i want to write about `open source' as a way of bringing humanity further.

i as reminded of my thoughts on this because i encountered david hockney's official website. i do not link to it for this reason: on its home page one is asked to agree by clicking a button that no images on the site are to be used anywhere without prior permission.

well, this is taking mistrust a bit far i feel. besides, i hardly think that people wanting to misuse the images are going to be stopped by this button. but it does raise an interesting question about author's rights and copyrights where living artists or recently living artists are concerned.

but i will stop for now, having too little time to write enough, i will come back to this shortly.

art & communication

as an example of modern art issues in relation to communication, i give what i came across just now: the experimental art foundation.

The Experimental Art Foundation was established in 1974 as an initiative by Adelaide artists and theorists to encourage new approaches to the visual arts, promoting the idea of art as 'radical and only incidentally aesthetic'.

The EAF's current MISSION STATEMENT is:

To assist, promote and develop, through production, exhibition, distribution and the encouragement of debate, art and art practices that are analytical, critical and experimental, which challenge established thinking and expand cultural languages and discussion.

The EAF's current OBJECTIVES are

To actively assist, develop and promote new and investigative art practices; To promote discussion, understanding and appreciation of contemporary arts issues and to provide a forum for critical debate; To encourage and support the production and the exchange of ideas by South Australian, Australian and International artists through production, exhibition and dissemination; To respond to artists and arts community initiatives; To develop new and informed audiences through advocacy, education and information strategies; To support emerging artists; To foster strategic partnerships; To maintain a high profile city location; To practise access and equity principles; To maintain sound financial and organisational management

behold above one of the reasons that i consider myself to be a very old-fashioned artist. i don't think of art as radical and only incidentally aesthetic, i don't see art's primacy/duty/charge to lie in societal communication of `new' ideas. new newer newest: the world of advertising and fashion is encroaching on the world of art, if one can even tell a fundamental difference at all.

to me a lot of modern visual art becomes entertainment / performance / advertisement / fashion. however, who am i to say that this is an unwanted development? i can only state how art `works' for me: strongly when quiet. when universal themes (humanity, nature, (non)beauty, patterns, life, death) are explored in a profound way, which can be as varied as light itself.

still, i think the experimental art foundation is a good thing. and probably a lot of things coming about from its endeavors i will consider quite interesting and worthwile. it's just not really my way of communicating, like i said i feel more traditionalist by simply painting, drawing, sculpture.

shelter from the storm, 2008

suddenly i turned around and she was standing there / with silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair/ she walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns/ come in she said i'll give you...shelter from the storm from bob dylan: shelter from the storm