Art no competition

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Yes, you're right. Of course I make comparative judgments. And there 
also have to be canonical standards. Otherwise libraries wouldn't know 
what works to order, universities not what works to teach. Complexity of 
content, elegance and originality of style, perhaps also intensity play 
a role here. On the level of artistic production itself, however, things 
look - although concurrency is a factor - a little different. There is 
no world record in novel writing. Sports and art are essentially 
different. Although tradition and the state of the art are important 
check points, each writer/composer/painter etc is defining his or her 
own goal. The single modern work of art - operating along a specified 
state of artistic material - is exploring the human condition without 
any objective compass. "True are only those works of art which do not 
fully understand themselves," as Adorno puts it. I think Philip meant 
something similar when he said he's "interested in the work" instead of 
secondary rankings. Looking back, you can of course say that you, for 
instance, prefer /Kind of Blue/ and /Ulysses/ to /Finnegans Wake/ and 
/Bitches Brew/, but the latter ones had to be done and were, in the 
moment of their creation, as important as the former ones. Focusing 
again on the concurrency between artists of the same genre, it can also 
be added that the overall constellation is often more important than the 
question who's the winner and who's not. Händel, for example, cites Bach 
with samples in some of his sonatas. To recognize this may be more 
exciting than to state that Händel is inferior to Bach.


On 15.08.2012 21:18, malignd at aol.com wrote:

> I agree that art isn't a competition, but really -- you don't make 
> comparative judgments?  Do you not think Bach is a greater (whatever 
> you mean by "greater") composer than, say, Pachelbel?  Picasso a 
> greater artist than Jeff Koons?  Etc.  We can't easily define them, 
> but I think we all agree that there are metrics of some sort or other 
> -- Nabokov's tingling of the spine or ... whatever.  Why are you on 
> the p-list and not the maeve binchy list?  (Just an example; don't 
> want to pick unnecessarily on Maeve ...)  Or every single author's 
> list?  You could cite personal preference, but I think you'd be 
> dodging the point.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
> To: Phillip Greenlief <pgsaxo at pacbell.net>; pynchon -l 
> <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Wed, Aug 15, 2012 6:41 am
> Subject: Art no competition (was: Re: Borges, Woolf)
>
>
> On 14.08.2012 21:14, Phillip Greenlief wrote:
>
>> art isn't a competition - i don't care who wins the latest literary 
>> pissing contest, or who did what first, i am interested in the work
>
> Makes me think of Christoph Schlingensief who said "art does not know 
> any winners and so I call off this event right now", when he was to 
> proclaim the winner of the 'Publikumspreis der Nationalgalerie für 
> Junge Kunst' in Berlin in September 2005 ("Kunst kennt keine Sieger, 
> also breche ich die Veranstaltung ab").
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christoph_Schlingensief
>
>

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