Art no competition

[Prashant Kumar]

>> Sport and art are essentially different.

This is an interesting and important distinction to make here. Sport is
constructed, assembled from borrowings throughout human activity and
distilled into events. There is art in sport but sport itself is not art.
It is too pure, abstract, it doesn't force us to the moment of wonder, that
power to lend a glimpse but briefly of the intersubjective. There are rules
and records and yardsticks aplenty, so we can have winners, losers. But how
many arts long is Ulysses?

If we view the recipient of an artistic award as a "winner" with some
corresponding set of losers, then we are neglecting  this distinction.
Surely an artistic award is (or should be: I'm talking easy ideals here) is
an asterisk, a token from a community to the recipient as recognition of
something worthwhile.

P.

On 17 August 2012 02:45, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>wrote:

>
> 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> <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
> To: Phillip Greenlief <pgsaxo at pacbell.net> <pgsaxo at pacbell.net>; pynchon
> -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> <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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