Art no competition

[Madeleine Maudlin]

"Sports and art are essentially different."

Oh come *on*.  I've heard that Pynchon even wears shin pads when he writes.

And not just when he writes.

On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 9:45 AM, 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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