More on Dismaland

[Tommy Pinecone]

Interesting that you mention that "deep thinker" image. I was studying a
few books of art history last year, all of which I checked were about
60-100~ years old as scholarship was, on the whole(by which I mean there
are a few distinguished scholars now amongst the rabble, while the opposite
was true of the past), of a higher quality. But in two of these large
studies, two separate authors warn against "reading into a painting", which
was then growing in popularity.

They may stand for something-as the Flemish were "working in the sight of
God", as Gaddis mentions-but there is no narrative or preaching; whereas
when we come to modern art it is frequently a matter of "I put this here
because...".
I read, a few years back, about art related to Wittgenstein, and one
example was a sheet of glass with "FUCK:STATEMENT" in bold letters; this
isn't art. It's shock and gimmicks, just like a few months ago, on the news
here, in Ireland, there was a woman knitting a jumper with wool that she
shoved up her vagina first. And rest assured she was batting her eyelashes
with an ear to ear smile on the news informing us that numerous people were
telling her what she was doing was amazing, brave, empowering, etc.

If a piece of artwork needs a narrative to make us say, "oh, I get it now,
great", we're in trouble.

Which, as an addendum, I frequently attribute to conceptual
misinterpretations of Joyce: peripheral readers hear that Ulysses is
brilliant and extremely difficult, read it with a companion book for the
sake of reading it, without extensive reading of the Canon, and then think
that the difficulty, the metaphysics and the small details are the sources
of its worth.
But really it is the concept of Ulysses and Joyce's awareness of his place
in the literary tradition that matter, that's why Stein didn't understand
why she was not as acclaimed as Joyce despite her experimentation: he goes
beyond difficulty and new ways of doing. Beckett acknowledged this with
great chagrin and that is where his important work came from: knowing his
place in the tradition, which is to say it couldn't go much further, and it
would be of more value to take away and break down the path in another
direction entirely. Forgive me getting off topic, this is what too much
free time gets you
On 21 Aug 2015 01:29, "John Bailey" <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> ...which I thought was an online joke after that last email but is
> apparently real.
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=64&v=_wruEnynr1w
>
> It's an art project initiated by Banksy with ~50 collaborators from
> around the world.
>
> Unfortunately the video makes a fair bit of it look as nuanced and
> sophisticated as an undergraduate comedy revue.
>
> FWIW I think Banksy's work is outrageously overrated too.
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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