...They'd damn'd well better!

{A response to chapter 2, 'Viewers Make Meaning'.}
Dear Paul M.,
As you well know from our phone conversations, I have been very frustrated over my difficulty in digesting the information I am expected to. Through timely conversations with Martin French and my dear friend Kristie I have been able to process and to delineate to some extent... My own personal struggles with transitioning into university life (as oppressive an environment as it is), the lack of meaning in postmodernist thought, and my difficulty understanding the text. They are all bound together and swirling around in my head. I would like to understand and respond in a way that doesn't betray my own arrogance, however, I keep asking myself whether this subject is worth the intellectual energy to understand. Is the text really saying much of anything? And, if it is, I likely wont understand it 'till months latter anyway. At times I feel like I'm looking for sound in a vacuum. Ultimately I find value in it, as a whole, as it creates a sort of (perhaps artificial) suffering that challenges one artistically. That isn't to say suffering should be valued for it's own sake, as that is a lie. (As Thomas Merton has pointed out, 'No one man is ever called to suffer merely for the sake of suffering.' No Man is an Island, Ch.5, 4. para.4) Before I fly completely off the world in another fit of tangentitus- I have realized I must stop focusing so much on grasping everything here and find one paragraph or idea to focus on. Still, I end up with more questions than answers, but isn't that the nature of learning, or at least the beginning? No need to be 'progressive' and pretend I have it all figured out.
Paul, as a man who better understands art in the postmodern world and likes it, I am curious to hear more of your thoughts on this subject. You may help me put things in perspective.
Having said I should limit myself to single topics I none-the-less find myself dwelling on a theme. The title of the text makes a statement: 'viewers make meaning'. Keeping this vantage point in mind I should like to drift over to the passages dealing with class and taste, under the heading of aesthetics. Two places in this passage are of particular interest to me: page fifty six and page sixty. The author (if she exists) states (Pg.56, para.II): '...These qualities [ex.: beauty] do not reside in the image or object but depend on the contexts in which it is viewed, on the codes that prevail in a society, and on the viewer who is making that judgment. All viewer interpretations involve two fundamental concepts of value - aesthetics and taste.' And in the following paragraph: 'We no longer think of beauty as a universally shared set of qualities. Contemporary concepts of aesthetics emphasize the ways in which the criteria for what is beautiful and what is not are based on taste, which is not innate but rather culturally specific.'
Floating about in my head, in the same parade of hot air balloons, are some thoughts on Charles Dickens, and serial publication. But I seem to have forgotten something: from page sixty of the text (para. I), '...Institutions such as museums function not only to educate people about the history of art but also to instill in them a broader sense of what is tasteful and what is not, what is valuable and what is not, and what is "real" art and what is not.' Now, hopefully this will all jive with my notes.
Does accessibility add or imply value? The impression I get from reading the text at hand, or simply leaving my house, is that we live in a society that purports to value accessibility. Our buses are wheelchair accessible and we have the Internet for all our informational needs. Another side of this is plastic cherubim. Has not our obsession with accessibility, combined with (or even spawned from) industrialization in part led to plastic forms in Walmart? As an artist I find that side of it revolting. We don't need artists to sculpt winged children: we have a mold and plastic to do that. The artists can wither under fluorescently lit isles as an employee of Safeway (cram all the irony you can into that!). From here my train of thought moves to Dickens. Here we have one the great writers of English; complex, multi layered stories lusciously overflowing with 'big' words, run-on sentences running for paragraphs and paragraphs running for pages. Beautiful. Bourdieu's opinion aside. At the time of publication Dickens' novels were printed in serial form, month to month with illustrations. These same novels were then, at his insistence, printed in whole in 'cheap editions', making them affordable to the relatively poor. In this case does mass accessibility and popularity add value to his art or cheapen it? If the art is true, it shouldn't have to worry about who values it; prince or peasant. In Dickens I think we have an example of an art both high and low, being placed on a pedestal later, while so much else was being removed and 'made available' to the common man. Is not Dickens now considered by most complicated and classic, and in a way elite? He seems to have grown cultured in our decultured times. No matter, we have Hemingway (No elitism or wordsmithery here! Just vulgar, carousing men.).
This looks like a good place to quit for now, make a sandwich, and play with sidewalk chalk before continuing.
---Stefan Wolf

To end with a bit of poetry:
"Hark! Wild Robin winds his horn
And, as his notes require,
Now our laughter-loving spirits
Must in awe retire
And let their kinder partners,
Speechless with desire,
Go in their holy selfishness,
Unfunny to the fire."
W.H. Auden, from The Willow-Wren and the Stare