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Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey)
Username: Ramsey

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 195.93.21.74
Posted on Sunday, November 29, 2009 - 01:34 pm:   

I hope any of our British contributors who were watching television last night caught the Roger Scruton documentary - not even mentioned, I'm dispirited to note, in the Observer's television review. It occurred to me that the Platonic aspirations of beauty in art that Scruton supports aren't too far removed from the aspirations for my field that David Aylward summed up in his famous quote.
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Steve Jensen (Stevej)
Username: Stevej

Registered: 07-2009
Posted From: 82.0.77.233
Posted on Sunday, November 29, 2009 - 01:51 pm:   

I've heard Scruton's views on beauty described as old-fashioned; nevertheless, I still feel that he's right.
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Allybird (Allybird)
Username: Allybird

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 80.47.50.55
Posted on Sunday, November 29, 2009 - 02:09 pm:   

I searched for David Aylward horror and came up with this link straight away on authors discussing the next decade in horror - published in 1999.

Ramsey is in there - I agree with all that he says and some others make some interesting comments too.
http://www.darkecho.com/darkecho/horroronline/999.html
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Seanmcd (Seanmcd)
Username: Seanmcd

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 86.151.243.114
Posted on Sunday, November 29, 2009 - 02:12 pm:   

Didn't catch it last night. Which channel ? Maybe it will be on replay ?
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Steve Jensen (Stevej)
Username: Stevej

Registered: 07-2009
Posted From: 82.0.77.233
Posted on Sunday, November 29, 2009 - 02:14 pm:   

It's on BBC iPlayer, Sean :-)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00p6tsd/Why_Beauty_Matters/
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Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey)
Username: Ramsey

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 195.93.21.74
Posted on Sunday, November 29, 2009 - 02:29 pm:   

"I searched for David Aylward horror and came up with this link straight away on authors discussing the next decade in horror - published in 1999.

Ramsey is in there - I agree with all that he says and some others make some interesting comments too."

Oh no! That'll teach me to twit Craig (on the film thread) about subtlety! But I am in favour of it as a way of communicating horror (folk may have noticed).
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Allybird (Allybird)
Username: Allybird

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 80.47.50.55
Posted on Sunday, November 29, 2009 - 02:43 pm:   

Oh - bugger. Here am I getting all carried away (because I love to read opinions on horror) and I've managed to stir things up :>( Sorry Ramsey.
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Steve Jensen (Stevej)
Username: Stevej

Registered: 07-2009
Posted From: 82.0.77.233
Posted on Sunday, November 29, 2009 - 02:56 pm:   

I'm reading John Marks's Fangland at the moment, with a view to reviewing the book. It's interesting that Marks touches on themes relevant to this thread...As I read it, the novel suggests that we now live in a world of surfaces, with no concern about anyone bar ourselves, and no 'depth' to the arts or life itself. A telling insight expressed by the protagonist (a television news producer) underlines this:

'I began to understand for the first time that every man and woman who had ever been forced to strip and stand before their own mass grave, every girl ever slaughtered before her parents' eyes, every village ever annihilated, every name ever extinguished for all time on the whim of a butcher, every single little massacred citizen in every little place I had never heard of since the dawn of time, had actually existed.' (emphasis mine)

We have lost 'sight' of life's realities; our news programmes - which tell of the woes of real people, not mere statistics - are presented as titillating drama; we have been encouraged to stop caring about the lives of others. This is in fact more tragic than any newsworthy disaster or massacre, and in the literary arts, we may soon lose that vital given of the reader/writer relationship - the ability to engage the reader, to make them sympathise, empathise with anybody except themselves. It's not just the sense of beauty that we are losing but the communion between human beings.
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 75.4.248.79
Posted on Sunday, November 29, 2009 - 04:29 pm:   

Actually, I agree fully, Ramsey - subtlety is a technique. I think you mean (?) it becomes a merit when its absence is easy. The unsubtle is itself a technique, and both fail when the whole is less than the sum of its parts; and I believe the nature of horror lends itself more easily to the second, so you get more egregious examples on that end. It need not be that way. A thoroughly unsubtle horror story that is an example of brilliance - just a random choice here - is Graham Masterson's "Pig's Dinner."
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.169.221.67
Posted on Sunday, November 29, 2009 - 05:40 pm:   

Last night, Scruton ignored the roundness of art.
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Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey)
Username: Ramsey

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 195.93.21.74
Posted on Wednesday, December 02, 2009 - 01:06 pm:   

Mine's gibbous.
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 217.37.199.45
Posted on Wednesday, December 02, 2009 - 01:11 pm:   

If Scruton said anything worthwhile about art, he did so in accordance with the Withnail Principle: even a stopped clock is right twice a day. To me, he will always be associated with an attempt to justify Thatcherism in terms of Kantian philosophy – an idiotic piece of special pleading that falsifies the humanist tradition.
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Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey)
Username: Ramsey

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 195.93.21.74
Posted on Wednesday, December 02, 2009 - 03:37 pm:   

Well, Kingsley Amis was pretty vociferous in supporting Thatcher, but he's still a considerable writer.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.153.239.188
Posted on Wednesday, December 02, 2009 - 03:40 pm:   

And that, I feel, brings us back to The Intentional Fallacy.
My art is rhomboid really. I meant 'roundness' as a synonym for holism.
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 217.37.199.45
Posted on Wednesday, December 02, 2009 - 07:30 pm:   

Ramsey, I think a writer of fiction is different from a writer of non-fiction. In the latter case, especially when you're talking about an academic, it's all bound up together. You can't separate aesthetics from politics, especially not when they are expressed through the same medium.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.153.239.188
Posted on Wednesday, December 02, 2009 - 07:34 pm:   

You can't separate aesthetics from politics...
================

I, for one, would appreciate some supporting background to that statement.
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Karim Ghahwagi (Karim)
Username: Karim

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 80.167.108.253
Posted on Wednesday, December 02, 2009 - 08:56 pm:   

Hitler and Walter Benjamin walk into an empty room together. They are both instructed to draw a circle with a piece of chalk on a blackboard. Both men have drawn circles that are exactly the same size, perfectly similar. Now a third man is blindfolded and led into the room. He is instructed to sit down on a chair and listen for ten minutes as first Hitler, then Walter Benjamin are told to hold a ten minute talk about what that circle means to them. The man sitting on the chair is never told who the two speakers are. Their voices are muffled or distorted so that the voices are not recognizable. The blindfolded man is a normal family man, middle of the political spectrum. When both Hitler and Walter Benjamin have finished talking, they are removed from the room, then the man on the chair is instructed to remove his blindfold. The man is then asked which circle he prefers. The man on the chair says that both circles look the same, but then the man inquires as to which circle the first speaker drew. We point at the circle to the left-Hitler's circle. Alright the man says, I prefer the circle to the right, the other circle was drawn by a fucking fascist.
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Karim Ghahwagi (Karim)
Username: Karim

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 80.167.108.253
Posted on Thursday, December 03, 2009 - 01:22 am:   

Sorry about being a bit sardonic there. I can still enjoy the aesthetics of a piece of art I disagree with politically, for example, as mentioned several times earlier on this board- the propaganda film, The Triumph of the Will. Formalistically it is a well made film, even though the subject matter is horrible. But it is a well shot, perfectly composed and edited propaganda film. I just find it difficult to enjoy the aesthetics of a piece of art, that then contains some views I find to be caustic. A certain world-view of the would-be creator inevitably colours the aesthetic experience, the psychological reality or depiction of certain groups of people in a story for example, etc, etc. So the above wasn't some flippant comment to Des's remark, far from it, a good question/ point,- merely reacting to the question. Some author, who's name I will not mention, and who's work I enjoyed a great deal when I was younger, really had some very conservative, pretty far right views, and that was disappointing to say the least. I then went back and looked at some of the stuff that I had read when I was younger, and it made me realize things.
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Joel (Joel)
Username: Joel

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 91.110.250.166
Posted on Thursday, December 03, 2009 - 01:32 am:   

I don't mean the underlying aesthetics of an artist, I mean the verbalised aesthetics of a critic and theorist. To take another example: while it's possible (and not dishonest) to separate Larkin's poetry from his social attitudes, it's impossible to separate his critical writings from his social attitudes.

Des, I have to say: if non-fiction writing on a specific theme is not the product of the author's personal intention, what is it? Chopped liver? When I read your comments here I assume they are they are the product of your intention. Otherwise how can I read them? It goes without saying that when sxpjio jdodg, ,sdfs;f jiorgijnx ,l mkls ./,,./
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 75.5.14.249
Posted on Thursday, December 03, 2009 - 04:07 am:   

Karim, your example reminds me of something else, that dung portrait from a few years ago, that was labeled something or other referring it to Mary the mother of Christ. It looked nothing like anyone specific. Now, removing my already overwhelming suspicion that the whole thing was publicity-stunted (I assume that with oh so many things...), it is amazing that just putting a label beneath a painting of anything - hell, formless swirls of color, it wouldn't matter - can change the perspective, and anger people. If you were to put "Allah disowning Mohammed" under formless swirls of color, you'd get the building bombed.
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Karim Ghahwagi (Karim)
Username: Karim

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 193.89.189.24
Posted on Thursday, December 03, 2009 - 08:35 am:   

Craig was this from that art show called 'Sensation'? Had works by Hirst as well? The show was attacked by the public, paint thrown on the artworks etc.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.153.239.188
Posted on Thursday, December 03, 2009 - 09:18 am:   

Joel, sorry, I thought you were saying "You can't separate aesthetics from politics..." as a general dictum. Aesthetics , for me, normally concerns the making or appreciation of Art whether intentioned as Art or not (well, we can never know the intentions).

Of course, these thread posts above are not ostenisbly intended as Art - in common with much ostensible Non-fiction - and can only be taken at face value, as you suggest. Unproductive and often silly not to do so.

Meanwhile, there is a bigger discussion to be had, perhaps, regarding the ambivalence of some Fiction and Non-Fiction, some Art and Non-Art.
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Karim Ghahwagi (Karim)
Username: Karim

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 80.196.50.16
Posted on Thursday, December 03, 2009 - 11:01 pm:   

Oh no that issue was brought to a satisfactory conclusion right here, unless we want another example, this time with Gandhi and Wittgenstein perhaps.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.153.239.188
Posted on Thursday, December 03, 2009 - 11:14 pm:   

Can anything be brought to a satisfactory conclusion on this type of discussion? I think not. In fact, I'm still confused by what Joel meant looking back.
!s there an Aesthetics of Non-Art?

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