Building Nothing Out of Something

Goldsmith in his infinite fur-coated wisdom writes, “Why atomize, shatter, and splay language into nonsensical shards when you can hoard, store, mold, squeeze, shovel, soil, scrub, package, and cram the stuff into towers of words and castles of language with a stroke of the keyboard?”

The simplest answer is to say why not atomize, shatter, and splat language, but if you want a more philosophically sophisticated answer, it lies in everything ever written by the Dadaists and the Futurists. Now, I don’t necessarily disagree with Goldsmith—I like to stuff words into towers too, and there are masterpieces made in doing that—however I must bring up an argument made in our class by the subtly aphoristic Dave “The Mean” Levine who said that art movements love to base themselves on the negation of all art before themselves. Goldsmith doesn’t really throw out everything before him—he says Flarff is “[f]using the avant-garde impulses of the last century with the technologies of the present,”—but he is still saying that the old stuff isn’t as good as the new stuff. Stealing is better than breaking, mink is better than fox.

The question of aesthetics, the question of what is appealing, comes to mind. Earlier in the semester Erin brought up the topic of liking a piece of art for its aesthetic, non-philosophical appeal alone, and isn’t that enough. My answer is that it is enough if it is good. John Cayley’s “Translation” for instance was ugly as hell, the music atonal and awkward, and the text illegible. It’s appeal is in its philosophy, and what it stands for, or really, what it stands against, that makes it a good piece of art. It stands against harmonies and readability that we usually associate with good art. Understanding brings appreciation. “Translation” is meant not to be understood, and is therefore unlikeable. However, the fact that it is meant to be “ugly” in all ways, creates understanding, and therefore makes it beautiful. Q.E.D.

But even so, Dave is still right. “Translation” is made to negate all art before it, and in doing so it promotes itself as worthwhile. Is it really worthwhile? How worthwhile is it compared to a van Dyke painting. Most people would not want to compare the two because of the philosophical space that separates them, but what if you take out the philosophy? What is left?