Week One: Photograph

I describe this photograph somewhat tongue-in-cheek as a brilliance competition between a full moon and a streetlight.

Week One: Comment

For the post on the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, the article presents no facts. So, it's worth it to do some quick research to find out what the Act includes, where it came from, who wrote it, and how Obama feels about it. Wikipedia is the first place I went. There are a number of facts and statements there that give me a lot to consider. The article posted presents only bias. As Courtney writes in her comment, "it is our job as citizens and as people to think and to know about what is happening in your own country." I'm assuming, then, she is registered to vote.

Week One: Social Change

All politics aside, I’m drawn to the reports yesterday that the iPhone 4S release in China yesterday brought fights and an egg attack. Here’s a quote from the event, “Americans do make good products. Much better than ours.” The quotation tells a tale. Every contemporary commercial event is potentially an artistic event by accident or intention. We’re selling one of our products that still has the idea of America built into its appeal as well as its physical structure. This realization strikes me as an ontological experience if ever there was one. The idea. Its creation, production, and sale. We may think we’re selling a manufactured thing in China. But we actually may be selling the concept of a dream that has viability in the life of a world we don’t fully comprehend. That world may be alternative, similar to the world Linklater suggests in Waking Life.
http://behindthewall.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/13/10147277-iphone-4s-china-release-sparks-scuffles-and-eggings

Week One: Thinking

What if I write the following sentence? Once Linklater began to commit his ideas, images, dialogue, and so on to a medium he could show an audience, his artistic expression became impure. I sound Kantian perhaps. I bring this point to the table to establish my standpoint for the beginning of this class. I can speak more exactly here than I did on the first day about the reason I’m interested in this class. It’s easy for me to notice quickly that one of the ways the “artworld” talks and thinks at this moment possibly results from a body of thought and practice that wasn’t even available to me when I went through school. I graduated in 1973. All of the theorists we’re reading here whose publications appeared after 1975 weren’t available to me as aestheticians 40 years ago. Their names aren’t new to me in some cases; however, they weren’t organized into schools and movements yet. In the decades between then and now, these aestheticians have been contextualized by their schools and movements. They are now. The artistic culture we’re living with since 1975 is a construct that I’ve passed through as it developed. So, today I may speak in Kantian language. It’s my nature and something my education gave me the categories to recognize. I can place Linklater’s film in a place if I hold true to my Kantian schema. But if I begin to incorporate a more contemporary set of criteria to use in consideration of the film, such as, Timothy Binkley’s or Elizabeth Schellekens’, I begin to consider the film’s more cognitive qualities (Binkley) and engage with the film on an imaginative level “with the idea central to the artwork rather than a perceptual experience of its aesthetic properties” (Schellekens). And so, here I am in the present.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conceptual-art/

Week One: Art

The elasticity and fluidity of the appearance of objects in the world of Waking Life stand counter to my actual dreams, especially those that seem extra realistic and firm. Of course, they aren’t. They’re as ephemeral as mist. However, at the time I experience them, their reality is often more entertaining than any other state of awareness. The craft Linklater employed in Waking Life, the rotoscoping, helps him to convey for me as a viewer a variety of joys, sensations, pains, and tortures that people mask during their waking lives. In the film I detect, because of my age, traces of older films Linklater doesn’t reference directly. I’ll use those references to allow me to slip willingly into the experience of the film without regarding the film as 1) either a work of art or not, 2) either high or low art or not, 3) either worthy of serious consideration or not. Of course, this isn’t the first film of its type to establish a single main character moving through a series of unusual and edgy episodes to a point where he wonders how to free himself from the dimension of his entrapment. It’s also not the first use of rotoscoping in film, although Linklater used it here for the entire film. But, all previous film history aside, I’m called upon to wonder if the film is about its look, its rhythmic—visual and musical—effrontery, the day-long chronology of its characters, its verbal content. Possibly it’s about all and none of these, which for me exposes the film as being about itself. Beaudrillard writes contemporary art’s “only reality is that of its operation in real time and its confusion with that reality.” In other words, contemporary art doesn’t squint toward either past or future.
http://insomnia.ac/essays/contemporary_art/