A rough start...

So I realize for those of you who read my Blog that I haven't been posting. This blog is a bit harder for me to get momentum simply because I don't have the time and its not a priority of mine... yet. Plus its not part of school so I don't have that looming over my head anymore to really motivate me to continue, sorry.

Anyway I thought I would take some time to reflect on some school shit thats been buggin' me... Just to give a quick synopsis on what this has anything to do with is I'm of course in school and right now I'm taking a 100 level Art History class in summer school. So we just went over Greenberg's Essay on Modernist Painting in 1960 and I'll be very upfront with the fact that I'm in no way "qualified" to explain or write about in a "formal" way. I'm 100% sure that many others have written much more thoughtful and interesting papers both in favor and against Greenberg's analysis.

With that said... Greenberg draws a parallel with Modernist Painting and science and philosophy in their abilities to "self-criticize". By "self-critical" I mean that they refer to the issues within themselves to improve themselves. Now thats a little confusing to someone that doesn't understand the ways in which science and philosophy does this. Take science, the way modern science works is you have a research group working hard with their experiments and they think they find something significant. Next what happens is that finding is published with methodology and conclusion so that others in the scientific community can replicate the experiment. If they then get the same results and find the conclusions then it is even further researched and gains credulity with the more people that do it and find results/data that support the findings. The research/experiment that doesn't hold up in this way are discarded for whatever inconsistency that is found in the process. That is what is meant by "self-criticism". This is the strength of science and philosophy...

So how would Art do that? Greenberg poses that Art should do that by referring to itself like these other practices do. Specifically in the context of painting, painting should refer to what makes itself different from everything else (Greenberg thinks its "flatness")... that sounds great in all but in practice it doesn't work and I'll explain why I think so. Both Science and Philosophy, like art, look at the world but then go a step further in trying to find answers to questions they encounter in the world. Now essentially what I'm getting to is that Art doesn't do so. True some artists attempt to show their philosophical points of view (I know I do) but Art's purpose isn't to do so. I would pose that art is a kind of language and a reflection of culture. Its purpose is to communicate those things that Science and Philosophy find and try to answer (for the purposes of staying consistent with my own examples, and Greenberg's for that matter, I say science and philosophy but really mean cultural interests of the time period).

So if its purpose is to communicate we can see that with in mind it might be possible to self-criticize as a means of communication but I think that Art has always done so. Because it gets rid of the stuff thats "no good" and keeps the stuff that has significance. Basically what I'm saying is that Greenberg had an interesting idea that is applicable in some respects but I feel he was looking down the wrong path and exploring the wrong thing that makes Art different from other human practices.