Harris:
1. We need Americans to accept evolution.
2. More importantly, in order to do that, we need Americans to be competent at the science and philosophy. It is condescending and paranoid to suppose that people cannot be reasoned with by confronting them with mature arguments.
3. Accommodation of faith with science means accepting evolution without good reasons, which means rejecting (2) within at least some parts of your life. This is at worst an embrace of scientific illiteracy, and at best self-deception.
4. Since the actual problem is scientific competence (2), not evolution (1), we should reject accommodationism.
Mooney:
a. Agrees with (1).
b. Competence at (2) would be nice, but it’s not going to happen. It is not condescending or paranoid to be realistic about what will threaten people’s precious identities.
c. Both faith and science can and have both been held by professional scientists without any sense of internal contradiction. Since these scholars are not scientifically illiterate, (3) must be false. And they are not deluded since the area of theology is beyond science, and open to metaphysical speculation.
d. Since the only problem we can solve is (1), and there aren’t any dangers in (3), we should embrace accommodationism.
For my part, I really don’t care about evolution (1) that much, but I do care about (2) a great deal. It seems pretty clear to me that Mooney is aiming for a culture where people accept evolution on faith. I don’t see the value in that — I don’t see any value in that.
Like Harris, I think it is far more important that we have a culture of mature people who are able to respond to arguments with more than incoherent shouting. I think it is absolutely vital for us to have high schools full of students that know when they’re being fed logical fallacies by their president, parents, peers and teachers. For without the maturity that is involved in reasoning, citizens will not have the confidence or wherewithal to decide for themselves when they are being courageous in expressing their convictions, and when they are delivering empty bravado. Without helping people develop these mechanisms and expectations involved in rational dialogue, they are robbed of the opportunity to hold any meaningful sense of self-respect. As far as public life is concerned, then, such people are fundamentally unfree, shackled either by unwritten laws or by the unbreachable limits of their own ignorance.
Fuck Darwin, fuck Buddha, fuck Jesus, and Newton, Moses and Einstein. Give me your reasons.
Well this is an awesome little article about grad school in the humanities:
Several years ago, the professional career counselor Margaret Newhouse wrote an essay for The Chronicle called “Deprogramming From the Academic Cult.” Newhouse argued that graduate school in the humanities indoctrinates its students into believing that they are failures if they do not remain inside the ivory tower, even if there are no suitable academic jobs for them. Career counselors, she argued, have to find ways to persuade unemployed Ph.D.’s to believe that the outside world is not evil and that they are not apostates if they do something besides teaching and research.
Although I am currently a tenure-track professor of English, I realize that nothing but luck distinguishes me from thousands of other highly-qualified Ph.D.’s in the humanities who will never have full-time academic jobs and, as a result, are symbolically dead to the academy. Even after several years, many former graduate students grapple with feelings of shame and failure that, to outsiders, seem completely irrational.
For all its claims to the contrary, graduate education does not seem to enhance the mental freedom of many students, some of whom are psychologically damaged by the experience. As Newhouse suggested — perhaps more rhetorically than seriously — graduate school these days seems to have a lot in common with mind-control cults.
It’s all tongue-in-cheek, I think, but maybe not as far from the mark as any other claim we’re prepared to make about societies.
I have some fond memories from when I was an undergraduate. In my first year as an undergrad (this was post-9/11), I was enrolled in a course in anthropology. Since I was sick of the idea of social scientists naming kinds of societies arbitrarily in an us-or-them sort of way, I defined “cult” as “any social system that you’re not allowed to leave”. It was meant to be a playful attempt to get a discussion going about how definitions of societies are on the basis of fuzzy criteria, which always result in biting a bullet whenever we want to make our criteria clear. An incredulous fellow student replied, “Well, is Islam a cult, then?” I replied, “Some specific communities of it, sure. And Marxism too, probably.” And, I might have added, my family, the nation-state, post-industrial societies, anything you want to define in such a way that they’re hard to get out of. Adding “the classroom” to that list would be no trouble at all.
You can get away with saying this sort of playful nonsense as an undergrad, if you’re willing to accept the punch that you’ll take to your grades, the gossip, and so forth. But as a graduate student, things suddenly become far more rigid. You’re no longer just an acolyte who is expected to learn the basics of the discipline. You’re a member of the profession, and need to be trained in the fine art of sobriety and humorlessness. This is all fine and well, since setting the tone in just this way has no doubt prevented many a fist-fight and thrown chair during conferences. There are perfectly sensible reasons to be motivated to adopt certain scholarly norms of conduct, and confining fanciful thought-experiments to the medium of the blog.
Unfortunately, these scholarly norms are distorted by the forces of supply and demand — as far as this goes, fatalism is just the unavoidable consequence of doing business. For in a market that is so overwhelmed with capable applicants, and where tenure-track jobs are becoming more and more obsolete, it simply stands to reason that the criteria for job selection will be based on arbitrary factors: race, luck, sex, politics, popularity, friends, and the like. In a bleak way, discrimination according to these factors is a relief, since they are so obviously arbitrary that they can be pinpointed as clear examples of injustice or challenged as systemic bias. (Not much of a relief, I grant you, but still.)
What is even more pernicious is the rise of a kind of instruction creep, where arbitrary, insignificant, and blatantly indefensible rules and doctrines are put in place as a substitute for clear thinking and prudent conduct, for the sake of expediency. The principle of charity, for example, is frequently misused in Canadian schools (following McGill’s lead) as a device for preventing the student from making honest arguments with what is stated in the text, rather than as a sensible and effective device for interpreting the most true beliefs that they can from the text. When we encounter shallow or prime facie equivocations, then sure this is an excellent tactic for encouraging the aspiring scholar to read the text more carefully. However, when we encounter a deep equivocation in the argument, one that is not supported or refuted by strong textual evidence, and we are supposed to choose between two interpretations, one true and one false, then (by this method) we are still supposed to prefer the true one. With the help of this feat of sophistry, begging the question has become obsolete! The interpreter will beg the answer for you.
That is just one example. There are others. The point is that most of us know of the dangers of instruction creep on our lives, or at least have a dim awareness of it. But I’m sure many haven’t quite got the picture. I am sure there are many grad school students out there that are perfectly competent and yet have developed strong cases of impostor syndrome just trying to keep up with the instruction creep that inevitably follows from market scarcity. Hence the feeling of not being able to leave the cult of the humanities behind. There’s still so much you have to prove. The unwritten laws don’t satisfy themselves.
And of course there are also the men and women lucky enough to have been born a generation earlier, and so had a better chance to find a tenure-track position. For many, professional sanity depends upon delusion as far as this matter is concerned, and that goes without saying. These are unthinkable thoughts, which cannot be confronted, only ignored or flatly dismissed.
So it’s refreshing to see the converse so plainly stated by the tenured author… even if he or she happens to be hiding behind a pseudonym.
Updated Sept 4/09, 7:30PM, 11:36PM.
Serious philosophy.
Brown explains:
We first start with the primary and secondary intensions of a statement. Let’s take our old standby ‘water is H2O’ and our two ways of considering possible worlds as either actual or counter factual. So, ‘water is H2O’ is true when we consider any possible world as counter factual. This is because ’water is H2O’ is an a posteriori necessity. There are no worlds, considered as counter-factual, where water isn’t H2O. But there are possible worlds, which if we consider as actual instead of counter factual, ‘water is H2O’ comes out false. So, take Twin Earth. On Twin Earth ‘water is XYZ’ is true and so when we consider Twin Earth as actual ‘water is H2O’ is false. That is to say that if Twin Earth were the actual world ‘water is not H2O’ would be true (because ‘water is XYZ’ is true there). What we have here is the makings of the distinction between primary and secondary intensions. The primary intension of a statement is given by asking whether it is true or false at possible worlds considered as actual while the secondary intension of a statement is given by asking whether it is true or false at possible worlds considered as counter factual. In effect then the primary intension of a statement is given by some kind of reference fixing description and then we determine whether the statement is true or not by taking a possible world and letting the description fix the reference at that world and the secondary intension of a statement is given by assigning the actual reference of the terms in question and holding that fixed as we vary our counter factual worlds.
Primary and secondary conceivability are then defined in terms of the kind of intension at work. So, take ‘water is not H20′. Chalmers accepts that there is a sense in which this is not conceivable. This is the sense in which we give ‘water’ the reference that it actually has. Then ‘water is not H20′ is equivalent to saying ‘H20 is not H20′ which is a contradiction. But this is to use secondary conceivability. ‘Water is not H2O’ is still primarily conceivable since if we consider Twin Earth as actual it will be true. This is because we assign ‘water’ just the reference fixing description and so to say that water is not H2O is just to say that ‘the stuff picked out in the same way we pick out H2O is not H2O’ which is true at Twin Earth. This captures Kripke’s way of putting it. When we think that we are conceiving of water not being H2O were are really conceiving of a person who is in the same epistemic situation as we are when we pick out H2O but isn’t picking that stuff out (i.e. Twin Earth).
In my reply, I pointed out that the trouble here is on just how powerful we think our words are when we say some statement is inconceivable. I’m afraid there is no substantial sense in which the statement ‘water is not H2O′ is inconceivable. For example, heavy water is water, but it is not H2O — it is D2O (or whatever).
Rigid designation is not a feature of our semantics, but our pragmatics. There is a sense, a clear sense, it seems to me, in which our suggested means of interpreting the statement “water is not H2O” is rigid in the primary intensional treatment. For the sentence is only an input, and we choose the manner in which we are to output a clear proposition; this output is an interpreted sentence, which largely has to be qualified with statements like “…for my purposes…” in order to be satisfactory. One of our purposes might be to save the appearances; another might be a lazily tolerant attitude; another might be to target substrata. The point is that it’s a choice, dependent upon our prior stance, which might be intentional, physical, functional, or any bastardized admixture of them.
So when we use phrases like “a priori” and “a posteriori”, I’m afraid I don’t really quite know what we mean. Suppose we take the essentialist stance. If so, then the phrase “water is not H2O” is a priori because we set up our interpretive goals in such a way to make it necessary; it is a posteriori because the information file that provides us with the semantic data had to be learned for us to even get that far.
Richard responds by agreeing that pragmatics is more active in this puzzle than semantics. However, he thinks (a) I’ve missed the point of the ‘water is not H2O’ example; for Kripke would be happy to substitute the final outcome of scientific analysis (whatever it is — call it Dy2) for “H2O”. (b) He also helpfully clarifies the sense in which we’re speaking of the “a priori”, for Chalmers: namely, as justificatory.
That would seem to be an appeal to temporal externalism (lucidly explicated by Henry Jackman). [Edit: This was mistaken -- Richard had plain old vanilla externalism in mind. But that doesn't change the outcome of the objection that is to follow, since the thing being criticized is the illegitimately optimistic attitude towards the use of placeholders like Dy2. -- b] But we use our terms in the present, and while we are open to future revisions of the kind that are being talked about (eventually leading to an extension that is completely settled), we’re going far up and beyond the call of what is required in a semantic theory. To explain the meaning of a thing, at bare minimum we need to make sense of present usage, goals, and past usage; in Davidsonian terms, our prior and passing theories. But temporal externalism employs what we might call predictive theories, which attempt to make sense of future usage in some idealized state. So my first reply is that it’s otiose for that requisite of a semantic theory — unless it can be shown to be indispensable for making sense of any semantics whatsoever.
Suppose, then, that extension and intension, properly specified, is in fact a requirement of a successful semantic theory. Without them, there’d be no such thing as semantics at all. In that case we had better look hard for the conditions under which this certainty is available.
Future usage may be vital to what we want to accomplish when we’re in an essentialist mood, and this is why we have to keep ourselves open to revision. And part of the effort involved in being open to revision is the decision against closure of the meaning, at least until such future time that (we hope) our extension will finally settle in such a way that its satisfaction-conditions can be intelligibly specified. From a non-Archimedean POV, the future is a counterfactual; we’re trapped in the present, and the future hasn’t actually happened yet. And while of course the future will inevitably become the present and past, that assurance gives us no grounds for pinning down the unique future counterfactual, or range of counterfactuals, we’re supposed to predict as actual. Without specifying a particular prediction, although we’re positing that we want to hone in on the counterfactual future that will make our claim(s) about water (whatever it might be) true, we’re not at all privy ourselves to the stable truth-conditions involved in making good on the claim(s).
We were able to fool ourselves into thinking we were able to have successful predictive theories so long as canonical examples like “water is H2O” were at the ready; we were able to masquerade our prior theory off as a predictive theory. But the fall of that legend anticipates the fall of the doctrine. So the long and the short of it is that, for my second reply: while the essentialist vantage point is highly interesting when used retrospectively, it offers us none of the helpful semantic bells and whistles that we’re hoping for prospectively. Here we appeal to x, an unknown, a variable to be filled; so we end up making such claims as the stand-in “water is Dy2″, with nobody of course knowing a thing about what this is supposed to mean except “substitute adequate theory here”. No doubt we will have an adequate prior or passing theory one day; but since that day has not come, we must be satisfied with a retrospective semantics; and if no such thing is possible, then it would seem that no semantics is possible.
The third argument concerns question-begging. We’ve been talking about H2O with essentialism/physicalism as a stance, just for convenience. But it applies to any stance, including the intentional stance, or some illicit shifting between stances to establish our conversational purposes. And if a stance we happen to adopt offers no semantic help, then it isn’t all that clear what good Chalmers is saying, except saying “For my purposes, it’s inconceivable that zombies are thinking”. This is as weak as saying, say, “Arguably, Pluto’s status as a planet is mythological”. Well, if arguably it is, then arguably it isn’t.
We’d seem to be saved if we could draw in a few stable and objective pragmatic variables, like “time” and “agent”, to supplement our semantic work and make it stable. But there’s quite a bit more going on when we’re at a point where we appeal to implicit strategems. For we take the conversation to be against the backdrop of essentialist explanations, against the canvas of a physicalist stance; or we take it against the backdrop of some other stance. Our stances provide the complex of goals that we are seeking when we do justificatory work in an effort to reach closure over some claim(s), which we then call apriori. But if you take that stance for granted, then the semantics narrows to the point of a pin because that’s just the way we want it: we smuggle our prior stances into our semantics.
[Edit Sept 4, 5/09: If we want to say that semantic smuggling produces prime facie evidence for our claim(s), then we threaten to abuse the notion of "evidence" by making it a coarse substitute for what is, in effect, a choice we've made. And if we stop taking them for granted, then while claims like "it is inconceivable that water is H2O" or "it is inconceivable that zombies exist" are intelligible, these arguments have seemingly lost all their gravitas. In such cases the evidence is no longer prime facie on anyone's favor, it is rather (as evidence goes) what we might call ephemeral: it raises questions and intuitions without supposing we're in any place to answer them.
If we take that kind of lesson seriously when we talk about epistemic justification, a proper semantic theory ought to be able to consign meta-inductive skepticism a sizable role to our semantics without threatening us with a loss of intelligibility.
We are of course scientifically justified in talking about the results of the revolution in chemistry -- let there be no doubt about that. But for all we know, our justifications are always sub-optimal, and always open to revision. If we fall short of apodeictic certainty, we fall short of closure of our satisfaction conditions, and hence abandon any sense of a priori that is not itself the result of our stance. We of course can say the claim that 'water is H2O' is true, but that is against the backdrop of social life where the philosopher-scientist is in a constant battle to sway people away from passionate false beliefs. When we say a matter is "settled" in the pious sense, it is because we assume there are imperfect people in our audience (and with us among them) who may hold false beliefs. And against these false beliefs, generations of persecuted scholars have come to understand the only defense is either gentle certitude or silence. On the other hand, if we had more time, we might qualify our claims in the way that prudence requires, which would persuade with such nuances that we wouldn't be so terribly afraid of saying, "I am but 99.99% sure that this is true". It would go without saying that this is far and beyond good enough, but not enough to save inconceivability, or synthetic aprioricity, unless it is meant to be adopted as a matter of whimsy.]
Or at least that’s how it seems to me. I may be entirely wrong. But these are issues that I find enormously troubling, and enormous amounts of philosophical literature as currently practiced presently depends on staying the course in the present direction.
Reuters’ Spanish service and Venezeuala’s Telesur are reporting that the IMF granted US$150 million to the defacto regime in Honduras, which is now into into its third month.
Both reports stem from a press release by the Honduran Central Bank (BCH).
The BCH release reads (in part):
“At the initiative of the twenty industrialized and emerging countries (G-20), presided by the Prime Minister of England, Gordon Brown, the International Monetary Fund injects liquidity into the world economy and Honduras augments it’s international reserves by $150.1 million.”
The CBH release goes on to state that the money was received on August 28th. Telesur is reporting that the IMF will give another $13.8 million to the coup regime next week.
(Click here for a decent interview on the coup that just rocked Honduras.)
I’m not very good at outrage on blogs, but I’m also not very good with a philosophical attitude towards empire. I’d like to approach the subject with some kind of rhetorical tactics at hand that will disarm and amuse the reader, some kind of white-hot feat of language to cement the insanity of the situation into the clearest prose. I don’t think I can do this, except just to observe that these are the people who manage the world.
3QD’s philosophy blog contest: voting now open!
You’ll vote for me, of course.
Edit: or else the monkey will be displeased.
B&W comments on a recent paper in evolutionary psychology that uses weird reasoning to explain depression in terms of its ability to entice people into being prudent.
I don’t want to defend these authors because they’re pretty clearly off base if we’re talking about clinical depression instead of mild ennui. Still, I should point out that if we leave open the idea that it’s an internally caused phenomenon ultimately best understood if we focus on, say, a deficit in certain neurotransmitters, then the question naturally arises as to whether or not these underlying causes are evolutionary in origin. So what might that be? I think we might as well think about it, even if just for fun.
IIUtC, the authors seemingly link task failure to inhibition, and inhibition to prudence; and by linking inhibition to depression; ergo, they jump the shark by linking depression to prudence. This is a fantastical conclusion; it’s like concluding that we should be afraid of housecats, because certainly we should be afraid of tigers, and tigers and housecats are both feline.
From the outset we have to observe that, whatever the survival benefits of something related to depression might be, clinical depression itself cannot be beneficial. It leads to suicidal thoughts and inclinations (and hence suicide); and the dead don’t reproduce. This ought to be written in big, neon letters in the authors’ minds: depression moots evolution. But then that just makes the existence of depression all the more puzzling.
Maybe there are some murky intuitions that suggest there must be some kind of link between inhibition and depression. We might observe that there is a special case of inhibition called learned helplessness, where the mere desire to perform goals that reduce pain are pre-empted by behaviorist adaptation to the environment. If this outlook is internalized, then it is not incredible to link inhibition to anhedonism through learned helplessness. And sure enough, anhedonism is a trait that we find in those who are clinically depressed.
Maybe this has an analogue in evolution. At any given stage of evolution, we might find changes in an environment that are sudden or unexpected. During such stages, natural talents that are positively adapted to the previous environment may prove to be useless or counterproductive in the new one. You would very well expect that the population of persons being left behind would encounter constant failures in pursuit of the goals that they had previously taken for granted. Constant failure with respect to goals that are central to the person’s repertoire of adaptively positive talents is a milder case of learned helplessness. (Though of course this isn’t necessarily limited to talents that might cross generations, but also to skills, which can be learned within a single generation. But we might plausibly suppose that talents are more likely to be central to a person’s favorite goals.) Maybe this analogue is a long shot, or falls short of leading to clinical depression, but at least it doesn’t seem crazy to me.
Another hypothesis might be what I would call the “ship of fools” hypothesis. When you become convinced that the society you live in is full of idiots, i.e., people who are complete wackjobs that are going to get us all killed, then you will do whatever you can to run away. When Pompeii is about to explode, the prudent man does not sit around politely discussing the ins and outs of relocation logistics with his neighbors if they’re not convinced. He runs away. That would explain the antisocial element. And then learned helplessness emerges when one comes to understand that, in the present-day world, there is simply nowhere left to run.
If the “ship of fools” hypothesis sounds unbearably arrogant, that may be to its credit. For it may turn out that people with depression may also carry symptoms of narcissism (if we feel like taking that old Freudianism seriously). Though I’m at a loss to explain how narcissism has any adaptive value, especially insofar as it produces a default flight response.
After watching this video, my fellow Wikipedia expatriate Frank Franco, internationally renowned as a passionate man of letters, observes,
I honestly don’t know what to make of this. At first, I was offended, outraged and sarcastic. Then, I started to admire the man’s sheer audacity and shamelessness. What does it even mean to say the guy sounds atrocious and BAD? He likes it and seems to be enjoying [himself]. What I still don’t understand, though, is the audience?… The usual reply is simply that this man could indeed have been very far ahead of his times. Not only that, but in a case like this, the guy actually had a larger audience than the vast majority of “traditional” jazz musicians or experimentalist [improvisationalist] musicians. Yes, I’m pretty sure the man is playing absolute BS. But I still give him vast credit [for] the sheer balls and for actually PULLING THE WOOL over so many people’s eyes. As someone said on a jazz guitar forum: ” My cat sounds like that when she jumps around the piano”. Yeah, but your cat didn’t become famous, play with people like Pat Metheny and became a sort of revered “artiste”. The question then is: why this guy and not the cat?
And I have to agree, the above video is like filling your ear canal with garbage. But there is an interesting question there. Here was my attempt at explanation.
I think the riddle might be solved by looking at the nature of art. Suppose that art is craft on presentation; suppose further that craft is capacity exercised. Well, there are two things that can attract people here.
One, the presentation itself, the admiration for a lack of hesitation. This explains the appeal of guys like Wesley Willis, although there’s more than a bit of an ironic appeal there too. The aura of the art comes from audacity.
Two, the capacity itself. When the cat jumps on the piano, we think it is artless, but when a composer who is a classically trained virtuoso nevertheless decides to create a piece that is akin to a cat jumping on the piano, we are supposing that there is some craft behind it. That’s the Picasso effect. This is analogous to the relationship between a museum and an artifact. Even if the artifact happens to be a fake, so long as the museum thinks it is real then it’ll treat it as valuable. The aura of the art comes from the knowledge of the viewer.
Edit to add:
My description shies away from talking about things directly in terms of social relations. But obviously the quality of art has something to do with social relations, to put it mildly. And it would be a blunder to not say something substantial about the role of social relations in art or in aesthetics.
The “presentation” criterion tends to be saturated in social activity, but it’s a question of degree. Usually, we talk about art as the presentation itself, we have pictures in mind of galleries and salons and people in powdered wigs and so on, and that’s all social in the most robust sense of intentional interactions (not just other-regarding behaviors).
But we also have to make sense of weird cases. Suppose that an author dies before any of his crafts are published, and so they are burned in a fire before anyone could see. Were they art? Well, the author had the intent to present, so we might say yes. Well, what if an author (like Kafka) actually demanded that his works be burned after he dies, and the executor refuses to do so? Then they’re presented, in which case it’s clearly art.
But suppose the executor really did burn the manuscripts — were they art before they entered the flames? After all, they weren’t presented, and the author had no intent to present, so it’s a puzzle. I want to say that the nature of the activity of writing seemed to make it so that we can call it lost craft; as presumably he didn’t write it all just for therapy or else he’d have thrown it away himself. In which case craft is a minimally social activity, and borderline art depending on the kind of craft it is. But what if he did just do it for therapy? Then it’s not art or craft, it’s lost doodle.
Okay, so that’s a lot of labyrinthine wordsmithing to devote to a more or less trivial subject, so it had better help us make some interesting inferences or else this train of thought has all been a waste of time. Why should we be motivated to reject lost doodles as ‘art’? And what does this account of art have to say about craft and art and social stuff?
I want to agree that the point of art is to foster an aura which is at least incompletely characterized by a willingness to protect and present some objects. And I wanted to say that lost doodles have no intended aura; obviously they weren’t protected, so that’s a cheap and easy thing I might get away with saying. But I don’t know if I can convince myself of that. The beginning of Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” chronicles features a library full of books that famous authors were going to write, but didn’t. These mysterious books would have been worthy of protection, wouldn’t they? Or am I just saying that because their potential for coming into being is actually exhausted by some false ideas that The Sandman put into my head…? — in which case this would be an complicated version of the fake artifact that I sketched last post. And I’m not at this time comfortably acquainted enough with my intuitions to decide which. Dead end.
Is craft inherently social? If the definition of art is at all substantive, then crafts cannot be characterized by presentation as a goal. Rather, the capacity and the product are goals, and while presentation may occur it is only incidental. So a tap and die maker may do their work and produce their product, if it is only craft (and not art), then there is neither an intent to put it on display nor will this happen in fact. You nail the board, but you don’t ooh and aah over the nailed board. There’s no necessary aura to the product, but most crafts are still quite social in some degree or other. We gain satisfaction from crafts by their connection with our knowledge of the work that’s done successfully. If there’s an aura, it lies in the capacity, the labor and skill.
For a true Marxist sort of aesthetician, the aura ought to derive entirely from our background assumptions about what capacities went into making it. Every case of art is like the case of the museum artifact, which may or may not be art depending on its causal history, and every case of craft is art. I see the merits of that position, but don’t want to be entirely committed to it. For I want technology to retain its aura even after we discover it is not magic; I want the stars to be beautiful regardless of whether or not I misunderstand how they work. And if I find out that the man I took to be a genius is actually just a cat jumping on the piano then damn it, I reserve the right to call that cat a genius! But the cat’s work had better sound pretty damn fine.
Last remark in this screed… good and bad art doesn’t necessarily track good and bad craft, though it usually ought to. Andy Warhol may have been a talentless dingus, but his work pointed something out to people about the way their brains were starting to change. His craft may be been lame, but it makes for good art in that context, because the aura doesn’t come from his capacity per se, it comes from the deluded social order.
An Israeli producer takes random Youtube videos and creates masterpieces.
