One take on "the sacred"

How to Live, by Todd Settimo.

Climate Revelations

An atheist concludes that he can't talk about climate without talking about God
by Auden Schendler
Published in the January/February 2009 issue of Orion magazine

We can intellectualize the need for action all we want, but in my experience, in the end our motivation usually comes down to a cliché: our kids and, for want of a better word, our dignity. The journalist Bill Moyers has said, “What we need to match the science of human health is what the ancient Israelites called ‘hocma’—the science of the heart. . . the capacity to see. . . to feel. . . and then to act. . . as if the future depended on you. Believe me, it does.”

Read more...

This piece echoes some of our earlier discussions here; thank you to my friend Todd, who brought it to my attention.

What we mean, so far, by "sacred"

Sometimes we mean ideas or items defined by culture as "sacred" but without significance beyond that.

Sometimes we mean that the sacred is revealed to us by personal, subjective experience.

Sometimes we wonder if there isn't some essential universal quality of sacredness which exists without reference to what we do —or don't— posit or believe.

What causes us to believe something is sacred?

On what basis do we deny that the sacred is anything more than human credulity?

Is there any single idea or object or phenomenon which we might all agree is sacred?

What do we mean by "sacred"?

As far as I know, I have no particular answer in mind. What do you think?

For when smiles are hard to come by...

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

A garden update

Once the sun comes out, all hell breaks loose in the Oregon garden. The winter squash has sprawled everywhere and is beginning to flower; the beans are in full flower and bearing the tiniest of wee protopods. The sunflowers and corn are shooting upward at an astonishing rate and provide a perfect privacy hedge for the back end of the yard. No tassels on the corn yet, but the sunflowers are beginning to pop.

"Show, don't tell," (you are always directed in writing workshops) and so, taken less than a week apart:

Corn, beans and squash, mostly

Two weeks ago, we installed our first Three Sisters planting, inspired by the traditional agricultural practices of many Native Americans. We "sacrificed" the sunniest swathe of lawn to accommodate ten mounds:






























This is Oregon, of course, where everything grows with astonishing rapidity. Here is the same planting only two weeks later:






























We seeded an heirloom open-pollinated corn called Country Gentleman; there wasn't room for enough corn mounds to guarantee wind pollination, so we will have to fertilize by hand, "tickling the tassels." I certainly hope that process is self-evident.

In the far corner is a cantaloupe hill, and there is a sunflower mix interspersed on either end.

We've also just cleared a lot of construction debris out from behind the garage; there we hope to attempt quinoa, and a beautiful dried bean called Yin Yang:

For music lovers everywhere

The Leningrad Cowboys (Finnish) and the Red Army Choir (Russian) together again for the first time.

Do a search on YouTube. Yikes! These guys will take on anything: 'Delilah,' 'Gimme All Your Lovin,' 'My Way,' 'Stairway to Heaven.' Dylan. The Beatles. Eric Idle. The Turtles, fergawdsakes.

The problem with American music is that it just never got weird enough.

I felt, therefore I… was?

Lest you, dear reader, form the impression that I spend my time entirely engaged in abstraction contemplation, I submit the following:


If you have ever mistakenly thrown a favorite wool sweater into the washing machine, you know that wool fibers under stress, heat, and agitation will shrink and mat inextricably together. Sometimes this is done deliberately in order to produce wool felt, a dense and durable fabric.

A conscientious recycler, I try to use up the (inevitable) remnants of knitting efforts in some way —in what knitters call "stash projects." As part of the ongoing campaign to spruce up my dad's house, I've been working on bright new accent pillowcovers made from Marimekko fabric scraps, in keeping with the Danish modern decorating style my parents always preferred. There was also a large ball of handspun wool yarn in the stash bin, variegated greens which would coordinate with the fabric.

Of course I'd need some additional wools to match. That's the thing about stash projects, you often have to buy something new to use up the something old.

So I knitted up some little sample squares and felted them in the sink by hand, in order to estimate how much bigger than final size the proposed pillow cover would need to be knit. For a 16 x 16 pillow: 18 x 38. This actually came out fairly accurately. Then I tried a very simple knitting method suggested by my friend Trilby which uses three different yarns in sequence. Lovely subtle stripes.

The easiest way to felt is using a top-loading washing machine, which you can stop and start as you check on the progress of felting. Our machine is an efficient front-loader, so I must either borrow a washer or felt by hand— in this case, by feet, in the shower, with hot water and dish soap and dancing around on the piece to provide agitation.

(In the absence of a yardstick, a mini poodle was used for scale.) Before and after felting:

The container, or the thing contained?

In February, Matt Coolidge, of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, spoke before a reasonably packed house as part of PICA’s free Monday night arts lecture series. Coolidge’s organization, known as CLUI, is “dedicated to the increase and diffusion of information about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized and perceived.”

Don’t be misled, however: CLUI is not a policy wonkery; it’s a loose collection of post-modernists inhabiting that peculiar DMZ between art making and curating. They maintain a searchable database of unique American places; design and install interpretive exhibits across the country —including the recent “Pavement Paradise: American Parking Spaces”; conduct bus tours of unlikely locations (such as the assortment of gravel pits which created Irwindale, CA); offer art residencies in such facilities as the (alleged) Enola Gay hangar; and carefully monitor water levels at Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake.

CLUI’s stance toward its subject matter is consistently wry, clever, and non-prescriptive, asking the viewer to experiment with unfamiliar viewpoints. Coolidge opens his talk with a still shot of two men in an unrecognizable terrain, standing before an interpretive display whose message is invisible to the audience. One man gestures toward the display, as if to interpret its interpretation, and the other films him, adding yet another layer of interpretation —which is then re-interpreted by Coolidge for his audience, each member of which harbors his or her own interpretation.

As Coolidge explains, the landscape has no meaning except whatever meaning is perceived or assigned by the observer. And each individual’s experience of a given landscape is mediated by unique expectations, experiences, cultural precepts and personal beliefs.

CLUI encourages thought-provoking exercises, and yet —is it thought which we most need to provoke? In this post-modern world where so many of us have lost our species-long identification with our physical surroundings, can reconnection be brought about solely through intellectual means? Is it not the heart rather than the head, which we long to engage, and might not a more visceral language of art serve us better?

CLUI’s work also begs the question: With what meaning is the landscape invested by its residents who are not human? I look out on “my yard,” but how do the local squirrels see it? As their hazelnut warehouse? The migratory songbirds, as an overgrown haven from predators? What meaning rises from the billions and billions of microorganisms which are, by immense orders of magnitude, the most numerous life forms on earth?



My father, when hospitalized, becomes disoriented and experiences delusions. The phenomenon is known as hospital-induced psychosis. It’s common in elderly patients but can occur in anyone deprived of familiar environmental cues; symptoms moderate with the presence of friends and family, and generally fade when patients return home.

In the hospital, of course, meals are often unrecognizable; nursing staff appear and disappear with shift changes; lights may be on all night and off all day. On Dad’s last visit he lost the ability to make sense out of the large clock on the opposite wall, but was perfectly capable of operating the telephone in his room. He called us at home at midnight wanting to know where the hell breakfast was, and again at 4a.m. to inform us he was ready to go home, and demanded to know why nothing was being done about it. The following morning he became convinced that hospital security was preventing his children from visiting him, so he called the police department.

I can’t say I blame him. Disoriented he might have been, but he knew he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Every time I return home from a couple months caring for Dad in California, I experience a baffling period of “re-entry” which is surely similar in origin. There it is again when I’ve left home and returned to California: I’ve had just enough time to grow accustomed to a different repertoire of environmental cues.

Some years ago I was hospitalized myself for a medication reaction. Exhaustion and dehydration took their toll: often my eyes wouldn’t focus; nasal passages suffered such that I couldn’t smell at all, or taste my food, or hear well; my fingertips were so dessicated I couldn’t feel texture. In short, all five senses were impaired. Even back at home, without the usual sensory data, it was difficult to muster much interest in life.

Perhaps life in hospital or held hostage or in solitary confinement is traumatizing not only because familiar human contacts are missing, but also due to the of absence a rich externality. We require tangible sensation, complex energy, moving between us and what we think of as “environment”; without this it is difficult to be clear about who we are. In some sense, the landscape supplies us with meaning.

Perfectly imperfect

On my last day in Oregon last week, I went to the Portland Art Museum with my friend Ed. We wanted to see the exhibit of Chuck Close prints, and In Winter, Silk Linings, a collection of Japanese kimono prints.

Ed and I have each returned to our fine arts roots, but we met years ago professionally, as graphic designers. This shared background gives us an unusual familiarity with the methods used in both Close’s experiments and in traditional woodcuts.

The Close show was fascinating. It was well-curated, including not only technical background information, but selected prints capturing sequential stages of an edition, and record-keeping ephemera which Close and his collaborators employed in an astoundingly detailed and systematic process.

We sat down in front of a series from the silkscreen portrait of artist John Chamberlain, a half dozen or so samples from an edition employing 100 colors and an unknown number of screens. We tried to understand exactly how Close had developed the image, how he knew which colors to add where, and when. Even the meticulous charts he worked from could not have resolved the thousands of tiny dilemmas of value he faced with each additive impression.

Close’s images are compelling, but his process seems almost more important than what it expresses. In the end, we were exhausted simply by studying, and wondered if perhaps such technical virtuosity was evidence of some kind of mania.

There was little relief to be found downstairs amongst the woodcut prints. These too are meticulously wrought. It is hardly surprising that Close collaborated with Japanese woodcut masters in creating some of his editions. In wood these masters carve out representations of the most delicate lines and brush strokes. The patterns and colors and stylistic details of kimono fabric are captured in every particular; there are even tiny areas of brocade-like embossment. We found it difficult to imagine that such painstaking and laborious craft was rewarding, or even economically feasible, but it must have been.

* * *

During my formal working life I was exceedingly organized. I kept lists and careful calendars, developed systems for almost every contingency, always working to become more efficient. Not very many items slipped between the cracks, but some inevitably did. Finally one day I realized that, yes, it might be possible to manage things even more effectively, but to do so was going to require significantly more time and energy; there would be a diminishing return on investment.

In most activities there must be a similar point of diminishing return. That’s a peculiarly Western materialistic expression of the understanding that we don’t and can’t control the world we experience. At least, not often, and not very much.

Perhaps it is fitting that the concept of wabi-sabi, on the other hand, springs from the same Japanese culture which produced such painstaking craftsmen. In the wabi-sabi aesthetic, nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect— but is nonetheless beautiful. Because no result can be ideal, the process of working towards a result becomes more important. Craftsmanship becomes each simple momentary act of creation, one after another, rather than what is left when the creating stops.

Constant inconstants

Leviathans, 2007, mixed media

For the last six months, I’ve been more or less living in my childhood home, helping to take care of my Dad, who had a stroke early this summer. I imagined that, with the flood of impressions and associations, I would be writing about it all along. But I suppose the current has been too strong.

It also helps if you have time set aside to write. These days, my leisure time, such as it is, is reserved for art making, and it seems to be difficult to fold in writing as well.

In the absence of a press, I’ve been experimenting with pastels and oils. So soft and sloppy and malleable! A nice counterbalance to the past couple years of careful etching. This is the most satisfying part of my life right now, as true when in Oregon as when I’m camping out in California. I don’t shift gears easily, and it’s reassuring to have a constant of some kind.

It’s good to spend as much time as possible just a little outside your comfort zone. I believe that, and yet, it’s so… uncomfortable.

The Smartest Guys in the Room. Sort of.

I finally saw the documentary this week. (Thank you, PBS.)

What I found most striking, in this portrayal of the fabled rise and fall of Enron, was the extraordinary capacity for self-delusion exhibited by its clever executives, and their complicit counterparts in banking, trading, legal and accounting firms. All sense of reality was suspended in favor of the agreed-upon fiction that Enron was, in essence, a magical money machine.

Tonight marked the re-debut of Bill Moyer’s Journal. (Thank you again PBS, I feel I’m getting my money’s worth.) In “Buying the War,” Moyers and his crew review the mainstream media’s craven and gullible coverage of the march toward war in the Middle East. The 90-minute show highlights the huge disparity between relevant, verifiable facts, and the Bush administration’s deft marketing of the Iraqi war: another agreed-upon fiction.

Is there any reason to suppose beltway insiders are less self-deluding than titans of industry?

I’m forcibly reminded of a particularly naïve question I raised a few weeks ago on a discussion list (which shall here remain nameless). My question concerned the global ruling elite, and amounted to something like ”What are they thinking?”

“They aren’t thinking,” effectively summarized the collective response.

They’re as busy telling themselves stories as any humans on the planet.

In the Orion piece mentioned here earlier, Curtis White says, “[T]he violence with which environmentalists are most concerned is not the aberrant violence of the individual human but the violence of organizations. In particular, the violence that we know as environmental destruction is possible only because of a complex economic, administrative, and social machinery through which people are separated from responsibility for their misdeeds. We say, “I was only doing my job” at the paper mill, the industrial incinerator, the logging camp, the coal-fired power plant, on the farm, on the stock exchange, or simply in front of the PC in the corporate carrel. The division of labor not only has the consequence of making labor maximally productive, it also hides from workers the real consequences of their work.”

And makes them much more susceptible to fictions of the most destructive —and self-destructive— kind.

Curtis White: The Ecology of Work

The second of Curtis White's essays has appeared. An excerpt:

Challenging our place in this system as mere isolated functions (whether as workers or consumers) is a daunting task, especially for environmentalists, who tend to think that human problems are the concern of somebody else (labor unions, the ACLU, Amnesty International, Habitat for Humanity, etc.). We’re about the “Earth first.” My argument is simply that the threats to humans and the threats to the environment are not even two parts of the same problem. They are the same problem. For environmentalism, confronting corporations and creating indignant scientific reports about pollution is the easy stuff. But these activities are inadequate to the real problems, as any honest observer of the last thirty years of environmental activism would have to concede. The “last great places” cannot be preserved. We can no more preserve them than we can keep the glaciers from melting away. Responding to environmental destruction requires not only the overcoming of corporate evildoers but “self-overcoming,” a transformation in the way we live. A more adequate response to our true problems requires that we cease to be a society that believes that wealth is the accumulation of money (no matter how much of it we’re planning on “giving back” to nature), and begin to be a society that understands that “there is no wealth but life,” as John Ruskin put it. That is the full dimension and the full difficulty of our problem.

But I could have picked almost any paragraph; they are each rich with meaning.

Playing for keeps

I recently came across this very intriguing cover story from SF Weekly: "Future Games:
She wants to harness the power of the communal cerebellum her games create and put it to work solving real-world problems."

Later this month, Jane McGonigal (the "she" in question) and her collaborators—one of them a node of PBS—will launch a game called "World Without Oil." It is purportedly the first large-scale non-commercial alternate reality game (ARG) which focusses on a real-world puzzle. (Although ARGs generally begin online, they are designed to spill out into daily life.) In the WWO game scenario as currently presented, eight friends learn that the world may face some kind of oil emergency on April 30, and they try to figure out what to do about it. So will all the people who choose to play along: potentially millions of them.

One immediate benefit from the pre-launch phase of the game is that interested prospective players are "teased" with links to reputable articles about peak oil issues which may be unfamiliar to some of them. Additionally, wikis are typically built to support ARG play, and this game is no exception; at the very least, more people will become better informed, perhaps more engaged, concerning limited resource issues.

Less tangible, perhaps, are the benefits which may accrue through the development of collaborative skills—skills in all-too-short supply in this culture of hyperindividualism.

It is impossible to know what the game designers have envisioned or how they may choose to limit or guide the play. Because this particular game has little or no budget, however, game "content" will largely be generated by active players. This might provide an opportunity for knowledgeable players to influence the scope and direction of play. Some players, for example, might find a way to point out that a short-term oil crisis is of less concern than The Long Emergency.

And anybody who has read The Tipping Point can't help but wonder if ARGs may prove to be particular "sticky" and "contagious" ways of sharing information.

Even more Radical Hope

Charles Taylor has created quite a little stiir in the blogosphere with his piece in the New York Review of Books, A Different Kind of Courage, a response to Jonathan Lear's book, Radical Hope, mentioned elsewhere in this blog.

For those unlikely to read the original work, it's a thorough summary. The prose is pedestrian, however, whereas Lear's language is rich, powerful and precise.

Charles Taylor was recently awarded the 2007 Templeton Prize. He is Professor of Law and Philosophy at Northwestern and Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Philosophy at McGill. His books include Hegel and The Ethics of Authenticity.

Just following instruction...

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Bill McKibben at Powell's

“I’m not an unbelievable optimist — after all, I wrote a book called The End of Nature. But we do have a window,” he said, "in which to act."

He was talking about global climate change before a standing-room-only crowd of scruffy Portlanders. McKibben, tall, raw-boned, and sporting a silver crew cut, was less formally dressed than his audience, wearing jeans and a faded Step It Up t-shirt.

At the same moment on the other side of the river, people paid $26 to hear John and Teresa Heinz Kerry plug their new book, This Moment on Earth. McKibben, ostensibly present for similar reasons, made somewhat passing reference to his own recent work, Deep Economy.

McKibben quotes Bush Sr.’s famous dictum that “The American way of life is not up for negotiation” as the American environmental pronouncement which has left the most lasting impression on the larger global community. Our hyper-individualism is the obvious problem, according to McKibben (and many other authors, including Daniel Quinn).

“The default basic assumption of our culture is that ‘More is better.’ This assumption is shared by both right and left,” he said. “And, for a long time, it worked fairly well.” But no longer. The environmental costs are crushing, for one thing, and it doesn’t seem to work for human beings either.

“We used to think you could tell what made people happy by looking at what they buy. But it turns out that people answer the question ‘Are you happy?’ pretty accurately themselves.” By that measure, Americans passed the happiness peak a long time ago —in 1956— even as their individual wealth grew dramatically. In fact, Americans feel a great need for social connection and community that cannot be met by their current culture.

The solution to our environmental and social dilemmas is to redirect economies and social structures to the local level. As the new bumper sticker says, “Think globally, act neighborly.” According to McKibben, the largest growth in the retail food sector is found in farmers’ markets. In Deep Economy, he cites similar developments around the country as examples of economic redirection.

He seems most enthusiastic, however, about his own “accidental” grassroots movement, Step It Up, which began when he and a few friends decided that, lacking any other idea of how to motivate reduction of carbon emissions, they would walk to Vermont’s state capitol and gather in front of the federal building. Much to their surprise, the few became a thousand.

“That may not sound like much to people in Portland, but in Vermont, it’s unprecedented!” So they wondered if they could perhaps inspire a hundred similar activities around the US, and launched the Step It Up website with the help of some local college students. As of this morning, almost 1200 events are scheduled for April 14th in all 50 states.

About gatherings like last night's, people often complain that it's "only preaching to the choir." McKibben reminds us that, historically, as little as 10-15% of a population have succeeded in initiaing huge changes. "And I don't know if you've noticed, but the choir is bigger and louder these days." Step It Up recently received a group photo of a hundred-and-some University of Texas sorority sisters in (I think he said) Step It Up t-shirts, bearing the legend: "Proof that it's not just the hippies who care."

When asked if Step It Up plans the obligatory huge march on Washington, D.C., McKibben says no. For one thing, he’s a writer, not an activist, “with no idea how on earth you arrange for 4000 port-a-potties.” He also feels it’s vitally important to “do it where you live, against the background of what you care about.”

* * * * *

I’m struck by how many of our brightest thinkers point to “the way we make a living” as the crucial arena for creating meaningful change.

As Curtis White said in his recent Orion article, “…Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs. We are willingly part of a world designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called “the visible God”: money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out. It creates a hole in our sense of ourselves and of this country, and it leaves us with few alternatives but to try to fill that hole with money and the things money buys…”

Curtis White: The Idols of Environmentalism

“No one,” he said during this evening’s talk, “is more surprised than I am to hear me talking about spirituality.”

White, an iconoclastic novelist and provocative cultural critic, spoke to a small but appreciative community college audience on the topic of sustainability—also touching upon Life, The Universe and Everything.

Although not noted for a background in environmental issues, he was asked by Orion* to examine our global predicament from his own quirky macrocosmic perspective: "...Only a weak and fearful society could invest so much desperate energy in protecting activities that are the equivalent of suicide."

In the course of this examination he has begun to formulate a series of Theses on the Spirit of Disobedience: Take Back Your Emptiness, not yet complete, a draft of which he shared with the audience. Here is thesis 3: "We are trapped between dogma and empire. It is possible to articulate an alternative notion of the spirit that is neither irrational nor in collaboration with empire, but it is not easy and mostly not familiar."

On the strength of tonight's experience, I’ve purchased White’s current non-fiction book, The Spirit of Disobedience: Resisting the Charms of Fake Politics, Mindless Consumption, and the Culture of Total Work. My expectation is that it will contain something to delight and also to affront everyone —yes, everyone— from a little lovefest/interview with James Kunstler, to a surgical dissection of “holy whores” Al Franken and Bill Maher.

But I’ll get back to you on that.


*Part One of this article may be found in the March/April 2007 issue of Orion magazine. If you aren't familiar with this publication, it deftly and beautifully explores the human place in the world through poetry, science, visual arts, and spiritual inquiry. White's article, for example, opens with a wee cool Parke-Harrison.

More: Audience and Artist

GUEST ESSAY

by Judith Davis

Your question about the responsibility of the viewer is important. Being an audience or a viewer is not a passive act and has a range of valid/invalid responses.

The primary responsibility of the viewer is to educate the eye. This doesn't mean agreement or acceptance of everything viewed because its the happening thing, because some mindless Ph.D gives convoluted reasons for the greatness of a work. It also means the viewer has to at times admit the eye can't judge a work because there isn't enough reference material internalized to give a valid opinion.

Every viewer has a right to say, 'that's crap' as long as a reason can be given for that judgment. The 'crap' opinion doesn't necessarily need a monumental reason. If the viewer's eye finds it obvious that's reason enough. An obvious work often has a political or social message. The viewer may agree with the message in the abstract, but find the obviousness of the work insulting.

There is also the work that would be good if the artist had used a different shade of green, had put this object over there, had made this object thicker or thinner, etc. There are structural problems within the piece that don't work. That work would be a failed piece, but not crap.

The primary responsibility of the viewer is when the eye is dumbfounded by the work. The brain stops processing and just wanders off into a soft wail of 'whaaaaat?'. The viewer can't say its obvious, can't say its failed, can't say much of anything except admit that it doesn't get it (although some times the viewer will not be put off because elements of the piece are likeable, example:the colors are pleasant, the graphic element is striking). At this point the viewer has to put the work on the back burner and think about it, research it, consider what elements the viewer likes/doesn't like and then judge if these are valid reasons. Then the viewer can decide if there is an issue of taste (i.e. I recognize the piece works and is important, but it doesn't resonate with me because I like more complex structure or I don't like work that is so busy or I don't like those color combinations, I don't like any paintings of dogs playing poker,etc).

Educating the eye for work on the back burner can take years. de Koonings pieces of big boobed women with huge toothy smiles were a problem for me. I could see they worked as a unit, that elements within balanced piece, the colors where appealing, but my brain was caught in the land of 'whaaaat?' and I knew I couldn't speak intelligently about these pieces. The local art museum had a very early painting of his that didn't help (perhaps going back to it now I'd be able to see how he was developing towards his toothy ladies, but the painting didn't give a key to his later work). So de Kooning was put on my back burner, an artist I couldn't discount because I knew my eye was lacking the key to understanding his work. I couldn't like him, but I couldn't write him off either. Years later I read an interview of Elizabeth Murray describing coming across a de Kooning painting when she was a student at the Chicago Art Institue. How she went every day to look at this work. Through her loving description of how the piece spoke to her I was given the key to understanding his 'artistic language'. My eye was opened to what he was doing, how he was doing it. I could then decide if he achieved his aims in individual paintings and whether his work was to my taste or if he was an artist whose work I could accept, but not necessarily like.

The easiest way to learn the language of a problematic artist is to find someone who appreciates the artist. Unfortunately today that is difficult as too many people accept all work without any critical appreciation. If it is made it is to be valued and they can't give valid reasons why they like any work. They don't have aesthetic values, although they may have plenty political/social explanations for the work. Political and social reasoning's are not interchangeable with aesthetic values.

Joan Mitchell's work looked like messy blobs when I saw them in magazine gallery ads. I could see her work was respected, but my brain couldn't get past the 'whaaat?' response. I got six large library books on her collective works (seeing how an artist's work evolved can be helpful to find the key to understanding, your viewer's eye evolves along with the artist). I didn't read biographies (although I did of course learn about her life along the way) because my aim was to understand the work and not to join a cult of personality. Each day I looked at her works and after a while my eye was able to recognize patterns and motifs that occurred in her work. After a few weeks I found that there were a couple of paintings that I really responded to, that I actually liked. I had found the key to understanding her artistic language. That doesn't mean I'm a big fan, that I swoon over each of her pieces. But I can look at her work and appreciate what she was trying to say and the methods she used to communicate with.

Each viewer's eye has had its own early training ground and some style's of work are more easily approached than others. It isn't the viewer's responsibility to enjoy, like or appreciate every work it sees. But the viewer's judgments must be based on values that can be described with reasons past one word epithets.

Lisa's comment that when jazz lost the melody is an excellent example of a valid judgment. She recognizes what speaks to her and what doesn't and has applied this to a break off point in jazz. You may disagree with her, you may love later jazz without melody, but you have to recognize that she has made a valid judgment based on a thought out criteria. She is a responsible audience. You could discuss jazz with her even though your view point is different because there are critical aesthetic issues to discuss between you.

The viewer also has a responsibility to think about why a piece of work is liked. There are graphic elements that zing the eye (i.e. eye candy) that at first gives a favorable response. The viewer must not be taken in, must have valid reasons for liking a piece as well as for not liking a piece. The viewer can even say, I know its just eye candy but I like it anyway, its fun, it makes me happy and that's enough.

The point is to recognize the work for what it is and then determine personal taste/aesthetics.