CLUELESS
Friday, March 14, 2008
by Lizza Littlewort
Art is useless. That there should be public institutions dedicated to the perpetuation of this arcane activity is laughable. Well, okay, it has one use. It can provide a bit of sensory pleasure. Some nice form and colour, tasty like a good cigar as we mix ourselves a drink at the end of another long day. But this ‘contemporary’ rubbish doesn’t provide any sensory pleasure. There’s no excuse for its existence at all.
Having fun qualified for chastisement (10 across)
Unless we get a bit better at pleasure. There are passive and active forms of pleasure. The passive form you sit back and it is all provided. The active form you participate. With contemporary art you are not given the answer, but only the clues, and like a sleuth you make your deductions. When the artwork is good, there is a keen and subtle thrill, a thinking person’s pleasure.
Consider for a moment the English tradition of crossword puzzles. They’re not much good at face value, unless you really like little squares. It’s in solving the clues that you get your pleasure. And what a subtle, intangible pleasure it is. Because crosswords take pleasure in the English language as a place to play. Anagrams, palindromes, words read backwards and upside down. Surface meanings, dual meanings, ambivalence, the sense in nonsense. And with it strange bytes of history, reversed cultural assumptions, embedded implications of other patterns of thought we only see in fleeting snatches.
Impossible to express in a four letter word? (9 down)
Solving crosswords is a culture with its own traditions. They are hard to explain, till you start to get them. “It’s not about what the words mean, it’s about what they don’t mean,” says Sandy Balfour’s girlfriend in Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose.
But yet the clues are not arbitrary. There is a structure which they obey, and through which they can be solved, and when one appreciates this structure one also begins to appreciate the peculiar mastery of the crossword setter, a mastery which had until this point been hidden.
And most of all, one begins to enjoy the game.
Art is useless. That there should be public institutions dedicated to the perpetuation of this arcane activity is laughable. Well, okay, it has one use. It can provide a bit of sensory pleasure. Some nice form and colour, tasty like a good cigar as we mix ourselves a drink at the end of another long day. But this ‘contemporary’ rubbish doesn’t provide any sensory pleasure. There’s no excuse for its existence at all.
Having fun qualified for chastisement (10 across)
Unless we get a bit better at pleasure. There are passive and active forms of pleasure. The passive form you sit back and it is all provided. The active form you participate. With contemporary art you are not given the answer, but only the clues, and like a sleuth you make your deductions. When the artwork is good, there is a keen and subtle thrill, a thinking person’s pleasure.
Consider for a moment the English tradition of crossword puzzles. They’re not much good at face value, unless you really like little squares. It’s in solving the clues that you get your pleasure. And what a subtle, intangible pleasure it is. Because crosswords take pleasure in the English language as a place to play. Anagrams, palindromes, words read backwards and upside down. Surface meanings, dual meanings, ambivalence, the sense in nonsense. And with it strange bytes of history, reversed cultural assumptions, embedded implications of other patterns of thought we only see in fleeting snatches.
Impossible to express in a four letter word? (9 down)
Solving crosswords is a culture with its own traditions. They are hard to explain, till you start to get them. “It’s not about what the words mean, it’s about what they don’t mean,” says Sandy Balfour’s girlfriend in Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose.
But yet the clues are not arbitrary. There is a structure which they obey, and through which they can be solved, and when one appreciates this structure one also begins to appreciate the peculiar mastery of the crossword setter, a mastery which had until this point been hidden.
And most of all, one begins to enjoy the game.
Labels: Joburg art fair
posted by Robert Sloon at 12:14 PM
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