Category: 8 November

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Models and Approaches

I found Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential to be very interesting. It is not like anything I am used to reading in an art history course. This of course created the question of why we read it. I felt that there can be parallels made between chefs and graffiti artists. Bourdain’s scars were a form of semiotic and the layering of his scars and marks mimics the layering of paint on a wall. The connections between chefs forms a community similar to the communities of graffiti artists. This brings in the topic of identity. The class presentation began with showing Ugly Delicious. This related through the cultural acceptance and blending of cultures. This transitioned nicely to art brut.

All of the pieces we read discuss the idea of beauty and the ideal. There is an importance in giving people something aesthetically pleasing. People react well to appearance and question things when they are not beautiful. This is seen in both ugly delicious and with art brut as a movement. Like food, art does not need to be beautiful to be meaningful. Standards of beauty are determined by the elite. Art brut is an authentic form of art which ignores the authorities which dictate art. Ugly food is a form of art brut. Art brut then relates back to graffiti in  culture. Graffiti artists are removed from culture in the same way that outside artists are. Their artwork is a way of sharing culture, but it is not meant to be shown in the way that the elite and beauty standard makers think of art.

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On Word and Image

Also wanted to mention kind of an unimportant point but something I thought was interesting in the Mitchell reading on word and image-

“Traditional cliches about visual culture… are based on the tacit assumptions of the superiority of words to visual images. Even in the most basic phenomenological reflections on intersubjectivity, the ‘self’ is constructed as a speaking and seeing subject, the ‘other’ as a silent, observable object, a visual image (60)”

“Image” in its passivity is considered inferior to “word.” I had never really thought about the physical implications of these words that might unconsciously make us biased towards one over the other. This hierarchy has become a part of the “natural” semiotic and aesthetic order.

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On Appropriation

After doing the readings for this week I realized that my view on what “appropriation” is has completely changed. I have always attached the potential exploitative indirect results of cultural appropriation with the actual concept of appropriation, and so there was always a negative connotation to the word for me. From Ashley and Plesch’s essay I’ve come to realize that the processes of appropriation extend both diachronically and synchronically and can produce kind of beautiful, fluid results.

Heyd’s “Rock Aesthetics and Cultural Appropriation” has made me personally realize that aesthetic appreciation shouldn’t be limited; instead we must educate those who engage in the aesthetic appreciation of other cultures to be conscious of context and cross-cultural etiquette. There is actually a lot we can gain from exploring other cultures (can enrich our understanding of other cultures, critique our own understanding of art, learn about another culture way of aesthetically appreciating something, offer a paradigm of resistance, and offer us an alternative model for the enjoyment of human creativity), but it is important to be respectful.