Current Reading Progress: Beginning of Renaissance Self-Fashioning
I have emerged from reading the selections of Better Living Through Criticism with many more thoughts on art than I originally had. I have always been inquisitive, and I have always questioned art and the like, but hearing—or rather reading—someone else questioning the stuff has been extremely thought provoking. One of the first ideas I came across in the reading, after continuing on from where I last left off in the previous blog post, was Scott’s notion of how determined we really are. Personally, I used to be a firm believer in libertarianism… until one day my faithful friend laid down the law and explained to me why my every action must have been those very actions that they were. With Scott though, I cannot quite get a grip on what he is thinking—which is oddly true for most of the reading. I have finally decided that Scott thinks we have some decision over the choices we make, but it is largely not up to us. In my common place book, I take a short couple sentences explaining why I want to be with Scott and how I could feasibly see his point of view being valid, but I then quickly slip back into a rambling monologue on the unfortunately reasonable snare of determinism.
Later in the reading, Scott discusses the interplay of the art world and that of the “bankers and industrialists.” It quickly gets me thinking about Karl Marx, a hot topic in my sociology class at Emory. Marx had the idea that the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas and that modern “superstructures” like banks and the realm of industrialism are vested in creating/sustaining the class illusion. Scott reminds me that one of the ways to do so is by funding the arts, or in other words, the giant expression of all culture that influences and controls a large portion of the social sphere. I also came across one of my favorite two-word phrases I have ever seen: semantic quagmire. I define it as follows: “n. a copious sage of language, commonly characterized by rambling speech, which often induces an overwhelmed or confused state.” Both of these blurbs are included in the first picture of my common place book I include below. I them vociferously and unabashedly scream in Scott’s face when he says that a piece of music “is not about or of anything. It says or espouses nothing. It advances no moral and presses no cause other than its own integrity.” Refer to my common place book for the drama. Take a 180 and my next blurb in the book is me bowing to the mind-blowing genius that is A.O. Scott. “Ratatouille” really is about “the symbiosis between artist and critic… at once ‘exuberantly democratic and unabashedly elitist, defending good taste and aesthetic accomplishment not as snobbish entitlements but as universal ideals.’” My world—my childhood—is forever altered.
In the next part of the reading, excerpts from A More Beautiful Question, I marvel at the stories and data Berger presents. He makes me at once furious at our inexcusably negligent education system and immensely upset at the inequality within said system. The graphs have been plotted in my common place book because I feel they deserve the work it takes to remake them; their data is that baffling. Also in my common place book I include what I think the world map world look like if the South Pole were the global superpower. The thought exercise came out of something I read in one of Berger’s chapters (see picture below and common place book for more information).
I suspect we will have many discussions on these topics in class, and I am ecstatic. I would also love to know whether or not we are going to share our common place books, or thoughts about the process, and such because I think it would be extremely valuable and fun to see what everyone else is doing.
