Predominantly Erroneous (Exohedron nonsense blog)

There's gotta be some college somewhere in the US where one of the dorms is called "Waffle House", right?

 

I think there is some value in a notion of "human social endeavor focused on aesthetic objects" that some people might call "Art". It is a notion that sounds like it describes a lot of the way that Art occurs.

Of course, one would have to also determine what "aesthetic" means, and I would then propose that it is a fully recursive notion, that it encompasses precisely those things that the person using the word would consider "Art" (terminological note: when I say the "user" of a word, I don't mean necessarily the speaker, but rather that, by taking in the word and extracting meaning from it, the listener also counts as a user of the word).

In particular, I think I would deny that any object can have intrinsic artistic value or merit or meaning. Rather, the production of the object, the presentation to audiences, its distribution, its consumption, these things as human acts can have value or merit or meaning, but the object is independent of such things.

All this to say that I think I might be philosophically incapable of appreciating Art as an extension of my philosophical inability to care about communities. I like some kinds of art, but Art is too much of the tree falling in an empty forest.

[EDIT] Okay, further thoughts spurred on by watching this guy with a masters in creative writing arguing with his chat about Art while attempting to play a video game: I think my main problem is that, from the viewpoint of my philosophical preferences, incoherent as they may be, I want to only respect things for which "death of the author" can be treated as an absolute principle, and Art simply isn't one of them. It is an important perspective, yes, but an impoverished one, and indeed one for which many pieces of Art are simply incomprehensible. But that means that appreciating Art in a less impoverished fashion would require caring about things that I simply do not.

 

"theater kid", but in the surgical operation sense.

 

Okay, yeah, actual wasabi is so much better than the horseradish knockoff we usually get here in the US.

 

So since the new Pope has a math degree, would it be funnier if we got an Ex Cathedra declaration about the truth of:
-The Riemann Hypothesis, which is currently unproven and therefore may be true or may be false,
-The Continuum hypothesis, which is proven to be independent of the standard axioms and is therefore neither provably true nor provably false
-The Godel statement for the Peano natural numbers, which if true is provably unprovable?

 

1: "Heelbook" is a pretty good professional wrestling joke
2: It's also a pretty good foot-fetish joke
3: I am not about to go find out for myself which timeline we live in

 

Someday I will learn to accept the validity of "traditional" cuisines that post-date the Columbian exchange. Someday.