history fails

[raven]

You know when someone comes into your room and you have to persuade them that you're not, really, really not trying to jump out of a third-floor window, really, you may have hit a low point in your life. (Actually, I was trying to catch a cushion I had just knocked out of it. Perfectly sensible thing to do, no I am not going crazy at all.)

Speaking of having hit a low point in my life, not only am I accumulating unhappy symptoms with a disturbing rapidity - why, hello there random tinnitus, swinging-from-hysteria-to-somnolence and jumping out of my skin at someone dropping a clove of garlic - I am reading cultural-imperialist articles on the philosophy of forgery and being encouraged by an insane classicist to use my newly-discovered heterosexuality FOR SCIENCE.

...not crazy at all.

Okay, let me backtrack. You - yes, you! - can help out not one but two nutty Oxonian finalists in their quest to retain their sanity and be awarded a degree! There are two ways in which you can do this!

First of all. I am, at the moment, revising for paper 109, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Criticism. I have many criticisms of this paper, it must be said. (Aha, see what I did there?) Most of them involve the way it's not a philosophy paper at all, it is a paper for failed literary critics. Real past questions have included: "The pointlessness of art is not the pointlessness of a game, it is the pointlessness of human life itself." Discuss and Given that horror movies frighten us, why do we go to see them? and so on.

Anyway. Yes. What is very handy for this paper is a ready stream of examples of "subversive" art. You know the sort of thing I mean. Tracy Emin's bed, Duchamp's Fountain, that kind of stuff. Of course, those are the two examples that everyone uses. I would quite like to use something the examiner hasn't heard eleventy million times before. Which is where you come in, dear flist. You all undoubtedly have better artistic taste than me. Tell me about art - things that are unusual, things that are on the boundary between art and non-art, things that a floundering philosopher might find interesting. I really would appreciate it; I'm swamped by awful aesthetics reading and nothing makes any sense.

Second of all. apotropaios is a very dear friend of mine, he is also a finalist, he is also going somewhat crazy. In the interests of science, he has been asking everyone he knows whether they've ever had intercrural sex. (Apparently, this was a particularly well-represented sexual practice in Greek vase painting of the sixth century onwards.)

This has rapidly devolved into a horror story of soft fruit and armadae of battle penguins. However. Hilarity aside, it is a serious request. If you - or anyone you know - actually has done this, or knows anything about it, he would like to know. Comments - his, not mine - are screened, and he is actually a good human who will be respectful and discreet and indeed, very grateful for any information.

I leave you now for a return to the philosophy of mechanical reproduction. Oh my I am so very fascinating.

Comments

[slasheuse.livejournal.com]

OH OH OH BLASPHEMY. DO YOU WANT SOME BLASPHEMY. "The Love That Dares To Speak Its Name", or something, it's by James Kircup and it's about having necrophiliac buggery with Christ.

Also "The Platonic Blow" is some Auden filth.

For forgery, read The Portrait of Mr W.H.

Would it be worth bringing in that discussion from Gaudy Night about the morality of the brilliant artist who paints pot-boilers?

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

The GN example is not quite right, alas. (This disappoints me more than it should.) It has the problem of an implied metaphysics of morality - it only allows us to discuss what art is in the concept of this particular notion of what it is right to do, and what it isn't.