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

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

Ugh, trying to remember the name of the Snape crossover mpreg that won the ... I think it was a nebular award. (Somewhat surprised that no one has yet mentioned fanfic. Surely this is the place to wibble about Transformative?). I will google, see if I can work it out.

Corpus Chriti by Terence McNally is the one with Jesus being gay that I wrote my dissertation on. On a mostly unrelated note there was the David Beckham nativity art a couple of years back.

Ugh, all of these are much to vague to reference properly. One of my favourite pieces of art like this that I've ever seen involved a display at the Satchi (can't spell) gallery a few years back, where if you didn't pay enough attention to the exebition, it seemed that what was on display was a bunch of paintings by a young child who'd been abducted and killed by a pedophile. If you actually looked at the content and studied the paintings and read the stuff that came with them, the artist made it very clear that it was a fake - that they'd done all the art themselves and no children had been abducted...

Wish I could think of better examples from music. 3.44 is the obvious one, but it's also the one that anyone who knows anything about music will know about. (Interestingly, I think he won some sort of interlectual property rights case against someone else who tried to publish a piece of music which was just silence...) One thing that you get from music easily is how quickly our... artistic morality? ... changes. When Stravinsky first composed Rite of Spring it was so shocking, people rioted at the opening performance. Now, it's standard concert repetiore. Carmina Burana (Karl Orff) is all about sex, and these days people rarely notice, because it's thought of as being sensible classical repetoire.

[vampire-kitten.livejournal.com]

Was it the tiptree? I know HP fanfic won it one year, and mpreg would be the obvious choice...

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Musical examples, yes yes! Thank you very much.