A brief reply to four posts:

Jo E: " To be honest I am not quite sure how you can do aesthetics without it [duende]"

Mea culpa!  As I say, at least it's a change from the anachronistic "art is beauty" and  the obscurantist "art is a source of aesthetic pleasure". But all the same I don't think I'll commit to full-blown "duendism" for now.


Mark: " I don't see how we can get past the idea that art is a language."

I think we sometimes see resemblances between art and a language (e.g. we say a certain piece of music "speaks" to us).  But we can't mean it literally. We don't use art to communicate with other people and we can't translate it into another language. So we must mean it as a metaphor. So it may be part of the truth but it's not all of it.


VB: "What is Art from your perspective?" 

Too big a question to answer on a discussion list unfortunately. My view is the same as Malraux's which I explain in some detail in my book. (Sorry for the commercial.)


R. Gillmann: "Art became irrelevant when science claimed all knowledge.  The way back to relevancy is through an aesthetic that challenges scientific hegemony of knowledge."

And perhaps there is more than one kind of knowledge - a difficult thought for (analytic) philosophy to digest, I know. But by no means out of the question.


DA
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