art and language: was, lexicon

Mark, here's the point I was after, and I got back into Outlook Express to
express it.  You and I seem to be speaking for different notions of "art."
Perhaps this clarifies:  I want to include "craft" within my all-purpose
definition.  Perhaps the "fine arts" are one end of the art/craft spectrum.
When I said that it was the scientific revolution that put it into our heads
that art was basically "secondary" to the important human business of
getting things done, I should also have noted that advanced technology and
life in a mechanized society have contributed as well to this sterilizing
attitude.  Unless you go to craft fairs, it is easy to forget what it was
like to live in a world where human labor and artisanry were highly visible;
if you did not make your own clothes or build your own house, you were in
contact with people who were hands-on milliners, seamsters, builders,
carpenters; if you were wealthy, you hired a painter to paint your portrait.
You listened to music that people played in your home, or on the street.  To
a great extent, the larger, more isolated, and more invisible our
technologies become (who makes the clothes you wear?  faceless paupers in
Singapore.  Who is Kate Bush?  A voice on a CD.  Who prepared your food for
you?  Somebody at a restaurant, or some faceless industry that has stocked
items in the supermarket), the more it contributes to a separation of what
one thinks is "art" and what one feels are the "basics" of living.  The more
it has contributed as well to our notion that poetry, painting, mastering
the piano, pottery-making, poetizing, reading fine books are "luxuries"
instead of visible and essential aspects of human life, and higher
developments of "craft."  Can we get along without fine art?  Sure.  But it
wouldn't (at least to me) be a life worth living.  Can we live a life
without craft?  Not and remain essentially human.  Maybe that's one aspect
of the difference between the crafts and the arts.

Language is an art.  You can speak and write it with minimal or maximal
skill.  It may be "hard-wired" in the brain, but we still have to learn it.
And some of us learn it and learn it for decades, honing our vocabularies,
fine-tuning our rhetorical skills, learning foreign languages, reading dead
ones.  There are so many people in our high-tech society who take it just so
far, who use language "only to get things done in."

I still maintain that language and craft developed together, tongue and
hand.  What other animal on this planet vocalizes or builds with as much
complexity as the human animal?  I am curiously intent on this topic, I'm
sorry.  Perhaps it's because I've devoted my life to teaching young adults
how to make their writing and their speaking more artfully efficient and
inventive, and to open their minds to the antiquity and complexity of the
written arts.  I'm not about to hear that this is a "luxury," or that it is
"the ultimate in free expression, refusing to obey set channels or rules."
Skill in rhetoric follows some definite rules, and one's mastery of it opens
more doors.  Off to bed.  Happy conlanging.

Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
Eskkoat ol ai sendran, rohsan nuehra celyil takrem bomai nakuo.
"My shadow follows me, putting strange, new roses into the world."
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teoteach.html


----- Original Message -----
From: "Sally Caves" <scaves@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Monday, June 02, 2003 12:18 AM
Subject: Re: lexicon


> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>
>
>
> > On Sun, Jun 01, 2003 at 01:43:34PM -0400, Sally Caves wrote:
> > > Why do you think that?  Why can't art also be "hard-wired" in the
brain?
> >
> > Well, maybe we just haven't studied art sufficiently to identify the
> > universals, but the term is applied so broadly that I can't see
> > what it is that might be "hardwired art."
>
> Is applied so broadly by whom? :)  By me?  I intended it broadly.  I
thought
> you were looking at it a little too narrowly and with too modern a
> definition.
>
> > > Art is a fundamental aspect of human society and has been from the
> beginning,
> > > evolving along with language and culture.  What has changed our
> > > understanding of this basic human truth is the scientific revolution,
> and
> > > scientific materialism.  We are basically machines, we function to get
> > > things done, society functions to provide us with the basics, art is
an
> > > excrescence belonging to those "humanist" guys.
> >
> > Back up a bit.  We ARE machines, but usually the term "humanist" is
> > reserved for the folks who agree with that statement.
>
> Not in all cases.  The term is also used by some of my scientific
colleagues
> to distinguish what they do from what I do (as an academic). :)
>
> > And while I agree
> > with it,
>
> .....that society first and foremost functions without art?  Let's back up
a
> bit and look at some of my "broader definitions" that you snipped.
Building
> a shelter and making it pleasing.  Is that an art or not?  Clothing.  Even
> the most small-scale societies, living in the warmest regions of earth,
> decorate themselves.  Not all art has to be the Mona Lisa, or even playing
> the clarinet.
>
> > I certainly don't think art is an "excrescence".
>
> I've heard it referred to as such.  Fluff.  Dispensible.
>
> > I'm a bit of
> > an artist myself - drawing as well as conlanging.  And it may be that
> > it's part of our programming, but I still don't think it's as
fundamental
> > as language.
>
> The original argument was whether artistic development came after
linguistic
> development or developed with it.  We have all agreed that we are in basic
> ignorance about this fact.  I think one could argue safely that writing
> developed reasonably late.  However, the fact that art is part of our
human
> programming is an important point we have in common.  Thank you.  I would
go
> further and say that it is probably as ancient in development as language
> is.  That it has developed into something far more complex and evocative
> than language, and nuanced, and harder to pin down, is an argument for
> another rainy day. Meanwhile, Michael has had some interesting things to
say
> on this topic.
>
> Sally Caves
> scaves@frontiernet.net
> Eskkoat ol ai sendran, rohsan nuehra celyil takrem bomai nakuo.
> "My shadow follows me, putting strange, new roses into the world."
>

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