Re: Lighting Some Flames: Towards conlang artistry

Jesse Bangs scripsit:

> It should not need to be proved that some art is better than others.
Indeed, it should not; all such attempts are futile.  They contribute
not to the advancement of knowledge, but only to the history of taste,
which vacillates and has fads and fashions and market booms (and slumps).

The proper place of evaluative judgment is in the eye/ear/brain of the
consumer of art, when choosing to read/look at/listen to/study some
particular works and not others.  Whatever you find rewarding and suggestive
to work with, by all means work with.

Notoriously, schools and manifestos are appropriate to artists who are
not fully established in their art, and it is quite common for the
works produced under the manifesto to be utterly contrary in spirit to
what the manifesto says.  (See Imagism, which was supposed to be about
tightly visualized concreteness, and wound up producing poems of
allusion and mystery.)

> Currently, this is almost entirely lacking on the Conlang list.  When
> someone posts texts or grammatical sketches, the responses are generally
> entirely congratulatory, or they are concerned only with correcting
> technical errors or confusions within the grammar.
"[W]e are all here not to see how many potatoes we can pick, but
to get the potatoes picked before winter."
        --Spider Robinson

>  The study of the history of art, music, or literature is a long
> series of redefinitions of what is proper, what is better, and a constant
> critical re-evaluation of everything that's gone before.
Northrop Frye rightly called this "leisure-class gossip":

"[Meaningless criticism] includes all casual, sentimental, and
prejudiced value judgments, and all the literary chit-chat which makes the
reputations of poets boom and crash in an imaginary stock exchange. That
wealthy investor Mr. Eliot, after dumping Milton on the market, is now
buying him again; Donne has probably reached his peak and will begin
to taper off; Tennyson may be in for a slight flutter but the Shelley
stocks are still bearish."
        --_Anatomy of Criticism_ (1957)

> And once again, if you don't like it form your own school.
"Or else don't."
        --Thomas A. Cowan

--
John Cowan <jcowan@...>     http://www.reutershealth.com
I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen,    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith.  --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_

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