Worldview Disrupting Lives, Marketing Pornography and Proper Art

[C]onsider that Seth is on the mark. So is Pastor McFarland. Great marketing is designed to get people to *buy* something: products, services, concepts. And the best way to do that is to appeal to their present worldview. Great leaders like Jesus, Gandhi, MLK, Siddhartha Gautama, et al. were *not* marketing anything. They were living worldview disrupting lives. Big difference. - Tom Asacker, in comments to "What is Real?"

Damn, Tom's words just hit me upside my head. Perhaps because it's so relevant to what I'm thinking about in terms of my own life these days.

My life is my message. - Gandhi

I don't have a "proper" response at this moment - only this improper post right now. I'll simply share snippets of something relevant that caught my attention yesterday. And I'm still digesting myself. Much of it speaks for itself without my elaboration if you read S-L-O-W-L-Y. Not exactly ideal sound bites for the blog format.

Yesterday, I find a document called "The Way of Art" via Google and I start perusing it. I find myself musing, "Wow, this is amazing. Gee, I wonder who wrote this?" I search the page. Ah, figures: Joseph Campbell.

Proper art, says [James] Joyce in [Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man], is "static" and improper art is "kinetic." Kinisis, as you know, means movement and Stasis, as you know, means standing still.

Kinisis: Improper art is kinetic in that it moves the observer either to desire, positive, or to loathe or fear, negative, that object represented. That's clear and simple. Improper art is kinetic, it moves the observer either to desire or to refuse, to fear or hate the object represented.

Art that moves you to desire is pornography. The Supreme Court of the United States can't define pornography, therefore, that's what we have. All advertising art is pornographic. You are going through a magazine and you see a picture of a beautiful refrigerator and beside it stands a lovely girl with lovely refrigerator teeth. And you think, I love refrigerators like that. Pornography. Picture of a dear old lady and you think, "Oh, lovely old sweet soul, I'd love to have a cup of tea with that dear lady." That's pornography. You go into a ski buffs department and you see pictures of ski slopes and you think, "oh, wow, to go down slopes like that." Pornography. - Joseph Campbell, from his lecture "The Way of Art"

Joseph Campbell continues that James Joyce, acknowledged as one of the greatest writers of all times, says we should look to St. Thomas Aquinas for an inkling of what proper art is.

Aquinas defines beauty as that which pleases; that's a very nice definition. There is another aspect, however, to art which is the sublime. And the sublime is that which simply shatters your whole ego system. In either case, we are over on the static side: one static held by fascination, the other static held by annihilation. The beautiful and the sublime. The sublime: enormous power, enormous space, to simply diminish and wipe out the ego. The sublime. - Joseph Campbell, from his lecture "The Way of Art"

It's easy to miscontrue Aristotle's statis here. By no means does it mean lifeless. It speaks to the infinitely present source of inspiration. The viewer is struck still - held in aesthetic arrest as Campbell would phrase it - and transported to this same source.

In this piece you touch another part of me. A part beyond the brain. You make me stop and contemplate. - Graham, comments in "What is Real?"

A few weeks ago I'm in the bookstore doing a bit of sleuthing on the Parsifal and the Holy Grail myth. I spot one of those oversized coffee-table astrology books. My curiosity peaked, I just had to open it to my birthday. It spoke of the path of the artist for me. This stands out: "Great art is energy channeled in from spirit and translated into words, images, or sounds to which people can relate. Art is powerful, not just because of the intense emotions it can stir, but because it helps people feel the inspiration felt by the artist at the time of creation."

In his early autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, James Joyce's alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, draws on Aristotle in a discussion of aesthetics, where he distinguishes between improper and proper art. The former is kinetic, meaning its purpose is to excite and elicit emotional movement in the observer, listener, or reader, as in pornographic or didactic art. The focus of the creator here is external, for it is on the audience's response. Proper art, Stephen continues, is static, insofar as it is interested only in the art itself - the internal - not its elicited or desired reaction....Whereas creators can be faithful to their inspiring Muse and not to the art's effect on others, performers likewise can be faithful to the inspiration's source, and not their special ability to arouse emotion in their audiences. A discerning public can tell the difference between proper and improper artists and performers; those who remain true to the genius of the inspiration as opposed to those who care only for the external gratifications - in Freud's famous words regarding the artist: the pursuit of honor, power, and love. - Kenneth Wapnick, "A Portrait of A Course in Miracles Student As An Artist"

I'd generally place my bets on people who are intrinsically motivated -- people who do what they do not to secure riches or fame, but because they simply love it. Left brain or right brain, those are the sorts of folks who change the world. - Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind from Lisa Haneberg's Interview with Pink at Management Craft

This contrast between mere form and genuine inspiration is seen, for instance, in many Elizabethan authors who wrote in the style of the day, yet Shakespeare's name, like Abou Ben Adhem's, leads all the rest; or in the late 18th-century, where dozens and dozens of composers wrote music utilizing the classical forms of the period, but there remains only one Mozart. - Kenneth Wapnick, "A Portrait of A Course in Miracles Student As An Artist"

The example of Jesus, Gandhi, MLK, Siddhartha Gautama, Mother Theresa and others show us if we draw from inspiration our lives themselves can be works of proper art.

Comments

[niti]

you've made an extremely powerful statement here and with respect to your previous post, where you say "I'd rather be real than great"; I'd like to share with you that Mahatma comes from Maha = Great and Atma = Soul. When you're truly real, you're Great and vice versa. Thank you for your conversations on this topic. You've given me much to think about, especially on being authentic.

[Colleen]

>>I don't have a "proper" response at this moment - only this improper post right now.

But the "improper" response is precisely the "proper" one. Bless you for puttin' it out there, sister.

>>I'll simply share snippets of something relevant that caught my attention yesterday. And I'm still digesting myself. Much of it speaks for itself without my elaboration if you read S-L-O-W-L-Y. Not exactly ideal sound bites for the blog format.

Again, who's to say? Sometimes mess is just the ticket...

[Alan Gutierrez]

Evelyn

I agree with Colleen.

Don't worry about the format of your blog. You write well. You are fun to read.

Write in the format that suits you best, and the blog sphere, Google, will route your message to the interested readers. That's my take at least. I'm not going to concern myself with whether I sound professional or intelligent. Rather, I'm going to record my ideas as best I can so that like minds can readily identify a like mind.

Cheers.

[win]

Hi Evelyn,

You wrote "My curiosity peaked, I just had to open it to my birthday."

Did you mean piqued? Was your curiosity challenged or did your curiosity reach it's peak? (grin)

[Jack Livingston]

As a martial artist, I've given much thought to the state of proper martial art. Martial movement is kinetic (hence improper), not because it moves, but because the improper artist's ego is trying to push a point or impress or control another (to move them). Proper martial movement happens when the form stands alone, the artist being "transparent to transcendence" (a term used by Joseph Campbell) because of his or her internal stillness (stasis).

[Alex]

As someone that did their thesis on the secular sublime using Joyce's aesthetics from Portrait as an example, and who is currently working in marketing and public affairs I found your post rather interesting.

One thing you might want to consider is that the sublime isn't necessarily about annihlating the ego as you attribute to James. Rather, the Kantian sublime has it that the importance of the sublime is twofold: the overwhelming aspect and, perhaps more importantly, that this is followed by an affirmation of the human consiousness over the unthinking universe that beholds it.

Joyce's brilliance lies in the fact that he can illicit the sublime response through using a classical structure rather than a romantic one (romanticism traditionally being seen as the progenitor of the sublime). We are drawn into wonder through the intellect (static). What attracts or repulses us by desire or loathing (kinetic) cannot illicit this wonder - it is simply, for Joyce, instinctual, like the closing of an eyelid when a fly lands upon it.

The sublime in art may begin with an initial epiphany of 'wow, look at the stars' or something analagous, but it is consumated by the intellect's moulding of this experience into a well-formed work of art for the consideration of others.