Intellectual and Experiential Resources:
1) List and briefly comment on each Encounter experience you have had this week. For readings, you may wish to copy and paste a short excerpt that you have found particularly interesting or useful, and comment on why you chose that particular excerpt. ...
the diverging views of joyce carol oates and helen croce on bill t jones “still here”
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University of British Columbia (UBC
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Fifth Weekly Learning Document
He Wang
Intellectual and Experiential Resources:
1) List and briefly comment on each Encounter experience you have had this
week. For readings, you may wish to copy and paste a short excerpt that you
have found particularly interesting or useful, and comment on why you chose
that particular excerpt.
“There is no doubt that the public likes to see victims, if only to patronize them with
applause. The main type of victim (the type that I think gave rise to all the others) is a
politicized version of the blackmail that certain performers resort to, even great
performers like Chaplin in his more self-pitying moments”. – Arlene Croce
Croce, in her article The Crisis of Criticism, takes a closer look at the continued backlash
against critical reviews of dance performances, especially conventional dance
performances like those of Bill T. Jones. Jones’s dance performance that uses the
experiences; fears, joys, and expectations, of terminally ill patients to create a
performance. In the author’s opinion such use of victimhood in a dance performance
leaves no room for criticism from the audience and or art critics. There is also a growing
disgruntlement and intimidation of critics by dance performers like Jones. This quarrel
between the two factions creates a disconnection between the artists, audience, and
critics. This article critically examines the state of art criticism in the age of intolerance
and victim art. I think it is important that artists leave room for critics to objectively
review their work without feeling pressured to conform to a particular opinion. However,
as shown by the article by Oates below this one, critics must also give artists room to
work and produce performances without fear of criticism.
“Art is a mysterious efflorescence of the human spirit that seems not to have originated in
a desire to please or placate critics. At the juncture of the communal and the individual, in
ancient cultures, ‘art’ sprang into being: the individual artist expressed the communal
consciousness, usually of a ‘divinely’ inspired nature” - Oates
Oates criticizes Croce’s position on the nature of art and the state of art criticism in the
wake of victim art and other modern forms of art that are destabilizing traditional art. In
her defense of artists like Bill T. Jones, Oates argues that the work of art does not require
those viewing it to recognize it as art for it to become one. If a performance evokes a
emotion and thought, it certainly qualifies to be art. Oates criticizes Croce’s criticism of
victim art. Oates article makes an important point, that art is indeed not static. Therefore,
it cannot be viewed through the same old traditional lens.
“The reader must recognize, however, that this position arises from contemporary
postmodern Western society; which despite our natural ethnocentrism, is not, of course,
the apogee of humankind’s enterprise and wisdom nor its ultimate destiny” – Dissanyake
This article seeks to answer the question of what art really is and from what it arose and
the future of it in human society. It contends that art as we know it today is a rather recent
concept born of and sustained since by a commercial society. So the origin of art as we
know it today is as old as the commercial society. I think the article, and the except above
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