virus: Art, advertising, and Seurat

Wade T. Smith (wade_smith@harvard.edu)
Tue, 10 Dec 1996 09:00:28 -0500


Art is as close as we can get to placing a meme outside of consciousness,
as naked as possible.

Good art is of course, completely unclothed.

Advertising is a mercantile utilization of these forms. Nakedness is a
prime tool....

Seurat, and many others, developed artistic methods based on
interpretations and models of contemporary science, especially the science
of the study of perception. They also borrowed from the mechanisms of print
and other replication methods. (Warhol, et al.)

Because art both erupts from and enters via the senses, we hope that a
visceral response precedes an intellectual one, and drama is the most
developed form utilizing the tools to accomplish this. (But it all gets
murky when someone asks, What about music?, and I get into my Aristotelian
bus [the seminal philosopher of aesthetics] and exclaim- Music is a tool of
drama!)

Aesthetics may well be memetics. Here in this small but concrete forum we
seem to be dancing around this issue, searching for a tune? Still learning
the steps? Or hoping one day to actually score, stage, sing, and broadcast
the opera?

*****************************************************
Wade T. Smith | 'There ain't nuthin' you
wade_smith@harvard.edu | shouldn't do to a god.'
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