Leaving Plato behind and heading for trouble

I guess being an artist is like being a cowboy. If you get yourself a hat, you can be a cowboy, and if you want to be an artist you just have to get yourself a beret. And you don’t even need the beret, you can just call yourself one, and I will take your word for it. And if you want to do something and call it art I will take your word on that too.

Once we decided to turn our sophisticated backs on Plato and his ideal objects we left the world of airtight definitions behind and entered the wonderland of relativity (Not Einstein’s, but more the ‘everything is relative’ type of relativity) where anything can mean anything. And outside of teetering more or less on the brink of nuclear war and global warming and fucking the ozone layer, and an endless series of meaningless wars, we have done pretty good for ourselves. We have tall buildings and streak of lightning cars and fancy clothes.

I guess that’s because we are amiable big apes. If our neighbor says, “Good day,” we don’t wonder how does he define ‘good’ or ‘day,’ we just think, “Screw you.” Luckily we don’t pay any attention to those trouble making philosophers or even to those two reasonable guys, Uncle Ken and Beagles, whose blog, after roughly two months remains unseen by human eyes except for ours.

That French guy said he thought therefore he was, or said something like that, there seem to be arguments about what exactly he said, but that’s among troublemaking philosophers so screw them. Anyway, we talk about art, therefore it is. There must be something there or else we wouldn’t be talking about it.

Well what about God then, who I am always proclaiming does not exist? Don’t we talk about Him plenty? I guess I would say, He exists as an idea, and that pretty much is how art exists. You can’t hold it in your hand, you can’t go there. But you hear other people talking about it, you have a pretty good idea that you both are talking about the same thing. Even the fact that people argue about what is and isn’t art gives credence to the fact that it has some kind of existence. I guess it’s best to just leave it there without going any deeper into it. Unless you plan on going deeper into it over several pitchers of beer, in which case anything is worth going deeper into it.

I’ve never understood critics in the sense of guys who don’t play the banjo or wield the paint brush. How can you be interested in something you don’t do? How can you understand something you don’t do? I don’t understand that.

I agree with interpreting art anyway you want. But I think you have to explain why you think so, and I don’t think you can ever say that you have the correct interpretation and every other interpretation is wrong.

The analog and digital thing is like a record and a cd. The record is analog, the sound comes from, well I’m not sure exactly where, some configuration on the plastic, some curve in it. A curve is just another form of line, and a line, no matter how short, has an infinite number of points along its length. I can always find a point between two other points, and a point between those next two points, and so on indefinitely. In the case of a record that would break down once we reached the scale of atoms, but I am thinking of the ideal line here. This is analog.

The cd on the other hand is nothing but ones and zeros. If you go down far enough you reach a point where you can’t go any further. It is like a string of beads, and a bead is as small as you can get. This is digital.

So in a digital universe time would pass in increments like that clock whose second hand only moves once a second, and space would be like a checkerboard where you can move one space at a time but never less than that.

Well what difference would that make? Well probably none as far as our everyday life is concerned. What difference does it make to our everyday lives if everything is a hologram or if the universe really has eleven dimensions and most of them are rolled up inside each other like last year’s wrapping paper? None really, just something to talk about. 

 Hey when is that waitress coming back with a refill on that pitcher?