The nature of art and the art of nature

I agree that there is something extra, though much is lost, when going from a textbook to a work of art. I guess feeling is as good a name for it as anything. But what of crappy works of art? Are they crappy because the creator doesn’t get that feeling right? But then maybe it is you who are not getting the feeling that others are and that’s why you are calling it crappy. But that whole, what is crappy and what is good art, is a whole other question. I think that if somebody tries to make a work of art, then by my definition it is a work of art.

I think the idea of a story that the author did not intend is interesting. Sometimes I’ll see a movie and really like it, but then when I read up on it I will discover that the intended message is far from the one I thought I had received. I think that there is an element, separate from the story part, and that is the aesthetic, the tune without the words, the placement of the colors and lines regardless of whether it is a painting of a flower or a tiger, the way the director arranges the scenes, regardless of the story. This is something I believe, but I’m not able to prove it logically.

I think you have said before that all genres are at basic, folk tunes, just gussied up in different ways. But is there a way to take say a rock song and break it down the way a chemist would, and come up with a root folk song, maybe an old one or maybe a new one? Can a Robert Johnson delta blues song be considered a folk song? To my uneducated ear it sounds like one since it is so simple.

I don’t know if questions like these can really be answered. Maybe the problem is with my way of thinking. I like to break everything down into categories, and especially mutually exclusive categories, like mammals or fish, you can’t be both. I realize this can’t really be done for some things like the difference between a folk song and a rock song, the difference is probably imperceptible like going between the colors red and yellow where you can go as red as you like or as yellow, and there is no precise point where it is red and not yellow at all, or vice versa.

I’m walking off the deep end again, but as long as I am I might as well continue. Do you think the universe is digital or analog? Like time, can you take a second and keep making it smaller and smaller still and it will always be a unit of time? Some of those new physicists you are not a fan of maintain that time only exists in certain increments, like one of those clocks that instead of the second hand running smoothly, it jerks every second but in between it doesn’t move at all. Likewise for space instead of always finding a distance between the marks on a ruler, they maintain that once the marks get small enough they can’t get smaller.

The Greeks used to ponder that if you had a grain of gold could you split it in half and still have gold, and on and on. But did you reach a point when you couldn’t divide it up since the resulting particles would no longer be gold?

The smallest piece of gold is a single atom and once you break that up, you have some nuclei, or some electrons, but you no longer have gold. And now we have divided the nuclei into protons and neutrons and then from that to quarks and now the big controversy is can we break up quarks? Are they composed of even smaller particles and does it go all the way down like the lady said to Bertrand Russell about turtles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down Actually looking that up on wiki it appears that that very story has its own turtles all the way down.

I have to stop now, my head is spinning.