***  Haus der Kulturen der Welt: Forum1 Archive  ***
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   [Date]: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 12:03:34 -0600
   [From]: Juan JosŽ D’az Infante <jdiazinfante@altamiracave.com>
     [To]: Cultural Exchange via Internet <forum1@hkw.kbx.de>
[Subject]: Re: [forum1] Re: the art of (limited electronic) conversation


Hi all

Dianne

you wrote
> It must remain that to be art. It is essential for art to be mysterious.
> Only then is it fascinating/compelling and not just entertaining

I think one thing is what I wrote and another one what you understood,

Art can be understood, and it is only Art when understood. Sometimes
understanding requires the knowledge of the code or knowledge of similar
codes. If something is ununderstandable is not art, if something is
mysterious is a thriller and not art. Poetry has nothing to do with the
making of a complex puzzle. As a matter of fact even the most complex
systems are made of a series of simple solutions.


Dianne wrote
>Duchamp and his disciples have had their 'five memorable minutes'
> don't you think?.

When I talked of Man Ray=B4s 5 minutes in every film, I was not talking of the
15 minutes of fame. In essence I was referring to the possibility of the
viewer to uncover the poiesis. In many cases a writer has a fantastic verse
like Luis Rius but nonetheless himself was a very mediocre writer. Curators,
in an ideal world,  are supposed to know how to contextualize this type of
situations, instead they follow the path of finding the "best". The Mona
Lisa is hardly the best painting ever and in the same tone can not be
compared to the Guernica, even though both of them are "portraits" of their
times. There is a possible common ground, though, between Picasso and
Leonardo in their way to perceive their surrounding world. There would be an
even closer type of comparison between Leonardo and Einstein. I think in
order to actually come to terms in finding the possible common bond I would
have to refer to the concept of "Cosmovision" introduced by Teilhard de
Chardin early this century as he saw a vertix converging in point called
Omega in which a lie and a truth are the same and everything becomes an
issue of consciousness and potentiality (in either way proper grammar is
needed).


Complementing the answer to Francois


Art is ONLY action, the work of art is what it is: An object, a painting, a
sculpture, a video. Art is a process of attitude. The thing/object that
remains is the object of fetish for the people that can not understand the
other part of art.
The collector is unable to have what the artist has, so he buys what he can.
(Art hanging is a didactic process).

Juan