Wednesday 5 March 2014

art as a sexual orientation

A comment on a friend's FaceBook page said that art might be a sexual orientation - a really disappointing one.

I enjoyed this idea. It reminded me of Lacan's idea of misunderstanding as being the basic orientation of sexual relations, reminded me of the famous phrase there is no sexual relation.

There's a truism that good art changes the way we see the world. This initially seems plausible, and perhaps as an experience of art in general it might work, but in my experience the extreme rarity with which particular art works could be described, even in a weak way, as changing the way I see the world, implies that it's not true in the particular. Art works, it works as an orientation, it has its objects (whatever they might be) around which it is oriented - but not in the way that it is represented as working, which may be to do with what is not representable about the experience of art.

Here's a PDF I've been reading on the meaning of the term "there is no sexual relation"