Unseen

You ask if a work, say Munch’s The Scream, is avant-garde. Well, is avant-gardedness a property of a painting the way “rectangular in shape” or “mostly blue in color” or “photorealistic” is a property? Is a painting avant-garde in the same way it might be surrealist?

Simon Paynton wrote:

This is the whole point: something has one original state, and many states of entropy.  So, if each state is arrived at by random chance, then statistically, it’s very unlikely to end up in the original state again.

But only if one assumes “normal” time, which seems to be directional quite apart from entropy. The sun comes up…[Read more]

In the books department I am currently working in as a curator, we have a shelf labeled “POP CULTURE/COUNTER-CULTURE.” I think this explains what happens to to anything that thinks it’s avant-garde.

_Robert_ wrote:

Avant-garde doesn’t have to be shocking, just innovative.

An example, please. In art. The term “avant-garde” is used almost exclusively in context of the arts.

Simon Paynton wrote:

Because there are many ways to undo something, but only one way to put it together.

Wrong. There may be only one original state, but many ways to get back there (in most cases). If I drop a widget and it breaks into pieces 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, the reconstruction can start by pieces 1 and 2 coming together, or 1 and 3, or 3 and…[Read more]

Is avant-garde possible anymore? And if not, is it because we are past being able to be shocked?

Back when I lived in the Cleveland, OH area, and back when that was where The Dali Museum was located, I saw the same paintings, and they are just as impressive as you say. A gigantic photorealistic paintinhag is an experience of a lifetime. Dali definitely was a master painter with talents on a par with Vermeer (an artist he very much…[Read more]

Simon Paynton wrote:

Random entropy can’t be reversed, or is vanishingly unlikely to spontaneously reverse. So it can happen forwards in time, but not backwards. We can go from “higher entropy” to “lower entropy” randomly in a reverse direction, because going forwards, things go from lower entropy to higher entropy, randomly. But we can’t go…

[Read more]

Simon Paynton wrote:

elephant

Yes, maybe you could say they’re parts of the same thing. After all, “number” is an abstraction of a collection of physical objects, and I maintain that the laws of logic originate in the physical world. That doesn’t mean that all logical statements refer to something physical – just that the logic is the logic of…

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