I recently bought Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory and in the translator's introduction, this quote from Barnett Newman, "Aesthetics is to artists what ornithology is to birds." I hadn't come across it before and it made me chuckle. The activities of artists, like avian behaviour, is not bound by any external system devised to explain or categorise it. The quote speaks of the indifference of birds, as well as artists, who just get on with doing what comes naturally.
As a maker of art, where it comes from and how it's received, aesthetics is a subject that interests me greatly. But not when I'm making art. I get on and do my art, according to the demands of the work and the idea I'm chasing. "Thought is the enemy of flow," according to this jazz drummer. Amen to that.
How the finished works are received by the audience, by the commentator or by a theorist like Adorno, is not my business. I agree with Newman on that.
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