Re: The Canon

Now we're cookin'. I think a better title for the book would have been "the basics" or something like that, since I agree that "the canon" evokes the sense of something stilted and ossified. That's not how the contents of the book come across, though. Quite the contrary, in fact. "When an artist follows a particular artistic canon instead of following his/her own creative process, the intuitive vitality is diminished. This results in the mentality of 'this is how our parents did it, so this is how we shall do it.'" The capricious attitudes I've encountered to "tradition" are intriguing. For some reason, in the West, "tradition" seems to be rich, uplifting, gratifying, and inspiring when it has a Native American, Eastern, or even African source. In the East (Japan, Korea, or China being examples), Western traditions frequently have the same positive connotations. However, "the mentality of 'this is how our parents did it'" turns into a negative in contexts such as the one you cite. A tradition can be something tried and "true", polished to a rich brilliance by repeated use for dozens of generations, or it can be something with "diminished intuitive vitality" simply because it's traditional and old-fashioned. It's a paradox how tradition can be viewed simultaneously as something positive and negative. "In the final global planetary stage, intelligence is released from tradition and the canons of art become hollow and empty." The authority of this statement seems to me both arrogant and narrowminded. It's my hope that, in present and future planetary "stages" (which are completely illusory, since anthropologists have long known that the stage models of culture advocated by Victorian "armchair anthropologists" like E.B. Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan, and even more recent cultural historians such as Julian Steward, Gordon Willey, and Philip Phillips, are simplistic representations of reality), intelligence (another illusion, however defined) continues to be a thick blend of tradition, novelty, and innovative synchretism. I spent most of yesterday afternoon in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Kansas City: http://www.nelson-atkins.org There, I wandered from works by contemporary Abstract Expressionists (Pollock, Rothko, etc.) through galleries of West African masks and ancient Chinese art (celadons, dragons, etc.) to an exhibit on the history of photography, where I saw dozens of daugerrotypes of the 1840s and 1850s--none of which were wholly "art" or "artifice" (and some of which were undoubtedly just lovely accidents of experimentation with an imperfect "new" technique). None of these, to me, represented "stages" of any kind, since people are still today making all of these forms of abtract, realistic, fantastic, and photographic art. The present and future should be home to these and other, yet unimagined expressions of the human spirit. I don't think I could bear the thought that any of them would disappear in the interest of a new "stage" that rejected tradition. (Though most of the works from China and many of the dauguerrotypes have fallen into categories that have been historically rejected, suppresed, and actively destroyed in different times and places.) I'm sorry, but the Galactic Research Institute seems to be stuck in a flawed, misinformed, authoritarian, stage model of unilinear "evolution" that recalls more than anything else the 19th century English patrician (and imperialist) concepts such as the "progressive" stages of "Savagery, Barbarism, and Civilization" and the "social Darwinism" of antiquated authors such as Tylor and Herbert Spencer (who coined the phrase "survival of the fittest"): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Burnett_Tylor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Spencer It is apparent to me that the authors of http://www.lawoftime.org are the ones who are bogged down in a certain "traditional" kind of thinking that is, ironically, most associated with rich, white, upper-class gentlemen during the glory days of the British Empire. Not that all of that was bad: Charles Darwin, for example, seems to have got it mostly right.