The Context of America

1
The Context of America

• Proposition
• The Context of America for the arts
• is a setting of preceptive perceptions
• which limit and devalue
• bi-directional experience.

Or, American Art is Red, White, and Blue
2
For Example

• The Smithsonian American Art Museum is the home
  of the largest collection of American art in the
  world. Its holdingsover 37,500 worksrepresent
  the most inclusive collection of American art of
  any general museum today, reflecting the nation's
  ethnic, geographic, cultural, and religious
  diversity.
• The nation's first federal art collection, it
  predates the 1846 founding of the Smithsonian
  Institution.
• The Museum is located in the historic Old Patent
  Office Building in Washington, D.C., where
  inventors such as Thomas Edison obtained title to
  their work. The building also served as a
  hospital for wounded soldiers during the Civil
  War, and in March 1865 it was the site of
  Lincoln's second inaugural ball.
• The museum's roots go deep, representing three
  hundred years of American artistic achievement
  and paralleling the nation's own cultural
  development. Today, Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Cole,
  Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Jacob
  Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Helen
  Frankenthaler are among the familiar artists
  featured in the museum's galleries.

See the web site
Question a Precept
3
A Nation?

• Preceptive Syllogism
• American art is national art.
• The Nation The United States.
• American art is art of the United States.
• Context
• We melt the art of any other(s) into our pot. We
  ignore the past. We control the future. We deny
  alternatives, so that
• Perception
• The opinion of individuals is all that matters,
  which is known through the condition of just
  being American.
• Likes (individuated or idiosyncratic tastes)
  determine the quality (goodness) of art, AND the
  context (of preceptive perceptions) defeats any
  attack on the internal validity of
  intersubjective chaos. Other nations arent
  American. Art of other Americas is not American.
  Other artistic, geographical, cultural, ethnic
  or national contexts, conceivably those which
  might reject perceptions as a foundation for
  judgments concerning the quality or substance of
  art, need not be considered. In fact, they
  simply cant be considered in the Context of
  America.

For Example Click Here
4
An excerpt from the acceptance lecture for the
1971 Nobel Prize in Literature
The mistakes which led me to a relative truth and
the truths which repeatedly led me back to the
mistakes did not allow me - and I never made any
claims to it - to find my way to lead, to learn
what is called the creative process, to reach the
heights of literature that are so difficult of
access. But one thing I realized - that it is we
ourselves who call forth the spirits through our
own myth-making. From the matter we use, or wish
to use, there arise later on obstacles to our own
development and the future development. We are
led infallibly to reality and realism, that is to
say to become indirectly conscious of everything
that surrounds us and of the ways of change, and
then we see, when it seems to be late, that we
have erected such an exaggerated barrier that we
are killing what is alive instead of helping life
to develop and blossom. We force upon ourselves a
realism which later proves to be more burdensome
than the bricks of the building, without having
erected the building which we had regarded as an
indispensable part of our task. And, in the
contrary case, if we succeed in creating the
fetish of the incomprehensible (or the fetish of
that which is comprehensible only to a few), the
fetish of the exclusive and the secret, if we
exclude reality and its realistic degenerations,
then we find ourselves suddenly surrounded by an
impossible country, a quagmire of leaves, of mud,
of cloud, where our feet sink in and we are
stifled by the impossibility of communicating.
As far as we in particular are concerned, we
writers within the tremendously far-flung
American region, we listen unceasingly to the
call to fill this mighty void with beings of
flesh and blood. We are conscious of our duty as
fulfillers - at the same time we are faced with
the unavoidable task of critical communication
within a world which is empty and is not less
full of injustices, punishments and sufferings
because it is empty - and we feel also the
responsibility for reawakening the old dreams
which sleep in statues of stone in the ruined
ancient monuments, in the wide-stretching silence
in planetary plains, in dense primeval forests,
in rivers which roar like thunder. We must fill
with words the most distant places in a dumb
continent and we are intoxicated by this task of
making fables and giving names. This is perhaps
what is decisive in my own humble case, and if so
my exaggerations or my abundance or my rhetoric
would not be anything other than the simplest of
events within the daily work of an American. Each
and every one of my verses has chosen to take its
place as a tangible object, each and every one of
my poems has claimed to be a useful working
instrument, each and every one of my songs has
endeavoured to serve as a sign in space for a
meeting between paths which cross one another, or
as a piece of stone or wood on which someone,
some others, those who follow after, will be able
to carve the new signs. By extending to these
extreme consequences the poet's duty, in truth or
in error, I determined that my posture within the
community and before life should be that of in a
humble way taking sides. I decided this when I
saw so many honourable misfortunes, lone
victories, splendid defeats. In the midst of the
arena of America's struggles I saw that my human
task was none other than to join the extensive
forces of the organized masses of the people, to
join with life and soul with suffering and hope,
because it is only from this great popular stream
that the necessary changes can arise for the
authors and for the nations. And even if my
attitude gave and still gives rise to bitter or
friendly objections, the truth is that I can find
no other way for an author in our far-flung and
cruel countries, if we want the darkness to
blossom, if we are concerned that the millions of
people who have learnt neither to read us nor to
read at all, who still cannot write or write to
us, are to feel at home in the area of dignity
without which it is impossible for them to be
complete human beings. We have inherited this
damaged life of peoples dragging behind them the
burden of the condemnation of centuries, the most
paradisaical of peoples, the purest, those who
with stones and metals made marvellous towers,
jewels of dazzling brilliance - peoples who were
suddenly despoiled and silenced in the fearful
epochs of colonialism which still linger on.
5
And he is
From Poetry And I, infinitesimal being,drunk
with the great starryvoid,likeness, image
ofmystery,I felt myself a pure partof the
abyss,I wheeled with the stars,my heart broke
free on the open sky.

• Pablo Neruda,
• a Chilean poet

And HE is America
Concerning the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature,
learn more
About Pablo Neruda, learn more
About another America, learn more