return to worldwidereview.com, the home of critical reviews

Re: marcel dzama at timothy taylor gallery london

From:     blp
Category: Art
Date:     23 March 2007
Time:     01:48 PM

Review:

Why can't we have some great art? Perhaps because great art depends on a complex relationship to
reality, and the notion of reality has got thrown out with the bathwater of religion. It's
implicitly seen as naive – less naive than being a grown-up peddling cartoon animal pictures to
other grown-ups (pace Dzama). Reality = truth = natural order = god. It's  not really the case that
this is so, but this may be the thought process that's got us here. It's a sort of massive
simplification of philosophy since the enlightenment, one that's riven with contradictions. Reality
= truth = natural order = god (even though we reject god for not being real). Journo Giles Coren, on
the Animal Farm TV GM debate the other night unwisely invoked the idea of a natural order and was
accused by the scientist of religiosity, which is a neat point, but a stretch. This is a great way
of ending a debate, which was never the purpose of philosophy, but when these things get watered
down, you do get stuck in the mud. Kant's rejection of empiricism, however convincing, is elided
without understanding, with a rejection of experience, another stretch, or a category error.
Reality, however much in doubt, is all we have and is more than us. Cartoon animals are less. 


return to worldwidereview.com, the home of critical reviews