The Concept "The End-of-......"

End-of-whatever, merely fill in the blank.

So, what do we mean when we say "End-of_Time" or "End-of-Science" (due to budget cuts and anti-science types in power) and "End-of-Post-Modernism", or any of those many and variegated notions which bloom now, in this the malaise of our years.

Quoting Abel Rey fron 1907:

If the physical and chemical sciences, which in history have been essentially emancipators, collapse in a crisis that reduces them to the status of mere technically useful recipes but deprives them of all significance from the standpoint of knowledge of nature, the result must needs be a complete revolution both in the art of logic and the history of ideas.... Knowledge of the real must be sought and given by other means.... One must take another road, one must return to subjective intuition, to a mystical sense of reality, in a word to the mysterious, all that of which one thought it had been deprived.

What it amounts to is a return to Intuition, a Going-Inside of individual minds and a turning away from the Extended Mind, the Group Mind, the commonplaces and hackneyed ideas whose time has finally run out - standing around forlornly, gaping like monarchs after World War I in search of a kindly kingdom!

It is mystical because it is not-yet-conscious in us: it remains Intuition for which we seek conscious expression. We stand around and write and orate, wondering "What's the word!? What's the word?! What are the words I'm looking for!??"

Some of us mess up, like Reverend Camping, and proclaim The End-of-the-World, for example, a wee bit early. Most us dive back into accepted forms of thought and activity.
Even those who truly turn to mysticism usually express themselves in the usual and accepted (dare we say "hackneyed" here, too?) forms of mysticism, becoming living icons of holy folks of the past.

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Art and Intuition

 

Lord Dooku

also known as Darth Tyrranus

(the nickname provided if you are slow 

in distinguishing good from evil)

The BBC is covering the fracas between George Lucas and the fans of his Star Wars. I think this means the orginal 3 films; no one considered compos mentis could be a fan of Lord Dooku and all the vacuity of the later prequels. I mean, I think the Family Guy take-offs on Star Wars are superior to those later films. (Blast! Now I have the Muzak version of Darth Vader's Theme from the Family Guy Death Star elevator playing in my head!)
It comes down to this, Lucas has been fiddling with the versions and denying access to the original versions of the films about which the fans assert

In our youth, our hearts were touched with fire...

and so on.

There is an excellent quote by Marcel DuChamp:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-14944240

In 1957 Marcel Duchamp, the philosophical French artist... gave a lecture on this subject called The Creative Act. He starts it with this thought:

"Let us consider two important factors, the two poles of the creation of art: the artist on the one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity."

He then goes on to argue that the artist is merely the medium for his or her work; that he or she is not fully conscious of what is being produced, much of which derives from intuition.
This is a concept that I've heard many times from authors to artists, where they tell me that their words or thoughts come to them unconsciously or from an unknown source.
Building on this idea of artist-as-medium, Duchamp then introduces the idea that the audience has a vital role in validating something as an artwork:

"'The artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius: he will have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that his declarations take a social value and that, finally, posterity includes him in the primers of Artist History."

In other words it's not for the artist to decide whether his or her work is any good, it is the job of the spectator, which in turn makes them part of the creative act.

Please note that there are elements here which closely resemble events in the history of religion as well as the history of art. So much comes from Intuition...

And it is hard to assert that Intuition is what we call an "Idea" since it is not fully conscious, if at all.

In fact, the very stuff of creation is within us and we struggle to find a proper "code" or "algorithm" that will render it fully conscious to ourselves and to others. Some of the primary codes lead us to expression in language, some to expression in sculpture, some to music, some to religion, some to physical activity such as Dance and Sports...

Again please note the importance of the Group or Community receiving the communication of the art: the audience. There may indeed be private languages, but there is no private immortality.

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