Today is beautiful and I like watching butterflies. I'm going to go buy a newspaper and a coffee.
Kidding. . . not that kind of blog.
It's always hard to know where to start. Intellectual Mutt is a blog about ideas. It's an arts blog but only in the sense of redefining art. Here is my definition, adapted from Heidegger:
A work of art is something new in the world that changes the world to allow itself to exist.
By this definition, lots of things outside the arts are art--heart-lung bypass machines, Google, Facebook, suicide bombing (the change in warfare given change in assumption that the soldier is trying to protect his or her own life).
By the same token, many things made in the art world are not art at all but high end, branded commodity products traded on an art market.
They might have been art out the outset, but the marketplace encourages an inertia toward brand extension rather than radical reinvention and related risks of abject failure and inability of buyers to recognize the value of the work.
The definition of art outside of art does not require something to be big and grand right out of the gate. There is no such thing as big C and little C creativity, just a continuum of ordinary people always having the potential to do extraordinary things, and the notion that creativity is about traction with process, not outcome.
And the basic ethos of Intellectual Mutt and of this definition is not about policing what is art and what isn't. (Who has time?) It's about expanding the invitation to everyone to consider themselves an artist-- or at least to consider themselves 'artisty' whatever their chosen identifying noun.
Craft of a beautiful caramel cake, art of a multi-layer barter cake. (I heart art and craft.)
Intellectual Mutt is also about a reassertion of generalist values at the peak of a gilded age of specialization. The front gate to our academic systems--at a graduate level--is based on specialization and novelty. People propose Ph.D. projects that 'discover new lands.' The problem is that most of the farmable land has already been discovered. So you end up getting a Ph.D. if you are willing to study, for instance, miniature frame painters of the second half of the quattrocento. Meanwhile, what about academic projects that are the equivalent not just of erecting buildings on previously identified plots of land but building bridges between them? Where's the connective tissue?
That connective tissue is a large part of the history of innovation. Many breakthrough ideas and inventions have an element of 'who put their chocolate in my peanut butter?' The stories contain the phrase "and also". So and so was a surgeon. And also an avid fly fisherman. He therefore figured out how to attach a balloon to a stick where no glue would do--by tying knots--thereby enabling the whole field of noninvasive surgery.
This man is named Thomas Fogarty.
(He now owns a vineyard.)
So this will be a pot luck of a blog, a sampling of ideas from different fields, all in service of the values of: creativity, generalist thinking, and--as a design problem--allowing those things to exist within the confines/ in relation to the market economy.
As Michael Greenberg wrote (quoting a character) in a recent Bookforum essay:
"The possibles seem limitless, but the actuals are few."
As Buckminster Fuller said:
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
Somewhere between those two. . . .
