Michelle Marder Kamhi's "Who Says That's Art?"

[Brant Gaede]

Minus Jonathan's emotional hyperbole, I'm simply saying that feminine pursuits generally appeal to feminized leftists... art, fashion design, interior decorating and the like.

I play piano. That is a feminine pursuit. I'm also into guns and motorcycles. Those are masculine pursuits.

Greg

It's funny. I was typing a long reply to one of your recent posts when you posted this. That caused OL's system to completely wipe out everything I had written. This has happened before. The platform is absolutely unstable in this respect. Anyway, since you've finally humanized yourself, I'm glad it happened, for my post would have lost most of its traction.

--Brant

[Brant Gaede]

if you can, answer the question.

The answer:

That is the way people are.

It's simple common sense that only a liberal government college education could dumb you out of!

In your subjective opinion, art is not a feminine pursuit and mechanics is not a masculine pursuit.

In my subjective opinion, they are.

This clearly defines our two different viewpoints.

One of our subjective opinions agrees with objective reality...

...and one of our subjective opinions does not agree with objective reality.

Greg

Brant, I think what Apey is trying to say is:

"Apey, real man. Alpha male! All others, girly men. What Apey like, and what Apey good at, 'masculine.' What Apey not like, and not good at, 'feminine.' So, 'lectric and mechanical, 'masculine.' Art, logic, thinking, learning, 'feminine.'"

J

You are misusing deduction, for while it logically supports what you say that isn't Greg in your conclusions. He isn't stupid, for one thing. He's very intelligent. He's just no good logically tying things together through strings of rationality. Or untying them. It has to be in his face, not that that means he's then right.

--Brant

[Selene]

Minus Jonathan's emotional hyperbole, I'm simply saying that feminine pursuits generally appeal to feminized leftists... art, fashion design, interior decorating and the like.

I play piano. That is a feminine pursuit. I'm also into guns and motorcycles. Those are masculine pursuits.

Greg

It's funny. I was typing a long reply to one of your recent posts when you posted this. That caused OL's system to completely wipe out everything I had written. This has happened before. The platform is absolutely unstable in this respect. Anyway, since you've finally humanized yourself, I'm glad it happened, for my post would have lost most of its traction.

--Brant

Brant there is an auto save now which I finally realized about a week ago...

[moralist]

if you can, answer the question.

The answer:

That is the way people are.

It's simple common sense that only a liberal government college education could dumb you out of!

In your subjective opinion, art is not a feminine pursuit and mechanics is not a masculine pursuit.

In my subjective opinion, they are.

This clearly defines our two different viewpoints.

One of our subjective opinions agrees with objective reality...

...and one of our subjective opinions does not agree with objective reality.

Greg

Brant, I think what Apey is trying to say is:

"Apey, real man. Alpha male! All others, girly men. What Apey like, and what Apey good at, 'masculine.' What Apey not like, and not good at, 'feminine.' So, 'lectric and mechanical, 'masculine.' Art, logic, thinking, learning, 'feminine.'"

J

You are misusing deduction, for while it logically supports what you say that isn't Greg in your conclusions. He isn't stupid, for one thing. He's very intelligent. He's just no good logically tying things together through strings of rationality. Or untying them. It has to be in his face, not that that means he's then right.

--Brant

My point is simple.

Art is a feminine pursuit so it holds a natural attraction for leftists because leftism is a feminine ideology. Just as mechanics is a masculine pursuit which attract right wingers because conservatism is a masculine ideology.

That is my subjective opinion, and everyone else here is perfectly free to disagree with it.

Jonathan clearly disagrees. it is his view that art is not a feminine pursuit and mechanics is not a masculine pursuit.

So my question to him is:

If art is not a feminine pursuit as he claims, then why are there so many homosexual males involved in the art world?

Greg

[Brant Gaede]

Ah yes, Pablo Picasso.

What a queer.

Hemingway--or are writers out of this "art" mix?

I'd guess part of the reason is many artists feel free to let themselves drift and experiment sexually for it's concomitant with what they do experimentally with their art as acts of creation.

Greg, you dump on artists as artists and you dump on creation. You try too much to universalize what works for you so you don't hesitate to clog dance on people in radically different professions you hardly have a true clue about.

Some on this thread argue that's what's wrong with Objectivists. I say Objectivism supports this wrongness, but not Rand the artist, only Rand the Objectivist. Rand the artist actually went off the rails consequently in her personal life desiring to have her respectability and eat it too. She didn't get back on the right set of rails with Objectivism, which she used as a club to clobber the Brandens with. If I'm right, Atlas Shrugged was the key transitional instrument from novelist to philosopher crystalized in Galt's Speech re-enforced by ten years of Nathaniel Branden spokesmanship. To see, understand and use her formal philosophy as a weapon has been its intellectual-cultural undoing after the end of the enabling charismatic forces.

--Brant

[moralist]

Greg, you dump on artists as artists...

Now you're universalizing.

I draw my own subjective moral line between genuinely beautiful uplifting ennobling art...

...and the ugly depraved degenerate perverted leftist crap Jonathan calls "art".

You're free to draw your own line anywhere you see fit.

Greg

[Brant Gaede]

Baited and switched or too slow on the uptake?

--Brant

I'm 71--take it easy on me, my mind is going (but the glasses and Viagra make up for a lot)

(just passed my DOT physical--yeah! [i cheated on the drug test--I didn't take any; they'll never figure that out unless they read OL])

when did you stop universalizing--your post 3228, 3229?

[Jonathan]

Minus Jonathan's emotional hyperbole, I'm simply saying that feminine pursuits generally appeal to feminized leftists... art, fashion design, interior decorating and the like.

I play piano. That is a feminine pursuit.

Therefore you're a feminized leftist!

I'm also into guns and motorcycles. Those are masculine pursuits.

I'm into those things as well! Therefore I'm a masculine right-winger!

J

[Jonathan]

My point is simple.

Art is a feminine pursuit so it holds a natural attraction for leftists because leftism is a feminine ideology. Just as mechanics is a masculine pursuit which attract right wingers because conservatism is a masculine ideology.

That is my subjective opinion, and everyone else here is perfectly free to disagree with it.

Having subjective opinions, and constantly practicing the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent, are actions which are judged by real masculine conservatives to be feminine leftism.

Jonathan clearly disagrees. it is his view that art is not a feminine pursuit and mechanics is not a masculine pursuit.

I haven't stated my position on the subject of identifying various pursuits as being either feminine or masculine. You're just so irrational and emotional, not to mention ape-like, that you mistakenly take someone's challenging the illogic, contradictions and double standards of your statements as being disagreements with all elements of your statements.

So my question to him is:

If art is not a feminine pursuit as he claims, then why are there so many homosexual males involved in the art world?

Do you think that's a logical question?

How many homosexuals is "so many"? It sounds as if you're claiming to have numbers to back up comparisons of the arts to other professions. If so, let's see the numbers, rather than just going by your "feminine" feelings.

The arts generally have more "out" homosexuals where other professions have fewer, often due to the fact that in certain "masculine" professions, gays are likely to face violent, rights-violating consequences to admitting to their sexual preferences. Do you think that such brutal initiations of force are "masculine" and "conservative" pursuits? If so, wouldn't that make leftists like Hitler and Stalin "masculine conservatives"?

Please try to answer the above questions with logic rather than your feelings. And I know what you're going to say: You're going to be very "feminine" and relativistic and say that I'm a leftist, and therefore I use "leftist logic," and therefore your true logic only appears to be illogical to me. But before making that standard reply of yours, keep in mind that I'm not asking you to use my "leftist logic." Rather, I'm challenging you to demonstrate the validity of your position, step by step, using your own real, proper logic. Show us how masculine, conservative logic works by constructing a formal syllogism which contains your premises and conclusion.

J

[Brant Gaede]

Jonathan with a lantern looking for a logical man in this one man.

[Jonathan]

Greg, you dump on artists as artists...

Now you're universalizing.

Yeah, Brant's the one who is universalizing! Heh.

And what's up with your winking at Brant? He's a dude, and winking is "feminine."

I draw my own subjective moral line between genuinely beautiful uplifting ennobling art...

...and the ugly depraved degenerate perverted leftist crap Jonathan calls "art".

Try to calm down and get over your leftist urge to be an offended victim about everything! Take a few deep breaths and get control over your emotions.

Better now? Okay. Now, please give some specific examples of "ugly depraved degenerate perverted leftist crap" that I call "art." I'd like to know specifically what you're so worked up about, and why my tastes or opinions about individual art works are so important to you, and so offensive and upsetting. I really haven't given a lot of opinions here about which works of art in the world are my favorite, or why, so I find it very amusing that you believe that you know much of anything about my tastes, preferences and judgments of various artworks. You seem to be very emotionally confusing discussions about what technically qualifies as art versus what is great or admired art. In an earlier post you frantically claimed that I was "peddling" art that upsets and offends and disturbs your tender sensibilities. So, which specific works of art do you imagine that I was "peddling"?

J

[Jonathan]

if you can, answer the question.

The answer:

That is the way people are.

It's simple common sense that only a liberal government college education could dumb you out of!

In your subjective opinion, art is not a feminine pursuit and mechanics is not a masculine pursuit.

In my subjective opinion, they are.

This clearly defines our two different viewpoints.

One of our subjective opinions agrees with objective reality...

...and one of our subjective opinions does not agree with objective reality.

Greg

Brant, I think what Apey is trying to say is:

"Apey, real man. Alpha male! All others, girly men. What Apey like, and what Apey good at, 'masculine.' What Apey not like, and not good at, 'feminine.' So, 'lectric and mechanical, 'masculine.' Art, logic, thinking, learning, 'feminine.'"

J

You are misusing deduction, for while it logically supports what you say that isn't Greg in your conclusions. He isn't stupid, for one thing. He's very intelligent. He's just no good logically tying things together through strings of rationality. Or untying them. It has to be in his face, not that that means he's then right.

--Brant

Ah, I see. He's "intelligent." And by "intelligent" you mean the type which isn't good at logic or rationality.

J

[Brant Gaede]

The world is full of such people. It enables compartmentalization. No one gets to be a master electrician without lots and lots of brains. It can't be done. A bad electrician can burn down your house. One wired a 3000 sq. ft new home here in Tucson with the wrong gauge wiring. It cost $20,000 to tear out all the drywall and replace it. A mediocre doctor can kill you. 100,000 people a year die in American hospitals because of medical mistakes. Each was under the care of a physician even if the doctor was not directly responsible. I think most of those are nursing or pharmacy mistakes. Ascorbic acid should be routinely administered in all IV drips respecting surgery--pre, during and post--unless there is a specific contraindication. This is not done. Too much operative or post-operative brain damage especially in the elderly, even unto death is a consequence. Strokes, heart attacks, embolisms. Some of the brain degradation is too slight to be discernibly symptomatic, but usually friends and family can notice the difference. Didn't happen to my father. I always loaded him up with a milkshake suffused with mega-vitamins. There seems to be no vitamin that accentuates blood thiners, including D and C and E, so that should not be of any surgical concern. But it's easiest for a surgeon to treat his ignorance as knowledge and say "No" if you ask him. On one level he's right to say that and on another quite wrong. So I let him--them--have his say--two or three times--and he thought he had his way--he didn't, I did--and we all were happy, happy, happy. My next door neighbor in NJ, however, spent the rest of his life in a nursing home his back surgery so mentally degraded him. His surgeon didn't even, as far as I know, give him the option of physical therapy. He said surgery or a wheelchair, but it was a bed his patient ended up in. The latest info on back surgery, no one knew it then, is it's a 50 - 50 chance for improvement either way, surgery or physical therapy. That's a broad statistical conglomeration, of course; there are too many individual variations for a layman who is not the patient to make that choice. That's between the doctor and the patient.

--Brant

[moralist]

Do you think that's a logical question?

A one second search turned this up...

"Having addressed the part of the question of female participation in dance, I now turn to why male homosexuals are disproportionately attracted to dance. On the fringe of society and receptive to the unconventional, the art world offers gay men an opportunity to express an esthetic sensibility that is emotional and erotic an insulation from a rejecting society, an avenue of courtship, and an arena in which to deal with homosexual concerns."

Dance, Sex, and Gender: Signs of Identity, Dominance, Defiance, and Desire

By Judith Lynne Hanna

I haven't stated my position on the subject of identifying various pursuits as being either feminine or masculine.

You either agree or disagree that art is a feminine pursuit, or that your ideology of liberalism is a feminine ideology.

If you agree that they are... then why are you trying to argue as if they aren't?

Greg

[william.scherk]

Ascorbic acid should be routinely administered in all IV drips respecting surgery--pre, during and post--unless there is a specific contraindication. This is not done.

I made myself a bet that I could take Brant's comment and turn the thread back to the question of Kamhi and "Who says that's Art?"

I lost the bet.

But, that loss aside, the last few operatic exchanges made me think of a piece of modern art. By a relatively youthful artist. Perhaps the Moralist can list its leftist failings and its depravities and its feminine taint; Brant can provide the side dishes; Jonathan can apply the lens of objectivity:

Edited April 10, 2015 by william.scherk

[Brant Gaede]

Do you think that's a logical question?

A one second search turned this up...

"Having addressed the part of the question of female participation in dance, I now turn to why male homosexuals are disproportionately attracted to dance. On the fringe of society and receptive to the unconventional, the art world offers gay men an opportunity to express an esthetic sensibility that is emotional and erotic an insulation from a rejecting society, an avenue of courtship, and an arena in which to deal with homosexual concerns."

Dance, Sex, and Gender: Signs of Identity, Dominance, Defiance, and Desire

By Judith Lynne Hanna

I haven't stated my position on the subject of identifying various pursuits as being either feminine or masculine.

You either agree or disagree that art is a feminine pursuit, or that your ideology of liberalism is a feminine ideology.

If you agree that they are... then why are you trying to argue as if they aren't?

Greg

Why do you use "feminine" pejoratively except to turn it into part of an argumentum ad hominem for a position that usually or frequenbtly doesn't make much sense and justify your prejudice against anyone not you if you don't like them for who and what they are? There is a difference in spite of great overlap between discrimination and bigotry but you've turned it all into a great big ball of brain-dead wax.

--Brant

[moralist]

Why do you use "feminine" pejoratively...

To be precise, my point is that feminine is as natural as masculine when expressed with moral propriety.

What I regard perjoratively is when a feminized nature resides within weak liberal males who failed to become men.

As evidence of the consequences, you need only to observe America today, lead by weak feminised liberal males.

And to make this clearer, note the stark contrast between the weak feminized liberal male Obama... and Netanyahu the man.

Greg

[Brant Gaede]

So, feminine is "weak"?

Is a gay male feminine and weak? Generally speaking one plays the female role and the other the male role penetrating the female role player. Isn't he masculinized though gay? But what's "weak" about taking it up the ass? That can be quite painful just like going to the bathroom can be quite painful.

Could a "feminized nature" reside in "weak" conservative males who "failed to become men"?

Objectively speaking, biologically, if a guy has male genitalia and pubic hair and can ejaculate sperm, he's a "man" although he's still got some growing to do, except maybe for his dick. He can make babies. I don't see your opinions expressed on these matters as anything other than your comfortable subjective impressions that you just dump on us armored against ratiocination. OL is neither the beginning nor the end of any discussion--it's the in between--unless it's from a true expert and maybe there's nothing you can add. Read George H. Smith for that. You cannot argue him down. You may say something complementary or supplementary or ask for more info, but you cannot task him for his ignorance of political philosophy and its history, which is not to say he doesn't know a lot more than that.

I don't think I'm any expert on much of anything except myself. That expertise took me a lifetime to get and I'm still adding to it.

--Brant

[moralist]

So, feminine is "weak"?

Only when that feminine nature resides in liberal males who failed to become men.

Obama is a feminized liberal male... which explains why he is such a pathetically weak leader.

Note, this is not about physical biological gender...

...it's about moral values... or more specifically, the lack of them.

Greg

[Selene]

Careful Greg...

[Brant Gaede]

Obama is "pathetically weak"?

What planet does Greg live on?

He doesn't want to dump on Obama. He wants to use Obama to dump on the "feminine" and the feminine to dump on liberals and artists and gays et al.

By using his "feminine" sword to battle "leftists" he makes himself a wimp as a fighter.

--Brant

and a wooden horse rider

[BaalChatzaf]

Looks like a terrific read, Ellen. The intro title says it all.

"If art can be *anything*, then..." (...then all bets are off).

I would have said: "If art can be anything at all, it is nothing in patricular"

[Brant Gaede]

Looks like a terrific read, Ellen. The intro title says it all.

"If art can be *anything*, then..." (...then all bets are off).

I would have said: "If art can be anything at all, it is nothing in patricular"

Art can't be "anything at all." Art in that sense is the provenance of the artist and whether he's an artist is up to him. All anyone else can rightfully say is, "Well, I don't think so, but I'm not going to argue the point and I'll just ignore this." Everything else is the destruction of creation--realized or just attempted--by would be cultural fascists seeking moral authority and prestige. That goes for artists commenting on the works of others. All I'm talking about is whether it's art or not art. Not whether it's good or bad art. Anyone is welcome and free to make such statements, not shovel in the rubric of ideological purity. For me "Piss Christ" is crap. I also badly want to say it's not art, but I restrain myself. For me it's more damning to say a work of art is crap than to say it's not art and crap. That's because crap has to be attached to something, best a category, and let the category do the damning. The category of "art" is a category of high human achievement, so if you make crap and call it art you are damned and "I'll get your little dog too!"

--Brant

[moralist]

Looks like a terrific read, Ellen. The intro title says it all.

"If art can be *anything*, then..." (...then all bets are off).

I would have said: "If art can be anything at all, it is nothing in patricular"

That reminds me of an old saying:

"A man who won’t believe in God will believe in anything."

Greg

[moralist]

Obama is "pathetically weak"?

Yes.

Absolutely.

...but he only ~appears~ to be strong to weak people.

In reality, he's the Islamic fascists' little poodle.

He and Kerry are the ultimate bend-over tag team

Greg