I wrote this on my ‘Test piece 1: hypothesis‘ post on the 17th September.
Perhaps this affects the pricing of equipment due to social desirability, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Although I think it raises some questions of accessibility and the various associations of status. It could be because art bases status of materials on historical lineage and science bases status of materials on functionality, but that is just my own opinion.
I wanted to highlight the last sentence, because I think it’s a potentially important point; which I will go back to further in the post.
I was reading Thinking Through Art, and this time I’m reading it properly instead of passively reading. I read it last time, but I was just wading through words, so in a way I was simulating the experience of reading without understanding the content (?). This time, I’m finding the terminology that I don’t understand. I’m using the Dictionary of Critical Theory, recommended by my former lecturers from the BA Fine Art course. I have a dictionary which I bought when I was in secondary school; it was recommended by my English teacher. I didn’t have the writing skills back then, but I think she saw potential in me to be a good writer one day. My history teacher saw something too, because she told my parents on parents’ evening that I belong in higher education, where I’m reading around topics and pursuing independent study. She said it with such passion too. (I’m going off on a tangent.)
In the Introduction: disputed territories in Art and theoria, Nicholas Davey writes that philosophical hermeneutics recognises that any communicative activity doesn’t arise from ex nihilo, Latin for out of nothing, but is enabled by pre-reflective historical transmission of norms, values and assumptions which give an inherited world-outlook, which he later terms as a historical horizon (Davey, 2006). Davey acknowledges that the humanities of communicative activities, such as art making and writing, comes from a lineage of norms, values and assumptions of that society that the author finds themselves in. So, when I wrote that art bases materials on historical lineage, it might not just be on the level of materials, but the meanings we place on these materials. It could be that the professionals operating in the sciences have a different system of hermeneutics, but that’s an opinion until I find evidence to back it up.