The question about "scholar" is not whether it means "disinterested" but 
whether that was in fact true at the time--so long ago--that you learned it.  
Is an advocacy of a European, Western "tradition" that excludes others 
truly "disinterested"?  And let's forget whether we take that position or not; 
is it "disinterested"?  [And of course you know I will say any theory that 
cannot find a place for most of human beings is actually pretty 
"interested."] And Eliot said many things, but a Harvard philosopy Ph.D 
(even if he did not go back to Harvard to accept it but did all the work and 
had his dissertation accepted) who spends his life writing critical and 
theoretical articles [really very "interested" ones] is pretty much anyone's 
definition of a scholar, whatever else he did.  I do not understand the need 
to denigrate all current research and thought in universities.  As if Eliot and 
Pound were greeted in 1922 with enthusiastic acclaim.  In fact, they were 
mocked in comparable sweeping ways.  Nor is there anything 
"disinterested" in sweeping mockery of scholars who write anything now; it 
is, I think, shamelessly "interested."  You are, it seems, under impressions 
not won by a labor of intelligence but picked up whole from a specific  
group in the media and in academia as well.  Unless one is prepared to 
know and argue from within that knowledge what is being debated by 
scholars,  adopting wholesale myths about them will not lead to any 
understanding nor will it in any way refute them--not that there is any single 
"they." 
Nancy







Date sent:      	Wed, 15 Aug 2001 13:11:09 -0400
Send reply to:  	[log in to unmask]
From:           	Ken Armstrong <[log in to unmask]>
To:             	[log in to unmask]
Subject:        	Re: Definition of art



--On Wednesday, August 15, 2001 12:02 PM +0000 [log in to unmask] 
wrote:

>> What is the current thinking about the
>> question of "what is art?".

> Whose "current thinking" are you asking about?

 Pat 'n all,
 Only judging by the question posed in his sentence preceding the one
displayed above, I think Steve means the current scholarly thinking on
"what is art."  At first I thought asking these questions is like standing
at the base of Niagra Falls to find out how nature feels about falling
water; the volume of the response might exceed the inquirer's ability to
absorb the answer. But then I thought that a prior question might be:
should "scholarly" and "thinking" be so conjoined in relation to the
specific question. This I ask not to scandalize anyone but in light of the
common phrase "scholar thinker," meaning one is both, and in that the two
don't necessarily require one another, at least up to a certain stage of
development. Eliot often noted that he was not a scholar. But that in
order to write poetry (to think poetry?) one must have, after a certain
age, a sense of history which is won by a labor of intelligence. And it is
Eliot the thinker-about-poetry that prompts the question, or at least the
assertion from Perl. Hasn't being a scholar changed? When I was in school,
admittedly not recently, the standard for the scholar, maybe then
beginning to change, was to be "disinterested." I am under the impression
that that is not the standard currently, or that being disinterested is a
pose or strategy that is considered inauthentic, and that someone today
who has an answer to Steve's question will probably be expected to couch
it in terms of some sort of advocacy. My modification of Steve's question
would be "can advocacy criticism authentically ask 'what is  art.'" I
don't have a scholarly answer.

 Just a couple three thoughts.
 Ken