Criticism — Our Theory and Practice

Luminasticity — the official publishing organ of Illuminati Ganga has a large number of Critical articles, from reviews of poetry, as well as selections from larger projects of critical analysis.

This document exists to provide a quick overview of the theories and ideas that guide our critical works.

Critical Theory — How to Criticize and Rank

In To Speak Meaningfully About Art we established the following of rules as a minimum applying to everyone who wants to speak meaningfully about art

1. Minimum rules to speak Meaningfully About Art

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To be able to speak meaningfully about any art you must be able to order that art into at least four categories, these are

1. Art that is good and to your taste
2. Art that is bad and to your taste
3. Art that is good and not to your taste
4. Art that is bad and not to your taste.

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We also established minimum rules that Critics should follow

2. Minimum rules for Critics to speak Meaningfully About Art

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A critic must also be able to differentiate between works that are

1. important in relation to their creator
2. Unimportant in relation to their creator
3. Important in relation to other works
4. Unimportant in relation to other works

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We established two facets that an artist should be able to bring to bear on discussions of their art

3. Extra Facets For An Artist to Speak Meaningfully about Art

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An artist should be able to consider the primary four facets but also the following

1. Things that I can use in making what I want
2. Things that I must go against in making what I want

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These rules were supplemented in the relatively facetious article Speaking Without Meaning About Art which mainly focuses on the kinds of people who would want to speak without meaning about art:

It would seem natural to expect that the way to speak without meaning about Art would be to just neglect to follow the rules laid out in the previous essay, but this is not exactly true. The people that essay assumes to not follow or know the rules nonetheless are people who wish to speak meaningfully about art, in some cases they are reviewers instead of critics, in some cases just normal people intent on telling you what they like and dislike.

There are however those who wish to speak without meaning about art, and whether or not they are familiar with the rules about speaking meaningfully and could follow them if they wished is no matter, it is orthogonal to their purpose.

The listing of people who definitely want to speak without meaning about art are

1. The Publicist
2. The Biographer
3. The Moralist
4. The Censor
5. The Problem-Solver

and— surprisingly enough

6. The Artist

The reasons for why these various roles may wish to not be meaningful when speaking about art are of course addressed in the article.

The article A Useful metric for finding Great Art discusses a heuristic that one can use to identify higher quality art using the basic 4 requirements for discussing art meaningfully.

All of the foregoing establishes that in the critical structures of Illuminati Ganga Subjectivity of Art is considered wrong

On Creativity

We have particular artists on the various sources of creativity in artists, one particular source is surprisingly misanthropy which inspires in youth a comedic view on humanity and all its acts:

There is a common narrative trope that those attracted to comedy are sad and miserable themselves, in those cases where this is true it is often because comedy is an early manifestation of the comics natural inclination for misanthropy. Comedic misanthropy is often a defense against the embittered misanthropy so prevalent with age or, perhaps, just experience.

The comic misanthrope is drawn to the viewpoint that life and human existence are jokes.

Of course creativity as an expression of misanthropy is relatively rare, the normal wellsprings of creativity are discussed in the article A Theory as to Why Art is Created:

Aside from those who create for money, some of whom may be among the finest of any art, mostly the reason why people create anything is for the experience of the creation. First comes the conception of what will be created, and then the actualization of the primary idea, which actualization brings with it numerous other ideas unknown until the point of working through the points uncovered by that initial motivation.

This more used reason for creativity and source for the creation of art is expanded on in the article Art as a tool for storing Mana

Mana, a Polynesian concept related to a spiritual force or energy permeating the universe, a force that can be cultivated in people and objects

Narrative — and the minimal requirements for an Artform

In Narrative and the Structure of Art it is discussed how narrative exists in art, and also the 20th centuries attempt to remove narrative from graphic arts, and the resulting imposition of external narratives by critics and the artists themselves.

..it is true of all the arts that narrative is a potential factor of the artwork. It is just that in some arts when narrative is present it is an explicit part placed into the work by the creator (the internal presence of narrative) and in others the narrative must be surmised by those who interact with the art (the external imposition of narrative) . In the graphic arts the narrative if present will be derived by its audience, in the literary arts it is internal to the art itself.

This article addresses various issues, such as:

1. The Destruction of Narrative
2. The Authoritative Imposition Of Narrative
3. Intersections of Internal, External, and Authoritative Narrative

And

4. Time and The Experience of Narrative

This is taken further in the article Off The Menu which establishes the following rules to determine when some part of human culture can function as an art form — these rules are:

Art Forms must allow for distributed Mana

Food does not in itself have any Mana on anything but a personal level, and, perhaps I am too harsh, but I do not see it as having any Mana on even a personal level. The Meal you eat cannot be eaten tomorrow by someone else, unless the aforementioned artist of shit makes their appearance. You may have a memory of the Meal, but you cannot go and taste the Meal again — you can at best taste a similar Meal in similar surroundings at some future time. The meal does not have Mana.

Art Forms must enable Memetic manipulation

Memetic change happens in the human brain as it associates pictures or language or audio fragments with similar things, for example one might see a picture and associate with a text that has some relevance. So obviously to have Narrative one needs to also allow for the more primitive Memetic manipulation of the content that will be used to build the Narrative in the human mind.

This can of course happen with a Meal, but just as with mnemonic functionality as the Meal is consumed and is no longer available the Memetic manipulations cannot be accessed by the brain or taken even further.

Art Forms must demonstrate a minimal level of expressiveness

The minimal expressiveness of art requirement is that any emotional state of a human can be conveyed by that art. This does not mean that every attempt to convey an emotional state in art must be successful and obviously it does not have to work for conveying emotional states to people that are in some way not able to feel emotions in the same ways as the general human population, but we should know the art is able to convey these emotional states with a good deal of accuracy to much of the population.

At the end of the article we discuss a simple heuristics for determining if an activity is an Art

1. Can the product of the activity convey any and all human emotional states?
2. Can the product of this activity convey simple, one sentence ideas, expressible without punctuation
3. Can the product of this activity theoretically convey any and all ideas expressible in any of the classical arts. (this is not that important, hence the “theoretically”)
4. Is memetic manipulation possible via the product of the activity — can returning to the ideas expressed in the potential art spark new ideas that relate to the original. If the art conveys the idea that Old Age envies the Freedom of Youth will further examination of the art cause other related ideas to be raised — Youth Fears the restraints of Old Age for example, or Old Age envies the freedom of Youth, just as Intelligence envies the Freedom of Idiocy — note that the ideas that come from memetic manipulation of the immediate ideas do not need to have the same simplicity, the only requirement is that ideas transmitted to an audience of the potential art should be able to change and evolve.
5. Does the product of an activity have distributable Mana — that is to say a meal may have Mana to those who take part in it but how do they convey that to others? Again this is a heuristic, many specific instances of Art will not have the possibility of distributing Mana to anyone who was unable to directly interact with the art at a particular time and place — but it becomes suspicious if by its nature an activity can only ever have personal Mana.

These works provide the theoretical underpinnings for Illuminati Ganga’s Critical works as of today.

This article was written by IG Agent 13, who has helped in the writing of many of the preceding articles, but also in the following:

Structure In The Mixtape of Taliesin

The Theme of Sleep in The Mixtape of Taliesin

On Apollinaire and the Calligrammes

Themes in The Mixtape of Taliesin: Youth And Age In the Suit of Clubs

Water in The Mixtape of Taliesin