Embodying the Black Experience

Between books, events, and media, the last couple weeks has been an interesting vortex for me in terms of the American experience in regards to Black & White.  In the basic speech class that I teach, the textbook urges that we be careful and specific in the way that we address and discuss individuals.  At times this seems to indicate what some would write off as "politically correct address" or as some of my students have termed it "pacification, conflict avoidance, and bullshit".  In my classes and in the afore-mentioned comment discussion I had about the shooting of Trayvon Martin, I tried to emphasize the effort that we need to make as Americans and human beings to interact with each other in an I-Thou interaction--as though meeting another Self instead of an Other.  During impromptu speeches, one of my students received the topic "What is one thing that you would like to see in your lifetime?" and he chose to speak on a vocabulary shift from "African-American, Asian-American, White-American" to "American"... he's a rather powerful speaker already and I get echoes of MLK's "all of God's children".  Another student responded to the question "what one person from history would you like to meet and why?" that he would like to meet Dr. King so that he could ask the civil rights leader if he felt that his death had been worth it.  The student referenced Trayvon Martin and said repeatedly "because I don't think it was.  I don't think it was."

Finally, I encountered this blog posting which discusses the recent popular series The Hunger Games and the just released movies.  Specifically at issue here is the presence of black bodies in the film and a particular audience response of young people tweeting their disappointment and disgust at the casting of black actors for characters that they did not read as "black bodies".  I choose that term, borrowing from Harvey Young, because the comments that this blog poster cites deliberately see and comment on the actors as "black bodies" instead of as individuals.  The blogger and several comments argue (having read the books, I can attest) that these readers failed to read the specificity of the book in writing them as characters with "dark skin."  But some of the readers did and substituted lighter readings of "dark"--not meaning lighter "black" but "not-black".

Having grown up and matriculated through very diverse schools, I identify with one young woman who commented on the above blog.  While aware of racism, I am not frequently the target of it and I have not been physically witness to it's more blatantly ugly forms.  My default is to perceive it as a thing for old curmudgeons or hicks--ignorant people, not people like me.  However, what I have come to believe with increasing strength is that passive response, pretending it does not exist, or innocently ignoring allows it to continue.

The solution is actively acknowledging, countering, and working to reclaim the dialogue.  By reclaim, I cite Harvey Young's definition of reclamation:
    "Re-claiming does not require that we erase the past and script a new one.  The prefix tells us this.  To reclaim is to take something back.  It is to possess something in the present while knowing that i has only recently been back in your possession.  It is to remain aware of its previous "claims" even as you articulate your own.  It is to know the past in the present as you work toward creating a future." (135)
In reclaiming, I included all of us who are defined by the gaze of another--whatever our skin tone, gender, clothing, sexuality, mannerisms, body shape and size, etc.  I also include all of us who are innocently unaware or exhaustedly ignoring, or injured and buying-in to try and relieve the pain.  It's difficult, I think, because the easy response is the angry one; the hard response is to deal with those who carelessly or maliciously utter/type the words.  Opening eyes is a lot harder than closing them.

To add to the discussion about the black body onstage: Here is a link to a Riverside production (in the Inland Empire, my home town really, it's pretty big) that premiered this year called "Dreamscape".  It centers on and reframes a shooting that happened 14 years ago in which a black teenage girl was shot 24 times by white police officers.  The play takes place in the moment of the shooting, punctuated by each bullet that connects with the girl's body.  The other character chronicles each hit, while the girl responds.  This article and production were shared with my by a friend in response to my posting of the above link about the Hunger Games.  She didn't know how particularly it would relate.  Both Young and George-Graves write about plays and performances that use the stage to highlight the metonymization of the "black body" and reclaim the pieces as parts of whole individuals rather than "both an externally applied projection blanketed across black bodies and an internalization of the projected image by black folk" (Young 13).  Young writes about Parks "Venus" and "In the Blood", McCauley's "Sally's Rape", and Orlandersmith's "Yellowman", while Georges-Graves writes about Urban Bush Women's productions like "Batty Moves", "Hair Stories", and "Hand Singing Song".  In all cases, the tension between the conceptual black body and the individual body is present.  Both authors discuss the productions, scripts, and performances work to re-individualize, re-contextualize, re-vitalize, and re-claim the body for whole individuals.

"Dreamscape"'s act of highlighting the violence done to individual body parts while allowing the actress to connect those parts back to her particular life is a powerful embodiment of precisely the reclamation that Young and Georges-Graves are describing.  Young writes that his premise is "that a remarkable similarity, a repetition with a difference, exists among embodied black experiences" (5) That the projection of a conceptual "black body" results in individuals, who are distinct and different selves, experiencing similar treatment, responses, behavior.

What I find ultimately hopeful about Young's writings, the above play, and the discourse that my postings have generated is the knowledge that "We are never entirely trapped by our habitus" (which Young defines as "the generative principle of regulated improvisation . . . [or] social expectations . . . incorporated into the individual" and the expectations that the individual projects back at society and individuals" 20).  But the questions and the issues brought up are complex and unsettling, requiring continued dialogue.

George-Graves, Nadine.  Urban Bush Women: Twenty Years of African American Dance Theater, Community Engagement, and Working it Out.  Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010. Print.


Young, Harvey.  Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body.  Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Print.

Art as Art as Revolution!

A Response to Marcuse

“The radical qualities of art, that is to say, its indictment of the established reality and its invocation of the beautiful image of liberation are grounded precisely in the dimensions where art transcends its social determination and emancipates itself from th given universe of discourse and behavior while preserving its overwhelming presence.  Thereby art creates the realm in which the subversion of experience proper to art becomes possible . . . culminates in extreme situations (read emotions) which explode the given reality in the name of a truth normally denied or even unheard.” (6-7)

Marcuse redefines/re-expostulates a theory of Marxist aesthetics in which “art as art” is revolutionary not because it displays the proletariat or is propagandic in nature, but because the very formation of content into art highlights the senses which are universal—the result of which is that we can see how class systems are arbitrary and meaningless because all humans share these Truths.  This reminded me of Emilia’s monologue in Othello to Desdemona: “Their wives have sense like them: they see, and smell,/ and have their palates for both sweet and sour/ as men have” (4.3.93-95), and Shylock in Merchant: “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?” (3.1).  Marcuse seems to take for granted that art communicates something (a la Tolstoy): “it communicates truths not communicable in any other language” (Marcuse 10).  But, for him, the specific strength of art is in it’s ability to do the double consciousness thing discussed by another writer (I can’t recall the name just now), that “Art stands under the law of the given, while transgressing this law” making it in fact the ultimate revolutionary, subversive act—This reminded me of the subversive actions of the main character of the recent, highly popular, YA series The Hunger Games.  All of her subversion is indirect through the will to live and to honor life in a Truthful way—which subverts her reality.  To be fair, her actions as a character are not art, but the book itself is.  There are some interesting parallels to modern society and, while popular, the books could still pack revolutionary punch—despite the fact that their popularity may have “weaken[ed] its emancipatory impact” (Marcuse 21).

I appreciated Marcuse’s discussion of the connection between Aesthetic Form, Autonomy, and Truth—“the truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality . . . to define what is real” (9).  To me, the definitive nature of art (in making and tearing down realities and ideas) is quite phenomenal.  Before Picasso, could we imagine the world in cubes?  While the multiplicity of views expands in the Information age, art can act like hand holds to perceptions.  Art makes tangible that which we can’t express (see above quote from p 10).  C.S. Lewis wrote a short essay called “Sometimes Fairy Tales Say Best What’s To Be Said”—I think art in general speaks louder and more accurately without words or in addition to words.  The embodiment and sensuousness of art expresses something beyond the solo capability of language.  Though then I am caught because what is literature and poetry if not language and where do you draw the line between artistic writing and non-artistic writing.  And this line (or the need to make that line) I think might be the problem entire. 

In any case, I do have some places where I feel a disconnect from Marcuse.  First, as he acknowledges, the pool of pieces that he works with in the middle sections of his piece is a small one and he may “operate with a self-validating hypothesis” (x) (though, as I have noted before, to define Art without a self-validating hypothesis might be impossible, since it a primarily retroactive process—kind of like exploding atoms in order to see what’s inside them).  Second, I have to ask about art that supports and upholds the negative/bourgeois status quo.  There is art that subverts and art that subverts subversiveness—like DISNEY FILMS! J that in their “Truth”/subverted world, actually promote oppressive ideals and scenario fulfillments.  It is an important question no doubt—and I rather think that Marcuse might respond by saying that the non-reality of the fairy-tales make them less true.  But then I would whip out some C.S. Lewis and throw his theorizing about the starkness and hyper-reality of the epic which more accurately expresses reality than realism ever can because it’s expressing those in-expressible things—that “reality” can’t quite express. 

On the other hand, some interesting pieces to analyze using Marcuse’s Marxist Neo-Aesthetic would be “Scott Pilgrim”, “Waltz with Bashir”, “Othello”, and, my own play for next year, “Time Stands Still.” 

“Art can be called revolutionary” (x)

“The truth of art lies in this: that the world really is as it appears in the work of art” (xii).  Totes—Truth versus truth

“It seems that art as art expresses a truth, an experience, a necessity which, although not in the domain of radical praxis, are nevertheless essential components of revolution”—Mmm.

“A work of art is authentic or true not by virtue of its content, nor by its “pure” form, but by the content having become form” (8) This makes me want to go back to my Christianity and Theatre paper from a couple years ago to add this in—a la Christian theatre is by this token not Christian because of its content, but by the content having become form—of course that would necessitate even more work on my part to define what I perceive as a Christian Theatre Aesthetic . . . A subset of my work for this class.

I’m sorry all, but I don’t have a specific citation for this Handout =\

Racism & the Negotiation of Embodied Performance

"Urban Bush Women's choreography is emblematic of how individuals and communities work through social anxieties using layers of performance. . . . Performing artists can speak politically or socially and culturally in a way that no others can." (3)  (George-Graves, Nadine.  Urban Bush Women: Twenty Years of African American Dance Theater, Community Engagement, and Working it Out.  Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010. Print.)

I was going to write about how much I love UBW's work to reclaim the body, but this afternoon I posted a link to facebook which provoked a discussion that was very emotional for me.  And it connects, so here we go.

This is the link I posted: it goes to an article by a young, white, male blogger who protests the lack of social outrage about the Trayvon Martin shooting.  For those of you unaware, here is a link to a source of information about the incident with links to the relevant news sources.  Martin was a 17-year-old unarmed teenager walking to his dad's house in a gated community who was followed by a neighborhood watchman, who continued following despite having informed the police and been discouraged from it.  George Zimmerman, who was carrying a handgun, shot and killed Martin, who was holding only candy and a drink.  Martin was black, Zimmerman is white, and there has been no arrest.  I posted the blog because I appreciated the sentiment of acknowledging that there is discrimination as the first step, and standing up for each other as the second step in ending racism.

A friend of mine who is white and has felt discriminated against for being white, responded claiming that we already have equal rights and people need to stop spreading reverse discrimination by making a big deal out of things.  I was so frustrated!  First because I felt that she hadn't read the blog just been offended by the title, and second, because I couldn't believe that my friend would support racism (in the sense that saying it doesn't exist allows it to continue happening) by saying we have equal rights.  I kept thinking about all these books that I read in my PhD studies, the articles and ideas and research and knowledge that I've gained in graduate studies.  I think about the Basic Speech class I am teaching in which I try to teach my students about the way that we build relationships/meaning/gender/society through our interactions and the choices we make and HOW do I help her see (without alienating her) that her experiences are valid but that there is also a HUGE problem with ignoring the racism still present in our society/zeitgeist etc.  That being white, we are part of the dominant cultural hegemony, even if people of color are breaking into the top echelon, the top echelon is cultured white, and that being part of that group makes it harder to see the things that happen to other people.  That being part of the hegemony, we aren't left out and when we feel like a non-white group is leaving us out we feel unjustly persecuted for the things we don't perceive that we did (ie slavery, or getting the colonial ball rolling back in the day).

In George-Grave's book, she discusses the way that UBW is perceived as a black lesbian group and when audience members see even a mixed race woman--who looks whiter--they respond with relief "Oh, I'm so glad you have a white woman" (27) as if without the white representative, we couldn't relate/wouldn't be allowed to participate with the performance.  This is despite the fact that Zollar is happy to have all kinds of performers in her group: male, female, white, black, native american.  But as part of the dominant hegemony, we rarely experience or understand what people of color do.  I am not trying to say that we aren't targets or that we don't experience racism, but rather that we cannot make a straight comparison without trying to understand the other side.  Specifically, in Martin Buber's terms an "I-Thou" relationship: "the subject (the "I") encounters a person (a "Thou") and sees her/him as a relationships rather than as an experience (or an object)" (Warren & Fasset 156). To me, this is what UBW's projects seem to do or aim for with their performance: "work through social anxieties using layers of performance" (3).

As I worked on typing up responses to my friend in the little comment boxes, I kept thinking of the UBW choreography and wondering if there was a way to use the performance to help explain what I needed to communicate.  Embodiment as a way to work through the social anxieties with layers of performance seems to me to be able to communicate more than my halting, stumbling, static words.  For instance, UBW's piece about hair as a way of understanding and expressing the itemization of the female black body through hair.  But as soon as I say that, I recall the ways all women are pushed to look in our culture.  There are differences and pointing out that you suffered too is a logical fallacy of some kind if you're trying to say that other suffering doesn't matter!! THAT is what I was trying to say!  That!

The acknowledgement that we all suffer in someway returns me to my aesthetic of blending and expressing and working through these anxieties between "Inter"culturally as well as "intra"culturally.  By bringing white bodies, brown bodies, yellow bodies, and all the color palates in between together, can we negotiate these things further?  Can we engage and refuse to take the easy way out of "can't we just all get along"--getting a long is the dream, but it is not something to take for granted, like any relationship it takes "work"--incidentally the theme of this book =)

The "alternate modalities" (George-Graves 6) that UBW explores through dance, singing, and story-telling were really inspirational to me.  So much so, that I actually turned my ipod on random and tried to work somethings out myself via dance.  I'm glad I did.  We live in our bodies, and the dominant culture--while promoting extreme exercise--does not consistently celebrate or reward or promote embodied living as a part of positive knowledge about self and other selves.  UBW's work is still important, still relevant, and, I think, could stand to be expanded further--if they can get the performers =)

Warren, John T. and Deanna L. Fassett.  Communication: A Critical/Cultural Introduction.  Los Angeles: Sage, 2011. Print. <--This is my Comm 1010 textbook, it's really good.

A Minor Complaint on Verbiage

“There clearly exists a dramaturgy of the director and a dramaturgy of the performer.  However surprisingly it may seem at first, we also can and should speak—not just metaphorically—of a dramaturgy of the spectator” (100) “an acceptance that theatrical pleasure arises and is maintained in an unbroken dialectic between the frustration and satisfaction of expectations.  This fragile balance is kept between the pleasure of discovery, the unexpected, and the unusual, on one hand, and the pleasure of recognition, déjà vu, and the anticipated on the other” (112).

            In reading, Marco De Marinis’ article on the “Dramaturgy of the Spectator,”  I noticed myself resisting his ideas.  I had to pull back from contemptuously writing him off several times after I wrote comments in the margins to that effect.  I did a little internet searching and found out that he is Italian and that his work has been translated—perhaps the translation is what has me all riled up.  As I re-read and tried to dig deeper, I decided several times that I don’t necessarily disagree with him.  On his basic premise that dramaturgy is “the techniques/theory governing the composition of the performance-as-text,” I am reluctant to adopt it entirely for myself—seeing as in his following discussion it seems to apply scientifically: structurally as those there were equations to discover.  Perhaps this is the root of my difficulty: De Marinis speaks as if all we need is to discover the correct balance (not that he says this is easy) of frustrating & satisfying the spectator/audience’s expectations.  While I do actually agree in some part with this idea, the wording, connotations specifically, really turn my stomach—“manipulation” for example, comes up many times.  The performance is meant to “manipulate” a specific response in the audience.  While De Marinis takes a whole section to explain that there are Closed performances (with a specific audience and interpretation in mind) and Open performances (which more or less leave interpretation and audience open), the language is seems reductive and cold to me.  To John Dewey (art and education theorist), part of the beauty of art is that is expresses things that are extra-verbal—visual & aural ideas that cannot be expressed verbally.  While I’m not sure that this is something that De Marinis would disagree with, I agree, and I feel that, while trying to verbalize helps us better understand (often by negation) what it is we are trying to do with art and whether or not we are succeeding, this article seemed to me to reduce art to the equation mentioned above—as though “that’s all folks!”

            Ok, enough of my frustrations (ha!), here are a couple things I felt better about upon reinspection:

“this dialectic between the constraints imposed by the work (the “aesthetic text”) and the possibilities left open to those who receive the work strikes a balance which is the essence of the aesthetic experience and source of its vitality” (101) I lied, this is simply another way of saying the above quote from page 112, with which I am still not sure I entirely agree—I recognize it as something that exists in art, but I don’t think I agree that it is the essence of the aesthetic experience or the source of its vitality. 

“the performance seeks to induce in each spectator a range of definite transformations, both intellectual (cognitive) and affective (ideas, beliefs, emotions, fantasies, values, etc).” (101)—this upon rereading, I do agree with.  Performance does seek transformation—even if it’s just a reaffirmation of something already existing.

“The partial or relative autonomy of each of the different dramaturgies (the director’s, the writer’s, the performer’s, the spectator’s) all work together in the composition of the performance and must be seen as mutually setting and occasionally adjusting each other’s boundaries” (101)—there is a group tension involved in the collaborative process of drama, and I do believe that the audience is part of that creation

Wrighting through Theatre

In his study, Contemporary Latina/o Theater: Wrighting Ethnicity (Carbondale, Illinois; Southern Illinois UP, 2008), Jon D. Rossini discusses the three part task of theatre to write, right, and wright ethnicity.  Specifically, he discusses contemporary Latina/o theatre artists and plays that take on the third task: wrighting ethnicity.

I appreciated the structure of this piece.  I wrote in the margins "take note of structure for dissertating."  But what was most fascinating and interesting to me was the structure in the web of argument, information, definition, and analysis that Rossini wove to set up his further analysis and and exploration of theatre.  The model of wrighting--which calls up the idea of making--through theatre is submitted as the process of creating "a new framework that enables an audience to recognize not only the creation of aesthetic and emotional pleasure through theatrical art but also the creation of theoretical alternatives for thinking of and through ethnicity" (Rossini 20).  In my personal aesthetic/artistic point of view, this is the most valuable of art forms--something that not only creates emotional pleasure but also intellectual pleasure--through learning and exploring ideas.

Rossini wrote "The intersection of identity politics and theater has made increasingly clear that the stage is an ideal space in which to explore a multiplicity of cultural identities, to understand new possibilities for cultural formation, and to draw attention to the continued tension in the embodiment of any given identity" (18-19).  This is particularly helpful to me in formulating ideas with my dissertation:  As I have previously laid out, I am interested in the transition between deployed and home.  For military personnel, there is a home identity--civilian, and a war identity--soldier.  Nancy Sherman writes about it in her book The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds, and Souls of Our Soldiers (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010), "becoming a soldier is not just a social or sociological phenomenon.  It is a psychological phenomenon, a deep psychological phenomenon . . . The idea of uniform, and a role, simply does not convey that weight" (20).  The idea that Sherman is refuting is that being a soldier is an on/off switch, that like the uniform it comes off after work.  The nature of the work is such that it affects the soldier's identity.  There is a culture at war and a culture at home.  Whether or not a soldier is injured (physically or mentally) while on active duty, he or she must contend with deeply contrasting identities and cultural systems--before and after, home and war.  But the soldier is not the only one who must contend with this culture & identity clash.  Just as Diana Taylor writes of the way most citizens were "not recognized as participants" in 9/11, even though we really were (243), Major John L. Todd points out in his article  "The Meaning of Rehabilitation," that "the term rehabilitation should be used in a broader sense; rehabilitation includes not only sailors and soldiers but the whole community" (1).  Just as Rossini notes about theatre's ability to explore multiple identities, models for cultural formation, and embodied identity in regards to wrighting ethnicity, I see a parallel for theatre's ability to do this for wrighting the homecoming soldier scenario.  Current plays, like "Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo" (Rajiv Joseph, 2009) and "Oorah" (Bekah Brunstetter, 2010), and movies, like "Return" (2011) tend to highlight the failure of soldiers and community to readjust to each other positively.  The implied outcome of the scenario is pain, misunderstanding, negative sexual relations, and ultimately failure to reintegrate positively.  Significantly, none of these pieces place the blame on the soldier or the community.  Rather, in the interest of what Sherman describes as not writing "a political tract for or against a war" (1), anti-war sentiment seems to be expressed through a presentation of failed reintegration.

So a forward looking challenge, one that I'm currently hoping to tackle eventually (!!), is how to use theatre to wright the returning soldier scenario in order to facilitate and explore positive outcomes for this scenario by "explor[ing] a multiplicity of cultural identities"--soldier, civilian, waiting wife, etc--"understand[ing] new possibilities for cultural formation"--specifically in understanding how soldiers/civilians, war culture/home culture etc fit together or might be "200 ft tall and made of foam" (divergent thinking)-- and "draw[ing] attention to the continued tension in the embodiment of" soldier/civilian identities.

<Insert celebratory "Yay!! Productive Blog!!" here>

Taylor, Diana.  The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. London; Duke UP, 2003.
Todd, John L. "The Meaning of Rehabilitation."  Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.  Vol. 80; Rehabilitation of the Wounded (Nov., 1918), pp. 1-10.  Web.  3 Jan 2012.   http://www.jstor.org/stable/1013901 

Aesthetic Distance

“It might be objected that . . . distance [is] another term for the imagination, or for a particular species of imagination.  That latter may indeed be an accurate description of distance . . . distance is not equivalent to all forms of imagination . . . clearly distance would be concerned with [responsive imaginations].  In a sense self-consciousness, knowing that one is “seeing as,” is the single unique feature of distance . . . distance is neither simply and on/off condition nor exclusively one of degrees but both: self-awareness, for instance, either exists or does not, but the self-awareness may be induced to a greater or lesser degree” (76)

Daphna Ben Chaim has brought together the work of several influential theater artists and pointed out the way that their theories related to the specific and essential aesthetic distance that good artwork uses to activate and affect self-consciousness towards a view of the “larger perspective” (72).  While I found the reading a little dense and difficult to follow—having not read the portions of the book that deal with the referenced artist’s individually, I found the idea very much an “of course, now there’s a word for that.”  The idea of aesthetic distance is similar to an idea I have about art.  In my sense, art is a protected way of telling the truth—communication, like Tolstoy—because it is at once personal and separate.  The fact that it is art gives it a tangible distance, especially theatre.  I appreciated the reference to Artaud, “For Artaud the theatre is a protected environment where one can permit himself [or herself] to be vulnerable only because one knows he is safe” (70).  I agree.  I think that viewing theatrical performance is both vulnerable and safe for an audience—this is part of what Chaim discusses with the distance.  For me, theatre is a tangible distance—just like Chaim talks about the productive tensions “between two extremes, total empathy on the one hand and its complete elimination on the other” (78)—because theatre/performance is live and happening right in front of the audience it is tangible and visceral in a way that film and other mediums aren’t, but it is also fiction/a deliberate performance, which makes it safe for the audience to participate in the ideas/feelings/truths being manipulated, displayed, and challenged (what Chaim would call the “larger perspective”).

I appreciated that Chaim discussed distance as an active response for the audience/viewers of a work of art (“An awareness of fiction is the most basic principle of distance in which there appears to be three distinguishable but interrelated components: 1) tacit knowing; 2) volition; and 3) perception as unreal.” (73).  Specifically that the audience believes and responds to the world of the play through volition, following Sartre “not freedom in imagination . . . but his discussion of the freedom to imagine: that it is an inherently free act of will” (74), which to me indicates that part of what makes art is the choice to participate with it as art.  And I’m back to subjectivity.  While we might get as much out of a particular page of manga as out of a Rembrandt, it is the agreement of large groups of people, or the right people, to participate with the Rembrandt (in museums & checkbooks) that leads to a group delineation of Art (vs art).  But then the distinction is also the responsibility of the artist, since the preservation of just the right amount of distance is accomplished not through any one particular technique but through the artist’s application of “a general stylistic context” (72).  This multi-sided equation, which is subjective (to social-actors in the art process, the particular stylistic choices, the subject, etc), leaves a lot of room for a cornucopia of works of Art, and gives a measuring stick for determining how a work of Art is one.  I would argue that this particular method works better on understanding pieces already delineated Art vs discovering them. 

It occurs to me that most of the methods for defining Art (whether what it is or when it is) are all best used retroactively—meaning to understand why a piece already (the Spanish word ya would fit here: porque ya arté) is Art not to identify it as Art before it becomes Art.  This reminds me of Blink, a book about correct snap decisions made by the subconscious mind.  Connecting that to Ira Glass’s comments about artistic taste, I couldn’t begin to say how it works cognitively, but—subjectively—as artists it happens for us.  We can feel/sense/subconsciously recognize art and not art as our senses, emotions & intellect come together around certain works.  Appreciation comes from understanding a work; Aesthetic response comes from this subconscious recognition. 

Now, I’ve wandered away from distance—or gained the appropriate distance from it to see the larger perspective . . . haha.

“Distance permits the involvement in the first instance and then is the condition for its development” (71).

“It is also probably true that there is no such thing as a “distancing technique” isolated from a general stylistic context” (72)

Distance in the Theatre: The Aesthetics of Audience Response.  Ann Arbor, MI; UMI Research Press.