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The Question
Background of Paper:
The paper "What is Art?" is an answer to question #10 of Dr. Snoeyenbos' (of Georgia State University) Philosophy of Art test : The following 'art cases' discuss contemporary artworks that are puzzling in that in some sense they address the issue: "What is Art?" (or perhaps 'What is artwork?'). Discuss one of these cases. You may find it helpful into relate your discussion to one or more of the art theories we have taken up in class.
The art case chosen: Is Tristan Tzara's cut up amalgam of nonsensically arranged words from Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 a poem? Is a seven year old's similar arrangement of cut up words poetry? Are either works original?
I also use Ben Jonson's "On my First Son" and John Milton's "On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough," to further clarify "what is art?"
The Art Case and Question:
In Tom Stoppard's play, Travesties, Tristan Tzara, the well-known Dada poet, creates poetry by cutting up Shakespeare's sonnets, dropping the individual words in a hat, and then selecting and arranging the words drawn from the hat at random. In one scene, Tzara begins with the Eighteenth Sonnet:
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest;
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
According to Stoppard, Tzara came up with:
shke thou thy gold buds
the untrimm'd but short fair shade
shines--
see, this lovely hot possession growest
sol long,
by nature's courses--
so...long--heaven!
and declines,
summer changing, more temperate complexion...
My seven-year-old daughter recent imitated Stoppard's Tzara, also by randomly selecting cut-up words from the Eighteenth Sonnet. Her work began as follows:
Death complexion see, declines
<
summer's this as Rough changing eye course thee
more sometime not hot lives long fade
dimm'd; often eternal growest: May
Nor date. wander'st lines this temperate. lease
When eyes too is that his can brag to.
Two additional poems are considered:
"ON MY FIRST SON"
by
Ben Jonson
1616 (1603?)
Farewell, thou child of my right hand and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy;
Seven years wert thou lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
Oh, could I lose all father now! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon scaped worlds, and flesh's rage,
And if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and asked, say here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry,
For whose sake, henceforth, all his vows be such,
As what he loves may never like too much.
"ON THE DEATH OF A FAIR INFANT DYING OF A COUGH"
by
John Milton
(1673)
I
O fairest flower no sooner blown but blasted,
Soft silken primrose fading timelessly,
Summers chief honour if thou hadst outlasted
Bleak winters force that made they blossom dry;
For he being amorous on that Lovely dye
That did thy cheek envermiel, thought to kiss
But killed alas, and then bewailed his fatal bliss.
...
XI
Then thou the mother of so sweet a child
Her false imagined loss cease to lament,
And wisely Learn to curb they sorrows wild;
Think what a present thou to God has sent,
And render him with patience what he lent;
This if thou do he will an offspring give,
That till the world's last end shall make thy name to live.
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