Yesterday was a blissful Sunday, and I was thinking again about a paper I am to give in Madrid in a couple of weeks (goodness - only a couple of weeks away). In the process of thinking it through as I sat at the bottom of the garden, distracted by the temptation to just sit strumming in the sunshine, I realised that one of the great wrongs we do the world of language is our use of the word art. In its original use, the word art refers not to artworks but to the skill and the know-how by which artworks are made. Even if in most contexts we hear art as referring to the product, it is actually the practice of artists in the making. Now if we knock this idea on, we begin to understand the context of Duchamp's urinal or Worhol's soup cans and even the Coen brother's film, Inside Llewyn Davis, and the process of perception. Now this may not make huge sense, isolated here, but as the paper I am unfolding takes shape it will. As Hegel might have said, it is 'thinking translating itself into existence... cancelling and overcoming the contradiction between subjectivity and objectivity....' But that was only a small part of the day, because I watched Dan run his Heroes and Villain's run and raising £500 for African schools and also because Abbi came home from Oklahoma - the whirlwind has landed - weeeeeeee.... she loves this tune and we played it loud:
