# Can Art Give Us Knowledge? | David Brown ## Метаданные - **Канал:** Closer To Truth - **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGIW1Cc6NWw ## Содержание ### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGIW1Cc6NWw) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) David, there seems to be a tension in aesthetic cognitism o whether the epistemological questions over knowledge or understanding. You've talked about six different kinds of knowledge that the arts can reflect upon or represent. What are they? How do they work? — So, I'd like to begin by um describing the difference between understanding and knowledge. Um because I think both can arise and be helpful in the context of the arts. So um let me give an example of each which may or may not but anyway here it goes. Um so in respect of understanding there there's a um piece of installation art in the art institute of Chicago by Gonzalez Torres which is a pile of sweets and you're asked to take a sweet um that is an American word is saying yes take a sweet from — he's a candy — candy take a candy um and it was done in honor of his boyfriend who was dying of AIDS. Um, and so the effect of this um, installation was not that you didn't know about AIDS and its effect um, but it was personalized. So you had a sort of understanding perhaps more of an empathy with what it meant for someone to die of AIDS, gradually lose weight and so on. And this was his way of trying to engender that type of understanding. Now it's so not new knowledge but understanding. So there's one example of understanding. Let me now give an example of um uh a piece of knowledge you might get um which um let me pretend I'm an artist and uh produce one for you. So, um I've gi I'm given a space in an art gallery and I um import into the art gallery various black pots um that I bought at the local garden center and I so structure them that they read am I indestructible? — Now there's something for you to reflect about and it's the type of art called con nowadays conceptual art. So it is a form of art. Um and it's may tell you something you don't know as you reflect on that work of art of mine — because um the point is um what's indestructible there certainly not the plants which will die in due course. What is indestructible is the black pots. So one of the issues in gardening at the moment is can we get rid of using black pots? They're the most efficient in terms of growth for plants because plants grow towards the light and because the light is excluded by the black um they grow. But um machines can't detect black. Um so when they're going through um the filter system for um u putting them through the for reuse, they can't be discovered. So they go straight into landfill and so on. So they last forever. — So you've got the issue what's indestructible. I hope I've told you something as a result of my little bit of art. So there's a difference between knowledge and understanding. So sometimes um an artwork's giving you understanding, sometimes giving knowledge, but I think it could do both. — Okay. So what are the six categories that you — So the six categories I thought were worth identifying what were um there's inspirational knowledge. So that's the question of how does an artist know something? Um and modern discussions talk in terms of creativity but very often artists say something came but I don't know from where — um and that could be investigated by um scientists psychologists you know are the it say the collective unconscious could it be from there or wherever so there's that type of question about inspirational knowledge. Um, another type of knowledge is symbolic knowledge. So, um, how does a metaphor convey meaning? And I'd want to say it's ### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGIW1Cc6NWw&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 09:00) polymic or um, multivalent or whatever. Its power lies in the fact it can mean more than one thing. Um, so if I call God a rock, um, that could mean a number of different things. Um, so I was talking to my godson last night and he came up with the idea it was to do with the size of God. You know, big means God's big, grand, or whatever. Well, it could mean that, but it could mean um something that lasts forever. another possibility. Um or it could mean as it does in the Bible sometimes it what gives shelter. — Think of in the desert and you suddenly discover rock that protects you from the heat. So there's a variety of meanings that come with symbolic knowledge. Then with imaginative knowledge, think of um a recent hugely successful novelist like um Hillary Mantel um and her work on Thomas Cromwell uh who was the chief minister of Henry VIII in Britain um England sorry uh and uh the reason why she's a huge success is because she's managed to bring a life to bring to life a particular period in 16th century England that you might not otherwise have been able to envisage. Um but that doesn't necessarily mean you have sympathy um or emotional identification with um Cromwell. That might be a further question. So another type of knowledge is where there's emotional knowledge. Um, so Toltoyy's War and Peace, for example, was wanting you to be emotionally involved so that you saw the dreadful cost of war. Um, uh, and you could have, and that's very often a name in among novelists, I think. Um, and it might contrast with um say detective stories where you're not really wanting to identify with the figures. It's just a nice quick read. Mhm. — Um then I think um different again might be um what I'd call performative knowledge where you were actually trying to bring something about um and so uh think of what happened with Amazing Grace and the singing of Amazing Grace um after the um Twin Towers fell by um Reie Fleming, the opera star um or Barack Obama singing. Well, if you think of it, it seems very puzzling that should be sung because it's a success story. I've lost but now I'm found and all that kind of thing when in fact something destructive happened. Um and so what the purpose of the um song is to try and bring about transformation performative knowledge. And then the final type of knowledge I would like to mention is experiential mediated experiential where something is brought about that's non aesthetic but is mediated through the aesthetic and that could be moral or it could be religious. — What's an example? Um so a moral example might be um a strong sense of um uh we could have bad examples um uh as well as good. So let me give a bad example. So you might think um with Lenny Reefen Stall's um films. Um so that's uh — glorifying the Third Reich. glorifying the Third Reich, but that wasn't, at least according to her, integral to her purpose. And in fact, I want to say it's a great work of art aesthetically that carries that further experiential consequence through it. — Um, but equally, there might be a case where that happened with religion. --- *Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/40338*