Robert Peters:

>So explain to me why Picasso paints differently than Rembrandt and why
>Schoenberg can use very dissonant music in contrast to, say, Mozart?
>Simply because their aesthetics (the aesthetics of Picasso and Schoenberg)
>allow them to do it.  And this is progress in art.

I would say:  simply because the need of new experiences.  Weariness, dear
Peter, is the "primum mobile" of art, and to "fully cover the dissonance
of the world", as you said in other message, is impossible by its own
deffinition.  There's an analogy to this in Lacan's theorical distinction
between "desire" and "fruition" (excuse me, psychologists, for this
barbaric reduction).  Progress is a teleological notion:  it needs a
starting point and an arriving point.  How can you read the history of
art from this?, what's the arriving point?.  There's only a multitude of
changes, which *seems* to have a clear direction.  I know that you want
to see the history of art as an epic poem or a novel, with heros, dragons,
castles, princesses and, of course...a plot.  That's beautiful and
politically correct.  I think different:  aesthetical changes can be seen
better as products of desire, and desire has no object (or at least it has
partial and false object).  Desire is always moving and skipping from one
object to another.  "Fruition" means the impossible:  the end of desire,
the finding of a deffinitive arriving point...death, in other words.

Pablo Massa
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