Romantic aesthetics speaks a great deal about the complexity, inexhaustibility, infinity of meaning in the work of art. This talk has very real ideological function, because "complexity" never means heterogeneity or plurality of meaning. Quite the opposite. "Complexity" and "unity" go together in the classical-romantic aesthetic. Coleridge puts it this way: "the Beautiful, contemplated in its essentials, that is, in kind and not in degree, is that in which of the "organic" work of art as a unified totality are simultaneously ideological limits. When these limits, art constitutes itself as an "infinite continuum of reflection" (Friedrich Schlegel). In other words, every artistic text is understood to contain a wealth of meanings, "connotations" as opposed to "denotations," that can elicit a possible endless and variable series of interpretations. In the American context, W.K. Wimstatt states the point this way: "Each reader will experience the poem is like a stone thrown into a pond, into our minds, where ever widening circles of meaning go out - and this because of the structure of the story." We fail to understand the true nature of the romantic concept of art if we believe, as one recent book states, that "conventional criticism aims at a closure of the troubling plurality: it aims at an interpretation, fixing a meaning, finding a source (the author) and an ending, a closure (the meaning)."

The Theory of the Avante-Garde, Peter Burger, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis


Last night, I had the pleasure to listen to panel of speakers (Fritz Haeg, Dolores Hayden, Frederick Kaufman, Shamim Momin & Paul Holdengräber) at the New York Public Library on Fritz Haeg's Edible Estates projects. Holdengräber defined the avante-garde as military action. That definition stuck with me. The powerful and unifying forces of changing a community's opinion, regardless of whether or not they are ready for it...Listening to Dolores Hayden speak was fullfilling in a way not easily described. When you remember the track that you are on, and you are inspired by what this Yale professor and author of numerous interesting books on suburbia, and art, and feminism...I felt I made sense. My lineage, my experiences, my goals - it is awkward to put so much on one experience, on one woman's words, but I know I am in the right direction. And I wanted to as modestly as possible express how much I enjoyed seeing this panel.

Tonight: