Form vs. Content

i had to vote content because i am always trying to interpret things, and figure out what the significance of various artworks are historically as well as what ideas they are trying to express. at the same time however i agree with de kooning, and sontag, that this approach can be reductionist

why can't we have both

you can. they are inextricable. this is about which aspects of a work of art you tend to focus on more. when you get a new record, for instance, do you try to pick apart what it sounds like and why or are you more interested in the emotions and ideas the artist is trying to convey. i think everyone here does both, but i also think that people have tendencies in how they respond to artworks, and what features they are more interested in.

I think this is a misunderstanding between the literary and dramatic arts on the one side and the plastic arts on the other (which to me would include recorded music, if not all music). The "content" of music is generally trivial, but because music writers tend to have a literary mind they often focus on the lyrics, meaning, and artist's backstory above everything else. The question of form vs. content is really a critical problem, not an artistic problem.

form is sedimented content yo

yeah was gonna bust out the Deleuze and Guattari but bottom line is this dichotomy is v. wrong

OTM. James Joyce to thread.

I think this very much depends on whether we're talking about narrative-driven arts or not. With, say, comic books I tend to focus more on the content, but with music, form comes first. (And sure, music often has narratives too, but the are very rarely the main thing, so music isn't really narrative-driven.)

that's a good point tuomas -- different mediums call for different approaches. and i know that this dichotomy is ultimately flawed, because the content of a work of art arises from its formal construction and, if you believe adorno, then formal conventions are themselves "meaningful" and reproduce content that the artist may not have intended etc. i think i said that basically in my OP. the poll question is more basic than that. it's about whether your first instinct is to attach meanings to artworks, or if your first instinct is to closely examine their surface elements... it's about critical habits of mind.

TBH, even if the dichotomy is flawed, I think it's useful when talking about narrative arts, but only then. Like, if I'm reading some art comic, where the focus is more on the the individual panels than any overall story they're conveying, I could say the form is more important than the content there. And on other hand, you have stuff like superhero comics, where the art and story duties are usually divided between different people, and people tend to follow specific writers regardless of who's drawing the comics, so you could say content is the more important thing there. But if you're listening to, say, instrumental music like techno, what part of it is form and what part is content?

i guess with music, considered apart from lyrics, the content usually transcends individual works and has to do with the cultural meaning of certain forms. so a thinkpiece on a certain techno scene, and how it functions and what that "means", in the view of the writer, would be a content-driven piece on techno. most music journalism is content heavy because they discuss the album in the context of the artist's career, and against the backdrop of a certain milieu in which he or she is seen to fit.

how it functions and what that "means", in the view of the writer, would be a content-driven piece on techno

But any techno criticism that's based on how it functions is both inherently *and* explicitly concerned with form, probably more so than with virtually any other kind of music. I dunno, I get the feeling from your initial post that you're starting off with a confused view of what form and content mean and driving this thread in the wrong direction from there.

All music writing uses a form, Einstein!!!!!

Yeah way to go Treeship!!!!!

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LKCeWwWlzsE/UOitGY0J32I/AAAAAAAAAKE/uktg1Bguakw/s1600/Chinatown+ending.jpg

ok. if you think the premise of this poll is too flawed, then feel free to use this space to discuss whether you would prefer to go to the moon or to be a member of the beatles.

Beatles = form; moon = content.

" it's about whether your first instinct is to attach meanings to artworks, or if your first instinct is to closely examine their surface elements... it's about critical habits of mind."

Fwiw this is a really interesting question in it's own right but form v content maybe isn't the most helpful of framing it, because of the confusion between content and interpretation here.

form, no doubt.

like with new orleans brass band music, the composition is by far the least important part, it's all about how you play it. some songs are barely more than a vamp, so it takes a good band on a good day to make them into something great.

and in books, i love narrative but not as much as line-level prose, which feels like it functions in the same way to me.

i guess i have to take form to the extent it can be taught to upper class students whose formal skills can then be used to separate them from the uppity rabble. anyone can come up with content

"Subject matter is everywhere, general, is brick, concrete, plastic; the ways of putting it together are particular, are crucial. But I recognise that there are not simply problems of form, but problems of writing. Form is not the aim, but the result."

Happy birthday Fassbinder!!!!

If content is always the same - if - then form is probably what matters.

If content - the things art is about - is the same as 'the facts of life' - birth, desire, procreation and death - and everyone experiences these things, then we can't really say 'well done poem/novel/painting, you have observed that people are born, desire and/or procreate, and die', because those things are obvious, and there's nothing to separate that observation from a cliche.

Then, what separates a good and a bad artwork about the same thing is the form the artwork has, its 'way of saying it'.

But, what happens if it turns out that every experience of 'birth, desire, death' etc is radically different, or if content is something that changes, evolves – is, basically, different ...

That's about where I'm up to with this.

i care most about form that resonates w/ its content

P.S.

Circumstances once forced me to share a house with some music students who were rockists and liked to smirk about how the blinded consumers thought they were hearing 'emotions' and stuff in music, but actually - chuckle - they were just listening to music theory and a piece of music could be dismissed if it wasn't really difficult to play. Therefore, in their view, the highest form of music was solo albums by guitarists from 80s hair metal bands.

They were wrong.

But they also weren't true formalists, unlike clever me, who argued that there was a pretty big difference between a piece's technical complexity/difficulty - i.e. would being able to create/play this piece of music get you into a music college -and how good that piece of music was.

Such that, yeah, a pop song that energises vast numbers of people and connects to their emotions is, to be sure, doing that using musical forms, you could write it all down on manuscript paper if you wanted. And again there's a formula for the clothes the performers wear, dance moves, etc. Yes. This is all a question of form. But what matters is whether it works, not how complex or difficult any of it was to pull off.

Which is, you know, basic level stuff around here, but I wanted to tap out this little anecdote to separate a sincere critical devotion to form, from a simple, pseudo-intellectual dismissal of content.

xp to Matt DC i agree that this is really a question about interpretation, and the degree to which people are mindful of the non-equivalency between a work of art and its "meaning." i like the idea of making polls though, and that's why i framed it this way, because i think the form/content distinction is related to this question. many times, especially in contemporary art museums, i see people trying to justify the works' existences by ascribing meanings to them, and implying that you need to "get" a work of art in order to enjoy it properly, and this way of responding to art has become tiresome to me. i think it's one way to go, but i think there are other ways to enjoy art, even work that is intended as "conceptual."

i'm not even gonna read this thread, form is content, duh, not gonna vote

I vote "vs." -- both and neither.

i'm hope you are content with that decision.

*I

i see people trying to justify the works' existences by ascribing meanings to them, and implying that you need to "get" a work of art in order to enjoy it properly, and this way of responding to art has become tiresome to me. i think it's one way to go, but i think there are other ways to enjoy art, even work that is intended as "conceptual."

yeah i think the deep problem with conceptual art is that it's ultimately such a thorough rejection of aesthetics, of the specific materialization of a work of art, that it makes no sense with the way that 'we' few artistic experience now. this book http://www.amazon.co.uk/Anywhere-Not-All-Philosophy-Contemporary/dp/1781680949/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370123819&sr=8-1&keywords=peter+osborne+anywhere is i'm sure a good point on these debates (haven't read it yet but i've heard enough from it to know that i appreciate its direction).

erm, 'view', not 'few'.

execution

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Content tends to be mostly basic, quotidian and often rather grim, even if it is indispensible. Content keeps you from going northeast when you really ought to go north-northeast to avoid flying into the mountain. Not fun stuff, but necessary stuff.

Human minds tend to enjoy form. Most of our arts are crappy containers for content, but pretty ace as vehicles for playing with form. I'd say as a general rule, form is the way to go, as long as you don't get too serious about it.

content is the present in a boring box of form

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

(squints and angles his head from side to side)

Does this poll look lopsided to anyone else?

i like that this poll proved that ilxors are aesthetes, although i guess that isn't a surprise.

ryan otm itt. aesthetes are friggin awesome, but radical newness comes with content tbh

that's the pain in the ass of radical newness

otm x 10000

i wish my name was liam fennel, that sounds cool

anyway, i think "radical newness" is usually achieved through formal innovation not through innovation in the realm of content. even conceptual art, the concepts themselves are never "new", really, it is always the manner of saying it that is new.

xp lol, i just typed it out to see if it wd fit, and came here to remind myself what I'd had before...

anyhow, Liam Fennell (I'd misspelled his name): Circle (the Finnish band): S/D

formal innovation = constantly strived for/achieved = rarely radical

radical newness comes with content bcz content is the same trampled ground it has been for aeons now...

xp to Treeship, I think it's more that the history of thinking about art has leaned so heavily towards form that we believe we can discuss form in detachment from content much better than we can do the opposite. Plenty of concepts are new or changing - I don't think many would disagree that, for example, the way we view technology and our relation to it was changed by how art dealt with that subject in the 20th century - and I think that dictates the form as much as it's dictated by it.

lol I really shouldve stopped with 'ryan otm itt'

yeah but are artists the conceptual innovators here or are they innovative in terms of finding new modes of expression that fit our new ways of seeing and thinking about the world? obviously it is both, but i guess i would be wary of thinking of artists as equivalent to philosophers or sociologists. they fill a different role... one that is harder to define because it is rooted in the interplay, or negotiation, of form and content; it's not just one of these things

sorry, xp to merdeyeux

I would say that if you are going to go with something like Ulysses which is probably a work that is synonymous with 'radical formal innovation' is that formally its a little regressive ie basic plot framework adapted from Ulysses which was def at least two millenia old at that point, with that structure being the backbone to what is essentially this 'day in the life' type novel of small-scale naturalism that was being developed by the writers Joyce admired when he was young, like Ibsen and Flaubert. The real innovation it could be argued comes as content, ie telegraphing the myriad half-formed stray thoughts and impulses shooting out in every direction could in fact be the terrain of the serious novelist.

Idk if you could say comparable things about Eliot or Picasso or whomever, though...

obv that second unitalicized Ulysses should be The Odyssey though, other things too

but aren't ulysses' experiments with representing consciousness as contingent flickers -- a reactive part of the surrounding reality more than the controlled meditations of a walled off cartesian subject -- formal experiments? it's about the way he wants to represent his day-in-the-life of Bloom, his radicalization of the naturalist novel. there are some phenomenological ideas that underlie his formal choices, but i have always thought that what is radical about ulysses is precisely its form. but the form breaks with convention so self-consciously that the reasons for these breaks become a part of the content of the novel. by representing consciousness in this way he is saying something about consciousness.

i guess all the early detractors from this question were right: "form" and "content" cannot be untangled, as you can never really determine where one ends and the other begins.

yeah I think the modernist canon itself undoes what were the dominant modernist theories of art (e.g. Greenberg) in a way that's often only ascribed to postmodern art - form is always something that's quite incomplete, never quite doing the job it's supposed to do and being undone by its matter as it goes along.

I wonder if feelings about form/content are consistent with whether someone prefers mp3s to physical media.

what is the short snappy phrase i am looking for that in my head is form resembles content but which can't be that because google returns like zero results for this phrase

help me out ilx

Adorno said form is sedimented content, i think, as someone said upthread, i think (using zing, don't want to scroll all the way up.)

The phrase you're looking for is "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny".

ha- thank you both. i think i am inventing shit/coining new schools of thought

There's also "Form follows function."

I was thinking about this thread while watching Here Comes the Boom w my mom.

)(i'm kinda glad no one took me up on this tbh lol)

http://www.ironpaper.com/webintel/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Content-300x199.png

"Content dictates form," I often say to students. It's one of the few pretty maxims I use in class.