Art de-mentalized

Recently, I defended the art-status of certain fairground attractions. I couldn’t begin to explain the likes of the Dutch’ De Efteling’s Villa Volta. I won’t. I also argued abundantly that perception is a bodily event, not a mere brain-event. I was thinking of J.J. Gibson’s ecological approach. And I argued that works of art seem to assume, phenomenologically speaking, that their audiences consist of people suffering from autism. I won’t elaborate these arguments now.

My point now is, that art appears to be in a process of de-mentalization. It is as though the argument of perception’s bodily nature is being read in cartesian dualistic terms: as if, because it is embodied and addresses embodied perceivers, it contains no mental processes. Q. what type of art belongs to such de-mentalized perception? A. Bungee-jumping, Zorbing, Yeti-balling. The person is here at the mercy of uncontrollable causal processes.

Controlling the uncontrollable

They are under control though. Interestingly enough, there is a conceptual difference between the ways in which we control our exposure to disasters shown in movies, and that to disasters like in the experiences mentioned here. With movies, our control is phenomenological: we simply know nothing of the things we see projected before us can in any direct way harm our bodies. With zorbing we control harm by delimiting it in causal manner.

Fight Club et al.

The trend-setter for a certain demoralizing development in art is called Jack-Ass. Or was it Fight Club, directed by David Fincher in 1999, with Brad Pitt and Edward Norton?
What is demoralizing about the events portrayed in both this series and this film, is the way in which persons (characters) in it are supposed to experiment with their bodies in abstraction from any more normal moral consideration. In Fight Club, Edward Norton’s character represents the more normal personality fighting the experiments.
There is no such character, no full-blood embodied moral person, in Jack-Ass. Art has lost track of human reality here.

This may, or may not have something to do with the above, with the de-mentalization of art.