Pragmatic Aesthetic
While Carney decries surface style and finds using symbols to gain meaning from a work promotes a shallow understanding of art, he believes that the meaning of the work lies at its surface. He posits a world where art is appreciated for what the work actually contains rather than what is read into it, an aesthetic he refers to as pragmatic. Living moment to moment, he argues, one can, for example, just appreciate the acting in a film and gain meaning from that, from what the characters actually say and do, and the tonal shifts that accompany these actions.
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Famous quotes containing the words pragmatic and/or aesthetic:
“Only the more uncompromising of the mystics still seek for knowledge in a silent land of absolute intuition, where the intellect finally lays down its conceptual tools, and rests from its pragmatic labors, while its works do not follow it, but are simply forgotten, and are as if they never had been.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)
“A dramatic experience concerned with the mundane may inform but it cannot release; and one concerned essentially with the aesthetic politics of its creators may divert or anger, but it cannot enlighten.”
—David Mamet (b. 1947)