From 457d380ad5ab101fccc599176d02f3e415b22770 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: phoebe jenkins <pjenkins@tula-health.com>
Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2024 21:57:43 -0400
Subject: another pass through first section

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 essays/introduction.tex | 5 +++--
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@@ -15,11 +15,12 @@ Thus, I reject art as an intellectual or cultural modality. In rejecting truth,
 We are not finished with art, however. Ever since art began to disintegrate as an institution, modern art has become more and more of a repository for activities which represent pure waste, but which counterfeit innovation and objective value. A two-way process is involved here. On the one hand, the modern artist, faced with the increasing gratuitousness of his profession, desperately incorporates superficial references to science in his products in the hope of intimidating his audience. On the other hand, art itself has become an institution which invests waste with legitimacy and even prestige; and it offers instant rewards to people who wish to play the game. What is innovation in modern art? You take a poem by Shelly, cut it up into little pieces, shake the pieces up in a box, then draw them out and write down whatever is on them in the order in which they are drawn. If you call the result a \enquote{modern poem,} people will suddenly be awed by it, whereas they would not have been awed otherwise. This sort of innovation is utterly mechanical and superficial. When artists incorporate scientific references in their products, the process is similarly a mechanical, superficial amalgamation of routine artistic material with current gadgets. 
 
 Now there may be some confusion as to what the difference is between the products which result from this attempt to \enquote{save} art, and activities in the intellectual modality which I favor. There may be a tendency to confuse activities which are neither science nor art, but have objective value, with art products which are claimed to be \enquote{scientific} and therefore objectively valuable. To dispel this confusion, the following questions may be asked about art products. 
-\begin{enumerate}[itemsep=3pt, parsep=0pt, topsep=3pt, leftmargin=1cm]
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+\begin{enumerate}[label=\arabic*., nosep, itemsep=0.5em]
 \item If the product were not called art, would it immediately be seen to be worthless? Does the product rely on artistic institutions to \enquote{carry} it? 
-
 \item Suppose that the artist claims that his product embodies major scientific discoveries, as in the case of a ballet dancer who claims to be working in the field of antigravity ballet. If the dancer really has an antigravity device, why can it only work in a ballet theater? Why can it only be used to make dancers jump higher? Why do you have to be able to perform \enquote{Swan Lake} in order to do antigravity experiments? 
 \end{enumerate}
+\vskip 0.5em
 To use a phrase from medical research, I contend that a real scientist would seek to isolate the active principle---not to obscure it with non-functional mumbo-jumbo. 
 
 Both of these sets of questions make the same point, from somewhat different perspectives. Given an individual with a product to offer, does he actively seek out the lady art reporters, the public relations contracts, the museum officials, or does he actively dissociate himself from them? Does he seek artistic legitimation of his product, or does he reject it? The objective activities which I have developed stand on their own feet. They are not art, and to construe them as art would make it impossible to comprehend them. 
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