forum for week of 14 Nov: when we don't want knowledge

I would argue that the primary time in which a person would perceive, think, and conjecture without attempting to find something "known" (given the sort of strict definition of known, as we have seen both in class & in this weeks reading), would be when someone consumes Art. Consider (as a particularly obvious & Canadian example) viewing the work of Quebecois painter Jean Paul Riopelle. When you face it, you will do many things. First, you will perceive it, noting the colours & their interplay, the relative textures of different sections, and what appear to be the background & foreground tones of the work. After/during that, you would (hopefully) begin to form thoughts about the work, the painter at the time of painting it, and possible messages the work might offer. You would also be likely to form conjectures about the painting, and voice them to others, who would in turn voice theirs to you, which would further affect your thoughts about the painting. However, In doing all of this it would be ridiculous to think that you were searching for knowledge. Art, especially Abstract expressionism, cannot ever be reduced to being an expression of a single thought or belief, or even a finite set of thoughts. It is the multitudinous interpretations, in which none can be said to be known, that makes Art so interesting. So the relation between Knowledge and inquiry might be that knowledge happens when one is pressured to find concrete, singluar thoughts, and inquiry can be used much more broadly, in areas in which no single answer might be definitively right. For anyone who thinks that we are only ever searching for knowlege when using our critical tools, I would suggest a heavy dose of MoMA & Confusion.