in draft: asian art

For many in China, marriage is about social obligation, not a matter of personal love, which is a Western idea. Similarly, perspective is abnormal in non-Western traditions of art. Perspective assumes that the human eye is the measure of the world.

avant-garde art

At the time, Manet’s Olympia was extremely controversial and was rejected by the Salon establishment. Because the nude is wearing small items of clothing: the orchid in her hair, a bracelet, a ribbon around her neck, and mule slippers, these items accentuated her nakedness, comfortable courtesan lifestyle and sexuality. The orchid, upswept hair, black cat, and bouquet of flowers were all recognized symbols of sexuality at the time. This modern Venus' body is thin, counter to prevailing standards; the painting's lack of idealism rankled viewers who noticed it despite its placement, high on the wall of the Salon. A fully-dressed black servant is featured, exploiting the then-current theory that black people were hyper-sexed. That she is wearing the clothing of a servant to a courtesan here, furthers the sexual tension of the piece.

The flatness of Olympia is inspired by Japanese wood block art. Her flatness serves to make her more human and less voluptuous. Her body as well as her gaze is unabashedly confrontational. She defiantly looks out as her servant offers flowers from one of her male suitors. Although her hand rests on her leg, hiding her pubic area in a "frog" gesture-also another sex symbol, the reference to traditional female virtue is ironic; a notion of modesty is notoriously absent in this work.

Olympia immediately launched responses. Caricatures, sketches, and paintings, all addressed this nude. Artists such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin, Gustave Courbet, Paul Cézanne, and Claude Monet all appreciated the painting's significance.

Similarly, Mapplethorpe's sadomasochistic photos were controversial when they first came out. It can be argued that Mapplethrope’s photos had a similar effect on the art crowd that Manet's Le Deeuner sur l'herbe had with the Salon establishment. While rosy nudity was permissible in academic Salon paintings of Greek and Roman themes, the fiat, sallow flesh tones of Manet's nude female picnicker disturbed first viewers by a harsh contemporary realism and immediacy. There is no attempt to soften or idealize. This sexual flesh is frankly available and unromanticized. The casual air with which Manet juxtaposes brazen open-air nudity with the raffish workaday costume of the two young intellectuals, lost in discourse, is exactly the tone of many of Mapplethorpe's photos, where libertines pose in relaxed moods amid the bizarre discontinuities of their sexual underworld. The original shock of Manet's painting is surely reproduced, with the greater explicitness of our age, in Mapplethorpe's extraordinary photograph, Man in Polyester Suit, with its large black penis poking from an otherwise fully clothed torso. Finally, Manet goaded respectable sensibilities by the cool, appraising look on the face of his nude woman, who, like his self-possessed courtesan Olympia, meets our eyes without apology or embarrassment. She is practical, efficient, a bawdy woman of the world who knows her market value. She has, I submit, the same unsentimental sexual efficiency as Mapplethrope’s jaunty sadomasochists.

Mapplethrope’s distinction at the time was that he revived the idea of the avant-garde at a moment when it seemed buried forever. The avant-garde tradition was terminated in the Sixties by pop art, which closed the gap between high and low culture. The art world since then had, in my view, sunk into naked hucksterism and puerile mini-fads, a toy-train rat race of mediocrity and irrelevance. American creative energy was flowing instead into popular culture, which was sweeping the world.

- Camille Paglia

Painting is dead!

Painting is dead even though painting is more popular today that it ever was.

When it comes to painting, its "death" is not the death of painting itself, but the death of its function as a representation of reality.

A camera is infinitely better at depicting reality than any painter.

How do you measure the value of a candle? You can't measure its value by light output, since the candle has lost its function as JC of lighting a room. The years that followed Thomas Alva invention of the incandescent lamp might have been called "the fall of the candle and the rise of the lightbulb."

Yet every night all over America millions of candles are burning. No romantic dinner is complete without candles on the table. Individual candles are sold for $20 or $30 each, much more than a lightbulb. Unlike an electric bulb, the value of a candle has no relationship to its light output. Like the fireplace and the sailing ship, the candle has lost its function and turned into art.

Every form of artwork has its passionate defenders. They will strenuously argue over the value of an individual piece of artwork because there isn't an objective way to measure its value.

Before the age of photography, painting was used to communicate the liknesses of kings and queens, princes and princesses, throughout a kingdom. Paintings also let the next generation know what previous generations looked like. Before the age of photography, Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and other famous artists invariably painted in a realistic style.

Painting is just as popular today as it was in Rembrandt's time. Only today painting is an art form almost totally divorced from reality. As photography gradually assumed the visual communication role, painting turned abstract and became art.

An inflated price is one of the indicators that a discipline has become an art form. When your great-great-grandfather had his portrait painted for posterity by the local artist, he probably paid for the work by the hour, at a modest hourly rate. Now that painting is an art form, the sky's the limit.

A decade ago Portrait of Dr. Gachet by Vincent van Gogh went to a Japanese buyer for $82.5 million. If Dr. Gachet had wanted to let his descendants know what he looked like, he could have had a photograph made and saved someone quite a few dollars.

Art has no function; therefore art has no limit on what it is worth. Art is worth what someone is willing to pay for it. Interestingly enough, that price depends primarily on the publicity a painting has received in the media, not on the amount of advertising run by Sotheby's or Christie's. Sculpture was once used to create icons or gods. Now that most people no longer believe in stone, brass, or wood gods, sculpture has become an art form. No park in America would be complete without a generous assortment of metal or stone objects, but few people worship them. Sculpture is now art.

Like sculpture, painting, and poetry, advertising is taking the same path. "Advertising," said Marshall McLuhan, "is the greatest art form of the twentieth century"

Not only pundits like McLuhan but also top-level advertising people working in the trenches are making the art connection. Mark Fenske, a highly regarded advertising copywriter known for his work on Nike and other brands, says, "It may be the most powerful art form on earth." Advertising legend George Lois entitled his magnum opus, The Art of Advertising: George Lois on Mass Communications.

Major museums around the world house permanent collections of advertisements. Absolut vodka posters are framed and hung on walls like paintings. An exhibition of Ivory soap ads is on display at the Smithsonian; Coke commercials are in the Library of Congress, and the Museum of Modern Art owns a collection of TV spots.

Walk into the offices of virtually any advertising agency in the world and look at the walls. You would think you're in an art museum—wall after wall of advertisements set in impressive mattes and expensively framed.

Hold the phone, you might be thinking. Agencies are just exhibiting samples of their work. Maybe so, but lawyers don't frame copies of their finest briefs. Nor do doctors exhibit pictures of their most brilliant surgeries. We have never visited any advertising agency and seen framed sales charts for the agency's clients.

Advertising is dead!

When a communication technique loses its functional purpose, it turns into an art form.

spiritual nature of music

What is essential is that music takes us out of ourselves. It allows us to escape from our worries and desires. It transports us to a larger universe and forges a community with fellow listeners.

Fame

What is renown? A gleam of transient light,
That soon an envious cloud involves in night,
While passing Time's malignant hands diffuse
On many a noble name pernicious dews.

Petrarch speaks disparagingly about fame as a measure of being good. His criterion is permanence. (Fame is assume to be transitory).

art is hard

Nothing is of more use to man than the arts which has no utility.

- Ovid

Modern life puts us in a sort of double bind. An enormously stressful, constantly changing work and personal life is coupled with an unprecedented amount of "leisure" time. This often leaves little or no mental energy for consumption in each "free" hour. Therefore, we quite reasonably seek to fill much of our leisure time with light entertainments: things that will occupy and divert us. Although these entertainments may well have some aesthetic value, that is not why we choose them and it is not the way we are using them. A deep aesthetic experience of even the most accessible art is exhausting and consuming. Glancing at the paintings in an art exhibition or playing Mozart as background music is perhaps entertainment, but the experience is not the experience of art.

You may at this point quite reasonably say, "But I have, at least occasionally, made such an effort and I still didn't like it." How much is enough effort before I call the supposed experts' bluff?

By the time you can clearly remember details about works in a given genre, when you can compare and contrast them to other more or less closely related works, you are at least seeing the aesthetic object not only through its deviation from your expectations. If by that point the genre or style of work is still unsatisfying, it may not be for you. As universal as I believe human aesthetics to be, we are all still very different individuals. Each of us has been shaped by particular endowments and experiences. Some of us may simply be lactose intolerant when it comes to a given type of expression. I suspect, though, that once you have explored a few kinds of cuisine you may start to see what one might love even in dishes that may be too spicy for you.

I believe that the investment of time it may take to explore something really new rewards one with enormous gains. Even more than reconsidering the works you love, exploring a whole new artistic terrain is a staggeringly powerful experience. I am tempted to cite the studies about greater stimulation increasing the production of new neurons in rat brains, but that's not really the point.

If all you need to do is take a walk, a treadmill or a small park will do. But we need places like Yellowstone, Patagonia, or the Galapagos to show us the extraordinary range of nature's possibilities. So, too, our aesthetic sense can be adequately exercised most of the time with the stimulation of entertainment we enjoy and the discoveries of everyday existence. But every so often, when you've saved up your pennies and energies and want to go someplace extraordinary, you're willing to put up with the discomfort and inconvenience of traveling so you can go to someplace strange and new. That's the goal of subsidized art - to provide those really exotic locales that you may never see but that can make you dream by just being out there.

- Joshua Fineberg

de chirico - longing

Whether we realize it or not, simply to be human is to long for release from mundane existence, with its confining walls of finitude and mortality