beautiful but worthless

photos like these have become a dime a dozen given the explosion of digital photographers

hipsterism

he like the other modernists wanted to be alone in company

/

"why do you have to be a non-conformist like everyone else?"

coming impressions of impressionism

art as music

all art constantly aspires toward the condition of music

beauty as subjectivity

If an assemblage of trees, mountains, rivers, and houses, that is, what we call a landscape, is beautiful, it is not beautiful by itself through me, my personal graces, through the idea or the feeling I attach to it.

A work of art is complete only when the consumer as it were cooperates with it.

mario sironi - industrialism

simplicity

the art of creating the whole from a single kernel

art is not about reality, but representation

Looking at a view from a great height, we unconsciously realize that objects nearby are big and clear, their colors bright, while those farther away seem smaller, fainter, and more blurred. Because of dust particles in the air, mountains in the distance appear blue or lavender against the sky.

A camera will record the way things look. But to the artist the representation of a wide and distant view offers a real challenge. He must confine its immensity to the limits of his canvas or wall; he must reduce its size, or take a small section of it. He must do something with the landscape to express his ideas about it. Perhaps he will cut out some of its myriad detail, will select and emphasize. He may even try to show that distant objects are not actually smaller than near ones, or mountains really blue. Scenery varies in different parts of the world; ways of looking at it and painting it vary even more.

- Alice Elizabeth Chase

art is about ideas

…With the invention of the camera, exact mechanical recording of appearance became possible. Artists were freed from any need to record. They could devote themselves to painting solely for the sake of transmitting ideas. They could experiment with colors, shapes, lines, seeking to express something more than exact representation.

is modern art that modern?

Most of all departures from the photographic rendering of appearance in pre-20^th century art are perfectly acceptable to us. We enjoy the skillful use of landscape to reinforce the meaning of a scene. The great masters’ handling of light and shade is so effective that it does not occur to us to object to its inaccuracy. We admire the perspective of Leonardo and Raphael. We accept El Greco’s elongated figures. Readers of comic strips and viewers of movie cartoons as we are, we certainly take in stride the exaggerations of caricature. Why, then, are we so often baffled by the distortions, the exaggerations of the art of our own times? Why is it so different from the art of the past?

One might answer with another question: Is it so different? Are not the artists of today doing what great artists have always done their ideas about the world through visual images? Is the difference between their works and those of the past partly due to the fact that ideas have changed and that the old images no longer have meaning? Perhaps the fault is with us; we have not moved along as fast as the artists; we are trying to see our new world in the old way instead of opening our minds and spirits to the impact of the new.

- Alice Elizabeth Chase

the spritual in art

El Greco, though considered a Spanish painter, was born in Crete, where flat, elongated Byzantine saints decorated the walls of churches. Many of El Greco’s paintings show people of normal proportions, but when he wanted to emphasize spiritual qualities, he, like his Byzantine forebears, lengthened and distorted. His “St. John the Baptist” stretches upward against the sky, his body well-muscled but impossibly elongated. Light flickers over it. The small head is supported on a strong neck, the fingers arc long and slender. John’s turbulent life and death are also suggested by the bright and ominous clouds.

El Greco - St. John the Baptist (1603)

inner emotion in art

Unknown - Amitabha Triad (1400)

Like the artist of the Middle Ages, Asian artists also interpreted the body so as to transmit inner meaning. A representation of Buddhist deity with eyes cast down, figure and draperies in smooth curves, embodies the idea of contemplation.

The "Angry Actor," an eighteenth-century Japanese print, is so confused anatomically that one wonders how his body works, but his anger is perfectly clear. This is indicated by the squares standing on their corners, by the sharp contrasts of dark and light, by the jagged contour against the background with hardly a line parallel to the frame.

Torii Kiyomasu - Angry Actor

the Last Supper

Leonardo di Vinci - The Last Supper (1498)

Perspective is a tool for the representation of depth in space. But it can emphasize meaning too. In the “Last Supper,” Leonardo da Vinci painted the walls and ceiling of the room receding to a vanishing point which coincides with the head of Christ. It is both vanishing point and the focal point of the whole composition. The window further emphasizes him, as does the arc above it, which is also centered on his head. In addition, Leonardo worked out a geometric organization for the picture, in which the figure of Christ is an equilateral triangle, his head the apex, his hands the two points. This triangle expresses the completeness of Christ, and is also a symbol of the Trinity. The only other triangular figure is that of Judas, to our left, a right triangle resting on one side, its hypotenuse slanting away from the Christ figure. Thus Leonardo withdraws Judas, the betrayer, from Christ, the betrayed. The other apostles gesture violently, yet are restrained in semicircular groups, emphasizing their inability to break out of the framework of their lives and engage in positive action. Christ is set apart, alone in the middle. Thus scientific perspective and geometric order serve the meaning of the picture.

there but for fortune go I

Evolution bequeathed people a small kernel of empathy, which by default they apply only within a narrow circle of friends and relations. Over the millennia, people’s moral circles have expanded to encompass larger and larger polities: the clan, the tribe, the nation, both sexes, other races, and even animals. The circle may have been pushed outward by expanding networks of reciprocity but it might also be inflated by the inexorable logic of the Golden Rule: the more one knows and thinks about other living things, the harder it is to privilege one’s own interests over theirs. The empathy escalator may also be powered by cosmopolitanism, in which journalism, memoir, and realistic fiction make the inner lives of other people, and the precariousness of one’s own lot in life, more palpable feeling that “there but for fortune go I.” 


- Steven Pinker




Show me a prison, show me a jail
Show me a prisoner whose face has grown pale

And I'll show you a young man
With many reasons why
There but for fortune, go you or I

Show me an alley, show me a train
Show me a hobo who sleeps out in the rain

And I'll show you a young man
With many reasons why
There but for fortune, go you or I

Show me the whiskey stains on the floor
Show me a drunk as he stumbles out the door

And I'll show you a young man
With many reasons why
There but for fortune, go you or I

Show me a country where the bombs had to fall
Show me the ruins of buildings so tall

And I'll show you a young land
With many reasons why
There but for fortune, go you or I
You or I

cubism and abstraction

George Braque - Houses at L'Estaque (1908)

A next step in this intellectual concept of landscape came with the so-called cubists, who broke up objects and spaces into geometric shapes which they felt offered a visual parallel to the order of the physical world.

Wassily Kandinsky - Composition V (1911)

Both types of landscape, the expressionist and the cubist, led into complete abstraction—on the one hand that of Kandinsky, whose paintings transmit light and life through glowing, exploding color areas, and on the other that of Mondrian, who states that for him ultimate reality is expressed in the opposition of verticals and horizontals and in a carefully balanced asymmetry.

Piet Mondrian - Composition with Large Red

Plane, Yellow, Black, Grey and Blue (1921)

Vanishing-point perspective in the Renaissance was a way of creating the illusion of distance, and relating objects to each other in the space thus created. Space was mathematically calculated. But many a twentieth-century artist is more impressed with the mystery and terror of space.

Giorgio de Chirico - Melancholy and Mystery of a Street (1914)

Giorgio de Chirico tried to transmit something of this in paintings which at first glance seem precise and obvious, but as you look become ominous, disturbing. What is this world with its impossibly long arcade, its light that casts shadow but has no warmth? Is the child real? What of the unexplained shadow beyond the building? We find ourselves uncomfortable in an uncanny stillness.

impressionism

Shortly after 1850, inspired partly by the new scientific study of light and optics, artists concluded that what we see is not objects but light reflected from objects.

The Blue House- Maurice de Vlaminck (1906)

André Derain - Charing Cross Bridge (1906)

What matter if the river is unnaturally wide, if the bridges are incorrect? The painting reflects the artist's delight in the scene. We call these works expressionist--the presentation of the artist's feeling about the view rather than the mere record of what we.

Georges Seurat - The Bathers (1883)

Some impressionists turned in another direction. They felt that the importance of landscape laid in its structure, its permanence; the exact effect of sunlight on a field at a certain time of day in a certain season might be interesting to observe and record, but what mattered was that the field was there, to be planted and harvested, in sun or rain, winter or summer. They were interested in its enduring qualities. Georges Seurat changed the impressionists’ dabs of color into precise dots. He constructed his landscapes almost as though they were made with blocks. In his “Bathers” each figure is solid and settled securely so that people and landscape give the feeling they belong together. The lasting characteristics of landscape rather than the transitory ones were similarly emphasized by Cezanne, who also had begun as an impressionist. Landscape to him was something that you tramp through, experiencing step by step. But the painting was not to look like an open window; it was on canvas and made of paint. Cezanne let the canvas show through here and there so you would not forget it. Your journey into the painting is measured by blocklike brushstrokes, vertical and horizontal, designating the rocks and houses that you pass. The depth in space is limited by the mountain which seems to tip forward to create a positive end to the distance. Its curve repeats and reverses the curve of the road in the foreground. Perspective is not a matter of vanishing point but of colors carefully chosen. The greatness of the painting lies in its structure, in the way in which shapes and masses fit together as logically as the stones of a bridge. You react to the painting with your mind.

Paul Cezanne - Landscape with Mountain (1896)

art allows for empathy and perspective

Our fondness for fiction shows that we enjoy feeling with other people, even when sometimes the feelings are negative. In a recent psychological study, Tom Trabasso and Jennifer Chung asked 20 viewers to watch two films, Blade Runner and Vertigo. Each film was stopped at 12 different times. Soon after the beginning of each movie, and again at the end, all the viewers rated their liking for the protagonist and for the antagonist. One set of 10 viewers had the job of saying, at each of the films 12 stopping points, how well or how poorly things were going for the protagonist and for the antagonist. These ratings agreed with the experimenters’ own analysis of the characters’ goals and actions. The job of the other set of 10 viewers was to rate what emotions, and of what intensity, they themselves were experiencing at each point where the film was stopped. These viewers experienced more positive emotions at points where things went well for the liked protagonist or badly for the disliked antagonist (as rated by the first set of 10 viewers); they also felt negative emotions when things went badly for the protagonist or well for the antagonist.

So, whenever we read a novel, look at a movie, or even watch a sports match, we tend to cast our lot with someone we find likable. When a favored character in a story does well, we feel pleased; when a disliked character succeeds, we are displeased. This process seems rather basic. It is rather basic. If this liking for a protagonist were all there was to it, reading fiction and watching dramas would not be much different from going on a roller-coaster ride. Indeed some books and movies do little more than offer just such an experience. They are called thrillers. But in some books and films, much more can occur. Along with the basic process of empathic identification we can start to extend ourselves into situations we have never experienced , feel for people very different from ourselves, and begin to understand such people in ways we may have never thought possible. George Eliot, a novelist whose books offer such effects, put it like this:

The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment. Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.

What Eliot is implying is that art is capable of inducing one of the most profound aspects of empathy: the ability to sensitize us to the emotions of other people, transcending the limits of our own experiences and perspective.

- Keith Oatley

Art is the expression of life. If life is varied and changing, rife with experiment, bringing new experiences and new knowledge, art must be, too. If some ideas are fruitful, some discarded, some meaningful for a time, then becoming obsolete, so are works of art. If some aspects of life interest some people and others stir their neighbors, so will tastes and interests vary in art. But the great artist has an awareness beyond that of most of us, is ever seeking for the deeper meaning of life, making it visible as he understands it. He can, if we will let him, guide us toward a wider and deeper understanding of ourselves and of our world.

nature becoming sacred

Paul Gauguin - Landscape with Poplars (1875)

the human figure

In painting the human figure, twentieth-century artists have shown little concern for accurate anatomy. It is as though, having mastered the structure of the human body, they were content to turn it over to the photographer and to the medical profession, while they devote themselves to other aspects of man. Paul Gauguin painted figures in a manner akin to the flat profile rendering of ancient Egypt. He enriched his palette with the warm browns and dark greens that he saw on a visit to Tahiti, and in "The Market" he shows native women on a bench, their faces and figures, the background and trees rendered in fiat areas of color.

Paul Gauguin - The Market (1892)

For a while Pablo Picasso was strongly influenced by the sculptural solidity of Greek statues. "The Race" is set in a simple landscape of sky, sea, and ground, within which pink figures as solid as stone move with astonishing abandon, their heads, arms, and legs thrusting outward like the spokes of a wheel rolling across the canvas.

Pablo Picasso - The Race (1923)

In the paintings of his "blue period," he was influenced by El Greco, elongating and patterning the figure in shallow space. Later, inspired partly by African sculpture, he broke up faces and figures into blocklike, cubist shapes.

Pablo Picasso - Women with Pears (1909)

Again, working with flat patterns,he created the delightful "Three Musicians", their dog beneath their chairs with upraised tail, as though beating time to their oboe, guitar, and voice.

Pablo Picasso - Three Musicians (1921)

the romanticist impulse

For many romanticists, the material world of the senses is far less significant than the immaterial and unseen. The major drama is often not given in the painting itself but in it the intimations of the interior body.

romanticism

The neoclassicist emphases on exacting order, painstaking detail, subdued coloration, and frozen forms were abandoned. The concept of art as depiction or illustration of real-world affairs gave way to a concept of art as an external expression of inner feelings. The canvases of Delacroix, Gericault, Millet, Courbet, and others were often bold and vigorous. Lively color or strong somber hues predominated; attention to detail was replaced by an expression of emotional content. The subject matter was often heroic, sometimes based on the works of romantic poets, Dante, or Goethe. The mysterious, fantastic, and morbid became familiar themes; pathos and tragedy were often celebrated.

Of special interest in much romanticist art is the creation of what might be termed a presence of the absent. As we saw, the romantic discourse of self created a sense of reality beyond immediate, sensory awareness; the unseen, inner depths were most substantial. Convinced of the reality and significance of these unseen resources, the artist was faced with the problem of conveying them through a visual medium. How can one use purely sensory devices to portray the reality of something beyond the sense?

The solution took many different forms. In England, J.M.W. Turner’s canvases placed the viewer in the midst of turbulent mists or vapors. What is empty space for most artists became palpable substance in Turner's hands. Further, one sensed that something laid beyond the vapors—perhaps the sun, or a fire, or mystical beings froth other lands. “The beyond” was thus the central subject matter of the paintings, but precisely what laid beyond was difficult to articulate.

Other painters used different means to create the presence of the absent. The Pre-Raphaelite and symbolists often painted realistic pictures of mythical characters, thus transforming myth into reality. The German painter Casper David Friedrich often included figures looking off into the distance, or painted landscapes in which the viewer’s eyes were directed toward a distant point itself not visible. One sensed “the beyond” but could never grasp its essence.

In Norway, Edvard Munch sustained the romantic tradition in his faces contorted by anxiety and anguish from an internal wellspring far removed.

Music paralleled the visual arts. In many respects the music of both the baroque and early classical periods complemented the Enlightenment emphasis on powers of reason. Much has been written about the rational heuristics underlying the scores of Bach and Mozart. With such composers as Beethoven and Schubert, however, the emphasis shifts toward the world of deep emotion. For Beethoven music was ideally an expression of feeling. (The Moonlight Sonata was dedicated to his “immortal beloved.”) This view of music as an external expression of inner profundity came to dominate the scores of Brahms, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Verdi, and Chopin. But romanticism reached its zenith in the works of Richard Wagner. Not only did feasts of emotion inspire his works (Tristan and Isolde was written in anguish over his unrequited love for the wife of a rich patron), but he conceived of musical passages as “careers of feeling.” The mythical and mystical were then given dramatic visual form on the operatic stage.

art

There isn’t much of a difference in the experience of painting a picture, writing a novel, making a comic strip, reading a poem or listening to a song. The containers are different, but the lively thing at the center is what I’m interested in.

- Lynda Barry

on art but on life as well

Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide whether it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they’re deciding, make even more art.

- Andy Warhol

concert hall as experience

I can’t believe that people really prefer to go to the concert hall under intellectually trying, socially trying, physically trying conditions, unable to repeat something they have missed, when they can sit home under the most comfortable and stimulating circumstances and hear it as they want to hear it. I can’t imagine what would happen to literature today if one were obliged to congregate in an unpleasant hall and read novels projected on a screen.

- Milton Babbitt

tension and resolution in music

The structure of music reflects the human brain’s penchant for patterns. Tonal music (that is, most baroque, classical, and romantic music) begins by establishing a melodic pattern by way of the tonic triad. This pattern establishes the key that will frame the song. The brain desperately needs this structure, as it gives it a way to organize the ensuing tumult of notes. A key or theme is stated in a mnemonic pattern and then it is avoided, and then it return, in a moment of consonant repose.

But before a pattern can be desired by the brain, that pattern must play hard to get. Music only excites us when it makes the auditory cortex struggle to uncover its order. If the music is too obvious, if its patterns are always present it is annoyingly boring. This is why composers introduce the tonic note in the beginning of the song and then studiously avoid it until the end. The longer we are denied the pattern we expect, the greater the emotional release when the pattern returns, safe and sound. The auditory cortex rejoices. It has found the order it has been looking for.

To demonstrate this psychological principle the sociologist Leonard Meyer, in his classic book Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956), analyzed the fifth movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, opus 31. Meyer wanted to show how music is defined by its flirtation with—but not submission to—expectations of order. He dissected fifty measures of Beethoven’s masterpiece, showing how Beethoven begins with the clear statement of a rhythmic and harmonic pattern and then, in an intricate tonal dance, carefully avoids repeating it. What Beethoven does instead is suggest variations of the pattern. He is its evasive shadow. If E major is the tonic, Beethoven plays incomplete versions of the E major chord, always careful to avoid its straight expression. He preserves an element of certainty in his music, making our brains beg for the one chord he refuses to give us. Beethoven saves that chord for the end.

Acccording to Meyer, it is the suspenseful tension of music (arising out of our unfulfilled expectations) that is the source of the music’s feeling. While earlier theories of music focused on the way a noise can refer to the real world of images and experience (its connotative meaning), Meyer argued that the emotions we find in music come from the unfolding events of the music itself. This ¡”embodied meaning” arises from the patterns the symphomy invokes and then ignores, from the ambiguity it creates inside its own form. “For the human mind,” Meyer wrote, “such states of doubt and confusion are abhorrent. When confronted with them, the mind attempts to resolve them into clarity and certainty.” And so we wait, expectantly, for the resolution of E major, for Beethoven’s established pattern to be completed. This nervous anticipation, says Meyer, “is the whole raison dietre of the passage, for its purpose is precisely to delay the cadence in the tonic.” The uncertainty makes the feeling. Music is a form whose meaning depends upon its violation.

ecstasy, then and now

then: religious ecstasy

Giovanni Bernini - Ecstasy of Saint Theresa (1652)

now: commodity ecstasy

God is dead and we have killed him and replaced him with capitalism

vanitas

Willem Claesz - Still Life

Pieter Claesz - Vanitas

science and art

Science is often thought to rob the arts of their importance and vitality. How ironic that evolutionary theory leads to a conception of the arts as such an important part of our "social physiology" that they can even be regarded as vital organs.

Science allows us to appreciate art more because through science, we can begin to understand why it is that we crave art, need art.

music as sexual display

Geoffrey Miller attempts to explain music along with all forms of art as sexual display practiced mostly by men for the purpose of attracting women. After all, the typical music video consists of young male singers ostentatiously flashing their wealth amid a bevy of nubile half-naked women.

origin of dance

Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involves. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participating in collective ritual.

Most of us today think of dancing as a mating ritual perfhrmed by couples or something that we pay to watch professionals perform onstage, but most dancing throughout history has been a group affair. From military drill to ecstatic religious dances, the community dances of villages on festival occasions, and the tribal dances of indigenous people around the world, groups of people assemble to move their bodies in unison, sometimes for so long that they drop from exhaustion or pass into a trancelike state. The effect in all cases is to create a sense of unity among members of the group who have danced together.

- David Sloan Wilson

other uses of art

The gift of a work of art, has enormous tax-shelter potential unaffected by the IRS using a panel of appraisers to try to spot valuation abuses. A Degas may have a fair market value today of $1 million. The donor can get a tax deduction for that amount even though he picked it up for one-hundredth of that amount a mere decade ago.

looks ominous, must be god

art and money

Joseph Albers - Homage to the Square:
Yellow Resonance (1957)

Edward Ruscha - The Act of Letting a Person Into Your Home (1983)

Ed Ruscha - Untitled Panel 1 of 2 (2008)

Georgia O’Keefe, Ladder to the Moon, 1958

Jasper Johns - Flags I (1973)

art: does it cost a lot of money because it is beautiful or is it beautiful because it costs a lot of money?