reason is emotion for the sexless

You will occasionally hear postmodern historians say that chivalric troubadours in eleventh-century Provence invented the experience of romantic love. This is absolute crap. Pleistocene people fell madly in love long before medieval minstrels started prancing around in tights. Erotic love is a human universal, existing in some form in all 168 cultures studied. The anguish of love dominates most art, music, and poetry; everywhere. Falling in love is a sacrament coded into our genes. We can't get around it.

All living things blossom when it's time for courtship. Caterpillars turn to butterflies. Buds turn into flowers and fruit. You turn into an idiot. Females everywhere perfume the atmosphere and sprout fecundity announcements. Males turn into warriors with weapons growing from their heads and brightly colored flags sticking up from their tails or manes or genitals. All living things become ready to breed or die trying. It seems like it's what they were created for, their purpose in life.

But, there is no purpose in life. All biological beauty happens not in order to copy genes, but because it happened to copy genes in the past.

The gene reproduction strategy that happened to work for our species is love. That's why we act like love is something special. Once you go insane for another Homo sapiens, you transmogrify into the state your sanity was built for.

Petunias are very good at hiding, conserving energy, and surviving until it's time to trade genes, when all of a sudden they go crazy and become beautiful. All living things are conservative, efficient, safe, and drab until it's time to breed, at which point they become extravagant, wasteful, risky, and beautiful. The primary purpose of the sober state of being is to prepare for the impassioned state of being.

We Homo sapiens are very good at thinking clearly and surviving in a social context, until it's time to trade genes, at which point we go mad. The stupidity of our overwhelming passions comes from a deeper wisdom than anything the wise can control. The definition of passion: when you become animated by an ancient imperative that transcends your mortal life. Passion comes from before you were born, and it reaches out beyond your death. To a gene, your passions are more important than you. We celebrate that ecstatic agony in our art and gossip, because there is no state achievable by humans that is more self-transcendent.

Fools don't fall in love. Lovers only look like fools to the wise, because those who aren't in love are merely preserving their bodies and social structures until they or their relatives fall in love, so they have nothing better to do than be wise. He who is wise is reason's slave. "Reason is emotion for the sexless," said the actor and poet Heathcote Williams. "People who are sensible about love are incapable of it," said Douglas Yates. Bob Dylan said, "You can't be in love and wise at the same time."

I've stopped expecting love to make sense. "Sense" is the servant of its master. We are not the authors of our decisions. We are the rationalizers of our impulses. Our passions read from a script written in our DNA text. As John Lennon proved with his love of Yoko, love is not only blind but deaf.

Love, or erotic passion, sometimes overrides our passion for self-preservation. That's why Romeo and Juliet makes us sigh and cry. We know they're stupid teenagers. We know it won't last. We also remember we never felt so alive as when we were stupid teenagers in stupid love.

That's because teenagers hold the keys to the driving force behind human evolution. Many Pleistocene newborns struggled to focus on the faces of their teenage parents. Most humans got born because of the passionate impulses of young people, not the sober decisions of the mature. When it came to surviving on the savanna, teenage passion worked like a high-octane engine.

If we didn't have our neocortical ability to foresee scenarios and weigh consequences, there would be a lot more tragic stories. In harsher, poorer societies, people risk death for sexual passion much more readily. They look to their futures and don't see much worth preserving. Now is their only chance to live—which is really each gene screaming in divine chorus," Get me the heck out of this mortal body! This is our last chance!"

Most art and gossip is not about the old and wise and responsible. Most art and gossip is about the young and foolish and impassioned. When characters struggling in stories attain the safe, enlightened, or married state of being, stories end, because drama stops. Stories end where conflicts are resolved. The only social event worth talking about is conflict.

Young people act young, and old people act old, because the way they act is the best strategy for the genes for which they encode. Older people want to preserve family stability and impart wisdom. Younger people want to assert their individuality and compete for attention to distinguish themselves from competing breeders.

Everybody's got a different job to do, and we all work for the same boss. The passionate die in much larger numbers than the sober. The passionate breed and bond faster than the sober. The sober maintain bonds they forged when they were passionate, so they can rear and guide little demons of passion.

- Joe Quirk

simplicity

Satie was, in a manner of speaking, starting European musical history all over again. The same could have been said of Debussy, who in 1901, remarked to his colleague Paul Dukas that too many modern works had become needlessly complex--"they smell of the lamp, not the sun."

postmodernism: art as interpretation

Acceptance of the indispensability of interpretation in appreciating artworks (not to mention simply recognizing them as art) opened a Pandora's box that is now called "postmodernism," a point of view that calls into question two centuries of assumptions about the elite and special nature of art. While the term "postmodern" is used (and abused) as indiscriminately as "modern" used to be, postmodernists are united by a belief that the "high-art" or modernist view I have just described is untenable and unacceptable. But they do not advocate a return to pre-Enlightenment views. Postmodernism is not simply another "ism" or movement. Instead, it is a declaration of the end of all isms and movements, of the impossibility of further theory. The postmodernists claim to reflect a pluralistic, rootless society whose consumerism, proliferation of media and media images, multinational capitalistic economy, and so forth make it vastly unlike any society that has previously existed.

Postmodernists eschew the very idea of overarching explanatory schemes (which they call "metalanguages," "metanarratives," or "meta-theories") by which facts or things can be connected or understood. They distinguish instead a plurality of discourses that belong to different "interpretive communities" (Fish 1980), each of which has its own parti pris, its own axioms to grind and fields to till. Hence any "truth" or "reality" is really only a point of view—a "representation" that comes to us mediated and conditioned by our language, our social institutions, the assumptions that characterize individuals as members of a nation, a race, a gender, a class, a profession, a religious body, a particular historical period. Artists, just like everybody else, do not see the world in any singularly privileged or objectively truthful way, but rather—just like everybody else—interpret it according to their individual and cultural sensibilities. What is more, since individual interpretations are derivative, people cannot even find a unique private world or style to express any more. All the "new" styles and worlds have already been invented (Jameson 1983).

For the postmodernist what has been enshrined as "high" art is nothing more than a restricted canon of works that largely represents the world-view of elite, Western European, white males. Writers such as Joyce, Eliot, and Lawrence who have been accorded the status of "masters" are merely individual voices who offer restricted points of view, many of which today sound sexist, racist, politically conservative or reactionary, or otherwise unacceptable. Terms such as "taste" and "beauty" and "art for art's sake" are constructions that express class interests. To claim that one can appreciate works arising from alien cultures is an imperialistic act of appropriation: one falsifies the alien work by focusing on those of its many characteristics that appeal to one's own standards while ignorantly ignoring or, even worse, dismissing the characteristics that were the standards for their makers and users. Art is not universal, but conceptually constructed by individuals whose perceptions are necessarily limited and parochial.

As a result of the discovery that modernist aesthetics masks chauvinistic, authoritarian, and repressive attitudes toward uneducated, nonestablishment, and non-Western people and toward women, post-modernist artists have thus set out deliberately to subvert or "problematize" the old "high-art" standards, often by parodying or otherwise flouting them. For example, instead of trying to create enduring, "timeless" works of art, postmodern artists deliberately create intermittent or impermanent works that have to be activated by the spectator or that cease to exist when the performance is over. Eschewing the site specification and religious aura of the museum, art is created on the street, in remote deserts, or found in humble or trivial objects and materials.

Postmodernist artists challenge the integrity of individual arts by using hybrid mediums—sculptures made of painted canvas, or paintings made of words and numbers. Artists challenge the high-art concepts of uniqueness and originality by copying, photographing, or otherwise appropriating images from past art for their new works, or by making many repetitions or reproductions of an image or construction. They create "pastiches" in the styles of earlier artists and present them baldly and unapologetically, without satirical intent, indeed usually without any social or aesthetic justification. They make works out of fragments that have no apparent relation to one another except for their juxtaposition.

Although the label "postmodernism" is relatively recent, postmodernist theory and practice was foreshadowed early in this century and even before this century. What seemed at the time a shocking (or amusing) aberration, Marcel Duchamp's Fountain—the infamous urinal displayed in 1917 at the New York Society of Independent Artists exhibition—can now be recognized as a crack in the dike of high art that in the past two or three decades has released an ever increasing flood of antiestablishment theory and realizations-of-theory (i.e., works of art).

The works and ideas that are called postmodernist can be lamented or ignored, but like modernism's works and ideas, they certainly reflect the society that gave birth to them. In light of the political calamities and barbarisms of the mid—twentieth century—totalitarianism of the right and left, genocide, the possibility of nuclear annihilation—the modernists' faith in human intelligence and their belief in the progress and perfectibility of human existence seem as antiquated and untenable as medieval theology. Socialism and, more recently, other underclass movements have challenged democratic societies' pretensions to providing objective, universal justice or equal protection under the law. As for virtue, the recurrent scandals at the very heart of democratic government suggest that morality is as difficult to unite with power as it has ever been. Freud's theories have made it hard for thinking people to believe that objective rationality alone could drive human affairs. The explanatory success of relativity theory in physics suggests the theme of relativity everywhere, including the fields of philosophy and ethics. The polluting fungoid spread of the automobile and its concrete accoutrements of freeway and parking lot over city and landscape, not to mention other even worse environmental ills, certainly calls into question the wisdom of human technological domination over nature. The proliferation of images in advertisements and on television make all events—from an exciting new dentifrice or room freshener to a fire in the Bronx, a missile attack on Tel Aviv, Johnny Carson's monologue, a famine in Africa, the Superbowl, or an earthquake in Peru—appear equally real (or unreal), occurring as they do in succession, compressed in time and space and significance.

To be sure, modernist artists certainly recognized confusion, multiplicity, and relativity: one has only to read the novels of Joyce, Mann, Proust, or Musil. Some questioned the uses of science and reason, and used their art to offer a mythology that might reorient and revitalize a materialist, hypocritical bourgeois society (e.g., Eliot's Wasteland, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, Lawrence's "blood consciousness," and the attraction of artists like Picasso and Nolde to primitive carvings). Yet these artists (whose work was also initially shocking and puzzling) believed they were by their experiments and distortions and abstractions better expressing an underlying reality, however mysterious and complex.

Postmodernists, on the contrary, as David Harvey (1989, 44) points out, uncomplainingly embrace the ephemerality, fragmentation, discontinuity, and chaos of modern life without attempting to counteract or transcend it or trying to define any eternal elements within it. This is the significant difference that separates them from predecessors who may also have recognized imperfections in the status quo. The postmodernists' capitulation (expressed as relativism and defeatism), their "tolerance which finally amounts to indifference" (Harvey 1989, 62), their "contrived depthlessness [that] undermines all metaphysical solemnities" are what makes their work so displeasing and disturbing to a general public that has not as yet become so cynical and nihilistic. For many people continue to believe (or want to believe) that the arts still have a mission to inspire and elevate or that philosophy is still obliged to search for and discover verities by which to live.

Although the art lauded by postmodernist critics is puzzling, if not shocking and offensive, to many people, the social problems and cultural predicaments it reflects cannot be gainsaid. Exposure of the rigid, exclusive, and self-satisfied attitudes that often lie behind the rhetoric of modernism should, in large measure, be welcomed, for it is preparing the way for the liberation and democratization of art. But the postmodernist proclamation that there are a multiplicity of individual realities, all of which are open to an infinite number of interpretations and equally worthy of aesthetic presentation and regard, troubles me. I find this aspect of post-modernist aesthetics inadequate: have not the postmodernists abandoned the crumbling edifice of modernist authority for an equally uninhabitable esoteric antistructure of relativism, cynicism, and nihilism? If everything is equally valuable, is anything worth doing? Is sprawling promiscuity really an improvement on narrow elitism? Is absolute relativism a more credible position than absolute authority? From the postmodern viewpoint, the answers would be "Unfortunately, yes. That's the way it is, like it or not." But the Darwinian metanarrative discerns a few encouraging handholds that should provide escape from the abyss and restore access to a world of human meaning and human reality.

- Ellen Dissanayake

modernism: definition

Modernism was a broad movement encompassing all the avant-garde isms of the first half of the 20th century. Although different modern-isms were often incompatible (and occasionally antagonistic) they all rejected the dominance of Naturalism and Academicism in favour of experimental art. The common trend was to seek answers to fundamental questions about the nature of art and human experience.

All modern-isms shared a common feeling that the modern world was fundamentally different from what had passed before and that art needed to renew itself by confronting and exploring its own modernity. For some this meant rejecting the industrial in favour of the primitive (Primitivism), for others a celebration of technology and machinery (Futurism).

In Modernism generally, the artist's exploration of his or her vision was paramount. Although this trend was already evident in the 19th century, it became an orthodoxy for Modernists. Certain modern-isms began to question what art is, what it is for and what it supports. Through this process artistic activity and cultural critique became more closely identified with each other. The Dadaists displaced the individual entirely, replacing him with the unconscious.

Modern-isms contested between themselves whether art should explore emotions and states of mind (Expressionism), spiritual order (Neo-Plasticism), social function (Constructivism), the unconscious (Surrealism), the nature of representation (Cubism) or the social role of art in a capitalist, bourgeois society (Dadaism). Many of these trends overlapped with one another.

Art increasingly became a means of discovering truth, whether a peculiarly modern truth (Futurism) or a universal truth (Suprematism).

Jean Arp - Overturned Blue Shoe with Two Heels Under a Black Vault (1925)

The unconscious, valued for its creative powers, became central to many modern-isms, not least for the Dadaists and Surrealists who tapped into it as the source of authentic, irrational creativity. The title of Arp's work is intended to be humorous and make us pay more attention to the work itself. Arp compared his creativity to natural forces of growth. The shapes in Overturned evoke the change and movement of living organisms and are meant to refute the rationalising preference for fixed forms and definite meanings in favour of the uncertain and the undefined.

Pablo Picasso - Carafe, Jug, and Fruit Bowl (1909)

Cubism, of which this painting is an example, is regarded as the most important modern-ism. Like many modern-isms, it makes intellect central to art. It systematically explores the relation between art and what it represents, thereby completely abandoning the Naturalistic aim to paint things 'simply' as they appear to the observer. Instead, Cubists sought to convey an object's existence in time and space, representing the object from different vantages. They explored how paintings are constructed, and how they function as works of art, making explicit the questions: what is art? And: what does art represent?

classical music is false catagory

I hate "classical music": not the thing but the name. It traps a tenaciously living art in a theme park of the past. It cancels out the possibility that music in the spirit of Beethoven could still be created today. It banishes into limbo the work of thousands of active composers who have to explain to otherwise well-informed people what it is they do for a living. The phrase is a masterpiece of negative publicity, a tour de force of anti-hype. I wish there were another name. I envy jazz people who speak simply of "the music." Some jazz aficionados also call their art 'America's classical music," and I propose a trade: they can have "classical," I'll take "the music."

For at least a century, the music has been captive to a cult of mediocre elitism that tries to manufacture self-esteem by clutching at empty formulas of intellectual superiority. Consider other names in circulation: "art" music, "serious" music, "great" music, "good" music. Yes, the music can be great and serious, but greatness and seriousness are not its defining characteristics. It can also be stupid, vulgar, and insane. Composers are artists, not etiquette columnists; they have the right to express any emotion, any state of mind. They have been betrayed by well-meaning acolytes who believe that the music should be marketed as a luxury good, one that replaces an inferior popular product. These guardians say, in effect, "The music you love is trash. Listen instead to our great, arty music." They are making little headway with the unconverted because they have forgotten to define the music as something worth loving. Music is too personal a medium to support an absolute hierarchy of values. The best music is the music that persuades us that there is no other music in the world.

- Alex Ross

electronic classical music

Karlheinz Stockhausen, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich.

progression of music

All music becomes classical music in the end. Reading the histories of other genres, I often get a funny sense of déjà vu. The story of jazz, for example, seems to recapitulate classical history at high speed. First, the youth-rebellion period: Satchmo and the Duke and Bix and Jelly Roll teach a generation to lose itself in the music. Second, the era of bourgeois pomp: the high-class swing band parallels the Romantic orchestra. Stage 3: artists rebel against the bourgeois image, echoing the classical modernist revolution, sometimes by direct citation (Charlie Parker works the opening notes of The Rite of Spring into "Salt Peanuts"). Stage 4: free jazz marks the point at which the vanguard loses touch with the masses and becomes a self-contained avant-garde. Stage 5: a period of retrenchment. Wynton Marsalis's attempt to launch a traditionalist jazz revival parallels the neo-Romantic music of many late-twentieth-century composers. But this effort comes too late to restore the art to the popular mainstream.

The same progression worms its way through rock and roll. What were my hyper-educated punk-rock friends but Stage 3 high modernists, rebelling against the bloated Romanticism of Stage 2 stadium rock? In the first years of the new century there was a lot of Stage 5 neoclassicism going on in what remained of rock. The Strokes, the Hives, the Vines, the Stills, the Thrills, the White Stripes, and various other bands harked back to some lost pure moment of the sixties or seventies. Many used old instruments, old amplifiers, old soundboards. One rocker was quoted as saying, "I intentionally won't use something I haven't heard before." A White Stripes record carried this Luddite notice: "No computers were used during the recording, mixing, or mastering of this record."

The original classical music is left in an interesting limbo. It has a chance to be liberated from the social clichés that currently pin it down. It is no longer the one form carrying the burden of the past. Moreover, it has the advantage of being able to sustain constant reinterpretation, to renew itself with each repetition. The best kind of classical performance is not a retreat into the past but an intensification of the present. The mistake that apostles of the classical have always made is to have joined their love of the past to a dislike of the present. The music has other ideas: it hates the past and wants to escape.

- Alex Ross

species-centered beauty

Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty--it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.

- George Eliot

collective ritual --> art

I realized that funerals are kind of a formalized handling of grief, with regular, community-sanctioned opportunities to weep and express one's loss at greater and greater intervals of time...and give to the bereaved a sort of patterned program to follow, a form that could shape and contain their grief. Instead of having to suppress their sense of loss in the interests of being brave or "realistic," or having to release it haphazardly or in solitude, the bereaved is enabled—compelled—by the ritual of mourning to acknowledge and express it publicly, over and over again, within a preordained structure. The temporal structure of the mourning ritual, simple as it is, assures that thoughts and feelings about one's loss will be reiterated at prescribed times. Even if one might not consciously have proper mournful feelings, the custom of successive almsgivings ensures that these feelings are elicited. The prescribed formal ceremonies become the occasion for and even the cause of individuals feeling and publicly expressing their sorrow.'

It occurred to me that in a very similar way, the arts also are containers for, molders of feeling: the performance of a play, a dance, or a musical composition manipulates the audience's response: expands, contracts, excites, calms, releases. The rhythm and form of a poem do the same thing. Even nontemporal arts, like painting, sculpture, and architecture, structure the viewer's response and give a form to feeling.

It is well known that in most societies the arts are commonly associated with ceremonial contexts, with rituals--perhaps then, the origin of art can be traced back to ritual in some sense.

…Both rituals and art are formalized. Movements—what people do—are prescribed, the order of events is structured, and the individual participants' perceptions, emotions, and interpretations are thereby shaped.

Ritual ceremonies and the arts are socially reinforcing, uniting their participants and their audiences in one mood. They both provide an occasion for feelings of individual transcendence of the self—what Victor Turner (1969) calls communitas and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1975) calls "flow"—as everyone shares in the same occasion of patterned emotion. For a time, the hard edges of their customary isolation from each other are softened or melted together or their everyday taken-for-granted comradeship is reinforced.

Rituals and the arts are bracketed, set off from real or ordinary life. A stage of some kind—a circle, a demarcated area, a museum, or platform—sets off the holy from the profane, the performers from the audience, the extra-ordinary from the everyday. And both rituals and the arts make conspicious use of symbols: things have hidden or arcane meanings, reverberations beyond their apparent surface significance.

Ritual ceremonies are universal, found in every human society. They serve numerous social purposes: they state and publicly reinforce the values of a group of people; they unite it in common purpose and belief; they "explain" the inexplicable—birth, death, illness, natural disaster— and attempt to control it and make it bearable. From the ethological perspective, people in social groups that did not have ceremonial rituals would not survive as well as those who did have them. They would be less cohesive and cooperative; they would respond to adversity in individualized, fragmented, unfocused, and ultimately less satisfactory ways.

- Ellen Dissanayake

religion and art are utilitarian

To say that religion or art or music are useful seems to me not in the least to devalue them but on the contrary it improves our estimation of their value. I believe that these "spiritual" and creative activities are even more important, in the literal, practical sense, than the more mundane ones that are the concern of politics, business, and industry.

modernism: art as ideology

Rapid secularization during the Enlightenment period stimulated inerest in a variety of new subjects. One of these new areas of interest came to be called "aesthetics": a concern with elucidating principles such as taste and beauty that govern all the arts and indeed make them examples of fine "art." Until the Enlightenment, no other society had considered art to be an entity in itself, to be set apart from its context of use (usually in ceremony or entertainment) or the content that it portrayed or suggested. What seems to us to be self-evident "art" (e.g., paintings, sculpture, poems, motets, cantatas or—in other societies—carvings, urns, figurines, masks, ornaments, dramatic performances) were not regarded as such by their makers or users. They found no reason to assume that these belonged in a nameable superordinate category, "art," that suggests a special mode of working or noteworthy social identity (being an "artist" rather than simply someone who paints) or a special result (a "work of art" rather than an altarpiece or ancestor figure).

As the subject of aesthetics developed over the next century, a startling and influential idea took hold. This idea held that there is a special frame of mind for appreciating works of art: a "disinterested" attitude that disregards any consideration of one's own personal interest in the object, its utility, or its social or religious ramifications. This unprecedented idea led to still another: the work of art is a world-in-itself, made solely or primarily as an occasion for this kind of detached aesthetic experience, which was considered to be one of the highest forms of mental activity.

"Disinterest" implied that one could transcend the limitations of time, place, and temperament, and react to the artwork of eras far removed from one's own—whether or not one understood the meaning they had had for their original makers and users. In this sense, art was "universal." Another key idea that gradually developed in the field of aesthetics was that works of art were vehicles for a special kind of knowledge—a knowledge that, with the waning of religious belief, often took on the spiritual aura and authority once restricted to the church. Still another corollary was the idea of art for art's sake (or life for art's sake), suggesting that art had no purpose but to "be" and to provide opportunities for enjoying an aesthetic experience that was its own reward, and that one could have no higher calling than to open oneself to these heightened moments.

As paintings became less and less like mirrors held up to nature or to society, viewers could no longer decipher or naively admire them. Critics assumed ever-greater importance as mediators between the artist and the public because someone had to explain to the mystified public what made an artwork good or bad and even what a work "meant." In England, in the early decades of the twentieth century, Clive Bell and Roger Fry were extremely influential as they invoked "formalist" criteria for appreciating the puzzling new work of postimpressionists such as Cezanne, or the cubists, work that could not be understood with the serviceable old standards (that anyone could recognize) of beauty of conception, nobility of subject matter, representational accuracy, or communication of valued truths. Art had become, if not a religion, at least an ideology whose principles were articulated by and for the few who had leisure and education enough to acquire them.

More elaborate and abstract formalist standards were developed America by critics such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg in order to justify abstract expressionism, a midcentury school of painting that affronted sensibilities and challenged what had previously been acceptable as art. Terms such as "flatness," "purity," and "picture plane" became the verbal tokens of the transcendent meanings viewers were told they could find in the skeins and blobs and washes of paint. Because these values were not easily apparent to the untutored observer, appreciating au became more than ever an elite activity, requiring an apprenticeship and dedication not unlike that of the artist. Never in question was the "high art" assumption that works of art—no matter how strange they looked or how unskilled they seemed to be—were conduits of transcendent, supernatural values, of truths from the unconscious, expressions or revelations of universal human concerns that the artist was uniquely endowed to apprehend and transmit.

As the "isms" proliferated and art became more esoteric and outrageous, the role of the critic became not only helpful but integral to the reception of works of art. Looking back, it seems inevitable that an "institutional" theory of art arose to explain what art is. As formulated by George Dickie (1974) and Arthur Danto (1964) (who were describing what was the case, not advocating or defending it), an artworld (one word) composed of critics, dealers, gallery owners, museum directors, curators, art-magazine editors, and so forth, was the source of conferring the status "work of art" on objects. What artists made were "candidates for appreciation," and if the artworld bought and sold them, wrote about them, displayed them, they were thereby validated as "art"—not before.

Implicit in this account is a recognition that what is said and written about a work is not only necessary to its being categorized as art, but is indeed perhaps more important than the work itself (Wolfe 1975). There is no appreciation of art without interpretation. We can tell that a pile of stones or a stack of gray felt displayed in a museum is different from a pile of stones on the pavement outside the museum or a stack of felt in a carpet store next to the museum because the objects in the museum are viewed through a lens of knowledge of their place in a tradition. "To see something as art at all," proclaimed Danto (1981, 135), "demands nothing less than this, an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art." In this view, there are no naive artists and no naive art: today's artists can both explain the theories behind the works that are to be seen in museums and galleries and place their own works in these traditions.

- Ellen Dissanayake

medieval / renaissance art

In medieval times, the arts were predominantly in the service of religion, as they have been in human societies from the beginning. They were not regarded "aesthetically" as something meaningful and significant in and of themselves, but instead valued only insofar as they revealed the divine. Renaissance artists gradually replaced eschatological with anthropocentric concerns, but during the transition from a God-centered to a man-centered art their works portrayed either a familiar ideal/divine realm or the actual world in which they lived. The artists' "art" consisted of accurately representing that subject matter using craftsmanlike standards of beauty, harmony, and excellence.

- Ellen Dissanayake

art is just making things special

The only way to understand and resolve the perplexing contradictions, inadequacies, and confusions of both modernist and postmodernist aesthetics is, I believe, by placing art in the broadest possible perspective: we must recognize that art is a universal need and propensity of the human species that post-traditional society by its very nature must deny.

It is significant that "art" acquired its modern meaning as something set apart at the same time that the arts themselves were being practiced and appreciated by fewer and fewer members of society. In small-scale, unspecialized, premodern societies, individuals can make and do everything that is needed for their livelihood. Such societies may not possess the abstract concept "art," but they offer all their members frequent opportunities to be "artists": by decorating their bodies and possessions, dancing, singing, versifying, performing.

Certainly, some persons in traditional societies are acknowledged as being more talented or skillful than others, but the special talents of the few do not preclude art making by the many. In these technologically simpler societies, as I described, the arts are invariably and inseparably part of ritual ceremonies that articulate, express, and reinforce a group's deepest beliefs and concerns. As the vehicle for group meaning and a galvanizer of group one-heartedness, art-conjoined-with-ritual is essential to group survival; in traditional societies "art for life's sake," not "art for art's sake," is the rule.

In our own highly specialized society, of course, the arts themselves have become specialties and do exist for their own sake apart from ritual or any other "ulterior" purpose. This separation, peculiar only to modernized or "advanced" societies, has made art a capital-P Problem. Art's heritage of specialization and its recent self-proclaimed irrelevance permits it to be dismissed by governmental budget-makers as a "frill." Art's traditional aura of sanctity and its association with the privileged class serves both to make it a highly desirable commodity for some members of society and the target of the bitter criticism of others. Thus art is simultaneously sanctified and dismissed as rubbish, becomes the subject of complex exegesis and is totally ignored, commands millions in the auctioneer's salon and yet is irrelevant to most people's lives.

To understand what art is, or again might become, we must look beyond that one-ninth span of human history (or, if we consider only history since the Renaissance, a one-eightieth span) for evidence of aesthetic proclivities in Homo sapiens before they learned to read and write. If we look at preliterate societies today and at young children in all societies, and combine information from these findings with what we can infer from Paleolithic artifacts, we will discover that art is both more protean and more simple than today's theorists would have it.

They, and we, commonly assume that art is concerned with images or texts—representations. But this "literate" approach takes for granted that art is objects—things, like words are things. Let us instead look at art as kinds of behavior, ways of doing things, including, but not confined to, visual or literary representation. When we look beyond the restricted case of modern, Western, and Western-influenced societies, when we expand our vision to include all examples of societies, past and present, we discover that people do a number of things that are artlike, congruent with what we think of as "art": they explore, they play, they shape and embellish, they formalize or make order. These ways of doing are inherent in human activity: they come naturally to us without being taught.

Regarding art as a behavior—an instance of "making special"—shifts the emphasis from the modernist's view of art as object or quality or the postmodernists view of it as text or commodity to the activity itself (the making or doing and appreciating), which is what it is in many premodern societies where the object is essentially an occasion for or an accourement to ceremonial participation.

"Making special" is a fundamental human proclivity or need. We cook special meals and wear special garb for important occasions. We find special ways of saying important things. Ritual and ceremony are occasions during which everyday life is shaped and embellished to become more than ordinary. What modern artists do, in their specialized and often driven way, is an exaggeration, an extension of what ordinary people also do, naturally and with enjoyment. Looked at in this way, art, the activity of making the things one cares about special, is fundamental to everyone and, as in traditional societies, deserves to be acknowledged as normal. And normal, socially valuable activities should be encouraged and developed.

Making important things special was a fundamental and integral part of human behavior for thousands of years before writing looked at its results and called them "art" or "texts." Writing told the explorers, players, shapers, and embellishers that they were making objects detached from reality, texts to be read and analyzed, self-consciously abstracted from their contexts. But until the present century, these explorers, players, shapers, and embellishers did not pay much attention, particularly to the more abstruse and esoteric implications of these literate pronouncements. Most artists until the present century did not care a whole lot about the words that their works provoked.

Textbooks tell us that the romantic nineteenth century was preoccupied with the artist or author; that the modernist twentieth century was preoccupied with the work or text; and that contemporary postmodernism is preoccupied with the critic/reader. It may be time now to turn from these to the human "reality" as expressed in species nature; that is, to perennial human needs, aspirations, constraints, limitations, achievements that along with "art" have been veiled, distorted, atrophied, or erased by the excesses of modern literate life.

- Ellen Dissanayake

perspectivism

In the Annunciation, Leonardo makes dramatic and convincing use of linear perspective. Everything in the painting recedes towards a single vanishing point on the horizon. This gives the impression that the angel and the Virgin share the same, unified space which extends continuously all around them.

Leonardo di Vinci - Annunciation (1474)

idealism in art

At its most general, Idealism asserts that the physical world is less important than the mind or the spirit which shapes and animates it. Idealists choose the soul, the mind or the psyche over the body, the material and the historical. When ideals (of appearance, or proportion for example) regulate the way an artist represents the world his work can be described as Idealist.

Plato's Theory of the Forms was the the most important Classical influence on Renaissance Idealism. The Ideas, or Forms, contain all that is necessary and universal and are therefore perfect and unchanging while the material world is simply a deceptive procession of changing appearances which have no more reality than shadows.

The leading artists of the High Renaissance--Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo --are all associated with slightly different forms of Idealism. Michelangelo's was most identified with the Platonic Forms because of his reliance on ‘disegno’(design). The term is used to describe art which is shaped by the artist's imagination rather than by his imitation, or copying, of a natural model. Michelangelo's art also idealised the body by giving it monumental proportions. His figures are usually astonishingly muscular.

Michaelangelo - Leda and the Swan (1530)

Raphael's figures are equally idealised but they are characterised by sweetness of expression, serenity, elegance, clarity of line and beauty of colour rather than physical grandeur.

Raphael - Saint Catherine of Alexandria (1508)

Leonardo's Idealism was different again. It was characterised by an emphasis on finding the Divine in the perfectly human. Beauty, subtle facial expression, the unity of the figure with its setting and the elimination of unnecessary detail to suggest emotion, were all aspects of his Idealism.

Leonardo di Vinci - Benois Madonna (1478)

.

Renaissance artists strove to paint the Ideal, not because they shied away from looking at the world, but because they wanted to capture the absolute and universal truth hidden within it.

establishment art

Academicism promoted Classical ideals of beauty and artistic perfection and established a clear hierarchy within the visual arts, preferring grand narrative or history painting and advocating life-drawing and classical sculpture.

George Stubbs - Whistlejacket (1762)

Stubb's Whistlejacket was an example of the meticulous attention to the figure which characterised Academic painting. Within the Academy tradition artists were expected to have a sound knowledge of anatomy.

Joshua Reynolds - Colonel Tarleton (1782)

Reynolds was one of the advocates of the 'grand manner' in painting. His Colonel Tarleton is a perfect example of the grand manner adapted for a portrait. The portrait displays Colonel Tarleton's military virtues - his nobility and bravery - and his personal triumph over everything base inhuman nature. His clothes are relatively plain and the activity in the background has been simplified to avoid any overt theatricality.

romanticism

Casper David Friedrich - Tree with Crows (1822)

The trees look dead but they are set against a sunset, reminding us that death is inevitable, part of the cycle of nature and not to be feared. However, the painting invites a melancholy response in the viewer rather than a philosophical indifference. Romanticism privileged nature as a source of truths about human experience which could be most effectively expressed in art and best understood intuitively or emotionally.

realism

Gustave Courbet - The Artist's Studio (1855)

Realists aspired to paint what they saw, even what was dirty and unpleasant. The Artist's Studio can be read as Courbet's critique of this failure to engage with the real world as he saw it: the artist's studio is grimy and crowded, but the painting on his canvas shows a beautiful landscape which bears no relation to the world in which the artist lives. Courbet was also showing himself to be both a master of Realist painting and of the style of painting he was rejecting.

heat

Andre Derain - Bridge over the Riou (1906)

Derain has simplified his landscape subject matter into a colourful pattern that flattens the landscape almost entirely. It's difficult to work out what is in the foreground and what is in the distance. Shadow and light are shown as different (through related) colours rather than as darker and lighter shades of the same colour. Derain uses a characteristic intensity of colour to capture the vividness and heat of the Cote d' Azur landscape and climate.

kosuth

Joseph Kosuth - Clock (one and five) (1965)

This work is composed of five elements: a photograph of a clock, a clock and entries from an English/Latin dictionary for the words 'time', 'machine' and 'object.' By placing a real clock beside a photograph of one, Kosuth questions why we consider a photograph but not the object itself to be art. This juxtaposition also challenges the idea that art is beautiful and/or functionless.

the viewer, not the artist

Sol LeWitt - Wall / Floor ("Three Squares") (1966)

Sol LeWitt has assembled aluminium beams covered with enamel to obtain a simple cubic form. The artist intends the work to be "created" through the perception of the spectator. The "creation" will change according to how the object is viewed.

The opportunity for multifarious objective interpretations to validate the work defies the conventional belief that art objects express or explore the artist's personal experiences. A further challenge to preconceptions forces us to judge the work as a concept not as an object made by LeWitt.

conceptual art

Conceptualism emerged in the 1960’s and was first defined and promoted as a movement by Sol LeWitt in 1967. Its central claim is that art is a 'concept', rather than a material object. There are strong precedents for Conceptualism in the work of the Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp.

Conceptualism is shaped by four basic tenets. The first is that the art work is an idea, or concept, rather than a material object. To understand the idea that shapes an art work is to understand the work itself - so it is possible to understand an art work without ever having seen it.

Conceptualists deliberately blur the distinction between language and art when they define the art work as an idea or concept. Regardless of whether a Conceptualist art work employs wood or canvas, the real work is the idea and the language used to construct, manipulate and explore it. The artist's intention and the spectator's response are an integral part of the art work itself. This has radically affected the materials used in Conceptualist art, and the way such works are made.

Conceptualism also criticises the commercialisation of art. In a capitalist economy commercial value is attached to tradeable objects, especially those which support and endorse current social arrangements. Designating an object as 'art' can be a sure means of increasing its material value, so it can be bought, sold and insured for enormous sums. When Conceptualists assert that the art work is the idea, not the material object, they hope to disrupt this trade, or at least problematize it.

Finally, by emphasising the concept over the art work Conceptualists attempt to disrupt the process by which ownership translates into social status and cultural authority. Individuals become important collectors because of their wealth, not because of what they know about art. However, institutions such as museums and galleries can shape and influence our experience of art through their powers of selection and omission.

Sol LeWitt - Cubes in Color on Color (2003)

value inversion

Andy Warhol - Marilyn Diptych (1962)

pomo art

Post-Modernism developed from critiques of architectural modernism in the 1970s. By the 1980s, visual art which criticized society was also being referred to as “post-modern”. Post-Modernism is effectively a late Modernism many of whose critiques can be traced back to Modernism itself.

Architects took the lead in the development of Post-Modernism. They criticized the International Style of Modernist architecture for being too formal, austere, and functional. Post-Modern architects felt that International style had become a repressive orthodoxy. It had been adopted by the corporate world and exploited at the expense of its social vision.

Post-Modernist architecture uses more eclectic materials and styles with greater playfulness. Parody of earlier styles is a dominant Post-Modern trait. Another is the refusal to develop comprehensive theories about architecture and social progress.

The ethical touchstone of Post-Modernism is relativism—the belief that no society or culture is more important than any other. Although few Post-Modern artists are pure relativists, they often use their art to explore and undermine the way society constructs and imposes a traditional hierarchy of cultural values and meanings. Post-Modernism also explores power and the way economic and social forces exert that power by shaping the identities of individuals and entire cultures.

Unlike Modernists, Post-Modernists place little or no faith in the unconscious as a source of creative and personal authenticity. They value art not for its universality and timelessness but for being imperfect, low-brow, accessible, disposable, local and temporary.

While it questions the nature and extent of our freedom and challenges our acquiescence to authority, Post-Modernism has been criticized for its pessimism: it often critiques but equally often fails to provide a positive vision or redefinition of what it attacks.

ironic?

Sol LeWitt - Cubes in Color on Color (2003)

jeff koons

...takes mass produced objects from everyday life and exhibits them as art. This thwarts our expectation of art's authenticity and uniqueness. Koons' work deliberately provokes us to consider how art institutions impose cultural and economic value on objects, and challenges our acceptance of their definitions of 'art'. These consumer items are exhibited as art to make us reflect on how our most private dreams of success are shaped by the culture and economy in which we live.

abstraction of painting

The written word became more specialized, more abstract and less and less like pictures. Pictures, meanwhile, began to grow in the opposite direction: less abstract or symbolic, more representational and specific. By the early 1800's, western art and writing had drifted about as far apart as possible. One was obsessed with resemblance, light and color, all things visible...the other rich in invisible treasures, senses, emotions, spirituality, philosophy.

However starting in the late 19th century, modern art movements such as impressionism, expressionism, futurism, dadaism incorporated abstraction back into art. Strict representation styles were of little importance to the new schools. The main thrust was a return to meaning in art, away from resemblance, back to the realm of ideas. Meanwhile, the written word was also changing, poetry began turning away from the elusive, twice-abstracted language of old toward a more direct, even colloquial style (Keats, Whitman). In prose, language was becoming even more direct, conveying meaning simply and quickly, more like pictures. "Meaning" was not abandoned by any means, but authors were definitely moving toward a more straightforward means of communication.

Paintings increasingly took on symbolic, even calligraphic meanings (Klee), while some artists addressed the ironies of words and pictures head-on. Paintings became so "unrealistic" and abstract, that modern art itself became virtually incomprehensible to the average viewer.

- Scott McCloud

     

why modernism

The first effect of modernism was to make high-culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition. The hidden purpose was twofold: to protect art against popular entertainment, and to create a new barrier, a new obstacle to membership, and a new rite of passage to the adult and illuminated sphere. To those whom modernism excluded, the movement seemed like a betrayal of the past. Tonality and tunefulness in music; the human image in painting; the pleasing dignity of metre and rhyme - even the homely comfort of a story well told - all these ways in which art had opened its arms to normal humanity were suddenly rejected, like a false embrace. To the modernists, however, the past was betrayed not be modernism but by popular culture. Tonal harmonies had been corrupted and banalised by popular music; figurative painting had been trumped by photography; rhyme and metre had become the stuff of Christmas cards, and the stories had been too often told. Everything out there, in the world of naïve and unthinking people, was kitsch. Modernism was not an assault on the artistic tradition, but an attempt to rescue it. Such was the surprising thought expressed by Eliot and Schoenberg, and their eloquence transformed the high culture of Europe.

- Roger Scruton