Friday, July 8, 2011

relativism in art

Just as these eras yielded very different kinds of human beings, they also valorized very different works of art, with contrasting notions of beauty, ugliness, sublimity, and bathos. Just compare public art such as Civil War monuments of the past (the solid and stolid military figure mounted on his favorite horse) with the Vietnam War Memorial (a list of over fifty-eight thousand names arranged on two rectilinear black-granite walls). It is as difficult to imagine nineteenth-century viewers being moved by the Vietnam memorial as it is to imagine contemporary viewers savoring an equestrian rendering. Likewise, in the eighteenth century, residents of France considered mountains to be repulsive. According to historian Graham Robb, "To those who gave the matter any thoughts, mountains—and the people who lived there—were remnants of the primitive world." Similarly, novelist Orhan Pamuk describes how differently tourists and residents of Istanbul experience the city: "A cascade of domes and rooftops, a row of houses with crooked window casings—these things don't look beautiful to the people who live among them; they speak instead of squalor, helpless hopeless neglect. Those who take pleasure in the accidental beauty of poverty and historical decay, those of us who see the picturesque in ruins--invariably were people from the outside."

- Howard Gardner


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