can art become cliche?

The power of art is often its power to surprise. When many sources such as authors, editors, and advertisers, display an image of a famous artwork, in the process the famous starts to look ordinary. The result: the surprise is used up too quickly and the images bore us rather than astonish or delight us. It is like having too many people tell us the same joke within a week's time. No matter how good the joke, at some point it ceases to be funny and perhaps even becomes annoying.

The importance of context suggests that results of the test of time are difficult to predict in art. An image can appear powerful in 2006 but by 2030 may be trite. The colors of the French impressionists do not appear dissonant or shocking to the modern viewer; they come across as conservative and pretty. After Led Zeppelin, Gene Vincent no longer sounds like such a hard-rocker. The dinosaurs in Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park were a special-effects revelation at the time and they delighted millions of moviegoers. Today they appear amateurish, as if they came out of an underfunded computer game from Eastern Europe.

Alternatively, other images and other cultural outputs gain in power. The fusion, funk, and general chaos of the late recordings of Miles Davis were a mystery to most jazz critics at the time. They could not understand why he would abandon bop or silky trumpet playing for what sounded like noise. Those recordings are now seen as seminal forerunners of jungle, trance, rap, and ambient music.

- Tyler Cowen

Rossini - William Tell Overture

Franz Liszt - Hungarian Rhapsody #2

inversion of status through co-option?

who said museums are meant to be enjoyable?

Museums do not depend on "customers" or ticket buyers. For a typical art museum, ticket receipts do not cover one-tenth of the cost of their operations. Museums are far more dependent on donors and sometimes on government subsidies. Direct subsidies are a more important source of museum income in Western Europe, not the United States, so let us focus on donors. For most American art museums, donors account for well over half of the yearly budget. The real influence of donors is much stronger, since donors are also the most important source of donated or lent paintings and sculptures. Donors may also volunteer, help museums organize exhibits, or use their contacts to borrow artworks from other museums. After all, most important museum donors are wealthy and influential people. A museum that does not make its donors happy will shrink in importance, relative to museums that are more donor-oriented. The incentive for a museum is to please donors.

Donors do not want exactly what visitors want. Visitors want that the museum be fun and easy to use. Donors are more concerned that the museum confers status upon them in the arenas of high culture, high society, and perhaps high finance. Donors like fancy receptions, which is why museums hold them.

In part, museums care about visitors for indirect reasons, so that then donors do not feel they are supporting an empty house. But the interest of viewers and donors do not in general coincide, and we should not expect the viewers to win out. (Note that zoos, which typically rely more on admissions and less on donations than do museums, tend to be designed for fun.) Consequently not every museum is easy to use. Don’t expect it to be. Get used to that. Work around it. Use mental reaming to make the museum more like institutions that are geared to satisfy us.

- Tyler Cowen

art or not?

We are all supposed to love the Mona Lisa, which is often described at the world's greatest painting, but is it really? Actually, I'm quite sick of it as well as these other "masterpieces."

art as theory

Our time and attention are scarce. Art is not that important to us, no matter what we might like to believe. So we should stop self deceiving and admit to ourselves that we don't just love "art for art's sake." Our love of art is often quite temporary, dependent upon our moods, and our love of art is subservient to our demand for a positive self-image. How we look at art should account for those imperfections and work around them.

Art has a social role in addition to its aesthetic value. We like art for how it complements our self-images and our relationships with others. Being by nature a lover of theory, I enjoy identifying with the grid-based abstract art of Piet Mondrian more than with Victorian fairy painting. When I was single, I would have been suspicious if a date of mine loved Monet above all other artists. He is a wonderful painter, but I would fear that she would find my tastes—which include Bruce Nauman and Jeff Koons—too strange and that I would find her too mainstream.

- Tyler Cowen

jmw turner

...Turner's contemporary detractors quite simply possessed no adequate framework within which to understand his achievement. In the early part of the nineteenth century landscape painting was still judged in terms of seventeenth-century Italian idealist and Dutch naturalistic models. By these standards, even Turner's more conventional paintings look poorly executed and disorderly. Lacking a structured idea-space within which to make sense of what Turner was trying to do, the critics simply decided he was mad.

J. M. W. Turner - Dido Building Carthage (1815)

A glance at just two paintings suffices to show how far Turner traveled and how revolutionary a painter he became, especially in his later years. The first, Dido Building Carthage, consciously imitates seventeenth-century landscape painting that Turner modeled himself on in his early period. The second, Sunrise, with a Boat Between Headlands, is a work, entirely characteristic of his late period, "which could be shown with the canvases of any Abstract Expressionist."

No painter except Picasso advanced so far from the painting styles he inherited, or bequeathed to those who came after him such a radically new vision of what painting could be. Turner's influence largely skipped over the art of the next five or six decades, but the revolution he wrought anticipated some of the most profound characteristics of twentieth-century painting.

J. M. W. Turner - Sunrise, with a Boat Between Headlands (1845)

His late paintings, of which Sunrise is a characteristic example, constitute an art in which light and color predominate over form, kinetic force replaces classical stasis, abstraction undermines faith in the reliability of visual representation, and (in seeming anticipation of relativity theory) space and time merge. To put it simply, Turner is the first truly modern painter.10

Great painters do more than produce beautiful or inspiring images. They succeed in transforming the context of painting itself, the space in which it can unfold in the future. This act of artistic paradigm creation is the work of the imaginative intelligence par excellence, transporting the mind to as yet unexplored regions where reason cannot go.

Turner possessed an imaginative intelligence of the highest order. His most radical achievements—liberating color, reducing figural representation to the point of pure abstraction, and making the process of painting meaningful in its own right—were, in modern business parlance, game-changing moves, representing a huge creative leap whose influence we can still recognize in the art of our own time. But the impulses that led him along this path flowed less from his own abundant artistic talent than from his passionate engagement with and integration of two of the most powerful emergent idea-spaces of the nineteenth century: Romantic art and empirical science. The very antithetical tension between them seems to have set his imagination on fire.

Turner's development as an artist affords a window into how the imagination does some of its most radical and exciting work: creating a new idea-space by integrating intelligence embedded in widely separated existing or emergent spaces. The unfolding of Turner's thinking as an artist shows how he allowed key ideas from Romanticism and science to play off one another until they finally—and powerfully—fused.

- Richard Ogle

dutch naturalism

Dutch naturalism was the artistic expression of a vast cultural and social shift taking place in northern Europe. Rapidly expanding global trade and rising prosperity, particularly in the Netherlands and England, was weakening the influence of the Renaissance on these non-Mediterranean countries. An increasingly wealthy commercial class had little use for worshipping an idealized past. At the same time, empirical science entered the cultural mainstream. The latter's objective, fact-based ethos was quite inimical to the idealism of Italian post-Renaissance painting.