Journal 3
Journal 2
Google Art Project
This is something about which to keep both your eyes open. The critical responses and artworks inspired and catalyzed by the ability to view, say, Van Gogh’s Starry Night in remarkably high resolution will be interesting, to say the least. I wonder what museums they’ll catalogue next?
HIGHART
VERSUS
LOWART
Distinguishing the fine from the applied arts, and identifying the former as les beaux arts, constitutes a form of repression masked as exaltation paralleled only by the perception of women as the Fair Sex. To put works of art or to set women at what came to be known as “aesthetic distance” — as objects whose essence and fulfillment consists in pleasing the senses — was a brilliant political response to what were felt as dark dangers in both … [In the arts] aesthetic distance then does what frames and pedestals do to icons and effigies, isolating them conceptually from the practical world and humiliating them as objects fit only to caress the disinterested and refined eye.
The Milky Way arches across this rare 360-degree panorama of the night sky above the Paranal platform, home of ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The image was made from 37 individual frames with a total exposure time of about 30 minutes, taken in the early morning hours. The Moon is just rising and the zodiacal light shines above it, while the Milky Way stretches across the sky opposite the observatory.
Matryoshka (Russian Nesting) Dolls
Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation”
“Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It’s very tiny - very tiny, content.” - Willem De Kooning, in an interview “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” - Oscar Wilde, in a letter 1 The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual. (Cf. the paintings in the caves at Lascaux, Altamira, Niaux, La Pasiega, etc.) The earliest theory of art, that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that art was mimesis, imitation of reality. It is at this point that the peculiar question of the value of art arose. For the mimetic theory, by its very terms, challenges art to justify itself. Plato, who proposed the theory, seems to have done so in order to rule that the value of art is dubious. Since he considered ordinary material things as themselves mimetic objects, imitations of transcendent forms or structures, even the best painting of a bed would be only an “imitation of an imitation.” For Plato, art is neither particularly useful (the painting of a bed is no good to sleep on), nor, in the strict sense, true. And Aristotle’s arguments in defense of art do not really challenge Plato’s view that all art is an elaborate trompe l’oeil, and therefore a lie. But he does dispute Plato’s idea that art is useless. Lie or no, art has a certain value according to Aristotle because it is a form of therapy. Art is useful, after all, Aristotle counters, medicinally useful in that it arouses and purges dangerous emotions. In Plato and Aristotle, the mimetic theory of art goes hand in hand with the assumption that art is always figurative. But advocates of the mimetic theory need not close their eyes to decorative and abstract art. The fallacy that art is necessarily a “realism” can be modified or scrapped without ever moving outside the problems delimited by the mimetic theory. The fact is, all Western consciousness of and reflection upon art have remained within the confines staked out by the Greek theory of art as mimesis or representation. It is through this theory that art as such - above and beyond given works of art - becomes problematic, in need of defense. And it is the defense of art which gives birth to the odd vision by which something we have learned to call “form” is separated off from something we have learned to call “content,” and to the well-intentioned move which makes content essential and form accessory. Even in modern times, when most artists and critics have discarded the theory of art as representation of an outer reality in favor of the theory of art as subjective expression, the main feature of the mimetic theory persists. Whether we conceive of the work of art on the model of a picture (art as a picture of reality) or on the model of a statement (art as the statement of the artist), content still comes first. The content may have changed. It may now be less figurative, less lucidly realistic. But it is still assumed that a work of art is its content. Or, as it’s usually put today, that a work of art by definition says something. (“What X is saying is … ,” “What X is trying to say is …,” “What X said is …” etc., etc.) read more: http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/sontag-againstinterpretation.html
