William writes: "Perspective is a system based on geometry. There are
other perspective systems that
don't rely on the vanishing point. It depends on your taste."
Remember the question in this thread at the moment is this: Is everything you
teach in art school a matter of taste? For openers, I think you're confusing
choosing a topic with teaching the particulars of the topic -- and you spend
most of your time teaching the particulars of such a topic as perspective.
There are also different systems of geometry. But once you choose the system
of geometry you will teach, taste does not come into it, any more than when
you choose to teach an alphabet. Once you set out to teach the Modern basic
Latin Alphabet -- the 26-letter one you're looking at right now -- it's silly
to
say it's "taste" moving you to teach that B comes after A. But that's the sort
of thing you'll be spending most of your time teaching. If you decide to learn
all the known alphabets, your course of study is not a matter of taste. Same
with systems of calculus, or symbolic logic.
Suppose you as a teacher know several different systems of perspective. And
you feel it's your duty to teach all these systems to the students. I think
it's a bad linguistic decision to call that pedagogic decision a matter of
"taste". Which system you employ in your work may depend on your taste, but if
you're going to teach any perspective at all I myself wouldn't call it a matter
of taste whether or not you teach at least Western standard graphical
perspective. And once you begin teaching it, do you really want to say it's
"taste"
that prompts you to teach zero, one, two, and three point perspective? And as
you teach the "rules" of Western standard would you tell the students, "Don't
worry, when I quiz you on it you can't get anything wrong because this is all a
matter of taste"? Such a promiscuous use of the word 'taste' will eventually
drain it, the way, say, those who call everything they don't like "obscene"
have exhausted that word.
You demean yourself in claiming all you could ever teach in art school was a
matter of taste. For my example, I could have eschewed perspective and chosen
anatomy. How you apply what you learn in anatomy class may be a matter of
taste, but not the facts about muscles, bones, tendons, ligaments.
You go on to say:
"Perspective is false in demonstrating reality. People in the distance are
not really tiny." This is foolishness, William. Perspective is concerned with
appearance, not "reality". "People aren't two-dimensional like that false
portrait of whatzername in the Louvre!" I rather think Hokusai never believed
that
Fuji was only two-inches wide "in reality". Euclid's parallel lines never
meet, but do you think he would dismiss one-point perspective because it's
"false"?
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