William: If art is not made "for ordinary lookers" and it is true that
Gustave Courbet said of Eduard Manet: " I myself shouldn't like to meet this
young man. I should be obliged to tell him that I don't understand anything
about his painting (and I don't want to be disagreeable to him)" (brackets
supplied) and that neither Mozart nor Salieri appreciated each other's
compositions, I would conclude that you will have very many persons to
convert to your opinion through discursive writing. One must presumably be a
member of a particular "school" or approach to qualify as an expert and
allowed to have an opinion, with even artistic contemporaries excluded.
Geoff C
From: William Conger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Perceptual Cropping was Marks on Canvas
Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2008 08:36:10 -0700 (PDT)
I stand by all of my comments regarding this worn out thread. Miller is
wrong because he bases all of his arguments on reception, that is, the
viewer, any viewer, and particularly the less informed and sensitive
viewers. Would he advocate the man in the street as the deciding expert on
a musical composition, a symphony by a major composer?
Ordinary viewers get what they look for. Art is not made for ordinary
lookers but for some elusive standard of excellence, based on the
excellences already evident to the most expert judges. That's how it
works. Art quality is not a mob rule sort of degraded pop contest, despite
the now pervasive notion that all passive audiences can evaluate anything.
As for the decorative, non-decorative issue, it's mainly moot. The word
decorative has become a pejorative word, robbing it of the values it
evokes, which are every bit as expressive as any illustrative narrative
work. Since Hans Hofmann is still being mentioned here (by me, I suppose)
one should read his own remarks about decoration. In fact, when the more
civilized past was less drunk with vulgar culture, the word was quite
honorific. However, it should be said that the decorative is also
metaphoric in the sense that a configuration of form (the whole design) can
easily, and always does, in fact, bring to mind multiple associations and
imagery that we regard as explicit, or representational. That's why any
shape at all will always "look like something else". The expression of any
visual artwork depends on its decorative elements, synonymous with Form,
Design, "Disegno" Composition.
WC
These topics are interesting but they deserve more nuanced investigation
that the list is willing to consider.
--- On Tue, 10/7/08, Chris Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> From: Chris Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: Re: Perceptual Cropping was Marks on Canvas
> To: [email protected]
> Date: Tuesday, October 7, 2008, 10:03 AM
> It looks like William's dogmatic formalism has gotten
> him into a hole, and
> even the loyal Brady has only helped him dig it a little
> deeper.
>
> Once again, it's time to apply the Miller test for
> aesthetic discrimination.
>
> Change the nose of the Mona Lisa by only a millimeter or
> two -- and every
> healthy human over the age of 10 will be able to
> distinguish (and deplore) the
> difference.
>
> But change those lines in the background by a similar
> distance, and I'm
> doubting that even the visual artists on this list would be
> able to notice.
> While entire lines could be removed or added in a Jackson
> Pollack painting,
> and no one in the world would be the wiser.
>
>
> Unfortunately, William refuses to recognize that his
> aesthetic ideology is
> appropriate to his own school painting (for which he should
> be proud) but
> doesn't apply outside modern formalism or historically,
> what is usually called
> the decorative arts.
>
> Impressionable guy that I am -- the more I chat with
> William -- and look at
> his work and the other geo-form painters, the more
> interested I am -- just
> as my interest has grown in other non-figurative genres
> like calligraphy and
> painted ceramics.
>
> But once the thrill of new-ness is gone from modern
> abstract painting (and I
> think it left about 40-50 years ago) -- how can it still
> maintain it's appeal
> -- or more importantly -- how can it still maintain that
> high cultural value
> that elevates it above the merely decorative arts - and
> allows the
> practitioner to call himself an artist rather than a mere
> artisan.
>
> This is a real challenge for those who care about this
> genre.
>
> Trying to apply, as William does, its doctrines/ideologies
> to the rest of art
> history, is not going to get very far any more.
>
> The better strategy, I think, is to remove the notion of
> "merely" from the
> words "decorative" and "artisan" -- as
> Asian cultures have done -- as they
> allow a few brush marks on a tea cup to have equal or
> greater value to pieces
> that represent men or gods.
>
>
>
>
> ____________________________________________________________
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