On Oct 10, 2008, at 12:12 PM, Chris Miller wrote:
1. Has expert advice ever caused you to derive an aesthetic
experience from a
work that did not occasion it before ?
2. Have you ever found ever found criticism to be as worthwhile
aesthetically
as experiencing artworks directly?
More muddlement. I get an aesthetic experience from the ear-splitting
grittiness of shoveling sand on a sidewalk. Not a particularly
pleasant one, to be sure.
Miller here means only an "artistically" aesthetic experience, as
opposed to a "sunset" experience or a "beautiful body in front of me"
experience. We've gone all around this one many different times. And
he seems to mean a positive experience, as distinct from a completely
null, non-aware experience. I don't think he means to suggest that one
day, after reading Greenberg or Shapiro or Rosenberg or somebody else,
he walks by the Motherwell in the National Gallery and says, "Holy
shit, that's a painting. I'm having an aesthetic experience. All along
I thought it was a strange wall, mere prose, but no! it's poetry!"
To answer him, I used to really not like Medieval art. I thought it
was clumsy, ungraceful, off-putting. In fine, it lacked the lambent
aura of beauty as I had learned it, the Classical forms embodied in
Greek and Roman sculpture and resurrected (almost literally) in Rome
and breathed new life in Florence, the magnificence of the High
Renaissance style. Of course, I was a kid, and I looked like a kid,
and I spake like a kid, and thus I disliked Medieval art like a kid,
too. But long exposure to Medieval art history, to studies of
manuscript illustration and trumeau scultpures, and all that stuff
thawed my heart and illuminated my mind, now no longer cosseted in a
kid's view but passionate as a young man. And after Giotto led to
Cimabue and the International Style, and Byzantine mosaic, and Hagia
Sofia, and the Book of Durrow, and Beautus manuscripts whirling in my
head, I turned my gaze to pre-Columbian sculptures, previously a
hopeless jumble of odd figures with big noses, but now a swirling wall
of puslating lines and life, reminding me very much of the all those
throbbing, undulating pyramids of nubile shapes in Angor Watts and
other Hindu temples. The more you know, the more you know. I'm working
on releasing myself to the charm of Northwest totemic art, which still
doesn't move me that much.
Further, I do derive an "aesthetic" experience from reading criticism
(and art history is a form or adjunct to criticism). Paglia, to take
an example that was lately pilloried, is such a writer, one who can
bring a reader (moi) to a different appreciation **and at the same
time** to give me the pleasure of reading well written prose.
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Michael Brady
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
