My copy of "How the Metropolitan Museum Misteaches Art" by Theodore L. Shaw has finally arrived!
Perhaps the rest of you are sick of this old, dead, iconoclastic pen pusher, but I just couldn't resist that title -- though, yet again, I have been thoroughly disappointed. To begin with -- he's only referring to John Canaday's 24-volume "Seminars in Art" that were published by the museum in 1958. I admit that I've seen some of them before and only cared for the pictures -- but still they deserve a little more respect than Shaw was willing to give them because he's not just objecting to Canaday -- but to anyone who would try to teach anything about Art -- as one might object to any authoritative guide to hunting the snark -- i.e. an "impossible voyage of an improbable crew to find an inconceivable creature" And yet still -- I found his 16-page diatribe fascinating because he offered visual examples to refute Canaday's assertions. For example -- regarding a Chardin still-life, Canaday had written: "The simpler such an arrangement is and the fewer the objects included in it the more difficult is the problem of adjustment of the parts to one another. You can test this arrangement by imagining it without the knife. Immediately, the mug is divorced from the other objects. Or if we substitute another apple for a pear or shift the position of the pear so that it leans toward the center of the picture rather than toward the left,we discover that we have to make other changes to compensate for the disturbed relationships" Admirably -- our intrepid "Aesthetics Cop" (as Shaw identifies himself) proceeded to make one of the suggested adjustments -- and presented the adjusted version side-by-side with the original for comparison. But not so admirably -- Shaw concluded that Canaday was wrong because he did a little field testing and "found that slightly more people prefer the variant" (i.e. -- Shaw dismissed the point that aesthetic discrimination was something to be learned -- so, as far as he was concerned, all opinions are equal -- and controversies can be decided by letting everyone vote) For those who are interested, the entire text -- and it's many pictorial examples -- may be found here: http://mountshang.blogspot.com/2009/01/aesthetics-cop.html ____________________________________________________________ Find out how fast you can be debt free! Click now. http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL2231/fc/PnY6rc3U014j8QpiHsS9rnHiKDbRor EiPKAeeiNZ14P5r7tzbFQ6w/
