On Jan 24, 2009, at 12:28 PM, Chris Miller wrote:
Michael -- will you please step out from behind the passive voice
(of how words "are often used") -- and tell us how you use them
yourself ?
You're prevailing upon me to change voices? Oh, dear. Tell you what:
why don't you learn to communicate in written English, using all the
punctuation marks--like commas--without resorting to those long-dash
crutches, which allow you not to pay attention to how a thought or
spoken utterance is clearly rendered in writing. Good English. It's a
discipline, like, oh, good sculpture, that can be learned without
diminishing your ideas.
Do you call some works "sentimental" because they seem to be
provoking excessive and self indulgent feelings in you ?
Why don't you step out from behind your faulty assumption that I in
fact call works "sentimental." I don't. That's not a term or idea that
I typically use when discussing works of art, either in a gallery or
place where the hoi polloi congregate to look at art.
Or -- have you determined that these works are aimed at provoking
that kind of response from other people ?
And -- do you disapprove of such feelings -- and consider those who
enjoy them to be somehow less sophisticated than yourself ?
I don't disapprove of any feelings. I am very careful, when I look at
WoA, to gauge my own reactions. Part of my response is immediate and
strongly grounded in sensuousness; part is a more reflective
consideration of many other things that affect the work, such as my
knowledge of the artist's other works (if I am aware of others), what
the work reminds me of formally and in other ways, my previous
encounters with similar works, etc.
Sentimentality refers to the work's appeal to the viewer's feelings.
It isn't always the big-eyed kids or old dilapidated barn that 'wallow
in sentimentality,' to use a phrase: ostensibly sophisticated artists
can produce works that appear rooted in some raw, powerful nonverbal
emotion. I'm thinking of those recently-voguish assemblies of twigs
and branches and bird's feathers and bark-lashings, trying to evince a
sense of the primitive yearnings, or some such (as I've been told by
the gallery statements). All made by middle-class white people whose
connections to the Sacred Earth of their ancestors go all the way back
to some comparative culture course in college. It's so ersatz, I find
it very irritating. That's sentimentality, too, of a high-tone kind.
Sentimentality of artworks is very close to what kitsch refers to.
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Michael Brady
[email protected]
