From: David Shelby <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: History of 'Sentimentality'
To: "aesthetics list" <[email protected]>
Date: Thursday, January 29, 2009, 11:06 PM
On this subject, one of my earliest art instructors
repeatedly cautioned us against sentimentality and as an
excercise he brought into drawing class several embalmed and
flayed cats from the biology department for us to draw. He
said that there was no way we could be sentimental about
that subject matter.
Sentimentality seems to have to with content and I
don't know why you can't make a good work of art
about sentimental subject matter.
Sent from my iPhone
On Jan 29, 2009, at 2:14 PM, William Conger
<[email protected]> wrote:
Yes, sentiment is different from sentimentality, as
modern is from modernistic. And sentimentality is a very
complicated idea with many facets. One is the replacement
of reality with myth. Much of art history relies on myth
and its corruption as sentimentality. One sentimental idea
in modern art rests on the myth of artistic and individual
freedom. But in fact the reality is that most art is in
bondage to some prevailing concepts and their implementation
in the art discourse and markets.
here's a related analogy:
At one time in America, before 1865, a huge percentage
of Americans were in fact in bondage. That's not only
the slaves but also the native Indians who were being pushed
into separate reserves. And this doesn't even touch on
the bondage created by group prejudice against those whose
ideas, political and religious, marked them as misfits,
disloyal, dangerous, etc. Yet most of our notions of
freedom and indiviualism were honed during that period and
remain glowing today. So it is with art as well.
That's why we need to continually confront and attack
the myths that are erected against reality. For me,
sentimentality in its various iterations is the signal of
misleading myth.
Sentimentality is the pair of rose colored glasses.
Once you put them on, everything is sentimentalized and myth
becomes the new reality.
WC
--- On Thu, 1/29/09, [email protected]
<[email protected]> wrote:
From: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: History of 'Sentimentality'
To: [email protected]
Date: Thursday, January 29, 2009, 1:28 PM
In a message dated 1/29/09 12:14:01 PM,
[email protected] writes:
(and we might notice that neither Aristotle
nor
Shakespeare offer any
social
or institutional or educational qualifications
for
their preferred
audience
of aesthetes)
it is probable that neither Donald Trump nor Maya
Angelou
would be among
their preferred audience.
Kate Sullivan
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