I entered this discussion because you had questions about the phrases
"visual literacy" and "formalist credentials" and I just tried to
inform you about what those phrases commonly refer to. I've even
heard terms like those used in a pejorative sense as in that case of
my instructor who was told that he had mastered all these formal
techniques and couldn't seem to say anything with them. These are
aspects of the psychology of vision that we use to see form, space
and color that virtually all humans share. This is why I call them
truths.
Do you have to employ them all in artworks to make a good work of
art? No. I like Frank Stella's minimalist paintings and there is no
perspective. He's still called a formalist.
The formal aspects of visual art are just the nuts and bolts of all
artworks. They don't always add up to a great work of art.
On Feb 10, 2009, at 4:33 PM, Chris Miller wrote:
I'm still not seeing any "definable and measurable truths" here
that aren't
trivial - since there are so many kinds of pictorial space and
perspectives
that might be applied in them. Can't we even say that each painting
is sui
generis ? -- even among those Renaissance paintings where new rules
of linear
perspective were introduced -- those rules seem to be broken at
will -- for
reasons that might be called 'aesthetic'. (I remember examining the
perspective in Titian's "Venus of Urbino" with some doctrinaire neo-
academics
a few years ago)
Perhaps one could say that the aesthetics of pictorial space are
universal --
since a modern aesthete might have the same preferences as an
ancient king in
a very distant land (and who doesn't admire the choices made by
Akbar the
Great ?)
But the reasons for those preferences seem to lie outside any
"definable and
measurable truth"
(BTW --- the images that David just shared are too ugly for me to
contemplate,
regardless of whatever truths of perspective they may be
exemplifying.)
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