>As for the Shoes - you may want to read Myer Shapiro's response to MH's reading fo them - I think you might find more satisfactory - and more to your taste
Heidegger's interpretation of Van Gogh's shoes has gotten a lot of mileage, hasn't it? It's appeared in Meyer Shapiro's "The Still Life as a Personal Object", and then both writers have been discussed in Derrida's "Truth in Painting" An eager young Communist, Kimberly DeFazio, has presented a nice gloss of the discussion here: http://www.redcritique.org/FallWinter2008/theimperialeye.htm .. and I'm inclined to agree with what she presents as "one of Derrida's main projects" -- i.e. "the deconstruction of the Western paradigm of artistic truth, or what he refers to as "the heritage of the great philosophies of art which still dominate this whole problematic, above all those of Kant, Hegel, and, in another respect, that of Heidegger" . Within this framework, Derrida writes, art in general becomes "an object in which one claims to distinguish an inner meaning, the invariant, and a multiplicity of external variations through which, as through so many veils, one would try to see or restore the true, full, originary meaning: one, naked. " Whether, as Saul suggests, I prefer to join Meyer Shapiro in thinking of Van Gogh's paintings of shoes as relating more to Van Gogh than to some kind of "equipage" -- the fact remains that "true, full, originary meaning: one, naked. " continues to remain elusive. Meanwhile, I haven't yet seen where any of them (Heidegger/Shapiro/Derrida) have addressed the issue of why Van Gogh's shoe paintings are more like 'works of art' than the millions of other recognizable images of shoes that can be found. (and I don't think that can be done -- without introducing a notion similar to that of 'beauty') I saw one of those shoe paintings last year -- and can report that it was incredible -- crackling with a compositional energy that is so fierce and intense, it just has to be called beautiful. Has anyone else ever seen them ? (or .. would you prefer to read what the schoolboys of Wikipiedia have said about the consensus scholarly opinion) ____________________________________________________________ Visa, MasterCard, AMEX & Discover. Compare Offers & Apply Online. Click here! http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL2231/fc/BLSrjnxUKRDBycUgmz4CmXN1oYxmFO ni8MEWW9glyemLIeSPCUR29n0nEjO/
