Whoa, that was not my post. It must have been from Berg since it's a quotation.
The history of art is a history of what is said about artworks. To know that is to know the history of art. Western style learning is primarily text or word based and that stems from he notion of the liberal arts. Making things, like artworks by hand -- painting and sculpture -- was to be engaged in illiberal arts, and fit for the illiterate and slaves. The point is that Butler was probably following that point of view by suggesting that the good art student will recap what the art literature (artspeak) defined as the best works and those definitions would be verbalized. That would lift the art student from a worker in the illiberal arts to something akin to working in the liberal arts. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Mon, November 15, 2010 4:14:10 PM Subject: Re: b His concerns and interests are all extremely contemporary, yet he chose to use a painting technique that was nearly 200 yx In a message dated 11/3/10 7:58:34 PM, [email protected] writes: > - If an art student is to do any good, his development will > epitomize the > history of painting. > > Samuel Butler > This is not to say I agree with Butler, but my guess is that he meant the equivalent of "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny". I.e the very young artist-to-be will have to work his way through all the various prior epochs of art. Butler was probably focusing on verbal arts when he made that shallow remark.
