Your view seems to accept 'nature' as it is. The artists of the so-called Beaux Arts Style (capital S signifies that Style is a perceptual method) did not accept Nature as it is but sought to idealize it, to perfect it, according to an imposed formal harmony. Where that harmony comes from is the issue because it may be -- for Beaux-Arts artists -- potentially present in Nature, it was not explicitly present. I came from the mind and it was divinely inspired, in accordance with God. An effort to make art in accordance with God's will or plan or grace was moral and it was exemplified by significant form (idealized form).
The chief problem with your view "art moralizes nature; nature moralizes art' is the absence of a definition of nature. Does this nature have a consciousness? Is it God? Is it reality? And what is art if it can be separate from nature? Let's take the case of Constable. Here was an artist who wanted to paint nature as it is. But of course he couldn't do that. He had to re-arrange, select, exaggerate, abstract, invent, and yet in the end he made paintings that are 'natural, seemingly unidealized presentations of nature. The same could be said of Courbet. One could argue that both artists followed a 'significant form' theory and yet their art does not have the graceful artificiality of the Beaux-Arts Style. That art (Victoriana stuff and our friend Bouguereau) made the most of linear harmony at the expense of natural complexity and the rough presence of nature (as in Constable or Courbet). This both the nature of Constable and Courbet and the Style (as in Bouguereau) seem to satisfy your synthetic -- tautology? -- definition and the two kinds of art contradict each other and both leave the notion of 'significant form' begging a stable definition, too. Cheerskep stands ready to swing his sword at any IS but any definition requires an IS as a bridge from one thig to another. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Michael Brady <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sun, July 29, 2012 8:16:29 PM Subject: Re: is list dead? On Jul 29, 2012, at 8:57 PM, William Conger <[email protected]> wrote: > Read my essay. I argue that the word moral and its implications was dropped > after the early modernists talked about formalist theory, art for art's sake, > the significant form, etc. but their ideas were precisely the same as those > embedded in the Beaux-Arts Style. In that way, the supposed break between > Beaux-Arts and modernism was as much manufactured as it was true, maybe more > manufactured. The art of the two types looks different but was it truly > different in fundamental theory? Words like moral became taboo in serious art > talk. But to say the same thing with other words, like 'significant form' was > accepted, and still is. I believe that all forms of art are exercises in imposing a moral order on the exempla and models that Nature shows us. We humans declare this or that configuration in artistic works to be harmonious or unharmonious, pleasing or displeasing, etc., **based on*** their supposed effects on our human feelings and perceptions. We impute to the instances in Nature the ability to engender those feelings of pleasure or displeasure in us. We say, for example, that certain lines or colors, sounds or movements in Nature are tranquil or exited, and thereby instigate tranquil or excite states in us. We go further and say that certain relationships and proportions are similarly conducive to good or bad feelings (pleasing or displeasing proportions of a figure, of color combination, of chords or sounds and tempos in music, etc.). These become "canonical" terms, terms of judgment, and are applied in such a way to define and even guide others in the proper or approved modes of appreciating. Consider in painting the different schemes of color harmony: direct complementary opposites, split complements, near neighbors, etc. The result is that eventually, every combination of colors is declared to be a form of "color harmony"--harmonies, btw, that the artist and vieweer are subject to but Nature is not! Nature does what it damn well pleases. At the very end of Annouilh's Beckett, one character says of Beckett, "With him it's not morality, it's aesthetics." Those two practices are not very far apart. As I have said before, "Art moralizes nature; Nature demoralizes art." | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady www.michaelbradydesign.com/Blog/ | [email protected] www.twitter.com/typehuile | www.linkedin.com/in/typehuile | www.facebook.com/typehuile "Thinking Like a Designer" at https://www.createspace.com/3462255 or http://snipurl.com/z43se
