Do I have an aesthetic ideal and can i point to an artwork that best expresses it.
I'll take this question seriously and admit that it's almost impossible for me to answer it succinctly. Why? I had an excellent undergraduate and graduate education in art history (allied to my art practice education). When I began teaching and for twenty years afterward before I went to Northwestern Univ to teach painting for another 25 years, I taught many art introduction and survey type art history courses. I must have memorized thousands of artworks and maybe more than a thousand artists and discussed all of that at length with thousands of students. The peculiar aesthetic appeal of each artwork was what my students and I tried to discover and that engaged us in broad, sometimes deep, analysis of culture and historical contexts. Of course, much of my knowledge was learned from others but I also learned how to examine art on its own terms, mostly by beginning with a physical description of it. The point of this is that I can probably adapt to a very wide variety of aesthetic expressions and can appreciate them. That means I can appreciate them independently of my own 'preferences' although when I do appreciate an art work I have no other preferences in mind or I try to erase them. I can find a lot to admire aesthetically in the work of very different artists. I try not to bring a template with me to project onto their work. As an artist there is an aesthetic, I suppose, I deal with. I don't really know what it is because each artwork I make is an attempt to discover an aesthetic and I pretend to embody in it. If I knew what aesthetic presentation I fully wanted then I could make it. But every artwork is a struggle for discovery and I can't know beforehand what aesthetic it might evoke. That last sentence could be regarded as disingenuous. Because my work has a look-alike quality over many works,there must be an aesthetic that guides me. Maybe. But the role of an artist is often to subvert what he or she does and thus obtain some 'distance' from the so-called aesthetic of the work. I think artists don't have an aesthetic ideal; they try to invent one and then treat it very warily, even ruthlessly. Someone once told me that most artists are 'imprinted' by an aesthetic experience with art in youth and that remains. A famous psychiatrist (John Gedo, who worte on creativity) once told me that a child's fetish object constitute the source of later aesthetic experience (a subconscious yearning to recapture it). The psychologistWinnicott said that the fetish is 'a transitional object' used by the infant to begin a negotiation with the real -- other than self -- world. WC ----- Original Message ---- From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]> Sent: Thu, August 23, 2012 2:30:50 PM Subject: Re: Aesthetic Ideal On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 12:32 AM, joseph berg <[email protected]> wrote: > Do you have one? > > Over time, did it change? > > If so, in what way? > Is there a work of art that you can point to that best expresses your aesthetic ideal?
