Apples - Rand on Still Life Paintings, Plus


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Continuing.

Rand next says that the reaction to the painting would be "instantaneous" and that:

The psychological mechanism which produces that response (and which produced the painting) is a man's sense of life.

(A sense of life is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence.)

It is the artist's sense of life that controls and integrates his work, directing the innumerable choices he has to make, from the choice of subject to the subtlest details of style. It is the viewer's or reader's sense of life that responds to a work of art by a complex, yet automatic reaction of acceptance and approval, or rejection and condemnation.

This does not mean that a sense of life is a valid criterion of esthetic merit, either for the artist or the viewer. A sense of life is not infallible. But a sense of life is the source of art, the psychological mechanism which enables man to create a realm such as art.

Rand next says that the emotion "is not an emotion in the ordinary meaning of the term." Instead, it's "a 'sense' or a 'feel,'" but it's "automatically immediate and it has an intense, profoundly personal (yet undefined) value-meaning to the individual experiencing it."

The value involved is life, and the words naming the emotion are: "This is what life means to me."

Regardless of the nature or content of an artist's metaphysical views, what an art work expresses, fundamentally, under all of its lesser aspects, is: "This is (or is not) life as I see it."

Ellen

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Rand next describes what she says is "the psycho-epistemological process of communication between an artist and a viewer or reader":

[T]he artist starts with a broad abstraction which he has to concretize, to bring into reality by means of the appropriate particulars; the viewer perceives the particulars, integrates them and grasps the abstraction from which they came, thus completing the circle. [....]

This does not mean that communication is the primary purpose of an artist: his primary purpose is to bring his view of man and of existence into reality; but to be brought into reality, it has to be translated into objective (therefore communicable) terms.

Ellen

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The next couple paragraphs directly bridge to the passage Jonathan quoted (post #23).

In Chapter 1 ["The Psycho-Epistemology of Art" (originally published in the April 1965 The Objectivist], I discussed why man needs art - why, as a being guided by conceptual knowledge, he needs the power to summon the long chain and complex total of his metaphysical concepts into his immediate conscious awareness. "He needs a comprehensive view of existence to integrate his values, to choose his goals, to plan his future, to maintain the unity and coherence of his life." Man's sense of life provides him with the integrated sum of his metaphysical abstractions; art concretizes them and allows him to perceive - to experience - their immediate reality.

She then says that "The function of psychological integrations is to make certain connections automatic [....]. And that "There are many special or 'cross-filed' chains of abstractions (of integrated concepts) in man's mind. Cognitive abstractions are the fundamental chain [...].

And then:

Cognitive abstractions are formed by the criterion of: what is essential? (epistemologically essential to distinguish one class of existents from all others). Normative abstractions are formed by the criterion of: what is good? Esthetic abstractions are formed by the criterion of: what is important?

See post #23 for the continuation.

Ellen

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Ellen, You're doing such a great job with this, I swear, I believed for a moment you haven't come to bury Rand, but to praise her! :smile:

A good starting point: "instantaneous". I cannot know how everyone else sees a picture. Briefly, I take in everything at one sweep or two, immediately. That first 'gulp' is often (not always) most revealing. Then I linger on parts, down to the fine details - and finally return to the over all picture. This can't be an uncommon method, for most viewers.

Yup, I try to find "the importance" of the image. What is its centre of interest? Its setting? How do all the parts inter-relate? My first sweep of that Vermeer reveals extraordinarily luminescent window light falling on a hyper-realistic tableau of bread and milk on a table, the milk maid's creamy skin on her muscular arm - but - then, fading further to her stocky and already matronly figure, her less distinct and mannish face, in surroundings of drabness.

The basic question I ask, is why? Why render some of the image beautifully, with such incredible skill, but use a very ordinary hard-worn woman set in such gloom and dinginess?

One answer, that this is what Vermeer saw around him, can't suffice. The artist can transcend his environment at will.

Anyway, the intention of this artist is not what I'm getting at for now. I'm trying to show that since we are hierarchical beings, with hierarchical value systems, a work of art is also viewed hierarchically, and we integrate it that way into concepts. From the first general "sweep", to the detailed examination. Like we do with all of existence. And it hardly matters if the artist himself acknowledges this explicitly, I'm certain any artist down deep still knows it. One may stop anywhere in that hierarchy - say, take away with one the aesthetic abstractions from a work and feel satisfied with their inherent beauty, alone. I think Rand took that ability to concretise beauty as almost assumed - which a master, by definition, could and should be able to accomplish. But what else? And what else after that?

Beauty by itself can't satisfy a hungry spirit for long. The "normative" and "cognitive" abstractions are what last in our concepts. I'll add that I'm using her words for something I could only sense - long before reading her theory on art.

Thanks for those Vermeers - the link to a slide show of his works shows his brilliant talent.

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I actually like the idea of aesthetic abstractions, except they sound an awful lot like hierarchy.

What is important?

That is the basis of establishing the standard for hierarchies.

But this is not restricted to art.

I would not call choosing one act as more important than another in a whole lot of cases an aesthetic decision. For example, within the context of self-improvement, it is more important for me to read a book on finance than it is to read a children's book about pirates. Also, a warm coat in the winter is more important than a bathing suit. I don't believe that is a difference arrived at by aesthetic abstraction.

I want to do some thinking on this...

Michael

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One more thing occurred to me.

Rand uses the essential characteristic of an entity to determine the differentia in its definition. This outright implies that such a characteristic is more important to the definition that the other characteristics in the genus.

I find it hard to call the identification of that importance an aesthetic abstraction.

Michael

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Here's a piece of writing that easily qualifies as a work according to Objectivism (it is a selective recreation of reality according to its creator's metaphysical value-judgments):

Mitch swaggered into his company's press room to announce that, after years of dedicated struggle, he had finally heroically succeeded in inventing a machine that ran on abundant and free energy sources, and would solve all of the world's problems. It did everything from convert stuff like dirt, CO2, dead bugs and toxic waste into food and medicine, to play chess way better than the best chess-playing humans could.

Mitch radiated handsomeness, rationally earned self-confidence, and strength, along with lots of other awesome traits and virtues that are too numerous to list here. He spoke only briefly to the press. "The universe is intelligible," he said, "and, as my success at inventing shows, man has the power of choice. He can choose his goals, achieve them through hard work and intelligent decisions, and he can find happiness."

Then he smile, leapt into the air with joy, and went home and started to think about what to invent next!

The End.


So, is the above great art? Doesn't Rand's stated Objectivist method of judging art require that it be judged to be great? After all, it very clearly communicates "metaphysical value-judgmetns" via a stylized, selective re-creation of reality. There's no mistaking its "esthetic abstraction" (its presentation of "what's important"). As for style, the only thing that Objectivism considers relevant is the clarity with which the message was delivered, and the message is pounded home with absolute clarity. Therefore it's great art.

J

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My first sweep of that Vermeer reveals extraordinarily luminescent window light falling on a hyper-realistic tableau of bread and milk on a table, the milk maid's creamy skin on her muscular arm - but - then, fading further to her stocky and already matronly figure, her less distinct and mannish face, in surroundings of drabness.

The above is a great example of the stupidity of people following Rand's attempts at applying her literary aesthetics to visual art while avoiding "outside considerations," willfully ignoring context, and mistaking their own subjective tastes for objective judgments. Tony has taken his uninformed, modern, subjective preferences in beauty, femininity, fashion, culture and race, and has anachronistically imposed them on a past culture about which he knows nothing, and cares to know nothing. Does it matter to Tony that the maid would actually be considered something of a temptress to the people of Vermeer's time? Hell no. Vermeer was apparently supposed to guess at what the subjective tastes and cultural conditions of Tony's future world would be, and alter his paintings accordingly to satisfy Tony.

Surroundings of drabness? By what standard is Tony asserting that the surroundings are drab? Does he have any knowledge of the construction styles, decor, technologies and standards of living of Vermeer's place and time?

So let's apply Tony's idiotic, anachronistic method to Atlas Shrugged: In the novel, the characters use things like dial phones, snail mail, typewriters and mimeograph machines rather than smartphones, texting, desktop computers and printers, and they travel by train rather than by aircraft! WTF? Why would these alleged "heroes" surround themselves with such drab old stuff! What psychological problems did their creator have, and why was she so intent on pushing her "metaphysical" vision of drabness and the refusal to let go of archaic technology?

The basic question I ask, is why? Why render some of the image beautifully, with such incredible skill, but use a very ordinary hard-worn woman set in such gloom and dinginess?

One answer, that this is what Vermeer saw around him, can't suffice. The artist can transcend his environment at will.

Another answer is that Tony is incapable of going beyond the severe limits of his own subjective tastes, and is so shallow as to be unable to consider the possibility that someone from a different time and place might have different tastes than he does.

J

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All silly stuff, actually. It's either false, or a false dichotomy.

I reject nearly all the above. But I didn't expect a 'charitable read'.

Fact is, an artist chooses with purpose what he brings into his frame.

Fact is, the viewer is fully entitled to(indeed, HAS to) question, why this, why not that?

HIS purpose is to understand and elicit as deeply as possible.

Notwithstanding that an art work is an "end in itself" - it is also man made, not some mystical entity never to be questioned (except by the art experts...) - and, one that must be gratefully accepted from 'on high'.

An art work is not an entity beyond understanding, over and above man's mind. An artist wishes to be understood, for starters. That a piece can be complex and multi-layered is true; but the ridiculous false emotions/mind dichotomy applied to art's appreciation, is not even arguable.

I think this was Rand's central hubris to her critics: That she dared to ask "Why"? And to link the purposes of artist and viewer.

Because I don't think her Manifesto on art is about "art", per se. It is essentially about man's consciousness, that of the creator, and that of the perceiver.

And if it could be erroneously argued that she should have stuck to literature, because that was all she was an authority on, they are missing the point: That nobody before has combined art with consciousness in such depth. The metaphysics, epistemology and ethics; the cognitive and the normative (in art!) - as she dared to do. All "the good" aimed to the (hierarchical) pinnacle of art as she saw it, Romanticism, which as she described, portrays man as "a being of volitional consciousness".

I'm personally leaning to the conviction that if a newcomer to Objectivism could entirely grasp The Romantic Manifesto - first - he'd understand some three-quarters of the philosophy - before even getting to the rest.

==============================

Fact is, standards of beauty have not changed much. Beauty is beauty. "Different time and place" has only a little validity as argument. I don't expect to see a Lamborghini in the background. If it's not already inductively established, one can see it from Vermeer's other works - some other settings, and the aesthetic standards of his time.

Fact is, if Vermeer wanted a prettier and sprightlier milkmaid - (or a less cell-like room) he could have 'had her'. A lumpy woman is not going to be "temptress" in any period. He could have had a beautiful landscape, glimpsed through an open door. Etc...

Otherwise, some might ludicrously argue that his scenes had to be depicted "truthfully" - as a photojournalist should.

After all, the impact on an observer is the whole rationale of an artist's craft - and if not always fully consciously created (as is the case often) it then offers us an insight into the artist himself.

But no. Of course, the artist's sense of life is never to be assessed either...

:smile:

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All silly stuff, actually. It's either false, or a false dichotomy.

I reject nearly all the above. But I didn't expect a 'charitable read'.

I reject your rejecting of all of the above.

Fact is, an artist chooses with purpose what he brings into his frame.

Fact is, the viewer is fully entitled to(indeed, HAS to) question, why this, why not that?

HIS purpose is to understand and elicit as deeply as possible.

Fact is, you don't know what artists do or don't do. You simply believe what Ayn Rand told you to believe about what she thought that artist should or should not do.

Notwithstanding that an art work is an "end in itself" - it is also man made, not some mystical entity never to be questioned (except by the art experts...) - and, one that must be gratefully accepted from 'on high'.

Where are you getting this crap? Are you having a conversation with an imaginary person? No one has said anything about art being a mystical entity never to be questioned. In fact, my point was that you should consider exploring the possibility of asking deeper questions than the ridiculously shallow and limited ones that you've been asking.

An art work is not an entity beyond understanding, over and above man's mind. An artist wishes to be understood, for starters. That a piece can be complex and multi-layered is true; but the ridiculous false emotions/mind dichotomy applied to art's appreciation, is not even arguable.

Who are you arguing with? It sounds as if you're arguing with someone who isn't posting on this thread, and maybe someone who lives inside your head?

I think this was Rand's central hubris to her critics: That she dared to ask "Why"? And to link the purposes of artist and viewer.

Actually, Rand did not dare to ask "why" when it came to the non-literary arts. Instead, she irrationally tried to force her theory of literature onto them. Her approach wasn't one of inquiry, but of posing as having answers.

...they are missing the point: That nobody before has combined art with consciousness in such depth.

How would you know? You haven't studied anyone who wrote on aesthetics before Rand. Neither did Rand. You don't know who said the same things that Rand said prior to her saying them. Rand is the only person you've studied.

The metaphysics, epistemology and ethics; the cognitive and the normative (in art!) - as she dared to do. All "the good" aimed to the (hierarchical) pinnacle of art as she saw it, Romanticism, which as she described, portrays man as "a being of volitional consciousness".

I think that we all know that Rand loved the idea of art being used for a moral purpose. But, unlike you, she was able to distinguish between ethical and aesthetic judgments. She understood that works of non-Romanticism could be judged to be aesthetically greater than works of Romanticism despite being judged to be ethically inferior.

I'm personally leaning to the conviction that if a newcomer to Objectivism could entirely grasp The Romantic Manifesto - first - he'd understand some three-quarters of the philosophy - before even getting to the rest.

I think you might be right there. Since Rand actually began with an aesthetic point of view and built her philosophy around it, I think that you could be correct that newcomers to her philosophy might do better by starting with the aesthetics too.

Fact is, standards of beauty have not changed much. Beauty is beauty. "Different time and place" has only a little validity as argument.

Fact is, here's an image of the Three Graces by Rubens:

rubens43.jpg

Fact is, you're just making stuff up in your ignorance. Fact is, cultural notions of beauty change constantly. Fact is, even Rand identified the fact that different peoples will have different standards of beauty. Fact is, not only do different times and cultures have different notions of beauty, but different individuals have vastly different notions of beauty.

I don't expect to see a Lamborghini in the background. If it's not already inductively established, one can see it from Vermeer's other works - some other settings, and the aesthetic standards of his time.

Vermeer's other works also include people who are generally not considered to be attractive by modern American standards. You should bother to take the time to look at them prior to claiming to know what they contain.

Fact is, if Vermeer wanted a prettier and sprightlier milkmaid - (or a less cell-like room) he could have 'had her'.

Fact is, prettier to whom? To Tony? Fact is, Vermeer must have had tastes exactly like Tony's? Fact is, Tony's tastes are universal?

A lumpy woman is not going to be "temptress" in any period.

How about the time period in which Rubens lived?

He could have had a beautiful landscape, glimpsed through an open door. Etc.

Here we have another example of one of the major comical pitfalls of the Objectivist Esthetics: Unaccomplished ignoramuses advising past geniuses on how they could have done better.

Otherwise, some might ludicrously argue that his scenes had to be depicted "truthfully" - as a photojournalist should.

Are you still having a conversation with an imaginary person? Who are you talking to and about? No one here is making these arguments that you're fighting against.

After all, the impact on an observer is the whole rationale of an artist's craft - and if not always fully consciously created (as is the case often) it then offers us an insight into the artist himself.

Which observer? Observers other than Tony have seen the kitchen maid as attractive. They recognize the "lumpiness" as being an issue of the clothing style of the time and of the specific culture's general range of tastes.

But no. Of course, the artist's sense of life is never to be assessed either...

I've asked you to explain what methods you use when claiming to know the artist's "sense of life" and his "metaphysical values." I've asked how you would objectively establish as facts the daffy things you claim to know about others based on your shallow, Rand inspired limitations when it comes to art. So far you've done nothing but evade the questions.

Here are some examples of the questions that I've asked recently and that you've evaded. Please answer them now.

From here:

Please give us some examples of visual works which you think qualify as art, and explain how you've rationally/scientifically tested and verified the fact that you haven't subjectively misread the work and that the artists did not fail in communicating their "views" to you. Please describe the method that you used in discovering what "view" the artist intended to convey.

Brighter Objectivists than you have had a great deal of difficulty grasping and answering the same challenge, so I'll give you the same additional help that I gave them in understanding what I'm after: When testing whether or not a means of communication has succeeded in delivering a message clearly from one party to another, the message that was received must be compared, by some means outside of the means that is being tested, to the message that was intended to be sent. That's very simple, basic science. Understand?

See, if the test message that is sent is "ZXMD," but the person operating the receiver hears, "CFNB," in order to determine if the intended message was received properly, we'd have to have some method of verifying what message was sent. See what I'm saying? The guy running the receiver couldn't just declare that he's certain that he heard "CFNB" as clear as a bell, and therefore he's absolutely certain that "CFNB" was what was transmitted.

So, if the artist is the transmitter, and you and I and everyone else are receivers, by what method do you propose that we determine that the transmitter and receivers succeeded, versus that the transmitter and only some of the receivers succeeded, versus that only the transmitter but none of the receivers succeeded, versus that the transmitter failed?

From here:

As I asked Tony on the other thread, how do we test and verify anyone's opinion that Vermeer had a case of "bleak metaphysics" versus that the person giving the opinion is in error to the point of being laughably inept at visual aesthetics?

J

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Jonathan,

Regarding your post #33, I think you're inadvertently falling into a Randian trap yourself over the issue of "intentions."

Picking up from Jules' photography thread, I'm not sure if you saw my post #128 there. I'll excerpt:

[....]

A couple specific examples which have occurred to me: Vermeer and Georgia O'Keefe.

There's very little - close to zero - information about Vermeer's approach to art, or about his life in general. Yet I think his work can unhesitatingly be classified as art.

Some of Georgia O'Keefe's work strongly suggests to many viewers (including me) sexual allusions which she adamantly disclaimed having any intention of suggesting.

[....]

Just as I think that Vermeer's work can be classified as "art" without any statement from him to the effect that he thought of what he was doing as "art," I think that one can dismiss Rand's objections to Vermeer's subjects whether one knows "outside considerations" of time, place, fashions in beauty or not.

To an extent, just looking at the Milkmaid painting, one does know that it isn't our era, unless it's a painting of someone in costume dress and set in a far-from-modern kitchen. But is there any need to know Vermeer's "preferences in beauty, femininity, fashion, culture and race"? Or "if the maid would actually be considered something of a temptress to the people of Vermeer's time"?

Would you consider Rand's objections valid if we could ascertain that Vermeer, like Tony, thought of the woman as Tony describes her?

[...] a very ordinary hard-worn woman set in such gloom and dinginess?

Ellen

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Otherwise, some might ludicrously argue that his scenes had to be depicted "truthfully" - as a photojournalist should.

They did have to be depicted "truthfully" - although a posed "truthfulness" (most of them) - if what he was after was messing around with a camera obscura.

Ellen

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Ellen, You're doing such a great job with this, I swear, I believed for a moment you haven't come to bury Rand, but to praise her! :smile:

A good starting point: "instantaneous". I cannot know how everyone else sees a picture. Briefly, I take in everything at one sweep or two, immediately. That first 'gulp' is often (not always) most revealing. Then I linger on parts, down to the fine details - and finally return to the over all picture. This can't be an uncommon method, for most viewers.

Yup, I try to find "the importance" of the image. What is its centre of interest? Its setting? How do all the parts inter-relate? My first sweep of that Vermeer reveals extraordinarily luminescent window light falling on a hyper-realistic tableau of bread and milk on a table, the milk maid's creamy skin on her muscular arm - but - then, fading further to her stocky and already matronly figure, her less distinct and mannish face, in surroundings of drabness.

The basic question I ask, is why? Why render some of the image beautifully, with such incredible skill, but use a very ordinary hard-worn woman set in such gloom and dinginess?

One answer, that this is what Vermeer saw around him, can't suffice. The artist can transcend his environment at will.

Anyway, the intention of this artist is not what I'm getting at for now. I'm trying to show that since we are hierarchical beings, with hierarchical value systems, a work of art is also viewed hierarchically, and we integrate it that way into concepts. From the first general "sweep", to the detailed examination. Like we do with all of existence. And it hardly matters if the artist himself acknowledges this explicitly, I'm certain any artist down deep still knows it. One may stop anywhere in that hierarchy - say, take away with one the aesthetic abstractions from a work and feel satisfied with their inherent beauty, alone. I think Rand took that ability to concretise beauty as almost assumed - which a master, by definition, could and should be able to accomplish. But what else? And what else after that?

Beauty by itself can't satisfy a hungry spirit for long. The "normative" and "cognitive" abstractions are what last in our concepts. I'll add that I'm using her words for something I could only sense - long before reading her theory on art.

Thanks for those Vermeers - the link to a slide show of his works shows his brilliant talent.

I don't think this can be improved on.

--Brant

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All silly stuff, actually. It's either false, or a false dichotomy.

I reject nearly all the above. But I didn't expect a 'charitable read'.

Fact is, an artist chooses with purpose what he brings into his frame.

Fact is, the viewer is fully entitled to(indeed, HAS to) question, why this, why not that?

HIS purpose is to understand and elicit as deeply as possible.

Notwithstanding that an art work is an "end in itself" - it is also man made, not some mystical entity never to be questioned (except by the art experts...) - and, one that must be gratefully accepted from 'on high'.

An art work is not an entity beyond understanding, over and above man's mind. An artist wishes to be understood, for starters. That a piece can be complex and multi-layered is true; but the ridiculous false emotions/mind dichotomy applied to art's appreciation, is not even arguable.

I think this was Rand's central hubris to her critics: That she dared to ask "Why"? And to link the purposes of artist and viewer.

Because I don't think her Manifesto on art is about "art", per se. It is essentially about man's consciousness, that of the creator, and that of the perceiver.

And if it could be erroneously argued that she should have stuck to literature, because that was all she was an authority on, they are missing the point: That nobody before has combined art with consciousness in such depth. The metaphysics, epistemology and ethics; the cognitive and the normative (in art!) - as she dared to do. All "the good" aimed to the (hierarchical) pinnacle of art as she saw it, Romanticism, which as she described, portrays man as "a being of volitional consciousness".

I'm personally leaning to the conviction that if a newcomer to Objectivism could entirely grasp The Romantic Manifesto - first - he'd understand some three-quarters of the philosophy - before even getting to the rest.

==============================

Fact is, standards of beauty have not changed much. Beauty is beauty. "Different time and place" has only a little validity as argument. I don't expect to see a Lamborghini in the background. If it's not already inductively established, one can see it from Vermeer's other works - some other settings, and the aesthetic standards of his time.

Fact is, if Vermeer wanted a prettier and sprightlier milkmaid - (or a less cell-like room) he could have 'had her'. A lumpy woman is not going to be "temptress" in any period. He could have had a beautiful landscape, glimpsed through an open door. Etc...

Otherwise, some might ludicrously argue that his scenes had to be depicted "truthfully" - as a photojournalist should.

After all, the impact on an observer is the whole rationale of an artist's craft - and if not always fully consciously created (as is the case often) it then offers us an insight into the artist himself.

But no. Of course, the artist's sense of life is never to be assessed either...

:smile:

Rand deserves this.

--Brant

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I follow these art discussions with great interest, but only tiptoe in with trepidation.....

I had never seen Vermeer's milkmaid painting before before clicking the link in this thread. The very first thing I noticed was the navy blue detail on the light blue tile at the base of the wall. I don't know what I'm supposed to learn of the artist's metaphysical value judgments based on that immediate observation, but I do have a question for Tony. If Vermeer intended for the room to be cell-like, why did he include that pretty detail?

On another note, I've often heard and read (a bit) about how Vermeer brilliantly painted light. I look at his paintings, and I see nothing special about the light in them. I'm jaded by my 21st century exposure to Pixar movies, high-def portraiture, and an overload of super-cool makeup and modeling effects. I mean, I'm the person who pointed out the tu-tu a girl was wearing walking down a street in the French Quarter, but didn't even notice that she was naked from the waist up. Her airbrushed "blouse" was just that well done. Which leads to my next questions. If it's possible for me to be unimpressed by Vermeer's technique because I'm comparing it to my 21st century standards, why isn't it also possible that one might be unimpressed by Vermeer's subject matter when comparing it to 21st century standards? I've obviously misunderstood what it meant at the time for Vermeer to technically produce such work. Why isn't it also obvious that one could misunderstand what he intended to convey at the time in that work?

More importantly, why does it matter so much to some people if I see something entirely different in a painting than someone else does? Have I subtracted something from another's experience by having a different experience of my own? Those are rhetorical questions.

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Would you consider Rand's objections valid if we could ascertain that Vermeer, like Tony, thought of the woman as Tony describes her?

[...] a very ordinary hard-worn woman set in such gloom and dinginess?

Ellen

Ellen,

Getting lost in the shuffle again, is the ~over all feel and look~ of a painting. Breaking it down to its details is a red herring I think, that defeats the over all intention, which is simply to take the art in, same as you'd do on first meeting a person. (And later, narrowing down his specifics).

Man's eyes are a universal; man's consciousness is universal; man's need of art, is universal. I would think every artist knows this, and acts accordingly. If the subject and other components of a picture (and their treatment)are what's important to the artist, they show what's important through his eyes and consciousness to us, the viewers. Then, one agrees with his view, or partially accepts it, or declines it.

If one needs a course in art ed to criticize it(either way), then I'd say the artist has pretty much missed his purpose or deliberately concealed it.

A youngster can comprehend the "over all look and feel" of a very good picture by a master, and respond to it. (I said this earlier from personal observation). THAT'S its value - its instant appeal, acknowledgement and instant future recall, many years later. BECAUSE, it is indicative of, and conveys "something" - rather than nothing, rather than anything-to-anybody...from the artist. That an artist may be Romanticist or Naturalist is irrelevant here, if he's aesthetically great and his view is essentially clearly depicted (not a derivative parody like J. earlier on Romanticist prose) - for me, I can take something of value from all of them: As you'll remember, I've said so previously, often enough; in fact, so often that J. should and does know this well.

Again, this is not about details or techniques etc. in artworks. While I emphatically don't hold myself to be an expert on Rand's thesis in TRM (and have read only a handful of scholars that are - Barbara was one) or as an art critic, I know it is the affirmation of man's consciousness (vis-a-vis art) which was Rand's focus and intent; it's that that I applaud, and from this I won't be distracted.

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There is no "over all look and feel" without the details, though, is there? Without the details, there is no artwork, so how can those details be irrelevant? What led you to the conclusion that the milkmaid was in a cell-like room? Was it the bare walls (a detail)? Was it the color of the walls (a detail)? I know that my conclusion that she was not in a cell-like room was arrived at because of the tiles (a detail).

Also, I'm not sure your way of viewing art is as universal as you believe. As I said, my eye was immediately drawn to the particulars of a small area of that painting. I didn't simply take it in, not in the way you described. Then again, I also rarely take that approach when meeting a person for the first time. I tend to always notice something specific about a person right off the bat.

Disclaimer: I have no credentials related to art, art history, or art appreciation. I have never taken a class beyond what was required in high school, and I'm pretty sure my scrapbooking doesn't really count. I also don't read books about art. I do, however, live in an area with lots of artists, and I count a few of them among my friends.

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Jonathan,

Regarding your post #33, I think you're inadvertently falling into a Randian trap yourself over the issue of "intentions."

No. Earlier I was falling into the Randian trap over the issue of intentions being relevant to something's qualifying as art, but you helped me to pull out of that nosedive (and I'm still in the process of rethinking my position). In a bout of unclear thinking, possibly due somewhat to medication, I somehow tricked myself into buying into the argument that I was exploring as being applicable to Objectivism.

But I still think that the Objectivist Esthetics does require precise knowledge of the artist's intentions, since it demands that art must communicate (communication is the act of successfully conveying intended information from one party to another) and that viewers be able to identify the "artist's meaning." Anything which fails to deliver an intelligible message of precisely intended meaning "ceases to be art" according to Objectivism, and anything which was not intended to precisely convey a specific "metaphysical" meaning could not qualify.

It also forbids illustrations from qualifying as art, and therefore is very detailed in its concern about intentions being extremely relevant to the categorization of works as art.

Picking up from Jules' photography thread, I'm not sure if you saw my post #128 there. I'll excerpt:

Ellen Stuttle, on 06 May 2014 - 2:17 PM, said:

[....]

A couple specific examples which have occurred to me: Vermeer and Georgia O'Keefe.

There's very little - close to zero - information about Vermeer's approach to art, or about his life in general. Yet I think his work can unhesitatingly be classified as art.

Some of Georgia O'Keefe's work strongly suggests to many viewers (including me) sexual allusions which she adamantly disclaimed having any intention of suggesting.

[....]

Just as I think that Vermeer's work can be classified as "art" without any statement from him to the effect that he thought of what he was doing as "art,"

I agree that we don't need the outside information, but technically, we do have enough information about Vermeer to know that his work was intended to be art. We know that he sold his work to art dealers, we know that he was a member of the Guild of St. Luke, we know that he altered his compositions for aesthetic effect after they had already been underpainted onto the canvas (in ways which deviate from reality rather than conform to it), etc.

I think that one can dismiss Rand's objections to Vermeer's subjects whether one knows "outside considerations" of time, place, fashions in beauty or not.

Right, but my point was that if we accept, for the sake of argument, the Objectivist Esthetics' stated standards of judgment, it is irrational to expect, as Rand and Tony do, that Vermeer should have satisfied their subjective tastes and modern notions of culture, standards of living and surroundings. I listed some of the reasons that Rand and Tony's judgments are subjective, irrational and unrealistic, but of course you're right that there could be many more reasons, including those to be found without resorting to referring to "outside considerations."

To an extent, just looking at the Milkmaid painting, one does know that it isn't our era, unless it's a painting of someone in costume dress and set in a far-from-modern kitchen. But is there any need to know Vermeer's "preferences in beauty, femininity, fashion, culture and race"? Or "if the maid would actually be considered something of a temptress to the people of Vermeer's time"?

There's no need to know Vermeer's preferences or the common standards of his culture unless someone like Rand or Tony is claiming to know Vermeer's "metaphysical values," his "sense of life," and his psychological or "inner conflicts" based on their personal Rorschach-like interpretations of his work.

Would you consider Rand's objections valid if we could ascertain that Vermeer, like Tony, thought of the woman as Tony describes her?

whYNOT, on 13 May 2014 - 6:08 PM, said:

[...] a very ordinary hard-worn woman set in such gloom and dinginess?

No, because the woman's appearance is just one element of the painting.

I think that we could say that Rand and Tony's views would be valid if we could interview Vermeer, and he were to say, "Yeah, they nailed it! Good job at interpretation! I have a brilliantly sharp mind, as Rand and Tony detected in my style, but I've put it to miserable use due to my psychological problems, inner conflicts and general immorality. I view man as incapable of finding happiness and as a plaything of fate. I'm anti-life and anti-existence, and Rand and Tony caught me out where I somehow managed to fool everyone else."

J

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"My way"? Did I recommend that everybody should do it so? You're getting stuck here. If you like to go from details to "over all", that's your way. Since when did I say detail was not important?

Do you see the milkmaid and background as lively and cheerful, or as basic and utilitarian?

Do you, or do you not, look to take in the complete picture, ultimately - with the intent of finding value for your life in it? That's the main question.

You don't have to be "expert" on art to appreciate it, is mostly what I'm saying. That notion has elitist or mystical premises. Just your eyes and your mind are enough. One can't trust them, what does one trust?

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But I still think that the Objectivist Esthetics does require precise knowledge of the artist's intentions, since it demands that art must communicate (communication is the act of successfully conveying intended information from one party to another) and that viewers be able to identify the "artist's meaning." Anything which fails to deliver an intelligible message of precisely intended meaning "ceases to be art" according to Objectivism, and anything which was not intended to precisely convey a specific "metaphysical" meaning could not qualify.

I agree that the Objectivist Esthetics does require as you say, but the Randian trap I was warning against is that of accepting the specified requirements. You seemed to me to be accepting these requirements yourself. I gather from your subsequent remarks that you were using Rand's requirements "for the sake of argument," to point out problems IF they're accepted.

Ellen

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There is no "over all look and feel" without the details, though, is there? Without the details, there is no artwork, so how can those details be irrelevant? What led you to the conclusion that the milkmaid was in a cell-like room? Was it the bare walls (a detail)? Was it the color of the walls (a detail)? I know that my conclusion that she was not in a cell-like room was arrived at because of the tiles (a detail).

Also, I'm not sure your way of viewing art is as universal as you believe. As I said, my eye was immediately drawn to the particulars of a small area of that painting. I didn't simply take it in, not in the way you described. Then again, I also rarely take that approach when meeting a person for the first time. I tend to always notice something specific about a person right off the bat.

Disclaimer: I have no credentials related to art, art history, or art appreciation. I have never taken a class beyond what was required in high school, and I'm pretty sure my scrapbooking doesn't really count. I also don't read books about art. I do, however, live in an area with lots of artists, and I count a few of them among my friends.

"My way"? Did I recommend that everybody should do it so? You're getting stuck here. If you like to go from details to "over all", that's your way. Since when did I say detail was not important?

Do you see the milkmaid and background as lively and cheerful, or as basic and utilitarian?

Do you, or do you not, look to take in the complete picture, ultimately - with the intent of finding value for your life in it? That's the main question.

You don't have to be "expert" on art to appreciate it, is mostly what I'm saying. That notion has elitist or mystical premises. Just your eyes and your mind are enough. One can't trust them, what does one trust?

You said earlier in post #41 that "breaking it down to its details is a red herring... that defeats the overall intention." I took that mean that you don't feel details are important. I wouldn't say that I see the milkmaid as lively and cheerful or basic and utilitarian. I see it as warm and homey, comforting. I see in it myself as I think my son sees me when I'm making his breakfast in our kitchen. I arrived at that because of those tiles, because they make me think of the tiles in my kitchen, albeit my tiles are on the wall and not the baseboard.

I suppose I'm reading too much into your posts as my impression is that you do think your way is more correct.

I don't necessarily need to take in the complete picture when viewing art in order for me to find value in it. I have one piece that I love, not because of the complete picture, but because there's a mistake in it that I find particularly endearing.

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As I said, my eye was immediately drawn to the particulars of a small area of that painting. I didn't simply take it in, not in the way you described.

Which area of the painting? (I'm betting, the area the painting is focalized on. :smile:) (Although maybe not, maybe the tiles.)

Ellen

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"My way"? Did I recommend that everybody should do it so? You're getting stuck here. If you like to go from details to "over all", that's your way. Since when did I say detail was not important?

Deanna seems to be saying that you appear to arbitrarily ignore elements in artworks which don't support your predetermined conclusions. If that's what she's saying, then I agree with her. Your method seems to be to seek to find something in artworks which you can intentionally interpret as representing something bad, and to therefore condemn the art and its creator. The interesting thing is that the exact same things are completely ignored in Rand's work, even though they actually exist there and are prominent, where they don't exist where you imagine seeing them.

For some reason, every artist other than Rand is expected to create perfectly beautiful fictional people (beautiful according only to Rand's and Tony's tastes) leaping about in joy, and existing in sparklingly clean environments in a pain-free, conflict-free, struggle-free world, and if the artist don't create like that, then they are accused of pissing away their talents by focusing on "drab" naturalism. On the other hand, Rand can write about people living in muck and oppression, and of their failing to escape it, and yet be praised for her Romanticism, sunny sense of life and metaphysical values.

And this is called bringing "objectivity" to aesthetics.

Do you see the milkmaid and background as lively and cheerful, or as basic and utilitarian?

In your mind, are those the only possible interpretations? How about "contemplative and serene"? How about as "finding happiness and enjoyment in existence"?

Do you, or do you not, look to take in the complete picture, ultimately - with the intent of finding value for your life in it? That's the main question.

You don't appear to do that. With artworks that were not created by Rand, you appear to search the complete picture for something by which to condemn the artist.

You don't have to be "expert" on art to appreciate it, is mostly what I'm saying. That notion has elitist or mystical premises. Just your eyes and your mind are enough. One can't trust them, what does one trust?

No one's claiming that people must be experts on art to appreciate it. The only area where some expertise would be required is that of people claiming to do philosophy of aesthetics as it pertains to the various art forms. In other words, if a person wanted to have her ideas considered seriously on the subjects of, say, photography or painting or music, she should probably study those subjects in depth rather than just blurting out the first opinions that popped into her head.

J

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As I said, my eye was immediately drawn to the particulars of a small area of that painting. I didn't simply take it in, not in the way you described.

Which area of the painting? (I'm betting, the area the painting is focalized on. :smile:) (Although maybe not, maybe the tiles.)

Ellen

Yes, the blue tiles along the base of the wall. They each have a darker blue detail on them. I can't imagine that is supposed to be the focal point of the painting. :smile:

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Breaking it down to its details is a red herring I think, that defeats the over all intention, which is simply to take the art in, same as you'd do on first meeting a person. (And later, narrowing down his specifics).

Whose discussion of details was I quoting? You change your rules a lot.

Ellen

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