Michelle Marder Kamhi's "Who Says That's Art?"


Ellen Stuttle

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Is a "masculinized leftest" a contradiction in terms?

More like an oxymoron. :wink:

Females who failed to become women are naturally leftist because they think collectively and tend to be dependent on the government. When that female nature resides within a male who failed to mature into an adult man, you have today's emasculated liberal male.

Greg

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It's true that all art is essentially "abstract," but that's not the particular being discussed here except maybe for music. It helps to think of a two-layered cake with the first layer being abstract and the second layer maybe abstract but of a different kind, especially if visual. If you wish, with music being only one layer.

--Brant

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The "abstract" appearance of an artwork is all to do with the rapidity with which one 'abstractifies' it mentally. I think that's what gives the false impression. Because one intuitively and instantly recognizes that any art looked at is a 'special instance of reality' - by the artist's presentation with close focus on what is important (to him), divorced from all inessentials, and emphasized by his technical mastery - I think it's a much faster, more intense process than grasping and conceptualizing random instances from 'real life'.

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Using her analogy of physical entities and melodies (which she called "musical entities"), she could have (not saying she did) realized that melodic music was like figural representational art, and further that since non-melodic music was still music (and thus still art), non-figural painting &c was still painting (and thus still art). This would be a logical pathway for her to revise (via Peikoff and, as often, without announcement) her position about whether abstract art is art. (Did she ever say it wasn't? Not sure I saw her say that in so many words. She only ruled out "smears," which is granted a rather vague, rubbery differentia for non-art.)

REB

Ha, I thought "smears" covered it pretty well - "I don't think of you" applied to art? Funny I don't recall if she said simply that abstract art wasn't art.

I am continuing with Kahmi's book, and I love her approach to these issues, and it so not my approach - actually that is a kind of interesting thing. I've done abstract color studies of creating currents of light and color as studies for the atmosphere of a figurative works. But when I think of doing an abstract work for itself, my mind becomes paralyzed with boredom - reminds me of picking a color for painting a wall. Combined with the few other things I know about art and art history, it is not a pressing personal concern. But Kahmi is going much deeper by going into the writings or quotes of the leading abstract artists, looking at the purposes of abstract design in other cultures, going into the psychology of how healthy minds work with perceptions and connections, and comparing that to the abstract artists views. And the elephant in the room was the abstract paintings were still viewed as decorative works that went with the couch, and the abstract artists kept insisting that that is not what they were about.

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Michelle Kamhi:

"Another type of "decoding" that has become all too common in postmodernist culture is far more problematic, however. It seeks to interpret art in terms of presumably hidden biases regarding matters of gender, race, social status, and political power, which are said to be part of a work's "subtext." But its conclusions are often of dubious validity.

An exhibition of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum some years ago contained a telling instance of such questionable "decoding." It concerned the painting Ernesta (Child with Nurse), created in 1894 by the American artist Cecilia Beaux (18551942). The image depicts a bright-eyed little girl standing next to her nursemaid, whose hand she grips. The top of the nursemaid's figure is cut off from just below the waist, so that her face is unseen. A zealous curator's wall text prompted viewers to regard the image as revealing the marginalization of nannies in the bourgeois society of the late nineteenth century.

A personal experience of mine some time later called that interpretation sharply into question. My Austrian-born daughter-in-law happened to snap a photograph of her mother and daughter, then a toddler, in which the relationship of the two figures was virtually identical to that in Beaux's painting. By analogy with Beaux's work, are we to conclude that this family photo is indicative of the marginalization of grandmothers in early-twenty-first-century European society? Or is it simply the result of the natural human focus on a much-loved child, who is being held securely by the hand of a caring adult?"

This is an example of the Marxist sickness of feminized leftists who constantly need to create imaginary victims dependent upon the State to make everything "fair".

To the hyper-politicized cataract encrusted eyes of the left,

the beauty of a loving relationship is ugly social oppression.

Greg

Indeed, the Marxist interpretation was quite silly. But it wasn't as silly, nor as hateful and angry, as some of the interpretations of art that I've seen from Rand and her followers. If postmodernists are "feminized leftists" because they create imaginary victims, what are Objectivish-types who are 10 times as frantic and shrill, and who create imaginary villains, and then absolutely refuse to listen to overwhelming evidence to the contrary?

J

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Ha, I thought "smears" covered it pretty well - "I don't think of you" applied to art? Funny I don't recall if she said simply that abstract art wasn't art.

This is the nearest I have seen.

"Color as such...is not an entity, but an *attribute* of enities, and cannot exist by itself.

This fact is ignored by the men who make pretentious attempts to create "a new art" in the form of "color symphonies" which consist in projecting moving blobs of color on a screen. This produces nothing in a viewer's consciousness, but the boredom of being underemployed. It could conceivably produce an appropriate *decorative* effect..." [Art and Cognition p.76]

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If postmodernists are "feminized leftists" because they create imaginary victims, what are Objectivish-types who are 10 times as frantic and shrill, and who create imaginary villains, and then absolutely refuse to listen to overwhelming evidence to the contrary?

J

True believers of the worst type.

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The "abstract" appearance of an artwork is all to do with the rapidity with which one 'abstractifies' it mentally. I think that's what gives the false impression. Because one intuitively and instantly recognizes that any art looked at is a 'special instance of reality' - by the artist's presentation with close focus on what is important (to him), divorced from all inessentials, and emphasized by his technical mastery - I think it's a much faster, more intense process than grasping and conceptualizing random instances from 'real life'.

Kinda ignores any essentialness that might be found in "inessentials."

Giving marching orders to artists is cultural fascism.

--Brant

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Ha, I thought "smears" covered it pretty well - "I don't think of you" applied to art? Funny I don't recall if she said simply that abstract art wasn't art.

Really? You don't recall? She threw fits over abstract art. She psychologized her head off over it, and frantically constructed images of "decomposition," "disintegration," "aborted embryos" with "empty sockets," and which crawl "through a bloody muck, red froth dripping from his jaws, and struggles to throw the froth at his own non-existent face, who pauses periodically and, lifting the stumps of his arms, screams in abysmal terror at the universe at large."

Hahahahaha!

She wrote:

"To reduce man’s consciousness to the level of sensations, with no capacity to integrate them, is the intention behind the reducing of language to grunts, of literature to 'moods,' of painting to smears, of sculpture to slabs, of music to noise."

It's quite odd that she thought that mere "slabs" could convey deep emotion and meaning in architecture, but that the same slabs were impossible to cognitively "integrate" in abstract sculpture! It's also odd that she found it unacceptable for literature to deal with mere "moods," but that she found it perfectly acceptable for music to deal with mere "moods."

Rand also wrote:

"Just as modern philosophy is dominated by the attempt to destroy the conceptual level of man’s consciousness and even the perceptual level, reducing man’s awareness to mere sensations—so modern art and literature are dominated by the attempt to disintegrate man’s consciousness and reduce it to mere sensations, to the “enjoyment” of meaningless colors, noises and moods."

Meaningless colors? Meaningless to whom? The question that no one wants to answer.

I am continuing with Kahmi's book, and I love her approach to these issues, and it so not my approach - actually that is a kind of interesting thing.

Huh? What do you mean that it is not your approach? It's totally your approach! It's the attempt to establish each of your own personal aesthetic limits of response as the universal standard for judging what is or is not art. It is the use of the fallacy of the "argument from personal incredulity." It's the same approach in essentials, and it only differs in details and style.

I've done abstract color studies of creating currents of light and color as studies for the atmosphere of a figurative works. But when I think of doing an abstract work for itself, my mind become paralyzed with boredom - reminds me of picking a color for painting a wall.

That would make sense, since you're not exactly known for understanding color theory or the expressive effects of selectively limiting your palette. You've got a typical Objectivish notion of color usage: Entire spectrum, heavily saturated, contrasty. No sense of the subtle effects of color chords.

Combined with the few other things I know about art and art history, it is not a pressing personal concern. But Kahmi is going much deeper by going into the writings or quotes of the leading abstract artists, looking at the purposes of abstract design in other cultures, going into the psychology of how healthy minds work with perceptions and connections, and comparing that to the abstract artists views. And the elephant in the room was the abstract paintings were still viewed as decorative works that went with the couch, and the abstract artists kept insisting that that is not what they were about.

Actually, she's looking for nothing but quotes which can be spun as supporting her position. She's practicing what's called "confirmation bias."

J

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The "abstract" appearance of an artwork is all to do with the rapidity with which one 'abstractifies' it mentally. I think that's what gives the false impression. Because one intuitively and instantly recognizes that any art looked at is a 'special instance of reality' - by the artist's presentation with close focus on what is important (to him), divorced from all inessentials, and emphasized by his technical mastery - I think it's a much faster, more intense process than grasping and conceptualizing random instances from 'real life'.

Kinda ignores any essentialness that might be found in "inessentials."

Giving marching orders to artists is cultural fascism.

--Brant

"Inessentials"- - - -for the artist.

He makes the choices: to include - or not include.. can't see where your cultural fascism enters.

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The "abstract" appearance of an artwork is all to do with the rapidity with which one 'abstractifies' it mentally. I think that's what gives the false impression. Because one intuitively and instantly recognizes that any art looked at is a 'special instance of reality' - by the artist's presentation with close focus on what is important (to him), divorced from all inessentials, and emphasized by his technical mastery - I think it's a much faster, more intense process than grasping and conceptualizing random instances from 'real life'.

Kinda ignores any essentialness that might be found in "inessentials."

Giving marching orders to artists is cultural fascism.

--Brant

"Inessentials"- - - -for the artist.

He makes the choices: to include - or not include.. can't see where your cultural fascism enters.

It's not mine. Are you aware you just jumped ship?

--Brant

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It's true that all art is essentially "abstract," but that's not the particular being discussed here except maybe for music. It helps to think of a two-layered cake with the first layer being abstract and the second layer maybe abstract but of a different kind, especially if visual. If you wish, with music being only one layer.

--Brant

I think the big issue here is that it appears that many of my opponents in this discussion don't have any actual knowledge of art history or of its established terms, but have only studied Ayn Rand and a few other thinkers who they've heard have views similar to Rand's. They don't even have a junior-high-level understanding of visual art history, which is revealed by the fact that they inappropriately impose their own Randian meanings on everything instead of going with the common, historical meanings of terms -- they've never been exposed to the common, historical meanings and therefore don't know them, so they substitute the only thing that they do know.

J

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Ha, I thought "smears" covered it pretty well - "I don't think of you" applied to art? Funny I don't recall if she said simply that abstract art wasn't art.

Really? You don't recall? She threw fits over abstract art. She psychologized her head off over it, and frantically constructed images of "decomposition," "disintegration," "aborted embryos" with "empty sockets," and which crawl "through a bloody muck, red froth dripping from his jaws, and struggles to throw the froth at his own non-existent face, who pauses periodically and, lifting the stumps of his arms, screams in abysmal terror at the universe at large."

Hahahahaha!

J

No. The "fits" were not "over abstract art" (how would it be, when it's not identifiable and Rand mostly ignored it?), but instead, the "art of our time".

The start of the paragraph:

"The composite picture that emerges from the art of our time..."

Please keep context.

(and "slabs" in sculpture and "slabs" in architecture is another false analogy.)

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The "abstract" appearance of an artwork is all to do with the rapidity with which one 'abstractifies' it mentally. I think that's what gives the false impression. Because one intuitively and instantly recognizes that any art looked at is a 'special instance of reality' - by the artist's presentation with close focus on what is important (to him), divorced from all inessentials, and emphasized by his technical mastery - I think it's a much faster, more intense process than grasping and conceptualizing random instances from 'real life'.

Kinda ignores any essentialness that might be found in "inessentials."

Giving marching orders to artists is cultural fascism.

--Brant

"Inessentials"- - - -for the artist.

He makes the choices: to include - or not include.. can't see where your cultural fascism enters.

It's not mine. Are you aware you just jumped ship?

--Brant

No idea what you mean. I was pointing out the obvious, that the artist is in full control of the content of his works.

I am not dictating what is "essential". His work is a man made given.

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Ha, I thought "smears" covered it pretty well - "I don't think of you" applied to art? Funny I don't recall if she said simply that abstract art wasn't art.

This is the nearest I have seen.

"Color as such...is not an entity, but an *attribute* of enities, and cannot exist by itself.

This fact is ignored by the men who make pretentious attempts to create "a new art" in the form of "color symphonies" which consist in projecting moving blobs of color on a screen. This produces nothing in a viewer's consciousness, but the boredom of being underemployed. It could conceivably produce an appropriate *decorative* effect..." [Art and Cognition p.76]

Again, the unanswered question: Which viewer's consciousness?

How did Ayn Rand become the universal representative of "the viewer," and why am I and millions of others excluded from being representative of "the viewer"?

I've known people whose consciousnesses experienced the "boredom of being underemployed" when reading Atlas Shrugged. Should they be the universal standard of judgment, and representative of "the reader"?

Rand's was the same method as Kamhi's: arbitrarily appoint oneself and one's personal aesthetic limitations as the universal standard, and then claim to speak for all of mankind, and arbitrarily -- and angrily -- deny the validity of the depth of aesthetic response of anyone who experiences more than you do.

J

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Ha, I thought "smears" covered it pretty well - "I don't think of you" applied to art? Funny I don't recall if she said simply that abstract art wasn't art.

Really? You don't recall? She threw fits over abstract art. She psychologized her head off over it, and frantically constructed images of "decomposition," "disintegration," "aborted embryos" with "empty sockets," and which crawl "through a bloody muck, red froth dripping from his jaws, and struggles to throw the froth at his own non-existent face, who pauses periodically and, lifting the stumps of his arms, screams in abysmal terror at the universe at large."

Hahahahaha!

J

No. The "fits" were not "over abstract art" (how would it be, when it's not identifiable and Rand mostly ignored it?), but instead, the "art of our time".

The start of the paragraph:

"The composite picture that emerges from the art of our time..."

Please keep context.

(and "slabs" in sculpture and "slabs" in architecture is another false analogy.)

Tony, do you ever live in reality?

J

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The "abstract" appearance of an artwork is all to do with the rapidity with which one 'abstractifies' it mentally. I think that's what gives the false impression. Because one intuitively and instantly recognizes that any art looked at is a 'special instance of reality' - by the artist's presentation with close focus on what is important (to him), divorced from all inessentials, and emphasized by his technical mastery - I think it's a much faster, more intense process than grasping and conceptualizing random instances from 'real life'.

Kinda ignores any essentialness that might be found in "inessentials."

Giving marching orders to artists is cultural fascism.

--Brant

"Inessentials"- - - -for the artist.

He makes the choices: to include - or not include.. can't see where your cultural fascism enters.

It's not mine. Are you aware you just jumped ship?

--Brant

No idea what you mean. I was pointing out the obvious, that the artist is in full control of the content of his works.

I am not dictating what is "essential". His work is a man made given.

From the consumer or observer of art to the producer, where you should be, which is not where you were. Rules of production are the artist's rules, not yours and not mine. Should be and ought to be are for the artist. An esthetician describes and classifies, not proscribes and prescribes. He is not a doctor. He can say good, bad and indifferent and give his reasons. Being a free man--just like the artist--he can pass moral judgment but then he becomes more than his profession and the judgment is not esthetical. When Frank O'Connor wanted to be a better artist he sought out instruction from artists, not estheticians.

--Brant

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Ha, I thought "smears" covered it pretty well - "I don't think of you" applied to art? Funny I don't recall if she said simply that abstract art wasn't art.

This is the nearest I have seen.

"Color as such...is not an entity, but an *attribute* of enities, and cannot exist by itself.

This fact is ignored by the men who make pretentious attempts to create "a new art" in the form of "color symphonies" which consist in projecting moving blobs of color on a screen. This produces nothing in a viewer's consciousness, but the boredom of being underemployed. It could conceivably produce an appropriate *decorative* effect..." [Art and Cognition p.76]

Again, the unanswered question: Which viewer's consciousness?

How did Ayn Rand become the universal "the viewer," and why am I and millions of others excluded from being representative of "the viewer"?

I've known people whose consciousnesses experienced the "boredom of being underemployed" when reading Atlas Shrugged. Should they be the universal standard of judgment, and representative of "the reader"?

Rand's was the same method as Kamhi's: arbitrarily appoint oneself and one's personal aesthetic limitations as the universal standard, and then claim to speak for all of mankind, and arbitrarily -- and angrily -- deny the validity of the depth of aesthetic response of anyone who experiences more than you do.

J

A good question. Why would 'Atlas' readers experience "the boredom of being unemployed"? You didn't, I take it, nor anyone else here. Does the fault lie with what the novel shows, and how it was showed - or with the reader? For certain, everyone's mind was engaged in the reading, whatever the reader's proclivities or view of life. If any reader claims "boredom", I'd immediately suspect their honesty: realistically they were not bored at all, and understand the book all too well (and cannot accept it).

I'm afraid our views of reality - and its apprehension - differ by a wide margin.

"Meaningless, to whom?" You ask.

Well, to all who have eyes they trust and wish to continue to trust. Frankly, your explanations of meaning you see in a few abstract paintings do not convince, in anything but the most vague, disassociated and general manner.

("Millions of others"?? I'll have to ask them if they all see the same...have you?)

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I dunno Brant. If I were going to paint, or you were, there are no "rules" really, in what we would paint and how we'd go about it.

Not to forget what's implicit: If I think there is something important expressed in the picture and I want/expect many others to view it, I would want it to be 'known', to be understood. Surely? Otherwise, do it for the enjoyment and hang it on my wall as decoration, who's to argue?

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Ha, I thought "smears" covered it pretty well - "I don't think of you" applied to art? Funny I don't recall if she said simply that abstract art wasn't art.

This is the nearest I have seen.

"Color as such...is not an entity, but an *attribute* of enities, and cannot exist by itself.

This fact is ignored by the men who make pretentious attempts to create "a new art" in the form of "color symphonies" which consist in projecting moving blobs of color on a screen. This produces nothing in a viewer's consciousness, but the boredom of being underemployed. It could conceivably produce an appropriate *decorative* effect..." [Art and Cognition p.76]

Again, the unanswered question: Which viewer's consciousness?

How did Ayn Rand become the universal "the viewer," and why am I and millions of others excluded from being representative of "the viewer"?

I've known people whose consciousnesses experienced the "boredom of being underemployed" when reading Atlas Shrugged. Should they be the universal standard of judgment, and representative of "the reader"?

Rand's was the same method as Kamhi's: arbitrarily appoint oneself and one's personal aesthetic limitations as the universal standard, and then claim to speak for all of mankind, and arbitrarily -- and angrily -- deny the validity of the depth of aesthetic response of anyone who experiences more than you do.

J

A good question. Why would 'Atlas' readers experience "the boredom of being unemployed"? You didn't, I take it, nor anyone else here. Does the fault lie with what the novel shows, and how it was showed - or with the reader? For certain, everyone's mind was engaged in the reading, whatever the reader's proclivities or view of life. If any reader claims "boredom", I'd immediately suspect their honesty: realistically they were not bored at all, and understand the book all too well (and cannot accept it).

I'm afraid our views of reality - and its apprehension - differ by a wide margin.

"Meaningless, to whom?" You ask.

Well, to all who have eyes they trust and wish to continue to trust. Frankly, your explanations of meaning you see in a few abstract paintings do not convince, in anything but the most vague, disassociated and general manner.

("Millions of others"?? I'll have to ask them if they all see the same...have you?)

In other words, Tony's personal lack of depth of response is the universal standard!

One thing I should do is go back and find some of the past Objectivish descriptions that I've encountered of the effects of specific pieces of music. Talk about "vague, disassociated and general manner"!

As for the "millions of others" all seeing the same, yes, I've witnessed many of them experiencing the same things in abstract paintings that I experienced.

On the other hand, I've witnessed, over and over and over again, Objectivish-types being unable to identify anything resembling subjects and meanings in realist paintings, let alone the same subjects and meanings. Did you forget about that already? Do you not remember that earlier on this thread, I posted images of realistic still life paintings, and no one has yet identified their subjects, meanings or aesthetic depth or emotional impact?

Heh. Objectivish-types are so aesthetically incompetent that they can't even identify anything in the art that they accept as art! So why do you think that anyone would accept Objectivish-types' insistence on believing that they are the limits of cognitive and aesthetic functioning?

J

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Ayn Rand as the "narrator" of art is absurd.

The issue of a narrator is an important aspect of the art of rhetoric.

"Narrative is found in all forms of human creativity and art, including speech, writing, songs, film, television, games, photography, theatre, roleplaying games and visual arts such as painting (with the modern art movements refusing the narrative in favor of the abstract and conceptual) that describes a sequence of events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to tell", which is derived from the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled".[2]"

"Narrative can also be found in oral storytelling processes, as seen in many Indigenous American communities. Narrative storytelling is used to guide children on proper behavior, cultural history, formation of a communal identity, and values.[3] Narratives also act as living entities through cultural stories, as they are passed on from generation to generation. Because the narrative storytelling is often left without explicit meanings, children act as participants in the storytelling process by delving deeper into the open-ended story and making their own interpretations.[4]"

"The word story may be used as a synonym of "narrative". It can also be used to refer to the sequence of events described in a narrative. Narratives may also be nested within other narratives, such as narratives told by an unreliable narrator (a character) typically found in noir fiction genre. An important part of narration is the narrative mode, the set of methods used to communicate the narrative through a process narration (see also "Narrative Aesthetics" below)."

"Along with exposition, argumentation, and description, narration, broadly defined, is one of four rhetorical modes of discourse. More narrowly defined, it is the fiction-writing mode whereby the narrator communicates directly to the reader."

Narrators are propagandists in the Ellul tradition.

Aesthetics approach

Narrative is a highly aesthetic art. Thoughtfully composed stories have a number of aesthetic elements. Such elements include the idea of narrative structure, with identifiable beginnings, middles and ends, or exposition-development-climax-denouement, with coherent plot lines; a strong focus on temporality including retention of the past, attention to present action and protention/future anticipation; a substantial focus on character and characterization, "arguably the most important single component of the novel" (David Lodge The Art of Fiction 67); different voices interacting, "the sound of the human voice, or many voices, speaking in a variety of accents, rhythms and registers" (Lodge The Art of Fiction 97; see also the theory of Mikhail Bakhtin for expansion of this idea); a narrator or narrator-like voice, which "addresses" and "interacts with" reading audiences (see Reader Response theory); communicates with a Wayne Booth-esque rhetorical thrust, a dialectic process of interpretation, which is at times beneath the surface, forming a plotted narrative, and at other times much more visible, "arguing" for and against various positions; relies substantially on the use of literary tropes (see Hayden White, Metahistory for expansion of this idea); is often intertextual with other literatures; and commonly demonstrates an effort toward bildungsroman, a description of identity development with an effort to evince becoming in character and community.[jargon]

A...

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Ha, I thought "smears" covered it pretty well - "I don't think of you" applied to art? Funny I don't recall if she said simply that abstract art wasn't art.

This is the nearest I have seen.

"Color as such...is not an entity, but an *attribute* of enities, and cannot exist by itself.

This fact is ignored by the men who make pretentious attempts to create "a new art" in the form of "color symphonies" which consist in projecting moving blobs of color on a screen. This produces nothing in a viewer's consciousness, but the boredom of being underemployed. It could conceivably produce an appropriate *decorative* effect..." [Art and Cognition p.76]

Again, the unanswered question: Which viewer's consciousness?

How did Ayn Rand become the universal "the viewer," and why am I and millions of others excluded from being representative of "the viewer"?

I've known people whose consciousnesses experienced the "boredom of being underemployed" when reading Atlas Shrugged. Should they be the universal standard of judgment, and representative of "the reader"?

Rand's was the same method as Kamhi's: arbitrarily appoint oneself and one's personal aesthetic limitations as the universal standard, and then claim to speak for all of mankind, and arbitrarily -- and angrily -- deny the validity of the depth of aesthetic response of anyone who experiences more than you do.

J

A good question. Why would 'Atlas' readers experience "the boredom of being unemployed"? You didn't, I take it, nor anyone else here. Does the fault lie with what the novel shows, and how it was showed - or with the reader? For certain, everyone's mind was engaged in the reading, whatever the reader's proclivities or view of life. If any reader claims "boredom", I'd immediately suspect their honesty: realistically they were not bored at all, and understand the book all too well (and cannot accept it).

I'm afraid our views of reality - and its apprehension - differ by a wide margin.

"Meaningless, to whom?" You ask.

Well, to all who have eyes they trust and wish to continue to trust. Frankly, your explanations of meaning you see in a few abstract paintings do not convince, in anything but the most vague, disassociated and general manner.

("Millions of others"?? I'll have to ask them if they all see the same...have you?)

In other words, Tony's personal lack of depth of response is the universal standard!

One thing I should do is go back and find some of the past Objectivish descriptions that I've encountered of the effects of specific pieces of music. Talk about "vague, disassociated and general manner"!

As for the "millions of others" all seeing the same, yes, I've witnessed many of them experiencing the same things in abstract paintings that I experienced.

On the other hand, I've witnessed, over and over and over again, Objectivish-types being unable to identify anything resembling subjects and meanings in realist paintings, let alone the same subjects and meanings. Did you forget about that already? Do you not remember that earlier on this thread, I posted images of realistic still life paintings, and no one has yet identified their subjects, meanings or aesthetic depth or emotional impact?

Heh. Objectivish-types are so aesthetically incompetent that they can't even identify anything in the art that they accept as art! So why do you think that anyone would accept Objectivish-types' insistence on believing that they are the limits of cognitive and aesthetic functioning?

J

Cunning argument. Let's see: Because you claim to understand abstract art, ergo, it follows you understand all artworks, abstract and realist.

Whereas, Objectivist-types who can see little or no intelligibility in abstract art, ergo, do not and can never understand any art.

One doesn't exclude or preclude the other, y'know. Yours is an argument from mutual exclusivity, with no evidence to back up your claims.

J: You must have put up many many pictures in your time, and I can't remember you making an in-depth assessment of one.

(And I don't mean the obvious stuff, perspective, colors, etc - or the aesthetics and history, alone).

Teasers, in order to provoke and mock unconventional and non-mainstream (or naive, as yet unformed) opinions by Objectivists?

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Cunning argument. Let's see: Because you claim to understand abstract art, ergo, it follows you understand all artworks, abstract and realist.

No, that doesn't follow. Tony, you need to go out and buy yourself a book on logic.

I have not claimed to understand all artworks. In fact, I've specifically said many times on this thread that I get nothing from certain artworks and art forms. The difference between you and me is that I don't stupidly insist that my aesthetic responses are the limits of all mankind -- I don't need to believe that you are pretending when you report that you experience what I don't.

Whereas, Objectivist-types who can see little or no intelligibility in abstract art, ergo, do not and can never understand any art.

Did you not read and comprehend my last post?! Objectivish-types can't identify anything in realist paintings!

One doesn't exclude or preclude the other, y'know. Yours is an argument from mutual exclusivity, with no evidence to back up your claims.

You're imagining an argument that I haven't made. I DID NOT MAKE THE ARGUMENT THAT since Objectivish-types don't get anything out of abstract art, then they get nothing out of any art. Rather, the argument that I've actually made is that when I present them with realist paintings, they can't identify subjects, meanings, or depth of emotional expression in realist paintings.

J

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I think the big issue here is that it appears that many of my opponents in this discussion don't have any actual knowledge of art history or of its established terms, but have only studied Ayn Rand and a few other thinkers who they've heard have views similar to Rand's. They don't even have a junior-high-level understanding of visual art history, which is revealed by the fact that they inappropriately impose their own Randian meanings on everything instead of going with the common, historical meanings of terms -- they've never been exposed to the common, historical meanings and therefore don't know them, so they substitute the only thing that they do know.

J

There is some truth in the fact that (I believe) many if not most Objectivists come from the sciences, with a fairly undeveloped exposure to and understanding of art. If their first deep exposure is top-down from the stratosphere of philosophy of art (Rand's) - and if as a result they go on to investigate further into all its complexities for their own purposes, while connecting it to their concepts - all to the good. Art history comes fairly low on the totem pole imo, but that too.

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There is some truth in the fact that (I believe) many if not most Objectivists come from the sciences, with a fairly undeveloped exposure to and understanding of art. If their first deep exposure is top-down from the stratosphere of philosophy of art (Rand's) - and if as a result they go on to investigate further into all its complexities for their own purposes, while connecting it to their concepts - all to the good.

It's not really "from the stratosphere." That's just the illusion that Rand crafted and which some of her followers buy into. I think it's an issue of intellectual laziness. Certain people who are attracted to Rand's ideas want to believe that they've found a way to bypass actually having to learn real stuff. They'd prefer to just avoid all of that work and just imagine that philosophy trumps everything else.

Art history comes fairly low on the totem pole imo, but that too.

Art history is reality, so what you're saying is that reality takes a back seat to Rand's opinions, including opinions about art forms which she knew little or nothing about.

J

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