Art and Subobjectivity

[reason.on]

I see you changed the ES you originally typed to the EM you meant. SOME typos, Christian, are hanging offenses. ;-)

Eeep! You weren't, of course, supposed to see that...:-)

RCR

P.S. Here's hoping I don't have wiziunikitsch nightmares tonight.

[reason.on]

JR= Jeff Riggenbach??

Yes.

RCR

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

So long as we are at it, why "Soze"?

Michael

(EDIT: I don't want to waste a post for a minor comment, so I am putting the comment here. Ellen corrected a mistake I made below. Thank you Ellen.)

[Ellen Stuttle]

A quick note posted just to correct a misunderstanding. I have some thoughts percolating which I much want to post, but the next at least three days will be busy ones for me.

I earlier commented that I wanted to reply to Christian's post #627.

Michael wrote a subsequent post, thinking he was talking about the same RCR post I meant. He wasn't. He was talking about RCR's #638. That, too, I consider an important post. But, at root, I consider the whole "representational" issue barking up the wrong tree to begin with. The post I was talking about was the one in which RCR talks about the issue of where the "art" is from the standpoint of the beholder.

To be continued ASAP.

Ellen

___

[Brant Gaede]

Jeff,

I'm going to do an article rather than post my reply to you here. Might take a day or two.

--Brant

[Danneskjold]

Sounds good.

[Kevin Haggerty]

Hey Jeff,

Haven't had much time to devote to your comments about my post #530. I'm frankly finding the constant activity on this thread a little overwhelming. Also, I was sorta waiting to hear from Victor after his surprising and hopeful statement here:

Kevin, that was a very thoughtful post...I would like to respond to it when I find the time.

But his subsequent comments, not the least of which being his umpteenth character assassination of Pollock in post #599, have left me little hope of it coming to anything, y'know, which is really too bad. I hope I'm wrong about this. (Victor?)

So, anyway, another reason I have been putting off responding to you is that your comments about my post come across as, well, pretty dismissive actually (don't worry, I get that from a lot of Oists). The more thought I give to your post, the more simply annoyed I find myself getting at what looks like flippancy. Forgive me if I'm wrong.

I put a great deal of thought into that post, and it actually represents at least a couple of decades of my personal investigation into Abstract Art and the nature of perception. And what you handed me was a short series of one-liners, dismissive quips and quibbling inversions. You act here, as many an Objectivist before you has acted, as a sort of conversational hangin' judge--you take a quick glance over my "case," and pronounce your sentence. Next!

As far as I can tell, this is a natural consequence of the Oist fixation on logical argumentation as the one and only criterion for the validity of someone else's point of view (that and the fetishistic obsession with passing judgement as quickly and often as possible). Y'all can have your "sense of life" and your "stomach feelings," but the rest of us have to be forensic club all-stars. (OL is a shining counter example in online Objectivism--speaking of which, I gotta thank Ellen and Michael and Jonathan and Christian and Dragonfly for your very kind words: thank you!)

You know how it goes, Jeff, if something doesn't make immediate and irrefutable sense to some Oists, then it must be spurious garbage, or an elaborate con job along the lines of The Emperor's New Clothes. Or if, reason forbid, the person you're talking to is unable to put his thoughts in perfect Randian terms, why then, he must be a Toohy or a Keating trying to destroy you all. (Oists will happily hand out pages of AR to read if you don't find their arguments compelling at first glance, but any attempt to tell an Oist that he needs to study up on a non-Oist approved subject is met with--well, you know.)

And so Oists dismiss entire ways of life after the most cursory investigation--the whole of human experience has already been summed up for them by Miss Rand and she has supplied them with the master-shorthand for all discussions of all matters. Or, I suppose, they'd say it was Logic itself (channeled by its great prophet) that supplied them with the glorious power to dismiss countless points of view out of hand.

Let me explain. Our minds seek out visual order almost compulsively. Our brains are hardwired to make the visual data we receive comprehensible. Our minds are often so obsessive about creating order that it can be very difficult to simply see what is in front of us. Beginning art students usually have to "unlearn" the mind's symbolic visual language in order to be able to draw accurately what they simply see. Ask a non-artist to draw a human eye, for instance, and you will likely get a familiar image of a circle within an almond shaped elipse. It can take weeks of hard work for the student to be able to lay these compulsive symbols aside, but once he does, a whole world of magnicent complexity and mystery opens up. The whole world is new and unknown and must be drawn to be understood!

Ok, so let's break this down. You're saying that our minds seek out visual order. I will agree with this part, and say it might have something to do with why you see order in this painting. It may be less the artist's intentions than it is your own head desperately searching for some type of order in that mess. You actually confess to exactly this later on.

Also, if you ask a non-artist to draw an eye they draw...an eye? What doese an artist draw when they are told to draw an eye (supposing we are talking about a human eye)? It doesn't seem like there's a lot more to it than the shape, at least not as far as we can percieve.

You apparently can't imagine that a visual artist's trained perception could be appreciably greater than--or meaningfully different from--yours; that such a difference in visual ability might give the trained artist information--knowledge--to which you have little or no access. This is exactly the kind of intellectual complacency I see again and again amongst Oists. They think because they've thought five minutes about a thing, they understand it perfectly and disarmingly, and far more clearly than people who've devoted their lives to the subject. If an Oist can't puzzle a thing out with his own imperfect mind at first glance, then it must be unreal or at least irrelevant.

No, Jeff, eyes don't look like the CBS television logo, no one's eyes do--anymore than the human head looks like a yellow smiley face, or the human form looks like a stick figure. Not really. It's an abstraction, a symbol, a kind of visual shorthand, which, for the non-visually inclined, often stands in for the actual thing. A skilled artist like Picasso may render the eyes of his subject in such a way, but he does so to describe his own consciousness and frame of mind, his willingness to disregard the subject in front of him, to disfigure her even, in favor of his own genius.

So, to my mind, a great work of Abstract Expressionism like Lavender Mist is practically a master class in unprejudiced perception in a single work. Anyone can throw random slashes of paint at a canvas, but it takes an extraordinary eye to keep the image from resolving one way or another. One can stare at a cloud and see a face or an animal, but that's as far as you get with clouds. The associative field of a great piece of Abstract Art can seem nearly infinite--the moment you think you see something in it, the larger context of the work refutes it. There is no face or animal anywere in Lavender Mist--take a good long look at it and try to track the things you almost see in it. Is Lavender Mist flat, or does it express depth? Flat like a map or deep like a foggy morning landscape? Are there objects in the mist? People? Houses? Points of fire? A city? A battle? A line of monks walking slowly up a hill?

So what you're saying is that you can't actually see anything in it? That may be because there isn't actually anything there.

No, Jeff, if I was saying that I would have said that. I was talking about what I call an "associative field." (Pet peeve # 4,345-a: writing lengthy posts in which I try to introduce a new concept for discussion, only to have my detractors glom on to one or two lines they think they can score off of.) Mere chaos and randomness is rarely very tantalizing as an image. But with the best Abstract Art, one's associations can go on as long as one looks at the work. The way the human mind works, as soon as it finds a hidden image, you can't not see it. It's like those picture puzzles we've all solved when we were kids of the "hidden in this picture are..." variety. Once you've found the image disguised in the tree bark, you really can't not see it. It's there, drawing your eye, undercutting the larger composition. This is exactly what does not happen in a great work by Pollock or Kandinsky. As you contemplate the work (and no, glancing at a jpeg on the Internet doesn't qualify as contemplation) your eye is drawn in so many directions, new relationships and interrelationships of form revealing themselves constantly. Forget for the moment whether it's Art or not, what the abstract painter is attempting to do is very difficult and very difficult procedures demand skill.

But let's say one lacks imagination, or really doesn't like having one's imagination challenged in this way, there's plenty up there on the canvas of a strictly objective nature if you take a moment to understand the thing in context. Imagine yourself as a great detective and the work of art before you is your "clue" as to the whereabouts and intentions of the artist. When one stands before a painting like this, the astute observer recognizes the many hours of painstaking deliberation and choice that went into making it (however wasted you may believe those hours to be)--choices of color, of proportion, of technique, materials, tools, media (yes, Pollock actually decided to drip his paint onto the canvas, rather than use a brush--it was not an accident).

A work of art, any work of art, is also at least a partial record of the artist's process during its creation. As a student of art, there is much to be gained from observing the artist's process refracted through the finished work. Pollock had a clear intention of bringing the viewer closer to his process. He called his paintings like Lavender Mist "action paintings" because they were a record of his actions while painting it. Where more conventional and naturalistic artists seek to disguise their techniques in favor of verisimilitude, Pollock celebrated the action of painting itself, the joy of creation itself. (I'm not saying that one can't see the artist's joy of creation in figurative art, but in a figurative work, it can never be the main subject.)

Hey, there's a subject: the artist in the midst of the creative process--to an unskilled observer dropping into the artist's mind, the inner landscape might indeed seem equivalent to an "explosion in a yarn factory." Or imagine yourself in the midst of some all-consuming project at your desk; your mom comes in and sees what to her look like random piles of paper and broken-backed books and starts putting what she can only see as "garbage" in the trash, putting things back in "order." At such times we are in the midst of "creative chaos" which is really a highly ordered arrangement, albeit unconventional in the extreme and difficult for the unsympathetic observer to grasp.

And yet, like the beginning art student who doesn't really look at what's in front of him but instead looks for the symbols his brain is preconditioned to seek out, the too-literally minded viewer of Lavender Mist may become frustrated because his mind's attempts to deliniate and classify what he sees come to nothing. His inability to find the familiar and the known may cause him to lash out at the work, to try to domesticate it that way. What crap, he says. Meaningless chicken scratch! A child could do better.

This paragraph is applicable to almost anything that doesn't have form. By saying this about anything that doesn't have an explicit form you can consider absolutely anything art.

No, Jeff. Read it again. I'm talking about aesthetics. No one gets mad at a mere random pile of undifferentiated matter. A photo, say, of your "explosion in a yarn factory" would make no one want to lash out ('cept maybe the factory owner). It's only something another man calls "art" that elicits such a response from the man who doesn't understand it. In fact, this layman's ultimate put-down "I could do better" is not reserved for Abstract Art alone, but foisted on examples from all arts in all genres, and it is almost always an empty, extravagantly ignorant boast.

-Kevin

[Ellen Stuttle]

Kevin,

Another extraordinary post! You explain these things SO WELL. I for one (and I know I'm not the only one here) feel indebted to you for the care and the eye-opening details you've put into your explanations.

You speak of the heavy traffic on this thread being "a little overwhelming." I, too, find it hard to keep up with, and some of what's gone on has no lasting merit. But in an odd way, I've been glad for the voices of opposition to abstract art. (I still don't know exactly which works by which artists Victor would classify as "abstract," but I'm using the term as an approximate designation the referrents of which are pretty "intuitive"; I'm including Kandinsky.)

The reason I've been glad is because of those here who have felt spurred to post and write about abstract works, with the result that my awareness of what's available has much increased. I love visual art, but it's never been the art form I've focused on; literature and music have been. I wasn't sure before these conversations on OL started if I'd seen any Kandinskys. I knew his name, and thought I had seen a few of his works, but I didn't know where or what. Amongst the works which have been posted is one (one of the Compositions, I think V) which I recognized as something I'd seen before and had liked a lot. Most of his work which was posted, however, I had never seen...and was bowled over by. So I'm grateful to have learned of work which for me is a new enthusiasm.

As to Pollock, you've opened my eyes. I'd never really looked before. I'd thought of his work as a gimmick, and except for a couple things of his -- I don't remember which ones -- which I'd seen pictures of and had a feeling of being interested by but hadn't pursued the feeling beyond the moment -- I doubt I've even seen photos. But studying Lavender Mist with your description showed me that you're right, and I'm fascinated. So I thank you again.

Speaking of "eyes," literal and metaphoric (as in, seeing with new eyes)...Three Christmases ago Larry and I gave a friend of ours with whose family we typically spend Christmas a book of Escher's works; his wife had also, independently, bought him an Escher book, a different one. He became so interested, he and his wife went to Holland for a couple weeks pursuing the Escher interest. While there, they looked at other art works as well. Two Christmases ago, they gave us a book they'd bought in Holland, a large book full of reproductions, titled Rembrandt's Eyes. The book follows the history of how eyes were done, developing into the way Rembrandt did them. Non-trivial issue, doing eyes in paintings.

Re this comment:

And so Oists dismiss entire ways of life after the most cursory investigation--the whole of human experience has already been summed up for them by Miss Rand and she has supplied them with the master-shorthand for all discussions of all matters. Or, I suppose, they'd say it was Logic itself (channeled by its great prophet) that supplied them with the glorious power to dismiss countless points of view out of hand.

Makes one wonder how the human species ever managed to survive prior to Rand. ;-) Of course, O'ists might say that it's been so sorry a performance as almost not to count as survival. She said as much in Galt's Speech...humans are the only species which can act as its own destroyer, which is how it has acted through much of its history...something like that, haven't time to find the exact quote.

Regards,

Ellen

___

Edited February 3, 2007 by Ellen Stuttle

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Two Christmases ago, they gave us a book they'd bought in Holland, a large book full of reproductions, titled Rembrandt's Eyes. The book follows the history of how eyes were done, developing into the way Rembrandt did them. Non-trivial issue, doing eyes in paintings.

Ellen,

I am finally getting around to organizing the mini-tutorials by Michael Newberry. He has one I just formatted called: Rembrandt: Master of Eye Movement. Short and sweet.

(I agree with you about Kevin's post, even in what he says about discussion. There is a HUGE difference between disagreeing and being dismissive. You can learn an awful lot from someone who disagrees with you but discusses. You can also be prompted to think some things through that you had not given much attention to before. You don't get much value from a dismissive person, though, except a wish to trade insults.)

Michael

[Danneskjold]

I messed up something in this post. I'm fixing it on word.

Edited February 3, 2007 by Jeff Kremer

[Ellen Stuttle]

So long as we are at it, why "Soze"?

Jonathan uses the screen name "keysersozekill" on Atlantis, and Atlanteans often refer to him as "Soze" or "the Soze." There's a lot of goofy stuff which has happened on Atlantis, amidst the shouting and the actual philosophizing; but the humor is fairly untranslatable to non-Atlanteans.

Ellen

___

[reason.on]

So long as we are at it, why "Soze"?

Jonathan uses the screen name "keysersozekill" on Atlantis, and Atlanteans often refer to him as "Soze" or "the Soze." There's a lot of goofy stuff which has happened on Atlantis, amidst the shouting and the actual philosophizing; but the humor is fairly untranslatable to non-Atlanteans.

Agreed. Sometimes reflecting on Atlantean modes feels a bit like "Tristam Shandy in Atlantis....a travelogue in endless parts" :twitch:

RCR

Edited February 4, 2007 by R. Christian Ross

[Jonathan]

So long as we are at it, why "Soze"?

Jonathan uses the screen name "keysersozekill" on Atlantis, and Atlanteans often refer to him as "Soze" or "the Soze." There's a lot of goofy stuff which has happened on Atlantis, amidst the shouting and the actual philosophizing; but the humor is fairly untranslatable to non-Atlanteans.

Ellen

___

I got the name from the film The Usual Suspects, in which Keyser Soze is the mysterious underworld kingpin.

J

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I just finished formatting all of Michael Newberry's mini-tutorials on OL. They are gems of artistic appreciation.

In terms of abstract art, here is his most recent tutorial: Abstraction in Representational Art. What is interesting is that Michael has been a strong crusader for the value of representational art over his entire career. I believe that his mini-tutorials will also go far in adding to that end. He is doing something positive in life to promote his values and sees no threat strong enough to stop him. (How's that for Objectivist?) Thus, he even sees enough value in abstract art to study it without feeling that it will stop or hinder modern representational art from flourishing. Here is an example from the tutorial:

(Michael Newberry writing:)

Kline, 1957

Abstract artists, such as Kline, distilled abstraction until there was little left other than abstraction itself. These bold expressions drove home the formal compositional elements, dividing the painted surface into simple positive and negative areas.

This mini-tutorial gave another manner of understanding and appreciating abstract art than what I have discussed. This seems halfway between seeing an outline (like a silhouette) and the mental processes I mentioned.

Michael

[Rich Engle]

I just got around to Kevin's post.

Talk about openin' up a can of whupp-ass! Yes!!

I love you, man. Yikes!! Hah!

Edited February 6, 2007 by Rich Engle

[Brant Gaede]

Jeff,

I'm going to do an article rather than post my reply to you here. Might take a day or two.

--Brant

It's in the Objectivist Living Room.

--Brant

[Danneskjold]

So, anyway, another reason I have been putting off responding to you is that your comments about my post come across as, well, pretty dismissive actually (don't worry, I get that from a lot of Oists). The more thought I give to your post, the more simply annoyed I find myself getting at what looks like flippancy. Forgive me if I'm wrong.

I put a great deal of thought into that post, and it actually represents at least a couple of decades of my personal investigation into Abstract Art and the nature of perception. And what you handed me was a short series of one-liners, dismissive quips and quibbling inversions. You act here, as many an Objectivist before you has acted, as a sort of conversational hangin' judge--you take a quick glance over my "case," and pronounce your sentence. Next!

Ya, sorry about that really. That was my about being dismissive.

You know how it goes, Jeff, if something doesn't make immediate and irrefutable sense to some Oists, then it must be spurious garbage, or an elaborate con job along the lines of The Emperor's New Clothes. Or if, reason forbid, the person you're talking to is unable to put his thoughts in perfect Randian terms, why then, he must be a Toohy or a Keating trying to destroy you all. (Oists will happily hand out pages of AR to read if you don't find their arguments compelling at first glance, but any attempt to tell an Oist that he needs to study up on a non-Oist approved subject is met with--well, you know.)

And so Oists dismiss entire ways of life after the most cursory investigation--the whole of human experience has already been summed up for them by Miss Rand and she has supplied them with the master-shorthand for all discussions of all matters. Or, I suppose, they'd say it was Logic itself (channeled by its great prophet) that supplied them with the glorious power to dismiss countless points of view out of hand.

How fashionable. Hey, maybe it’s not the “some Objectivists” that do it, maybe it’s just me. That was intentionally dismissive.

You apparently can't imagine that a visual artist's trained perception could be appreciably greater than--or meaningfully different from--yours; that such a difference in visual ability might give the trained artist information--knowledge--to which you have little or no access. This is exactly the kind of intellectual complacency I see again and again amongst Oists. They think because they've thought five minutes about a thing, they understand it perfectly and disarmingly, and far more clearly than people who've devoted their lives to the subject. If an Oist can't puzzle a thing out with his own imperfect mind at first glance, then it must be unreal or at least irrelevant.

No, Jeff, eyes don't look like the CBS television logo, no one's eyes do--anymore than the human head looks like a yellow smiley face, or the human form looks like a stick figure. Not really. It's an abstraction, a symbol, a kind of visual shorthand, which, for the non-visually inclined, often stands in for the actual thing. A skilled artist like Picasso may render the eyes of his subject in such a way, but he does so to describe his own consciousness and frame of mind, his willingness to disregard the subject in front of him, to disfigure her even, in favor of his own genius.

Ok, I really do get what you’re saying here. An actual eye, as seen on a human face, is of similar shape to a walnut/the CBS television logo. Anyone, Picasso as you mentioned, can also distort the eye for whatever reason they please. I neither dispute Picasso’s status as an artist, nor his chosen style as art. It is the pure abstraction with a lack of conceptual basis that I dispute.

Hey, there's a subject: the artist in the midst of the creative process--to an unskilled observer dropping into the artist's mind, the inner landscape might indeed seem equivalent to an "explosion in a yarn factory." Or imagine yourself in the midst of some all-consuming project at your desk; your mom comes in and sees what to her look like random piles of paper and broken-backed books and starts putting what she can only see as "garbage" in the trash, putting things back in "order." At such times we are in the midst of "creative chaos" which is really a highly ordered arrangement, albeit unconventional in the extreme and difficult for the unsympathetic observer to grasp.

I’m at a loss for words to refute much of this because to me, and I do admit that I am an unskilled observer, it seems like you make a great number of unsubstantiated claims throughout. In order for something to show a concept it has to contain a concept. By this I mean that something that is purely perceptual cannot show us a concept, although it can provoke a feeling, which is a concept, in us. Pollock’s painting “Lavender Mist” is sensory or perceptual depending on how you look at it. I have a hard time seeing how it can show much of anything.

And yet, like the beginning art student who doesn't really look at what's in front of him but instead looks for the symbols his brain is preconditioned to seek out, the too-literally minded viewer of Lavender Mist may become frustrated because his mind's attempts to deliniate and classify what he sees come to nothing. His inability to find the familiar and the known may cause him to lash out at the work, to try to domesticate it that way. What crap, he says. Meaningless chicken scratch! A child could do better.

This paragraph is applicable to almost anything that doesn't have form. By saying this about anything that doesn't have an explicit form you can consider absolutely anything art.

No, Jeff. Read it again. I'm talking about aesthetics. No one gets mad at a mere random pile of undifferentiated matter. A photo, say, of your "explosion in a yarn factory" would make no one want to lash out ('cept maybe the factory owner). It's only something another man calls "art" that elicits such a response from the man who doesn't understand it. In fact, this layman's ultimate put-down "I could do better" is not reserved for Abstract Art alone, but foisted on examples from all arts in all genres, and it is almost always an empty, extravagantly ignorant boast.

-Kevin

The difference is that nobody calls a “mere pile of undifferentiated matter” art. The frustration is not caused from a lack of understanding of something being shown, it is caused by the application of a concept that didn’t fit it, and a lack of a good explanation as to why. For instance, I say that this font is orange and you tell me it’s not, but I insist it is. Orange is a concept and if you tell me that the color of my font is orange because that is how it is defined and I say that the color orange is whatever I define it to be, you may get frustrated as a result of my obvious evasion. Now, obviously what orange is defined as is a ridiculous argument and I do not mean that the question of what art is defined as is anywhere near that in absurdity. My point is more that you have people lashing out because they are coping with a concept that they can’t define, not because of frustration that they cannot see meaning in the painting.

[Jonathan]

Wow. I just spent but a few minutes looking through old posts on this thread, copied a few suspicious phrases and googled them, and I've already found more instances of plagiarism.

Victor, in post #8:

Human cultures have invented countless ways to embody abstractions. Rituals, ceremonies, and holidays help us appreciate the meaning of important events in personal life and social life, such as birth, marriage, death, victories, and achievements. Art has performed this function in every culture and religion. Ancient Greek culture, for example, placed a high value on physical beauty, grace, and, in men, athletic strength---as in the sculpture of Polyclitus whose Doryphorus set the classical cannon for the proportions of the male body. Examples like the above could be multiplied indefinitely.

David Kelley, in Art and Ideals:

Human cultures have invented countless ways to embody abstractions. Rituals, ceremonies, and holidays help us appreciate the meaning of important events in personal and social life, such as birth, marriage, death, seasons, victories, and achievements.

[snip]

Art has performed this function in every culture and religion. Ancient Greek culture, for example, placed a high value on physical beauty, grace, and, in men, athletic strength—as in the sculpture of Polyclitus, whose Doryphorus set the classical canon for the proportions of the male body.

Victor, in post #8:

Art is the most powerful means of creating embodied abstractions. In art we can experience in a concrete form an astonishing prosperous meaning through the artist’s work. In the hands of the talented, the masters, and the genius---artistic creation can provide the most complex, the most precise, the subtlest, the most evocative, the most powerful and effective form of an embodied abstraction.

David Kelley, in Art and Ideals:

Art is the most powerful means of creating embodied abstractions. In art we can experience perceptual objects and worlds that achieve an extraordinarily rich meaning through the artist's work of selecting his subject and shaping the work to embody his vision. In the hands of a master, artistic creation can provide the most complex, the most precise, the most subtle, the most evocative—in short the most powerful and effective—form of embodied abstraction.

Victor, in post #178:

When I went to art school, traditional academic education had become a controversial subject in the debate over what an art education should cover. In the second half of the 20th century, the preponderance of art schools rejected the “traditional approach” in their programs, creating only confusion and chaos in students' minds with the advancement of modernist madness.

Igor Babailov, in Why we must keep the traditions alive:

Traditional academic education has become a touchy subject in the contemporary debate over what an art education should be. In the second half of the 20th century, the majority of art schools rejected the traditional approach in their programs, creating not only confusion and chaos in students' minds, but a diminished appreciation of fine art in viewers' eyes.

Victor, in post #178:

Eventually, I went on to teach a drawing and painting class.

Teaching was a great experience for me. Teaching adult classes, I emphasized studying the human form, working from life and eye-hand cordination. I taught drawing and anatomy - the two most important subjects that every artist should know as well as the "two-times table". In my class, most of the time was devoted to understanding and solving the problems of form and proportions, tonal (value) relationships. The students were also required to study composition, human anatomy, perspective and the technology of art materials - all of the ABC's for mastering an artist's skill. The benefits that were gained from this exercise are colossal. It trains your visual memory, intensifies your ability to see proportions and foreshortenings, and coordinates your eye.

As I have always told my students, the importance of good drawing skills cannot be overstressed enough. To quote Nicolas Poussin: "Drawing is the skeleton of what you do and color is its flash."

Igor Babailov, in Why we must keep the traditions alive:

Teaching at the Florence Academy was a great experience for me as well. Naturally, I was compairing it to the Surikov Academy, and the similarities in the educational approach were apparent. Both schools emphasize studying the human form, working from life and copying the Old Masters. Drawing and anatomy - the two most important subjects that every artist should know as well as the "two-times table" - are highlighted in both programs. In these courses, most of the hours are devoted to understanding and solving the problems of form and proportions, tonal (value) relationships and chiaroscuro. The students are also required to study composition, human anatomy, perspective and the technology of art materials - all of the ABC's for mastering an artist's skill.

[snip]

The benefits to be gained from this exercise are enormous. It trains your visual memory, intensifies your ability to see proportions and foreshortenings, and coordinates your eye. As I always tell my students, the importance of good drawing skills cannot be overemphasized. In the words of Nicolas Poussin, "Drawing is the skeleton of what you do and color is its flash."

Victor, in post #182:

Modernism [as I’ll call it from here on in, as I will not dignify it with the accompanying word ‘art’] is nothing more than "a high sounding nothing", to quote Metternich's famous expression. This ‘nothing’ needs a perpetual choir of apologists and elucidators--the noisier the better--to ensure that the swarm of pretentious bamboozled patrons that visit modern art exhibitions, and buy the ludicrously expensive catalogues, keep doing so.

Claudio Lombardo, in Understanding (?) Art:

Since modern art is no more than "a high sounding nothing", to use Metternich's famous expression, this nothing needs a perpetual choir of apologists and elucidators, the noisier the better, to ensure that the crowds of pretentious fools that visit modern art exhibitions, and buy the ridiculously expensive catalogues, keep doing so.

Victor, in post #182:

The only skill exercised by the Modernists, however, is the one applied to marketing and public relations--because without the sustain of a huge network of deferential and submissive art critics, cynical art dealers, powerful museums and institutions that have great interest in its promotion. This glorified “high sounding nothing” of modernism would have disappeared long ago--destroyed by its own barrenness, while actual art would thrive as it does fulfill a human need of the mind.

Claudio Lombardo, in Understanding (?) Art:

The only skill exercised by the modern "masters" is the one applied to marketing and public relations, because without the support of a huge network of subservient art critics, cynical art dealers, powerful museums and institutions that have great interest in its promotion, this glorified high sounding nothing would have disappeared long time ago destroyed by its own sick nature.

-----

I gave up after these. There are probably many, many more.

J

(Note from MSK: Thank you, Jonathan. Duly edited.)

Edited July 27, 2007 by Michael Stuart Kelly

[dan_edge]

Victor Pross, post #225 of This Thread

"If so, the answer is no. Of course we experience art in a direct and tangible way that might be expressed in an emotional way---but how is that different from anything else we experience in life? Just to pick a highly emotional non-artistic observation as an example: many of us have a very strong personal emotional reaction when it comes to spiders, but this does this make us incompetent of making rational evaluation about their danger, if such is the case? No, it does not. Here’s another example: someone might have strong personal feelings about an engagement ring, but this does not necessarily impede one’s ability to appraise the financial value, its material composition, or craftsmanship. Likewise, it is quite possible to set aside our personal prejudices if we wish to and evaluate works of art based on their objective qualities rather than merely how we react to them [such as theme or subject matter] at a personal or emotional level."

Brian Yoder, Q+A on ArtRenewal.com

"In a word, no. Of course we experience art in a direct and tangible way that might be expressed in specific emotional ways, but how is that different from anything else we experience in life? Just to pick another highly emotional non-artistic observation, many of us have a very strong personal emotional reaction against the idea of touching snakes and spiders, but does this make us incapable of making rational evaluation about their danger or practical uses or dangers? Certainly not. To chose a more man-made example, someone might have strong personal feelings about a wedding ring, but this does not (necessarily) impede his ability to evaluate its financial value, its material composition, or craftsmanship. Likewise, it is quite possible to set aside our personal prejudices (if we wish to) and evaluate works of art based on their objective qualities rather than merely how we react to them at a personal or emotional level."

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--Dan Edge

(Note from MSK: Thank you, Dan. Duly edited.)

[BAMF]

In its original and broadest sense, the term art (derived from the Latin ars, artis) dates back to antiquity and it is synonymous with the Greek term techne—which refers to the concept “skill” or “technique”. Like all concepts, this idea -- art -- did not occur in a vacuum as if it were some cerebral construct divorced from real experience. The term has a long genesis dating back to the ancient Greek concept of “mimetic arts.” It developed out of long tradition of surveying similarities between the existing art forms as well as differences between them and other products and activities—and the idea of “skill” is primary to the conception of art and it is embedded in the term. The abandonment of objective representation in the visual arts was the most profound of modernism’s departures from this tradition.

(Post #46)

This is from What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand.

(Note from MSK: Thank you, Kori. Duly edited.)

Edited July 29, 2007 by Michael Stuart Kelly

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Kori,

The form we are using here is to also quote the passage as the original author wrote it, since Pross often mutilated the original text by deletions, insertions and rearranging the order. I will do this for this instance (but later). I have put it in the queue for edits.

Michael