A Few Kant Quotes


Newberry

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"Clearly the nets and skeins within these miserable monstrosities represent the unsuccessful lurching toward concepts and precepts within the Wyoming native's deranged psyche (which was undoubtedly damaged by contact with Sioux indian savages). The space created within the paintings illustrates a lost wasteland in some kind of spatial nightmare embodying chaos, uncertainty and unchecked premises. Clearly, this is communism, circa 1937, Melinkov variation 2a. And the dripping technique in which the artist dances around the canvas splattering paint is obviously tribal, reminescent of the worst of skull-wearing savages from southeastern New Guinea (see ARI pamphlet #127; "My Years with the Passionate, but irrationally deranged, Cannibals of Port Moresby". Valliant, 1986). Everyone knows an artist should sit in a chair, bravely facing his destining embodied in paint and canvas propped up on an easel. Running dog critics, such as Clement Greenburg, are spreading filth to our children, unsettling their futures, and robbing their lives of visions of rational thought, which should be heroically portrayed in still-life paintings of decaying rutabegas, dead flowers in vases, and seashells. Our kids need stiff portraits of engineers poring over prints for spaceships. To the junkbin of history with the garbage of abstraction! We will be vindicated, sooner rather than later."

Heh. :lol:

It's interesting that you mention Greenberg. He's the only seriously influential person in the modernist movement that I can think of who was big on Kant. He promoted what he thought were Kant's ideas in connection with abstract art (his critics believed that he didn't understand Kant -- they thought that Kant believed that art must be representational, that it must look like nature). The thing is, Greenberg first began publishing his views thirty years after Kandinsky wrote Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and some twenty years after Mondrian began painting his grid images. He had some influence on Pollock and other artists, but only after they had already been painting in the styles which were allegedly Kantian.

Since then, of course, there have been many modernist and postmodernist artists, critics and theorists who have embraced, rejected or had mixed views on Kant, Greenberg, and Greenberg's interpretations of Kant. Art moved on, as it always does, but it seems that any direction it goes, other than where Ayn Rand, Michael Newberry and others want it to go, is due to Kant's evil influence.

J

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Jim:

MIchael's mentioning of an objectivist speaker linking Pollack's work to his family and communism is an example of the smearing that goes on in objectivist criticism.

You are quite right Jim. I didn't state well the way the Hicks developed the ideas. He discussed the social realists with their communist agenda from the 30's, to Greenberg calling for a uniquely American art, with no connection to Europe; then on to Pollock. Stephen wouldn't smear anybody, and is very thorough with background info, and conclusions. I was making a point that philosophical ideas, psychology, politics are all interesting angles in art history concerning influences--easier said then done. :)

That said, there are great painters, like Francis Bacon, with fairly disgusting subjects--I doubt I would like anything about him other than his skill.

Michael

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What a mistake it is to lay abstract art at the feet of Kant's influence. All anyone has to do is look at history and see that it develped in parallel with psychology.

I may have missed an earlier post pointing this out, but isn't the standard reason for change of emphasis in art from realism to abstraction simply that photography took off in the early 20th C, thus destroying the market for landscape and portraiture?

- (From the wiki):"The term Abstract Art was coined in the 20th century (ca. 1911) to describe a cultural phenomenon that occurred simultaneously throughout western culture."

1900 - First mass-marketed camera - the Brownie.

It's rather like blaming the decline in travelling theatre troupes post 1950 on Kant, rather than television.

Edited by Daniel Barnes
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What a mistake it is to lay abstract art at the feet of Kant's influence. All anyone has to do is look at history and see that it develped in parallel with psychology.

I may have missed an earlier post pointing this out, but isn't the standard reason for change of emphasis in art from realism to abstraction simply that photography took off in the early 20th C, thus destroying the market for landscape and portraiture?

- (From the wiki):"The term Abstract Art was coined in the 20th century (ca. 1911) to describe a cultural phenomenon that occurred simultaneously throughout western culture."

1900 - First mass-marketed camera - the Brownie.

It's rather like blaming the decline in travelling theatre troupes post 1950 on Kant, rather than television.

Daniel -

This could be a rather interesting discussion:

With the advent of photography, the role of painting/sketching as the primary means of capturing and retaining images across years and even generations obviously could decline. This would seem to make "Romantic" painting more dominant, at least potentially - the naturalistic function of reporting/capturing actual images becamse less important. Hence, painting/sketching could focus more on portraying what SHOULD BE or what COULD BE, at least potentially.

Is there discussion of this in the literature of the history of art? What was the timing for changes in what was portrayed? (Photo-like realism vs nonrepresentational, etc.)

(I'm hoping some of the smart art people (Newberry et al) can comment. I don't know.)

Bill P (Alfonso)

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I may have missed an earlier post pointing this out, but isn't the standard reason for change of emphasis in art from realism to abstraction simply that photography took off in the early 20th C, thus destroying the market for landscape and portraiture?

With the advent of photography, the role of painting/sketching as the primary means of capturing and retaining images across years and even generations obviously could decline. This would seem to make "Romantic" painting more dominant, at least potentially - the naturalistic function of reporting/capturing actual images becamse less important. Hence, painting/sketching could focus more on portraying what SHOULD BE or what COULD BE, at least potentially.

(I'm hoping some of the smart art people (Newberry et al) can comment. I don't know.)

Thanks Bill for the compliment and your astute thoughts. I mentioned this topic in one sentence somewhere in this thread. In the book Making of Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-Century Art by Fitzgerald, I don't recall him touching up on the subject of photography in competition with representational painting. Fitzgerald's argument for the change to modernism had a lot to do with the manipulation and manipulations of dealers, critics, speculators, the social wealthy elite, and museum curators and directors. Creating a synergy of these forces went and goes a huge way towards making an artist famous. Hence the title "The Making of Modernism."

The argument realism declined because of photography works if you equate representational painting to photography. Undoubtedly many artists, critics, and some laypeople, such Daniel here, thought and think this. But, aesthetically they are radically different. One example, would be that a really good painter is sensitive the energy of their "mark making." Think of how the lines wrap around a figure in a da Vinci drawing. There is nothing like this in photography unless the photographer manipulates the photo in some hybrid way, crossing drawing and photography.

da%20vinci.jpg

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I may have missed an earlier post pointing this out, but isn't the standard reason for change of emphasis in art from realism to abstraction simply that photography took off in the early 20th C, thus destroying the market for landscape and portraiture?

- (From the wiki):"The term Abstract Art was coined in the 20th century (ca. 1911) to describe a cultural phenomenon that occurred simultaneously throughout western culture."

1900 - First mass-marketed camera - the Brownie.

It's rather like blaming the decline in travelling theatre troupes post 1950 on Kant, rather than television.

Here's some speculation from art historian H. W. Janson:

It is tempting to think that [Manet] was impelled to create the new style by the challenge of photography. The "pencil of nature," then known for a quarter of a century, had demonstrated the objective truth of Renaissance perspective, but it established a standard of representational accuracy that no handmade image could hope to rival. Painting needed to be rescued from competition with the camera. This Manet accomplished by insisting that a painted canvas is, above all, a material surface covered with pigment — that we must look
at
it, not
through
it.

Janson may be right, a sense of competition with photography may have been a part of what motivated new styles in painting, but I think that photography's influence (and that of other advances in optics and chemistry) was generally more positive in nature. Many painters (including Ingres, Delacroix, Degas and Manet) were very excited about the advent of photography. They experimented with it, borrowed some of its effects, and were inspired by its instantaneity -- its ability to capture a fleeting moment, much like an Impressionist sketch.

As for why styles/techniques moved away from finely-blended, polished realism, though, I think that French chemist Michel Eugéne Chevreul probably had more of an influence than photography. His research on color harmonies, and the separation of colors into their constituent elements, heavily influenced Pissarro, who shared his enthusiasm with Monet and other Impessionists and Neo-Impressionists. I think that the "optical mixture" and "divisionist" painting techniques were due more to Chevreul's discoveries than anything else. I don't have my copy of Boorstin's The Creators handy, but if I recall, he goes into some detail on Chevreul's influence.

As I was looking through Janson's History of Art tonight, I decided to look up the period immediately prior to Kant's publication of the Critique of Judgement. After a section on painter George Stubbs (1724-1806), whose Lion Attacking a Horse (1770) was "a new type of animal picture full of feeling for the grandeur and violence of nature," there's a section on the "The Picturesque and the Sublime" about how picturesque landscape painting was "soon joined by wilder scenes reflecting a taste for the sublime — that delicious sense of awe experienced before grandiose nature, as defined by Edmund Burke in Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful of 1756." Burke was "satisfied the ideas of pain," which he believed were the source of the sublime, were "much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure."

Therefore Burke and Stubbs, who published and painted prior to Kant, were the most evil men in the history of art, and are responsible for Kant's ideas on the sublime, and for postmodern art.

Further, following the section on Burke and the sublime is a section on Alexander Cozens (c. 1717-1786) and his "ink-blot landscapes" or "blotscapes," which were the result of his having tired of creating picturesque landscapes which he felt, according to Janson, had become "stereotyped variations on an established theme," and of his having been inspired by Da Vinci who "had observed that an artist could stimulate his imagination by trying to find recognizable shapes in the stains on old walls." Cozens decided to produce similar random effects on purpose by thinking generally of landscapes while blotting a sheet of paper with ink and, according to Janson, "using as little conscious control as possible."

I can't find an online sample of the image included in the book, but it looks a lot like something that Pollock, Kline or Motherwell might have painted. I agree with Janson that it has "a highly individual graphic rhythm" despite not appearing to be representational.

So, Cozens was an early "Jack the Dripper" prior to Kant's Critique of Judgement, and he was inspired to commit his acts of art-evil by the very anti-life, anti-reason Leonardo!

J

Edited by Jonathan
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As I was looking through Janson's History of Art tonight, I decided to look up the period immediately prior to Kant's publication of the Critique of Judgement. After a section on painter George Stubbs (1724-1806), whose Lion Attacking a Horse (1770) was "a new type of animal picture full of feeling for the grandeur and violence of nature," there's a section on the "The Picturesque and the Sublime" about how picturesque landscape painting was "soon joined by wilder scenes reflecting a taste for the sublime — that delicious sense of awe experienced before grandiose nature, as defined by Edmund Burke in Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful of 1756." Burke was "satisfied the ideas of pain," which he believed were the source of the sublime, were "much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure."

Therefore Burke and Stubbs, who published and painted prior to Kant, were the most evil men in the history of art, and are responsible for Kant's ideas on the sublime, and for postmodern art

Nice stretch, but Kant and Janson clearly use "sublime" in different ways. Janson wrote: "soon joined by wilder scenes reflecting a taste for the sublimethat delicious sense of awe experienced before grandiose nature, as defined by Edmund Burke in Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful of 1756."

Yet Kant used sublime in an entirely different way, from the quotes Newburry posted "The sublime is that, the mere capacity of

thinking which evidences a faculty of mind transcending every standard of sense."

In other words, To Burke and Janson, Sublime was the literal and explicit feel associated with the recognition of something objectively great or grandiose (e.g. the awe experienced before nature) To Kant, the sublime was the feeling associated with the recognition of something objectively great, but ONLY when it was felt for no particular reason the feeler could identify and only when EXPLICITLY disconnected from reality (i.e. transcending every standard of sense) Caught in the rapture and fascination of a piece of garbage tumbling down the street (like the 'most beautiful thing in the world' from "American Beauty") is "sublime" to Kant, caught in the immeasurable rapture of the Grand Canyon is sublime to rational people.

"Sublime" was clearly a word in common usage in Kant's time, Kant took it and removed it's cause, and focused only on the effect. Just because they used the same word, doesnt mean they used in the same way. Prior to Kant, the sublime was an emotion one experienced on the precipice of the Alps, or staring through a microscope, it was the highest type of beauty. After Kant, the Sublime and the Beautiful were explicitly different things, the sublime was now something coming from the mental confusion of unintelligible 'poetry' or unintelligeble erratic blobs of ink.

You see, I am an atheist and I have only one religion: the sublime in human nature. There is nothing to approach the sanctity of the highest type of man possible, and there is nothing that gives me the same reverent feeling, the feeling when one's spirit wants to kneel, bare-headed. Do not call it hero-worship, because it is more than that. It is a kind of strange and improbable white heat where admiration becomes religion, and religion becomes philosophy, and philosophy—the whole of one's life.
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Nice stretch, but Kant and Janson clearly use "sublime" in different ways. Janson wrote: "soon joined by wilder scenes reflecting a taste for the sublimethat delicious sense of awe experienced before grandiose nature, as defined by Edmund Burke in Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful of 1756."

Yet Kant used sublime in an entirely different way, from the quotes Newburry posted "The sublime is that, the mere capacity of

thinking which evidences a faculty of mind transcending every standard of sense."

In other words, To Burke and Janson, Sublime was the literal and explicit feel associated with the recognition of something objectively great or grandiose (e.g. the awe experienced before nature) To Kant, the sublime was the feeling associated with the recognition of something objectively great, but ONLY when it was felt for no particular reason the feeler could identify and only when EXPLICITLY disconnected from reality (i.e. transcending every standard of sense) Caught in the rapture and fascination of a piece of garbage tumbling down the street (like the 'most beautiful thing in the world' from "American Beauty") is "sublime" to Kant, caught in the immeasurable rapture of the Grand Canyon is sublime to rational people.

A piece of garbage tumbling down the street would probably not be sublime to Kant. My understanding of his notion of the sublime (and I admit that I'm still just beginning to re-read him after a couple of decades) is that it's an issue of magnitude. It is the feeling of not being able to get our heads around something, something so large and complex that it is impossible to fully comprehend. So it's not an issue of of being disconnected from reality, but of being overwhelmed by its immensity yet still having an idea or concept of the phenomenon which is beyond comprehension.

"Sublime" was clearly a word in common usage in Kant's time, Kant took it and removed it's cause, and focused only on the effect. Just because they used the same word, doesnt mean they used in the same way. Prior to Kant, the sublime was an emotion one experienced on the precipice of the Alps, or staring through a microscope, it was the highest type of beauty.

Burke's view was that the sublime was based in pain, fear or terror, and was the opposite of beauty. It was the unknowable void, the power which overwhelms, the thing that excites terror.

After Kant, the Sublime and the Beautiful were explicitly different things, the sublime was now something coming from the mental confusion of unintelligible 'poetry' or unintelligeble erratic blobs of ink.

Did you read the part of my post about the unintelligible "blotscapes" by Cozens, created prior to the Critique of Judgment?

Sorry, but despite your refusal to see, I've demonstrated that Burke, Stubbs, Cozens and Da Vinci were the cause of all of the evil in the art world, and not Kant.

J

Edited by Jonathan
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Jonathan, You're right! Little did I know.... It pays to know your art history if you're going to talk about it.

For those who persist in tagging "evil" abstraction with Kant, or somebody else, put the shoe on the other foot. It's being assumed here by many that the horrid abstract artists are a stain on the otherwise generally "acceptable to objectivists" history of art, ala Kamli(?) and someone else. They're being connected by many to a philospher who the great aesthete Rand regarded as a monster and maker of great evil. Indeed, he was the creator of massive dry rot of the soul, or whatever - if "soul" raises your hackles. Kant equals the corruption of reason and paves the way for abstraction.

Yet, art history includes masterpieces and good work by thousands of devout Christians, hopelessly befuddled into a strange kind of antilife worship of some dying guy nailed to a cross (How repulsive that image really is. Imagine a new religion worshipping sculptures of somebody strapped to a gurney or an electric chair. Repellent). And, Cimabue, Giotto and the other fathers of the spectacular Second Millennium of art were devout. Christian art has the Pieta, the Padua Chapel, and on and on and on. And they're not regarded as evil, but as beautiful, foundations of our representational art. And there's Vermeer, much beloved by hardcore objectivists, and his somewhat horrendous "Allegory of Faith." How did the fabulous Ghent Alterpiece come to be with such utterly screwed up premises?

Japanese art, from early AD until the Nineteenth Century, is as they say "sublime", wonderfully composed and colored, contemplative, celebratory and so on. It's painted by artists who worshipped some fat guy sitting on a futon telling humanity that happiness is freedom from wanting anything at all.

Some of the greatest bird paintings of all time, those of early dynastic Egypt, were painted by people who worshipped their gods in the guises of hippos, crocodiles and other animals.

In the 20th Century, as Michael said, there's Francis Bacon, a fine figurative painter, who's idea of a good time was getting buggered and whipped by his father's stable hands. However politically correct everything is now with regard to sexuality and everything else, there has to have been something out of whack with regard to his sense of life, premises, etc. etc.

This could be parsed out forever. Constable's landscapes are OK. Velazquez's portraints, even of popes, are fine, but his religious paintings (if any) must stink by virtue of their ridiculous subject matter and their horrible premises. Brunelleschi's sculpted religious work is horrendously misinformed and monstrous, but by some miracle of a split psyche, his fantastic engineering of the Duomo, even if it is home to death eaters, is an inspired work of early capitalism, paid for by running dogs such as the Medici.

In other words, for some of you posters, look into your own knowledge of art history and philosophy and explain to me why the art we embrace and venerate in museums isn't filled with many awful kinds of visual expression, perhaps even more corrupt than abstraction? Why arent' there more Bosch's and late Goya's? Instead of the grumbling about abstraction that many people engage in, explain to me why this didn't happen in art history. What about the sculpted figures on cathedrals with rotting worm holes carved into their backs? Most artists we encounter in art history, from Christ's birth on, seem to have done inspired, beautiful work. In spite of Jesus, Buddha, Reverend Moon and Werner Erhard.

You can't rationally say that Kant paved the way for abstraction and that Christianity, with philosophers like Thomas Aquinas and various strange credes which have affected our lives in the West, helped pave the way for great figuration. Nor can you say that great Western art arose in spite of Christianity. For centuries the only art in the West was Christian art. And the same goes, of course, for Buddhist teachings and Oriental art, and so on.

Edited by jim
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> Sorry, but despite your refusal to see [Johnathan]

Psychologizing again: Omniscience about someone else's internal mental processes, characterizing a difference of opinion as willful evasion or something close.

This is one of the bad lessons we learned from Rand, Nathaniel Branden, and others of the old school: knee-jerk attacks on motives, character, or good faith.

,,,,,,

Even the side that professed to believe in Tolerance and Honest Error, often its members simply have not internalized thosee lessons and let sliming someone in this way slip out as soon as they get angry or disgusted enough at an intellectual opponent. Or after a thread has gone a few rounds. And they are getting frustrated. . . .

BAD HABITS DIE HARD.

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> Sorry, but despite your refusal to see [Johnathan]

Psychologizing again: Omniscience about someone else's internal mental processes, characterizing a difference of opinion as willful evasion or something close.

This is one of the bad lessons we learned from Rand, Nathaniel Branden, and others of the old school: knee-jerk attacks on motives, character, or good faith.

Heh.

Was there nothing in the second half of my sentence that gave you a clue that there was some sarcasm involved? You only quoted the first part of my sentence. Here it is in full:

"Sorry, but despite your refusal to see, I've demonstrated that Burke, Stubbs, Cozens and Da Vinci were the cause of all of the evil in the art world, and not Kant."

Did you seriously not detect even a trace of parody? Are you so unfamiliar with my views on art that you'd actually believe that I think there's a whole bunch of evil in the art world and that we need to identify which of history's super villains are to blame for it?

Um, I've been a little concerned about you lately, Phil. Are you okay? You don't seem to have your head in the game. You join conversations without seeming to have much of a clue about what's being discussed, and you seem to be much more arrogant and irritable than normal, misinterpreting or mischaracterizing what others say and going into the whole schoolmarm routine when it's not at all justified. I'm starting to worry that something might be seriously wrong in your life, and that maybe I should stop laughing at you, cut you some slack and show a little compassion instead. Is everything alright?

J

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Dragonfly, I don't suppose I'll ever be good enough at reading to ferret out what you mean past what seem to me the non sequiturs in what you say. "The words get in the way." (There's an English song with that phrase in it.)

Could you state what you're proposing as your "Null hypothesis"? As best as I understand you, it's a claim which I don't see as being a "null hypothesis" but instead as a positive statement which would require a demonstration to support. But maybe I am missing your meaning.

Ellen

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Could you state what you're proposing as your "Null hypothesis"? As best as I understand you, it's a claim which I don't see as being a "null hypothesis" but instead as a positive statement which would require a demonstration to support. But maybe I am missing your meaning.

The null hypothesis is that there is no causal relation between Kant's writings and the emergence of abstract art. To claim that there is, is making a positive claim, to deny that claim is not. It's like atheism: to say that God does not exist is not making a positive claim, it is the denial of a positive claim for which no evidence exists.

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Michael,

I don't have time to go into it deeply right now, but we are talking past each other. You insinuated earlier that I do not consider representational art to include the inner part. That is a presumption by you, not anything I wrote. I believe great art uses both inner states and outer entities. The subject being focused on can be outward or inward, but in my conception great art uses both inner and outer, whether the work is abstract or representational. This issue is degree, not exclusion.

Normatively, I agree that there is a manner of portraying the inner states (as the subject of the artwork) so that they imply primacy of consciousness, or contempt for life on earth or whatnot, but there is also a manner of doing it that implies the contrary—very much life-affirming—without restricting the depiction of inner states to being an attribute of a physically recognizable entity. Just like some representational art can "imply primacy of consciousness, or contempt for life on earth or whatnot," or the contrary.

I hold that making a normative standard out of whether the subject of the artwork is an outer thing or an inner state of consciousness is simply an arbitrary rule based on some very subjective thinking, although it is a perfectly valid cognitive standard for identification of style. As a normative standard, (i.e., abstract art is evil or crap, and representational art is life-affirming) is a vast oversimplification.

This is a much longer discussion and I hope to find time to work out some thinking on this.

Jim,

I understand your focus on symbols almost to a Jungian degree, but expressing them does not contradict the urge to observe and depict and share in artists. I see both going hand in hand very nicely. (I wish I had more time for this.)

btw - My email is mikellyusabr@yahoo.com

I keep in eye on my spam folder and I have seen nothing from you. Is this the address you were using?

Michael

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Could you state what you're proposing as your "Null hypothesis"? As best as I understand you, it's a claim which I don't see as being a "null hypothesis" but instead as a positive statement which would require a demonstration to support. But maybe I am missing your meaning.

The null hypothesis is that there is no causal relation between Kant's writings and the emergence of abstract art. To claim that there is, is making a positive claim, to deny that claim is not. It's like atheism: to say that God does not exist is not making a positive claim, it is the denial of a positive claim for which no evidence exists.

AH, light dawns, maybe! At least, I think it does in regard to what you take to be the point under dispute. Although I disagree that "to say that God does not exist is not making a positive claim." To say that God does NOT exist is to assert. To say that evidence would be needed to make a claim FOR God's existence is what I would call "the null hypothesis" in the circumstance. [see PS.] Do you see the difference between an assertion of a negative (God does not exist) and a statement that evidence would have to be adduced for the positive (God does exist)?

In any case, even if you don't see that point, thanks for the answer, since it leads me to think that there's been a miscommunication on terminology. Possibly part of the miscommunication is because of my using "abstract" for convenience in a reply to Matus.

Notice, though, that Newberry equated post-modernism with "non-objective" in his post #99 (here). That's the post to which I thought you were referring in your meaning of "non-objective."

[...] eventually I recognized the foundations for postmodernism (also non-objective art) where to be found in Kant's aesthetics. [Emphasis added.]

You didn't quote, but I thought at the time that you were picking up Newberry's equation of "non-objective" with "postmodernism." I don't know how it can be denied that there was an influence of Kant on what's generally called "Post-Modernism" in art. Not that I think that Kant would have liked the development. And please note, again, that by "influence" I do not mean "cause," as in physics. I'm talking about --near as we can tell -- the influence of a thinker's views on later persons' thoughts. (E,g, AR has had an influence on your views. The details of your thoughts wouldn't be what they are if you'd never heard of AR.)

I doubt that Newberry would claim that Kant was an influence in the development of abstract art, as I understand what's generally meant by the term. * "Abstract art," as I understand what's generally meant by the term, goes back to the caves -- 35 at least thousand years ago. Kant wasn't around back then. ;-)

Ellen

* a usage which I find weird, as I've said, since I'd think of all art as "abstract."

PS: I edited to take out the "positive" in "positive evidence," as per GS's correction below.

Also, that whole sentence is bad, as I said in a reply to GS -- see -- and "null hypothesis" (defined in the linked post) isn't the appropriate terminology for the example.

___

Edited by Ellen Stuttle
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AH, light dawns, maybe! At least, I think it does in regard to what you take to be the point under dispute. Although I disagree that "to say that God does not exist is not making a positive claim." To say that God does NOT exist is to assert. To say that positive evidence would be needed to make a claim FOR God's existence is what I would call "the null hypothesis" in the circumstance. Do you see the difference between an assertion of a negative (God does not exist) and a statement that evidence would have to be adduced for the positive (God does exist)?

What is "positive evidence" , AFAIK there is only evidence? I agree with DF, saying "God does not exist" is tantamount to saying "there is no evidence that God exists". If someone wants to assert the opposite then they must provide some evidence.

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MSK:

So long as man in history only looked outward to the world for value, letting God or the gods (and demons) be responsible for the inside of his mind part, art reflected observed or imagined external concretes. It is what we call representational in the plastic arts. When man started introspecting about his own mental processes, and this became important to him for any number of reasons, I don't see why that urge to put something he observes or imagines and finds important on display would evaporate. Yet in traditional Objectivist writing, this is not even on the table when abstract art is discussed.

The closest I understand this to mean is that before man introspected he made art of objects outside of himself, when he started to introspect (apparently you suggest from Freud onward), he looked inside and went abstract. That is the best I can do with this, your meaning is far from clear.

Edited by Newberry
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The closest I understand this to mean is that before man introspected he made art of objects outside of himself, when he started to introspect (apparently you suggest from Freud onward), he looked inside and went abstract. That is the best I can do with this, your meaning is far from clear.

Michael,

Let me help. When you say "he looked inside and went abstract," you are implying that man abandoned representational art at that moment. That is not what I am saying at all. I am saying he added abstract to his repertoire of possibilities. In that sense, yes he did go abstract. That's history. (As if there were such a creature as "man" as a collective, anyway! :) Maybe it might be better to say some men...) The timeline between abstract art and the development of psychology fits, at least.

I like the suggestion of the influence of photography, also. And probably cinema. And even the holy mess that was World War I. I don't think the addition of abstract art to mankind's wealth was due to one cause only and I do not believe for a minute that it killed representational art. Nor do I believe that people who appreciate abstract art do not appreciate representational art, nor that abstract art induces a person to be dismissive of representational art.

I do believe that the subject portrayed in representational art is an existent and ditto for abstract art. What goes on inside my head exists. My mental processes are not separate from reality, they are a part of it. In other words, I fall within existence and that includes my mental processes just as much as it does my body.

Thus it is a mystery to me why there is such antagonism to trying to depict that existent if selective recreation of reality is to be the standard.

Michael

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Ellen:

...I don't know how it can be denied that there was an influence of Kant on what's generally called "Post-Modernism" in art. Not that I think that Kant would have liked the development. And please note, again, that by "influence" I do not mean "cause," as in physics. I'm talking about --near as we can tell -- the influence of a thinker's views on later persons' thoughts. (E,g, AR has had an influence on your views. The details of your thoughts wouldn't be what they are if you'd never heard of AR.)

Ellen,

Again, it is pleasure to read your thoughts.

Acknowledging influences is sometimes problematic for people. I think when someone is exposed to a new idea, they are in an awkward position as it enters their consciousness--dismissing the idea and expelling it out of their head is easier said than done. I think my job is done on this thread.

Michael

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MSK:

I do believe that the subject portrayed in representational art is an existent and ditto for abstract art. What goes on inside my head exists. My mental processes are not separate from reality, they are a part of it. In other words, I fall within existence and that includes my mental processes just as much as it does my body.

!!!

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In any case, even if you don't see that point, thanks for the answer, since it leads me to think that there's been a miscommunication on terminology. Possibly part of the miscommunication is because of my using "abstract" for convenience in a reply to Matus.

Notice, though, that Newberry equated post-modernism with "non-objective" in his post #99 (here). That's the post to which I thought you were referring in your meaning of "non-objective."

[...] eventually I recognized the foundations for postmodernism (also non-objective art) where to be found in Kant's aesthetics. [Emphasis added.]

You didn't quote, but I thought at the time that you were picking up Newberry's equation of "non-objective" with "postmodernism." I don't know how it can be denied that there was an influence of Kant on what's generally called "Post-Modernism" in art. Not that I think that Kant would have liked the development. And please note, again, that by "influence" I do not mean "cause," as in physics.

But Newberry was not saying that Kant probably had some mere influence on some postmodernist artists, he said that Kant's ideas are the foundation of entire movements of art, including those which are in conflict with each other on a whole variety of issues. Saying that something is a "foundation" implies to me that it is indeed a "cause," as in physics.

To me, the problem is Newberry's method, which seems to be to personally interpret Kant's ideas as having a certain meaning, to personally interpret certain works of art or artistic movements as representing certain meanings or ideas, to see similarities in his personal interpretations of each, and to then conclude that the one was the "foundation" of the other.

And it doesn't seem to matter that the various artists and movements have wildly different views, including their notions of not only the beautiful and the sublime and whether or not art needs to be beautiful or sublime, but their views on the necessity of representation in art (postmodernists generally reject the modernist view), the specific natures of each of the art forms, etc. In effect, the Newberrian view seems to be that anything which is not very close to being Randian/Newberrian has its "foundations" in Kant (much in the same way that anyone who has different tastes in art than Newberry does is instantly identified by him as being a "cynical product of an American dark ages of art.")

Now, I'd think that as powerfully influential as Kant has allegedly been over the art world, it would be pretty easy to find some quotes from the thousands of artists whom he so strongly influenced. In flipping through my dozens of books on art, I see lots and lots of artists naming their influences. They're not bashful about giving credit to the artists and thinkers who inspired them, or about sharing their enthusiasm for the ideas. So, could we see some quotes? Anything at all from artists about Kant's ideas? (Just to be clear, I'm not asking this rhetorically -- I'm very open to seeing evidence of Kant's influence, and serious evidence, to me, would consist of prominent abstract/modernist and postmodernist artists interpreting Kant in the way that Newberry has interpreted him, and stating in which ways their interpretations of Kant's ideas influenced their art).

I'm talking about --near as we can tell -- the influence of a thinker's views on later persons' thoughts. (E,g, AR has had an influence on your views. The details of your thoughts wouldn't be what they are if you'd never heard of AR.)

We still haven't seen any evidence of the chain of influence that would allow us to conclude that Kant's ideas were the foundation of any art movement.

I doubt that Newberry would claim that Kant was an influence in the development of abstract art, as I understand what's generally meant by the term. * "Abstract art," as I understand what's generally meant by the term, goes back to the caves -- 35 at least thousand years ago. Kant wasn't around back then. ;-)

When people talk of "abstract art," I think they usually mean art which doesn't depict real objects. They mean paintings like those created by Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich and Pollock. The term "non-objective art," which you cite Newberry as including among the types of art which he believes have their "foundation" in Kant, most definetly refers specifically to those artists' works. So, Newberry does seem to be saying that Kant's ideas were the "foundation" of the art of Kandinsky et al.

J

Edited by Jonathan
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Now, I'd think that as powerfully influential as Kant has allegedly been over that art world, it would be pretty easy to find some quotes from the thousands of artists whom he so strongly influenced. In flipping through my dozens of books on art, I see lots and lots of artists naming their influences. They're not bashful about giving credit to the artists and thinkers who inspired them, or about sharing their enthusiasm for the ideas. So, could we see some quotes? Anything at all from artists about Kant's ideas?

I guess you could say the same think with respect to Peikoff's claim that Kant was the cause of Nazism. His name rarely pops up in books on Nazi Germany or biographies of Hitler. In fact, it appears they rather disliked the guy.

-NEIL

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Hey Jim,

I couldn't make heads or tails of your last post. I don't know if you are being cynical, sincere, or simply mixing it up.

Michael

Probably all of the above.

I cannot stand a lot of modern classical music, but I won't lay the problems (whatever they might be) at philosophy's doorstep. Rather, at music's, first of all.

You can't do it in the visual arts, either. It's a Randian kind of sleight-of-hand in which the real subject, about which she knows very little, disappears, enveloped by extensions from her philosophy, often blaming the evil Kant. You cannot lay your problems with things you don't like (and, by the way, which you know she doesn't like) so clearly outside of the primary subject matter. Her style is to disregard the real aesthetic content, history and so on of the subject and blame it all on some person or another within the realm of philosophy.

Of course we are part of the philosophies of our age, and those of earlier ages. But, it's a Randian trick, I think, to ignore the subject's real content and so on, and instead concentrate almost exclusively on philosophic abstractions.

Jim Shay

Edited by jim
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