Caricature Art

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

There's nothing nasty behind my intent, but I do think you are waffling, trying to have your cake and eat it too.

Shayne,

Boy are you ever wrong. My attempt is trying to keep a discussion forum running and civil. Wait until you try to do one, then you'll see how easy it is.

Oh, I forgot. You already tried to do that, didn't you?

Michael kinda sorta seems to agree, because he's denies my entire point (while seeming on some undefined level to agree with me, sorta): that there's a hierarchy here.

You are one of the sloppiest readers I have come across so far and this remark is just plain snarky.

I'm going pull rank because I have had enough of the bad vibes. Please keep them off the forum.

Michael

[sjw]

Oh, I forgot. You already tried to do that, didn't you?

No, actually. Spent 15min one time throwing up a forum on the request of a friend just to demonstrate how easy it was; other people decided my intent was to make yet another Objectivist forum. We rambled on a bit and then I shut it down. My real thoughts on this were that the technology isn't good enough yet to support the kind of forum that would be acceptable to a true Objectivist.

I'm going pull rank because I have had enough of the bad vibes. Please keep them off the forum.

I'll abide by your wishes but the only way I can do that is to not post.

Shayne

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I'll abide by your wishes but the only way I can do that is to not post.

Shayne,

Your choice.

Your intelligence is welcome. Your constant snipes at posters are not. (And neither are snipes at you.)

Bickering is crap. Kat and I don't want this crap anymore and we won't have it.

Michael

[Victor Pross]

Damn, I want to have a dialogue about art with anybody with gray matter, and that means you Shayne —along with any other OL poster.

[Jonathan]

I don't have time to add anything of much substance right now, or even to join the fizzling food fight (darn!), but I thought some of you might like Roberto Parada's work.

A few of my favorites from his website:

http://www.robertoparada.com/prints2/stare.html

http://www.robertoparada.com/prints2/rackem.html

http://www.robertoparada.com/prints3/garden.html

http://www.robertoparada.com/prints4/jcash.html

J

[Victor Pross]

Simply gorgeous stuff! Thank you, J! Of course, I love it.

Edited November 16, 2006 by Victor Pross

[Rich Engle]

Then he and Rich started calling me snobby

Absolutely incorrect. Find one place where you were told that. As in "Shayne, you are being snobby."

There wasn't even innuendo. We were both talking about general experiences in both the art and Objectivist world (Victor was speaking more about the art world, I was talking about O-world, although both being artists and involved with Objectivism we have experienced it both places). Never once was it directed at you. I have never once insulted you personally, nor intimated it. Best to be clear about that, very clear.

Did our experiences with dealing with you contribute to reflecting on those past experiences? Probably had something to do with it, but no more than associatively. Who cares?

And then, you decided to say to someone "if (A), you are thick." That, sir, is an insult, and a direct one. Notice the difference?

I also wonder about your statement that forum technology is not sufficient for a "True Objectivist." This is outrageous! IT and the Internet support business' much more intense needs; needs that far outstrip forums, or special interest website type stuff. Collaborative environments are absolutely no problem in the technology world. You gotta be kidding me!

In any event, Kat and MSK are right. I am disengaging from you. Have your last word if you wish. It might be better for you if you don't, but that's not for me to say. I wish you well. I simply find no joy in discussion with you.

Edited November 16, 2006 by Rich Engle

[Victor Pross]

Shayne,

I know you felt yourself being painted in a corner, but you could have extended the courtesy of answering my question. I answered your question, after all. I know you lost the innate talent argument, but don’t let that stop you from answering the question I asked you on this thread.

Victor

Edited November 16, 2006 by Victor Pross

[Ellen Stuttle]

I agree with Shayne on the differences between caricature and more serious art, but I am a bit adverse to making a hierarchy. It is like comparing beef and oranges.

There is something very deep within us that Atlas Shrugged touches that no caricature ever could. But there is also a fundamental part of our souls that caricature touches that Atlas Shrugged didn't and probably couldn't without destroying its heroic impact.

I don't see a hard and fast line but instead a gradual shifting of difference in emphasis. In other words, I don't think it is "like comparing beef and oranges" but more like comparing degrees along a scale (though a multi-faceted scale not a linear scale). Perhaps it's the linking of "caricature" with humor that makes it seem as if there's a sharp demarcation. But I think that there's a sense in which Atlas Shrugged IS caricature, or more precisely utilizes caricature. Of course Rand would object (vociferously) to the idea that her characters exaggerate certain traits to the point of not having "reality" as human beings. But I'd classify Atlas as allegorical in type, in particular as a modern "morality play." Amongst early reviews of Atlas there was a sympathetic review, I've forgotten by whom, in which the book was called an allegory. AR didn't like the description, but I think the reviewer was on target. One could say that the figures in an allegory "essentialize" rather that "caricaturize," but the difference is a fine line (visual arts pun) which I don't think can be given exact specification.

Another novelist of stature whose characters at least at times go over the line into "caricature" is Dickens. I had the pleasure of reading Bleak House a few years ago (I hadn't ever read it before then). Numerous of the characters are exaggerated enough in the descriptive details as to cross the border into caricaturing, but I don't feel that this in any way lessens -- I'd even say it hightens; it makes more memorable -- the emotional effect of the story.

Ellen

PS: I'm aware that I might be throwing a bombshell into an argument which is winding down. I'm not sure just what that argument is even "about," since I often, indeed usually, quit attending when "you said; no, you did," etc., starts to occur. But I think that both "sides" are presuming a clear demarcation of artistic types, and while the subject is still going, I want to register a dissent from that shared "premise."

___

Edited November 16, 2006 by Ellen Stuttle

[Victor Pross]

PS: I'm aware that I might be throwing a bombshell into an argument which is winding down. I'm not sure just what that argument is even "about," since I often, indeed usually, quit attending when "you said; no, you did," etc., starts to occur. But I think that both "sides" are presuming a clear demarcation of artistic types, and while the subject is still going, I want to register a dissent from that shared "premise."

Ellen,

After a while I forget what it was about—and I was in the thick of it! I agree that the “sez you-sez me” exchange exhausts the spirit and has one reaching for Aspirin. There has got to be an easier way to show anybody who disagrees with me that they're wrong. ;]

Victor

Edited November 16, 2006 by Victor Pross

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I don't see a hard and fast line but instead a gradual shifting of difference in emphasis. In other words, I don't think it is "like comparing beef and oranges" but more like comparing degrees along a scale (though a multi-faceted scale not a linear scale).

Ellen,

We think alike here. Both beef and oranges are food, so in one sense they are degrees of food. (I know it's a lame metaphor, but there it is.)

My point was that the same inner need is touched by both caricature art and any other "selective recreation of reality." On the allegorical level, the degrees move from humor to exaltation, but they are still allegories. Still, this shows the different aspects of man's cognitive/psychological/spiritual need that are being served (the emotional environment), so there is some level of difference in kind, also.

One doesn't crack up in church and one doesn't pray during a stand-up comedy routine, yet both activities serve the same core need. (I particularly find humor life-affirming and there is a growing body of evidence to show that laughing is very, very healthy.)

I have been studying Roger's essay, Art as Microcosm: The Real Meaning of the Objectivist Concept of Art, where his thesis is that art creates a whole alternative world, or stylized world, not just an element in it. I agree with this.

When Rand stated that she wanted to create the perfect man, she was stating that she wanted to create a vision of the perfect man that was limited in two respects: (1) it was her vision only, and (2) it was not a complete view. Both of these limitations come from the nature of art. Still, "the perfect man" would be a meaningless creation if he did not have a reality with the same limitations to act in.

In caricature, I see a "mental reality" operating, where metaphors can become literal. This scratches a real fundamental itch in addition to humor--essentially providing an emotional-level affirmation of the efficacy of the mind to change reality. Actually allegory does that too, but in Atlas Shrugged, the physical laws of nature are preserved.

Michael

[Ellen Stuttle]

Ellen,

We think alike here.

Uh... I can't say I'm getting any clear picture of the "alike"ness. Your current post seems at least more or less (actually, I'm not sure what you're saying in the current post, Michael) to contradict the earlier one I quoted. I think I won't try dialectics on the apparent thesis/antithesis.

Ellen

___

[Rich Engle]

My point was that the same inner need is touched by both caricature art and any other "selective recreation of reality." On the allegorical level, the degrees move from humor to exaltation, but they are still allegories. Still, this shows the different aspects of man's cognitive/psychological/spiritual need that are being served (the emotional environment), so there is some level of difference in kind, also.

I think that's a great summary.

If someone doesn't care for, say, caricature, that means the need doesn't exist (or least goes unrecognized).

And is it also not so that a person can lead a vital, productive, meaningful life without the need for, say, Romantic Realism? I think so because I could easily show you someone like that.

People have artistic pallettes, and sometimes they're into stuff that seems to be quite out-of-character from what you see of them in the "we" world.

I don't think you can put a value judgment on just the pallette. But people try...

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Uh... I can't say I'm getting any clear picture of the "alike"ness. Your current post seems at least more or less (actually, I'm not sure what you're saying in the current post, Michael) to contradict the earlier one I quoted. I think I won't try dialectics on the apparent thesis/antithesis.

Ellen,

I was specifically talking about degree. We think alike that caricature and heavy art are matters of the same essence, but varying in degree (although not a "linear" one).

Did I get that right?

I didn't understand the dialectics part.

Where you might have thought my post contradicted yours is when I mentioned "kind" in terms of the different emotions the different art forms address. As the emotions are different, so are the art forms. (And, to tell the truth, the different emotions can be said to have the same essence, but only be a difference of "non-linear" degree.)

Michael

[Ellen Stuttle]

Michael,

Let's start over, because now I'm not sure if we're agreeing or not. The basic point I was trying to make was to enter a dissent against the idea -- which Shayne certainly seemed to me to be making, and which I thought you agreed with -- that there's a basic difference of kind between "caricature" and "great art." I don't think there is such a basic difference of kind. Instead, I think there's a fair amount of "great art" which at least contains elements of "caricature," and that Atlas Shrugged, which I thought was being used as a contrast case to "caricature," is an excellent case in point. Rand uses techniques which she thought of as "essentialization" but which I think could also be described as "caricaturization."

Consider an example. Maybe this will help. The first scene wherein James Taggart is introduced. I think what she does there is a verbal rendering of what a visual artist would do in a caricature rendering. She paints in words an image which exaggerates certain key elements, making them vividly recognizable.

Does that clarify?

As to the "dialectics" reference, I'll let that one go. A little joke; but, as you've pointed out, sometimes trying to explain humor just succeeds at destroying it.

Ellen

___

Edited November 17, 2006 by Ellen Stuttle

[Victor Pross]

Ellen,

In regards to “essentialization", you are on to something here, and I do know where you are coming from.

Simply, I define caricature as an exaggerated likeness of a person made by emphasizing all the features that make the person different from everybody else. It is not the exaggeration of one’s worst features, as it is so typically thought, but rather, the exaggeration of distinctive features. Take Paul Newman for example. As a caricaturist, I would focus on his gorgeous piercing blue eyes, a distinctive feature, not an unattractive feature.

Now, you also said: “She [Ayn Rand] paints in words an image which exaggerates certain key elements, making them vividly recognizable.” Connecting this to caricature, you are again on the right track: many think that a caricature is necessarily a graphic distortion of a face. This is not the case. The essence of caricature is exaggeration—NOT distortion.

Exaggeration is exaggeration of “the truth” of a person, distortion means deception and falsehood. And what you exaggerate is the ESSENSE of a person, this being their features. Of course, I argued in the above article that caricatures should also draw on elements below the surface. In this case, a caricaturist can afford to think like a writer.

Victor

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Let's start over, because now I'm not sure if we're agreeing or not. The basic point I was trying to make was to enter a dissent against the idea -- which Shayne certainly seemed to me to be making, and which I thought you agreed with -- that there's a basic difference of kind between "caricature" and "great art."

Ellen,

You seem to be discussing caricature as a technique in a larger work. Rand certainly did that. Some of her characters are definitely caricatures. Ralston Holcombe in The Fountainhead comes to mind. The following could easily be a description of an imagined caricature by Victor:

Ralston Holcombe had no visible neck, but his chin took care of that. His chin and jaws formed an unbroken arc, resting on his chest. His cheeks were pink, soft to the touch, with the irresilient softness of age, like the skin of a peach that has been scalded. His rich white hair rose over his forehead and fell to his shoulders in the sweep of a medieval mane. It left dandruff on the back of his collar.

He walked through the streets of New York, wearing a broad-brimmed hat, a dark business suit, a pale green satin shirt, a vest of white brocade, a huge black bow emerging from under his chin, and he carded a staff, not a cane, but a tall ebony staff surmounted by a bulb of solid gold. It was as if his huge body were resigned to the conventions of a prosaic civilization and to its drab garments, but the oval of his chest and stomach sallied forth, flying the colors of his inner soul.

I was discussing the art form as a whole. A large work that employs many emotions is one animal whereas a simple work that concentrates on one or very few is another. This focus makes them different in kind as a whole work, but only as a whole work. Even then, this needs to be qualified and restricted to total aesthetic experience only. We read Atlas Shrugged or watch a play by Shakespeare for one purpose. We watch a stand-up comic for another. Yet the larger works can contain wisecracks and the comic can deal with universal themes. That doesn't mean that we will go to the comic when we want to be uplifted or contemplate some of the mysteries of being alive, or we will go see Shakespeare in order to laugh nonstop for a while.

As technique, I fully agree with your idea of degree. I also agree with your idea of arguing against a type of snobbery that tries to classify types of art in terms of value, thus saying that a work of fiction can be "great art" whereas a caricature can never be "great art." This even goes back to ethics: of value to whom and for what?

Give me a great caricature over a mediocre novel any day. Also, give me a great novel over a mediocre caricature any day. With a great caricature and a great novel, I'll take them both and appreciate each depending on what I require at the time.

Michael

[Rich Engle]

OK, I have a question (never a good thing)...

I agree with the idea of caricature being used as a way of describing many of Rand's characters... the negative ones.

But, would that also apply to the protagonists? They are also heavily emphasized/weighted, but more in the Olympian/Greek Godlike sense... Does that mean caricature?

r

Know whut ah meen?

[Victor Pross]

OK, I have a question (never a good thing)...

I agree with the idea of caricature being used as a way of describing many of Rand's characters... the negative ones.

But, would that also apply to the protagonists? They are also heavily emphasized/weighted, but more in the Olympian/Greek Godlike sense... Does that mean caricature?

r

Know whut ah meen?

Rich dude,

I think I may have answered your question [seen above] before you asked it.

What is a caricature? Simply, I define caricature as an exaggerated likeness of a person made by emphasizing all the features that make the person different from everybody else. It is not the exaggeration of one’s worst features, as typically thought, but rather, the exaggeration of distinctive features. The key word here is distinctive. That can apply to protagonists as well as 'negative characters.' Like my exmple above, take Paul Newman: As a caricaturist, I would focus on his gorgeous piercing blue eyes, a distinctive feature, not an unattractive feature. Olympian/Greek Godlike? Hey, that could be exaggerated!

Many think that a caricature is necessarily a graphic distortion of a face. This is not the case. The essence of caricature is exaggeration—NOT distortion. Exaggeration is exaggeration of “the truth” of a person, distortion means deception and falsehood. And what you exaggerate is the ESSENSE of a person, this being their features. I also go for the inner world of a character, as explained in the article above.

Victor

Edited November 17, 2006 by Victor Pross

[Rich Engle]

I think you did in fact answer it. It takes a minute to grasp your concept, which I thoroughly agree with. It's a much more elegant approach!

[Ellen Stuttle]

OK, I have a question (never a good thing)...

I agree with the idea of caricature being used as a way of describing many of Rand's characters... the negative ones.

But, would that also apply to the protagonists? They are also heavily emphasized/weighted, but more in the Olympian/Greek Godlike sense... Does that mean caricature?

r

Know whut ah meen?

IMO, yes, it does (as I think I said in each of my previous posts on this subject ;-)).

Ellen

___

Edited November 17, 2006 by Ellen Stuttle

[Ellen Stuttle]

Michael, I'll try one more time to say what I was trying to say and then I'll have to leave off till after the "Thanksgiving Seminar." I think that I might have unintentionally misled you by quoting your response to Shayne instead of directly quoting the comment by Shayne which was the precipitating remark I was addressing. That was his comment in his post #79:

[shayne wrote] So for you, concretizing the ideal man is an equivalent order of art as caricature? For you, a caricature artist can in principle be an equivalent artist to Michaelangelo or Ayn Rand? Is that the reason for the Leonardo tie-in, to try to imply that since he was a great artist, then all his art was great in this respect?

The point I was trying to make wasn't one pertaining to the needs satisfied by art, or to the snobbery issue, but instead a direct technical issue: In what Shayne wrote above, he indicates that caricature is inherently technically less on a greatness scale than the work of "Michaelangelo or Ayn Rand." What I was attempting to draw attention to is that Ayn Rand prominently uses "caricature" in her characterization technique in her major masterpiece, Atlas Shrugged. I know that she wouldn't have called her characterization technique "caricature" -- she'd have been angered by the description; she called it "essentialization." But I think the line of difference is so fine as to be hard to detect.

I'll add a couple other points: I wouldn't myself place AR-as-writer at quite the same "greatness" level as I would Michaelangelo-as-painter. I'd instead choose Shakespeare as the literary comparison to Michaelangelo. But Shakespeare used "caricature" techniques at times as well, though he also did much more fully-fleshed characterizations.

And, I think that those da Vinci drawings Victor linked are in the realm of "great," technically, though they could be considered "caricature."

Possibly there's been a misfiring of communication all along between what I'm saying and what you (and others here) are talking about, because in speaking of "great" art I'm speaking technically; I'm not talking about the degree to which one is "stirred" by the art work. But that's a distinction which does become a difficult one, since part of "great" technically is scope of subject and, yes, depth of insight.

And I think I'd better just leave off there...

Happy Thanksgiving, those of you who celebrate some sort of feast-day on or near next Thursday.

Ellen

___

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Ellen,

It is funny, but I understood you to be speaking technically. My own communication skills must be getting weak.

I understood that you were speaking about a technique of characterization. I merely tried to explain why I probably misunderstood at first--and in technical terms, albeit more general ones (function of whole work as opposed to part or specific technique). There is another reason I didn't understand at first. Victor produces whole works--to him a caricature is a whole work, whereas in Atlas Shrugged, it is part of a whole.

What just happened actually borders on a source of tremendous misunderstandings in Objectivism. It is what I call the cognitive/normative problem. I have constantly run into arguments where I am discussing "What is it?" and I get blasted or praised by someone who thinks I am making some kind of value judgment. (You didn't do that, but we danced around it.)

Even Rand acknowledged two sets of different concepts, cognitive and normative, although she did not elaborate much on this difference. I have encountered in some of her essays places where she switches cognitive and normative meanings for the same word in order to get preachy at the end. (I will write an essay later about that.)

Anyway, I hold that you have to know what something is before you can judge its value. I have encountered people who claim that the act of knowing something already determines its value--its value is built into its identity in cognition, so to speak. The first time I encountered this, I was aghast and completely bewildered. How could they do that to their minds? But some people do and they do it in the name of Objectivism.

Back to the point, here is what I imagine you would call a caricature-like growing up for a hero (Atlas Shrugged, p. 91-92, Signet paperback edition):

Dagny and Eddie spent their winters trying to master some new skill, in order to astonish Francisco and beat him, for once. They never succeeded. When they showed him how to hit a ball with a bat, a game he had never played before, he watched them for a few minutes, then said, "I think I get the idea. Let me try." He took the bat and sent the ball flying over a line of oak trees far at the end of the field.

When Jim was given a motorboat for his birthday, they all stood on the river landing, watching the lesson, while an instructor showed Jim how to run it. None of them had ever driven a motorboat before. The sparkling white craft, shaped like a bullet, kept staggering clumsily across the water, its wake a long record of shivering, its motor choking with hiccoughs, while the instructor, seated beside him, kept seizing the wheel out of Jim's hands. For no apparent reason, Jim raised his head suddenly and yelled at Francisco, "Do you think you can do it any better?"

"I can do it."

"Try it!"

When the boat came back and its two occupants stepped out, Francisco slipped behind the wheel. "Wait a moment," he said to the instructor, who remained on the landing. "Let me take a look at this." Then, before the instructor had time to move, the boat shot out to the middle of the river, as if fired from a gun. It was streaking away before they grasped what they were seeing. As it went shrinking into the distance and sunlight, Dagny's picture of it was three straight lines: its wake, the long shriek of its motor, and the aim of the driver at its wheel.

She noticed the strange expression of her father's face as he looked at the vanishing speedboat. He said nothing; he just stood looking. She remembered that she had seen him look that way once before. It was when he inspected a complex system of pulleys which Francisco, aged twelve, had erected to make an elevator to the top of a rock; he was teaching Dagny and Eddie to dive from the rock into the Hudson. Francisco's notes of calculations were still scattered about on the ground; her father picked them up, looked at them, then asked, "Francisco, how many years of algebra have you had?" "Two years." "Who taught you to do this?" "Oh, that's just something I figured out." She did not know that what her father held on the crumpled sheets of paper was the crude version of a differential equation.

The heirs of Sebastián d'Anconia had been an unbroken line of first sons, who knew how to bear his name. It was a tradition of the family that the man to disgrace them would be the heir who died, leaving the d'Anconia fortune no greater than he had received it. Throughout the generations, that disgrace had not come. An Argentinian legend said that the hand of a d'Anconia had the miraculous power of the saints—only it was not the power to heal, but the power to produce.

The d'Anconia heirs had been men of unusual ability, but none of them could match what Francisco d'Anconia promised to become. It was as if the centuries had sifted the family's qualities through a fine mesh, had discarded the irrelevant, the inconsequential, the weak, and had let nothing through except pure talent; as if chance, for once, had achieved an entity devoid of the accidental.

Francisco could do anything he undertook, he could do it better than anyone else, and he did it without effort. There was no boasting in his manner and consciousness, no thought of comparison. His attitude was not: "I can do it better than you," but simply: "I can do it." What he meant by doing was doing superlatively.

No matter what discipline was required of him by his father's exacting plan for his education, no matter what subject he was ordered to study, Francisco mastered it with effortless amusement.

How can anyone aspire to be like that? You can't. You have to be made that way. But as an "essentialization" or caricature of supreme talent, this passage conveys the meaning perfectly.

Come to think of it, this is a perfect example for the "innate talent" discussion.

OK, OK, enough.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Michael

[Kat]

So one may say, essentially, that caricaturing is essentially essentializing....

Kat