Cordair's Artists Best Ever

[Jonathan]

Yet another "objective" aesthetic judgment:

I can say that everyone who does artwork at the Cordair Gallery is objectively better than Michaelangelo, Leonardo or Rembrandt because they had the sum total of all these artists' lives' worth of matieral to use as a starting point. Note that I'm not saying that any of the new artists there are as groundbreaking as those original artists I'm just saying they STARTED development where the others had ENDED and by that very fact HAD to be better.

Likewise,

is an objectively better singer than

because Potts had the sum total of Pavarotti's life's worth of matieral to use as a starting point. Note that I'm not saying that Potts is as groundbreaking as Pavarotti, I'm just saying Potts STARTED development where Pavarotti had ENDED and by that very fact HAD to be better.

J

[Brant Gaede]

It's strange anyone would make such an ignorant post. It's time for Objectivists to get to work on objectively better novels than _______________.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

This is just plain embarrassing.

I'm so sick of this kind of shit coming out of the Objectivist world that I'm fit to be tied.

What the hell kind of subculture is this anyway?

Michael

[Matus1976]

I don't know... Michelangelo pretty much sucked at painting women, unless they were all body builders with bad breast implants.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Mike,

It's a shame Michelangelo didn't read Playboy magazine, isn't it?

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

It looks like he used a male model. I think that was a common practice then. Good female nudes are much harder to do and find than male. This probably looks a lot better at a distance.

--Brant

[Landon Erp]

I haven't posted here in a couple years but I feel the need to respond to this. I've made this argument a half a dozen times before and it usually gets ignored because I speak in terms of comics creators. The one time I use people everyone is familiar with then it gets noticed.

Usually it goes something like:

Jim Lee is better than Jack Kirby because even though Jack Kirby developed all the techniques and tools Jim Lee would later go on to use, Jim Lee had the benefit of time to see what Kirby did that worked and where the flaws were. On top of that he also had the benefit of learning from people like Neal Adams, John Byrne etc. and applying the same process to them for a greater sum total once he actually became fluent with his work.

Effectively you're seeing someone who has had the benefit of learning from Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Neal Adams, Frank Miller and numerous others learning from the groundbreaking new things they brought to the table as well as the flaws each possessed to learn from and it shows. Does this however mean that generations from now his work will be valued more than that of any of his mentors. Not necessarily. He had good runs on X-men and Batman but he's never had a "Coming of Galactus," or "Dark Phoenix Saga" or "Dark Knight Returns" and may never but his work is more technically proficient than that of any of his mentors.

His work has a technical prowess that is higher than any of his mentors but that does not necessarily mean that his work will have more impact.

When I listed the fine artists these were all people who brought new techniques to their field which had never existed before. As such especially the first times they were used they were not as good as they would later become through trial and error and practice. Any art history student can point to things the renaissance artists did that anyone today would know better than. Michelangelo's proportions on women were often very unrealistic (since he worked from male models quite often) and there are countless other things. At the time these things were not even worth mentioning because each of these artists were bringing so many new things to the table. But it would be unforgivable today for any new artist to not learn from these flaws and take every great artist as being so great they were beyond question.

This is how progress works you learn from what came before you. You understand how great the advances were and you learn to fix the flaws. I could hardly imagine living in 2008 and still using the exact type of light bulb that was built in Edison's laboratory with no improvements.

How the Cordair gallery fits into this discussion is that you have a number of artist who had the benefit of learning from Michelangelo, Leonardo et al. as well as Objectivist aesthetics. Also the specific context of this was omitted. It was in response to Lindsay Perigos musical statements where he basically wasn't granting any merit to anything that was less than 200 years old. It was in response to the fact that we have today artists who've been working within just the past few decades who've picked up what at one point was nearly a dead tradition and they're keeping it going. It's the best thing around today but this tradition didn't have many people propping it up for a long period of time so it's more of a best by default than obviously best. But honestly all the things I mentioned are technically better as in executed with more skill and understanding than that which came before it which I translate as objectively better.

The works from the past I mentioned had inspiration, skill, and innovation whereas the modern works only have the first two. But there is enough of this for them to qualify. Being part of the tradition means the newest entrants have had the greatest who came before them to learn from, and in many ways they may be placeholders for said tradition, but they're there.

The post was in response to the idea of holding onto good memories while letting the future die. I used it as a means of pointing out that traditions reemerging and new works being created is not only a possibility but a reality.

But on a side note I wouldn't much disagree with Mr. Gaede's assessment of Objectivist lit (with Rand herself as a notable exception). There is far too much resting on her accomplishments there and not enough innovation. I don't think the premise of any Objectivist written novel has ever interested me so much that I'd go beyond reading a book listing @ somewhere like Lasiez Faire books. To be honest over the past year I've spent more time reading David Morrell, Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane than most anything that I think would be "Objectivist friendly." I expand on this in my last and next scheduled post at Superhero Babylon. Since I'm just back to discuss this topic (and quite frankly this may be the only time I'm happy to still have my account open here) the hosts may feel free to disable my link. I don't think that you'd actually do that but based on my status as a poster, and what I've said about this forum elsewhere it seems like common courtesy to offer. You don't owe me any advertising.

---Landon

Edited December 10, 2008 by Landon Erp

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Landon,

Your approach is precisely one of the ways Objectivism gets used that I find lamentable. Mankind has a magnificent accumulated intellectual wealth and this gets ignored as everything gets filtered through Rand.

Rand has great merit and it is a disservice to her merit to do this (as it turns her work into a cult).

The truth is that there can be advances in specific artistic techniques (but not all techniques). In expressing sense of life, it is totally wrong to say that a modern painter of a particular school you happen to like expresses his/her sense of life better than the masters of the past did.

The mistake made last century in the history of music was precisely thinking that more advanced harmony built on the old was an improvement. What we got was atonal music. Thank goodness that idea was finally abandoned.

Although I too find great fault with Perigo's artistic approach, I do not find your approach to be a remedy. I find it to be worship, not aesthetics.

EDIT: Just to be clear, since a wrong impression could be gathered from my posts above, I believe you are misguided, but I also believe you are a good person.

Michael

[Landon Erp]

I went out of my way to post here so I don't think insults will serve either of us and I'm glad you seem to think the same. I became aware after being told about this thread that I might not have been as clear as I would've liked and I thank you for this opportunity to further clarify. That coupled with my own use of the bombastic style characteristic of SOLO probably made my point even less clear.

I think you conceded the biggest part of my point however. I was mainly speaking in technical terms. The technique applied today is objectively better than what has been available or used in the past. I don't however think this is an automatic process. A better way of saying it is that an artist working in say the romantic style of painting today has the entirety of art up until this point to use as a starting point. Part of my contention with Perigo's approach is precisely that this is not automatic. It's not a simple matter of finding the right mesh of pre-existing styles, it involves understanding what made the styles and works of the past work and learning how to actually use those elements rather than just copy them. On top of that it does require an element of each new artist bringing something new to the equation, I used the example of finding a flaw in a previous artist and working to improve/fix it but it could also include exploring something new which had been entirely overlooked by previous artists or even taking something which had been effectively explored in an entirely new direction. A general statement could be made that each new person who works in a specific artistic tradition needs to "bring more than they took." Rand herself even admitted as much with her essay bootleg romanticism where the flaw was that the creators "took more than they brought."

As to sense of life I hate to say it but your statement kind of reminds me of what my previous statements inspired from Perigo. He always accused me of trying to hard to make a case for "headbanging caterwauling" when I said nothing about rock music at all. I may have to re check what I've written up until now but I don't think I said anything about sense of life. Though I do remember recently making a rather obvious statement that Dashiell Hammett the author of "Nightmare town" had a malevolent universe premise. But based on what I've read of the man I think the only response making this statement about the man would inspire would be "Sounds about right, never really thought to give a name to it."

I don't think I said anything along the lines that anyone actually expresses it better, but more that because of advances they are objectively more capable of doing so since they don't have to invent the techniques with which to work on top of actually executing the work. They still may develop techniques of their own, but they will be building upon the work of others who have already made greater strides than they themselves.

To be honest I could use examples from a number of mediums but I am kind of curious why you think I'm elevating my personal favorites. I'll admit that as far as sculptors go I'd say that I like a number of entrants from the Cordair crowd better than other modern sculptors I've been exposed to but personally I always loved the works of Rodin and Michelangelo. I also think you'd have to know my tastes of comics to understand my original analogy but I liked Jim Lee as a 12 year old and I usually only use him because he's a great example of the typical modern style and every time I make this argument I always make it a point to list his elevated status over cartoonists I actually prefer. I'm saying it's objectively better in a few very specific ways in a manner with very little emotional attachment to it. It's objectively better but it could be an artistic evolutionary dead end. Though I do remember cases where artists who started out as little more than clones of their literal or figurative mentors and ultimately became much better than them.

(Ironically) long story short my original statement was an intentional oversimplification. Also I think I hear the word "Randroid" rolling around your head (not specifically You Michael, but possibly someone else reading this) when you read this but it actually originates more from a comics industry mentality than anything Rand ever wrote. Ditko said something along the lines of my thesis statement in an interview once and I've heard it echoed by a number of other greats in the comic industry (many of which Jewish but that's the only ideological link). And my first instinct was "how could you call those hacks better than you?" But over time when I really thought about it and took the emotional side out I saw how right they really were. But the biggest thing to remember is that just because something was more effectively executed doesn't mean that it had more to say or expressed a better sense of life. Again, when I analyze these things I try to take my personal tastes out of the equation.

---Landon

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Landon,

I didn't concede anything on this point because it is what I have always held. The notion that advances in artistic techniques exist is pretty obvious.

Here is my objection (and I am frankly delighted to discover that it is merely a question of expression, of words, not concept). When you make a blanket statement like: "I can say that everyone who does artwork at the Cordair Gallery is objectively better than Michaelangelo, Leonardo or Rembrandt...," it's a pretty big fudge to later say you were not including the most important part of art: the meaning and worldview. (This last is a can of worms, but it is present to some extent in all art.)

You don't need to explicitly discuss a component of a concept for it to be included in the concept. When you imply "all" and use words like "everyone," and make a blanket statement like "objectively better," you are using a pretty broad abstraction.

Nobody has a crystal ball to tell what your real meaning is, nor do they have anything but your words to go on for guessing at what you want to leave out. If you say, "Except for that" (with identification of the excluded component), or something similar, this helps delimit the concept from a broad one to a more narrow one. Simply qualifying your statement is enough to dispel the poor impression.

But even with that qualification, I can agree that modern artists have a better technical starting point than their predecessors, but not that their finished works are better or worse than modern artists. Artistic greatness is individual, not collective.

When you use a word like "objectively," you can't have it mean one thing one minute and another later. "Objective" metaphysically means simply reference to facts. Epistemologically it means something observed or considered according to a standard that is accepted as real.

So if you want to judge the "objective" quality of an art work, you have to look at what standards the artist set for himself and whether he adhered to them. You also have to include what standards of the human psyche responds to that kind of art and whether the art work met them. There are convention standards and a few others, including availability of resources and techniques (which I believe is your ballpark in the issue). Probably the most fundamental standard is whether the work can be judged as an entity, as an end in itself. When you say "objective" without any qualification, you convey that you mean all those standards.

Whenever people started talking about "objective" and so forth, Rand often responded with, "By what standard?" That's a good habit to acquire. And it's a good habit to provide your standard when making blanket statements for rhetorical effect. It makes communication of meaning a whole lot easier to understand.

Michael

[Landon Erp]

Conceding the point was probably an aggressive wording but seriously we're on the same page there and that's what matters. But by objectively better I meant as much in the same way Rand wrote on Tolstoy, there's some art out there that says some pretty abysmal things in an excellent manner. I'd like a piece of work that said something I didn't like or adamantly disagreed with but did it well more than I'd like one that conformed closer to my values but didn't do a good job of it.

By the standard I just applied the movies Closer or Spanglish are far superior to most novels by Objectivist writers because they were beautifully shot and acted and the dialogue was well written even though both had a story where I had no investment in the well being or misery of any of the characters because none of them made much of an impression on me positive or negative.

Sense of life is and world view is something personal to the artist and the audience. I've always tried to state that my criteria was the level of technical skill involved and my Cordair example was a specific response to a specific person. This person claimed to value the lessons of the Romantic Manifesto and that there are people who've taken those lessons seriously and had positive results based on that.

But ultimately sense of life is too personal to deal with in this way. I may not agree with the mentality it took to write "Nightmare Town" but I'm glad that the people who share that mentality have something which reflects their world. But beyond that even in something relatively open to interpretation like literature people are drawn to different things within the same work. I like horror movies because the heroines there are deeper and more interesting than any superheroine but most people would be tempted to dismiss the entire genre as being born of bad sense of life.

At the end of the day I'm a "nuts and bolts" guy when it comes to aesthetics. I'll read a novel and compare it to the film adaptation to see where things were improved or worsened. I'll compare different adaptations of the same story. I watch different edits of the same film. I listen to director commentaries and watch deleted scenes and try to determine if they handled the tough decisions correctly. I can watch a film or read a novel and see it like an engine and understand how moving different elements of the story or "pressure valves" can drastically affect the overall work. It can turn an unstoppable psychopath into a loveable loser who can't catch a break. It can turn a bold man who takes charge of his own life into a neurotic wreck who can't keep anything together. That's the one thing which keeps sticking at me of what's been said of me here. Anyone who works with me or has long discussions with me eventually says I think TOO technically about these subjects and I pay too much attention to how things actually works to spend any time in mindless worship.

If you ask by what standard I'll tell you. By and objective TECHNICAL standard with only the barest minimum reference to sense of life and only in cases of the blatantly obvious in the context of a particular discussion. And that's all I'm trying to say, the form that art takes may be different but this principle stays the same. I saw this under attacked and reacted accordingly. Sometimes I can't understand how someone can claim to love something but not want to understand how it works. But accordingly I know my television works on principles involving electricity, circuitry and broadcast frequencies while there are other people out there who understand every scientific principle which makes it possible. Since I'm not a scientist and have only a passing interest in this subject a scientist trying to explain this to me as a peer would only frustrate himself and confuse me he'd speak to me in simplified terms on the subject, making sure I had a base understanding of everything involved but also not trying to educate me to his level within the span of a single conversation.

As such my original response was one part emotion one part technical. I see scientists who post on Youtube about evolution against creationism who react the same way. They see people talking about throwing what they see as unimportant parts of science out the window while, using a video camera in conjunction with a computer to post a video on the Internet. It's part desperately wanting to educate people and part audacity and people seeing education as unnecessary.

In closing Michael I thank you for your graciousness. I've said some pretty terrible things about this forum elsewhere and you would've been completely within rights to not allow me to post in your house but I respect the fact that you did and am very thankful as well. Also since you didn't take down my previous link to the blog I write for with Joe Maurone I'm going to give the link one more time. At Superhero Babylon there's a focus on discussions about portrayal of heroism in the culture as well as thoughts on what it means to be an "Objectivist" and a "hero" since in general the two might seem to be at odds with each other. I also spend a good portion of my time there just discussing aesthetics as applied to fiction, most notably my hero archetype series. and general aesthetics series.. But once again thank you for the opportunity to clear up my views here.

---Landon

[Jonathan]

When I listed the fine artists these were all people who brought new techniques to their field which had never existed before. As such especially the first times they were used they were not as good as they would later become through trial and error and practice. Any art history student can point to things the renaissance artists did that anyone today would know better than. Michelangelo's proportions on women were often very unrealistic (since he worked from male models quite often) and there are countless other things. At the time these things were not even worth mentioning because each of these artists were bringing so many new things to the table. But it would be unforgivable today for any new artist to not learn from these flaws and take every great artist as being so great they were beyond question.

This is how progress works you learn from what came before you. You understand how great the advances were and you learn to fix the flaws. I could hardly imagine living in 2008 and still using the exact type of light bulb that was built in Edison's laboratory with no improvements.

How the Cordair gallery fits into this discussion is that you have a number of artist who had the benefit of learning from Michelangelo, Leonardo et al. as well as Objectivist aesthetics. Also the specific context of this was omitted. It was in response to Lindsay Perigos musical statements where he basically wasn't granting any merit to anything that was less than 200 years old. It was in response to the fact that we have today artists who've been working within just the past few decades who've picked up what at one point was nearly a dead tradition and they're keeping it going. It's the best thing around today but this tradition didn't have many people propping it up for a long period of time so it's more of a best by default than obviously best. But honestly all the things I mentioned are technically better as in executed with more skill and understanding than that which came before it which I translate as objectively better.

The works from the past I mentioned had inspiration, skill, and innovation whereas the modern works only have the first two. But there is enough of this for them to qualify. Being part of the tradition means the newest entrants have had the greatest who came before them to learn from, and in many ways they may be placeholders for said tradition, but they're there.

I disagree with you, but thanks for clarifying your views.

I think the problem may be that you're comparing what you consider to be the technically best aspects of works of art created by Cordair's artists to the technically worst created by the past masters.

Do Brian Larsen's women look more like real women than Michelangelo's most masculine women? Yes. But are any of the sculptures by Cordair's artists in the same league technically with Michelangelo's David or his Pietà? Hell no. Not even close. Are a few of the Cordair artists' proportions rendered more realistically than the worst of Leonardo's or Rembrandt's? Sure. But do the Cordair artists, at their best, even begin to approach the technical mastery of Leonardo's and Rembrandt's best use of lighting, values, color theory, sfumato, translucency of flesh, etc.? Again, hell no, not even close.

And compositionally, there's nothing at Cordair that approaches, say, Michelangelo's Libyan Sybil or Rembrandt's or Leonardo's best portraits.

J

[Landon Erp]

I was going to opt out at this point but since you started the thread and what I scanned of your response of "Music of the Gods" (if you're who I'm thinking of and I got my third hand information correct) I'll make a little exception.

As far as shape and proportion and composition go I'd say most artists who've worked since the renaissance have improved upon the original models. For better or worse new work is informed by older work and you cannot un-ring the bell. If you break down an artistic work point by point a newer artist will usually beat out an older artist. In many cases this will be because newer artists adapt work from older artists and put their own improvements on top. But there is also something to be said for a work not being a simple sum of its parts. There have been numerous times lately where I've seen something complicated where each individual facet of a work was great but the overall work itself was not. Or to put it simply, in a comparison of old to new, most people would have to grudgingly admit that each individual point of a newer work is better regardless of whether the newer work was more or less original than the earlier work or which work was actually stronger as a whole.

But to be honest I should reiterate my biggest qualifier here. I'm mainly speaking in principles and my actual examples might be a bit weak. I can talk anyone's ear off about fiction, comics and filmmaking but my fine art background is substantially weaker. There might be some subtleties I'm glossing over.

But I already said I was done with my discussion here and I don't want to overstay my welcome, Just wanted to acknowledge that I read your piece and you do have some valid points. But I also thank you for your time and for hearing me out.

In general if you or anyone else wants to discuss anything I brought up here with me they can e-mail me @ Landonerp@gmail.com.

---Landon

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Landon,

You are not overstaying your welcome. Feel free to come and go as you please.

My policy is that what is good for Landon is good for OL, so long as the posting guidelines are respected.

Michael