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Thursday, March 06, 2003 |
"Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence." --Robert Fripp
10:50:06 AM 
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Wednesday, March 05, 2003 |
"Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life." --W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965), 'Of Human Bondage', 1915
11:53:24 AM
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Wednesday, February 12, 2003 |
"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up." --Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)
12:17:10 PM
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Thursday, November 21, 2002 |
"Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time." --Thomas Merton, 'No Man Is an Island'
10:12:00 AM
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Thursday, October 17, 2002 |
"Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life." --W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965), 'Of Human Bondage', 1915
12:15:58 PM
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Monday, July 15, 2002 |
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Tocqueville . . . "I do not believe that it is a necessary effect of democratic institutions to diminish the number of those who cultivate the fine arts," he wrote in a famous passage from Democracy in America, "but these causes exert a powerful influence on the manner in which these arts are cultivated. In aristocracies, a few great pictures are produced, in democratic countries, a vast number of insignificant ones."
. . .
Moral correctness, political correctness, and aesthetic correctness all derive from the same censorial Puritan spirit. Like a replay of parent and child, the corrector demands the right to punish the artist’s incorrigible impulse to misbehave.
. . .
There is a fourth horseman laying siege to the arts these days, perhaps the most ominous of all, and its name is fiscal correctness.
. . .
price being exacted by America’s well-intentioned commitment to diversity, namely, the prospect of a pluralistic culture without high art, a generous and democratic society in which everything is given equal opportunity, except the greatest achievements of the Western world.
2:14:30 PM Google It!
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"Derive happiness in oneself from a good day's work, from illuminating the fog that surrounds us." --Henri Matisse
12:39:52 PM
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Wednesday, July 03, 2002 |
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"[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered." --Al Capp (1909 - 1979)
12:46:44 PM
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Tuesday, June 25, 2002 |
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"It is the spectator, and not life, that art mirrors." --Oscar Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray
11:57:02 AM
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Tuesday, May 07, 2002 |
"Filmmaking is really about expressing the relationship between an individual's actions and the place where they unfold. Otherwise, it's just theater." --Eric Rohmer
12:53:56 PM
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Tuesday, April 23, 2002 |
"There is some element of every aesthetic experience, every human experience, that is generalizable and communicable and belongs to all of us. If this were not true, art would be pointless. The common ground of our response is terrifically important."
3:24:54 PM Google It!
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Wednesday, April 17, 2002 |
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"Although its sex appeal has since faded somewhat, the optimistic branch of cultural studies now rules within the academy´s humanistic disciplines. Its academic practitioners place all 'cultural products'--including objets d´ art as traditionally defined, along with the artifacts of popular culture--on the same level, as specimens to be analyzed, not evaluated. Indeed, the concept of evaluation is itself regarded (theoretically, at least) as another datum to be analyzed."
" . . . cultural theorists do not refrain from making judgments of value. What they do refrain from is basing those judgments on the standards of excellence worked out by artists (and critics) within a certain tradition. Instead, they apply their own standards, which begin with the assumption that all cultural products are ultimately about power and possess value only to the degree that they attack the established social order."
3:47:39 PM Google It!
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Saturday, April 13, 2002 |
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures. --Henry Ward Beecher (1813 - 1887)
10:27:54 AM
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Wednesday, April 10, 2002 |
We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. --John F. Kennedy (1917 - 1963), October 26, 1963
3:22:05 PM
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Monday, March 18, 2002 |
"There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun." --Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)
1:13:24 PM
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Thursday, February 28, 2002 |
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February 26, 2002
ART REVIEW
Parisian Artworks, Not Always by Parisians
"LONDON — "Paris: Capital of the Arts 1900- 1968," at the Royal Academy of Art ... a hospitable and provocative encyclopedia, with 282 works on show."
"The terminal date for the show, 1968, works well for two reasons. One is that art and artists played their full part in the social upheavals that brought France almost to a halt in May 1968. The other is that 1968 also saw the arrival at the Grand Palais of a major exhibition of American art from 1948 to 1968. On these two events, much was to hinge." ... [more]
2:03:25 PM
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Tuesday, February 26, 2002 |
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"'Avant-Garde and Kitsch' is one of the most muscular pieces of criticism ever written. Greenberg essentially ripped modernism—the work of Picasso, Kandinsky, Joyce, Eliot, Gide, Stevens, Hart Crane, and so on—out of the context in which it was created, and redefined it as art about art, as work that meditated on the nature of its own medium. Thus abstract painting could be understood as an exploration of the possibilities of figure and ground, paint and canvas. Greenberg thought that painters no longer attempted to imitate objects for the same reason that Horkheimer and Adorno offered: because realism had been co-opted by the culture industries of the modern state. It wasn't that he enjoyed abstract painting more than representational painting, he said. It was that under current historical conditions abstract painting was the only genuine painting possible—just as, for Adorno, atonal music was the only form for genuine music to take."
"The avant-garde's opposite number, in Greenberg's scheme, is kitsch, 'ersatz culture'—art for capitalism's new man (who turns out to be no different from Fascism's or Communism's new man). Greenberg's description of this culture is the Frankfurt School description: Kitsch 'is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations,' and so on. In Greenberg's analysis of contemporary culture, there is no third term: art is either avant-garde or kitsch. And kitsch is by no means restricted to the working classes; The New Yorker, for instance, is 'high-class kitsch for the luxury trade'—it waters down avant-garde art and peddles it as a commodity."
1:21:10 PM
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Saturday, February 23, 2002 |
We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand. -- Pablo Picasso
12:47:25 PM
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Paradoxes of painting
Yet still it is a marvellous time to be a painter. ... four claims about painting today: ... its public standing ... the painting as object ... painters themselves ... painting's meaning and consequences. "
[One:] "painting is now the least popular of the arts ... [at big art shows] there are more people gathered around the signs and labels than the pictures. ... The visual arts have a lot to contend with: looking comes naturally to us but seeing does not. ... The big event in the modern history of visual art was the invention of photography. ... photography will always drive out painting, not because it is truer but because it is cheaper."
[Two:] "A painting or sculpture is an energy source ... It absorbs energy from the artist and radiates it back to the looker. ... no great photograph has ever had anything like the power of a great painting. ... you cannot ... load up a photograph with enough energy to make it great art. ... the energy of an artwork reflects in some way the intensity of the artist's effort. ... The obvious question is, where is the art? Where is it hiding? If the image in the mirror is identical to the mask we started with, what has the artist done? The answer is: he has added energy. ... he has taken an object and pumped up its energy level"
[Three:] " ... when we say that an artist is often someone who works relentlessly, we are also describing a personality type: a perfectionist, an obsessive. ... A perfectionist is a dissatisfactionist. The same force that drives artists to work relentlessly on their artworks, to load them up with energy, makes them unlikely ever to be wholly content with what they have done. ... something fundamental about art. ... superhuman accomplishments require superhuman talent, or a superhuman capacity for unhappiness with your work, or both. ... 'When I paint,' Matisse said, 'I am giving plastic expression to objects in my mind. When I close my eyes, I can see things better than with my eyes open... This is what I paint.' ... at the bottom of the art of painting there is a mismatch between mind and hand. ... no artist can ever hope to realise more than the tiniest fraction of what he imagines. ... The thing is to keep trying."
[Four:] " ... art doesn't progress, any more than human nature does. ... an artist merely does his best to convert mental images into physical ones. Many great artists had no direct pictorial influence on anyone. ... They had spiritual influence, of course, but that is not the sort of thing art historians usually have in mind when they speak of influence. ... Influence can be dangerous. ... On intellectual (as opposed to artistic) grounds, cubism is a racket: a catch-all for sorts of styles in which the picture space is not quite flat, the image is not quite abstract, and the nervous juddering ostinato lines have a wound-up, caffeine energy that is exhilarating for short periods and impossible to sustain. ... the aspects of an artist's style that other artists can imitate, that are the most "influential," are exactly the ones that are most generic and least valuable."
Science is a crescendo. Art is an expanding circle.
"why have recent decades been ideal for painters? ... no artist who tries to please a crowd of more than one is likely to do anything of value. ... the act of painting is boiled down to its essence, sheer obstinate compulsion. ... Painting changes and a painter has to be part of his times. ... Picasso said, 'art that is not in the present will never be.' A painter must know and feel what is going on around him. ... the art world's "nostalgia for the days when art was not riddled with postmodernism's adolescent smirk." ... Today the art world ridicules art pure and simple with naked contempt and a mirthless nihilism that is chilling. ... There is a new, dissident art today-"post-ironic art." It is rarely charming and is sometimes violent or ugly." ... [more]
12:46:34 PM
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Friday, February 22, 2002 |
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Ceci N'est Pas Surrealism
"Surrealism aimed to revolutionize life and art both ... by accessing the subconscious and recording the results. ... Apollinaire coined the term "surrealism" in 1917 to describe a spontaneous verbal creation—one that was beyond, or "sur," reality. ... André Breton ... denounced 'the reign of logic' ... "
" ... Surrealism, together with its precursor, Dada, is generally regarded as a reaction to the climate of despair that surrounded World War I, when it seemed as though Europe's social and technological advances had culminated in nothing greater than its own self- destruction. ... Surrealism was more of a religion or philosophy than an artistic style. Its artists—including Dalí, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, and the poets Jacques Prévert and Paul Eluard, among others—valued any technique that would allow them to make work automatically, the better to freely associate and thereby reach into the collective unconscious."
" ... sexualized nature ... the Surrealists were notably active .... In their lexicon, desire, the open relationship, the chance encounter, and the ménage à trois (or more) loom large, often as an avenue to self-revelation. ... these relationships were the opposite of casual: Desire was frequently accompanied by love, which often led to marriage. ... perhaps the most alluring aspect of Surrealism was that it was open to all ... "
"Surrealism ... prefigured Abstract Expressionism, 1960s Happenings, 1970s performance art ... American cultural life as we know it today would not be possible without it. Most of our visual culture, including music videos, television, and advertising, remains permeated by its typically disjunctive imagery, its knee-jerk desire to shock, and its fixation upon sexuality and the subconscious. ... The Surrealists helped to popularize Freud: Our love of therapy, self- knowledge, personal autonomy, and the child within probably could not have advanced so far without them."
" ... in recent months, we have come to value the common good over individualism and are perhaps more bent on rediscovering humanist values rather than challenging what's left of the status quo. Curiously enough, however, Breton foretold this, too. In 1960, he reflected: 'The sickness that the world exhibits today differs from the one exhibited in the 1920s. ... In France, for example, the mind was threatened back then with coagulation, whereas today it's threatened with dissolution. ... It's perfectly obvious that such a situation calls for different reactions from today's youth.'" ... [more]
2:59:52 PM
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Wednesday, February 20, 2002 |
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Return the Parthenon Marbles
"Museums around the world fear establishing a precedent that would cause a broad new look at the legal status of their own antiquities. But that look has already begun." ... [more]
4:51:30 PM
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Tuesday, February 19, 2002 |
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What Happened to Art? [Review of 2 Books]
The Invention of Art: A Cultural History
By Larry Shiner (Philosophy Professor). University of Chicago Press
The Invisible Masterpiece
By Hans Belting (Art Historian). Translated by Helen Atkins. University of Chicago Press
"Our notion of art as the self-guided, original expression of an individual genius could only develop later, between 1680 and 1830. ... the combined forces of Enlightenment philosophy, a growing middle class, and new cultural institutions ... transformed the conception of art. ... Only after the political revolutions of the eighteenth century did art develop an autonomous life."
"Kant, Schiller, and other theorists set down new definitions of 'the aesthetic,' prescribing not only the right kind of art but the right way to enjoy it: in quiet contemplation. ... the middle-class public was intensely uneasy in such matters. To the rescue, enter a whole new caste of cultural intermediaries: curators, art dealers, and, for that matter, book critics."
"Craftsmanship, purpose, pleasure giving -- these are the qualities that Shiner claims were lost as art crystallized into an independent realm. ... In Shiner's view, the advance of modernism looks 'less like a great liberation than a fracture we have been trying to heal ever since.'"
" ... Belting begins his story of art at Shiner's 'fracture' point, the late eighteenth century ... [artists begin to] attempt to make art itself visible. ... this attempt ... has been art's mission for 200 years. ... an 'idea of art gained mastery over works themselves' ... Art could never again come to rest in the form of a 'masterpiece,' for to do so would be to abandon its utopian ideals. ... 'This then is the hell of art: one chases a phantom.'"
"Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, where the heroics of history painting tell a new story, of national disgrace; Gauguin's will-to- primitivism in the South Seas; Malevich's Black Square backed up with manifestos; Tinguely's Hommage à New York, a sculpture of scraps set on auto-destruct. Here are all the familiar myths of modernism and several less familiar ones, each chronicled as the effort to mark some progress toward 'an impossible ideal.' ... After the precision of van Eyck and the luster of Titian, what could artistic 'progress' possibly mean? As a disheartened Delacroix complained in his journal in 1847: 'The traditions are exhausted. All the great problems of art were solved back in the sixteenth century.' Hence, we find modern artists not so much trying to build on the achievements of the Old Masters as breaking them down to disclose art's hard quintessence, abandoning one by one every visible means of support: narrative, figuration, feeling, space, and ... even authorship."
"Behind both Shiner's cultural lamentation and Belting's episodic history stands Grandpa Hegel, who foretold art's irrevocable flight from the world of forms into the realm of ideas. Hegel saw the seismic shift from Classical to Romantic art as a change not just of style but of 'element.' Art's very constitution had changed, he wrote, 'from sensuousness to inward reflection. . . . What is apparent to the senses alone sinks into worthlessness.' For Hegel, this move toward abstraction was evident not just in art but in the overall dominance of ideas, which art forms would never again be able to contain." ... [more]
4:40:17 PM
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© Copyright 2003 Michael Jamison. E-Mail: 
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