ART006: Week 5, 10/29

Berger, Ch. 4 & 5

• Buying a painting is like buying the thing the painting represents
• Oil painting initiated in early 15^th century but found its own identity in 16^th century
• Oil painting undermined by Impressionism and overthrown by Cubism
• Oil painting informs our idea of art
• Paintings show what the art collector wishes to possess
• The art of any period tends to serve the ideological interests of the ruling class.
• Art history struggles with the relationship between the outstanding and average work
• Hack work is where the market makes greater demands than the art
• Oil painting is unique in its ability to accurately and aesthetically represent subject matter
• Oil painting’s “substantiality”
• Interpretation and analysis of “The Ambassadors”
• Merchandise as subject matter for oil painting
• The historical painting was the highest form of oil painting
• The mythic subject matter was the reference point for aristocracy so they may see in themselves a higher moral caliber
• Genre paintings are meant to show the rewards and consequences of behavior
• Landscapes as the lowest form since they represent the intangible and unmarketable parts of the world
• Landscapes led the way in initiative
• Landscapes move from the tangible and substantial to the indeterminate and intangible

Max Weber, “Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism” (p136)

• The fundamental elements of capitalism are borne of Christian Asceticism
• The Puritan wanted to work, everyone else is forced to
• Asceticism has forced the rise in value of material goods
• The call of duty lives as a ghost of dead religious beliefs
• In the US, the pursuit of wealth becomes as sport when there is no spiritual dimension

Part II Introduction (p127)

• The first decade of the 20^th century in art sought to synthesize the new with the traditional
• The avant-garde sought to evoke nature, but from an urban existence
• The avant-garde began to develop on the international stage
• The loosening of the traditions and established technical guidelines allowed for culture to seep into the art
• 3 related moments: modernization (the impact of technology), modernity (the character of life during these changes and awareness and willingness of it) and Modernism (the representation of the inchoate experience of the new)
• Max Weber: “the iron cage of modernity”
• The ability to travel faster influenced attempts to place the human experience in the state of flux
• Response to modernity is either depression or exhilaration or to seek the cause of modernity
• Socialism as a challenge to social order
• Art be committed to the struggle to change that modernity
• Art’s role in bringing social change
• Cubism as hermetic art established as the paradigm for future art
• “On one side there is the impulse to an art whose first duty is to decode the modern world and perhaps even to participate in changing it. On the other is that art whose principal response to the modern condition has been the conclusion that art must transform itself.”

ART006: Week 5, 10/27

Berger, Ch. 2 & 3

• The social presence of a man is dependent on the promise of power which he embodies
• A women’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself and defines what can and cannot be done to her
• Women are born into the keeping of men
• The surveyor and the surveyed as 2 distinct elements of her identity
• Men survey women before treating them
• Every women’s presences regulates what is and is not permissible within her presence
• Men act, women appear
• Nakedness was created in the mind of the beholder
• The woman is blamed and is punished by being made subservient to the man
• In all nudes, the woman is aware of being seen by the spectator
• Mirror used as a symbol of vanity
• A naked woman is painted for the enjoyment of the men viewing her
• Beauty as competition
• Nakedness as a sign of her submission to the owner’s feelings or demands
• Non-European traditions place the woman equal to the an in sexual activity
• To be naked is to be oneself, to be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself
• Nudity is a form of dress
• The principal protagonist – the man as spectator – is never painted
• Women are depicted without pubic hair to minimize their sexual passion
• The anonymity of nakedness
• The banality of disclosure grounds us in reality
• Rubens’ painting of his second wife as a depiction of expression

ART006: Week 4 Readings

Chirico, “Mystery and Creation” (AT, p58)

• “To become truly immortal a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere.”
• “Profound statements must be drawn by the artist from the most secret recesses of his being”
• Art should have no recognizable content but stem from the emotional, subconscious
• Presentiment is eternal proof of the irrationality of the universe

Breton, “First Manifesto of Surrealism” (AT, p447)

• Freedom alone remains capable of inducing emotion
• Imagination from slavery and what can be
• Madness is a victim of imagination, but imagination frees them from their concerns
• Realism is hostile to intellectual or moral advancement
• “We are still living under the reign of logic” but is only a secondary interest
• Superstition has been forbidden by conventional thought
• Subconscious thought, long neglected, has been brought back
• Dreams have been grossly neglected
• Waking events given more credence than dreaming
• Dreams indicate continuity and organization
• The waking state a “phenomenon of interference”
• “The mind of the man who dreams is fully satisfied by what happens to him.”
• The inspection of dreams may lead to unraveling of all mysteries except the Great Mystery
• A future resolution of dream and reality dubbed “surreality”
• Only the marvelous is beautiful
• The speed of thought is no greater than the speed of speech
• A writing challenge between Breton and Soupault reveals similarities
• Surrealism: “Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of though. Dictated by thought, in absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.”
• Surrealism asserts non-conformity

Aragon, “Declaration…” (AT, p456)

• Surrealism has nothing to do with literature…
• …is not new
• …determined to make a revolution
• …exists
• …seeks to free itself and creativity from Society

Breton, “Surrealism and Painting” (AT, p457)

• “The eye exists in its primitive state”
• Visual imagery is its own language
• “It does not matter whether there is a perceptible difference between beings thus invoked and real beings, for this difference can at any moment be made light of.”
• The presentation of artwork, with all its fixed and well-defined imagery cannot compete with real life
• Reality itself is in question
• Art as imitation is a conceit
• “the exterior world appears more and more suspect”
• “The plastic work of art, in order to respond to the undisputed necessity of thoroughly revising all real values, will either refer to a purely interior model or cease to exist.”
• “insolent grace” as the ability to reject the world and occupy itself with its own life
• Picasso has discovered and is exploring a new path
• Picasso’s scrapped ideas offer some solace and hope to the conventional that he might abandon his course of work
• “We grow up until a certain age, it seems, and our playthings grow up with us.”
• The Surrealist claim Picasso as one of their own
• The study of conventions would be a waste of time
• Matisse and Derain are tamed lions no longer seeking nor even remembering where they came from
• Braque as a great refugee
• Braque took pity on reality and his hand has trembled

Freud, “On Dreams” (AT, p21)

• The process of displacement interferes with the interpretation and understanding of dreams
• Dream-thoughts are expressed in metaphor and simile
• Dream content is manifested in pictorial situations
• Dream material is drawn from earlier memories, often from early-childhood
• Real scenes rarely appear in dreams
• Dreams also include fragments
• Dream material lacks familiar characteristics of the conscious
• Dream material is condensed and fragment in a process Freud calls “regression” where logical links are lost, restoration of those links is the work of the analyst
• The correlation and placement of elements in a dream communicate their importance
• Dream content can be interpreted only after is has been assembled into a “dream-composition”
• “considerations of intelligibility are what lead to the final revision of a dream; and reveals the origin of the activity”
• A badly constructed dream is just as valuable as a fully assembled dream
• Dream façades are falsely interpreted dream-content re-ordered by the conscious
• “dream work as the process of transforming the dream-thoughts into the dream-content”
• Dream-work is not creative, draws no conclusions, just condenses and fragments
• Dream-work is just one of a series of psychical mechanizations
• The presence of thoughts and imagery in the unconscious mind leads to repression by the conscious mind
• 2 thought-constructing agencies: 1) has free access to consciousness for its products and 2) is the unconscious that has access by means of the first. There is censorship between the two leading to repression
• Under sleep, the repressed cannot be held back
• When regaining consciousness, the censorship regains control possibly accounting for the loss of memory of the dream
• Most dreams are traced back to erotic wishes
• Sexual wishes are represented in dreams by non-sexual references but use clues to represent the links through indirect representation
• There are a variety of symbols for representing genitalia and intercourse and common in all the members of a particular community
• Dream symbolism extends beyond dreams

ART008: Week 3, Garbage, Superstition, Panorama and Towers

Center for Land Use Interpretation:
Nothing like a little trip to learn about garbage to start the day off right when going to view various pieces of cultural detritus to compare to the social detritus. Why doesn’t art get recycled like banana peels? (I’m looking at you Warhol…)

Museum of Jurassic Technology:
Truly a deceptive place on all levels. Through many twists and turns, every nook and cranny of the place houses the absurd, the curious and the odd. And that’s a good thing. A very good thing.

For me, the keystone exhibition that I feel unlocks the meaning of the place was the homeopathic remedies section near the back (at least I think it was in back, that’s where the bathroom was), The collection of folk remedies gave one the perspective to evaluate the rest of the exhibits through the lens of the concept presented there. The idea that the entire place exhibited artifacts of those engaged in trying to explain the world as they sought with the latest technology they had available to them. At various points one could read about the impact and observatory and its work had on the unsuspecting populace, view delicate dioramas featuring a glass-reflected ghost image or the culture of the mobile home as the nomadic peoples attempting to reclaim their origins in modern terms.

The Velaslavasay Panorama:
I appreciated the attention to detail and the overall presentation of the panorama but was sorely disappointed in the actual painting itself. There was such a lack of detail that there was no possibility for total immersion in the experience. I don’t believe anyone stayed longer than the time it took to circle the room.

Watts Towers:
The towers have been such a part of LA lore for so long that it was quite difficult to see the achievement for what it really is. My initial impression of the towers and their juxtaposition to the surrounding neighborhood was that it was a Thunder Mountain reject from Disneyland run amok. Hell, for all I know, Disney may have ripped it straight off.

The video about the towers that featured Rodia in his time peeled away the hardened perception I had of the towers and allowed me to appreciate the uniqueness of one man’s vision and passion rising up and surviving through a cruel world intent on exploitation of every man’s work.

ART006: Week 3, 10/15

Ball, “Dada Fragments”

• Introduces symmetries and rhythms
• Dada loves the extraordinary and absurd, life is a contradiction
• View life holistically
• Insubordinate, questioning, all is subject to suspicion
• The world has fallen apart
• The use of image to comprehend
• “the word and the image are crucified”
• By breaking down existence, a new “plasticity” arises in the world
• The ego centric Renaissance gave rise to the mechanical appetite
• By constructing images in new ways using new methods, it drives toward being all-encompassing

Tzara, “Dada Manifesto, 1918”

• The essence of argument boils down to the “ABC” and the “123”
• “the love of novelty is the cross of sympathy”
• Tzara is against action, for contradiction and affirmation yet neither for nor against
• Dada means nothing, several etymological options are presented and negated simultaneously
• Art should be created and remain subjective, with no clear meanings
• Criticism is useless
• “after the carnage we still retain the hope of a purified mankind”
• Everyone go their own way
• Dada born of a need for independence
• Dadaists recognize nor need theory
• Cubists see art from all sides
• Futurists see art in motion
• Everything is false
• The ability to explain rationally by thought, is relative
• There is no ultimate Truth
• “the magnificent quality of the mind is the proof of its impotence”
• “Experience is also a product of chance and individual faculties.”
• Art as the sole basis for agreement
• Art as a private affair
• “candied diarrhea”
• “Logic is always wrong”
• “Morality creates atrophy like every plague produced by intelligence.”
• A call to wipe the slate clean
• Morality not ordained by a supernatural force, but a construct
• Dada in opposition to the past and embodiment of the cast aside in history
• Dada is freedom
• “a roaring of tense colors and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE”

Duchamp, “Creative Act”

• Two poles in the creation of art: the artist and the spectator
• All artistic decisions are pure intuition and cannot be expressed or thought out
• The artist can claim genius but the spectator confers social validity
• Art can be good, bad or indifferent
• The “art coefficient” is the ratio of what the artist intended to express and the realization
• The spectator determines the overall weight of a piece through the transubstantative act of experiencing the artwork
• Art is created by both the artist and the spectator

Duchamp, “Apropos of Readymades”

• Duchamp coins the term “readymades” in regards to appropriation of existing materials into new context, interpretations
• Choice of readymades not based on aesthetics, but on absence of good or bad taste
• Duchamp would place short sentences on the readymades to carry the viewer to new realms of interpretation
• Duchamp limited his production of readymades to keep them from being tainted and consumed by “art junkies”
• Readymades replicas carry the same aura as the original
• Since paint is manufactured, Duchamp posits that all art is made from readymades

ART008: Week 2, La Cienga Field Trip

LAXART:
One room was dominated by a reject from a sci-fi movie complete with menacing spires and ominous mechanizations. It was explained that the piece was an expression of a stuppa as a futuristic teleportation device for the soul as well as the body. The concept is intriguing and the piece itself, though quite imposing, left my flashing back to bad ‘70’s future movies where the best way to invoke the future was to make everything white as if color would cease to exist in the future

The other room featured a video enclosed in green walls that featured a disjointed and chaotic love story of an adulterous couple in Hiroshima. I found the piece engaging if while distracting. The artifice of having subtitles running commenting on the dialog and story narrative gave a meta-narrative to the entire story that pulled it from any kind of contextual anchor.

The Cockpit
The most confrontational works experienced on this trip. The gallery was divided into 2 viewing areas with 4 different themed works on display: a video montage of several character sketches on a loop, the artist with 2 sock puppets at a lectern fielding questions regarding her work, a series of posters as companions to the video montage and a combination image /video work addressing the murder of God by his subjects. This video was on a loop as well and the entire viewing was punctuated by the screaming of a court jester lamenting the violent demise of his deity. Suitably graphic but a complete lack of subtlety seemed to undermine possible other interpretations.

Blum & Poe
One area featured a series of paintings using optical illusions as a thematic device for exploring an array of concepts from sex to violence to murder. The works as a collection reinforced each other well, but I feel that each piece on its own would have more impact and could have greater meaning isolated from its cohorts. The bloody spray across one of them drew me to it ore than the others if for no other reason that a respite from the headache inducing spirals.

The other area housed a series of cast heads of the audience made from wax heads the artist had shot with various caliber weapons. I don’t think they were served by having the all in one location since the repetition of the heads was again distracting fro would most likely be strong visceral reaction if viewed in turn.

MC Gallery (Going out of Business)
Works exhibited in this gallery were being presented in the trite device of a going out of business sale complete with flyers featuring every god-awful graphic abortion abandoned in an ad forced to turn tricks to bring in the almighty dollar. There were quite a few pieces that I gravitated to, but the piece constructed out of found objects during a family’s relocation to represent the family members sparked a prolonged engagement of the piece.

ART008: Week 2 Readings

The Poetics of the Open Work

The “open work” in contemporary art is probably one of the last, if not the last, playground for artists to discover and exploit. After centuries of artist presenting predetermined and ordered depictions of subject matter, the modern moved in and questioned whether or not strict meaning and interpretation are necessary or even desirable to the artist. And now we question whether or not the artist even has a motive or meaning at all.

The “open work”, when defined as an open-ended work that requires the audience to participate to confer or infer meaning in a piece, presents unique opportunities for dialog and exchange of ideas, context, meaning, philosophy and even bodily fluids in some cases. All in the name of art.

The give and take of the open work excites the world of art and rightly so. Now it can be possible for anyone to be an artist because the audience determines whether or not something has meaning. An “artist” can simply make the next logical step from Duchamp’s readymades and simply grab something fro somewhere and stick it in a gallery and force someone else to give it meaning and value. And of course buy it. Kind of sounds like the Emperor’s new clothes.

ART006: Week 3, 10/13

Worringer, “Abstraction and Empathy”

• Works of art are on equal terms with nature but not connected to it
• Beauty not necessary for art
• Modern aesthetics part of the theory of empathy, but not applicable to most art history
• Urge of empathy and urge of abstraction on opposite poles
• “Aesthetic enjoyment is objectified self-enjoyment” (p.66)
• No psychology for need of art but the history of it would equal religion
• Empathy of the world comes from relation to the cosmos and awareness of it
• Psychic need forms seeds of artistic expression
• Evolution of art corresponds to the empathy to the world
• Every style of art represented the maximum bestowal of happiness for the humanity that created it
• The need for empathy is the need for naturalism
• The urge to abstraction has been present in all art and is the dominant tendency
• “The urge of abstraction is the outcome of a great inner unrest inspired in man by the phenomena of the outside world, the “immense spiritual dread of space”
• Abstraction rooted in primal man’s reliance on touch to bolster his visual experience
• The dread of space a function of the “bewildering” phenomena of existence promoted a need for tranquility
• Abstraction became the means for instilling tranquility through representation out of context towards approximation of an absolute value
• The style of the highest abstraction is “peculiar” to primitive peoples and connected to it
• The flux of phenomena causes the urge to abstract and “divest” the subject matter from its natural context
• The “instinct for the ‘thing in itself’ were the most powerful in primitive man”
• What was previously instinct is now “the ultimate product of cognition”

Marinetti, “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism”

• Marinetti narrates a series of thoughts and activities late one night, probably after imbibing a large quantity of substances
• He and his friends hop in his car and during the course of the trip, Marinetti chases Death and ends up flipping his car into a ditch in trying to avoid 2 bicyclists
• After he is extricated from a muddy ditch downstream from a factory, Marinetti begins to espouse the Manifesto of Futurism
• Love of danger, habit of energy and fearlessness
• Courage audacity and revolt
• Exalt aggressive action
• The beauty of speed and being at the wheel
• Beauty only in struggle
• Glorifying war
• Destroy the established art world
• Futurism to be launched from Italy
• Museums as cemeteries
• Desire to destroy the old works
• The movement must end before they turn 40
• The successors in turn will overthrow them as well
• Art can be nothing but violence, cruelty and injustice
• Hurl defiance to the stars

Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism”

• Malevich also rejects the established art, like Marinetti in his Suprematism
• Artists who base their works of art in nature are frauds
• To reproduce the natural world is to be a thief
• The savage founded the principle of naturalism
• The savage could only see and reproduce his form, but not himself in any meaningful way
• As the savage embraced nature and his consciousness developed, his ability to see the world increased
• The nature and inner condition of Man was developed and express completely in the Renaissance but not the pinnacle of art
• There is a need to create a new beauty beyond the established
• The artist must be able to create something not of nature
• An artist must be a creator out of nothing
• “Color and texture in painting are ends in themselves”, but have been destroyed by the subject
• Rejection of the Futurist movement means condemnation to crawling about the graves of the Old Order
• The beauty of speed
• Futurism a means to the end of Suprematism
• Painting will remain the means of reproducing this or that condition of the forms of life
• The Futurists were unable to abandon subject-matter
• “the intuitive…should reveal itself in forms which are unconscious and without response”
• “colours matured, but their forms did not mature in the consciousness”
• “a painted surface is a real, living form”
• Suprematism is the new Realism
• Colour is that which a painting lives
• “Painters should abandon subject and objects if they wish to be pure painters”
• The beauty of objects does not need to be depicted in whole
• All repetitive forms should be omitted by the artist
• A non-objective, pure world of art
• “each form is a world”
• “art and its new ways were always a spittoon”
• The old ways of attempting to transfer nature and the spiritual into canvas and stone are laughable
• “Aestheticism is the garbage of intuitive feeling”

Greenberg, “The Decline of Cubism”

• Art has declined since the early 1930’s
• Cubism the greatest feat of art of the 20^th century, the only vital style
• “the great art style of any period is that which relates itself to the true insights of its time.”
• The radical artists need more courage and nerve since their course is unknown
• “Cubism expressed the positivist or empirical state of mind with its refusal to refer to anything outside the concrete experiences if the particular discipline, field or medium in which one worked”
• By the early 1930’s Cubism was in crisis
• Surrealism and neo-romanticism resurged
• After 1939, Cubism entered its final stage of decline
• Post WWII had destroyed any sense of optimism in Europe and the progressive tendencies of the avant garde were succumbing to the established and familiar
• The decline or modern art post-WWII is the result of the loss of general social premises in Europe
• Consequently, the innovative and vibrant art center has moved to the United States

ART008: Week 1, Screening

Art Safari

When Art has said everything and done everything, where can it go? It goes to the audience to then say everything and do everything for the “artist” who used to do it for them. After viewing Ben Lewis’ film on Relational Aesthetics as a new “ism”, I’m left torn as to whether or not total audience participation is a good or bad thing.

The audience has always had a role in the “activation” of any art piece whether it be the patron wanting a portrait or installing three lamps in a museum that in themselves have no intended meaning but require the audience to project one. Lewis interviews several artists in the latter vein who are working with and requiring the viewer to engage the work for it to be a completed work. There is certainly some fertile area to play with for the artist. The idea of a static piece that has built-in ideas and context seems to have been consigned to the past as a relic of societies that could not conceive or desire audience participation. But when the piece is the detritus from a meal cooked in a gallery, where is the artist’s hand in it and can he claim it as his own? Should he share the credit (and the proceeds) for his/her notoriety?

I note in counterpoint that involving and modulating the audience’s participation fascinates me as well and it is something I have been trying to through my New Media work with computers. Virtual Reality is one path that many are on right now, but I am interested in the abstraction fused with chaos that audience member /participant can bring. Therein lies the virtue of “Relationalism” as espoused by Ben Lewis and hopefully it won’t be soiled by the stampede’s rush to stake a claim in this new arena.

ART006: Week 2 Readings

Berger, “Ways of Seeing”, (Ch 1)

• “Seeing comes before words”
• “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.”
• “The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe.”
• “We only see what we look at.”
• “To touch something is to situate oneself in relation to it.”
• To see means also the ability to be seen
• “an image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced.”
• Images last longer than what they represent
• A photograph is an image of how the viewer viewed the moment
• An image is a direct connection to that moment
• “History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past.”
• When we view art, we situate ourselves to it
• “we still live in a society of comparable social relations and moral values…which gives the paintings their psychological and social urgency.”
• “Mystification is the process of explaining away what might otherwise be evident.”
• We now see art from the past different from how others have perceived it.
• Perspective as the center of the universe, the place of God
• The uniqueness of a painting was akin to the uniqueness of its location
• Paintings could not be seen in two places at the same time
• The uniqueness of the original is in relation to it being the original of numerous reproductions
• Artwork purchased now has another meaning affixed in its value
• Interest in original art and museum is dependant on level of education
• Reproduction makes possible other uses and contexts for the artwork
• Reproduced paintings, like all information, have to hold their own against all the other information being continually transmitted.”

Roszak, “A Few Beautifully Made Things”

• High industrialized nations are living way beyond what the earth can afford
• Counting population not by heads but by appetites
• Need a humility not just knowledge
• The nature of addiction is guilt and becomes a psychological problem
• Environmentalists needing and working with psychologists
• Rejection of the outer and inner
• People are becoming unhappy being consumers
• Ecopsychology to define what is sane on the social scale
• Why have we lose our innate connection with nature
• Humanity may be flawed in such a way as to ensure our destruction
• The ability to dominate nature as a form of security
• The “industrial holocaust”
• Waves of enthusiasm with each new technological paradigm shift, then followed by disappointment
• Art is one of the major sources of differing sensibilities
• Artists are one of the most important resources for eco-psychology
• Creative endeavor as a profound spiritual satisfaction

Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (AT, p. 520)

• At a certain point technical reproduction became part of the artistic process
• Reproductions do not replicate the original’s uniqueness, but reinforces it
• The original establishes authenticity
• “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art”
• “the uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition”
• Early artworks served a ritual purpose
• Ritual purpose and aura never separated
• Pure art as divorced from social context
• Reproduction divorces artwork from ritual
• Artwork based now on politics
• The illusionary nature of film is developed during editing
• The painter maintains his distance from reality while the cameraman penetrates
• The painter captures the whole, the cameraman fragments later assembled into a whole
• Reproduction causes a ore visceral, superficial, reaction in the masses as opposed to the more thought out and reflective insights gained investigating a painting
• The conventional is reviled by critics, while critical praise is shred by the majority
• Painting not able to provide simultaneous experience
• The creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later
• Dada sacrificed market ambitions for a higher purpose
• “What they (Dadaists) intended and achieved was a relentless destruction of the aura of their creations which they branded as reproductions with the very means of production.”
• Dada to “outrage the public”
• “Quantity has been transmuted to quality”
• Duhamel feels film is the lowest form only fit for the masses
• “Architecture has never been idle”
• “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian asses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate”
• Fascism introduces aesthetics to political life which leads to war

Freeland, “Paradigms and Purposes” (But is it Art?, Ch 2)

• Art as the imitation of life
• Plato viewed art as a “skill”, imitation not exalting the ideal and the eternal
• Aristotle believed that imitation could educate via tragedy and human flaw
• With the advent of photography, painting began to move away from imitation
• Chartres exemplifies medieval ideals of art
• Several pagan philosophers are depicted along side saints in Chartres
• Greek philosophy had a great impact on European ideals
• Aquinas as the first Christian thinker on Beauty
• Medieval philosophers did not meditate on art
• Beauty is an essential and transcendent attribute of God
• Exacting rules regarding medieval gothic structures were perfected
• Luminosity and stained glass emblematic of the light of God
• The use of allegory in decoration “encyclopedias of stone”
• The entire endeavor was sublimated to exalting the Divine
• 3 medieval aesthetics: proportion, light & allegory
• Versailles’ gardens themed around Apollo and express Greek mythology
• The gardens served political, social and cultural purposes
• Emblematic of the rule of the monarchy
• Kant felt the harmony of the faculties is what led to being viewed as beautiful
• “Wagner saw opera as “Gesamtkunstwerk”, a complete art form in which he controlled not only musical features but also the libretto, staging, costumes and sets.”
• Wagnerian opera reveal and revel in tragedy
• Nietzsche criticized “Parsifal” for being too Christian
• “Aesthetic and moral concerns clash to create a quandary in assessing Wagner’s operas”
• “Warhol helped spark the transition from macho New York Abstract Expressionism to playful, gender-bending post-modernism”
• Something becomes art when accepted into museums and sold to collectors
• Warhol demonstrating that anything could be art
• “Danto argues that in each time and context, the artist creates something as art by relying on a shared theory of art that the audience can grasp, given its historical and institutional context”