In recent weeks, I've received an increasing percentage of comments criticizing pictures for featuring "ugly" people or "evil" themes, rather than for being "poorly drawn" or "badly painted" or "unimaginative."
- In a recent post about illustrations for the classic novel Lolita, many commenters were uninterested in the creativity or quality of the images because they didn't approve of the book's plot. None of the images were explicit, but the underlying story was too "depraved."
- In a recent post about an illustration of President Trump, many commenters were less interested in the artistry of the image than in what they suspected were the "totalitarian" sympathies of the artist, or even my own suspected political leanings for showing such a picture ("You are a Fabian Socialist, a hard leftist, a radical in sheep's clothing. A snooty superior commie pretending not to be, quietly and cleverly trying to undermine our constitution. You are worse than a total partisan hack. You are a Manchurian activist; a deceiver and a traitor.")
- In a recent post about drawings by artist John Cuneo, a number of commenters criticized Cuneo's pictures for being too ugly. ("It’s hard for me to appreciate Cuneo’s illustrations because they are so damn ugly." Cuneo is a "a psychosexual slob." His drawings show "saggy tits" and "flab.") Even worse, some suspected that Cuneo's admirers have "lib" leanings.
The direction of these comments surprises me; there's plenty of beautiful art about ugly subjects. Just ask Shakespeare.
My own test for Cuneo's drawings was never, "Would I invite this woman to the prom?" Rather, I feel his drawings are beautiful because their line work is sensitive, complex, thoughtful, probing and intelligent:
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| Details of Cuneo drawings |
Cuneo is not for everyone's taste, but as far as I'm concerned people who dismiss such drawings as "ugly" are applying criteria from a parallel universe. They are likely to miss out on some of the most rewarding material art has to offer.
So in today's post it's probably worth considering: what makes a drawing "ugly"?
I've previously written about how much I adore this drawing by Tom Fluharty:
Readers who sneer at drawings of "flabby" people may be troubled by this picture, but I personally consider it a masterpiece of good drawing: well conceived and designed, with those crisp dark accents shaping and containing that billowing flesh. Fluharty threw away the anatomy book and drew this with his eyes opened, the way good artists are supposed to. He was never tempted to let symmetry do half of his work for him. At the risk of further shocking readers, I would defend this drawing to anyone as "beautiful."
Next, there's artist David Levine, who walked right past the academic models to draw what he called the "shmata queens," the heavy, ungainly women who hung out on a nearby beach. Levine said he was interested in...Again and again Levine drew and painted these women on the beach. I'm sure if you asked whether he thought they were "ugly" he'd be puzzled by the question. Certainly they aren't ugly in any sense that should be relevant here.
92 comments:
Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Thank you so much for sharing these paintings.
I pretty much agree with art as separate from politics or even subject (though I'd rather spend my time looking at beautiful well-kept women than slobs.) You'd take less heat on the political end if you ever wrote that "this artist, though to my right politically, is a masterful artist, and does great work." Sadly, I've read every piece you've ever posted here and can't remember any such statement. For you, good art with political content always leans left. Your business, but when I read your assessment of an artist, I have to adjust accordingly.
It's interesting that this topic comes up in an English-language art blog. I used to think that intolerance was primarily a German problem because we've had authoritarian periods in history. But perhaps that's precisely why we also had good illustrators like Otto Dix.
David, the point of contention seems to be whether the artist is wallowing in depravity for the sake of it, or taking the viewer / reader through a depraved / nihilistic situation on the way to something higher (e.g. the main character’s ‘redemption’ and therefore the positive ‘message'), thereby contrasting the bad with the good.
I don’t think a painting of an old woman is involved in quite the same debate. Most of us would agree that there’s nothing morally wrong with growing old, and there is a certain type of beauty in old faces.
"poorly drawn" or "badly painted" or "unimaginative."
The Trump one was criticised over these points.
Bill
(For skipping the drawing, faking the painting, and having misfits in the imaginative. /Bill)
Tolerance doesn't = numbness; & not sure where 'intolerance' fits in here at all, tbh.
Bill
"We have to be careful about judging art based on the morals of the people depicted, or whether a character has a wart on her nose, or whether the colors are pretty."
Most people will accept and see that there is depiction as illustration and depiction as means-to-participation. Some things are contained within their past, such as say Napoleon, but you won't find a 20th c tyrant on a gallery wall (if any paintings of them still exist).
Like Larence suggested, some things are transcended by where they are viewed from (where the artist places himself and the viewer). Some are extremely dubious, such as the work of that photographer that Jamie Lee Curtis was called out for having on her wall; he was specialising in large photos of children done up as if they were dead and arranged in things like metal barrels, car-boots, drowned in baths, etc (or -very - similar, the specifics escape me, but that was the ball-park); child-abduction/murder-chic. There was the Balenciaga campaigns with the children, teddies in bondage gear and court papers on child porn. There are 'comics' depicting vile criminal material involving children. I'd gladly put a match to all that stuff.
None of the things criticised here come anywhere near those levels, but some could be evaluated on the basis of their content; it's entirely valid to do so in certain contexts.
Bill
(LaUrence - sorry ! /bill)
Ugly stuff sucks (it is ugly).
John Cuneo only makes ugly stuff, and that sucks.
Pretty colors rock (they are pretty).
There's always room for grotesques, I think it's a matter of whether there's a 'siding' with things that are really warped, inwardly. I'd put most of Cuneo's work up with Arcimboldo and gargoyles, I love his animals. Some of the other scenarios...not so much. C'est la vie.
Bill
What about about Lucien Freud? Talking about ugly… but he’s undeniably great. Flu
He (Freud) seems to kill everything he paints, a lot of portraits inadvertently end up making the sitter's boredom look like entropy, but he goes further;
even the corpse-like dogs clook like they couldn't be bothered licking their nuts due to existential ennui.
Also the only artist I've seen whose work looks worse in-person than in reproduction.
All of which is acceptable and there's certainly room for in painting, not so much this: https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/10/lucian-freud-nude-portrait-daughter-annie
The painting mentioned here is either misdescribed or there's another one (of her about that age - maybe a sketched painting associated with it - not the ones of his daughter/s he did when they were older), where the child has been painted as fully exposing herself while seated. It's clinical, but nonetheless looks like a violation even in the act of painting it.
(To say nothing of brother, Clement.)
Bill
Robert Piepenbrink-- If you've read every piece I've posted then I'm truly flattered. I just noticed that this week is the 20th anniversary of when I started this blog; 20 years ago I was working very late at my law firm (again) and felt the need to do something therapeutic. If the shops had been open perhaps I would've bought myself a new hat instead.
Back then I had no intention of ever mentioning politics or anything else about myself here. It wasn't relevant to the opinions I wanted to express, and besides law firms frown on such frivolities. For 19 years the merits of a picture didn't seem to require me to write disclaimers such as, "this artist, though to my right politically...."
I'm happy to say that most of the artists I met along the way similarly saw no need to insert their politics, unless it arose in the natural course of developing friendships. It turned out that Leonard Starr, my first boyhood artist hero, was far to my right. I met him through this blog and I only learned his political leanings sitting around the fireplace in his living room. It never made one jot of difference to my regard for the quality of his art, or to my affection for the man. And it turns out that the highly excellent Tom Fluharty, one of my current artist heroes, is also to my right (although his caricatures of the right and left are equally devastating). It was no surprise that political cartoonists such as Mike Ramirez or Jeff MacNelly are to my right, but it has nothing to do with their great talents or my view of them as wonderful people.
Now, because of the polarized times in which we live, a lot of commenters seem to think that my location on the political spectrum, or the locations of individual artists that I write about, should have an impact on the validity of their art. I hope that's not true. I've been critical of Jon McNaughton's Trump paintings, not because they praise Trump but because I think they're horribly painted and stupidly conceived. I was just as critical of Shepard Fairey's ridiculous, plagiarized Obama portrait.
If anyone out there wants to defend the Trump NFTs of superhero Trump with lightning bolts coming out of his eyes, or the paintings of Jesus with a protective arm around martyr Trump in the courtroom, you're welcome to do so here as long as you think you can do it in the language of art. If the argument is that an artist deserves a thumb on the scale because they're a soldier in the fight against the deep state... well, that's not what this space is about.
Anonymous. Just curious.. are you able to make art at a high level? Just wondering. It’s easy to criticize talent and unable to do it yourself just wondering. It’s like me criticizing a drummer when I don’t drum.
For what it’s worth (two cents?) I thought all these examples were beautiful and the more I’ve seen of Cuneo’s work the more I appreciate his talent.
You're right, it is easy.
https://postimg.cc/75cG8FD5
https://postimg.cc/V0Y5W19V
Bill
Beautiful work Bill.
(Thanks Richard, one's just a crib though. /Bill)
The spirit with which a comedian points out that people in the audience, or even himself, are funny-looking matters a lot. It is very easy for that to shade over into calling them (or himself) ugly. Those that pull off roasting regularly without offending are silly, they have a clearly buoyant spirit, gleeful in a childlike rather than a malignant way. They talk in a comic rhythm with a voice with different weird gears of tone that they shift between. And they laugh even at themselves. Those that fail tend to do so from a place of sullen, serious, or negative energy.
Still, as pointed out years ago by Patrice O’Neal, rough jokes that work and rough jokes that merely offend come from the same hopeful creative place. And to deny a comedian’s ability to do the latter also denies the world of the former. Because the only true test of offensiveness is when comedy hits the live audience. That’s how the line is determined, and it moves depending on the audience.
I don’t think these same points apply to, as a group, the Fluharty drawing, the second and fourth Levin watercolor, and the Andrew Wyeth paintings. These are not works of comedy. They contain people, but those people have become transposed as artworks. They are not illusions of characters, but, as I’ve said before, the illusion of illusions of characters. They have passed from materiality and become part of meaningful visual songs. And that, I would say, is the ultimate charity in depiction.
Awesome examples. All four of these "ugly" artists are great and prove your point perfectly. There are already hundreds of blogs with pin up art for people who can't deal with the idea of flab.
Yup I recognize it, but still nicely executed
I was in the supermarket a day or so ago and passing the children's toys I noticed a large cardboard cutout of three AI generated teenage girls representing the contents of the boxes behind them; dolls embodying a fantasy of what to aspire to in adolescent female beauty. I halted in front of this trio of silicone-skinned pink confections staring dilated back at me through their long regular eyelashes. Witches from the uncanny valley, they were the most unsettling thing I'd seen for some time. I moved on lest I be turned to stone...
It was the lovelessness of it that made it all so ugly. The body snatched automaton, the sex robot, the one-armed embrace of the slot machine, the con man's smile...
It is love that makes Wyeth's Christina's World, or Rembrandt's plain-Jane Saskia, or Michelangelo's Christ nailed to the cross, so beautiful.
Including Fluharty's backside.
Chris, I agree. I accidentally lost a comment that talked about this, the love and care and attention in those selfsame works. After some thought I came to conclusion that "aesthetic dematerialization" - the transfiguration of the figure into part of a composition/song - was even more 'flattering" because it becomes not at all about physiognomy; totally transcends the physical. The beauty of the picture as a whole then conditions our sense of the figures/character.
Funny. thing. I've never looked at artwork thinking of the artist's political slant. I usually took the position of a student in learning from it technique-wise. Preference comes into it of course (subjects) but never their political leaning. Could be also I've grown up watching material from the 40's through the 50's and listening to OTR from that era so things that are considered negative now was the norm then. I can also put things in their perspective places and time. Without applying any kind of sensibilities from the current era. I'm only critical of art for the technique. Subject matter is subjective, political leanings are irrelevant to my appreciation of the work. I'm more critical of the technical aspect. I'm of the mind of the student.
I know the aesthetic purists will disagree, but…
A student of art should consider how the artwork is “used” by the audience, and subject matter is central to this use.
Saying you don’t think about subject matter, only “technique,” is like a TV writer claiming he doesn’t think about setting, only the poetry of his dialogue. Subject matter is part of an artist’s technique, as essential as anything else you do with a pencil.
Congratulations on twenty years! You do good work, and I was happy, when I found your site, to go back to the beginning and see all of them. And I too regard the artist's politics as distinct from art. But my observation was that so far, if the drawing you posted tilted to the right politically, you always found something wrong with the art, and I observed no such trend in art which tilted to the left. I will be happy to be refuted.
(Goya could be another source of images for this post)
I would not qualify any of the posted images as "ugly". It's actually very hard to produce an ugly image, I think. Or perhaps there are several "ugly" possible. Like offensive and disgusting to watch because it hurts your values, or just beyond boring.
(This is my personal example of "ugly")
You can’t go into every home and find out how a work of art is being used, or interpreted, or discussed. That’s a completely unknowable and uncontrollable factor.
If you try as an artist to circumvent every possible misuse, misinterpretation, or complaint, you will stifle yourself completely and produce nothing interesting or personal.
The main import of subject matter is that it is fascinating, exciting, or fun enough to the artist to galvanize the artist to go to work, to have some vision, and to willfully make some beautiful illustrious manifestation of that vision. And then that vision becomes the subject. Which dematerializes the predicate subject and we’re off to the artistic races.
Art is “written” with intuitive forces and subconscious conceptions. Who you are will come out. The song will take shape. Anything else will be like the décor bolted on the wall at a theme restaurant.
Lots of Cuneo stuff can stand head held high beside the Goya Caprichos. Often with fuller form and animation, and as much interest.
Bill
Robert Piepenbrink-- If I understand you correctly, you are less concerned with my reverence for politically conservative artists (such as Starr, Jack Davis, MacNelly, Rodriguez, Fluharty, James Montgomery Flagg) than with my lack of pictures showing a conservative position. I agree such pictures are fewer and farther between, but they are not non-existent. I've repeatedly shown Fluharty's scalding portraits of Hilary Clinton, as well as his caricatures ridiculing other Democrats. This blog is probably the only place on the internet where you can see James Montgomery Flagg's drawing of a woman (representing taxpayers) rubbing her sore bottom after she has been sodomized by a senator(!) The conservative political cartoons of Ramirez and MacNelly I've displayed certainly show a conservative perspective. Some people argue that Norman Rockwell's illustrations (especially while he was with The Post) reflect a conservative, small town bias and criticize me for promoting them. Go figure.
xopxe-- I agree there are more varieties of "ugly" than Heinz has varieties of ketchup. The word means different things to different people. To underscore that point, the picture you offer of your personal example of ugly seems more incompetent and awkward to me than downright "ugly." If the picture turned out to be a mural painted by teenagers for a school project, would you still criticize it as ugly, or would you think it was endearing?
David, to be honest I think I find that thing specially ugly it's because I find the (long dead) painter specially annoying. Dalí triggers the same reaction.
Perhaps finding something ugly is more of a primal reaction than finding beauty. You can learn to find beauty in things, after all.
This relates to the rather pointless Bill's Goya / Cuneo comparison. When I first saw Cuneo's work it immediatlly reminded me of Carlos Nine's work. I don't know why, but it did. And this meant reminding me of the post-dictatorship revival of the early 80s, when late-arriving punk coexisted with new-wave in photocopied zines that mixed works by established emigres in Europe and teenagers whose art training was tracing LP covers. Nothing that reminds me of that can be ugly.
"I don't know why, but it did."
You win
Bill
Who?
Just a joke, never mind.
Bill
Hey Bill wonderful drawing. It allows a platform for you to talk. You have chops and your words make me consider what you are saying. Thanks.
>Richard< subject matters only in proper depiction. To me as a constant student, how the subject is created, what technique was used, can I learn to better myself and skills by aping said technique are my focus, subject second. Personal taste does influence subject choice and depiction when attempting a facsimile of the technique, but the subject is a ends to a means to realize the technique. You copy a cast in the technique of Bargue to gleam the how and why and to improve your own skill set. By trying his technique, you try and see how they go about solving the problem set out before them. The cast subject.
It's ugly because it has to be
It's ugly because it has to be. Sorry, I didn't mean to post as anonymous.
ACL, can you say more about what you mean?
Well, I'm going to throw out a series of disjointed ideas that may do little to make myself understood. I think some works "have" to be ugly, otherwise the message is diluted. Caricature, criticism, irony, and mockery coexist better with "ugliness." However, ugliness is not synonymous with mediocrity or poor workmanship. I think you have to know a lot and be very good at making "ugly things." And when people get indignant and angry, I think that's when the artist knows they're on the right track. On the other hand, perhaps, instead of using the term "ugly," we should use something more like "grotesque." When you look at a painting like Goya's Saturn Devouring One of His Children, it is anything but pretty, and yet no one doubts that it is an incredible work of art.
There are many other aspects as well. If I recall correctly, on this very blog, David once said that Crumb wouldn't have a place in the world today. And one of the aspects that made Crumb great is his "ugliness."
There’s ugliness which is true and natural to the thing, and ugliness which is unnatural and untrue to the thing.
A lion eating a gazelle is “ugly” but in a way that is true and natural, so it can also be artful. A gargoyle is ugly in a way that is true and natural to a gargoyle.
Crumb is usually ugly in a way which is untrue and unnatural. He will turn even a sweet child into a slobbering petulant monster. Cuneo primarily ugliness of this same kind. There’s nothing truthfully ugly about a man guiding his member into a pair of garden shears held by another man sitting on a very small stool.
I can’t think of words offhand to distinguish these, but my complaints are only ever with the latter, never the former.
I propose "ugly" ugliness as opposed to elegance. Elegance means fit for purpose. Goya, Crumb and Cuneo drawings are fit for purpose. An inept attempt at realism in a Nature Morte is not. Neo-classic imagery to elevate modern politicians, is not.
Help me understand how the picture of the guy getting ready to chop the other guy’s member is “fit for purpose”. What purpose?
It's a doodle, the artist just came up with the concept and idly drawn it, perhaps while sitting in a killer zoom meeting. Perhaps he really hated the guy on screen, or he knows the Spanish language idiom "me quiero cortar las bolas" for when you are really frustrated. Then he proceed to watercolor it, because he's a professional
Did you answer what purpose it’s for for?
Maybe the guy is a mohel?
Yes, to transmit that idea successfully. Elegantly because the resources fit the idea. Not ugly.
“To transmit the idea successfully”
The idea being that one guy is getting ready to cut another guy’s di<k off, or something else?
Would you say that any picture of the cutting, if we can tell what it depicts, is successful? That would be a low bar.
Or is there more to the successful “transmission” of the “idea” beyond our ability to understand what it depicts?
Agreed, the specific vision of the artist will come through in everything they paint (assuming some priors).
NC Wyeth could have painted only flowers in vases , and assuming he could paint them with the same investment, his personal vision would still be imbued.
But the value and experience the audience gets from The Giant will still be fundamentally different from that of a vase, no? Did NC do nothing particularly important when he chose to paint a towering giant made of clouds?
"The idea being that one guy is getting ready to cut another guy’s di
Yes, that idea. It's a good idea.
"Would you say that any picture of the cutting, if we can tell what it depicts, is successful?"
No, that's not enough not to be ugly. You have to do it elegantly, fit for purpose. In this case for example, in seemingly effortless and fast squiggly ink. If you go slow and methodical and worked up, then it would be ugly (say, the castration in the Roman de la Rose)
"Or is there more to the successful “transmission” of the “idea” beyond our ability to understand what it depicts?"
I'm arguing that the not ugliness resides on how neatly the message fits with the style, tools and language.
This means that you can find something ugly only because you do not understand the language and don't see how it fits. For example, a medievelist could find the above mentioned illustration perfectly adequate and not-ugly.
Oh crap, messed up the italics.
Transmitting a broad comic idea successfully entails basic, even naive communication design; big dorky elements, clear blocking, clear awkward scenario, exaggerated characters, funny and consistent cartooning, and an improvisational tone.
Meanwhile elegance entails refinement; tasteful discipline, consideration, high-mindedness, ease, balance, proportion, and a minimalist harmony of elements and ornamentation.
Nobody would ever say that National Lampoon’s Animal House was elegantly cast, or elegantly acted and staged… simply because funny people made you laugh in a comic scene. They goofed around the whole shoot. The comedy was anarchic and the camera mostly stayed still to capture it, with basic edits.
Cuneo’s work is similarly goofed into being. It’s unapologetically low comedy; broad, brazen, mad, chaotic, distorted and horny. Big misshapen heads, big pink noses, funny dainty hand gestures, tiny feet, disheveled hair, codpieces without the cod, figures out of balance and floating... It feels impromptu from start to finish; informal rather than composed. It shows evidence of its own meandering creation coming straight from the dome. No errors are even edited out that I can see. This is the opposite of refined. And rightly so. Funny ain’t pretty. To a comedian, elegance is just another piety to heckle.
Squiggly lines = good for cutting off di<ks
Regular lines = not good for cutting off di<ks
Richard wrote: "Help me understand how the picture of the guy getting ready to chop the other guy’s member is “fit for purpose”. What purpose?"
Oh please-- important myths, legends and artworks about castration go back 5,000 years and span important cultures such as ancient Egypt and Greece. They have to do with manhood and identity, with power and submission, with fertility and patricide. Stories of castration are fixed in our constellations (Cronos castrated his father Uranus with a sickle rather than pruning shears). The detached phallus of Osiris was a founding myth of ancient Egypt. There have been a hundred stories since then. More recently, check out the novel, Ancient Evenings.
So let's not try to claim that image as a symbol of current postmodernist decay.
I don't disagree with xopxe that the drawing could come from "a doodle, the artist just came up with the concept and idly drawn it." Many excellent drawings are born that way. But even if it did, it may still have been the subliminal product of feelings of inadequacy or uncertainty or anger or paranoia. My sense of Cuneo's drawings is that his musings can be more psychologically complex and layered even when they aren't the planned result of a conscious narrative.
"There’s nothing truthfully ugly about a man guiding his member into a pair of garden shears held by another man sitting on a very small stool."
"Oh please-- important myths, legends and artworks about castration go back 5,000 years and span important cultures..."
Both true. People today laugh when they hear about Victorians omitting, or burying in allusion, their recounting of how (Egyptian) Atum set Creation going ( - by being a dirty, dirty little boy). But today stuff is marked 'nsfw', some art is regulated by both its purveyers and consumers in a way that's not just on account of the sensitivities of others, but themselves. Split like the vicar dribbling over his secret daguerreotypes of ethnic nudes. Only exhibited in certain contexts, shared with certain people.
So it's not as if the content-matter is only a thing for people with weird complexes. Everyone regulates, even censures - which is not = censors.
There are deep and dark things in the mythologies (which presumably aren't necessarily typical for the people they're from). Or, for us, nor is arriving at work with no pants. And that giant secateurs sure does wince.
Bill
"check out the novel, Ancient Evenings"
You haven't sold it to me.
Bill
He's begging for litigation using that.
Bill
Kev, oh we just have different definitions of elegance. For me elegance is synonymous with "fit for purpose". Nothing wrong in that, definitions are never wrong, just useful or not.
I'll stick to "fit for purpose" then: if the means match the tasks, and do it concisely, effectively and efficiently, then it can not be ugly-ugly.
Richard: Yes. A talented artist might find other solutions to the problem. Perhaps a very tasteful raphaelite, with lots of floating hair and silky drapes.
David,
Myths and legends are filled with events that, within a specific larger narrative, are meaningful and artful. However, in isolation and without a narrative foundation, these same events are merely degenerate.
A picture of a man eating a baby doesn’t automatically gain narrative and psychological depth simply because the myth of Cronos exists.
Countless other Greek myths involve ped0philia, violent r@pe, b3stiality, torture, etc. Therefore, I’m not so sure that “Well, the ancient Greeks wrote about it” is the proof of legitimacy you want it to be.
Is there an art movement that you like, but for whom you don’t think could “elegantly” do a drawing/painting of the garden shears castration?
The shredding of flesh and the splattering of viscera only becomes beautiful when the involved pain and suffering has been somehow abraded from the presentation or put out of mind because of larger concerns.
And that’s exactly what you did by discussing the gazelle's killing as true and natural. In the larger view, which is abstract and conceptual, one can see the predator-prey relationship as an essential part of the health to the much larger organism of nature to which we all belong and depend.
Sam Peckinpaugh takes a different abstract tack, creating a slow motion edit-ballet of violence, so the horror is only suggested or aestheticized and orchestrated like visual music. Frazetta does the same but in the still image.
Which is all to say, it is abstraction in the service of expression, or some concept or vision, some larger expression of truth, that dematerializes the ugliness of reality and its attendant pain, suffering, flab, failing health, and so on. So it can be both understood and, in some sense, appreciated. And in the process we get ye olde 'truth and beauty.'
Howard Pyle taught that if there was anything ugly, bizarre, weird, creepy, disgusting, etc. required to tell a story pictorially, it should be somehow suggested rather than shown explicitly, evoked rather than shoved in our faces, so it becomes haunting and mysterious rather than gross and depressing. So it pinged the faculties of imagination and wonder rather than the limbic system.
Garden-shears Bobbitt-lopping is a different piece of cod entirely; I agree with you there. The Brandywine artists would have called it, definitively, an incident. Which meant it was not in any sense epic (having larger connections to grand struggles and common experiences and emotions, which is what they strove for.) They didn't believe in incidents as art subjects, so they relegated them to vignettes. And vignetting incidents... really that's comedy in a nutshell.
You can have ten thousand lesser artists make a picture of children playing on a beach suddenly seeing a distant magical giant stride across the sea and not one will capture the imagination like N.C. Wyeth’s. Same predicate subject, same literal idea, but without the vision, the picture goes dead. No animation from within, without, and beyond.
Thus it isn’t the literary idea that is being expressed by N.C. It is the experience. Which includes the wonder, the awe, the mystery, the quality of the day, the taste of salt in the air, the wind coming off the sea, the white surf swept off the caps, what it feels like to be a small child, what it feels like to be insignificant in the face of the scale of nature, and so on. And the composing of that experience as haunting and lovely visual music.
The predicate subject is like a party invitation. It is important because it invites you on a journey, but it isn’t the party. And at the end of the night, who knows where you left it.
"Kev, oh we just have different definitions of elegance. For me elegance is synonymous with "fit for purpose". Nothing wrong in that, definitions are never wrong, just useful or not."
It's an inelegant use of the term. In that it is not fit for purpose.
Perhaps I did Cuneo a disservice by selecting the detail of the man with the pruning shears from a very large and complicated drawing ( https://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2016/09/one-lovely-drawing-part-51.html ) but I wanted to show examples of art that might, on the surface, come across as "ugly" to some but with closer scrutiny might be seen as very beautiful.
People who don't look below the surface admire work by Andrew Wyeth for being warm and reassuring country scenes that reaffirm traditional values. But more astute viewers recognize that there are tragic and even terrifying layers below the surface with Wyeth-- the noble dog who is chained up, mistreated and tortured to death; those frightening meat hooks in the ceiling at Kuerners, the elements of death that are laced through his many pictures; the brutality of Karl Kuerner's WWI war experience with its Nazi undertones. Wyeth never draws the menace of pruning shears threatening a penis, but he is every bit as dark in his own way.
The same might be said of Robert Frost-- a folksy country poet on the surface, but if you read Randall Jarrell or Lionel Trilling, the sentimental interpretations miss the darkness and loneliness at the core. You can find plenty of ugliness below the surface, if you but look.
Should we seek out ugliness, or should we be content with the prettiness at the surface? I suppose that depends on how eager we are to understand the art we're discussing. One of America's greatest philosophers, William James, wrote, "There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality....and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deeper levels of truth."
"...selecting the detail of the man with the pruning shears from a very large and complicated drawing"
Glad to see it properly contextualised. Now the guy zeroing in shouting "Hey - a d*ck !" is the one who gets funny looks.
Bill
Can it be looked at as the same thing recurring at different levels, nested in each other ? One, The artwork, complete in itself, containing both its own elements explicitly and its own language of allusion, mystery and the numinous using shape, pattern, negative space, hollows, lifts.....
The other, the world, viewer's imagination, etc., which operates in similar ways ?
Bill
Can you expand on what you mean, Bill?
Just, fyi, the viewer's imagination is engaged by the very effects I'm talking about, because each is meaningful poetic illusion that requires the participation of the viewer to bring alive. Like the needle on the record.
"definitions are never wrong, just useful or not."
If a definition's not useful it's usually because it's wrong.
Bill
Richard: "Is there an art movement that you like, but for whom you don’t think could “elegantly” do a drawing/painting of the garden shears castration?
No. Seems there's always some very clever artist.
Kev: "It's an inelegant use of the term. In that it is not fit for purpose.". You are starting to see the inner beauty in the definition. It's elegance.
It would be interesting to compile a list of works for terrible things, and see what makes/makes not them fit for purpose:
- Saturn devouring his son
- Ivan the Terrible killing his son
- The blind leading the blind (there are several)
- weapons of mass destruction / trench warfare
- apocalypse through flooding
- the corruption of the elites
- cutting of someone's genitalia / hair... (Wait, this is reminds me of Enrique Breccia's "El Matadero"!)
- ...
Bill: "If a definition's not useful it's usually because it's wrong."
No, a definition is useful when is shared and helps communication. That is application and environment dependent. If you use a word with it's dictionary definition, but nobody you are talking to groups knows that word, or they use it differently, then your definition is correct but useless.
Just as a nested hierarchy involving the world, experience, memory, sorta thing. Which concentically contain each other, with the prime one being whichever has the particular vantage loci. And an artwork is both another of these type of 'planes', but also takes the place of each at different times.
I just didn't find Richard and your points contradictory, but relational, and was wondering if it could be framed in some way. The artwork is self-justifying/contained, but is enfolded in process with things that are too.
Bill
No, that's Consensus / mutual comprehension - a different issue. You assume it already exists before coming to definition.
"Definition is never wrong" - there's a whole set of structure and word-relation there, slapped on to reality and dependent on it. And you're mixing up word and definition in your last bit.
Bill
(Incorrect, here, means the same as 'wrong'; it's not a value judgement./Bill)
So then by ‘fit for purpose’ don’t you just mean “In a style and genre I like”?
No one loves Cuneo like Apatoff!
Bill:
Richard: I don't see the logic. I said I can not discard any style as being able to treat any theme, as I understood was answering your question. Perhaps you misstated it, and were asking for an example of a piece in a genre I like that I consider ugly? If it's so, that's actually a hard question, because you are looking between stuff that in general already matches you sensibility and you understand, so when it hurts it hurts deep. From the top of my head, the last Tin Tin -Tin Tin and the Pícaros-, and Oesterheld/Solano Lopez' sequel El Eternauta 2. Both are pretty ugly (the second in a particularly tragic way).
Well, one hears arguments that art is contextualized in a whole bunch of different ways, nested within this or that cultural era, movement, project, or academic interest area. And then you can argue that we see what's on canvas in relation to prior experience, expectation, other pictures we've seen, better drawn versions of what we're looking at, more idealized versions of the same thing, and so on.
Continuing in this mode we can say the content is in relation to the form, the references and narrative is in relation to the composition, the drama is in relation to the expression, and so on. That's a kind of superposition argument, that these different takes are stacked one upon the other.
But I think this is all academic talk. The best art, it seems to me, creates its own imaginary aesthetic dream world; parallel to our own, but with its own reality, tone, and physics.
Thus when you see a character in a painting, you see that character. You don't see a reference to that character, because that character may not have a reference. It may be wholly made up and probably is. Just as when you see Indiana Jones in a movie, you see Indiana Jones, not some reference to Indiana Jones.
The great work of art is self justifying as well as self-defining. And furthermore every element in it, including the characters, is wholly integrated with the overall composition. You cannot extract a fictional character from his aesthetic environment because he's indistinguishable from it.
You cannot distinguish form from content because the content is written in the language of form; abstraction and suggestion. Nothing is literal, the drama is expressed rather than shown because drama can't actually be shown; it is only an experiential state of mind.
People don't actually know why they get immersed in a story, usually deluding themself with ready rationales after the fact. The reality is that Indiana Jones is Indiana Jones because "he" seems to do Indiana Jones things in Indiana Jones movies. If you saw him playing video games and eating Cheetos in that costume, it stops being him. Because the illusion of 'Indiana Jones' isn't localized to the actor in the costume. Meanwhile the tension you feel watching him struggle for what's right in a movie is not his but yours. He doesn't exist except as a movie. Same as a "character" in a great painting.
A definition is useful when it accurately describes some particular phenomena succinctly and uniquely. A word is useful when it and its unique definition are widely shared.
Elegance: from a quick internet survey of dictionaries and etymologies printed in the last 300 years:
The beauty of propriety, not of greatness.
beauty without grandeur, nice, not coarse, not gross
perspicuity, purity, neatness, and a happy choice and arrangement of words.
Polished, polite, refined, graceful, pleasing to good taste.
Nice, sensible to beauty, discriminating beauty from deformity or imperfection
Beautiful in form and colors, pleasing.
Arrived at through training and cultivation through the study of ideals of grace.
Tastefully ornate, choice, fine, tasteful, selected with care
Characterized by refined grace
Dainty, fastidious
etc.
Just because you call fork a spoon doesn't mean it'll hold soup.
Oh, if you are bored: let's provide an example of something that is elegant but not fit for purpose, and something fit for purpose that is not elegant.
As trivia, "fit for purpose" is surprisingly hard to translate from english. The spanish, french and russian equivalent phrases use "adequate" of similar instead of "fit", and sound much weaker. If I want to define elegance in spanish i would say something "a creation that uses the minimal amount of resources in the most clever way to obtain the best effect possible, transforming something complex into something simple".
Walk through any hardware store and the shelves will be filled with items fit for purpose which are not beautiful, graceful, pleasing, refined, in good taste, tastefully ornate, dainty, or fastidious. Most purely utilitarian items aren't the best and most beautiful possible solution, but the cheapest possible solution that is good enough to do the business, aka "fit for purpose." Cheap factory produced parts are rarely elegant. Nobody buys Ductwork Fancy Magazine.
Your fallacy is using part of the definition (appropriateness, adequacy, fitness) as the whole definition. Undeniably, we cannot find something that is appropriate that is not fit for purpose. And we cannot find something that is fit for purpose that is not appropriate. Because synonyms have the same meaning.
Your Spanish version is much closer but omits the fact that poetic concision isn't lossy, so it doesn't result in "simplicity" per se. Only seeming simplicity. An elegant dress is not parsimonious nor dumbed down. An elegant work of art might be orchestrated quite densely, yet be imminently singable. Optimize it and it might end up as muzak; simple and fit for use.
Either way, elegance isn't searchingly improvisational; refinement and searching improvisation have opposite meanings. Elegance doesn't questioningly waver, because it is the answer to a question perfected through iteration and consideration. Elegance is not the wondering and experimenting phase. Nor is elegance base, dowdy, flabby, frazzled, or imbalanced either.
Elegant comedy is so rare and difficult it's almost an oxymoron. It entails precision, deep forethought, logic, and dramatic structure. And yet it needs to get a laugh. A buster Keaton gag. Wodehouse. A Benchley essay. A skit by Nichols & May. A lacerating Mamet scene in Iambic Pentameter. Cardini or Ricky Jay in comedy magic. A lexical rant by George Carlin. A Norm Macdonald joke with what he called "perfect form" (Where the punchline is the same as the setup.)
"a definition is useful when is shared and helps communication. That is application and environment dependent."
Yes, application and environment thus determine the definition.
If it's not useful or sufficient it gives a clue that it's likely wrong. Or 'incorrect' if you prefer.
Bill
Yes, "art, it seems to me, creates its own imaginary aesthetic dream world; parallel to our own, but with its own reality, tone, and physics."
And you break the spell(=art) if you step outside this. But the art has changed the world for the person who has experienced it also (folded itself into it, enlarging it not just as an added part but by broadening the field of imagination that takes in the whole. That's a seperate thing to the art itself, not proper to it, and doesn't - and actually can't - impinge on it).
Bill
Kev, what you're saying here is exactly in line with how the worthiness of a work of art is nested within the meta hierarchy of love. To see that incidents are manifestations of the deep patterns governing how reality lays itself out, rather than them being isolated 'facts' that are arbitrarily assigned value, significance or morality. So, to see a thing within love is to see its ultimate relation with everything else. 'Epic' as you say.
Well said Bill!
I posit that if you do not find elegance in a woodworker's hammer, a vise, a laser level, or a plow, it's only because you are not able to appreciate their fitness for the task. The people who had to melt lead to fix ductwork found PVC duct joints elegant. The people at CASIO who came up with the TQ-140 alarm clock found the design insanely elegant.
About simplicity vs perceived simplicity, absolutely. Elegance might be a mirage, because our brains are very eager for simple rules, and we are all too ready to accept something that seems true for truth. There are a lot of elegant theories that upon closer inspection show themselves to be subtly broken, and thus not fit for their task of explaining or predicting (as all this could be). Then they stop being elegant. Late TV is full of mirages that are neither fit nor have a purpose. Furthermore, "simplicity" describes how something latches into the already existing structures in your mind, and thus changes between individuals and groups. Simplicity (and elegance) is something you perceive, and it's something that you must be equipped -or learn- to be able to perceive.
About your other quasi-examples: a densely orchestrated piece that can be sung? If the task was to sound grand and fill a space, and yet have room for a singer to narrate a story, that's an elegant piece of work. An elegant dress? You are going to an Edwardian Ball and want to show that you are of good standing, are world-savvy and cultured. The only judges of elegance you care for are your peers.
This is awkward. When you are in a group of people beyond your buddies, words and meanings are negotiated and agreed upon by use. You start talking, and then adjust. It's like being a social creature 101.
Yes. The rules are within that group who might have developed their own peculiar semantic idiom.
If it can't be understood according to the mutually agreed system, it is 'wrong'.
Wrong being contextual does not = "definitions are never wrong, just useful or not."
Do students have to pay you for this ?
Bill
"If I want to define elegance in spanish i would say something "a creation that uses the minimal amount of resources in the most clever way to obtain the best effect possible, transforming something complex into something simple"."
Can't you think of exceptions to this, the Alhambra for instance ? Decoration that is not fussy or fastidious yet goes beyond functional ? Lyre-birds ?
A plain graceful, elegant dress ('Edwardian' was your addition)?
There are inelegant and elegant fonts. And everything else. Function / Function + X.
Your inability to perceive the difference may be down to having a conscripted definition of the word.
Whether or not that is down to a deficiency of capacity reflected in your personal semantic idiom, or an ideological semantic came first and caused the mischief, who can say ?
But when everyone else can see it, it amounts to the same thing as putting your hands over your eyes in order to tell people something isn't really there
"I posit that if you do not find elegance in a woodworker's hammer, a vise, a laser level, or a plow, it's only because you are not able to appreciate their fitness for the task."
The fuller definition of the word incorporates fitness for function, plus further qualities. As was stated pretty clearly above.: "Your fallacy is using part of the definition (appropriateness, adequacy, fitness) as the whole definition"
So who exactly is failing to appreciate/see here ?
Bill
Handsomely, among other things for explaining to insufficiently socialized young adults that "when you are in a group, you are part of that group".
Would that be like an english-speaking group with an agreed definition of "elegance" ?
Bill
“I posit that if you do not find elegance in (x,y,or z) it's only because you are not able to appreciate their fitness for the task.”
A giant grim grunting ork of a man, squat of neck and lumbering, moved a refrigerator for me the other day. I can assure you that I appreciated his fitness for the task.
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