When Cy Twombly's painting, Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor (1994) was exhibited in Houston, a visitor to the museum was so moved by the painting that she took off her clothes and danced naked in front of it. She later wrote, “The painting makes me want to run naked."
When Clyfford Still's painting, 1975-J, went on display in Colorado...
I agree with their judgment that the Twombly painting is superior to the Still painting. Nevertheless, we shouldn't overlook the fact that nude criticism suffers from some inherent ambiguities and is therefore susceptible to being misconstrued.
For example, a young woman critiqued Gustave Courbet’s infamous 1866 painting L’origine du monde, by hoisting her dress up above her waist and sitting on the museum floor in front of the painting with her legs spread. (NSFW).
Her action may have sensitized some visitors to the oppressive colonialist patriarchy responsible for such paintings. However, a disturbing percentage of the crowd seemed to miss the point entirely, and happily applauded or pulled out their cameras.
Perhaps for this reason, the woman felt it necessary to return to the old fashioned written word, going back to the museum to deface the painting by scrawling "Me too" on it.
Art criticism written in words has a more direct, literal meaning than symbolic nude criticism. It eliminates a lot of ambiguity. But of course, ambiguity can be a desirable thing when the critic is a nitwit.
These acts have absolutely nothing to do with art criticism and everything to do with narcissists exploiting public forums sanctioned by post modernist ambiguity to give them permission to indulge their personal need.
ReplyDeleteIt was commissioned by the diplomat Khalil Bey. The Ottomans normally get a free pass on the patriarchy/colonialism thing
ReplyDeleteBill
I happened to be in Paris in 2015 when that Courbet exposition occurred. I knew of it because they had posters in the Metro stations. The posters were basically the painting with some text.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, what always impresses me when I see manifestations of that kind is how many and how deep cultures we have. That woman's values and aesthetics make sense for a lot of people, as ridiculous/outrageous/stupid they might look. I might not "get it", but neither I do rugbiers, trainspotters, survivalists or new-age flat-earthers. But there they are.
I could see more, and justified, reasoning involved if people were upset by the posters.
DeleteBut the painting is in a gallery. It's even behind a free standing wall to prevent passing view, children, etc., if preferred. If you don't like, don't look.
Bill
chris bennett-- Really? I'd say that the woman who rubbed her butt on the Still was probably just drunk, but unless you disbelieve her sincerity, the woman who danced in front of the Twombly could be having a genuine, if uninhibited, reaction to the swirling freedom of the painting. How would you classify a girl sitting in front of you at a rock concert who gets so caught up in the music that she can't resist standing up and dancing, spoiling your view for the rest of the concert?
ReplyDeleteThe third woman I'd say was making more of a political statement than an artistic statement, but the content of an image is properly subsumed within the category, "art criticism."
Anonymous / Bill-- Good point. I think the story of this painting, and how they recently tracked down the model, is absolutely fascinating. I love this painting.
xopxe-- I was not aware of that. Call me old fashioned, but I think using Courbet's painting as a poster in Metro stations shows terrible judgment for many reasons (not the least of which is that transplanting that painting to the site of industrial transportation shows a complete ignorance of the nature of the artwork). The choice is so pointlessly antagonizing, it almost justifies the rage of Deborah de Robertis, the woman behind the vandalism. I suggested that she was a nitwit, but clearly the French authorities had no shortage of nitwits on their side.
I agree with your point about "how many and how deep cultures we have," which is why manners (so-called "ethical traffic lights") become more important in an increasingly polarized environment. There are too many creeps out there insisting on flaunting their particular preferences as subway posters.
Sounds like karmic justice to me, considering Courbet’s own vandalism;
ReplyDeletehttps://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/269671
Richard - yes, quite a unpleasant person, in many respects.
ReplyDeleteAnd only if it was supernatural karma, if there were such a thing, and not people who think they're its agents like we see elsewhere.
Bill
These incidents remind me of the poster showing a visitor to a gallery standing in front of a painting and opening his (or her) trench coat to it; the caption, of course, is "Expose yourself to art!",
ReplyDeleteThat people would put on these kinds of public spectacles is bad enough. But that anybody would laud any of it just makes you hang your head.
ReplyDeleteAt first, one presumes mental illness is the most obvious explanation. But apparently there must be some premeditation involved; some bizarrely misguided attempt to “say something” and be important for a hot moment. Otherwise why not put on your ridiculous display in the street, rather than the art gallery? By choosing the gallery space to put their worst foot forward, they are in fact formalizing their coming out as flailing and inarticulate simpletons for all to see.
The unwell women responding to these imbecilic works through public nudity are also beneath contempt.
David, speaking of cultures and illustration, I have an honest question.
ReplyDeleteFrom what I've seen, there are many successful female illustrators, at least down here and in Europe. Has a woman ever commented on this blog? (I understand that anonymousness makes it challenging to answer the question). In any case, they are hugely underrepresented here. I can think of several reasons. Perhaps they tend to be younger, and there is just a correlation between being a young illustrator and not being interested in the content prevalent on this blog, or perhaps it's just they do not inhabit the blogosphere and use other platforms. Or perhaps it is a global engagement thing not restricted to this blog. What do you think?
As a side note, I always found it curious that women are a smaller proportion of comic artists than from general illustrators and fiction writers. My best guess is that it's an industry thing, tough I'm not sure what mechanisms are at work.
You could be right about the medium. There a lots of women commenting in the earlier posts. Before social media took of in a big way. More commenters in general, then, though. Same with lots of blogspot blogs. The medium has lost a lot of traction. But it still can work in ways far better than social media. Feels less branded, allows better content and control. I'm sure at least one in maybe six or seven that still comment here are female. But the most frequent commenters are guys.
DeleteAs a side note, I always found it curious that women are a smaller proportion of comic artists than from general illustrators and fiction writers. My best guess is that it's an industry thing, tough I'm not sure what mechanisms are at work.
ReplyDeleteThis one, at least, is easily explained. Drawing comics is, by far, the most destructive and least paid work an artist/illustrator can enter into. One needs a special kind of self-destructive monomania to do it, and women in general seem not as biologically charged to blindly dive head first into the abyss as men.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
That's like saying women aren't up to it. 'Biologically charged' ? I mean, wtf ? Next you'll be using 'hysteria'...
ReplyDeleteYeah, I know, it’s not very…woke? Marxist? Post-modern? And I have no science to back my assertion up with. I just know that making comics is suicidal. Like going to war armed only with a spoon. You know you’re most likely going to get killed, but it’s still just something you have to do. Women, in general, seem to lack this spermatozoid impetus.
ReplyDelete- - -
Postmodern Anonymouse
Anonymouse, that reminds me of an interview with Russian chess GM Grischuk. When asked why there are far fewer great female chess players than male, his opinion was something like, "To be great at this, you must start very young and dedicate your whole life to it. Women have too much common sense for this bullshit".
ReplyDeleteMy hypothesis is that they just aren't interested in the kind of stories the comic industry is churning out. There are more women in the segments where authors have more control ("indies"), and their production has a distinct personality.
Condescending bs. Masked as a compliment. Nothing like left-wing males (right?) - when the sexism comes out, it really, really shows.
ReplyDeletehttps://arttrip.it/artemisia-gentileschi/
ReplyDeleteRichard and Bill-- I wasn't familiar with the communards' destruction of the vendome column, but I'd draw a distinction between vandalizing art and destroying a war trophy. It sounds like Napoleon melted down vanquished enemy canons to create a statue glorifying himself dressed up in the robes of Caesar. That kind of military arrogance invites a militant response.
ReplyDeleteNapoleon seems to have generated a lot of hostility from artists because he came to power pledging freedom and rights for the people, then reversed himself and declared himself emperor. Beethoven's Eroica symphony was originally written as the Bonaparte symphony after Napoleon promised to be the liberator of the people, but Beethoven was so disgusted by Napoleon's betrayal that he tore right through the paper erasing any trace of Napoleon's name.
Chris-- sounds fair. It's a dialogue with the art.
Kev Ferrara-- I wasn't always certain, when you criticized mentally ill people putting on a public spectacle, whether you were referring to Twombly and Still or the women who reacted to their work.
Based on this discussion, I'd say that neither side is blameless. I'm disgusted by the women who vandalized the Courbet but I'm also disgusted by the pigs who decided to flaunt and misuse Courbet's painting by confronting subway riders with it.
"I wasn't always certain, when you criticized mentally ill people putting on a public spectacle, whether you were referring to Twombly and Still or the women who reacted to their work."
ReplyDeleteIf you saw both possibilities from the start, then either my construction was clumsy or the joke was too obvious. Both sins where I come from.
For the record, I think anybody should be allowed to create and sell anything they want, and it isn't at all my interest in preventing modernists or postmodernists from exhibiting and selling (provided the work is actually original by the artist). Nor do I think either Twombly or Still was mentally ill.
However, I do find parallels in the inarticulateness and infantilism of all the involved players. At the heart of public displays of blatant, unsophisticated communication (simple, disordered, weakly-transformed, or untransformed sensations and emotions) is the pomo-enabled barbarism that I claim has been - and continues to be - so destructive to our culture.
xopxe - The male bias has been significant in all aspects of the culture industry, but, yeah, comics seems to have been perhaps even more exclusive than many other fields. I don't think indie comics has been an exception to this at all, but it seems things are changing, and that's a good thing - especially if this means relatively fewer muscle and pouch laden hero's journeys in the mainstream.
ReplyDelete---
Postmodern Anonymouse
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI think it's more fundamental than just "what industry churns out," but rather what the medium best lends itself to.
ReplyDeleteComics really only lend themselves well to stories that are extremely narratively limited. They just can't tell that much story per page and require an excessive amount of work to create. You can write the first draft of an entire novel in the amount of time it takes just to write, draw, and ink a traditional 22-page comic book. And that 22-page comic book can tell about as much story as 2 pages of a novel would.
If you're going to pick comics over a novel, you'd better have a damn good reason, because otherwise, they're an extremely limiting medium.
One such good reason is if you have a story that is primarily visual. That works great for things like superheroes or science fiction fluff, where you can just use exposition to explain scene changes and backstory. But it does not work very well at all if you'd like to tell a story with naturalistic dialogue exploring the complexities of human relationships.
And even if your story is visual, you have to have a good reason why you wouldn't just tell the story as a TV show or movie. Special effects budgets were a major limiting factor for movies until recently, which meant that for a long time, comic books were able to tell stories that TV shows and movies couldn't afford to tell, like stories about guys who shoot fire out of their eyes or fly around in spaceships.
If your story revolves around a couple mostly going out to dinner or for walks in Central Park, why not just make it a TV show? Narratively, is it really worth losing the artistry of the actors in exchange for the artistry of the draftsman? Usually, it's not.
The male bias has been significant in all aspects of the culture industry, but, yeah, comics seems to have been perhaps even more exclusive than many other fields.
ReplyDeleteSo easy just to say "male bias" and move on. Just in comics: A hundred years, tens of thousands of personages and editorial meetings, so much individual choice, inherent interest differences, inherent differences in technical, spacial, and structural abilities, social pressures, demographic changes, differences in neuroticism and the ability to handle stress, etc... and you just spit out the talking point "male bias."
Are you the laziest leftist "thinker" of all time? Or just a run of the mill lazy leftist?
How about spending a good amount of time trying to defeat your hand-me-down meme-beliefs instead of repeating them as if they are incontrovertible? How about some scholarly rigor and nuance? How about some complexity?
You can't keep thinking you're some kind of intellectual if you don't pressure test what you believe. Only cultists, dupes, and children just believe what they are told. Especially from politicized sources.
Richard, yeah, I suppose that makes sense.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I don't really think the difficulty/ungratefulness/pain caused by a medium is much of a deterrent for people diving into it. There are millions of young guys and girls trying to make it in the music industry or stand-up comedy after all. When you start, you just don't know, and when you know it's too late.
But there is something about the kind of stories. "Indie graphic novels", where you are most likely to find a female artist, tend to be more character-arc-driven. The drawing serves more of a texturing and grounding role than an action and layout-explaining role. Personally, I find them somewhat unfulfilling, but that's perfectly OK; I'm just from the Tin-Tin generation.
Also, an interesting study case is Satrapi's Persepolis. Originally a comic book, it is archetypically modern-feminine and was produced into an even more influential animated film.
"So easy just to say "male bias" and move on."
ReplyDeleteTo flesh out the point...
I always ask "Name one female artist you think was as good as any male artist in the top 50 of the medium THAT WAS TURNED DOWN FOR WORK BECAUSE SHE WAS A WOMAN."
Responses tend to be of the vague hand-waving type, anecdotes without specifics, Kafka Traps ("the absence of evidence is proof of the extent of the suppression"), and guesswork based on ideological indoctrination. Or there's maybe one or two gals that might just crack the top 100 that allege bias, and that is used as some sweeping indictment of everything and everybody.
In illustration, none of the allegations stand up against the long term success and employment of, say, Neysa McMein, Joyce Ballantyne, Zoë Mozert, Jessie Wilcox Smith, or Rose O'Neill, just to name a few off the cuff.
Why weren't these talented and dedicated women denied work?
Kev, this is awkward. A recommendation from this engineer: just go out there and ask them about their career experiences. But when doing that try to sound like you are honestly interested and care.
ReplyDeleteRichard, another interesting subject to study is Manga. As I understand it, it is heavily segmented by theme/target population, and some take a very different approach to classic Western concepts of observation, action, and character development. Some of it is specifically intended for a female audience. Perhaps there is something to learn about different preferences and approaches to storytelling.
Richard - Superhero and sci-fi soaps barely scratch the surface - you'd be better off looking at works like Dave Sim and Gerhard's "Cerebus" to get an idea of the near infinite combinatory possibilities of comics. I consider comics (or, more specifically, sequential art) more as a field than a medium - a field in which the relatively recent artificial divide between images and words can be collapsed. More than mere illustration, more than merely the juxtaposition of verbal and non-verbal text, sequential art is at once an expanded strategy for reading and writing that has no equal on the page.
ReplyDeleteFerrara - It's true, referring to "male bias" in this context without no further clarification, takes for granted that everybody's onboard with, for instance, the work of Simone de Beauvoir.
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Postmodern Anonymouse.
Well, I know she supported paedophilia and practiced sex with minors.
DeleteIf that qualifies...
Bill
A recommendation from this engineer: just go out there and ask them about their career experiences.
ReplyDeleteIf I want to hear about coding in Uruguay, I'll know who to ask.
However, regarding the art scene here in New York, which I've been in for decades, I'll stick with my own extensive experience. Thanks anyway.
Ferrara - It's true, referring to "male bias" in this context without no further clarification, takes for granted that everybody's onboard with, for instance, the work of Simone de Beauvoir.
ReplyDeleteIt's simpler than that.
Editors have ALWAYS been starved for shining talents who can do the work well and on time. Always.
Knowing that, every time somebody starts telling me a story about "bias" against them, I stop them and say, "let me see your work." 100% of the time, in my experience and those of my pro friends who I've discussed this with, the work doesn't measure up. This is a standing joke by now.
The problem getting this truth out is; very few who haven't already figured it out want to hear it. A great many people have a completely skewed sense of the quality of their work, and how difficult it is to get professional jobs, and plus have some "issues" with criticism from "authorities"; so the answer "get better, you aren't good enough" doesn't register in the proper way.
Steve Martin recently put it perfectly, "Be so good they can't ignore you."
That's the truest true statement that's ever been said about getting steady work in the arts.
Much more likely to get biases against hiring white dudes for the past decade. Anti-straight white male is crazy hot right now with so many woke women in the industry and all this DEI being pushed. And half the people in art schools now identify as queer/nonbinary, as much a political position as a gender one. So its only going to get worse for white guys as everything becomes woke activism and propaganda. AI will be a mercy as the industry implodes.
ReplyDelete~ FV
But there is something about the kind of stories. "Indie graphic novels", where you are most likely to find a female artist, tend to be more character-arc-driven. The drawing serves more of a texturing and grounding role than an action and layout-explaining role. Personally, I find them somewhat unfulfilling
ReplyDeleteCharacteristically “feminine” dramas and mysteries are my favorite genres. I’m perfectly primed to love those kinds of graphic novels and have aggressively tried to find some to like. Finding none, I tried for several years to make some to like, assuming as you did that it was merely a problem with the market, and ran time and again into the fundamental limitations of the medium.
The closest I’ve ever found to a comic successfully doing that sort of thing was Jordi Lefebre’s Malgré tout. But still, it fails miserably. There’s an old saying in Hollywood: “You can’t montage love.” And that’s what even the best examples feel like.
You simply can't tell an emotionally complex, long-form narrative when you have maybe 7,000 words and 900 pictures total in a 150-page graphic novel to work with.
You end up having to take shortcut after shortcut to give the audience sufficient information to understand the subtext of the characters' interactions with such limited material. By the end, it's like you're reading an illustrated summary of a relationship rather than seeing a relationship play out.
"Characteristically “feminine” dramas and mysteries are my favorite genres. (...) The closest I’ve ever found to a comic successfully doing that sort of thing was Jordi Lefebre’s Malgré tout."
ReplyDeleteHave you tried Dieter Lumpen? Very cinematic, beautifully drawn comic mysteries with some humor.
The early Dieter Lumpen issues are easily my all-time favorite comics. I think that brand of period boy's adventure genre is about the best the comics medium can do. It really sits perfectly in comics' sweet spot for visual interest mixed with simple but strongly moody drama that doesn't rely on significant stretches of dialogue or characterization.
ReplyDeleteIt's simpler than that.
ReplyDeleteIt's more complicated than that. A very specific history of cultural movements led towards the point of Gustave Courbet's disembodied vagina being splayed and displayed in a temple of art. Throughout this sequence of events and actions, at any given moment in time and place, what was considered "good" and "bad" was a direct product of this same history. This holds true from all sides, for creator and audience (and thus also for mentors, editors, ADs and "pros"). The point isn't that women haven't been able to rise to the standards and appreciations of men, it's that they've had to - in order to be deemed good.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Have to agree with Kev, here, 'mouse'. That's really just quoting slogans from those books. It makes little to no sense, even in the terms in which you're laying it out, never mind measuring those claims up against objective reality.
ReplyDeleteThe most I can make out of it is you are claiming that • women artists have to be as good as the best men artists to succeed (which is, y'know, ok), • poor men artists succeed better than poor women artists (probably has often been true), & ( the nonsense bit) • that historical sequence has allowed in some way to prevent great art by females from being recognised for its own merits ? And is there an implication that poor achievements from an oppressed class should get special treatment because of the oppression ? (Sorry if I've misread that one - your language seems used to obscure rather than clearly explain what you mean. You may have inadvertently picked that up from those books, where they do that to hide the paucity of what they're saying).
If you read and exist within abstract theorising and try to force-fit it to the outside world rather than use the latter as your yardstick (which was why I mentioned de Beauvoir's being a part of the french pseud pro-paedophilia movement - it wasn't just a jibe, it was to show that her whole critiques of power was bullshit posturing) you're going to smack into the brick walls of reality time and time again. Which is why the language is being criticised - it's academic, strung-out sloganeering used to sustain its own bubble-reality.
Bill
Bill - It is not my intention to be obscure, and I apologize for not being thorough enough for you. But let’s be real - you’re not really interested in having ideas such as the male gaze expanded upon, are you? So, let’s try a non-academic approach, by way of a meme I serendipituosly happened across today:
ReplyDeletehttps://x.com/hatecoleslaw/status/1795257650722316532?s=46&t=zd64TqKISVKRUBd95NhvFg
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Postmodern Anonymouse
I"m starting to think that Kev's right, and "Postmodern Anonymous" is simply a low grade Chinese AI bot sent out to automate our demoralization. Wouldn't be surprised.
ReplyDelete~ FV
You're talking about sexual politics, 'mouse', because your allegations about sex-based bias against female talent made no sense and was used only to bring the other grieveance stuff up. It seems you can't look at reality except through this stuff.
ReplyDeleteHow did this kick off again....?
No, I'm not interested in the male gaze. You're right there. I'm interested in good work.
Bill
~ FV
ReplyDelete- I think bots these days have advanced beyond this.
Bill
And you're 'academic' - only in the sarcastic, pejorative sense, I'm afraid.
ReplyDeleteIt really does read like from a schoolkid.
Bill
I think it's pretty clear that art history is "male," that what got made leans male, and our traditional standards for quality are male. You don't have to be a leftist to see that (in fact, I think being a leftist would usually blind you to that, since they traditionally hold as axiomatic that men and women are exactly the same with the addition or subtraction of some genitalia).
ReplyDeleteAnonymouse's implication that women, left to their own devices, would have invented a very different mastery and a different definition of quality seems self-evident.
What we define as mastery is clownishly male.
Take our obsession with optics in our historiography around Renaissance "mastery." We know and celebrate the names Piero della Francesca, Giovanni di Paolo, and so on because they explored the vanishing point. That "mastery" in painting could be so closely attached to insensitive technical realism is a very male notion.
I suspect women would rather define mastery in terms of how it makes them feel, in which case a poorly sketched drawing of a cute child presenting a parent with a flower would definitionally be more masterful than a highly rendered painting of marble columns vanishing to a point on the horizon.
Three hundred years earlier, in Song Dynasty China, there were deeply poetic works, in a more feminine vein, which would warrant much more strongly, I think, the title of master to women, or a place in a historiography of mastery. Had Europe in the 15th century been making these sorts of poetic, airy watercolors, I think women would have more easily shown their own sex's remarkable artistic qualities.
But rather, by the time we got to Raphael, we were so far down into the autism that only the most unusual woman could possibly have participated by those standards.
And to circle around to the "male gaze," obviously, if what's being celebrated institutionally is naked paintings of hot chicks, that's going to give men an unfair advantage. Guys will happily look at a painting of a naked chick for a year straight, which makes painting it much easier. One need only imagine the opposite to see that's true. If the art establishment demanded painters spend a year rendering an erect dong, I'd do something else.
The Chinese artists were overwhelmingly male,
Deleteand
" women would rather define mastery in terms of how it makes them feel, in which case a poorly sketched drawing of a cute child presenting a parent with a flower would definitionally be more masterful...",
etc., is clownishly gendered.
As is attributing technical competences as 'male' (though no doubt many of the males of the past would have done, which makes it weird seeing it done again from this supposedly pro-female angle).
The technical competences you've isolated on their own (and why ?) are sterile. But without them pure crap is what's produced, if we're talking about figurative art used to simulate what we see.
These competencies are necessary, before and aside from how they're employed.
There is plenty of sentimental fluff of the kind you're associating with women that was produced by men.
There are, though, most certainly 'male' and 'female' qualities, but once people start to define them or pin them down - softness female, vigour movement male, or whatnot - they fall apart.
They're really as concrete but as immune to description in terms of absolute or consistent analogies as are colours.
"Guys will happily look at a painting of a naked chick for a year straight, which makes painting it much easier"
People for whom a naked chick is sufficient stimulation might, but there is more here than eroticism involved. The human form has always worked like a mirror and window in art, to the human and the natural. Women get this just as much as men. Think 'David', etc.
"One need only imagine the opposite..." etc
Have you ever been to a life drawing/painting session using a male subject with women artists ? The reality of it doesn't match the assumption here.
But I don't think the subject was the Courbet picture or female nudes, whether whole or cadavered for pervy old turkish politicians, anyway, but general ability. Which had been alleged to exclude talented women because ability/expertise was somehow 'male', which is nonsense.
Raphaels = 'autism'.
No way. Over refined for our tastes, but spoiled by his imitators so much that it's hard to see them.
Bill
But blokes looking at Michaelangelo's David would of course be totally gay.
ReplyDeleteNot me !
Bill
Wow, America must be such a hellscape, with art-challenged women and the white heterosexual male population being ostracised. That would have old men yelling at clouds everywhere.
ReplyDeleteRichard, Jordi Lefebre is strangely hard to get here, by some weird obsession of the editorial masters (or my bad luck). I find it weird that my primary references into the "female" comics are actually by male artists: Clowes' Ghost World and Tardi's Adèle Blanck-Sec series.
Also, that was a funny idea: in an alternate Universe Courbet paints an erect dong, does not get into a museum or Metro station posters. Teens keep on drawing dicks on Museum bathroom stalls and Metro walls. And absolutely yes, we have a lot of self-serving "standards" all around us. The "I like this because of this UNIVERSAL TRUTH (which codifies stuff I like)" thing we see a lot here.
I thought a little about comics being a "shitty medium" idea, where my opinion was that young people just don't care. On the other hand, it is my experience as a teacher that high school girls and young adult women care a lot about whether a domain or area is "full of morons" (men, Spanish is a gendered language). There's an intuitive perception (sometimes right, sometimes wrong) that some places are full of overly energetic bull-shitting bullies and creeps that will make their lives miserable.
This circles back to my question of whether there are women in these comments.
Richard,
ReplyDeleteSince it is widely appreciated that men have, will, and do make beautiful things to ingratiate themselves to and impress women – and this goes half the way to explaining the entire history of art and culture - your whole line of reasoning needs a rethink.
Just as one example, Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne is clearly a work for both sexes. Because it contains the synthesis of male and female visual-poetic modes. It is narratively, poetically and aesthetically penetrative -engineered like a Swiss watch - yet also lovely and decorative. (Orson Welles said that artists constitute the ‘third sex’ because of these ranging abilities.)
I can name a thousand works in this wedded way, because all great art is manifested of this synthetic spirit, as far as I can tell.
Yes, touting one point perspective as some great art achievement is autistic. Technical developments like that thrill the kind of nerds that write art history books and the kinds of dorks that read them uncritically. Who else cares about it in the arts (outside of a basic art course) except those keen to impress by discussing cultural trivia? When was the last time that a great narrative artwork was obviously using Renaissance Perspective as its main artistic value?
But Perspective™ was more than an artistic technique, because it dovetailed with the resurgence in interest in Platonism and Pythagoras Cults. That there was math intrinsic to reality was part of an esoteric-geometric religious revival of that time that connected back to antiquity and pointed toward Newton. (And the engineered modern world.)
Finally, yes, salacious pictures of nude ladies is the kind of art basic men like for reasons others than the artfulness. You’d think, from your argument, that this was some giant percentage of the art world. Like every art collector is Charles Martignette.
You also completely ignore that many an artful nude is appreciated by men and women alike. Many women like to see women appreciated as women (lovely and enticing givers of life, say, rather than lurid sex objects), unless they are bitter and politicized. In which case every nude is funneled into the lurid “male gaze” category, which is the very problem with the idea.
The Chinese artists were overwhelmingly male,
ReplyDeleteand
" women would rather define mastery in terms of how it makes them feel, in which case a poorly sketched drawing of a cute child presenting a parent with a flower would definitionally be more masterful...",
etc., is clownishly gendered.
As is attributing technical competences as 'male' (though no doubt many of the males of the past would have done, which makes it weird seeing it done again from this supposedly pro-female angle).
The technical competences you've isolated on their own (and why ?) are sterile. But without them pure crap is what's produced, if we're talking about figurative art used to simulate what we see.
These competencies are necessary, before and aside from how they're employed.
There is plenty of sentimental fluff of the kind you're associating with women that was produced by men.
There are, though, most certainly 'male' and 'female' qualities, but once people start to define them or pin them down - softness female, vigour movement male, or whatnot - they fall apart.
They're really as concrete but as immune to description in terms of absolute or consistent analogies as are colours.
"Guys will happily look at a painting of a naked chick for a year straight, which makes painting it much easier"
People for whom a naked chick is sufficient stimulation might, but there is more here than eroticism involved. The human form has always worked like a mirror and window in art, to the human and the natural. Women get this just as much as men. Think 'David', etc.
"One need only imagine the opposite..." etc
Have you ever been to a life drawing/painting session using a male subject with women artists ? The reality of it doesn't match the assumption here.
But I don't think the subject was the Courbet picture or female nudes, whether whole or cadavered for pervy old turkish politicians, anyway, but general ability. Which had been alleged to exclude talented women because ability/expertise was somehow 'male', which is nonsense.
Raphaels = 'autism'.
No way. Over refined for our tastes, but spoiled by his imitators so much that it's hard to see them.
Bill
Richard - I had a longer reply (originally posted first after yours, and before the short one) which keeps vanishing. If it gets duplicated here multiple times if it eventually appears, apologies to all.
ReplyDeleteBill
"overly energetic bull-shitting bullies and creeps that will make their lives miserable."
ReplyDeleteOr pompous oafs who talk down to them while 'taking their part'.
Bill
<<<< This circles back to my question of whether there are women in these comments.
ReplyDeleteYes. And the lady doth protest too much.
~ FV
Since it is widely appreciated that men have, will, and do make beautiful things to ingratiate themselves to and impress women – and this goes half the way to explaining the entire history of art and culture - your whole line of reasoning needs a rethink.
ReplyDeletePlenty of guys will also aggressively hump a woman for 30 minutes, forgetting she has a clitoris, and then ask her, "How was that for you?" I'm not saying men don't try to make things for women—we clearly do. That may be the top reason we do anything.
But when men make things for women, it often looks like casting shirtless Henry Cavill as Superman, whereas when women make things for women, it looks like a Kristin Hannah novel. Guys think -- well, what I like is a hot chick with big boobs, so women must want a hot guy with big muscles -- and then wonder why their movie is mostly popular with gay men.
Richard,
ReplyDeleteIn making my argument, I used the example of Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne.
Gently, I would suggest you respond to that painting instead of the cartoonish straw men you substituted in for it.
You also completely ignore that many an artful nude is appreciated by men and women alike. Many women like to see women appreciated as women (lovely and enticing givers of life, say, rather than lurid sex objects), unless they are bitter and politicized. In which case every nude is funneled into the lurid “male gaze” category, which is the very problem with the idea.
ReplyDeleteObjectification isn't sexual per se, it's a denial of subjectivity, of selfhood. The problem was never that some men might leer, the issue of the male gaze is that women have had no escape from having to see themselves as objects "appreciated as women" through such leering eyes. "Hell is other people!" doesn't mean other people are bad - it laments the inescapability of objectification of oneself through the eyes of those around us. Or, as the kids might say, "We live in a society!"
The male bias of art doesn't mean women couldn't be as good as men - at painting as well as at looking at paintings. They always could, but only in the same way black people could be as white as white people.
---
Postmodern Anonymouse
ReplyDelete"What we define as mastery is clownishly male"
'Mastery' - 'knowledge' is better - is understaning form + light, perspective - not just architectural lines to vanishing points, but the placement of form within the picture plane, relating these to the viewer, etc - values, contour/pattern.....
None of these are gendered, or culturally fixed. They might have this or that set of emphases in different cutural contexts, but they apply to all.
Without them - if trying to make pictures meant to simulate visual-imaginative reality - only crud will be produced.
'Quality' (as in 'ineffable qualities'....'female' quality...etc) as a criteria is something else altogether.
These is what was being referred to earlier. They are as objective as rules within music. Hence the determination that women were/are subject to male control of these is nonsense. No man can alter or set them other than they already are.
If a female artist is fluent in these, and any man tries to deny the work it is the man who will end up laughed at.
Bill
ReplyDelete"The male bias of art doesn't mean women couldn't be as good as men - at painting as well as at looking at paintings. They always could, but only in the same way black people could be as white as white people"
Nonsense. See above.
Bill
Ergo, constructivism/deconstructivism, 'x' is a social/gender-based/etc-construct (and all the tosh that follows from these errors) is nonsense when 'x' is any objective reality.
ReplyDeleteBill
They are as objective as rules within music. Hence the determination that women were/are subject to male control of these is nonsense.
ReplyDeleteWhat rules of music you refer to?
They are as objective as rules within music.
ReplyDeleteThat's the math of music (and in Titian's case, the math of visual art). It is male (and on the spectrum) to think music and art are FOR math in the first place. To the average woman, melodies exist to give the Taylor Swifts of the world something to sing over, and Taylor Swifts exist to remind you of your college ex-boyfriend. The idea that Mozart is better than Taylor Swift is nonsensical -- Mozart doesn't make women think about their ex-boyfriends at all, so he's not even worse. He's just irrelevant.
Women are not men with boobs. The difference between the sexes is greater than the difference between species.
Can women be just as good as men at making math music and math art? The evidence of the past few centuries suggests that no, they can't. Women stink at making art that women don't like. All the best art that women don't like is made by men.
But women are a helluva lot better than men at making art that only women like.
<<<<Objectification isn't sexual per se, it's a denial of subjectivity, of selfhood. The problem was never that some men might leer, the issue of the male gaze is that women have had no escape from having to see themselves as objects "appreciated as women" through such leering eyes. "Hell is other people!" doesn't mean other people are bad - it laments the inescapability of objectification of oneself through the eyes of those around us. Or, as the kids might say, "We live in a society!"
ReplyDeleteLooks like we have a Queer Propaganda "expert" on hand.
Women have been gussying themselves up since recorded history began. Cosmetics is a trillion dollar industry because a billion women want to be looked at. A tale as old as time. Obvious and normal to anyone, unless you are so unfortunate to end up some confused or unhappy spectrum kid and in some creepy postmodern college class looking for answers.
More and more people understand the phrase "Male Gaze" as an attempt by relentless Queer activist groups to pathologize perfectly normal heterosexual behaviors and interactions. Creating problems and disturbances where there are none. Like calling normal heterosexuals "cis" - an attempt to marginalize the normal. It's all just weaponizing words to disturb, confront, and confuse. The opposite of education. People are increasingly inoculating themselves against it as they become aware of the schemes of the surprisingly powerful postmodern queer faction.
~ FV
"Titian's case, the math of visual art (...) math art."
ReplyDeleteAssuming this isn't a joke, I'd love to hear you explain what you mean.
You might first need to define how you are using the term "math" of course. Then what you mean by "math art" and then how that relates to Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne - which I'm assuming you're writing (at least to some large degree) in reference to.
"Women have been gussying themselves up since recorded history began. Cosmetics is a trillion dollar industry because a billion women want to be looked at. A tale as old as time. Obvious and normal to anyone"
Imagine having to explain this? Crazy.
"The difference between the sexes is greater than the difference between species."
ReplyDeleteFor those reading along: This is in relation to chimpanzees only, our nearest evolutionary relatives.
The line is: Men are more genetically similar to male chimps than to human women. Same with women being closer genetically to female chimps than to human men.
By math, I mean something broader than the term is usually used. I mean both the math we already know, the math we will eventually discover, and the math that may forever remain unknown. In essence, I'm talking about a universal math existing prior to humanity – one that is real and discovered, not invented.
ReplyDeleteAs such, I also extend this broader definition to include not only the arithmetic we use explicitly (1 + 1 = 2), but also the math we can intuitively sense and interact with.
For example, many plants clearly grow according to a mathematical pattern. Even if we can't directly access the equation governing their growth through algebra and figures, we can sense that math is at play. We can interact with it too. By arranging pebbles on the beach in the same shape as the plant's growth pattern, we're engaging with math, even if we can't quantify it. As we alter that pattern, we're essentially changing the mathematical equation – introducing variables, figures, noise, etc., in an equation we can only perceive indirectly.
In music, when musicians cycle through chord shapes, they can feel that they are “geometric” (not just by analogy, but literally geometric). While a musician might not be able to perfectly quantify how chord shapes are geometric or how their geometry differs, they can still instinctively sense a mathematical relationship. Melodies are a mix of fractions, geometry, numerical series, noise, chaotic variables, etc.
Math music is music where this sensed math is a key element of the work. Classical and instrumental Jazz are all about math. Jewel's 1995 smash hit "You were meant for me" is not about math at all. For those unfamiliar with the concept, I'd recommend listening to Philip Glass's Glasswork, as the math in it is quite readily apparent.
Turning to visual art, by "math art" I mean art that approaches its subject matter similarly to how Mozart approaches music. NC Wyeth's work is highly mathy:
https://arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-bostonglobe.s3.amazonaws.com/public/KAGXY6QTZEI6NLH532N76DWBFU.jpg
https://i.etsystatic.com/13984062/r/il/68adfb/2783739652/il_1140xN.2783739652_1cyv.jpg
Even an alien with no understanding of the objects depicted in these paintings could still appreciate their core content, just as they could appreciate Mozart's music. The fact that the paintings include giants, children, clouds, fishermen, lily pads, etc., isn't crucial to their appreciation. When NC paints a tree, he gives us the mathiest tree possible:
https://archive.org/details/ripvanwinkle00irvi/page/44/mode/2up?view=theater
Quentin Blake, on the other hand, like Jewel, has no math: https://quentinblake.com/storage/956/sp202_001.jpg
An alien wouldn't get anything from that at all. It's sentiment, human experiences and meaning, and other earthly girl stuff.
Titian is in the math camp, his pictures are, as you say "engineered" into existence. Not hearted into existence. They're emotionally dead, but intellectually vibrant. He manages to turn everything from clouds to the human figure itself into an N-dimensional infinite-precision sudoku problem.
Richard - it's not 'for math', it's dependent on the frequencies and their interaction that are measured with it.
ReplyDeleteIt's how our minds-via-senses are in tune with physical structure.
It's inherent - we can hear this series of notes sounding simultaneously make a chord while another sounds like shit.
We have similar visual-based sensitivities. When the things I listed (which are rough headings and not exhaustive) to knowlege and understanding of the natural world (bodies, matter, gravity/balance) can be got across well enough, you'll have a competent piece of work.
This about ability, not 'taste'.
'The idea that Mozart is better than Taylor Swift is nonsensical'
If you're trolling, roll up your sleeves....
Seriously, of course you can prefer one over the other, and for good/legitimate reasons. But the achievements of one over the other are there and you're smart enough to know they apparent to anyone with an ear and brain.
Bill
I've only just read your later post above now.
ReplyDeleteYes. It's inherent in the world and in our perception - not obsessive navelism.
Bill
Obviously you can - whether conscious choice or within a cultural setting - concentrate on any set of those perameters (emphases) or omit some altogether and excel in the narrower set. Like Quentin Blake.
ReplyDeleteDoesn't change anything about the need for ability.
Only a fool would think it a piece of crap because it does so, choosing to excel within x & y beacause t, u, v, w & z are irrelevant to it. But if your work tries to make use of the full alphabet but you don't know how to wield it, then.
And works that can, achieve more - colour achieves more than monochrome. But a monochrome work that understands tone beats a colour one that doesn't.
And so on.
You're absolutely wrong about Titian, that piece sings the harmonies, pattern...etc. you feel it before you try to think it.
Some artists were great enough to have intuitive feeling for these things and the thought that comprehends it thouroughly united, and could create direct with this organ guiding them.
Bill
ReplyDelete"Can women be just as good as men at making math music and math art? The evidence of the past few centuries suggests that no, they can't."
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LS37SNYjg8w
Girls laughed most at this when it came out.
Bill
You're absolutely wrong about Titian, that piece sings the harmonies, pattern...etc. you feel it before you try to think it.
ReplyDeleteHarmonies, patterns are math. They are not sentiments, "feelings".
'The idea that Mozart is better than Taylor Swift is nonsensical'. If you're trolling, roll up your sleeves....
[...] But the achievements of one over the other are there and you're smart enough to know they apparent to anyone with an ear and brain.
Well, that depends on what you think music is for.
I don't think anyone disagrees that Mozart is more difficult to make (it is male to associate the difficulty of something with its perceived degree of achievement).
But to someone who thinks music is for a different purpose than math, saying Mozart is better might sound like saying making love while standing on your head is better. Yes, it's more acrobatic to stand on your head than to lay side by side, but are you sure that sex is an acrobatic art?
To women the world over, Taylor Swift is more successful than Mozart at music's ultimate goal. Mozart's in the bedroom standing on his head, Taylor Swift is whispering sweet nothings.
The other thing - Mozart achieves more. It might be more than you need. But his works are obviously better. As in the examples involving visual that I tried to explain.
ReplyDeleteI haven't been able to stop laughing at various scenarios involving that year-long commissioned dong. All end in "aw, hell...".
Bill
Again, what are those universal music rules that are outside of men's control? "Math" is not actually a rule.
ReplyDeletePick six notes on your guitar and pluck them. Now pluck the ones that form a chord. Math is made of rule.
DeleteBill
Structure/matter-quality-feeling-thought/structure.
ReplyDeleteBill
Play A on the guitar. Now play A minor. You've felt math.
ReplyDeleteBill
(Bad link above, try - youtube.com/watch?v=LS37SNYjg8w )
ReplyDeleteBill
We have already been here. You assume, again, that your acquired tastes are some sort of unmovable truth that everybody should match against. I'll just quote myself from another post.
ReplyDeleteMoonlight Sonata is not a Universal. That's something only someone raised in an European tradition (both artistic and imperial) could believe.
To an African musician never exposed to Beethoven it would sound pointless (how do you dance this? Why the obsession with melody?) A indian trained musician would find it jarring with a weird key, almost painful to listen. And so on.
Of course both could read a treatise on European music and discover that it's actually cool and learn to enjoy it, and then pester their friends on this foreign music that can actually be moving, if you accept it.
And, again, in your continual pattern of sweeping in like a zorro with his mask askew, you attribute things to people which they have not said and positions they do not hold.
DeleteDo you think africans are imperceptive to melody, or haven't used it ?
Read. Then think. Then reply.
Bill
Which is the better architecturally - not which satisfies a delimited set of wishes and desires, in which case I can be sated by the first, but which achieves more - the Borgund Stave Church or the Alhambra ?
DeleteBill
I prefer a thatched bothy, but the Djenne Grand Mosque is better.
DeleteBill
You said there were objective rules in art and that it was ridiculous to say that they were set up by men. And used as an example the "rules of music". I contend that.
ReplyDeleteYes, they are musical traditions that don't care about melody. Like they understand it, but simply don't appreciate it. To be considered a great musician, you must understand rhythm, timbre, and how the human body moves. In others, harmony is the only thing to master. And there are traditions where they'll cringe if you pluck a Spanish guitar. Shocking, I know.
All music belongs to a culture and was developed by the people in its place. The XVII-century German tradition of music and one of its exemplars, modern Western pop, is just that. But there are (massive) places where to be recognized as a great musician, you should start practicing from here:
https://youtu.be/zgvIpV0sWf0?si=NWoS2Bs2c-NLJ39j
You'll learn that sounds have both physical and metaphysical properties and that the musical scale has 12 notes and like a zillion gamakas.
DeleteI was talking about notes, intervals, chords.
I was listening to some beautiful african music, with a simple four note melody repeated again and again, that spent its attention on the rhythm. It was even slightly out of tune, it reminded me of how John Coltrane adjusted reeds to get rid of the 'clean' sound of the instrument. But they were still using the notes of a four note melody. As did he rely on melody even when he waz pulling it apart. You can't play any sequence of notes notes without a learned or innate ability to understand how they relate to each other. They are musical rules. Sometimes communicated mathematically. I do not understand them, but can hear them. Everyone can. Little children can. This is not 'culturally relative.' Invent a harmonious chord.
Colour harmony, tone as related to objects in light and how humans see, balance in nature and our subliminal intuition of it (pereption of imbalance, intuition of gravity...), ratio, proportion, understanding of three dimensional form, fluency in natural forms human animal vegetable mineral, understanding the picture plane in relation to the viewer whether using linear perspective or not (it is always partly used and partly rejected and always has been from Lascaux to Utagawa Kuniyoshi to western artists breaking the rules where the foreground becomes the threshold for the viewer to enter)....none of these were invented. They were discovered. They are an assembly of rules. You can thrive within one or more of them. You can surpass art that uses more when using less. But
art that's proficient when using more is better than those using less.
An outline drawing is inferior to a tonal one (with outline sublimated/included), is inferior to one in colour (with both), assuming equal levels of proficiency in each.
Bill
ReplyDelete"All music belongs to a culture"
I recently heard a distant bird sing a lovely melody that I later recognized as the opening theme to the William Tell Overture. Presumably Rossini heard the same type of bird over in Italy a few hundred years ago and also found it lovely.
To the degree our auditory senses are shared (and they are overwhelming shared in the normal distribution of anatomical and sensory variation) that is the degree to which music at the abstract level is universal in its aesthetic effect.
This idea that music's effect is entirely cultural or traditional has been debunked. And it is such a jejune notion that only a racist egghead would have proposed it in the first place. And only someone who does not understand the role of abstraction and form in the arts would have bought into it for more than a few minutes worth of consideration. (Bad ideas always spread among untalented academics who can't stop telling people their dumb intellectual thoughts or repeating others'.)
Yes it is true that one may be trained in the customary music of one's tribe or social set. Even from birth. But that's more a matter of psychological comfort than anything else.
But that cultural comfort can change,. We can reorient with exposure. For example, when a mass of great western classical recordings were put online for free a few decades back, the vast majority of downloads were into China. And there were a lot of downloads.
I shouldn't like the Balinese Monkey Chant, but I do. (It's a damn good time.)
An African doesn't feel a shuffle beat any differently than an Eskimo. Because steadiness (of a downbeat) is a universally experienceable phenomena. As is the squashing and stretching of the placement of the upbeat within the plastic fabric of musical time. Everybody anticipates based on expectation. Every aesthetic expectation is set up by consistency. And there is a pattern in every swing beat that we may quickly orient to, and then whatever plays against it is fresh melodic or rhythmic information.
There are many fascinating videos of people previously wholly wrapped up in the mostly thematically-monotonous world of hiphop/rap listening to melodic and harmonic music for (essentially) the first time. It is reminiscent of those who see color for the first time with the use of special glasses. Which only proves that ears are ears and people are people.
I've heard blackbirds perfectly mimic car alarms, maybe your bird's ancestor picked that something nicer up from a gramophone by an open window... But your route is more likely, and appealing a thought.
DeleteInteresting piece here, might be of interest to some - https://hermetic.com/godwin/spiritual-currents-in-music
Bill
Harmonies, patterns are math. They are not sentiments, "feelings".
ReplyDeleteHarmonies and patterns only exist for their own sake in decorative design, not in narrative. The point of harmonies and patterns in the narrative arts is to sensually suggest feelings and poetic ideas such that we the audience experience them synthesized to the narrative, as enrichments to aesthetic understanding.
Thus, your argument transposes to asserting that poetry is math. And no it isn’t. No more than a fun discussion with your friends is math. Meanings aren't calculations, they stem from feelings/sensations in relation to experience.
“In essence, I'm talking about a universal math existing prior to humanity – one that is real and discovered, not invented.” “I also extend this broader definition to include not only the arithmetic we use explicitly (1 + 1 = 2), but also the math we can intuitively sense and interact with.”
Abstract Relations is the universal language – that which we all intuitively sense - if we must speak of mentalese essentials.
Mathematics corresponds to certain abstract relations in this larger set of total experience-able relations and not others. There have been arguments about whether math is more prime than logic, or vice versa. Then there are graphic or visual abstract relations, rhythms and resonances, and so on – the stuff of the arts - which again corresponds to certain sensible abstract relations within the total pool and not others.
Point being, it is not calculability that underlies both science and art, but abstract relations.
When your eye moves from a pastel red, to a gray red, to brown red to a strong red… this is not calculation, but the trailing after resonances and feeling the impact of changes in intensity with respect to those resonances as your attention shifts from reddish spots of one quality to reddish spots of another.
Math is an idealistic approximation technique for certain kinds of (mostly) quantifiable relations. Math works best when calculating that which is inherently ideal in form and dynamics. Which makes it correspond to reality in some precise and perfect way almost never. (Unless it is a game-like reality that we ourselves have built.)
The more unwieldy and complicated the math becomes as you try to mathematize the nonlinear organic qualities of art, the more you should understand that you are leaving the purview of math's particular brand of relations.
While math is “unreasonable effective” in many applications, it is also maddeningly imprecise even in its own speciality areas for the most basic calculations. Forget the impurity of real experience.
Take the circle. And the formula for calculating Pi. After playing around with 3.14 in school, we move to 22/7 as we progress. It turns out 355/113 is more precise. Then somebody mentions 52,163/16,604 as far more precise, and we’re off to the races. Off to infinity, in fact if we want to be perfectly precise in some ideal circular calculation.
Which means, in describing/calculating a circular geometry perfectly, ideally, it turns out the pi equation itself must become ideal/perfect. At which point it becomes unusable by a real human being because the numbers go to infinity.
ReplyDelete"Play A on the guitar. Now play A minor. You've felt math."
No, you've felt a structural shift in resonances of an implied sound shape in sound space corresponding to a simultaneous shift in two of the three intervals present in the chord.
The optimal positions for the notes on the helix of sound space (to achieve certain known chord types) can only be roughly calculated using mathematized geometry, but never exactly calculated. Because idealized sound space only roughly correlates with the organic compromised geometry of our ear canals. And the tempering of the notes in the western 12-tone scale is actually inexact mathematically. Which is why the notes go off tune as one goes too high or too low and why Eddie Van Halen, for example, tuned his thirds differently depending on the song.
Math is just a technique.
Well, I can't pretend to understand it,
Deletebut that bit was meant in response to Richard's 'Harmonies, patterns are math. They are not sentiments, "feelings".'
As part of my longer ramble about the inseperability of these.
I.e., you feel the difference between the A and the A minor.
There is a kind of harmonised discord in the latter, a wound in it, which feels beautifully not quite healed yet almost transcended, and sorrowful.
Bill
But that cultural comfort can change,. We can reorient with exposure.
ReplyDeleteYou are a freakily bad reader for someone who writes so much. I said exactly that in the original quote, to requote it again:
Of course both could read a treatise on European music and discover that it's actually cool and learn to enjoy it, and then pester their friends on this foreign music that can actually be moving, if you accept it.
The whole point is that artists in society are measured against that society's standards, not some hypothetical higher truth. They'll succeed or fail whether they can speak the society's language or not. And languages are battlefields, with winners and losers.
Also, don't assume that because you enjoy an artistic expression, you understand it. I've seen tons of tourists saying how cool are the shittiest of candombe cuerdas'.
I said exactly that in the original quote, to requote it again:
ReplyDeleteContext.
You said that "all music belongs to a culture" and any music outside one's particular culture requires incrementally accumulating data and familiarity in order to appreciate or enjoy. "Understanding" a work of music seems very important to you in this process.
Since millions of people have loved and been moved by music outside their culture upon first hearing, as I have, I can't agree with your position.
Which is why I argue for the universality of direct aesthetic experience, and of avoiding consciousness, timidity, and expectation in order to experience new music directly, to give it its best open shot at your soul, so to speak. No data, familiarity, or understanding required.
Keeping open at first blush matters, because aesthetic effects have diminishing power with repetition. The first free time you hear something, allowing yourself to vibe with it, is always the best, most moving hearing. With increasing plays after that peak play, the effects go dimmer and dimmer. You may be moved, but less so. And then barely at all. Which fact allows one to "understand" what is going on better intellectually, while simultaneously reducing your ability to actually experience the work as it was intended.
It is the problem of analysis and direct experience being mutually incompatible.
Considerable time away from a work may bring back some of its original power. But only if you leave out the left-brain "oh I know how this goes and why" play-by-play.
> Then there are graphic or visual abstract relations, rhythms and resonances, and so on
ReplyDeleteRhythm and resonance are math as far as I’m concerned, so I’m not sure what distinction you’re making.
<<<< They'll succeed or fail whether they can speak the society's language or not. And languages are battlefields, with winners and losers.
ReplyDeleteWhat are you talking about?
~ FV
"Rhythm and resonance are math as far as I’m concerned, so I’m not sure what distinction you’re making."
ReplyDeleteSince the Quentin Blake image you showed before is full of rhythm and resonance and you declared it to have "no math" maybe you should take a breather and regroup.
Kev said:
ReplyDelete> The first free time you hear something, allowing yourself to vibe with it, is always the best, most moving hearing.
And in explanation:
> It is the problem of analysis and direct experience being mutually incompatible.
This appears odd to me. The words "free" and "direct" seem to be doing a lot of qualifying for so bold an assertion. I mean, even "best."
There have been songs which, at first hearing, I am confused and thrown-off by---but only after giving them a second, third listen, do I begin really to like them.
I pre-empt the response: "That's because the third listen was the first one you were 'free' to the song." Surely, though, I learned something about the song, settled into its conventions, during those first and second listens? And, were it not for that, I wouldn't have been "free" to it in the first place.
Interested in your response.
What are you talking about?
ReplyDeleteNothing my friend, nothing :)
Since millions of people have loved and been moved by music outside their culture upon first hearing, as I have, I can't agree with your position.
ReplyDeleteNothing wrong with being a cultural tourist. But do you know the kind that, as soon as he arrives, starts to express how worldly he is and how he "gets it" and explains stuff to you in awkwardly out-of-tune fashion, and it's apparent that he's just an un-curious outsider? Helluva annoying.
Sounds like you've multiple bees in your bonnet.
ReplyDeleteBill
Ha ha, that's a funny idiom. Noted! :D
ReplyDelete"There have been songs which, at first hearing, I am confused and thrown-off by---but only after giving them a second, third listen, do I begin really to like them."
ReplyDeleteA lot of novel pop music has sold a million copies in a week, but some sonic novelties can be overstimulating. But why give a second and third listen if you didn't already find something worthwhile there?
Anyway, our orienting reflexes are very rapid-acting; blink a few times and we become accustomed to the light. We can get to the free/pure listening state by relaxing into sensory neutrality, by giving up expectation. It doesn't require some kind of cultural re-orientation. We don't need to learn anything to experience aesthetic phenomena.
Moreover, designed surprises are so foundational to art's effectiveness that acclimating to a song's idiosyncrasies is actually a detriment to experiencing it. The more you listen to a song the more it goes from astonishing and effective to easy listening. Because you know what's coming.
"The whole point is that artists in society are measured against that society's standards, not some hypothetical higher truth."
ReplyDeleteGood art sets up its own expectations intrinsically, compositionally. Setups are literally essential to every artistic effect structure. Payoffs are measured against setups. This is how art works.
If an important setup is outside the work and exclusive to one sect or culture, that is an artistic disunity, the intrusion of something literal, tribal, and/or political. Like how weddings and funerals have certain expectations of mood and music depending on the culture.
"What are you talking about? Nothing my friend, nothing :)"
Frankly, I didn't understand what you were talking about there either.
"Nothing wrong with being a cultural tourist."
Why must you couch everything tribally?
To you, all humans are divided by art instead of joined by it.
Good art sets up its own expectations intrinsically, compositionally. Setups are literally essential to every artistic effect structure. Payoffs are measured against setups. This is how art works.
ReplyDeleteNo, art works by communicating. Good art communicates an idea passible of artistic expression effectively. Communication depends on the emitter, the language, and the receiver being in tune. Languages are conditioned by the medium and developed by the participants through experience. Artistic languages, as all languages, are a balance between clarity for the receiver and expressiveness for the emitter.
Frankly, I didn't understand what you were talking about there either.
Oh, I'll try to be more explicit. English is my third -or fourth, depending on how you count- language.
To you, all humans are divided by art instead of joined by it.
No, you just flatten all humanity's experience and culture to your gut feeling. You are ready to classify the result of the humanity of millions through millennia as good or bad art, based on whether you "find something worthwhile" on the first listening or not. What an uncurious and obtuse approach! All shrouded in an incredibly pedantic and tautological rationalization of your sensibility for "good art".
I didn't read anything from anybody corresponding to the charectisation in your last paragraph. ('flatten all humanity's experience...', etc)
ReplyDeleteThe two 'art works by communicating' & 'art sets up its own expectations intrinsically, compositionally' aren't exclusive of each other.
In a little melody, tension or vacancy is set up and filled, constantly.
Griots call-and-response does the same.
Refrains in traditional song, even though we know what they're going to be, do the same (in this case, it just repeating the pattern, the expectation weighted in the difference of each preceding verse or line still works even though it's based on fulfilling what the song has taught us to expect -
'The may's [maid] to the well to wash & to wring
The primrose o' the wood wants a name
An ay so sweetly did she sing
I am the fair maid of Coldingham
O by there cam' an eldren man
The primrose o' the wood wants a name
O gie me a drink o' your cauld stream
An' ye be the fair maiden of Coldrinham'
etc.
Much if not most traditional music has circular patterns in it. Works the same way.
At the most basic level - in all music - every series of rises precede a fall until the last note, or every drop a rise, and all along we are in a state of tension as to when it will happen.
All movement by people in two dimensional or three dimensional representation similarly.
Is there an entirely frozen and passive statue, such as in archaic greek sculpture, or early icons of the Madonna ? I don't think so, even in the most styled rude work there is animation implied, preceding or expectant.
Narrative art of all kinds, obviously.
Mozart's Piano Concerto No.21, particularly the slow movement....
A series of coloured beads on a string...
It's not about forcing everything into a set of standards, or bugbears about the imperialist west categorising everything into its own standards, it's just fundamental human stuff.
Even beyond this, in the natural world, the tension in form works the same way - either the movement against or succumbing to weight, in rock strata or the dips and rises in a tree branch, or even just in form itself - everywhere there is form there is felt tension, which creates feelings of expectation vs resolution constantly.
Bill
And who hasn't slapped their hands on their thighs, knees bent, before the Courbet vagina?
Delete(In profound anticipation at the emergence of the universe from primordial chaos)
Bill
<<<No, you just flatten all humanity's experience and culture to your gut feeling. You are ready to classify the result of the humanity of millions through millennia as good or bad art, based on whether you "find something worthwhile" on the first listening or not.
ReplyDelete? Kev can obviously answer for himself, but I didn't get that from what he was saying at all. You twisted it. But I don't think your error is because English is your third or fourth language. I think its because you've got a "chip on your shoulder". (Another classic English 'idiom' for ya!)
~ FV
Oh, I'm glad it was a misunderstanding! :-)
ReplyDeleteBill,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading what you wrote and agree, of course. Good to have you around.
No, art works by communicating... etc.
Imagine thinking you're teaching me something with points like these? "Art works by communicating?" "Languages are conditioned by the medium?" A "balance between clarity and expressiveness?"
I'm telling you insights and you tell me back college shit.
"No, you just flatten all humanity's experience and culture to your gut feeling. You are ready to classify the result of the humanity of millions (...) tautological rationalization of your sensibility for "good art". "
Obviously, given that you're just a dabbler in drawing and a coder most of the time, there's no shame in you not understanding what I'm writing about aesthetics and poetics. It is difficult material that took me a long time to research and process. But don't scramble what I write in your head out of context to create the worst possible misinterpretation of any given line in order to attack me. That doesn't speak well for you as a person or a thinker and it's just annoying to read.
Umm...
ReplyDeleteWe've gone over 100 posts on this thread, fellows. Let's not overstay our welcome. I think its about time to call it a wrap.
Peace out.
~ FV
God, it’s getting tough to have any real conversations with all the noise from the tourists in here.
ReplyDeleteOur ability (or disability) for metaphorical interpretation acts on itself as well as on all incoming and processed data.
ReplyDeleteThe fact of our meat machineries, that we are as much merely local extensions of the world as are birds and earthworms, remains. There’s no escaping it.
But unlike the bird and the earthworm, we evolved into a state of having a certain cognitive surplus, which we sublimate our into the production of meaning. Birds do not worry about tomorrow. Earthworms do not (seemingly) tell stories of old. But we do, connecting the one with the other, the few with the many. The physical fact of birdsong, of the rhytm of a beating heart, of thunder and the wind thus becomes meaningful for us. Not because it inherently is, but because we make it so. And our own meaning, not only that which we produce ourselves, but in which our selves are produced, is obviously the most meaningful. Our vocalizations are better, our gods are better. Our metaphorical selves, our culture
is simply better.
- - -
Postmodern Anonymouse
Kev said:
ReplyDelete> Moreover, designed surprises are so foundational to art's effectiveness that acclimating to a song's idiosyncrasies is actually a detriment to experiencing it. The more you listen to a song the more it goes from astonishing and effective to easy listening. Because you know what's coming.
I wonder what this implies for an artistic process. Artmaking is procedural, and as I render a piece I get used to its geometry (so I squint, or stand far back, or flip the canvas). How can an artist predict his work's effect, if he is cursed to get used to it as he makes it?
(Relevant context: Dunn says that an idea chooses you, you don't "come up with it." A good artist serves the idea. I've found this advice useful. But mental images aren't relationship-bearing in the same way that sensed images are---they don't hold fast geometric and color relationships. This is what I mean by "artmaking is procedural": these relationships must be developed, as it were, over the course of the painting.)
Kev, someday you'll realize that all your theories do not explain why Dante's poetry condemned traitors to the center of hell or that Goya was completely absorbed by the politics you despise. Because You don't listen to them. You ignore the humans who wanted to be understood they were.
ReplyDeleteOh, and the language as a battlefield which confused you, as Poet said in the second book I read out of my own volition:
ReplyDelete- Cuando yo uso una palabra -dijo Humpty-Dumpty con un tono burlón- significa precisamente lo que yo decido que signifique: ni más ni menos.
- El problema es -dijo Alicia- si usted puede hacer que las palabras signifiquen tantas cosas diferentes.
- El problema es -dijo Humpty-Dumpty- sabes quién es el que manda. Eso es todo.
Artmaking is procedural, and as I render a piece I get used to its geometry (so I squint, or stand far back, or flip the canvas). How can an artist predict his work's effect, if he is cursed to get used to it as he makes it?
ReplyDeleteI'd say the whole point of having a forceful/clear imagined vision to pursue from the start (and a loose sketch of that vision only to remind you of your initial imagined vision) is so you can get into the technical weeds and have the thing die for your personally as you work on it, but still have an overall effect scaffolding that should work on the audience as it did on you when you conceived it and sketched it. The initial vision/feeling is the "prediction" of the effect of the end result. Which is why it is so important to hang onto it for dear life as you go along.
Otherwise, we "finger paint" the whole thing hoping for an ending. And the problem there is that every move along the way goes dim as the next bright idea move comes to mind. So you never get a total vision of the thing as a unit. All tactics, no strategy.
For checking as you go, you already have the best answer to the problem of diminished returns with repetition of effect: you flip the canvas/look at it in the mirror, or take a shot of it and play with it photoshop, etc. That's the best you can do.
My check for showing people an artwork for feedback is if they have a positive nonverbal emotional or surprised response, that's what I want. If the first response is something intellectual/analytical, that's bad. Because it means the mind has not been overtaken by the aesthetic forces, it has not been swept away from consciousness into the dreawworld of the image.
With music there is no mirror to flip the song through. But because I have a small pro recording studio, I can play a song at an incrementally slower or faster rate on my DAW, or at an incrementally higher or lower pitch. When recording my own music, my trick is to listen to the song at incrementally faster rates, then when the speediness gets almost comical, I switch to a crazily slow rate. Which then seems very verrrrry slow. Then I listen to the song at the normal rate and it feels fresh again.
Kev, someday you'll realize that all your theories do not explain why Dante's poetry condemned traitors to the center of hell or that Goya was completely absorbed by the politics you despise. Because You don't listen to them. You ignore the humans who wanted to be understood they were.
ReplyDeleteSo myopic and predictable. So self-righteous.
I'm not ignoring anybody or anything. My project is just focused. Focus is how you get progress in a very difficult area of inquiry. Focus prevents sprawl and disorganization.
What I'm doing is drilling down on the nature, structure and organization of aesthetic forces and poetic suggestions and how this forms a natural language, and how that language works on our mind and soul. Also how we have and can use the information to make transcendent visual poetry and beautiful works of Art which join all of us together. Art, or poetry more broadly (including music), being one of the things that I firmly believe makes life worth living; good beautiful, meaningful culture.
I get that you think your project is the most important thing in the world, so everybody else's projects are inferior and should be brought under the umbrella of your project, under your control, discussed as you believe they should be discussed, no matter how surface-level. Or under the control of those like you, or those who lead those like you. Because you and they are smarter and more informed and more moral than those not in your cult. And you are doing what is important. And "One day you'll see how much smarter I am than you! One day you'll understand what a great moral man I am now! One day the whole world will know that I was righteous! I knew all the right facts! I hated all the right people!!!"
"God, it’s getting tough to have any real conversations with all the noise from the tourists in here."
ReplyDeleteI'm still popping in here if you want to finish your thought.
Bill demonstrated that language is the source of song as it reflects the world around us. Dexter Gordon in Round Midnight said he couldn’t play a song because he forgot the words. Illustrators derive their images from the effects a story has on their imagination. If language is integrated into song as aesthetic experience, then it’s also integrated into the visual language and aesthetic experience in art, even if hidden in impact, or a secondary read.
ReplyDeleteThe older languages possess references to the metaphysical which were strained out of English in the last century. In older languages things had multiple definitions to their relations. The video provided by xopxe alludes to a counterpart or completion to what is knowable, possessable. The idea wasn’t unknown to the Greeks, but here it never makes it past accusations and counter accusations. Are modern presumptions really as tight and sound as we think? Yes, things are intelligible enough but the unresolvable persists.
It’s the subject of an essay by E.F. Schumacher in his classic book, Small is Beautiful, in the sixth chapter titled, The Greatest Resource - Education. He described nine hypotheses from the 19th century and how they flattened language and distorted human understandings.
https://archive.org/details/small-is-beautiful-1973-e.-f.-schumacher/page/n53/mode/2up
Kev,
ReplyDeleteCould you take a moment to say what you mean by the term "finger painting" please?
Your comment about the importance and reasons for maintaining one's first vision throughout the realisation process was very good...
Thanks in advance,
Chris.
Hey Chris,
ReplyDelete"Finger Painting" has been an established "learning tool" to teach young children to be "free and creative" for something like 60 years over here in the U.S. Basically: under adult supervision, a set of gooey-but-fluid non-toxic paints squirted on palettes, and young children dipping their fingers into it and then smooshing their fingers over a piece of slick paper to make ersatz modern art. (Probably the origin of the phrase "my kid can do that!")
There's no planning, of course. Just one colorful gestural improvisation after another. Which accumulate into about what you'd expect.
No doubt as bad as it sounds!
ReplyDeleteCheers Kev.
This has just reminded me of the time at the Slade School when my teacher Euan Uglow noticing a student exclusively using his fingers to apply pigment to his picture said to him "Don't you know how to paint with brushes?"
ReplyDeleteIt sounded like he had told him to grow up...
Science states meanings. Art expresses them.
ReplyDeleteJohn Dewey
What an oblivious statement.
At issue in the E.F. Schumacher essay is that the western world split into two different tribes when one dominant group adopted a language to the omission of the former. The new language addresses that which can be reduced to equations and the other language was aware that life was filled with paradox and doesn’t resolve itself in such, but may find its completion or resolution in ways difficult to quantify.
I couldn’t think of two different tribes defined by two different languages which address completely different kinds of meanings. I think we know which tribe art belongs to.
Yes, there are science projects to understand synesthesia, or how we see the color yellow, or the emotional consequences of two different notes, but that isn’t art in itself and does not resolve life’s paradoxes. At their best they open one to wonder at belonging to something larger than oneself. But the purpose of an equational language does not entertain how.
Artistic and scientific ways are very similar. The tribalism is imposed or learned, not implicit. Da Vinci is the obvious reference, but history is full of people who saw no conflict.
ReplyDeleteThe human fascination with engineering and science is rooted in an intuitive sense of elegance. We take aesthetic pleasure when we see a theory or machine that surprises us but at the same time is also fit for purpose and has internal consistency with no waste. At the same time an engineer or scientist would recognize the type of work an artist does, with experimentation, problem solving and the "i'll recognize it when i see it" feeling. Even the failure modes are relatable, like when you step back and look at what you have done and realize that at some point you got tunnel vision and lost what you were trying to accomplish.
Even pseudo-science has a parallel in bad art. "Cargo Cult Science" is a term very readily applicable to some artistic activities.
Artistic and scientific ways are very similar. The tribalism is imposed or learned, not implicit. Da Vinci is the obvious reference, but history is full of people who saw no conflict.
ReplyDeleteTwo practices do not need to be similar for there to be no conflict. Art and science are distinct languages brought into being as different ways to approach aspects of truth. Da Vinci knew this, as did Newton.
The human fascination with engineering and science is rooted in an intuitive sense of elegance.
A piece of technology or an equation modelling a distinct phenomenon can fascinate us without it being elegant. The internal combustion engine holds the attention of many people, as does string theory, but neither of them are elegant.
I would say the root of the fascination comes from the left hemisphere of the brain whose mode of attention is (in contrast to that of the right hemisphere) very narrow in its focus, generalising and categorising in its approach to experience, linear in its methodology and apprehends phenomena as clusters of discreet parts so that it only understands the world in terms of an accumulation of self-consistent cause/effect mechanisms.
Chris and xopxe,
ReplyDeleteDewey’s statement implies that science and art are expressing the same thing in a different manner. That’s not true.
Yes, it’s natural to seek understanding in the parts of art. Every artist tries or should try to figure out things to gain a fuller comprehension of what they’re doing. That’s not really the issue Schumacher is discussing.
Schumacher has no qualm with science and understands its necessity, but paradox is the larger part of reality. We simply are not in control of the elements we have to deal with and often have no idea how things resolve themselves. That is, the elements in paradox don’t fully reveal themselves, or don’t in a predictable manner. It simply can’t be mathematical, even when one is being as cautious as possible. That’s why it’s acceptable for Dionysus to fly off his chariot in a painting. That can’t happen in math.
Math can also be elegant, imaginative and beautiful, but the subject matter is different. The paradoxical is a matter of the heart and that is the purpose of Schumacher’s essay.
Josef Pieper made the point that philosophy is closer to science than religion in its methods. He also was trying to describe that the west is at a crossroads having dismissed the metaphysical as lacking seriousness. His book discusses the element of receptivity as a means of wisdom, which is at the root of its title, Leisure, The Basis of Culture.
I think it’s fair to say the west has defined and divided itself into two tribes accordingly and the art, heart and metaphysical side is in need of repair, while the mechanical tribe is running wild.
Weird example: String theory is elegant to the point that it's the only thing going for it. And, of course, an internal combustion engine is elegant. Have you watched how it tames explosions into smooth and controllable power? Beautiful. There is no need for left-brain/right-brain junk science; just the way it balances and self-regulates, so satisfactory to observe.
ReplyDeleteScientific and engineering work are as far from being linear as they can be. It's 100% creative work. The first stage of the scientific method, the hypothesizing itself, is fueled by intuition: you just come up with a possibility that fancies you, just because. You don't even have to justify or explain why you came up with that idea; that's your prerogative. An engineer must look around and see the relations and interactions that nobody sees. And when he pulls from memory that one idea that grabbed his attention for its cleverness and sees how it solves this problem that makes him suffer he feels almost the same as a musician when he finds that chromatic resource that just fits in the piece as if the piece was asking for it. The drive is the same.
Don't fall for the caricaturization of other's work, just visit the Wikipedia page for Euler's identity (e^(i*PI)+1=0) and find these quotes that show how mathematicians feel about mathematics:
Stanford University mathematics professor Keith Devlin has said, "like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler's equation reaches down into the very depths of existence".[7] And Paul Nahin, a professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire, who has written a book dedicated to Euler's formula and its applications in Fourier analysis, describes Euler's identity as being "of exquisite beauty".[8]
Mathematics writer Constance Reid has opined that Euler's identity is "the most famous formula in all mathematics".[9] And Benjamin Peirce, a 19th-century American philosopher, mathematician, and professor at Harvard University, after proving Euler's identity during a lecture, stated that the identity "is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth".[10]
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteMath and science were included among the arts, and life was defined not by its lowest but highest, nestled in beauty. Not just exterior beauty, but interior beauty; not foreign to the Ancient Greeks.
ReplyDeleteIndia had its sacred cow and Buddhism a desired receptive abandonment. The west its sacrifice of the lamb. So the disposition of docile receptivity or peace, as a desired state, was widely held despite cultural or tribal differences and endless conflicts.
Let’s take something of a simple paradox, the desire to extend receptivity, which is the desire to extend warmth and receptivity as an act of generosity. It used to be known as hospitality and somehow survived two world wars. It was further decimated by protests and the search for human potential in the 60s and 70s. How can one capture a dispositional paradox if its dispositional feeling or experience is no longer recognized? Have we evolved to dismiss the interior? I think its a question being expressed today through a lot of confusion. How can an artist capture something that’s no longer recognizable among common pursuits or ideals? That’s how I think the matter relates to art.
That’s the only reason I’ve brought it up multiple times.
David,
ReplyDeleteA reply I gave (numbered 125) to xopxe's latest comment to me has vanished. It's the second time this has happened to me on this thread.
???