SOME EXCERPTS AND QUOTATIONS ON ART

A.

from “Spirituality in Abstract Art” by Pamela Schaeffer

"Art is the daughter of the divine," contended philosopher Rudolf Steiner in the 1920s. Most art 1overs today would assume that Steiner was referring to a pre-20th-century past. True, art was once the daughter of the divine, they might say. But in the 20th century the once-dutiful daughter has struck out on her own, ignoring her religious heritage (indeed, ignoring religious subject matter altogether) and turned her attention to form. Abstract art is a purely aesthetic activity. Certainly in the late 20th century, it is rarely associated with religion.

However, in recent years this story of abstract art has begun to undergo revision. Art critics have discovered that for many artists, abstraction is a way not to express emptiness but to communicate particular ideals. A number of major exhibitions exploring the roots of abstract art have emphasized artists’ utopian hopes bred by the industrial revolution, or their revolutionary political thought, or their revival of primitivism out of a dissatisfaction with the modern world.

B.

from “Against Interpretation and Other Essays” by Susan Sontag

Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It's very tiny – very tiny, content. /Willem de Kooning, in an interview/

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. /Oscar Wilde, in a letter/

The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual. (Cf. the paintings in the caves at Lascaux, Altamira, Niaux, La Pasiega, etc.) The earliest theory of art, that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that art was mimesis, imitation of reality.

It is at this point that the peculiar question of the value of art arose. For the mimetic theory, by its very terms, challenges art to justify itself.

Plato, who proposed the theory, seems to have done so in order to rule that the value of art is dubious. Since he considered ordinary material things as themselves mimetic objects, imitations of transcendent forms or structures, even the best painting of a bed would be only an "imitation of an imitation." For Plato, art is neither particularly useful (the painting of a bed is no good to sleep on), nor, in the strict sense, true. And Aristotle's arguments in defense of art do not really challenge Plato's view that all art is an elaborate trompe l'oeil, and therefore a lie. But he does dispute Plato's idea that art is useless. Lie or no, art has a certain value according to Aristotle because it is a form of therapy. Art is useful, after all, Aristotle counters, medicinally useful in that it arouses and purges dangerous emotions.

In Plato and Aristotle, the mimetic theory of art goes hand in hand with the assumption that art is always figurative. But advocates of the mimetic theory need not close their eyes to decorative and abstract art. The fallacy that art is necessarily a "realism" can be modified or scrapped without ever moving outside the problems delimited by the mimetic theory.

The fact is, all Western consciousness of and reflection upon art have remained within the confines staked out by the Greek theory of art as mimesis or representation. It is through this theory that art as such – above and beyond given works of art – becomes problematic, in need of defense. And it is the defense of art which gives birth to the odd vision by which something we have learned to call "form" is separated off from something we have learned to call "content," and to the well-intentioned move which makes content essential and form accessory.

Even in modern times, when most artists and critics have discarded the theory of art as representation of an outer reality in favor of the theory of art as subjective expression, the main feature of the mimetic theory persists. Whether we conceive of the work of art on the model of a picture (art as a picture of reality) or on the model of a statement (art as the statement of the artist), content still comes first. The content may have changed. It may now be less figurative, less lucidly realistic. But it is still assumed that a work of art is its content. Or, as it's usually put today, that a work of art by definition says something.

None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did. From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art. We can only quarrel with one or another means of defense. Indeed, we have an obligation to overthrow any means of defending and justifying art which becomes particularly obtuse or onerous or insensitive to contemporary needs and practice.

C.

Likes and Dislikes /from "History of Art" by H.W. Janson/

Deciding what is art and rating a work of art are two separate problems. People have long been in the habit of compounding the two problems into one; quite often when they ask, "Why is that art?" they mean, "Why is that good art?" How often have we heard this question asked – or asked it ourselves, perhaps – in front of one of the strange, disquieting work that we are likely to find nowa­days in museums or art exhibitions.

There usually is an undertone of exasperation, for the question implies that we don't think we are looking at a work of art, but that experts – the critics, museums curators, art historians – must suppose it to be one, or why else would they put it on public dis­play? Clearly their standards are different from ours; we are at a loss to understand them and we wish they'd give us a few simple, clear-cut rules to go by. Then, maybe, we would learn to like what we see, we would know “why it is art?”.

But the experts don't post exact rules, and the layman is apt to fall back upon his final line of defense: "Well, I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like". And there is another unspoken assumption, which goes something like this: "Since art is such an 'unruly' subject that even the experts keep disagreeing with each other, my opinion is as good as theirs – it’s all a matter of subjective preference. In fact, my opinion may be better than theirs, because as a layman I react to art in a direct, straightforward fashion, without having my view ob­structed by a lot of complicated theories. There must be something wrong with a work of art if it takes an expert to appreciate it."

D.

Art Appreciation 'A Gender Issue' / 24 February 2009 BBC News/

“We know for sure that there are differences between the male and female brain” /Professor Friedermann Pulvermuller, an expert in brain studies at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit/

When it comes to appreciating art, men and women really do think differently, research shows.

While women use both sides of their brain, men only use the right half to judge if a piece of work is beautiful, a team of scientists discovered. This may reflect the different ways men and women's minds have evolved – men tend to focus on the big picture while women take in “local” details too.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports the findings. Professor Francisco Ayala, from the University of California Irvine, and colleagues asked 10 men and 10 women to judge the beauty of artists’ paintings and photographs of urban and rural landscapes.

At the same time, the researchers measured the magnetic fields produced by electrical activity in the brains of the volunteers. This revealed that both men and women were using a part of the brain associated with spatial awareness, called the parietal lobe. However, while women used both right and left sides, men used only the right parietal lobe.

The researchers suggest that this is because women are contextualising the information and thinking more about the details of what they are seeing, assessing the position of objects according broad categories, such as "above" or "below", or "left" or "right". The men, they say, are focusing on the overall image using a more precise form of mental mapping.

And they say the differences may have evolved millions of years ago when early humans became hunter gatherers. Hunting, traditionally done by men, required a "coordinating" ability to track animals accurately while on the move. A "categorical" spatial awareness was better suited to foraging for fruit, roots or berries, a job mainly carried out by women.

"Women tend to be more aware than men of objects around them, including those that seem irrelevant to the current task, whereas men out-perform women in navigation tasks," the scientists told PNAS. "Men tend to solve navigation tasks by using orientation-based strategies involving distance concepts and cardinal directions, whereas women tend to base their activities on remembering the location of landmarks and relative directions, such as 'left from', or 'to the right of'."

The different ways men and women mapped the world appeared to influence their perception of beauty, they believe.

Professor Friedermann Pulvermuller, an expert in brain studies at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, said: "This is an interesting study. We know for sure that there are differences between the male and female brain. The connection between the two hemispheres is better developed in females generally. So the findings are in agreement with what we know, but we would need more work before we could make any firm conclusions."

E.

From “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde

1. Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

2. All art is quite useless. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it immensely.

3. The artist is the creator of beautiful things.

4. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.

5. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

6. The artist can express everything.

7. All art is at once surface and symbol.

8. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

9. Diversity of opinions about a work of art shows that the work is new complex and vital.