Posted on 03/24/2013 7:43:42 AM PDT by BenLurkin
“It is only by understanding the neural laws that dictate human activity in all spheres — in law, morality, religion and even economics and politics, no less than in art — that we can ever hope to achieve a more proper understanding of the nature of man.”
to suggest that the human brain responds in a particular way to art risks creating criteria of right or wrong, either in the art itself or in individual reactions to it. .... experience suggests that scientists studying art find it hard to resist drawing up rules for critical judgements. The chemist and Nobel laureate Wilhelm Ostwald, a competent amateur painter, devised an influential theory of colour in the early twentieth century that led him to declare that Titian had once used the ‘wrong’ blue. Paul Klee, whose intuitive handling of colour was impeccable, spoke for many artists in his response to such hubris
But the problem runs deeper, because equating an appreciation of art with an appreciation of beauty is misleading. A concept of beauty (not necessarily ours today) was certainly important for, say, Renaissance artists, but until recently it had almost vanished from the discourse of contemporary art. Those who like the works of Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys or Robert Rauschenberg generally do not appreciate them for their beauty. Scientists as a whole have always had conservative artistic tastes; a quest for beauty betrays that little has changed.
Even the narrower matter of aesthetics is not only about beauty. It has conventionally also concerned taste and judgement. Egalitarian scientists have a healthy scepticism of such potentially elitist ideas, and it is true that arbiters of taste may be blinkered and dogmatic: witness, for example, the blanket dismissal of jazz by Theodor Adorno, a champion of modernism.
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
Yes indeed!
Well Done.
Connectivity by Denise Mahlke
It's my thesis that music is fundamentally an imitiation of bird songs, from which our aesthetic sense derives. NOVA had a show once entitled Why Do Birds Sing? but they never even came close to addressing the title question. They confined themselves entirely to the question of why they MAKE SOUNDS, and maybe that's all science can ask.
I kinda like “Connectivity”.
Ham-handed, utterly ordinary and stultifying. The composition is static, the typography is unworthy of a first-semester community college student in her first graphics course, the neurotic use of the same little border over and over and over again suggests an overly controlled mind. She managed to even kill the comicbook-heroic Art Deco Nazi kitsch beloved of would-be revolutionaries the world over, and that’s not an easy thing to do.
This plodding little apparatchik in the making is very small. Her revolutionary betters understood the value of a compelling visual in propagandizing the masses. This is just ... Microsoft Word dabbling to post on cobwebbed bulletin boards in obscure government offices for dullards shuffling their way toward retirement.
And if someone else likes it, it's better art. What is great art? Lasting art.
Last Light on Capitol Reef by Ray Roberts
Great composition and use of color can make even sinkholes beautiful and compelling.
***and lectured about dissonance and ugliness for its own sake.***
Same here. Many of us did not like the crap we were being taught. We wanted to learn to draw, and paint, not crap about the beauty of twisted metal. I was working days in a steel shop and saw lots of twisted metal and it was NOT ART.
I eventually had to teach myself.
Same here.
I also taught myself music composition and audio engineering, but I have seen even those processes degenerate into a form of industrial, monotonous drivel. I know HOW to use beat-box and looping software, but I choose to create music WITHOUT them.
I wish more people here in NW Arkansas liked REAL ART. Most here want the cabin painted on a saw blade and tobacco can type of “art”. (gag)
Thankfully Walton’s Crystal Bridges art center is trying to upgrade the local’s art experience. They are now displaying a collection of NORMAN ROCKWELL’s original works.
In my South Florida town, there are the most hideous “twisted metal” sculptures on every street corner.
Turns out these were all paid for with tax money.
Does the ornithologist teach the bird to sing?
(I forget who said that.)
Look into the landscape paintings of Arkansas native Margaret Speer.
http://www.biddingtons.com/content/creativespeer.html
Her color sense and composition are very nice, with a sort of softness that recalls some of the great Impressionist painters. She’s active so her work should be affordable and accessible, as a print if not an original.
I think art can be evaluated subjectively and objectively, just as good books can.
I'm an artist, and I'll tell you one thing. Modern art is crap. 8-)
That's one way of looking at it. It may be wiser to recognize it as designed for conquest.
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