Last week I offered a post that was a simple timeline of some of the events associated with the Renaissance, that "rebirth" of classical culture beginning in northern Italy that soon spread both west and north. I will expand a bit on the subject here. As a matter of periodization: the term "Renaissance" is conventionally associated with the second half of the fifteenth and the whole of the sixteenth century. I think it's fair to stretch into the seventeenth just a bit to take in Cervantes' great novel, as I did in the timeline. The term first appears in the middle of the 16th century, in the Italian form "renascita" (rebirth) in a book by Giogio Vasari, LIVES OF THE ARTISTS. "Renaissance" is a Francophone reworking of Vasari's term, coming much later. The period known as the Enlightenment, which saw itself as a successor to the Renaissance, may be said to have begun about 30 years after the publication of DON QUIXOTE, with the publi...
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I'm writing about this because I'm not sure I understand it. Corrections of my stupidity are more than usually welcome. Five points: 1. "Taste," for Kant, is the act of deciding whether something is or isn't beautiful. (Not "sublime," another matter I'll stay away from here.) 2. For something to be beautiful, it must offer "disinterested satisfaction." Presumably, a heterosexual man who finds a woman "beautiful" has an "interest" in mind, consciously or not. Because it is not DIS interested, then sexual appeal is NOT "beauty" in the Kantian sense. On the other hand an image of abstract art, or perhaps a musical motif, may be considered beautiful, and those are both a better candidates for satisfying the test of disinterest than our beautiful woman in the "male gaze." 3. The fact that one takes pleasure (that is, the grounds of one's taste) is not completely subjective. If I find a mus...
I was about to ask my readers a question: "who is responsible for that now-classic image of a diner at a street corner with James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and I believe Elvis Presley sitting nonchalantly inside? "The viewer is supposed to imagine himself driving by that street corner, getting a glimpse of these legends, but of necessity hurrying on...." But then I realized -- hey, you're on the internet thing, dummy! You can find it. So here it is. Boulevard of Broken Dreams. I had misremembered the created/captured moment. Elvis isn't sitting about nonchalantly -- he's working there, behind the counter, serving Monroe, Dean, and Humphrey Bogart. And the artist? Gottfried Helnwein, working a variation on Edward Hopper's Nighthawks. I find Helnwein's image much more arresting than Hopper's. But you can judge for yourself, dear reader, because this is after all the internet.
"Color itself is a degree of darkness." German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said that, and much else, in his publication Theory of Colors. Brain pickings recently ran an appreciation of this Treatise, calling it "an absorbing account of the philosophy and artistic experience of color." It was also part of the romantic rebellion against classicism -- Goethe was taking on boring clockworks-loving old Newton. Here's a link to the Amazon page which will allow you to look inside Goethe's text if you're so inclined. https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262070375/braipick-20
John Berger was the writer behind WAYS OF SEEING, a 1972 television series (and accompanying book) in art and politics that has been very influential in academic discussions of that crossroads. He has a new book out, PORTRAITS, and I've been looking at a review of it in the February 2016 issue of HARPER's. The review, written by Mark Kingwell, calls this a "monumental late-life collection of some six dozen appreciations of individual artists." One of these appreciations, of Vincent van Gogh, says this: "All modern artists have thought of their innovations as offering a closer approach to reality, as a way of making reality more evident. It is here, and only here, that the modern artist and revolutionary have sometimes found themselves side by side, both inspired by the idea of pulling down the screen of clichés." Kingwell, the reviewer, finds this idea touching, but naïve. "What force in such dreams, then, down here on planet Earth?" he a...
On November 7th, a US bankruptcy court judge, Steven Rhodes, approved Detroit's plan, allowing its exit from bankruptcy court protection. One of the remarkable subplots in Detroit's bankruptcy-court saga has been the availability of works of art as collateral. Rhodes' opinion described the Detroit Institute of Art as "an invaluable beacon of culture" and declared that the liquidate its assets, that is, to sell its artworks for the benefit of the creditors of the city, would be "to forfeit Detroit's future." I'm not sure I believe that. After all, the works themselves would have remained intact, surely? Unless we believe that the high bidder would be someone with a malicious design to destroy what he/she/it was buying. I think the reasonable guess is that the artworks involved would generally have ended up in the hands of other museums, or in a smattering of cases in the hands of wealthy collectors willing and in fact eager to take good c...
For my week-by-week desk calender through 2013, I will rely on an unflashy but serviceable volume from American Express. As with last year's Amex calender, there are factual tidbits on each page about various destinations where I can presumably enjoy a debt-financed vacation with my Amex card. One of the early pages tells me, for example, with reference to the Seychelles, in the Indian Ocean, that their "rich diversity" is reflected in several traditional dances, which it proceeds to list (but I won't.) While the Seychelles get January, the city of Marseille in France gets February, with an early reference to its use in the 1970s as the seedy setting of a great movie, The French Connection . But the city, we are assured, has come a long way since then. Separately, I have two month-by-month calenders for the coming year, For my office, I have one from Amber Lotus Publishing, providing me with fractal art. Artist Alice Kelley creates these images through a compu...
Jacques Barzun died last week, just a month short of his 105th birthday. I've written of Barzun before: here for example, and here . I had the honor of a long, though epistolatory, friendship with Prof. Barzun, and it now seems incumbent upon me to donate his letters to some appropriate scholarly repository. I do think that some of this correspondence will help shed some light on his thought, for future researchers. I'm certain that his reputation is bound to grow over the coming decades. Perhaps the definitive biographer, the one who can do for Barzun what Barzun did for Hector Berlioz , is still 81 years away. Berlioz, after all, died in 1869, and Barzun's two-volume work on his life and times appeared in 1950. And it did so in no small part because Barzun heard Berlioz's "Ballet of the Sylphs " performed when he was only four or five years, a memory that never left him. Perhaps we can best pay tribute to Barzun in his passing with some words h...
The latest issue of Harper's has a round-up, by Joshua Cohen, of new books. The one that catches my eye is a comment on a collection of the writings of art critic Jed Perl. I've probably read a good chunk of that book, as I'm a fan of Perl's work as it appears in The New Republic. Unfortunately, Perl's new book, Magicians and Charlatans , looks a little pricey for me. So I'll confine myself to just quoting here what Cohen writes about it: "[T]his miscellany's greatest recommending stretches are its critiques of what is essentially unreal: the art market. Shock, that old weapon of Dada and Surrealism, concussing sensibilities since World War I, has become a marketing manifesto licensing a Christ soaked in human urine (Andres Serrano's Piss Christ ) and a Mary slathered in elephant dung (Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary ) not as expressions of rage but as provocations of PR ....The museum is converted into its architectural double, t...