The American Heritage dictionary gives us the definition of an advisor: an educator who dictates to students on matters. Where art goes, advisors sit in offices filled with a contemptous sense of authority. Its funny that when given the ‘task’ of capturing the sublime, a student is found thumbing through the reference books for classical stories of Herakles and Dido in order to beautify his naked creations. Their work resembles patched up escutcheons, something lavish to hide the fragile meat behind it. An advisor has taught them well- they too have perfected his practice of grave digging and priding himself in his heritage, his practice of claiming to know what he cannot, and they too, like him, can look into the dead eyes of Venus and imagine life in it. They too have learned the ‘art’ of making a live body stiff by trying to define and capture it, label it as an is when he isn’t and they aren’t. Wanting to advise on the unadvisable betrays an underlying impotence- it also conveys a failure to find naive joy in the subject. In this case, beauty; its almost as if they are married to the tortured adjectives they jot down in their ‘suffering’ or the Olympian gods and goddesses they sprinkle in their ‘art’. Never listen to the married man- art, to one who knows it, is a violent love affair, filled with joy and cruelty. It is also clean, the clean and fresh of orchards or blind violence. One hears a stiff echo every now and then from a mentor who’s mostly written in his melancholy- has he suffered? The modern man or the soldier does not suffer; he’s experienced the unpleasant- and it reads well. This is not to say suffering is auxillary- quite the contrary as it too is essential. 2 and 4 can describe math as well as counting marbles can, but art and beauty violates this principle: I was told once of an ancient settlement that predates the Egyptians by 4500 years. Çatalhöyük, an ancient city in Turkey, built by a people that buried their dead beneath their floorboards. The advisor is classic decay- never listen to the man who invites you to his home where one can smell death floating up from the cracks in his floor.
You find the characterization of modern-day works via classical precepts and figures contemptible in all cases? Is Venus always "dead" to you? Are you saying that sophisticated artistic criticism has irremediably tainted or overshadowed the creative process? Or do you believe there is some corrective measure that might be taken to athetize the pretension, if you will? Is authoritative, respected criticism deleterious to the aethetic itself? I should say not, in some cases, but you may disagree. Don't you feel you've been hasty in your morbid generalization of these "advisors," whose dediction to heritage has, no doubt, varying degrees in individual cases? Could you rephrase that 2, 4 bit?
I think that what she is saying is that art is in the creating not the imitating. I am able to copy paintings and drawings all day long. I'm rather good at it. In my arrogance, I have called myself an artist. However, I have never truly been able to create something new. Always a pale echo. I'm no artist. Not in that medium anyway. At best, I'm a technician. A graphics worker. I think that studying the old masters is like studying any old things. Caution is required. Beware of possession. Sometimes, one loves a work of art and an artist so much that one becomes that artist so that he might make that work of art. Where's the art in this? The art of impersonation? Maybe so if you were honest about it and called it for what it was. It's not that Venus is dead. It's that Venus is pastiche. It's already been done. Why make another? Make your own work. Don't recreate someone else's. Advising without creating is parasitism. Those who can do. Those who can't teach. Those who can do neither criticize (advise).
Rap: She looks mighty stupid dangling in every piece of work we call 'masterpiece'. Sister Wendy, decaying with the works of 'art' she praises, finding more than is there- imagine all the work she could have created with those human hands of hers, human hands that shape cities from mountains. Instead she's stuck in the past, in love with paint and marble. Allow me to modify: "An advisor has taught them well- they too have perfected his practice of grave digging and priding himself mostly on his heritage- a dead thing he had nothing to do with. The way the Neo-nazi prides himself on being white" More or less. There is a tendency to appeal to the Greek for insta-sophistication. Alabama, home of the illiterate inbred and greasy mechanic, has a statue of Vulcan jutting up from its city as redemption. For them, 'art' is a business or trade when it should be a consecration of joy. Tell me about the tits on Artemis to describe beauty. Tell me about Morpheus, or Hades: "The black rains of Hades showerd down upon us, it is evil! Death becomes me, oh Lethian waters drown my sorrow! Take me now sweet Morpheus, the furies have betrayed me" Compared to: "I died a neat death, like breath off a razor" This practice of needless ornament is also found in men of letters- like using strings and strings of needless adjectives for effect. You're notorious for this, Rap. Vert: Snap. Honesty is a beautiful smell.
Forgot this: Certainly. We all know there is a sense for beauty in the math world- the simplesse of a gravitational theory reconciled with the chaos of the quantum world in one Theory is Romance to a particle physicist. He can, I feel, easily explain that joy he feels inside by using a 4 or a 2. My joy in words, color, and sound are not as easily captured by the 4 or 2 as they lack the integral function of numbers. 2 and 4 in formula gets us to the moon. Prose and quartets and adagios go nowhere. Someone using gods and crumbling pantheons where some fat peasant used to pee on when the priests were way in an attempt to describe what this is I feel inside when looking on the beautiful, is, to me, a testament to illiteracy and dishonesty.
Rosa: Yes, they do. But have you ever felt it with Euripides? Or for that matter looking on the inert lumps of art of Hanson's human models? Not a godamned thing. The Mona Lisa, I am told, captures the quiet grace of beauty. Yet I look on her and can picture her behind the counter scratching herself and selling me chorizo. The Greek world gave us the stage and on it made actors- but aren't actors rigid things that fail to capture human nature? And yet the best are found scribbling out their poems and plays and novelas stuffing them with gods and godesses like a godamned orgy, praising the rump on Mercury as if it were gold. You get this sense of their 'art' having a false mustache. Don't you? Or a throwing a boa around as if the gesture alone is what's beautiful.
As an aside, I don't like Mona Lisa at all. Too me, Klimt's "Portrait of Gertha Felsövanyi" is far more beautiful and intriguing. *** I have a theory on catharsis and why some things come off much more as art than others. So "Hamlet" ends with a load of dead royals and some resolutions, and that would be it, thank you very much, if "Hamlet" were a Greek tragedy. But it isn't. Old Greek pieces prepare the catharsis, complete it, it cannot be missed. One feels relieved after a Greek tragedy. But take "Hamlet": catharsis is left to the viewer/reader. That simple to be, or not be, simple almost to banality -- so that it can be easily remembered. So that it stays with you. Catharsis happens only after the reader has somehow solved that to be, or not to be for himself. Shakespeare challenged the reader to do for himself what the old Greek author provided pret-a-porte. To me, this is art: that a piece *challenges* you to seek for your own catharsis in that piece. (Which can be scary, as one may very well never find it.) Human nature -- a desperate lover, a sangrona, a man who could not make up his mind, a betrayed queen, a man, a woman -- they must be read, not seen. The actors don't imitate, they mean. I can't stand Cecilia Bartoli, I think she's fat and ugly. I watched a production of "Don Juan" once with her -- and Don Juan sings about her exquisite beauty. Blegh. Or Kenneth Branagh playing "Hamlet": I can't bring myself to watch it, Branagh looks way too harlequinesque to be able to play "Hamlet" for me. -- In such cases, it becomes most painfully apparent how much we concentrate on the actor, and not on what he tries to mean. It is somewhat unfortunate that we are so bound to the material carrier of a meaning, that, for us, this material carrier sometimes, if not often, obscures the meaning he is actually trying to convey. And I am not thinking about the good actor vs. bad actor distinction here, although it is very relevant. I am thinking about the good reader vs. bad reader distinction. Something that requires competence. Biedermayer.
Rosa: Just googled it. Very pretty. NICE! The mark of good writing or good art is, to me, the being forced to think otherwise than we would have or the seeing what one has always seen but imbued in a light and color so thick with life that the enlightenment becomes delicious as opposed to appealing or simply intriguing. You say catharsis, I say a bathing in ice. But why would one put Shakespeare in a better light than, say, Euripides? Because Willy's characters were flexible and conducive to irony? Captured the human condition and tied it with prose? The Greeks did the same. Its not about the artist himself as much as the reaction- the artist creates his work, we see it, and those drunk on their heritage, the impressive, or the fashionable are the first to call it art. I'm saying here that something like Shakespeare, as beautiful as he is, would become ugly the day that I find everything I write sprinkled with thees and thous. Art becomes ugly with the presumption of those with no talent. You know what all this masturbating to the Greek world reminds me of? Counting off beads on a rosary and calling it praying. I always picture a so called artist squatting down to his work, counting off names and calling it art. Aye. And I see you've remembered sangrona, moja. But I don't feel actors aim to capture meaning as much as they aim to convince themselves above all. Theoron- beautiful woman hired to act out the part of a filthy, greasy, lesbian. Don't you think she had to convince herself first? She played it beautifully.
Gendanken: Where do you see the "masturbating to the ancient Greek world" in modern art? I can't name a major visual work from the fifties onward that makes much reference to the Greeks at all. Generally if any culture is invoked, it's "tribal-ethnic-indigenous-whatever" and not ancient Greece.
It doesn't have to be, considering they are following the same rules. And this is also tangential- I'm not concerned for 'modern' art, and for that matter the moderns tend to have this boastful quality about their mediocrity. The modern 'artist' relishes in that he has no responsibility to answer to in his work, he throws intimidating rules out of the window, everything remains arbitrary and comfortable, and he's left to make slop. It becomes conscious incompetence. What I am concerned with here is how receptive the 'talented' mind is to opinion, something like Wittgenstein using titles for luster or reading Eros and Ananke in Freud.
Yes, tangential seems a fitting way to put it, Gendanken. Our bounteous classical inheritance never seemed so bad to me. I don't believe I'll ever get tired of the re-runs. I can see it all now... Nike of Samothrace, The Vulgate, an abundance of Latin letters, The Divine Comedy, Hildegard von Bingen, Jacque-Louis David, Jean Ingres, Joshua Reynolds... Tough titty, said the kitty... That's it, people! I'm starting a thread, right here in 'Art and Culture,' wherein I will slowly, painstakingly, translate the Bible from Latin to English. Or, at least, so say I.
Rap: Ha! And you're right- inheritence is not bad. I never said it and I don't think it. Get to that thread, Rapaccini. I'd be more than happy, animated, can, gay, genial, glad, jolly, joyful, joyous, keen, light-hearted, lively, merry, optimistic, spirited, sprightly, vivacious to join you.
gendanken: Okay, well, what in fuck are you talking about? You mention the ancient Greeks being over-valued. By who? If anything, the ancient Greeks are ignored by the modern art community. Wittgenstein doesn't title his prepositions, they're simply 1, 1.01, 1.02, etc.
Xev: And......again with the moderns. Well if we must, this may help: "There were more than 3,000 references to Classic Greek history and mythology in the media and on the Internet this morning versus virtually none only 30 days ago. There is an almost desperate attempt in the worldwide media frenzy to link any news story to the Athens Olympics and classical Greek history, with the overuse of such terms as sword of Damocles, Trojan horse and Achilles heel. The media is going to any lengths to get in as many classical references into a single story as possible." Courtesy of http://www.languagemonitor.com. Said and http://abcnews.go.com/wire/World/reuters20040815_96.html That said, the "best" poets have been Roman-Graecophiles. If still lost, I've already said what I should say here: http://sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=40289 I said title, not infrastructure.
gendanken: Well I'd hope you weren't talking about the art community during the late middle ages, it'd be rather foolish to address them. They're kinda, well, dead. The only art critics it would make any sense to address in a criticism would be the ones alive now, eh? Thus I can only assume you're referring to the moderns. Not really. How does the media hyping enter the realm of art? Your thread is specifically addressed to art 'advisors', critics in other words. You mention the Greeks in the context of art, not in terms of whether Tom Brokaw is feigning knowledge of Euripedes. Last I checked, not many newscasters moonlight as art critics. You're objecting to the title. Okay. Well you've read the book, since you see the title as inappropriate and abstruse given the subject matter. What were your thoughts on it?
I'm afraid you'll have to go the the library for this one ... the pictures I could found on the net were all in rather distorting colours. She looks much different on good paper reproductions than on photos on the net. (Some things are unscannable.) There surely is one practical problem (I seem to be exquisitely fond of practical problems, judging by how often I mention this phrase -- I'm going to start using PP fo it ...): The way the Old Greeks saw the world and the individual in it is certainly different than the way we do. I like to use this analogy: Bach's music, "The well-tempered piano" -- one just likes it. There is something about it. Yet it also strikes as a bit dull. Bach was working on the contrapunct -- two melodies, each one of them rather uninteresting, yet together, they make a splashing new melody. This is the key to listening to those pieces. But: we are not used to think this way about music anymore, we are used to the pattern of the leading and the accompanying melody. It is hard for the modern listener to split himself up into two halves and yet join them. One easily loves Bach, glorfies this music -- yet there remains this incomprehendable dimension, and this music seems somehow foreign. It never really speaks to you. Why? Because it has lower artistic value? No. Because we don't know its language anymore. And I can imagine the same with old literature. We are fascinated by it, yet it leaves one rather unmoved. We don't speak its language anymore, even though the words may be the same. Shakespeare is simply closer to us. Certainly true for some cases. But look at the above consideration. You just called me yours. Heh. Oh yes. And I can't resist: Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit That from her working all his visage wann'd, Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing! I'd say they first need to convince themselves -- as this seems a requirement for meaning something. Yet, there is something monstrous in this convincing themselves.
Rosa: I still think its pretty. An oily madonna. Oh, but music.....music. No matter the method or style, music – like Bach- touches us where I feel no other medium can. The best phrase, the prettiest word, the most violent imagery pales to the force of music. Music...is a blood transfusion. You need a language for music? Xev: Didn't think so- even cursed myself on the drive home. No matter- we'll work from here: That's just it. Don't know how your art experience was but I had two professors with yellowing posters of the Parthenon and Aesklapyion on the wall. I show up fresh as roses, greedy for the pencils and pastels in the studio only to find we are going to be studying the Classical periods of our Mother countries. There was a thread here giving 'advise' to artists, I go the poetry thread and there in the lines I found those two professors again that embodied this principle that began with the Romans- the principle of art made obedient, the phenomena of borrowed substance in a race where a baton just keeps being passed and passed to nowhere, run by clumsy athletes with no business running. Don't let me the first to point out how unimaginative the Romans were. Most art has since that time became a lazy, parasitic process- its become this guy: "He spent many days on his preliminary sketches. He spent long hours in the library of Francon & Heyer, selecting from Classic photographs the appearance of his house. He felt the tension melting in his mind. It was right and it was good, that house growing under his hand, because men were still worshipping the masters who had done it before him. He did not have to wonder, to fear, to take chances; it had been done for him." His art is just as dead as he is- and were he a professor he'd be either one of those cadavers that almost killed art for me. Addressing them is addressing the mediaeval artisan or critic- or for that matter the Renaissance one or the Romantic one or the Victorian one as no one is there, no person is there but an empty shell filled with sterility and baseless romance. Its these people that would keep those pens and pastels from me or look on a blue woman with vanity drawers as breast symbolizing female chastity as crude or lacking taste. What taste?! Every last color on that paper had my name, my person and selfish pride on it. Where was theirs? Shakespeare- another one that was dead to me because of being introduced to him by a cadaver. On my own I found my love for him, as it should be. Well, I'd be lying if I said I did not drop him for Chomsky considering my....language fetish. Have you read "On Certainty?" What did I think: That I am a terrible disappointment to myself. That my language theory is just as nonsensical as his propositions and that he beat me to the punch line. That all philosophers do is gymnastics- I've said this somewhere- and how nice it was to find an honest one that, at last, sought to dissolve problems with the only medium the gymnasts keep making them in: language. Also, I can credit him somewhat for my getting caught up the science of what reason *is* in terms of self and language- using the natural sciences of raw meat and brain to explain it as opposed to philosophy. Language is a torturous joy for me- and I don't think I'm alone in this. I picked on his title for the same reason Twain picked on Cooper: eschew surplusage.
gendanken: Okay. I guess we come from different experiences. I live (and grew up in) a rather artsy town which has a pretty good liberal arts college. Nobody ever really went into the Greeks, or "classical" art in general. It was all "this photograph signifies the bleakness of modern life by showing a nail rusting above a montage of newspaper clippings that highlight the postneodeconstructionistic theories of Lacan...." When I've taken art classes, it's invariably some "ethnic" chick with dreadlocks explaining how we are going to explore the tribal traditions of the Yami-Yami people by painting our first picture in our menstruel blood. Not that I have anything against deconstruction or ethnic traditions or finger painting with used tampons, but the Greeks I learned in humanities and not in arts. I felt they should be taught more. Sure, I posted in "that thread". Wanderer made valid points. Art should not be made obedient to tradition or strict definition of what 'art' is, but it should also not become ethnic finger painting with tampons. Art, on the other hand, will take care of itself. The crap won't survive, the good stuff will. That's why we think of the Classical Greeks as elegant, isn't it? Because by and large, nobody bothered to preserve the crap. Self-expression is great. But I wish the modern arts weren't so full of pompous twats who expect us to throw our panties at them for being "artists". Nope, I picked up one of Chomsky's political works once and found it lacking, I haven't gotten to his language theory yet. Although I'm told it's better to read than the muddle of Derrida.
Xev: Snap. And that's what I meant by: No, you don't have to be responsible to either you or your audiance- just shred every last bit of personality left in you , water it down to a pulp and make you a mosaic of Eskimo placentas. Diversity bloody rocks, its so deep. Same rules- mimic. And I feel they been abused- Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Lowell. Offenbach. The nike emblem on my sneaks. Yah. Yup. They call this free expression an over-emphasis of form and structure- so is elephantiasis. The imagery is always that of an obstinate, unimaginative child flaunting its bad posture. The way the poor come to embrace their poverty and call it 'dignity'.
