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Let's start with definitions

Cem_Usakligil

Well-known member
Asher Kelman said:
....I hope this answers you Cem,...
It certainly does Asher, thanks :).

When I wrote that I would not change my views on art just by reading this thread, I wasn't correct. I realise this now, thanks to you and also thanks to the earlier reaction I got from Ray. Again, having stated that I was willing to learn from the discussion, I was inherently agreeing with you since everything one learns changes him/her, one way or another.

My previous rambling re. picking on words was kind of a primary reaction since I was afraid that we would start arguing for argument's sake (pun intended) and not for answering the questions posed to start with.

Anyway, "more input", "more input" :).

Cheers,

Cem
 

Mary Bull

New member
Asher Kelman said:
I'd like to add some rationale for my more detailed expression of "What art means to me?" as opposed to a simple phrase like "To me art is beauty truth and I know it when I see it." When I am able to compress my own thoughts to such a phrase I'll celebrate. Certainly I'm working on it.
Keats had his Grecian Urn say, "Beauty is truth, truth, beauty." There have been countless critical discussions since then as to whether this was his own personal philosophy or only what he perceived to be the message of that particular work of art. For myself, I incline to think that it was his own personal philosophy.

At any rate, he said that before he was 25 years old. He died before reaching his 26th birthday.

I took Keats's two words and made them into my own aphorism, "The essence of Art is beauty telling the truth."

That's the heart of what I myself think it is, but surrounding all that is a lifetime of experiencing art with my eyes, my ears, and yes, even my nose, in some of the creations of the great perfume makers. So I do have my ideas on how to make something good and why some things seem good to me and other things do not seem good to me.

Although, I'm bearing in mind Dierk's caveat that a definition of art doesn't address the question of good art vs. bad art. He said that was worth a separate discussion, IIRC.

Now, I stand with Dierk, in that, as nearly as I understand him, I believe we here at OPF have two threads to our defining: An objective definition and a subjective definition. I doubt that I have much to contribute to the objective definition--I think Dierk has said it all and said it well.

So far as my subjective definition, I do know what I like "when I see it" or experience it. And I usually do know that instantly. The appeal is immediate and nearly always lasting.

"Would you believe in love at first sight?"

Oh, I would, I would, I would!!

Quoting Asher on the purpose of making these definitions:
My postulate of "The Arc of Intent" (see posts #3 and #5 above in this thread), might possibly be useful to others. The idea is to share a more conscious practical framework to make art. Futher, if desired, it might then hopefully be appreciated and valued by others and even facilitate earning money with it more readily. By disclosing my own ideas on art, I hope to get feedback and further instruct my understanding and directions.
I, too, am always trying to make my output better. In writing, in taking pictures, in performing music.

And it just makes sense that hearing how others do it--especially those who have been thinking about it and doing it a lot longer than I have--will often give me an insight into how to get more satisfaction from my own life.

I say nothing about the details of any codes, rules or the details of postulated syntax in art. That I will attempt to approach later.

I have not, as yet, probed how my postulated "cascade" of reactions might work triggering our responses to art.
I'm looking forward to reading what you have to say.

Mary
 
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Ben Lifson

New member
Keats and the Rainbow

Of Keats Dierk says that

"His most famous quip about this is the accusation Newton took the poetry out of the rainbow by unweaving it with his prism experiments."

Yes. And it was Pope who wrote

"God said, 'Let Newton be,' and there was Light."

Besides, Keats was wrong and silly. The poetry never went out of the rainbow. By the time Keats said that Wordsworth had already written (long after Newton)

My heart leaps up when I behold
A Rainbow in the sky!
So was it when I was a child,
So is it now I am a man,
So be it when I grow old or let me die!

The child is father to the man
And I would wish my days to be
Bound each to each in natural piety

Which is obviously informed by the age old meaning of the rainbow as God's covenant to Noah

Wordsworth had also written

The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose,
The Moon doth with delight
:Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth....

The rainbow kept its poetic and symbolic meaning through the American nineteenth century, as in this line from a Negro spiritual

God gave Noah the rainbow sign
It won't be the water but the fire next time

And the rainbow has gotten into the lyrics of 20th Century popular song, in America:

I've got the world on a string,
Sittin' on a rainbow,
Got the string around my finger...

and

Somewhere, over the rainbow
Way up high
There's a land that i've heard of
Once in a lullabye

and has given us a charming song, L'Arc en ciel, by Ka'ssav the important Martinique zook band of the 70s and 80s, whose lyrics, in Caribbean French, I don't remember well and don't have handy.

Keats was obviously speaking for himself

yrs
 

Mary Bull

New member
John Keats (1795-1821) Was Not Silly

Ben, I know and appreciate all that you quote of poetry and popular music and the rainbow, and I have known the 19th century lines for well over three-quarters of my lifetime.

I disagree only with your characterizing Keats as "silly." He was young and romantic, but very serious about his art and very accomplished in it.

The quote about "unweaving the rainbow" is not from "Ode on a Grecian Urn."

The statement which I quoted is the statement which Keats put in quotation marks in the last lines of that great poem,
-- " 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.' " --
which have been the subject of critical discussion as to whether these lines expressed Keats's personal philosophy.

"Unweave a rainbow" is from his long poem, "Lamia." And it could very well be that he did regard scientific understanding of light as taking some of the romance and wonder out of experiencing a rainbow.

For me, it does not. It, rather, enhances it, and I am so pleased to catch the sunlight and throw the rainbow spectrum on my wall, with a prism hanging near my south-facing window.

Please let us not any more call one of the great English Romantic Poets "silly."

Mary
 

Ben Lifson

New member
Asher and the Rainbow

Oh, Asher! Do you really believe that Newton took all the poetry out of the Rainbow forever, despite George MacDonald's The Golden Key? Or Frank Gohlke's beautiful little picture of the Swiss rainbow (cover of his Chicago Museum of Contemporary Photography catalog)?

yrs

ben
 

Ben Lifson

New member
Silly Keats

He wasn't a god. He was one hell of a smart man and a great poet but he was just a human being and his passion for Fanny Brawn had some silliness about it. It's always sad to see a smart man chasing a woman who won't respond to him,

"A proud woman," as Yeats wrote, "not kindred to his soul"

and the smarter he is the sillier the pursuit of the dream.

As for Yeats, wasn't it Maud Gonne, his Fanny Brawn, who used to refer to him as Silly Billy Yeats?

I kind of like her for that. It's so refreshing, in contrast to his liking her to Helen of Troy in the poem No Second Troy

"Was there another Troy for her to burn.?"

And wasn't it Auden who wrote of him, in fact, to him, or to his soul, in the first line of Part II of his elegy In Memory of W. B. Yeats (d. January 1939)

You were silly like us: your gift survived it all;
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself...

"Like us" surely has two meanings: "Like us human beings," and "Like us poets." And as Auden is speaking for poets in this poem do we know that he would have excluded Keats from the charge of silliness?

Poets, even great poets, even poets as great as Keats aren't saints, the things we say abouat them do not have to be fragments of a hagiography.

yrs

ben

www.benlifson.com
 

Mary Bull

New member
Young, Romantic, Passionate, and Compassionate Keats

I do not take my view of Keats from anything except my own reading of his letters and his poems. And the contemporary sources about him that I have read quoted in biographies of him--but I don't necessarily subscribe to the opinions of his contemporaries or the opinions of later poets and critics about him.

I read him for myself, and I reiterate, "He was not silly."

Fanny Brawne was a young teenager who actually matured in her relationship to Keats, in the view I take of her. Keats knew that it was in her best interest not to take their relationship where he longed to have it--he knew after that fatal Scottish walk and Tom's death--Keats nursed Tom during Tom's last illness--that he was in all probability going to die of tuberculosis, also.

His training in medicine was as good as the times afforded. He knew, almost certainly, that he was going to die, and he protected Fanny from the worst consequences, in that day and age, of being a young widow.

He was a young, romantic poet, and he was not silly.

Although Yeats and Auden sometimes were.

Mary
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Ben Lifson said:
Oh, Asher! Do you really believe that Newton took all the poetry out of the Rainbow forever, despite George MacDonald's The Golden Key? Or Frank Gohlke's beautiful little picture of the Swiss rainbow (cover of his Chicago Museum of Contemporary Photography catalog)?

yrs

Ben,

My question, was "and I?" was intended as a pointed quip and here is context
Asher Kelman said:
Ben Lifson said:
Keats was obviously speaking for himself

and I?

The meaning in my quick humor was not clear, I can see!

I intended by, "and I?" to imply the apparent bypassing of everything except poetry posts.

I was hinting that my own answers to "What art means for me" were never aknowledged. The fascinating and extensive discussion of both Wordsworth's and Keat's poetic speech took most all the attention. My own speech is, perhaps more ordinary. Nevertheless, my thoughts are carefully assembled and I posit, more relevent to Guy Tal's question, "What art means to you?"

I now need a drink! It's two early for Bordeaux wine, sorry Nicolas, so we're in U.K. mode. I'm going to prepare more English tea, "PG Tips", a blend of the finest Assam, Ceylon and Kenyan teas. In this tea, only the top two leaves are used! I will now clear my mind and start the careful brewing process!

Cheers! (Yes, Ray, I can still use that salutation, "Old Chap"!

Asher
 

Ben Lifson

New member
Mary and Silly Junkets

I stand corrected. He wasn't ever silly.

For that alone he would have gotten into the Dictionary of National Biography and the Guinness Book of Records even if he hadn't written that little poem about the Mermaid Tavern, "Souls of poets dead and gone" or something like that.

Anyone who could write that poem was a great poet. That's not a silly poem.

Far from it.

Nor is his mistake about Stout Cortez silly, it's just a mistake.

yrs

ben

www.benlifson.com
 

Mary Bull

New member
Keats's criteria for the making of poetry--and art?

Exactly, Ben, although I detect a faint whiff of sarcasm in your citations.

Keats was playful. He did know how to play, and he is on record as loving claret.

As to "stout Cortez," I concede the deficiencies of Keats's education in the fields of literature and history. His guardian pulled him out of school at the equivalent of U.S. grade 8, and apprenticed him to be an apothecary and a surgeon.

Ben, should we be over in a daughter thread in the Layback Cafe?

Although, I was thinking of seeing how Keats's criteria for making poetry would transpose as criteria for making pictures. He wrote them, early on, to his publisher:

1) Poetry should surprise by a fine excess. There should be plenty going on it, figure-ground relationships and complex figure-ground relationships, beauties of form, small unexpected pleasures waiting to be discovered.

2) Poetry should not overwhelm the reader. There should be a continuum, leading the reader in and onward with an arc (to use Asher's word) of beginning, climax, and completion.

3) If poetry does not come as naturally as the leaves to the trees, it had better not come at all.

In the making of pictures, should we not feel a sense of recognition when we have made one that satisfies ourselves, and should not the viewer feel a sense of recognition, as if he could enter the scene, when the scene is representational, or as if he is at home in the abstract forms, when the forms are abstract?

In other words, should the making of pictures and viewing of pictures not come as naturally as the leaves to the trees?

I'm just speculating here, Ben, and I hope you will give my thought unsarcastic consideration, and tell me seriously whether this transposition--in your view--would work or not.

Mary
 
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Ben Lifson

New member
Keats and Ut Pictor Poesis

Mary,

!. ....There should be plenty going on [poetry], figure-ground relationships and complex figure-ground relationships, beauties of form, small unexpected pleasures waiting to be discovered.

Same for pictures. Figure-ground relationships and complex-figure ground relationships are among the chief means that a picture (even an abstract picture) creates the feeling of deep space, for the depend in large part on planes appearing to be either in front of or behind other planes.

Eugene Atget was a master of figure-ground relationships. Paul Strand was very good at them.

Beauties of form? Of course, throughout.

Unexpected pleasures: again of course. To see how Charles Negre, in about 1852, made a complex figure group out of four large umbrella trees on a plain outside of Cannes, each tree being many yards away from the trees to either side of it is a pleasure, but when one sees that it's actually a five-tree group, the fifth being very small because tens of yards in the background yet still joined visually to the fourth tree to the right is a sudden, unexpected and delightful surprise, revealing unsuspected possibilities of form in an un-prepossessing landscape and unexpected aspects of Negre's virtuosity.

A similar surprise occurs in a Garry Winogrand photograph when one discovered that a figure group of three figures -- one tall blonde woman in a white sheath dress with miniskirt and two men about 8 feet behind her and ogling her -- is instead a five-figure group, the additional two figures being in deep shadow tens of yards behind the woman in the white dress and connected to her by three or four strands of her blonde hair blowing out to the left of the photograph by the wind.

2) Poetry should not overwhelm the reader. There should be a continuum, leading the reader in and onward with an arc (to use Asher's word) of beginning, climax, and completion.

Yes again. Garish, sensation, over-stated photographs pale and cloy quickly. Most of William Klein's pictures are examples of this, as are most of Sally Mann's and Nan Goldin's. "Popper art" some people call it, after popper drugs, a whiff, a rush, a high, a comedown, in quick succession.
Yes to climax and completion. In a complex picture, e.g. many by Cartier'Bresson, there are several stories being told at once, a story about line, about form, about gesture, about darks and lights, each one coming to a climax but at different places in the picture. This makes not only for completion but for drama and a series of climaxes each with its own emotional impact but each impact different so that the picture inspires and holds in equilibrium several dissimilar and even contradictory emotions at once.

Contradictory emotions: the terror and pity of Othello's murder of Desdemona and the beauty and pleasure of the verse.

3) If poetry does not come as naturally as the leaves to the trees, it had better not come at all.

And you ask:

In other words, should the making of pictures and viewing of pictures not come as naturally as the leaves to the trees?


I don't know. I don't think so. Picasso struggled hard and long over his portrait of Gertrude Stein -- tens of sittings and he couldn't get the head and face right until he saw an exhibition of ancient Iberian sculpture. He was often very quick, mind you, and highly prolific, which gave him a reputation of having great facility. Late in his career this began to be held against him in reviews and articles...As though his facility made him and his work facile. It stung him once and he shouted, "What facility? What are they talking about? You know that green and black striped blouse in that portrait of Jacqueline? It took me four months of painting it in and scraping it out and painting it in and scraping it out to get it right. Four months! Where's my facility?"

Proust worked how many years on A la recherche du temps perdu? And was revising up to the his death?

Pope took the Essay on Man (or was it the Essay on Criticism) through 17 revisions, the sixteenth in the carriage on the way to the printer's and the seventeenth while the typesetter was setting type. And we all know the story of The Dunciad.l

Thomas Mann started The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man early in his career, wrote a certain number of chapters and knew that he didn't have the skill or knowledge to go on so he put the manuscript away. He took it out again very late in life and finished it -- the last book he finished, I think.

When I was a young small camera (35mm, 6x9 cm) photographer in the days of film, most of the photographers I knew, both young and masters, knew that four to six hours' photographing a day, shooting at least six or seven 36-exposure rolls of film a day, was minimum practice and we didn't expect very much from any of those c. 200 pictures/day. We were glad at that rate to net 12-20 good photographs a year.

Robert Frank's The Americans, c. 84 pictures, came from something like 750 rolls of film, which we all considered an amazingly high yield.

Then there are amazing periods. When Walker Evans was working for the FSA in 1936 it was, said John Szarkowski, former Director of the Photography Department, Museum of Modern Art, "as though all he had to do was walk out of his hotel room every morning and there were pictures everywhere." (For Szarkowski's exact words, see the PBS film Walker Evans, America, which I wrote.)

And Eugene Atget seems never to have made a bad photograph in his life -- but of course we haven't seen them all, he made thousands.

How long did it take Milton to write Paradise Lost? But Keats is right about the appearance of ease. The War in Heaven section of Paradise Lost reads like the work of a man who has lost interest in either his theme or his verse, or is tired, very tired. I asked a Milton scholar about this, who said that scholarship to date (this was 1993) points to the composition of this section late in the composition of the poem. If so, no wonder it reads like the work of a tired poet.

It's the appearance of ease that counts. In the very, very good Manet of the woman in the pink peignoir, with a parrot on a stand next to her, the neck to floor peignoir looks to have been painted very quickly -- thin paint (a lot of white beneath it), wide fast-looking brush strokes, overlapping hapazard-looking brush strokes as though the paint had been slapped on. But the brush strokes also make a beautiful composition of their own within the peignoir's contours and the management of pink over white and white breaking through pink is both virtuosic and thrilling, so it may have taken a very, very long time to paint so that it merely looked haphazard.

You know, in 17th-century portraits, especially Netherlandish ones, those high ruffled collars and all that lace? Very intricate, yes? They look so intricate, so detailed, as though they took a very long time. Well they would take us a very long time. But in many cases they weren't painted by the painter himself Ruff collar and lace experts came in and painted them, very, very quicklly. They had the method worked out to a formula... they were specialists. Why should the master sweat to do it when a specialist could do it quickly and make it appear intricate?

So it's hard to say. The appearance of ease, yes. But that's where the composition comes in, too, which assists in the sense of flow...

The appearance of ease in good and great photographs is part of what makes people think that no effort or special skill went into making them.

But we do know that Cartier-Bresson would sometimes wait for half an hour or more for the right person or thing to come into a street or a courtyard to complete the composition that was only almost there. The decisive moment had nothing to do with anything like a story or drama or human behavior, it was always about the moment when the composition came into being, the moment that decided the composition.

As for the viewing of pictures, it is very difficult at first. Like taking pictures, it requires hours and hours a week if not hours and hours a day. One must only look, not read. Months and Months, even Years, must be devoted to this, just as an undergraduate, you had to devote many years to learning how to read a poem. Then, suddenly, it becomes much easier.

In the Metropolitan Museum one day, after many months of going there every day and struggling to learn how to look at a picture and other works of art, I was walking briskly to get to some gallery, Dutch, I think, and passed a big Italian Renaissance painting, The Blinding of Samson. Huge. I glanced at it and said to myself "The only good thing in that painting is the figure in the top right corner" and walked on. Then I stopped and said, "How can you say a thing like that after just a glance?" So I went back and looked It was a dull, dry, academic, formulaic painting, everything predictable, the light falling just right, the diagonals just right, the musculature just right...And the only thing that had that "unsuspected pleasure waiting to be discovered" was that incidental figure in the top right corner I can take you there and show it to you and show you exactly why it stands out from all the other figures.

Does this begin to answer your questions?

yrs in good faith

ben

www.benlifson.com
 

Kevin Bjorke

New member
Guercino:

guercino-samson.jpg


(Not to be confused with Rembrandt's painting of the same story, which Degas declared boring)
 
Hi Guy,

I have not read the thread yet and plan on doing that in the next couple hours as it is a subject that interests me.

Guy Tal said:
... Ben Lifson actually attempted to define what "art" means to them.

How about we each take a crack at it? It may help the discussion to know how others perceive the concept and where they're coming from.

...

Art to me is the deliberate expression of an impression.
I tend to go for a fairly simple definition.

Art is Expression.

Short, simple, and open to interpretation. If it expresses nothing to a viewer, then it is not art for that viewer. A novel can be art or a collection of words. A painting can be art or just boring blobs of paint on a surface. A mathematical proof can be art or simply a chain of logic. I have seen one mathematical proof that was so beautiful in its simplicity that it is art.


Guy Tal said:
To me art is not about the process or the tools or the skill or the subject. Art is about one thing - the artist's intent.

To that extent the question "can monkeys create art?" is a very different one from "can monkeys create something that may be perceived as art?".
And what was the monkeys intent? Did it express something the monkey felt? Or did the monkey simply want the treat or praise for doing as it was told? Was the viewer even capable of understanding the monkeys intent?

In my view monkeys can create art for some viewers. The question is whether it expresses something to the viewer.


Guy Tal said:
.

This is especially true for abstract art where by definition something is omitted, or left absent - entrusted to the viewer to fill in with meaning (some might say this is true of all art but that's another discussion).
I disagree. Abstract art is something where the totality of the work fails to craft an explicit correlation to reality while still expressing something. i.e.,

SPD52854.jpg



Carefully composed to not leave any idea what is seen and just leave
ine, shape, and texture with just a hidden hint of reality
(note the splash of green grass behind the sculpture).

While impressionistic works leave it to the viewer to fill in the details while nonetheless leaving a clear impression of the subject. i.e.,

SPE29853_RSE_01.jpg


1/2 sec. @ f/13 or some such as I was bored on a cloudy grey day
and needed to explore something different.

In other terms more related to social reality an abstract will often elicit the following reaction:
I like it, but what in the world is it?
And that lack of comprehension of the subject signifies abstraction.

Whereas an impressionistic image clearly evokes in the viewer the reality of what they are seeing even if it the image is not realistic.

enjoy,

Sean
 
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Cem Usakligil said:
How about a slightly different definition: "art is the deliberate expression of an intention"?

Why does expression require intent to be art? Some of the most artful expression I have scene were mother natures rendering of physical principles. What was the intent? Was there an intent?

enjoy,

Sean
 

Cem_Usakligil

Well-known member
Sean DeMerchant said:
Why does expression require intent to be art? Some of the most artful expression I have scene were mother natures rendering of physical principles. What was the intent? Was there an intent?

enjoy,

Sean
Hi Sean,

In my opinion, simply because of the reason you have stated. If there was no intent, then all the great wonders of nature would have to be classified as art too. If we do that, we can then simply cease the discussion since ALL then will be art. I think that there are some (religious) beliefs that think along those lines.

Regards,

Cem
 
Cem Usakligil said:
In my opinion, simply because of the reason you have stated. If there was no intent, then all the great wonders of nature would have to be classified as art too. If we do that, we can then simply cease the discussion since ALL then will be art.

Ah, but not that mother nature does evokes art in the viewer. But the way the tide washes a strand of kelp upon the shore with the the slow outflowing of water gently setting down the kelp in smooth balanced curves that I have never been able to achieve placing itself is art. This art stems from the smooth diffusion of force into the gently outflowing water, but the smoothness of it communicates/expresses the both the beauty and power of nature to me.

So stepping back to Art is Expression I am left with the conclusion that is it Art (with a capitol A). <silly grin> Stepping back to Asher's Arc of Intent and implementation I can see both there albeit neither are conscious.

In other terms I love to photograph mushrooms. The vast majority lack artful placement. On private land* I have no qualms about reworking the environment to make their placement artful if I can. Often times I fail at making their placement artful. In this process I use my hands and my boke scissors**.

Another example is looking at new fallen snow and the pristine beauty of the world which I cannot call less than Art. Where is the intent? Yet I still see and feel the beauty of the result.

enjoy,

Sean



* On public land I try to leave no trace and limit my impact to that of a deer walking through unless the rules ask more respect of me.


** My boke scissors are used to remove unnecessary or OoF elements that hurt a composition when using my hands and pulling would ruin the composition.
 
Ben Lifson said:
Do you not think that art is about and/or affects the feelings?.

...

--the reason we pity both these evil brutal corrupt characters is that they are beautifully drawn.

We can't care for a character in art, whether painting or novel or film or short story or ballet, unless he or she is beautifully drawn, becomes a beautiful form.

I disagree. I love to capture beauty in my images and want all my images to evoke flattering feelings of the subject with few exceptions. But stepping back to the novel (I have viewed millions of photos and only read a mere five or ten thousand novels at age 33), the thing that makes a character real and draws us in to them is not beauty. What paints a character as real is writing that evokes sympathetic feeling for them. We have their emotions painted before our eyes so that we feel with them regardless of the decenct or atrocious behavior they display. And it is that tie in with our emotions that completes the expression of their personality making them feel real.

In other terms I would say their feelings and behaviors are beautifully drawn while they themselves may be atrociously drawn (i.e., sad, selfish, little, vindictive souls).

ever the language lawyer, <smile>

Sean
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Sean,

What you may observe that you like, may just be beauty! Much of art is beautiful. Beauty and truth are insuffucient for art. The art we talk about is the art of humans, not the art of the gods or birds in a mating dance. Art is something more. Art has intent. Art is made. A snowstorm and sand dunes happen.

They all may be beautiful, memorable and worth revisiting, but there are no messages written in the sands or in the snow.

Art made by man encodes our ideas and thoughts, conscious and unconscious. The choices we make in art depend on everything that makes modern man, genetics, experience, education and training.

Art needs intent, thought and implementation to some form that can be sensed and then the feelings, emotions, meanings, significence and call to action may follow in a cascade when the the art is experienced.

Beauty is not required for art, only an expectation by those who explore art for some reward to the senses and the mind. It is toward fulfilling such expectation that art if made.

Asher
 

Mary Bull

New member
Ben Lifson said:
Mary,

!. ....There should be plenty going on [poetry], figure-ground relationships and complex figure-ground relationships, beauties of form, small unexpected pleasures waiting to be discovered. [Ben quoting Mary, who was paraphrasing Keats]

Same for pictures. Figure-ground relationships and complex-figure ground relationships are among the chief means that a picture (even an abstract picture) creates the feeling of deep space, for the depend in large part on planes appearing to be either in front of or behind other planes.
Thanks for confirming my intuition.
Beauties of form? Of course, throughout.
Unexpected pleasures: again of course.
As for me in this fine essay you've written here.
To see how Charles Negre, in about 1852, made a complex figure group out of four large umbrella trees on a plain outside of Cannes, each tree being many yards away from the trees to either side of it is a pleasure, but when one sees that it's actually a five-tree group, the fifth being very small because tens of yards in the background yet still joined visually to the fourth tree to the right is a sudden, unexpected and delightful surprise, revealing unsuspected possibilities of form in an un-prepossessing landscape and unexpected aspects of Negre's virtuosity.

A similar surprise occurs in a Garry Winogrand photograph ...
I'll try to see if I can find and view these.
Poetry should not overwhelm the reader. There should be a continuum, leading the reader in and onward with an arc (to use Asher's word) of beginning, climax, and completion. [Ben quoting Mary, who was once more doing a loose paraphrase of Keats.]

Yes again. Garish, sensation, over-stated photographs pale and cloy quickly. Most of William Klein's pictures are examples of this, as are most of Sally Mann's and Nan Goldin's. "Popper art" some people call it, after popper drugs, a whiff, a rush, a high, a comedown, in quick succession.
Yes to climax and completion. In a complex picture, e.g. many by Cartier'Bresson, there are several stories being told at once, a story about line, about form, about gesture, about darks and lights, each one coming to a climax but at different places in the picture. This makes not only for completion but for drama and a series of climaxes each with its own emotional impact but each impact different so that the picture inspires and holds in equilibrium several dissimilar and even contradictory emotions at once.
What you say here brings me home with a sense of immediate recognition.
Contradictory emotions: the terror and pity of Othello's murder of Desdemona and the beauty and pleasure of the verse.
And lasting--the experience captured by the poet-playwright for all time, to await each new person's encounter with it, and the pleasure of each returning reader (or attendee at a performance, be it stage play or film).
3) If poetry does not come as naturally as the leaves to the trees, it had better not come at all. [Ben quoting Mary, who was quoting directly from Keats's letter to his publisher.]

And you ask:

In other words, should the making of pictures and viewing of pictures not come as naturally as the leaves to the trees? [Ben quoting Mary]

I don't know. I don't think so. Picasso struggled hard and long over his portrait of Gertrude Stein ... He was often very quick, mind you, and highly prolific, which gave him a reputation of having great facility. Late in his career this began to be held against him in reviews and articles...As though his facility made him and his work facile. It stung him once and he shouted, "What facility? ...It took me four months ... Four months! Where's my facility?"
Keats also revised, and worked a long time on, for example, *Endymion*, as you know. So I think his meaning was more to "doing it with the appearance of ease," which you address below. But I don't know that for sure.
Proust ...
... Pope ...
... Thomas Mann ...
Yes.
When I was a young small camera (35mm, 6x9 cm) photographer in the days of film, most of the photographers I knew, both young and masters, knew that four to six hours' photographing a day, shooting at least six or seven 36-exposure rolls of film a day, was minimum practice and we didn't expect very much from any of those c. 200 pictures/day. We were glad at that rate to net 12-20 good photographs a year.

Robert Frank's The Americans, c. 84 pictures, came from something like 750 rolls of film, which we all considered an amazingly high yield.
Astonishing. I had no idea of this before you told me.
Then there are amazing periods. When Walker Evans was working for the FSA in 1936 it was, said John Szarkowski, former Director of the Photography Department, Museum of Modern Art, "as though all he had to do was walk out of his hotel room every morning and there were pictures everywhere." (For Szarkowski's exact words, see the PBS film Walker Evans, America, which I wrote.)
I am going to order a copy immediately, if it's still offered at Shop PBS, since I missed seeing it. I do have *Let Us Now Praise Famous Men*--was re-reading it just last month.
And Eugene Atget seems never to have made a bad photograph in his life -- but of course we haven't seen them all, he made thousands.
Apt comment.
How long did it take Milton to write Paradise Lost? But Keats is right about the appearance of ease. The War in Heaven section of Paradise Lost reads like the work of a man who has lost interest in either his theme or his verse, or is tired, very tired. I asked a Milton scholar about this, who said that scholarship to date (this was 1993) points to the composition of this section late in the composition of the poem. If so, no wonder it reads like the work of a tired poet.
No wonder, indeed.
It's the appearance of ease that counts.
That's what my horn teacher stressed to me when I began to take private lessons from her to polish up my disused skills late in my life. (I was 67 years old, and that was 12 years ago.)
In the very, very good Manet of the woman in the pink peignoir, with a parrot on a stand next to her, the neck to floor peignoir looks to have been painted very quickly -- thin paint (a lot of white beneath it), wide fast-looking brush strokes, overlapping hapazard-looking brush strokes as though the paint had been slapped on. But the brush strokes also make a beautiful composition of their own within the peignoir's contours and the management of pink over white and white breaking through pink is both virtuosic and thrilling, so it may have taken a very, very long time to paint so that it merely looked haphazard.
Appearance of ease. Yes.
You know, in 17th-century portraits, especially Netherlandish ones, those high ruffled collars and all that lace? Very intricate, yes? They look so intricate, so detailed, as though they took a very long time. Well they would take us a very long time. But in many cases they weren't painted by the painter himself Ruff collar and lace experts came in and painted them, very, very quicklly. They had the method worked out to a formula... they were specialists. Why should the master sweat to do it when a specialist could do it quickly and make it appear intricate?
I didn't know this, at least, not about detailed sections like the ruff collar and lace.
So it's hard to say. The appearance of ease, yes. But that's where the composition comes in, too, which assists in the sense of flow...

The appearance of ease in good and great photographs is part of what makes people think that no effort or special skill went into making them.

But we do know that Cartier-Bresson would sometimes wait for half an hour or more for the right person or thing to come into a street or a courtyard to complete the composition that was only almost there. The decisive moment had nothing to do with anything like a story or drama or human behavior, it was always about the moment when the composition came into being, the moment that decided the composition.
Some photographers who are showing very fine images here at OPF also describe this necessary waiting. Following the footsteps of the acknowledged masters?
As for the viewing of pictures, it is very difficult at first. Like taking pictures, it requires hours and hours a week if not hours and hours a day. One must only look, not read. Months and Months, even Years, must be devoted to this, just as an undergraduate, you had to devote many years to learning how to read a poem. Then, suddenly, it becomes much easier.
Indeed.
In the Metropolitan Museum one day, after many months of going there every day and struggling to learn how to look at a picture and other works of art, I was walking briskly to get to some gallery, Dutch, I think, and passed a big Italian Renaissance painting, The Blinding of Samson. Huge. I glanced at it and said to myself "The only good thing in that painting is the figure in the top right corner" and walked on. Then I stopped and said, "How can you say a thing like that after just a glance?" So I went back and looked It was a dull, dry, academic, formulaic painting, everything predictable, the light falling just right, the diagonals just right, the musculature just right...And the only thing that had that "unsuspected pleasure waiting to be discovered" was that incidental figure in the top right corner I can take you there and show it to you and show you exactly why it stands out from all the other figures.
I wish. I am not likely to be in New York any time soon, more's the pity.
Does this begin to answer your questions?
Abundantly. Thank you so very much.
yrs in good faith
To which good faith I respond with pleasure, sincerity, and gratitude.

Mary
 

Cem_Usakligil

Well-known member
Sean DeMerchant said:
...In other terms I love to photograph mushrooms. The vast majority lack artful placement. On private land* I have no qualms about reworking the environment to make their placement artful if I can. Often times I fail at making their placement artful. In this process I use my hands and my boke scissors**.

Another example is looking at new fallen snow and the pristine beauty of the world which I cannot call less than Art. Where is the intent? Yet I still see and feel the beauty of the result.
....

* On public land I try to leave no trace and limit my impact to that of a deer walking through unless the rules ask more respect of me.

** My boke scissors are used to remove unnecessary or OoF elements that hurt a composition when using my hands and pulling would ruin the composition.
Hi Sean,

The intent is in your head, when you decide what you see is worth seeing and when you set out to photographing it. You then make many decision re. the camera, lens, lighting, composition, which bits to tidy up using boke scissors, etc. All these actions result from your intent towards capturing this natural "beauty" and sharing it with others as well.

As has been discussed before, one of the aspects with which everybody so far seems to be agreeing, is that the beauty of the art has nothing to do with the beauty of the subjects pictured therein. One can picture the most hideous sights (such as the naked little girl during the Vietnam war, Kim Phuc) and still make art out of it. Again, it is the intent that makes the difference, IMO.

Cheers,

Cem
 

Ben Lifson

New member
For Mary: Beethoven & the Appearance of Ease

Mary,

Beethoven's Opus 18, six string quartets, is based on, in the same keys as and is an homage to Mozart's Six String Quartets Dedicated to Haydn, which in turn is based on, in the same keys as and is an homate to Haydn's six Russian Quartets.

When it came time to compose the fifth quartet with its great cello theme and variations movement based on Mozart's formidable fifth quartet with its great cello theme and variations movement Beethove felt the need to know the Mozart score as intimately and in as much detail as possible.

So he began to study his copy of the Mozart score as he had for the previous five quartets but soon found this method unsuited to his purpose. His copy was covered with his previous notes and he didn't want to follow his earlier responses to the music. He wanted to follow the development of Mozart's music idea by idea, form by form, note by note and decsision by decision.

So he bought a new score and began to study it but quickly found this method unsuitalbe too.

He could read the score at performance speed, hear the music as though it were being played. But he wanted to hear the piece as it was being built up in Mozart's imagination, note by note, etc.

So he copied the entire score onto fresh music paper. In this way he could hear each note as it formed under his pen on the page and hear the piece taking shape and analyze its structure and observe its individual forms appearing, being varied, disappearing, rea-appearing in different guises, etc.

When he finished he wrote his own great fifth quartet.

Which has all the elegance and ease of the other five quartets in the group.

yrs

ben

www.benlifson.com
 

Ben Lifson

New member
For Mary: Paul Strand, Yeats and the Appearance of Ease

Mary,

I knew a photographer my age who, as a young photographer in his twenties, had been Paul Strand's darkroom assistant.

At that time, Strand was ill and frequently confined to his bed so it was the young photographer, already a master printer, who made the prints, going back and forth between the darkroom and Strand's sick bed, receiving and following Strand's detailed instructions.

He told me that Strand would sometimes reject as many as a hundred prints or a few more before he would approve of a print and have the edition printed.

A hundred or more.

You surely know the lines from Yeats' 1904 "Adam's Curse,"

I said, ,'A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstiching has been nought...'

It's the same,, in its own way, with making pictures & it's the same, in its own way, with looking at them.

yrs,

ben

www.benlifson.com
 

Kevin Bjorke

New member
I was going to suggest Wittgenstein's notion that reductive definitions often break down because they only approximate meaning -- one gets a 'family' of definitions that overlap but do not exactly cover all possibilities. His famous treatise on this uses varying definitions of 'game.' This is also much-covered in Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.

Is it art before we make it? Must we see it before we make it? Is it art only after it has been received? By us, by someone else? Is it art when not being viewed? Is it art when copied? How imperfectly? When does it become art, when does it become not-art? Is art simply what's left when all non-art is eliminated?
RandRG.jpg
I feel that ironically, much of art comes for our struggles against mediacy - the covering up of real things (including feelings and impressions) by words. Only a fraction of what we really think and perceive can be directly expressed by single words. We seek to see and feel and say more. Hence dance, cooking, visual art, poetry.

And why I like 'art is the revelation of the individuality of things' (which was one of the possible definitions of 'art' rejected by Henry Rankin Poore, many years ago).

I found that someone else has already done some of the legwork in the 'Wittgenstein family resemblance' department regarding attempts to define 'Art' (not surprising) - check out this url for some references.

(Getting farther, Lakoff's theories try to reconcile some of the seeming contradictions between Wittgenstein's notions and essentialism by reminding us that we all are consciousnesses embodied specifically in the sorts of mammals that we are required to be)
 

Mary Bull

New member
Everybody is not so far agreeing--when "everybody" includes Mary

Cem Usakligil said:
Hi Sean,
... As has been discussed before, one of the aspects with which everybody so far seems to be agreeing, is that the beauty of the art has nothing to do with the beauty of the subjects pictured therein. ...
Then I am not included in the meaning of the word "everybody."

Cem, the jury is still out for me on what we are to take the word "beauty" to mean in this discussion--I am inclined to accept what Dierk posted to me: that the word "beauty" here in this thread is best taken in its everyday meaning of "prettyness" and "appeal."

That's on the subjective half of Dierk's expertly done dissection of the entangled attempts to define Art in this thread.

http://www.openphotographyforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1458&page=4

Dierk points out the two kinds of definitions:

1) Objective definition
2) Subjective definition

I really do think he is right, and that I cannot "stretch" the meaning of the word "beauty" to encompass whatever ideas I may have of how I experience what I think of as art. I cannot stretch it to encompass "this depiction of an ugly subject" is art (as I think of art) and QED "this depiction of an ugly subject" is beautiful.

I think in this discussion we should reserve the word "beauty" to be used as Ray West and Daniel Harrison use it.

I think we have to find another term for what we experience when we see a well-done "depiction of an ugly subject."
One can picture the most hideous sights (such as the naked little girl during the Vietnam war, Kim Phuc) and still make art out of it. Again, it is the intent that makes the difference, IMO.
The intent may make the difference.

But the intent does not make what comes to our eyes, when we see this hideous image, a thing of beauty. Not even if we include in the meaning of "eyes" our "inner eye."

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever." --John Keats.

The ugly sights of the Vietnam War (and such photos of ugliness from all wars) are, conversely, things of pain.

Mary
 

Mary Bull

New member
For Ben: Paul Strand, Yeats and the Appearance of Ease

I do know that you are right about this.

I appreciate very much the anecdote about Paul Strand and also the reminder of Yeats's fine and true lines.

Mary
 

Mary Bull

New member
For Ben: Beethoven & the Appearance of Ease

I did not know this story before you told it to me. And I have three very fine biographies of Beethoven on my library shelves in this house.

Thank you so very much. This is so like Beethoven, as I conceive him in my imagination, and it will enrich my hearing of all of these string quartets in the future.

I have CDs of a couple of different groups performing the Mozart, one group of the Haydn, but I do not have all the Beethoven string quartets in performance on CD. So, once again, our conversation sends me off to Amazon.com.

Thanks a mil for this wonderful exchange with you yesterday and today.

Mary
 

Mary Bull

New member
Mary does not say that Goya's Saturn is artless, because she does not believe that

Kevin Bjorke said:
So Mary you say this is artless? Or do I misunderstand your statement?
You did misunderstand my statement, Kevin. Thank you for asking.

I said that "ugliness beautifully depicted" does not equate to "beauty" as I think we should be using the word in this thread.

The image you post here is not artless. Indeed, it is great Art.

I demur that we should call it beautiful. I posited that we should find another term for what images like this picture are.

Maybe great art is enough of a characterization to suffice.
Goya-Saturn.jpg


(What was the line? 'Ugliness beautifully depicted'?)
That's the line, or a paraphrase of it. But it's out of context. What I said was:
Quote Mary:
I really do think he [Dierk] is right, and that I cannot "stretch" the meaning of the word "beauty" to encompass whatever ideas I may have of how I experience what I think of as art. I cannot stretch it to encompass "this depiction of an ugly subject" is art (as I think of art) and QED "this depiction of an ugly subject" is beautiful.

I think in this discussion we should reserve the word "beauty" to be used as Ray West and Daniel Harrison use it.

I think we have to find another term for what we experience when we see a well-done "depiction of an ugly subject."
I do think of this painting of Saturn by Goya as art, and as great art.

Although I could, in the past, think of it as beautiful, I can no longer use that word for my reaction to it. It is powerful and moving. The colors and forms are beautiful to me, in the sense that they appeal to me.

For the purpose of keeping the discussion of definitions of art here unmuddled, I think we should forego calling this painting beautiful.

Sad but true. I am evolving and trying to attain to a more precise vocabulary.

Mary
 

Ben Lifson

New member
Subject, Form and Beauty

The Goya is not beautiful because of the subject

Therefore, Rubens' Raising of the Cross in which a big wooden cross is being raised up with a man nailed to it hand and feet, with his face twisted in pain, is not beautiufl.

All the numerous Crucifixions with that same man hanging in pain, his left side bleeding from where a soldier stabbed him with a spear, his forehead bleeding from where a crown of thorns pierces the skin, his hands and feet bleeding around the nails that pierce them and hold him there, and, as we know, suffering a slow death from sujffocation, are not beautiuf.

And all the Davids and Goliaths, with David holding aloft the trunkated head of Goliath, bloody and torn at the neck, are not beautiful.

And Caravaggio's Judith and Holoferness, with Holoferness's half-severed neck spurting blood from the arteries Judihs sword, still driving downwards, has already severed, while the hard erect nipples of Judiths breasts press in excitement with the combination of sex and murder, against the white bodice of her dress is not beautiful.

And Hiernonmys Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, with its distorted charcacters and monstrous goings on is not beautiful, nor is Brueghel's Triumph of Death, with its monstrous slaughter.

And all those enormous 17thC battle paintings with blood, gore and coprses all over the place are not beautiful.

And Delacroix's The Death of Sardanapalus, with the bored monarch watching his servants slaughter all his concubines and horses and other servants before he himself committs suicide -- for he will not die leaving the rest of his court die, everyone must die with him (an obscure mid-eastern legend) -- a picture of sadism -- is not beautiful.

And Poussin's Rape of the Sabine Women with all those Romans taking all those women by force is not beautiuful.

And Poussin's The Plague at Astaroth, with all the Philistines dying from the plague all over the place, and his Death of Germanicus with the poisoned Germanicus lying in bed all brown and decaying from, the poison are not beautiful.

And David's The Death of Marat with Marat lying bleeding in his bath is not beautiful.

And Gericault's oil sketches of cadavres and body parrts in the Paris morgue, full of depictions of dead and decaying flesh, are not beautiful.

And Jacques Callot's prints of the misfortunes of war are not beautiful.

And Goya's Disasters of War are not beautiful.

And King Lear, in which we watch wretchedness in rags suffering in a storm and watch a bastard son order his father to be blinded and then stands on stage watching while his servants do so is not beautiful.

And Othello strangling Desdemona is not beautiful.

And the myriad battlefield deaths in the Iliad are not beautiful.

And Marlowe's Edward II, in which the king is killed by being impaled with a red hot iron is not beautiful.

And Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, in which the Duchess' brothers order the parasite Bosola to bring her "by degrees to mortification" and in the end strangle her -- on stage -- is not beautiful to watch. Cover her face," says one of her brothers, "Mine eyes dazzle. She died young."

And Piranesi's prisons with their instruments of toture and their despairing inmates are not beautiful.

And Zuburan's pictures of martyred saints, e.g. St Agnes (I think) holding a silver platter bearing her two cut-off breasts, and another saint holding a silver plate bearing her two plucked-out eyes are not beautiful.

And Grunewald's Isenheim Altar Piece with its tortured agonized Christ is not beautiful.

And Brueghel's Parable of the Blind Men with its six filthy, diseased, disfigured, mis-shapen, disgusting blind beggars in their filthy rages falling one over the other into a filthy ditch is not beautiful.

And all the paintings of violence and carnage, torture and martyrdom, from say the early Renaissance to the end of the 191th century, including, as I said before, all the Flaggelations of Christ, the Raisings of the Cross and the Crucifixion, all showing the ravaged bleeding intensely suffering man are not beautiful.

Because of their unlovely, unbeautiful, disturbing and ugly subject matter.

If a beautiful subject is the guranatee of a beautiful picture. every issue of every fashion magazine would be full of masterpieces.

yrs

ben

www.benlifson.com
 
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