Tag: art

~ Mark

It’s an odd feature about the way human beings work that there are many things that we’re interested in that we don’t know if it’s acceptable to be interested in them. […] I think that’s the role of many, many art forms–to legitimate certain questions and certain sensitivities.

Alain de Botton in Philosophy Bites. This reminds me of some of Tyler Cowen’s arguments in The Age of the Infovore:

Sociological approaches to cultural taste often imply that taste differences are contrived, artificial, or reflect wasteful status-seeking. The result is that we appreciate taste differences less than we might and we become less curious. Neurological approaches imply that different individuals perceive different cultural mysteries and beauties. You can’t always cross the gap to understand the other person’s point of view, but at the very least you know something is there worth pursuing.

~ Mark

Art is cognitive play. Humans and other intelligent species engage in prolonged periods of physical play as children—mock combat, feats of balance and coordination—in order to train themselves to deal with situations they will face as adults. Art, beginning with the songs of mothers and infants, trains our minds. Cognition is, first and foremost, pattern recognition, and art is concentrated pattern. But humans are also intensely social animals—the source of our evolutionary success—and the life of small human groups, as primate studies suggest (and everyday experience confirms), requires a constant effort of social cognition: eye contact, shared attention, awareness of status hierarchies, sensitivity to what others may be feeling, intending, discovering, believing. That’s where storytelling comes in.

William Deresiewicz in Adaptation: On Literary Darwinism | The Nation, summarizing some arguments in Brian Boyd’s On the Origin of Stories. (via wehr)
~ Mark

The great thing about dead or remote masters is that they can’t refuse you as an apprentice. You can learn whatever you want from them. They left their lesson plans in their work.

Austin Kleon.
~ Mark

As an artist you can sit and tinker with stuff forever. You can add and take away but I think that’s kind of the importance of having someone over you saying, “We need this, this is a deadline.” Sometimes those oppositions or those who push and pull are needed because we’ll just sit and tinker forever.

Andre 3000.
~ Mark

They say you only live once but every time I come to work I feel like I’m starting a second life.

Kanye West on the transformative power of creative endeavors.
~ Mark

People tend to think that creative work is an expression of a preexisting desire or passion, a feeling made manifest, and in a way it is. As if an overwhelming anger, love, pain, or longing fills the artist or composer, as it might with any of us—the difference being that the creative artist then has no choice but to express those feelings through his or her given creative medium. I proposed that more often the work is a kind of tool that discovers and brings to light that emotional muck. Singers (and possibly listeners of music too) when they write or perform a song don’t so much bring to the work already formed emotions, ideas, and feelings as much as they use the act of singing as a device that reproduces and dredges them up.

David Byrne. I was reading Colin Marshall’s thoughts on Bicycle Diaries and remembered this quote from my own write-up.

Damien Hirst prepares to unleash another round of art for buyers – latimes.com

~ Mark

I like this litmus test that Damien Hirst suggests:

If I put a painting outside a bar at closing time, and it’s still there in the morning, it’s a crap painting.

He also suggests the market for art is bigger than you think, even at his prices:

I remember flying into L.A. at a time when my paintings were 20,000 to 50,000 pounds and looking at the swimming pools here and thinking everyone who has a pool can afford one of these. The market is so much bigger than anyone realizes.

I hadn’t thought about it that way. Also, on the idea of masterpieces vs. ubiquity:

You also have to ask yourself as an artist, “What would be more appealing … to have made the Mona Lisa painting itself or have made the merchandising possibilities — putting a postcard on everyone’s walls all over the world?” Both are brilliant, but in a way I would probably prefer the postcards — just to get my art out there.

All this reminds me of one section in Andrew Potter’s The Authenticity Hoax, a part where he writes about Robert Hughes’ criticism of Damien Hirst’s work:

“The idea that there is some special magic attached to Hirst’s work that shoves it into the multi-million-pound realm is ludicrous,” [Hughes] wrote. But there is a special magic attached to Hirst’s work. That magic is the spectacularly successful brand known as Damien Hirst. And for those to whom the brand is successfully markted—hedge fund types, tycoons of all sorts, generally anyone who happens to be cash-rich but taste-poor—it makes his products worth every cent. […] Some people think a Lamborghini is vulgar, and lots of people can afford yachts. But put a Damien Hirst dot painting on your wall and the reaction is, “Wow, isn’t that a Hirst?” The point is, Hirst is not selling art, he’s selling a cure for rich people with severe status anxiety. Judging Hirst’s work by the criteria of technical skill, artistic vision, and emotional resonance is like complaining that the Nike swoosh is just a check mark.

Damien Hirst prepares to unleash another round of art for buyers – latimes.com

Composers As Gardeners – Brian Eno – Edge

~ Mark

The reason I have an a cappella group is because it gives me every Tuesday evening the chance to do some surrendering. Which is, by the way, the reason people go to church, I think, as well. And to art galleries. What you want from those experiences is to be reminded of what it’s like to be taken along by something. To be taken. To be lifted up, to be whatever the other words for transcendence are. And I think we find those experiences in at least four areas. Religion, sex, art, and drugs. […] Essentially they’re all experiments with ourselves in trying to remind ourselves that the controlling talent that we have must be balanced by the surrendering talent that we also have. And so my idea about art as gardening.

More from Brian Eno. (via)

Composers As Gardeners – Brian Eno – Edge

~ Mark

billa:

Reading between the Lines

On September 24th, Gijs Van Vaerenbergh will reveal a construction in the rural landscape, by a cycle route, that’s based on the design of the local church. This ‘church’ consists of 30 tons of steel and 2000 columns, and is built on a fundament of armed concrete. Through the use of horizontal plates, the concept of the traditional church is transformed into a transparent object of art. 

The Decay of Lying – Oscar Wilde

~ Mark

Dang, this is a great essay. If you only know it from the famous “Life imitates Art” bit out of context, you’re missing out on a world of goodness. There’s a million quotable parts. Here’s a few…

I first got sucked in with this (tongue-in-cheek?) bit on Nature.

If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture, and I prefer houses to the open air. In a house we all feel of the proper proportions. Everything is subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure. Egotism itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity, is entirely the result of indoor life. Out of doors one becomes abstract and impersonal. One’s individuality absolutely leaves one.

I wonder about this one:

The more abstract, the more ideal an art is, the more it reveals to us the temper of its age. If we wish to understand a nation by means of its art, let us look at its architecture or its music.

On the change from old-school fiction vs. fiction in Wilde’s time, when novels were really taking off. Still true today?

The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.

And finally to that “Life imitates Art” thing.

Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into existence. At present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects.

Along the same lines…

A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher.

We see lilypads and think of Monet, we see Western landscapes as perfect replicas of an Ansel Adams, we experience love through filters we borrowed from Romeo & Juliet or Casablanca. Reminds me of a bit I quoted from The Age of the Infovore, when Tyler Cowen acknowledges that many of his dreams, fantasies, experiences are borrowed:

I treasure those thoughts and feelings so much but in reality I pull a lot of them from a social context and I pull them from points that are socially salient. That means I pull them from celebrities, from ads, from popular culture, and most generally from ideas that are easy to communicate and disseminate to large numbers of people. We all dream in pop culture language to some degree.

The Decay of Lying – Oscar Wilde

Art Bollocks – Bryan Ashbee

~ Mark

The art market is not a free market. It’s rigged; hugely distorted by the presence of public subsidy – the grants and funding available to organisations and individuals deemed to be producing “significant” work. To get access to this, it’s even more important that artists create the right theoretical discourse to surround their work.

Also known as bullshit. A handy guide for writing your own art bollocks:

A useful catch-all formula can be applied to all of this work, which I freely offer here, without charge:

“X’s work
{wryly/mockingly/cunningly/innocently/intelligently}
{deconstructs/subverts/disrupts/parodies/appropriates/undermines}
{popular notions/stereotypes/archetypes/conventions/the mythology/strategies}
of
{gender/representation/style/sexuality/commodification/identity}
by …”
followed by a nod at whatever images or objects are assembled.

(via)
Art Bollocks – Bryan Ashbee

A question of discrimination – AC Grayling on art and elitism | The Guardian

~ Mark

A mature culture is one which wishes to know more about other cultures, and which values the best examples of what it has of them, and which is better able to appreciate them because it has standards and insights developed in appreciation of its own.

It was the African figures in the Louvre that inspired Picasso. That one fact alone could serve to remind us how porous high culture is, in both directions, and how symbiotic the existence of all cultures is, especially in the globalised world. When receptive sensibilities engage with the artefacts of the past and other civilisations, they are nourished by them and learn from them, not least how to be discerning.

A question of discrimination – AC Grayling on art and elitism | The Guardian