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I am curious as to what "living the literary life" means to members who might care, or do care, about living it themselves. I have some thoughts on this I will return to later, but I am curious as to what the regulars, or even the not so regulars, think about this aspect towards creativity and end product.
Anyone?
Literary life as in the life of a writer, or the life of a critic?
... or the life of a life-long student or lover of literature?Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
(a critic)Quote:
Originally Posted by Kafka's Crow
Like JBI, I have some questions as to what you are speaking of. I am a bibliophile... a passionate lover of literature... but don't consider myself a writer at all. Taking your question on creativity over into my own field of the visual arts I will say that a great majority of the notions of what the artist's life is like is like is no more than stereotypes. Artists come from all walks of life. They earn their keep in all manners. They can be found all across the political spectrum. The only common thread that runs throughout us all is a passionate need to make art. Pablo Picasso is the "author" of a great many of the most insightful aphorisms related to the artist's life:
We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.
Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.
Good artists copy. Great artists steal.
Every child is an artist. It's a challenge to remain an artist when you grow up.
It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.
The quality of a painter depends on the amount of the past he carries with him.
A painter is a man who paints what he sells. An artist, however, is a man who sells what he paints.
When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.
The first of these is the most insightful... or has certainly been so for me. It challenges the notion of the artist as some moonstruck visionary who only creates when touched by the muses, and recognizes that artists may indeed be touched by inspiration... but the largest part of the labor of creation is undertaken day after day... like any other job.
Why do you assume we need a qualification between the two? A critic, especially in the modern era, is rarely separate from the profession of creative writing itself, though in luke's case that might be different, as professional art critics develop chest pains the minute MOMA gets gas.;) (and luke will jump on me about that, I'm sure)...Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
As mentioned, I do have some thinking aloud on this, but I have to go google televisions and reluctantly price one. I hate tv, but love movies, and even without the digital switch, can't do Netflix and get my DVD player hooked up without a new television, alas, but I will leave with this thought, for now.
I always had romantic notions about it from when I was JBI's age (assuming he is about my age now as when I was an undergrad in 82). I thought the very power of my work would land me the right perfectly urbane husband with similar humanistic leanings, and that maybe I could even try to raise a baby thereby, despite my limbs, and that travel would come my way and be manageable simply because it was my right, and that my age now would have enveloped me in the perfect aesthete's bauble.
Compared to what my life really is (public housing, disability benefits, and containment challenges minus Depends because they are too difficult for me to handle...) was it worth all this cost, and so much of my idealism scattered over many lengths of football fields?
Mmm. I dunno. I will run on more later.
You need to read Leopardi, I think he is right up your alley:
From A Silvia
My sweet hopes died also
little by little: to me too
Fate has denied those years.
Oh, how you’ve passed me by,
dear friend of my new life,
my saddened hope!
Is this the world, the dreams,
the loves, events, delights,
we spoke about so much together?
Is this our human life?
At the advance of Truth
you fell, unhappy one,
and from the distance,
with your hand you pointed
towards death’s coldness and the silent grave.
Note, in terms of translation, maybe 3/10, but I used it because it is in the public domain, and I don't have an English copy of the Canti on me.
I had prospects of being some sort of successful writer when I was about 11-17 or so. I guess I cowered, and decided it would be safer to be a critic - less risk required. I think I made the correct choice, as I am a poet kind of guy, and even if I was successful, I would still be starving.
A painter is a man who paints what he sells. An artist, however, is a man who sells what he paints.
Oh, I like that one.
I have an extremely clichéd imaginary image of the ‘literary life’. You know it is all about loafing around on over-sized divans, wearing comfy loose-fitting clothes and sipping absinthe. I'm sure it will be like this in after a few more years of study anyway, don't shatter my illusions please.
Hey, I'm still studying and I'm already doing that! :thumbs_up My divan is not over-sized though...Quote:
Originally Posted by Neely
Hey, yes you have made my day! :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Etienne
Must say I have a few lost illusions of the artist's life. I still haven't managed that garret in Paris... right on the Seine. I've yet to get around to purchasing a beret. My wife has this thing about nude models strolling around the live-in-studio... in fact, after a year in New York living in my studio I found that it wasn't for me either. I do have lots of black clothing, however... the artist's obligatory "uniform" you know.
I cannot post it as funny as I heard it, but the word is that George Plimpton was drunk on absinthe when he and his fellows started The Paris Review. Remarkable that it still remains one of the premier literary journals in this still fresh century.Quote:
Originally Posted by Neely
Has anyone here ever had absinthe? Spot on Neely!:thumbs_up
That's an interesting topic; I too am interested in the opinion of those here.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jozanny
As to living the literary life, I believe that is split into two, perhaps three: writing, reading, and maybe critiquing and editing.
I suppose I am a writer, but I'm not really comfortable saying that because I'm only seventeen, and I too have ideas of rather high standards (Tolkien, Dostoevsky, Sayers, etc.) to match up to. So perhaps I'm a writer apprentice, because I certainly do study their styles :).
I definitely am a reader, though in interests of both age and modesty :p I don't think I fully understand what that means...YET. I read not necessarily a lot but I generally pick one book at a time and read it through (unless it is interminably long like Les Miserables and goes into a so-far seemingly pointless digression onto the effects and repercussions and even meaning of Waterloo) and go through to the next one.
As to critiquing and editing, it seems like I do a lot of that on my own work :lol:. I've helped out a few friends but I would like to continue "practicing" in this aspect, especially because I will have to do a lot of that as a professor, which is my career goal :). It will be interesting to learn how to portray classical ideals and principles in a modern-ish light.
andave: I get this, when you say *only* seventeen. I did not really prove anything to myself until by chance I hit the minor leagues as a disability reporter. I had been publishing for years, mind, before that, in the independent and little presses, but after a while, literary journal affirmation wears a bit thin, even when I appeared with Jayne Anne Phillips in Oxford Magazine. (If you Google Machine Dreams you can find something out about Phillips, but my admiration for her nearly has a homo-erotic enthusiasm to it... did I just say that?:blush::D) Alas, I will always have deviance for solace, but my point was, and is, that even though I have slowed down, to my detriment, since 06, I can and do believe in myself because I broke ground by getting my byline in The Philadelphia Inquirer.Quote:
Originally Posted by andave_ya
That is the big leagues, and I can and will do it again, barring a medical issue doesn't bring me down first.
Young writers like yourself seem to go one of two ways. They make a big splash and get stuck there, or they toil on like a good soldier until they find the appropriate multi-cultural niche. It takes discipline, a willingness to get hurt (some people will take your efforts and shred them, trust me), and the biggest thing, is persistence. You have to keep getting rejected.
I veered off a little here, but ought to content myself in the role of Mother Goose who has a few nuggets of wisdom to leave in the basket. Last one, for now: live. Don't beat yourself for taking chances which may end up being mistakes. I do that too often to myself.
I have had it once when someone brought it from a trip abroad (very good). Can't get hold of it here that much at all, barring dodgy online sites and the like, it seems that I have to make do with beer, at least for a while.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jozanny
Ha, would cost a bomb now. I don't think artists nowadays can afford to live where 19th-early 20th century artists used to live in Paris (St Germain, Latin Quarter, Ile de la Cité or Montmartre)...Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
For me living an artist's life means not being overly preoccupied with material aspects of life but giving importance to aesthetics: trying to live as beautifully, or at least as gracefully, as possible. Not being "petit-bourgeois" in mind.
That's good, Bitter, I like that. Beauty is so, how should I put it, so beautiful. I love beauty. I love beautiful people, children, music, paintings, Raphael and Ginevra Benci. Still there is a devil in me howling for absinthe, blood, outrageous acts like walking a lobster down our high-street, useless, fruitless friendship with servile, self-seeking, ignorant snobs, the insolence of office, the pangs of desprized love, all things self-destructive, to be likeQuote:
Originally Posted by Bitterfly
Ainsi qu'un débauché pauvre qui baise et mange
Le sein martyrisé d'une antique catin...
Then there is the dandy. Oscar Wilde, Stephen Frye. Stephen Frye as Oscar Wilde:
Wow! Debauchery and sphistication incarnate. Rimbaud and Lord Alfred Tennyson rolled into one! There are so many different ways of 'living the literary life'. I chose to choose nothing! I just want to be. I just want to love beauty and occasionally let this love overflow into a tiny poem. I want time, to read and read and read. I want to read everything. I have a book in my head, a novel. I used to write occasionally but feel a lot distracted during this last year or so. (been falling in and out of love with the same person which has left two thoroughly confused souls on a planet where most of the inabitants seem to know where they are going!) More often than not, I hear a scream inside my head like Joh Keats's angushed cry in:
I cry your mercy -- pity -- love -- ay, love!
Merciful love that tantalizes not,
One-thoughted, never-wandering, guileless love,
Unmask'd, and being seen -- without a blot!
O! let me have thee whole, -- all -- all -- be mine!
That shape, that fairness, that sweet minor zest
Of love, your kiss, -- those hands, those eyes divine,
That warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast, --
Yourself -- your soul -- in pity give me all,
Withhold no atom's atom, or I die,
Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall,
Forget, in the mist of idle misery,
Life's purposes -- the palate of my mind
Losing its gust, and my ambition blind!
I used to think I was Horatio, I am bloody Zhivago from the toe to the top of my head! Some literary life indeed! Where is the next big novel of human endurance and of love? Where is the next Hugh Kenner? Why did Keats go on living? Where have all the diciples gone? My kingdom sold, sold for a mole on that beautiful face! (khal i rukhsar i yaar i man!). When asked by the Sultan of Ghazna about the price of his huge kingdom, the blind poet Rudki answered, "just a mole on my beloved's face!". I think this is all it was worth. All gone in a frenzy of madness. But boy, don't I love that one mole that I got for all my dreams and all my ambitions! If I had ten empires, I would have given them away. Beautiful to live two, three or even four lives simultaneously!
That's beauty as well. Beauty of self-destruction/violence/provocation. I can't say I live like that though - too much morality has rubbed out my streak of cruelty, for instance. But I like the idea of debauchery (wonderful French film, by the way, called Le Libertin, which could perfectly illustrate that line from Baudelaire). But still, that's why I don't think people who are anxious about eating healthy food, not drinking or smoking, going to bed early, buying a flat and saving up money for their retirement before they're thirty etc live beautiful lives. They're too careful with themselves - and if I understand you well (i'm not sure I do though :D ), that's where you're going too, no?Quote:
Originally Posted by Kafka's Crow
And I was thinking about the dandies. I think I associate the artist's life with them and the decadents.
And yeah, read read read...
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kafka's Crow
My heart is fraught with yearnings deep concealed,
With strivings of a spirit unresigned--
Ye burning thoughts! O be ye confined,
Lest in too fierce a fire my soul be steeled!
- James F. Cooper, Jr
(okay, it's telling me my message is too short. Better?)
This is the kind of artistic life I had yearned for: Youth, beauty, creativity, danger and risk. Youth has disappeared but I go on, I can't go on, I will go on!Quote:
He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the
strand. His cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs
were trembling. On and on and on and on he strode, far out
over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the
advent of the life that had cried to him.
Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word
had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called
him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall,
to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared
to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy
from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant
of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory.
On and on and on and on!
He halted suddenly and heard his heart in the silence. How
far had he walked? What hour was it?
There was no human figure near him nor any sound borne
to him over the air. But the tide was near the turn and
already the day was on the wane. He turned landward and
ran towards the shore and, running up the sloping beach,
reckless of the sharp shingle, found a sandy nook amid a ring
of tufted sandknolls and lay down there that the peace and silence
of the evening might still the riot of his blood.
He felt above him the vast indifferent dome and the calm
processes of the heavenly bodies; and the earth beneath him,
the earth that had borne him, had taken him to her breast.
James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Oh, some wonderful, wonderful stuff here, the Wilde, the Keats, Baudelaire, Joyce thoughts like these:
For me living an artist's life means not being overly preoccupied with material aspects of life but giving importance to aesthetics: trying to live as beautifully, or at least as gracefully, as possible. Not being "petit-bourgeois" in mind.
And these:
And yeah, read read read...
And these too:
Beauty is so, how should I put it, so beautiful. I love beauty. I love beautiful people, children, music, paintings, Raphael and Ginevra Benci. Still there is a devil in me howling for absinthe, blood, outrageous acts like walking a lobster down our high-street, useless, fruitless friendship with servile, self-seeking, ignorant snobs, the insolence of office, the pangs of desprized love, all things self-destructive.
Surely the only life to live is the literary one? Stuff the life of the pettie bourgeois and stuff the life of the wage slave. Stuff “reality” it is to my books that I turn to tell me what is truly real, things of this nature:
It will be a marvellous thing - the true personality of man - when we see it. It will grow naturally and simply, flowerlike, or as a tree grows. It will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not prove things. It will know everything. An yet it will not busy itself about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by material things. It will have nothing. And yet it will have everything, and whatever one takes from it, it will still have, so rich will it be. It will not be always meddling with others, or asking them to be like itself. It will love them because they will be different. An yet while it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing helps us, by being what it is. The personality of man will be very wonderful. It ill be as wonderful as the personality of a child.
"The Soul of Man Under Socialism" Oscar wilde.
Must say I have a few lost illusions of the artist's life. I still haven't managed that garret in Paris... right on the Seine.
Ha, would cost a bomb now.
Tell me about it. I couldn't even afford to do the grungy American Abstract Expressionists' variation and have the bombed-out old factory live-work studio in Manhattan. Such space is now reserved for high-end corporate lawyers and investment brokers.
Kafka... you wax poetic today... and you sing the praises of that which has been outlawed by many Modernists: beauty. Personally... as I have aged... I find that ugly expressionism is less and less interesting, while beauty... well surely Keats had it right all along. Keats and Wilde. (And isn't Wilde always right about everything?). Yes... Raphael and Ginevra de Benci with her flawless full moon face enthroned before Leonardo's unearthly landscape of spiky juniper plants. And Botticelli's Primavera. God! That's beauty!
I never liked modern art, to be honest. Literature, yes but modern art is too stark for my liking. Literature has beautiful things to offer: James Joyce (specially the passage quoted above), Pound's Cantos, Eliot, even the bare landscapes of Samuel Beckett's works offer lyrical beauty at times. But modernist painting hasn't got that for me. Please point me towards one truly beautiful modernist painting. The poppies of Flanders are mentioned repeatedly in literature but why painters overlooked the persistent, resilient, unmissable presence of beauty in the midst of all the horrors that their times required them to depict? Why did Picasso fail to make that one flower beautiful that seemingly blossoms near the broken sword of the fallen warrior in Guernica? It is drab and uncouth charcoal lines like everything else in the painting! It is there, beauty can never be excluded but don't let it blend and disappear in all the other rubbish, please. Make it stand out, give it its due place, i-e on the pedestal. Bring it out. Crisis sells, death sells, disaster sells, pain sells, pleasure sells, ecstasy of the flesh sells. Good news does not sell, peace and calm do not sell, ecstasy of the mind does not sell, beauty in its essence does not sell. That's what is killing beauty, its inability to become a commodity. All you, who dream of a life artistic, make Pound's Canto xlv (With Usura) your mantra. This poem has the answer for us:Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
Usura rusteth the chisel
It rusteth the craft and the craftsman
It gnaweth the thread in the loom
None learneth to weave gold in her pattern;
Azure hath a canker by usura; cramoisi is unbroidered
Emerald findeth no Memling
http://reactor-core.org/usura.html
I love this poem and read it whenever my heart yearns for an "artistic life" or beauty and love. It tells me what went wrong.
I was, actually in love with Ginevra de Benci for many, many years. Then I met a woman who looked like Ginevra. It was nice having her around but she was married and had two children! Didn't Leonardo paint that portrait at the time of Ginevra's marriage? I was a little late then! 'Too much water has passed under the Butt Bridge in both directions', since then (as Samuel Beckett would say. Butt Bridge is actually a bridge on River Liffey in Dublin, I thought Sam Beckett was taking the piss. Very factual, very humorous!) I once wrote a poem about the Lady and the juniper tree. I read La Vita Nova at that time. There are so many ways you could fall in love with beauty. I posted this poem in the 'Personal Poetry' section of this forum the other day. It sums up my ideas on love, beauty, risk, self-destruction and life:
http://www.online-literature.com/for...ght=revolution
I never liked modern art, to be honest. Literature, yes but modern art is too stark for my liking. Literature has beautiful things to offer: James Joyce (specially the passage quoted above), Pound's Cantos, Eliot, even the bare landscapes of Samuel Beckett's works offer lyrical beauty at times. But modernist painting hasn't got that for me. Please point me towards one truly beautiful modernist painting.
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...ightmedium.jpg
Pierre Bonnard-Perfume Bottle
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...imt_kissss.jpg
Gustav Klimt-The Kiss
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...irrorsmall.jpg
Pablo Picasso-Girl at the Mirror
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...ri_matisse.jpg
Henri Matisse-Still Life and Open Window
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...gsomething.jpg
Edouard Vuillard-Still Life on Mantle
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...ke-Charmer.jpg
Henri Rousseau-Snake Charmer
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...d/Tooker13.jpg
George Tooker-Couple in Window
Of course we could argue endlessly as to what exactly constitutes "Modernism" and what constitutes "beauty"... and there is no way to convince someone into recognizing or appreciating the beauty in a work of art if they cannot see it. To my mind these are just a few examples of the wealth of "beauty" that exists in Modernism. If "beauty" is missing from art, it is missing since the demise of Modernism... since aesthetics and form were rejected in favor of the idea as the center of art. Indeed... it is only under certain theories of Post-Modernism that beauty itself has become suspect... almost considered proof of the shallowness of a work of art or an artist.
It has been suggested by some critics that "beauty" and concern with aesthetics have been dismissed as shallow because they imagined as being inherently feminine... as opposed, no doubt, to the more rigorous art that is more focused upon rigorous thought. No doubt such a criticism is somewhat valid. It echoes the thoughts of the contemporary British painter, Howard Hodgkin, who points out that the focus on color has long been imagined as proof of the less-than-serious nature of one's art. By the same token, a recent examination of Matisse pointed out that many of the critics of Matisse suggested that his paintings were too colorful... and too beautiful to be considered as serious as the more "masculine" work of Picasso.
The poppies of Flanders are mentioned repeatedly in literature but why painters overlooked the persistent, resilient, unmissable presence of beauty in the midst of all the horrors that their times required them to depict? Why did Picasso fail to make that one flower beautiful that seemingly blossoms near the broken sword of the fallen warrior in Guernica? It is drab and uncouth charcoal lines like everything else in the painting!
I would suggest that the beauty which exists even in the shadow of the most ultimate ugliness and horror is indeed there... and it has been recognized by many artists... including Picasso:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...cassosmall.jpg
In the darkest days of the Second World War Picasso presented a still-life with a bull's skull against the absolute pitch black of night. And still he suggested the regal cloth of honor in the royal purple... demanding that this dark scene be recognized for its link with the regal art of the past.
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...uild/128sm.jpg
Max Beckmann presented horrific scenes of torture... alluding to both Hieronymus Bosch and the nazis... and yet presented these scenes in a brilliant, luminous color anchored with a bituminous black that suggested a gorgeous Gothic stained-glass window.
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...ptychsmall.jpg
Francis Bacon imagined the mortality and meanness of humanity in the most ghastly scenes... staged with the most exquisite sensitivity to design and composition... as if he were composing a Renaissance altarpiece.
It is there, beauty can never be excluded but don't let it blend and disappear in all the other rubbish, please. Make it stand out, give it its due place, i-e on the pedestal. Bring it out. Crisis sells, death sells, disaster sells, pain sells, pleasure sells, ecstasy of the flesh sells. Good news does not sell, peace and calm do not sell, ecstasy of the mind does not sell, beauty in its essence does not sell. That's what is killing beauty, its inability to become a commodity.
There are some artists who have taken a contrary philosophy... fearing that what we define as "beauty" is too easily commodified... coveted and fought over at the marketplace. Their thoughts... with which I do not agree... is that art must offend the bourgeoisie... it must be, as Picasso once put it... a finger up the bourgeoisie a$$. Personally I find shock for the sake of shock far to easy... while true beauty is far more difficult than it may first appear.
All you, who dream of a life artistic, make Pound's Canto xlv (With Usura) your mantra. This poem has the answer for us:
Usura rusteth the chisel
It rusteth the craft and the craftsman
It gnaweth the thread in the loom
None learneth to weave gold in her pattern;
Azure hath a canker by usura; cramoisi is unbroidered
Emerald findeth no Memling
I love this poem and read it whenever my heart yearns for an "artistic life" or beauty and love. It tells me what went wrong.
Perhaps... but then again it may also convey the inability of those who are "experts"... even artists within a single genre, to recognize the beauty in other artistic forms when these go beyond the accepted forms that beauty took in the past. I have pointed out to my studio-mates that their inability to appreciate the more jarring "beauty" of Gorecki, Ornette Coleman, Osvaldo Golijov... or any Modernist/Contemporary "classical" composer is certainly not unlike the response that many others have when responding to Modernist/Post-Modernist painting.
I was, actually in love with Ginevra de Benci for many, many years. Then I met a woman who looked like Ginevra. It was nice having her around but she was married and had two children! Didn't Leonardo paint that portrait at the time of Ginevra's marriage? I was a little late then!
This sounds like something out of Gautier. Surely you have read Omphale and/or The Fleece of Gold?
Where's the distinction? Is Klimt a modernist or a Secessionist/symbolist?
You can still buy cheap houses in Toronto Suburbs!Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
Where's the distinction? Is Klimt a modernist or a Secessionist/symbolist?
It depends upon how one defines "Modernism". The broadest definitions begin with Courbet and continue through Abstract Expressionism. Other definitions are more restrictive and begin with Picasso's Les Demoiselle d'Avignon and exclude anything not meeting a certain Modernist criteria (whatever that may be). I am somewhat tempted to place the start of Modernism with the Post-Impressionism. Impressionism... for all its brilliance and innovations... is still rooted in the notion that a painting presents an illusionistic picture of the visual world. The primary shift of Modernism... far more central even than Pound's dictum to "make it new"... is the move away from the notion that a fundamental and essential element of art (especially painting) is this illusionistic rendering of the visual world. Post-Modernism... Van Gogh, Gauguin, Bonnard, Munch, etc... begin the process of overturning this notion which had been held since the Renaissance. Of course Cubism and Picasso would provide the true break... establishing the notion that painting is but an organization of color, shapes, lines, and sometimes images upon a flat surface. Klimt, like many early Modernists, benefited greatly from an intense academic training... but he certainly made great us of Modernist vocabularies. His use of flat patterns and designs owe much to non-Western traditions (Persian and Islamic) as well as to pre-Renaissance art (especially Byzantine mosaics)... but none of these artistic traditions would have been seriously embraced prior to the shift of Modernism.
:lol:Quote:
Originally Posted by Neely
Yes, I have the very same illusion. Surely it will be like that once I have 'Dr' in front of my name ;)
Yes but Toronto, honestly, is not exactly what I'd call a beautiful city...Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
Charming sentiment, that to some degree fits my own, but I always needed specific-rendered role models, somewhat less lavish than Kafka's exuberance for Wilde. Decadent wit and art for art's sake was quaint when I was an impressionable underclassman. Looking at it through my current lens, it moves down a notch to nearly chirpy. I always looked at my professors. The pragmatist who studied the impact of technology and its intersection with the power of Empire, whether Roman or American, who conveniently died of cancer about a year after I made the terrible error of asking him if he wanted to go out to dinner. Some students can turn mentors into partners, but that fate always eluded me. His cultural education was admirable, and his ghost sat on my shoulder of embarrassed grief for a long time, almost identical to the fate of my Grecian-American editor, who did so much to give my work exposure in my locality. I did not ask her out to dinner, but did ask for a critique of my best poetry manuscript, some months before she was defeated by breast cancer. I had heard she was ill, oddly enough, in my disability-activist circles, but had no idea it was terminal, and her loss to me is equally tinged with shame for that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Bitterfly
They both had qualities of containment and discipline worthy of following, and I could never quite manage the degree of imitation aspired to, being a stumble bum gaffe prone disabled poet who could never quite cut it into the career being the aesthetic.
It isn't beauty with a capital *B*; it is a refined sensibility, a reticence as a way of living your art, which my recent essay in Breath & Shadow is somewhat preoccupied with. Beauty can be found in any moral paradigm, as luke points out.
Does that idea of beauty as feminine come from the Burkean (or Kantian) distinction between the beautiful and the sublime? Is it still used nowadays? It's strange that the works of so many masculine artists can be "dismissed...as inherently feminine".:confused:Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
Yes! Beauty is almost a question of habit. Only some musics/paintings/poems are more difficult to see as beautiful than others, because they don't fit classical criteria. I didn't like Picasso or Matisse straight away, for instance, but now I find their works beautiful. Same for some of Schubert's pieces, funnily enough. I wonder whether I'll end up finding dodecaphonic music beautiful one day though - I know some people do.Quote:
Perhaps... but then again it may also convey the inability of those who are "experts"... even artists within a single genre, to recognize the beauty in other artistic forms when these go beyond the accepted forms that beauty took in the past. I have pointed out to my studio-mates that their inability to appreciate the more jarring "beauty" of Gorecki, Ornette Coleman, Osvaldo Golijov... or any Modernist/Contemporary "classical" composer is certainly not unlike the response that many others have when responding to Modernist/Post-Modernist painting.
Thanks a lot, by the way, for the pictures and comments. Very interesting.:thumbs_up
Hmm, I agree and disagree with you. Of course it's easier being impressed by and try to follow such models when you're just out of your teens (don't know why, though). But as an adult, while you can admit to yourself that you'll never live such a life (too many responsibilities), and that's probably part of growing up, I don't think it's wise to completely forsake them. There's nothing particularly "quaint" about decadent art, if you think of Huysmans or Mirbeau. Rather, it points to a certain ideal - of cleverness, of aesthetics, of beauty - and what a pity it is to abandon all ideals! I'm rather sick of having to leave them to adolescents! :DQuote:
Charming sentiment, that to some degree fits my own, but I always needed specific-rendered role models, somewhat less lavish than Kafka's exuberance for Wilde. Decadent wit and art for art's sake was quaint when I was an impressionable underclassman.
It has been suggested by some critics that "beauty" and concern with aesthetics have been dismissed as shallow because they imagined as being inherently feminine... as opposed, no doubt, to the more rigorous art that is more focused upon rigorous thought.
Does that idea of beauty as feminine come from the Burkean (or Kantian) distinction between the beautiful and the sublime? Is it still used nowadays? It's strange that the works of so many masculine artists can be "dismissed...as inherently feminine".
Since the Renaissance there has always been a sort of division between masters of disegno (drawing and design) and color. One can almost attribute this to Vasari who argued that the Roman and Florentine painters who focused upon drawing were somehow more "serious" than the sensuous colorists of Venice. Intriguingly, a large majority of the Florentine/Roman tradition focused more upon the male nude than the female (Botticelli and Raphael being obvious exceptions. Arguably this may owe much to the sexual preferences of these artists (Leonardo, Michelangelo, Bronzino, Pontormo, Mantegna, Donatello)... but it also makes a certain logical sense. The male nude with greater definition of musculature is far more conducive to a style that focuses upon linear contours and sculptural form... while the softer female nude was far more suitable to a greater tactile sensuality and soft-focus atmosphere as found in the Venetian tradition.
These two polarities continued into later painting. Rembrandt and Velazquez were clearly colorists... or rather, "painterly painters". Ingres... and even Blake were far more about line... disegno. Of course there was always Rubens who could draw like Michelangelo and paint like Titian... and as such he has long proven problematic for some. But then again... if we are honest we will recognize that this division is not so clear. Ingres, for example, is an absolutely exquisite colorist. Nevertheless... what he does exhibit in his work (and the same can be seen in Blake, Michelangelo, Botticelli, Pontormo, Bronzino, etc...) is a clear "abstraction". Blake would declare, for example, that while there may be no such lines or abstractions in nature, they do exist in imagination.
It would seem thus that the focus upon disegno became a focus upon abstraction... and abstraction, as an invention of the imagination, was thought of as more rigorous than the colorists who merely responded to their visual perceptions. Cezanne famously said of Monet, "Monet is but an eye... but my God! What an eye!" In spite of the compliment, one must admit that there is also a certain condensation involved. This condescending manner continued into Modernism where a great sensualist such as Matisse or Bonnard could be dismissed as intellectually "light-weight"... after all, they were but responding to their perceptions. Duchamp would push the gap even further. Fearing the old French dictum, "dumb as a painter" he developed an artistic language in which the idea was everything... the form negligible.
Duchamp's impact continues to mark art today. Where a great painter recognizes that the process of painting... whether one is completely inventing one's imagery... or responding to a physical model... involves continuous thought... to the point that each mark is often weighed as carefully as a single word in a lyric poem... The conceptualists or Post-Duchampians argue that aesthetic and formal concerns are somehow false. They would have us all believe that Matisse and Bonnard and Morandi are are somehow not as good as they appear... while the gallery laden with inflated condoms, cuckoo clocks, sandbags, and random documentations are somehow far better than they look.
Of course they would never blatantly suggest that Matisse or any great sensual painter is too "feminine" while the Minimalists, the Art Brut, and the performance artists are more "masculine". Such would be clearly "politically incorrect"... and suicide as far as one's reputation went. Still the sub-text is clear. Art based in rigorous intellectual theory is to be far more valued than art rooted in sensuality and the artist's response to the physical, tactile world. Of course I am clearly biased toward the art rooted in sensory experience... art that embraces beauty and color and the sensual touch.
StLukes, I think you are giving far too much credit to some of those Post-Duchampians, my experience with them is that they mostly make crappy art because they cannot make anything beautiful, but still want to pass as artists.
Yep, it's annoying how ambivalent they are: I know how I always hesitate between wondering whether it's genuinely art, and thinking they're just intellectualising something quite uninteresting and/or trying to provoke. A friend of mine told me about this exhibition in Versailles, where a contemporary artist has, for instance, placed a sculpture of Michael Jackson and his monkey in front of a portrait of Louis the XIVth.... Not quite sure about what to think about it.
Thank stlukesguild, I have the impression that I grasp the implications more clearly now! Abstraction vs senses then. I definitely prefer art that makes an immediate impression on my senses.
Some folks we consider artists now lived back then as common office workers ...
As well as some scientists.
I had a very interesting talk with a friend, these days, who loves to read. I thought with myself that she liked me because I write, and I'm intriguing, and, well, if she likes books, I'm a bit like a book, as well as books are like people.
A person learns from books. A writer writes books. A writer learns from people.
And, to finish with something else, there are a lot of arts ... Writing's one thing, painting is another, singing, playing a musical instrument are yet other things, and there's dancing as well, and theatre. I imagine you're talking about the life of a writer. I myself chose not to live from what I write, so, I have a common office worker life. I mean to sell [other people's] books, but not even this I managed to, not for long, anyway, however I haven't given up, and I work with something else ... I'd work gladly in a bar, I think, as a waiter. Only, it didn't happen this way.
And there are certain books I won't read at all! There are too many books, and I have a long line, and no hurry, and a short life. (I hope to reach Abraham's (out of the bible ...) life-span.)
I hope I'll get married! fer heaven's sake!, haha!
& I'm baroque ~
-x-
:crash:
The problem with this, is what accounts for the interest of the ready-made art of Duchamp, for example, and most of what followed from it. Duchamp presented a Fountain. Great, new idea, funny, shocking. Now tomorrow, I present a different Fountain as a piece of art. That's just boring, there's no shock anymore. That's just the problem with the ready-made art, it's that the art was the idea. All subsequent ready-made art attempt are simply presenting the same work over and over, even though it might be something else than the Fountain, it doesn't matter.Quote:
or trying to provoke.
So besides the exception, most of what is made is this view becomes in fact, an attempt to provoke watchers into boringness and is almost an exercise to try to be impressed, entertained, or shocked. A lot of it is insipid and boring. It's telling the same joke twice.
Now if someone present an exposition of fountains, but those fountain appeal to the senses, now this is something entirely different. It would be in some way an insight of Duchamp's idea, and taking something quite ridiculous and making a piece of art for real. But the difference is that now the Fountain is the art as well, and not just the idea.
But in fact, I think this whole conception of Duchamp, was a big joke from him. He was making fun of people while having fun himself. Some people just took him too seriously.
Is the literary life the one where you write absolutely nothing because there are a million children around vying for your attention and your creativity is channeled into creating and growing babies and your hands are perpetually covered in dish soap, or laundry soap, or bubble bath...and the closest you ever get to writing is making a tablet to practicing the alphabet or a list of spelling words?? And yet in your heart of hearts you think still, somewhere, you are a writer...if only you had words....and time...and quiet....and not being needed....
Or is the literary life the one where your home is girded with books, and you met your spouse working at the bookstore where he still works, where everyone who ever gets a gift from you knows that they'll be getting a book. The one where when your gaggle stumbles into the Waffle House all but the smallest have books in hand...the one where several of the people in your home regularly stay up far too late reading or listening to stories???
LOL! Then yes--we, I, live a very literary life!
StLukes, I think you are giving far too much credit to some of those Post-Duchampians, my experience with them is that they mostly make crappy art because they cannot make anything beautiful, but still want to pass as artists.
That may be... but had they not been convinced during their years of formal studies in art school as to the merit of ideas and Duchampian conceptualism as opposed to art based upon drawing and painting... the image making that is the most primal urge behind the creation of art that begins when a child starts drawing Mom and the dog... had they not been pushed into spending far more time reading art criticism, and theory, and philosophers who naturally assume the idea is far more important that the form than they did with actually learning to draw and paint... they might have actually developed those skills. Surely very few 18-year olds enter art school because they wish to be the next conceptual artist. Most entered art school because they loved to draw... to create images. Unfortunately, the ideas of conceptual art can be quite seductive... and far easier to master than the skills needed to paint well.
Yep, it's annoying how ambivalent they are: I know how I always hesitate between wondering whether it's genuinely art, and thinking they're just intellectualising something quite uninteresting and/or trying to provoke. A friend of mine told me about this exhibition in Versailles, where a contemporary artist has, for instance, placed a sculpture of Michael Jackson and his monkey in front of a portrait of Louis the XIVth.... Not quite sure about what to think about it.
Acckk!! You speak of Jeff Koons. The virtual Satan of contemporary art. Where Thomas Kinkade paints endless sentimental schlock that is loved by those with virtually no artistic sensibility (not far from those sad-eyed children of several decades ago), he is not given the least attention by the 'serious' art world. Yet Koons works are just as shallow... sentimental... glitzy and schlock-laden. The only difference is that Koons and his dealers have been able to convince a large enough audience that his work is "serious" because he recognizes how bad it is (which I don't believe) and as such they are saved by being ironic.
But in fact, I think this whole conception of Duchamp, was a big joke from him. He was making fun of people while having fun himself. Some people just took him too seriously.
Exactly... If you read the history of Duchamp... and especially his Fountain... you will find that it was all intended as part of a grandiose joke upon the art world. Certainly the urinal was never intended to be actually seen as an art object. Perhaps the best critique of the iconic status of this work was the "artist" who peed in it, declaring that it was his intention to reduce the work to its original purpose. As conceptualism has grown more pervasive I have noticed that there is an increasing division of art world between those who would embrace art as idea and those who see themselves first as painters, print-makers, sculptors, etc... Where a few NY galleries and a few pompous critics once dominated what constituted ART... and what ART was GOOD ART, their control has greatly waned. Magazines such as American Art Collector now rival Art News and Art in America, and the strongest artists featured there are often able to demand prices that rival or even surpass the average Art in America artist.