ruined by interpretation

In class we had to read "The Great Gatsby" as a class novel study. I finished the book in a week-end, reading it for hours on end. I want to say now that i liked it very much and since have gone on to read Fitzgerald's other novels.

My post is not about the quality of the novel in question but on how my class butchered the book through analysis. Gatsby was torn apart chapter by chapter, each bit of meaning was squeezed out and examined. The book was ruined, every bit of mystery completely removed. So my question is have you ever had a book spoiled for you by over analysis and over thinking? I know that books should be looked at in depth but have you had any experience of something like this?

I've been fortunate that nothing has been ruined for me, though I've often been annoyed by overanalysis. This calls to mind, however, Ray Bradbury's heated objections to the way that so many have interpreted Fahrenheit 451, mainly that it is publicly regarded as a criticism of censorship but he actually intended it to be more of a denunciation of the increasing influence of television and pop culture.

It depends on the teacher. My highschool teachers ruined reading Macbeth and King Lear for me, whereas my professors have given me great insight and appreciation for things I used to loathe. I've cured myself of my problem with Macbeth, and with Lear, yet I still haven't gotten over my hating of Ondaatje's poetry, though I suspect that wasn't the teacher, but rather Ondaatje's fault.

Hey at least they gave you texts to ruin. I didn't study a text until half way through my 2nd year. I studied Genre. Who knew the 'city' was a genre? Who knew the 'flaneur' was central to it? And who knew Lacan and Foucault had anything to do with it? Questions i didn't care about then and don't care about now.

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Originally Posted by cynara

In class we had to read "The Great Gatsby" as a class novel study. I finished the book in a week-end, reading it for hours on end. I want to say now that i liked it very much and since have gone on to read Fitzgerald's other novels.

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Glad to hear you enjoyed The Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald has remained as one of my favorite authors. Give Tender is the Night a chance, if you have time - truly a work of art!

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Originally Posted by cynara

My post is not about the quality of the novel in question but on how my class butchered the book through analysis. Gatsby was torn apart chapter by chapter, each bit of meaning was squeezed out and examined. The book was ruined, every bit of mystery completely removed. So my question is have you ever had a book spoiled for you by over analysis and over thinking? I know that books should be looked at in depth but have you had any experience of something like this?

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Reading a book and sharing interpretations can get quite exhausting, and, I agree, it can ruin a book. I love hearing others' opinions and interpretations, even if I disagree with them, explaining why I joined this forum originally; for me, it takes a lot to ruin a book, and I normally find the reason behind that with others pushing their views upon others - both teachers and the 'know-it-alls.' In this light, however, one can see a novel from multiple perspectives, notice details s/he failed to see, and encorporate different backgrounds of knowledge to interpret the novel - both a blessing and a curse sometimes.
Some books that got butchered for me: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Middlemarch by George Eliot, and almost all of the works by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.
In my opinion, some books, despite how much attention they receive, get better and better with the more studying and discussing they need - books like Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Prophet by Khalil Gibran, and many works by James Joyce, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Albert Camus.

It is very much the way, alas. Fortunately, you eventually become immune to it, and great literature will eventually return to your original perception. I remember one of my lecturers butchering Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey by insisting it had a strong political subtext, something which caused me almost physical pain. But now, I've entirely purged my mind of his drivel, and can still enjoy the poem for what it is.

I was lucky, as it seems...

My only thing that was really ruined was really Antignone. I was not educated enough (nor was the rest of the class) in Greek culture to understand the problem with the Gods and everything.

My liking of Shakespeare was not affected as he was still too dfficult. We did exerpts of Romeo and Juliet, but we did not analyse.

In French, we did Le Rhinocéros of Ionesco. I don't think the teacher got it either... I don't have the impression anyway. It wasn't totally ruined, though...
What we read for the rest, was total crap, anyway.

In Dutch we did general style, so we never overanalysed.

As Blackadder put it before kicking Shakespeare: 'And that is for every schoolboy in future, looking for a joke in your Much Ado about Nothing.' (:lol: great :D) I never had that poblem. I praise myself lucky...

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Originally Posted by Lokasenna

It is very much the way, alas. Fortunately, you eventually become immune to it, and great literature will eventually return to your original perception. I remember one of my lecturers butchering Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey by insisting it had a strong political subtext, something which caused me almost physical pain. But now, I've entirely purged my mind of his drivel, and can still enjoy the poem for what it is.

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Wrong political subtext? How is that possible? An author writes always in th right context, never mind what the reader thinks...

Can you actually clarify that?

I like interpreting literature, and it doesn't harm the literature; but overinterpreting and misinterpreting literature do harm the enjoyment.

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Originally Posted by kiki1982

I was lucky, as it seems...

My only thing that was really ruined was really Antignone. I was not educated enough (nor was the rest of the class) in Greek culture to understand the problem with the Gods and everything.

My liking of Shakespeare was not affected as he was still too dfficult. We did exerpts of Romeo and Juliet, but we did not analyse.

In French, we did Le Rhinocéros of Ionesco. I don't think the teacher got it either... I don't have the impression anyway. It wasn't totally ruined, though...
What we read for the rest, was total crap, anyway.


As Blackadder put it before kicking Shakespeare: 'And that is for every schoolboy in future, looking for a joke in your Much Ado about Nothing.' (:lol: great :D) I never had that poblem. I praise myself lucky...

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I really like Antigone, both versions. I love the conflict between the gods who pass judgement on the poor vulnerable mortals and the tragedy and flaws and...I can't believe we have to do Greek comedy.

Rhinoceros is about Nazism. Everyone starts turning into rhinos so the man starts wishing his skin was all wrinkly, etc...even though the rhinos are creepy.

We were forbidden from interpreting the poem 'Nutting' as being sexual in class, but I did manage to put the interpretation into my A-level exam :)

I agree texts are ruined by interpretations and translations.

I don't believe that any piece of literature can be over-analysed to the point that it ruins the work itself. Different points of analysis are merely different viewpoints that can be taken or leaven at the door.

The only way that an analysis can possibly be harmful is if a teacher/critic argues that a piece has only one possible meaning, or restricts the free interpretation of a work of art for their students. Either way this is trying to reduce the art, and the students' appreciation of it, which is simply a fault of the teacher/critic and not of the object of analysis itself.

There is no such thing as over-analysing literature.

I don't believe that any piece of literature can be over-analysed to the point that it ruins the work itself. Different points of analysis are merely different viewpoints that can be taken or leaven at the door.

The only way that an analysis can possibly be harmful is if a teacher/critic argues that a piece has only one possible meaning, or restricts the free interpretation of a work of art for their students. Either way this is trying to reduce the art, and the students' appreciation of it, which is simply a fault of the teacher/critic and not of the object of analysis itself.

There is no such thing as over-analysing literature.

I agree. No work of art of any real merit can be reduced to a single "meaning" or interpretation. And certainly I agree that the only possible harm is that wrought by the critic/scholar/teacher who insists upon a single correct interpretation. I won't go so far as to suggest there are no "wrong" interpretations, however.

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I won't go so far as to suggest there are no "wrong" interpretations, however.

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Well maybe not "no" wrong interpretations, but as long as a fair interpretation is derived from the text itself, strictly speaking, there can be relatively few "wrong" readings.

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Originally Posted by Neely

Well maybe not "no" wrong interpretations, but as long as a fair interpretation is derived from the text itself, strictly speaking, there can be relatively few "wrong" readings.

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You'd be surprised. Plenty of wrong, or stupid readings, or simply readings with no substance (like people who comment something like, "the words chosen here are beautifully written and evoke wonderful images" or other such nonsense). I'd say 80% of academic readings are meh, 40% bad, and 95% of unscholarly readings are pretty mediocre, in terms of accuracy. It's not so uncommon to see complete debasements in criticism, let alone the common reader. Besides which, the bulk of bad readings suffer from not having anything interesting to say - that's the real crime, I think, a teacher taking the SparkNotes, and essentially dictating it to their class. Quite simply, a good class on literature assumes that the students good enough as to be able to write the sparknotes themselves, and thereby teaches something which can't be downloaded from the internet.

Nope.

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Originally Posted by Neely

Well maybe not "no" wrong interpretations, but as long as a fair interpretation is derived from the text itself, strictly speaking, there can be relatively few "wrong" readings.

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There are an awful lot of interpretations out there that have so little connection with the text that one wonders if someone didn't attach something that was meant for a different text.

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Originally Posted by higley

I've been fortunate that nothing has been ruined for me, though I've often been annoyed by overanalysis. This calls to mind, however, Ray Bradbury's heated objections to the way that so many have interpreted Fahrenheit 451, mainly that it is publicly regarded as a criticism of censorship but he actually intended it to be more of a denunciation of the increasing influence of television and pop culture.

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I haven't read Farenheit 451 but I find it ironic that it is intended as a denunciation of the increasing influence of television and pop culture when, according to Wickipedia, Ray Bradbury is an author of science fiction, fantasy and horror, three of the staples of television and pop culture.

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Originally Posted by JBI

You'd be surprised. Plenty of wrong, or stupid readings, or simply readings with no substance (like people who comment something like, "the words chosen here are beautifully written and evoke wonderful images" or other such nonsense). I'd say 80% of academic readings are meh, 40% bad, and 95% of unscholarly readings are pretty mediocre, in terms of accuracy. It's not so uncommon to see complete debasements in criticism, let alone the common reader. Besides which, the bulk of bad readings suffer from not having anything interesting to say - that's the real crime, I think, a teacher taking the SparkNotes, and essentially dictating it to their class. Quite simply, a good class on literature assumes that the students good enough as to be able to write the sparknotes themselves, and thereby teaches something which can't be downloaded from the internet.

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Not a maths scholar JBI?

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Originally Posted by JBI

You'd be surprised. Plenty of wrong, or stupid readings, or simply readings with no substance (like people who comment something like, "the words chosen here are beautifully written and evoke wonderful images" or other such nonsense). I'd say 80% of academic readings are meh, 40% bad, and 95% of unscholarly readings are pretty mediocre, in terms of accuracy. It's not so uncommon to see complete debasements in criticism, let alone the common reader. Besides which, the bulk of bad readings suffer from not having anything interesting to say - that's the real crime, I think, a teacher taking the SparkNotes, and essentially dictating it to their class. Quite simply, a good class on literature assumes that the students good enough as to be able to write the sparknotes themselves, and thereby teaches something which can't be downloaded from the internet.

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Yes I know that there is a lot of pretty poor stuff around criticism wise. I remember once reading a scholarly piece on Wilde which tried to make a case that Wilde's poor early writing could be explained by the fact that he had not yet had a true homosexual encounter until he met Robert Ross. It wasn't until he had this relationship that he could fully realise his potential as a writer (or something like that).

The thing is though whether or not we agree with an argument or whether it is phrased well is not really the issue. We can argue against a case, and may be able to do so in better terms, but it doesn't necessarily mean that there is an exact right answer, nor should there be unless we want to reduce art to mathematics, heaven forbid.

As for the absolute dross, as in your example, we can just ignore it.

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Originally Posted by PeterL

There are an awful lot of interpretations out there that have so little connection with the text that one wonders if someone didn't attach something that was meant for a different text.

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Agreed. It's like the person reads one book, loves it, sees some passing similarity and then tries to take the interpretation of one book and stick it onto another.

I think we can all agree that a good book has to be open to interpretation and not merely dictated to us. Maybe I'm just saying that as a theatre fanatic but the most interesting books are open to interpretation: Lolita, The Great Gatsby...

It's a quality of being vague, but not too vague, allowing the reader to decide.

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Originally Posted by Neely

Yes I know that there is a lot of pretty poor stuff around criticism wise. I remember once reading a scholarly piece on Wilde which tried to make a case that Wilde's poor early writing could be explained by the fact that he had not yet had a true homosexual encounter until he met Robert Ross. It wasn't until he had this relationship that he could fully realise his potential as a writer (or something like that).

The thing is though whether or not we agree with an argument or whether it is phrased well is not really the issue. We can argue against a case, and may be able to do so in better terms, but it doesn't necessarily mean that there is an exact right answer, nor should there be unless we want to reduce art to mathematics, heaven forbid.

As for the absolute dross, as in your example, we can just ignore it.

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Was the last line directed at my botched grammar - I don't know what happened when I wrote it, but I must have been out of it (I was studying Chinese, so perhaps that is why the grammar makes absolutely no sense).

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Originally Posted by kelby_lake

I think we can all agree that a good book has to be open to interpretation and not merely dictated to us. Maybe I'm just saying that as a theatre fanatic but the most interesting books are open to interpretation: Lolita, The Great Gatsby...

It's a quality of being vague, but not too vague, allowing the reader to decide.

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Yes absolutely. The same thing goes for all the arts of course, its just that we often think of interpretation as relating to the book only, but naturally you can analyse anything (or almost anything) to the same degree.

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Originally Posted by Neely

Yes absolutely. The same thing goes for all the arts of course, its just that we often think of interpretation as relating to the book only, but naturally you can analyse anything (or almost anything) to the same degree.

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Not vague, I would argue, but open, in the sense that certain elements give opportunity for the audience to create their own meanings and interpretations. I wouldn't, for instance, call W. C. Williams' Red Wheelbarrow vague, but more open ended. Likewise, Pound's In a Station of the Metro;

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Invites the reader to form meanings, yet isn't exactly vague, since vague implies there is an intended meaning. Hamlet isn't vague, he is merely elliptical, and doesn't tell people what he thinks (and if he does, he often seems to have thought that out, as to dupe them, and the audience as well). The openness comes from the fact that there is far more going on than what is seen before the audience.

The sense of negative capability that seems referred to in your post is only one aspect - that sort of leaving things out is a method, but even if you are Zola, and try to hammer in all the details, there is still going to be an under layer to everything, which will not easily be understood, and which invites room for interpretation.

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Originally Posted by JBI

Was the last line directed at my botched grammar - I don't know what happened when I wrote it, but I must have been out of it (I was studying Chinese, so perhaps that is why the grammar makes absolutely no sense).

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No, no, not at all. I merely meant the example you gave "the words chosen here are beautifully written and evoke wonderful images" I didn't even notice any error of grammar. Would you think I could possibly have it in me to be so caustic?

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Originally Posted by kelby_lake

Agreed. It's like the person reads one book, loves it, sees some passing similarity and then tries to take the interpretation of one book and stick it onto another.

I think we can all agree that a good book has to be open to interpretation and not merely dictated to us. Maybe I'm just saying that as a theatre fanatic but the most interesting books are open to interpretation: Lolita, The Great Gatsby...

It's a quality of being vague, but not too vague, allowing the reader to decide.

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Yes, the good ones leave something for the reader to do. Then there are the ones where everything is laid out for the reader, if the reader can notice it; I am think particularly of The Name of the Rose, in which everything was there. There was no mystery, but other people have indicted that they didn't see it.

You got a nice discussion going, cynara.

Interpretations are inevitable, welcome, and don't make me shirk from literature at all, even if a reading is particularly terrible - in which case I just disregard it, or read it for laughs.

Beckett famously wrote at the end of the Addenda in Watt, 'no symbols where none intended'. That sounds great, but it's probably the most disingenuous thing he ever wrote - to refute its plausibility, look no further than the novel's characters' names (Watt -> What; Mr Knott -> Not / Knot; etc).

And what a great thing that there are so many different readings; were books to be so base and meaningless as to not elicit interpretations, what would be the point of reading them, anyway?

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EDIT: I've reread the OP and realised I didn't really answer it, my post was more based on the discussion that ensued. I have gone through that horrid experience of putting every single detail in a chapter under a microscope for a week or so. It may spoil the reading of a couple of novels then, but the idea that they keep hammering into your head in school is worth a thought: think twice before taking things at face value. An important lesson too, which I sadly ignore most spectacularly every now and then.

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Originally Posted by wessexgirl

Not a maths scholar JBI?

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you can be both meh and bad at the same time. I could have said, for instance, 40% meh, 40% bad, but the meh ones are often overlapped with the bad ones. Perhaps what I should have said; 80% are meh, with 40% of those being flat out bad.

I think what hurt Gatsby was how much time we spent on it. We were reading and analyzing minutely for about three months. I don't mean to say having a group of fresh opinions can ruin a book, or that translation ruins a book, it's more to do with finding meaning in every phrase. I can literally recite whole chapters of the novel. Instead of remembering the book in a sequence of events i can only picture it in jerky episodes.

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Originally Posted by Brian Bean

I haven't read Farenheit 451 but I find it ironic that it is intended as a denunciation of the increasing influence of television and pop culture when, according to Wickipedia, Ray Bradbury is an author of science fiction, fantasy and horror, three of the staples of television and pop culture.

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Fantasy, horror and science fiction all existed long before television. Pop culture refers to whatever is currently popular, so in older times classics like Dickens and Shakespeare would have been considered the pop culture of their era. So there's nothing wrong with the aforementioned genres or anything ironic about him writing those genres.

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Originally Posted by cynara

Fantasy, horror and science fiction all existed long before television. Pop culture refers to whatever is currently popular, so in older times classics like Dickens and Shakespeare would have been considered the pop culture of their era. So there's nothing wrong with the aforementioned genres or anything ironic about him writing those genres.

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Kyd perhaps, but pop culture as a form never consisted of theatre - keep in mind geographically where the theaters were - generally around municipalities or people with money at least - certainly sea ballads and drinking songs would be closer to "popular" culture, and even folkmusic and dancing in their own silly way - though things were far less text-heavy, so culture as a popular medium, that is, a periodical medium, was less common perhaps than it is today. We could, for instance consider Beowulf pop culture, but I think that doesn't understand the context of its composition - if it was popular, it was popular over time, rather than over geographical space, and popular over time is rather oxymoronic - the power of the text over time is very different than popular in the sense that the most people have experienced it. Dickens clearly was a popular writer, but being removed, we read him very differently today, and hardly as a popular writer (I think people, for instance, at the academic level tend to like books like Bleak House over the more popular Christmas Carrol or Tale of Two Cities). In truth, Zola was a popular novelist, but even he has conquered time in terms of appeal, and has been appropriated into a sort of "artist" chic rather than populist voice. I know, for instance, a specialist in 19th century French Fiction (she is a leading scholar on Zola) who has read countless books that were beyond popular yet nobody today really knows them.

Popular in the sense we have it today, as a textual form rather than oral, a spatially bound rather than time-bound form originated really with the ease of production. Generally, the emergence of printing helped create a more textual society, but what really set off popular culture was the introduction of pulp into the printing world. Instead of loaning libraries controlling the distribution of texts (which around 1800 would go for 300$ a book in today money, often more if the book had many volumes). Keep in mind also, that literacy was also a relatively new phenomenon. Popular culture, in reference to texts ultimately is a second half of the twentieth century phenomenon, unless you count bourgeois romance reading girls as the "mass market".

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I think what hurt Gatsby was how much time we spent on it. We were reading and analyzing minutely for about three months. I don't mean to say having a group of fresh opinions can ruin a book, or that translation ruins a book, it's more to do with finding meaning in every phrase. I can literally recite whole chapters of the novel. Instead of remembering the book in a sequence of events i can only picture it in jerky episodes.

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I don't know, it sounds pretty cool to me, the fact that you can recite whole chapters of the novel is quite an impressive result you have to admit. You don't have to hold on to all the possible ways of reading particular lines in the close readings you did, you can still stand back and enjoy it for what it is, same as I can still read Little Red Riding Hood to my kids and not worry too much about its sexual signification!

No, I can honestly say I have never had a book ruined for me by thinking about it too much.

Some books don't much stand up to being thought about... but those are generally books I haven't much enjoyed reading in the first place.

As for analysis, some analysis I find irksome because I don't agree with it.

Some analysis (like some anything else) can be wrong-headed; this is no more a reason to condemn analysis than the fact that some science has turned out to be wrong is a reason to abandon science.

In the field of literature, there are many analyses that need interpretation.

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Originally Posted by prendrelemick

In the field of literature, there are many analyses that need interpretation.

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Interpreting the interpretations is quite interesting :)

Oh come on. Hermeneutics is not exactly a science, though you might never guess from New Critics, as practiced in the late 20th century through today. I'd rather an extended and insightful discussion than opinions trussed up in stock phrases. As nice as it is that a large group of readers can get together in a community like this one, a quick perusal of the May discussion of The Maltese Falcon shows that a high percentage of the participants didn't post much in the way of an analysis, good, bad, insightful, or otherwise.

Now, Hammett isn't Borges, but I can imagine that Borges owes much to Hammett's trump cards, and there is something worth gleaning even from commercially driven genres, especially when they become classics, but the fastest way to kill cultural appreciation is to express things like this:

It sucks.
I like it.
Didn't do much for me.

That right there contributes to the devolution of the human animal, rather than improves upon the quality of insight and ability.

Now, I agree, things can get nonsensical. Jed Perl despises the artist Francis Bacon, and says Bacon isn't a painter even though Bacon obviously offers canvas and representational modes which offer the viewer a certain degree of brutalism. Me? Despite Goya, I don't see what all the fuss is about. Abstract expressionism, Impressionism, Picasso, Warhol, these traditions have long chucked pictorial accuracy, so far be it for me to know to a certainty that Bacon is an empty shell, and would cause luke to recoil in horror--but this points to the problem of the art world being three or four times removed from a non-afficionado like myself. I *know* a little here and there, had some art history, but I don't have the deceased Updike's Harvard erudition to be able to practice as an art critic, and few people outside of practitioners like luke can function in that role, but most of us should be able to assess narrative and other arts beyond

I like it or I hate it

and I am sure I could do that looking at Bacon even in near ignorance as to why he is Barry Manilow rather than a real recording artist, like Frank Sinatra, which is another way of saying I disagree with Perl even though I lack his expertise. One cannot say Barry isn't a musician and a singer, even if one can point to what makes him a terribly bad one.

Jed Perl... I can't think of a more conservative idiot as critic since the New Republic's own Hilton Kramer. An iconic figure like Francis Bacon dismissed as the worst painter of the 20th century and another, Robert Rauschenberg brushed away with a wave of the hand: "As for his art, it stank in the 1950s, and it doesn't look any better today." I'll only give him a slight benefit of the doubt because he was quite strong in his responses to the recent exhibition of my own beloved, Pierre Bonnard. Still... I do get where you are coming from in that certain criticisms are indeed less than satisfactory. To state "I like it" or "I hate it" may be fine if backed up with some logical reasons as to why. All criticism comes down to personal opinion at a certain level, albeit some opinions are better than others. "Statements like "It sucks" or "The greatest writer since Shakespeare" or "The worst painter of the 20thy century" are so meaningless that they beg no response other than a bemused smirk.

Jozy... you again paint me as far too much of the conservative in artistic matters. Perhaps to a certain extent I am a classicist... certainly I am deeply rooted in the history of art... but as such I am more than aware that in the vast majority of instances it is those who are so deeply rooted that are the greatest innovators (whether we speak of Michelangelo, Rubens, Ingres, Picasso, Matisse, or Anselm Kiefer) and not the oblivious iconoclasts. Picasso, for example, could question and challenge the very foundations of Western painting so well because he knew it like the back of his hand. Pollack, on the other hand, built off his immediate predecessors and peers and eventually arrived at something new, but seen within the larger context of art history he is quite limited in his range, his output of truly great paintings in quite small, and his importance is rather diminutive in comparison with an artist such as Paul Klee... let alone Picasso.

Personally (surprise, surprise, Jozie) I find Francis Bacon to be an incredibly powerful painter. Perl argues that Bacon embraces all the wrong directions and elements in art. Nothing could be more ridiculous. The very notion of a monolithic development of art is dead... and always was wrong. Yes, Schoenberg, and Weber, and Berg were far more experimental than Puccini, Rachmaninoff, and Delius... but somehow I suspect that the latter composers may just outlast the former. Innovation and fracturing the art of one's predecessors isn't the sole measure of artistic merit.

A good many of my artist friends share a similar feeling that the status of Abstract Expressionism was far overstated (thanks especially to the hyperbolic criticism of Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg)... or rather that it was overstated to the exclusion of artists who did not follow in the same mold. We have come to expect that a number of European masters including Francis Bacon, Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti, Lucian Freud, and Giorgio Morandi way prove in the long run to have been just as important... if not more-so. Indeed, considering the strong Post-Modern predilection for a pre-Modernist "realism" in painting, one needs to look quite hard for heirs of Abstract Expressionism and a great deal of Modernist Expressionism and Abstraction as a whole.

Perhaps the major problem faced by each of these artists (outside of the fact that they were not working in New York) is that they did not follow in the footsteps of the New York School and they largely had little of no interest in what the New York School was doing or what the dictates of the all-powerful Clement Greenberg were. When Greenberg said (to paraphrase) "painting is about flattening the picture plane, eliminating the subject and the artist's hand" later filed painters such as Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, and Helen Frankenthaler (who just happened to be sleeping with Robert Motherwell... and then Greenberg) said "Yes sir! Mr. Greenberg, sir!" Robert Rauschenberg rebelled and said "screw you, Greenberg!" and then churned out one of his in your face combines that broke every rule of Greenberg. Francis Bacon, however, I have always imagined, would have simply said "Clem who? Is he gay?":lol:

The reality is that Francis Bacon is a limited artist. He lacks the range of Picasso or Matisse. In his way his work exists in just as narrow a range as that of most of Abstract Expressionism. On the other hand, his work is clearly rooted in the work of his predecessors... but those he looks to and that which he built upon were not the same as that of the mainstream Ab-Ex. He built upon Picasso's Surrealist period distortions of the figure, a certain Japanese minimalism of compositional design (Bacon began as a designer), Matisse's color sense, the manipulation of paint and tonalism of Soutine, Van Gogh and Baroque masters such as Rembrandt and especially Velasquez, and perhaps more than anything... photography and film. Where earlier artists such Degas, Bonnard, etc... may have gained something from the compositional ideas of photography, Bacon may have been one of the first to recognize that there were images in film and photography that were as iconic and essential to 20th century culture as that of any painting: the scene on the steps from Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, Hitler ranting an Nuremberg, Muybridge's studies of human movement, etc... Bacon drew from such disparate sources... images of the realities and horrors of 20th century life (both personal and public) and then he staged these within the highly aestheticized context of the religious icon and altarpiece. The resulting works are among some of the most resonant paintings of the latter 20th century:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2430/...cdf48985_o.jpg

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Originally Posted by cynara

Fantasy, horror and science fiction all existed long before television. Pop culture refers to whatever is currently popular, so in older times classics like Dickens and Shakespeare would have been considered the pop culture of their era. So there's nothing wrong with the aforementioned genres or anything ironic about him writing those genres.

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Exactly. I've never really considered Bradbury to be "just" a sci fi writer, but say rather that he writes about the human condition in the hypothetical context of a futuristic time, I really think he can't be pinned down to fantasy for its own sake--although as cynara says, those predated television anyway.

But luke, what I am saying is I don't even know how to find the assurance to agree or disagree. There was some interesting pushback against Perl, and without knowing much, I do think he took it over the top. I see Carivaggio as a very powerful artist, after all, even if Perl singles him out as an archetype to be blamed. It is the experience transmuted which creates great work.

I'd like to see a Bacon exhibit one day. Perl raises his voice so much that I think I might try to judge for myself.

Stanley Kubrick once said something about film that I've always found applicable to all the arts: "film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later."

For me, it's essential to enjoy a work passionately first, and not attempt to grasp it all intellectually. Allowing it to provoke reactionary emotions and your own intuition of knowing there's more there but not being able to completely discern it. In this sense, one can look at art as like a relationship; the early part is all hot and passionate romance. The analysis and interpretation is where one turns the intangible to the tangible, the intuitively sensed to the consciously grasped. If a work still holds up to this and maintains its greatness then it's probably a truly great work of art. This would be like marriage and knowing someone for many years after the passion is worn off; if it lasts, it's probably real.

There are a couple of works I've spent years studying in depth (two would be 2001: A Space Odyssey and Neon Genesis Evangelion). In both cases I began by passionately loving them and, in the case of NGE, being profoundly effected by my first viewing. But all of the analysis, discussion, and "solving" of the mysteries gave me a greater appreciation for just how impressive both were. My blind passion turned into a kind of deeper, '20/20' appreciation for what the works accomplished and WHY I was so effected.

I do recall a quote from a professor of Shakespeare who said that he'd give back all of his knowledge of Romeo & Juliet if he could go back and experience for the first time. In a way, I understand the sentiment. There's nothing that can replace that sense of passion one gets from encountering a truly great and personally affecting work or artist for the first time. I just look at all the other stuff as a logical next step. Because passion must eventually wear off; and that's where we find out if something has lasting value.

Jozie... There's a wonderful diptych in the Philadelphia museum by Rogier Van der Weyden that has always reminded me of Bacon:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3350/...f8dc984a_o.jpg

The reddish area is far more orangish... a cadmium red light hue... from what I remember... so that it fairly well screams. Like Bacon the painting merges the horror (of the act of a crucifixion) and dramatic realism with an extreme artifice: not only is the drama taking place within a shallow space that suggests a stage set... something out of Beckett's Endgame... but there is an absolute artfulness in the placement... the flow of the draperies and movement of the bodies are artfully thought out. The end result is rather like the horrible scenes of the Inferno as they unfold in the controlled structure's of Dante's terza rima or Baudelaire's nightmarish scenes presently within perfectly realized sonnets. There is this frisson that results from the contrast between the content and form that Bacon also achieves in his strongest works. Perl's criticism of Bacon's lack of structure immediately leads me to think that he hasn't the least concept of formal structure in art. Painters, unfortunately, have long been at the mercy of critics... who as writers are masters of words... but not necessarily visual form. I had to laugh upon reading this review with an artist friend and admit that perl was good at what he did. His quoting Lisa Yuskavage, George Condo, and John Currin... three of the worst contemporary schlock artists... perfectly undermined Bacon, who is nothing like these latter painters. I have little doubt that much of the negative direction taken in the visual arts is owed to criticism that focuses more upon elements that can be readily explored in words: subject matter, narrative, socio-political ramifications, philosophical underpinnings... as opposed to color, touch, rhythm, harmony, and other essentially visual elements.

I may have seen this luke, though it has been awhile since I've been to old stodgy--but to my point--overkill helps. I have neither Perl's expertise, nor yours, but I have learned, and when it comes to art, I do not mind proclaiming some stupidity.

I think, however, that we'll always be negotiating a balance between critical scholarship and lay accessibility.

If I can turn the tables on the OP's plaint, the closest problem I have to ruin by interpretation is when theater directors attempt absolute fidelity to Shakespeare. (Not a big fan of Originalism here, hint hint.)

I feel that for Shakespeare to thrive, adaptation, variation, and textual study and criticism is essential--although I have to handicap that with the caveat that, I have never seen some of the plays which interest me most in terms of producing them, Measure for Measure, among others.