Blogging the Bookshelf » Art

On Autobiography – “Notes on Dali” from “Fifty Orwell Essays” – George Orwell

Tim — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 04:40:05 +0000

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

Teachers – “An Artist of the Floating World” – Kazuo Ishiguro

Tim — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 23:28:06 +0000

A teacher or mentor whom one admires greatly in early adulthood will leave his mark, and indeed, long after one has come to re-evaluate, perhaps even reject, the bulk of that man’s teachings, certain traits will tend to survive, like some shadow of that influence, to remain with one throughout one’s life…

..the way I poise my hand when I am explaining something, certain inflexions in my voice when I am trying to convey irony or impatience, even whole phrases I am fond of using that people have come to think of as my own – I am aware these are all traits I originally acquired from Mori-san, my former teacher. And perhaps I will not be flattering myself unduly were I to suppose many of my own pupils will in turn have gained such small inheritances from me.

Pronunciation and Culture – “Cultural Amnesia” – Clive James

Tim — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 05:36:06 +0000

Gauguin did the same for me before I could pronounce his name. (I called him Gorgon.) Degas I gave an acute accent over the “e,” not realizing that the “De” was an honorific prefix: “duh” would have been closer to the right sound, and certainly would have conformed to my general reaction when faced with his genius. Adding tear sheets from magazines to a small stack of thin books, I built up an archive of reproductions, calling him Day-ga until a kind woman from Vienna at last corrected me. (She ran a little coffee house in the Strand Arcade. How young and foolish of me not to quiz her on the story of her life.) From then on, I never laughed at anyone who mispronounced an artist’s name, because it usually only meant that what he had read had run far ahead of what he had heard, and I knew too well how that can happen. When you are learning a new language, there is a blissful moment when, from not knowing how to, you pass to not knowing how not to. The second phase is the dangerous one, because it leads to sophistication, and one of the marks of sophistication is a tendency to forget what it was like to be naïve.

Urgh – I never knew this. Duh-ga is close to my favourite artist and I’ve been mispronouncing his name for years! I love his conclusion about someone who mispronounced a cultural phrase though…

Real Sell Outs – “Cultural Amnesia” – Clive James

Tim — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 05:36:05 +0000

Sartre, whose underground activities had never amounted to anything except a secret meeting on Wednesday to decide whether there should be another meeting the following Tuesday, not only claimed the status of Resistance veteran but called down vengeance on people whose behaviour had not really been all that much more reprehensible than his own. The sad truth was that he, even more conspicuously than Camus, owed his wartime fame as a writer and thinker to Nazi tolerance, for which a price had to be paid. The price was to lace one’s eloquence with a judiciously timed silence. The trick was to pay up and make it look like compulsion. So it was, but only if you considered your career as indispensable—something artists find it all too easy to do.

Art and the Hierarchy of Needs – “Cultural Amnesia” – Clive James

Tim — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 05:41:06 +0000

We also have to grasp that art proves its value by still mattering to people who have been deprived of every other freedom: indeed instead of mattering less, it matters more.

Very true – the willingness of people in repressed regimes to risk their lives in the name of artistic expression is telling.

The Richest Cultural Moment in History – “Cultural Amnesia” – Clive James

Tim — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 05:15:05 +0000

It would be a desirable and enviable existence just to earn a decent wage at a worthwhile job and spend all one’s leisure hours improving one’s aesthetic appreciation. There is so much to appreciate, and it is all available for peanuts. One can plausibly aspire to seeing, hearing and reading everything that matters. The times are not long gone when nobody could aspire to that.

I think this is a really important thing to remember. We might look back on previous times as somehow more culturally rich, but I wouldn’t choose to live in any time but now.

Humanism – “Cultural Amnesia” – Clive James

Tim — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 02:55:05 +0000

Humanism wasn’t in the separate activities: humanism was the connection between them. Humanism was a particularized but unconfined concern with all the high-quality products of the creative impulse, which could be distinguished from the destructive one by its propensity to increase the variety of the created world rather than reduce it. Builders of concentration camps might be creators of a kind—it is possible to imagine an architect happily working to perfect the design of the concrete stanchions supporting an electrified barbed-wire fence—but they were in business to subtract variety from the created world, not to add to it. In the connection between all the outlets of the creative impulse in mankind, humanism made itself manifest, and to be concerned with understanding and maintaining that intricate linkage necessarily entailed an opposition to any political order that worked to weaken it.

Artistic Contradiction – “Anthills of the Savannah”. Chinua Achebe

Tim — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 03:10:05 +0000

Do I contradict myself?” asked Walt Whitman. “Very well, I contradict myself,” he sang defiantly. “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Every artist contains multitudes. Graham Greene is a Roman Catholic, a partisan of Rome, if you like. Why then does he write so compulsively about bad, doubtful and doubting priests? Because a genuine artist, no matter what he says he believes, must feel in his blood the ultimate enmity between art and orthodoxy. Those who would see no blot of villainy in the beloved oppressed nor grant the faintest glimmer of humanity to the hated oppressor are partisans, patriots and party-liners.

Art and Scarcity of Attention – “Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist” – Tyler Cowen

Tim — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 04:00:06 +0000

Our time and attention is scarce. Art is not that important to us, no matter what we might like to believe… Our love of art is often quite temporary, dependent upon our moods, and our love of art is subservient to our demand for a positive self image. How we look at art should account for those imperfections and work around them. “

Keep in mind that books, like art museums, are not always geared to the desires of the reader. Maybe we think we are supposed to like tough books, but are we? Who says? Many writers (and art museums) produce for quite a small subsample of the… public.
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In each room, ask yourself which picture you would take home – if you could take just one – and why? This forces you to keep thinking critically about the displays. If the alarm system was shut down and the guards went away, should I carry home the Cezanne, the Manet, or the Renois? In a room of Egyptian antiquities, which one caught my eye? And why? We should discuss the question with our companion.

To put it crudely, we must force ourselves to keep on paying attention. Ranking the pictures focuses our attention on our favourites. It also focuses our attention on ourselves, which is in fact our favourite topic….
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At the end of the visit, ask which paintings stuck with you. Did you find yourself thinking back on the Munch, the Pollock, or the medieval tapestries? A week later ask the same question. Then go read about those artists or that period. That is a more useful procedure than reading about art in advance.

We should view paintings repeatedly, but especially after we have spent time with other artworks. The best way to understand one art museum is to go see another art museum with a related but not identical collection.

Scarcity of Attention and Elitism – “Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist” – Tyler Cowen

Tim — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 07:31:05 +0000

We must ignore the carping of the sophisticates. Well-educated critics may claim that pictures cannot be ranked, value is multidimensional or subjective, or that such talk, represents a totalising, colonising, possessive, post-capitalist, hegemonic Western imperialist approach. All of those missives are beside the point.

When it comes to the arts, dealing with the scarcity of our attention is more important than anything, including respecting the artists.