Modernist and Medieval Art · 11:20pm Apr 17th, 2017
While those paintings from my post “We Didn’t Start the Fire” are fresh in your mind, I want to talk about the relationship between modern art and medieval art. Modern art is often thought of as something new, but in many ways it is a return to the medieval artistic tradition. It began with a strong influence from primitive art [1], and it is not at all coincidence that primitive art, medieval art, and modern art share so many defining characteristics. They’re all based on philosophies situated at one extreme of what I call the principle dimension of art, which for the moment I’ll call idealism versus realism.
Cycladic head, Greece, circa 2500 BC
That’s not all there is to it, but rather than explain that, which will take many posts, let’s look at similarities between modern art and medieval art.
Color
Note the symbolic choice of face colors in Munch’s 1895 Jealousy from my previous post, Picasso’s use of blue throughout his blue period to show misery and despair, and the use of colors associated with death, disease, mold, and corruption rather than the colors of wolves for Jackson’s The She-Wolf.
Perspective
Fresco, St. Georg Church, Reichenau, Austria, 10th century A.D.
Picasso, Factory, 1909
Note the pseudo-perspective on the buildings in “Factory”, painted as as a child paints a building, where no one perspective is privileged, but each side looks more like it would if you were looking more directly at that side. This is called Cubism, and is the same approach used to draw the buildings in the Reichenau frescoes. The general multiple-simultaneous-perspective approach is also common in primitive art and is strictly mandated in ancient Egyptian art.
Essences govern medieval and modern art
A standard explanation is that Cubist painting and related styles depict the different sides of objects simultaneously, to give a truer picture of the object than one would get from a realistic drawing using perspective. I think this reveals the underlying motivation: All such paintings are made by people whose philosophies say that a realistic picture of an object is not a true picture. They are attempts to convey more of the “essence” of a subject than you could perceive simply by looking at it.
This principle governs medieval art. That’s why it’s so unrealistic. Principles of medieval art include:
- Instead of perspective, draw the most-important side of each figure.
- Size is used to show importance rather than distance.
- Colors are used for their symbolic meanings rather than to be realistic.
- Space is not represented, as it is unimportant.
All these principles recur in modern art.
Medieval painting, possibly of the Ark, source unknown
Cezanne, Four Bathers, 1890
Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907
Size and space
Cezanne’s painting places the bathers in a three-dimensional scene. There is space between them, and you can tell where they’re standing. Their sizes have been curiously inverted: the one farthest from the viewer, but most-central to the picture, is drawn the largest, while the one closest to the viewer, but compositionally least-important, is the smallest, as in medieval art.
In Picasso’s painting, size varies at random throughout each figure. Not only can’t you tell how to place these women in three dimensions, you can’t tell whether the central two are standing up or lying down. All five are scrunched together unnaturally closely, their figures filling the canvas. Space, and relations between people or things, are no longer important.
In the medieval painting, the largest figures are, perhaps, Noah and his wife, not because they are closet, but because they are most-important. They look upwards because they are closer to God than the other figures are. The sky is gold to indicate they are performing the will of God (see Benton p. 70). It’s hard to say where the other people are, or where the boat (Ark?) is. The green squiggles signify more than depict water.
In medieval paintings, every person was drawn in a position and posture indicating their relationship to God. In modern art, there is no God. The world has lost its center, and so positions and postures should remain ambiguous and unlocatable, adrift in a space without coordinates.
If you scroll through all the paintings in my previous post, you’ll see there is no space in Modernist painting, even if they’re representational. This is not AFAIK adequately accounted for by modern art critics, because their perspective does not allow them to notice that it’s missing. Space is not shown in modern art because space is not a property of objects. Modern artists, and the continental philosophy it’s based on, focus on what the essence of an object or the meaning of a word is, and have forgotten about the question of how objects or words relate to each other, or combine to give meaning.
Structure and creativity
Modern art rejects the notion of structure, whether the structure of natural objects, the composition of a painting, the dramatic or logical structure of a story, or the graceful and efficient load-bearing structure of a dome or arch as opposed to the structurally-indifferent brute power of right-angled steel bars. This rejection of structure is known as Structuralism. The idea is that rather than being aware of structures, relationships, and measurements, you need only be aware of contrasts. Mark Rothko’s paintings are the apotheosis of this notion:
It originates in Saussure’s linguistic theory, which says that words are defined not by properties of the things they denote, nor by algorithms, but by the set of words which contrast with or bound them. For instance, “tall” is not defined by an understanding of physical properties that make an object tall, but by being the opposite of “short”. “Wrist” is defined not as a particular anatomical feature, but as that word which lies semantically between “hand” and “forearm”.
Structuralism, however, is purely topological, uninterested in the metric space words lie in or the set-membership functions one might use to define them. That means they don’t care about how far apart the meanings of words are, the fuzziness or interpenetrability of their boundaries, or any unclaimed space between them. Philosophically, they’re reverting to Aristotelian logic, in which only first-order predicates exist, there are no quantifiers and no measurements, no action at a distance, and all reality conforms to a kind of Law of the Excluded Middle in which everything must be This or That. Re. the Law of the Excluded Middle, we may also observe that they’re reverting to a belief in Aristotle’s claim that empty space is impossible [2, 3].
Art of the High Middle Ages, similarly, had no notion of compositionality--the idea that a composition is more than the sum of its parts, or has some property other than the collection of the properties of its parts. I’ll give detailed support for this claim in a later post.
Ancient and medieval philosophy was focused on the idea that the answers to mysteries lay in the essences of objects, not in relationships between objects. Aquinas’ theory of imagination was that it produced images of remembered objects, and could construct a new image either by putting together multiple objects which had never been seen together, or by putting together formal properties from different known objects, “as when from the imaginary form of gold, and the imaginary form of a mountain, we construct the one form of a golden mountain, which we have never seen” (Eco p. 110).
There was no allowance in the medieval scholastic theory of the imagination or creativity to conceive of, say, a wheel, other than through having formerly seen a wheel. That would be a creative act, and to suggest that humans were creative would have been heresy.
Much of post-modern theory can be described as making the heresy of creativity unthinkable. This is why post-modernists like fan-fiction. Well, not enough to actually read it, but enough to write articles about it. They think it’s inherently uncreative (e.g., Coppa p. 231, 232, 245; Jamison 2013b; Wershler), and that it validates their claims that proper literature is not creative (Barthes 1971), but merely recombines elements of previous literature, the way Aquinas thought ideas simply recombine things people have seen before. (This belief may be technically true, but it is more misleading than informative due to the inability of humans to conceive of the degree to which the human brain decomposes sensory information.)
Summary
If you compare all the paintings in my previous post to 19th-century paintings, you’ll notice stylistic or technical differences. Modern art [4]:
- is crudely drawn
- uses a small number of colors, usually a subset of red, yellow, white, blue, black, green, and brown
- chooses colors for their symbolic or emotional values
- does little blending or shading of colors, and only for one-dimensional gradients--it never blends three colors to show realistic shadows, or shadows and a color gradient at the same time
- does not use perspective or uses multiple simultaneous perspectives
- does not depict empty space; stuffs the picture full (unless it’s an empty-canvas conceptual piece)
- does not try to depict objects realistically
- does not show people having emotions (a trend which began with Manet and Seurat’s coolly dispassionate evening parties and picnics, and harks back to neo-classicism and classical Greece)
This is nearly the same as the list of differences medieval paintings have from Renaissance paintings! Modern art, conceptually and technically, rolled back the Renaissance. This is because it’s based on a philosophy which rolls back the Enlightenment and Renaissance to return to medieval conceptions of the world. More on that later.
[1] “Primitive” is a controversial word now. In most cases it’s more precise to say “hunter-gatherer”, but we can’t for art, because we often don’t know whether an ancient society was a hunter-gatherer society. We can, however, usually look at its technological artifacts, and its art, and say whether it was primitive. If anyone is offended by the term, their presumption that the term is an insult only proves their own prejudice against primitive societies.
One good source for the influence of primitive art on modern art would be a biography of Picasso, but that’s just scratching the surface. (McGill 1984) describes a large art exhibition arguing that the influence of primitive art on modern art was more philosophical than formal and that Picasso wanted to return to irrationalism and ritualism. I would say philosophy and form always go hand-in-hand.
[2] Aristotle’s claim is cleverer than it at first appears, and might be correct in two senses. One is that a vacuum must have quantum fluctuations; the second has to do with how space is created by mass in general relativity.
[3] Much of deconstructionism can be concisely described as the claim that reality is unknowable because Aristotelian logic and physics don’t work in real life, but that’s also a topic for a separate series of blog posts.
[4] Of course there are exceptions--probably thousands or even tens of thousands of exceptions. Matisse, a Fauvist, maintained a sense of space. Georgia O’Keefe blended 3 colors to show color-realistic shadows. But these rules probably hold for more than 90% of modern art.
References
Roland Barthes, 1971. “From Work to Text.” In Leitch et al., pp. 1326-1331.
Janetta Rebold Benton. Materials, Methods, and Masterpieces of Medieval Art.
Coppa, Francesca. “Writing Bodies in Space.” In Hellekson & Busse 2014, pp. 227-246.
Umberto Eco 1959, translated 1986. Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. Yale University Press.
Hellekson, Karen, & Kristina Busse 2014. The Fan Fiction Studies Reader. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2014.
Jamison, Anne E. Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking over the World. Dallas, TX: Smart Pop, an Imprint of BenBella Books, Inc., 2013.
Jamison 2013b. “An Interview with Jonathan Lethem.” In Jamison. (No page numbers in e-book.)
Leitch et al., eds., The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism. New York: Norton, 2010.
Douglas McGill 1984. “What does modern art owe to the primtives?” New York Times September 23, 1984.
Wershler, Darren. “Conceptual Writing as Fanfiction.” In Jamison, pp. 408-417.
I'm reminded of a comment you made a while back about modern progressivism being built on a medieval foundation with a fresh coat of paint...
Your definitions of modernism is so didactic that it excludes by definition much of which is considered 'modernist' by contemporaries and practitioners. For one thing, all this bollocks about empty space seems aggressively wedded to manifesto-style definitions that don't actually match real modernist painters aside from Picasso and his Cubist bullshit. Mondarian and Georges Ribemant and Salvador Dali are all about negative spaces and relations between objects and space. They're *crazed* relations, but still, there's a visual vocabulary addressing relations and space.
To reduce modernism, even in its most mad surrealist form, to simple reductive return to medievalism, is to throw away what is distinct and interesting about them. It is *not* a return to form, but rather, explorations which may or may not include some reversions to the old measures. Because object-oriented ideological art with a tendency towards the refusal of renaissance-type scientific perspective is not simply 'medieval'. Such things have been discarded before, when the Hellenistic craze for purely representational art was discarded after a brief few centuries of support. Representational can be seen in this perspective as a brief period in art, covering the few Hellenistic centuries, and then the Renaissance through the Victorian era. Most centuries discard this conceit in favor of politically-motivated imagery. It is, in a certain sense, an exception to the typical rule.
A reversion to 'bad luck', in the Heinleinian sense.
This is why, in internet art, the tiddy so big.
And hooray for Mark Rothko! :D
4500056 More like crayons. And not Crayola ones, but the cheap ones out of the dollar store.
4500197 I thought that was merely the result of better nutrition...
Sounds as bold definition but one really interesting as well and to me, at least in the artistic area, you've convinced me, this post was specially interesting
I'm a little curious though of the overall intentions of your dissection of modernism, it's just to state your analysis or to make a judgment of it? Today we tend to associate "medieval" as something terrible, and sayin "turning back to medieval" sounds like despective, but, thecnically it isn't (unless you want it to be
). From an aesthetics point of view, all those characteristicis you mentioned (size as a show of importance instead of space for example) seems like just a valid way of aesthetical exploration, or are you stating that they are a negative trait?.
4500167
Like I said, 90% coverage is good enough, and I've got 90% coverage of "stuff that shows up in Google image search when I look for modern art." I'm not trying to produce a "definition" in the old-fashioned sense, but the category's central characteristics.
> It is *not* a return to form, but rather, explorations which may or may not include some reversions to the old measures.
Like I said, form and philosophy go hand in hand. I believe it is a return to an old philosophy rather than explorations, but I'm only beginning to lay out my evidence. Many returns to earlier forms follow this return to philosophy, though of course not 100%.
> when the Hellenistic craze for purely representational art was discarded after a brief few centuries of support.
How is that possible, since Greece was conquered during the Hellenistic era? Changing the art produced because you were conquered and enslaved doesn't count as discarding your art.
Agreed. I'm getting to that. Most centuries used politically-motivated imagery, and those cultures that did so had philosophies and art that were remarkably similar to each other, and markedly different than those from the times of representational art. The TL;DR for my next 100,000 words is that we can build a theory of literature (doesn't work well for music or architecture) by deciding whether or not we want to be totalitarians.
4500225
Great question. A few responses:
- Art, religion, literature, philosophy, & politics seem to be a package deal. So if you say, "I love medieval art, but I don't like burning people at the stake," that might not lead to a coherent theory of culture.
- There are many people alive today who like medieval aesthetics. For instance, my mom loves a book My Utmost for His Highest. It's an allegorical Christian novel. Its characters are all named after virtues or vices, and they act out their virtues and vices, and then at the end of each chapter the Shepherd comes and rescues Much-Afraid. The dramatic tension is always dispelled by the appearance of the Shepherd within about one page of when it's created, so that instead of providing tension at the end of the chapter, it relieves the tension before ending each chapter. Everything happens as expected, and the whole novel's purpose is to let Christians read basically a series of sermons reassuring them of their beliefs. I think it's a rotten, stupid book, but she loves it, and the cover says "Over 2 million sold."
- I think, however, that we don't have to throw up our hands & say "You can't judge taste!" You can observe the effects of the different approaches to art etc. I observe that the time periods when representational art dominates are the times when science and personal liberty advance, when people seem happier, and when people develop a more-correct understanding of reality, while the time periods when art is used for propaganda are those times when people seem miserable and self-destructive, when they are cruellest to each other, when they are deceived about the nature of the world, and when they fail to learn more about the world. So I am, bottom line, ultimately willing to say medieval art is objectively bad, because it goes along with an entire system of life and thought that reduces knowledge, freedom, and joy.
- All that said, however, there are many times in history when a nation or people's survival is threatened, and the turn to a totalitarian regime may be the best thing for them at that time. Totalitarian regimes seem more durable than liberal ones.
That as may be, and I am awaiting evidence with bated breath, but I'd just like to point out that the whole quote 'The whole is greater than the sum of its parts' is lightly mangled Aristotle.
(The whole being greater than the sum of its parts is also super-important in the whole concept of Henology you can see in neo-Platonist philosophy)
4500167
I'd argue that not all modern art is Modern Art. Certainly not how people use the term. People generally imply by use that Modern Art is, well, whatever the visual equivalent of gibberish is.
4500226
You might try watching television about it. I think that would give you a considerably stronger grasp of the topic, though of course it's only, well, watching television about it. Try Robert Hughes' 'The Shock Of The New' series from 1980, and Matthew Collings' 'This is Modern Art' series from 1999, and if you like, Simon Schma's 'Power Of Art' from 2006 which is far more sensationalist than either.
To just google image search is to completely fail to understand virtually everything about the subject. For instance, to look at Pollock's choice of color and say it's colors of 'death, disease, mold, and corruption' is to not understand the way Abstract Expressionism began by rejecting symbolic intention and realism, and then went on to reject aspects of traditional art like the emotionally evocative color itself. Art went from 'reproducing' to 'theorizing' and became dependent on a structure of theory (such as some of the Color Fielder work like Frankenthaler, taking 'flatness' and the picture plane to such an extreme as to forbid any impasto at all: good luck getting Google Image Search to tell you how important these authors considered impasto or the utter lack of it).
Tom Wolfe argues that this is the fatal flaw of Abstract Expressionism: that it pursued intellectual structure to such an extent that the visual experience became completely unimportant next to the concepts the painters were espousing. And then you had guys like Rothko (a /) to Present Perfect, another Rothko lover!) who, near as I can work out, was not only mastering the emotional weight of delicate shades of color, but was incorporating sort of 'procedural' variations in these shades (not painted stroke by stroke, but the artifact of color blending and mixing on the actual canvas) of such sophistication that it doesn't even hold up in reproduction much less JPEG. I've not seen a Rothko of this type in person. I want to. It seems that if you do, you get lost in the painting as your eye starts to register patterns and forms within the seemingly 'solid' colors… If he'd wanted to paint like Kenneth Noland or Barnett Newman or Frank Stella, he could have. Rothko wasn't going for the more conceptual abstraction of removing feature from the picture plane, he was exploring subtlety down at the threshold of human visual perception, with the best techniques he knew for doing so, and then expecting you to stand well back, 'about eighteen inches' (this for paintings as tall as a man).
I'm sorry
there are many subjects which I'm not terribly interested about (like Greek literature, for instance). This is one where I've had a persistent, hungry interest, and have done painting of my own which nobody's really seen. I would say turn to Wikipedia over Google Image Search, except that I'm digging through Wikipedia now and startled by how incapable Wikipedia is of even hinting at what was going on in these fields. "The Painted Word" is far better even though it's a popular book: Wikipedia so thoroughly reduces everything to the 'what' and refuses the 'why', that it finds itself incapable of illustrating any purpose at all behind these inexhaustible leaps for meaning and intellectual structure in art.
And then, Google Image Search gives you JPEG versions of the 'what' with not the faintest question of a 'why'. I suppose if you're set on making up your own 'why' (which is EXACTLY what all these artists were doing, so you're in damn good company in a sense) then this is perfectly suitable. But what it really calls for is not essays, and definitely not teaching people what art movements 'really meant'.
It calls for you to go out and paint
4500548
First, thanks very much--I should have intuited that Aristotle or Aquinas must have a theory of complex objects. This thinking seems to be missing, though, from Aquinas' discussion of how imagination works. Any pointers on that? Do you know what Aristotle said about imagination?
Second--how do you keep remembering relevant passages from the massive writings of ancient authors? Did you read, understand, and memorize Aristotle's physics and metaphysics? Should I even ask about Aquinas? I only know what I am directed to by other texts on particular subjects. I don't sit down and say, "This week I shall read the Metaphysics."
I appreciate your long comment, because I would like to understand what it is that people like about, for instance, Mark Rothko. But I have very strong evidence to my mind that the kind of art you're defending is the emperor's new clothes, and when you say things like that you have to see it in person, only you've never seen it in person, you're making me more skeptical, not less.
4500635
I would much rather you recommended a book. I can't imagine having enough time to watch a television series about art. TV is too slow an input modality, and you can't see the art well at all.
I think that if you do that, it might not be right to call what you're doing "art". Art is communicative. If color choice doesn't communicate color (denotation), and it doesn't communicate emotional or other symbolic value (connotation), then is it communicating? If I write a story in which my hero is going on vacation, and I describe the resort she goes to like this,
... and you say, "Well, that sounds like a poor choice of vacation spot to me," and I say, "You don't understand--I'm rejecting the denotational and emotional valences of these words. You should just listen to the sounds of the consonants and syllables. They're very pretty-sounding, which is why I chose them," then I would not be an innovative writer, I would be a shitty writer. If Pollock chose those colors without knowing or caring what effect they would have on viewers, then he's a shitty painter. If Rothko was unaware that the hair of the figure(s) in "Heads" look like dog turds, then he's a shitty painter--and if he was, he's literally a shitty painter.
That would be doing something with paint, and maybe we could call it art, but it might be better to call it visually-aided philosophy. Except it ain't philosophy, since it ain't explained clearly. I don't think it's any kind of valid intellectual activity. You can't espouse concepts if you can't say what they are.
Sure. So could I. But he couldn't paint like Norman Rockwell. Rothko was not a master painter; he was a guy who honed one technique for almost 20 years. Time to stop the exercises and use it in a painting, Mark.
The term "master painter" didn't originally mean "really good painter." It meant a painter who was the master of journeymen and apprentices. He would conceive of an entire work, with many different components, requiring many different techniques, and would direct his workers to each handle those parts which they were capable of. If you look at a painting by an old master, it's full of many different techniques, each one as sophisticated as the One Thing that Rothko does, but used, together, to make a painting. If Rothko were in one of those painting shops, all he would be good for is to be the guy who paints the parts where two colors meet. Like, "Hey, Mark, I need a border here where the sky meets the sea. Do that border thing you're so good at." That would be it.
If you escalate what Rothko does to the level of a painting, you're trying to fill your mind with one tiny thought, admiring one little trick instead of the combination of dozens into a painting. And for Rothko to just keep doing it, year after year--it stretches my credibility past breaking to believe that he was an honest artist. There is no one technique in painting important enough to justify spending 20 years practicing it.
Actually Rothko painted a lot of other things besides the big blocks of 2 to 3 colors; you just don't see them, because they're painfully ugly.
uploads0.wikiart.org/images/mark-rothko/no-9-1947.jpg
No. 9, 1947
drawing100.wikispaces.com/file/view/antigone.jpg/136249991/antigone.jpg
prod-images.exhibit-e.com/www_washburngallery_com/69cf7ccd.jpg
Heads, 1941-1942
One one hand, I agree with the sentiment--people who can't paint shouldn't be art critics, just as people who can't write shouldn't be literary critics.
On the other hand, I notice that no important post-modern literary critics have ever written fiction, unless you count crappy experimental fiction, which a few minor ones have "written". (I don't think sticking your name on a phone book should count as "writing", though.) I'm also not aware that Clement Greenberg ever did any painting, and the MOMA has featured conceptual artists who don't even create their own art. The modern art establishment has thus already firmly rejected the idea that you need to paint to understand modern art.
When I tried to critique modernist and post-modern writing as a writer, I was told, "You can't do that--you don't understand the philosophy." Now you're telling me I can't critique painting until I learn how to paint, and until I see the paintings in person, although they rarely come within 400 miles of me. Taken together, this all sounds like a system created to tell people in Kansas that they can't have opinions on art.
Hmm. If you keep running into the same criticism from people who are more familiar with the terrain, maybe it's just that people are expressing the criticism poorly.
I think you've got every right in the world to say 'Rothko is lame and it's absurd his late work is deemed that much more valuable than his earlier crud, not to mention that of lots of other painters'. However, if you did that, you'd run into much less static, I think. After all, my sense of what Rothko's doing (and it's not totally obliterated by reproduction, but people have persuasively, even dramatically, argued that personally encountering one is on a whole other level of intensity) is that Rothko is triggering feelings and reactions with what looks at first glance like wall-painting. It smacks of magic to be able to pull that one off, and I think the valuation on his work is partly based on the mystery of evoking such intense feeling from seemingly nothing.
Part of that situation is knowing that uncultured oiks from Kansas will scoff. To scoff is not automatically annoying or offensive.
It seems to me you run into a difficulty much like a good friend of mine given to devils-advocacy and free-thinking (laudable things, to be sure!). You look into spheres you're not especially familiar with, and rather than scoff, your critique is in the way of 'explaining' things through making up plausible-sounding scenarios that can be wildly off base, and building a narrative in the way a direct creator might do. (I'm also reminded of Lester Bangs' music critiques, which are full of creative outbursts of thought)
Even to say 'art is communicative' flies in the face of some of the postmodern schools of thought. And this is fine too, I myself prefer art that's communicative, and this is one reason I like Rothko, who did what he did with the loudly, continuously expressed intention to affect people emotionally and indeed to deliver something of a leftist manifesto, but in paint. The sheer incongruity of attempting this through color-fielding has a charmingly mad audacity to me, and we do know that was his intent because he said so, a lot. Many of the others, led by Greenberg and numerous other critics of the day, got into strikingly different intentions, abstractions, and indeed their work became largely or entirely philosophical. Hell, Picasso's introduction of collage to fine art was a philosophical outrage.
Outrage is fine too.
It's just that, if you set out to critique My Little Pony, and you say, "Ponies are SATANIC! Because Apple Bloom has a red bow in her hair and red is satanic and obviously the intention of the person creating this supposedly creative work is to lead grown men to satanism! Because look, there are all these grown men and some even dress up as Apple Bloom and wear the red bow of Satan! And I can google image search pictures of Satan and it's within 2% of exactly the same color! The person animating all this must have their wickedness understood!"
That's of course a silly mockery of a position, but it contains relevant mistakes I bump into when you critique. There is no isolated person creating MLP: it's an animation studio, directed by a toy company, which never even intended to target grown men as an audience. Apple Bloom's bow isn't a mark of Satan, at least so far as I know. And if you Google image search for pictures of the Demiurge: first of all, you're getting only other artist's opinions all the way down, and secondly, the very concept of a Demiurge is awfully multilayered.
I can't help but think that you, and perhaps we all who keep bringing you down, are looking at this the wrong way. From where I see it (and I know people who've had just the same reaction when you traipse into THEIR bailiwick), it's not that you're not allowed to have an opinion, it's that you're just wrong.
And to be wrong in these oddly constructive, world-building, art-explaining ways, means that you're launching yourself out into areas that you don't know in the least. We should be more appreciative of this willingness to confront the unknown. You're trying to build something, it appears. You're kind of doing it through trying to recontextualize all manner of creation from whole schools of thought, whole historical movements you're seeing only through a lens of history.
Go ahead, then. If you were to go out and paint, or write original fiction (or even fanfiction) the one thing nobody could take from you is the right to paint your world the colors you choose, with whatever justification you wish or with none at all, and then explain what people ought to understand about your own intentions. The modernist writers did this. Rothko did this. The advanced postmodern conceptualists did this so hard they barely created things in the first place, they were so hot to explain them.
If you must explain what others mean through so distorting a lens, you're fair game for getting jumped on by people who are familiar with the field, who are of the opinion that your take is screwed up. To say 'you don't understand and can't say that' is to say that your take on the matter is wrong, full stop. It's like a more polite way of saying 'NOPE', because you've got things wrong and plainly haven't done your research. You say things like 'there is no space in modern art' (heck, your whole summary) and go on these riffs, and to believe your words is to mentally shut off whole areas of understanding, areas that are sometimes fundamental to the intentions of the artists. You seem not to know some of the most basic things about the subject, and it's not even all in service to your argument.
Example: of all the things you chose to cite to illustrate (I think) that modern art is a witting or unwitting throwback to primitive art, how on earth do you manage to cite the Demoiselles d'Avignon and not know that the distorted faces of three of the Demoiselles are literally, intentionally, painted images of African face-masks Picasso saw in a museum? I'm not entirely sure whether it supports or hurts your argument, that Picasso's primitivism was literally inspired by African primitive art: if you mean to suggest the artists take primitive cultures as inspiration, then you have the solidest possible historical confirmation. If instead you're suggesting the art sort of subconsciously degrades to an 'idealized' state that's like a kind of automatic substrate to artistic expression, and 'realism' takes work and smarts and skill and is preferable because otherwise artists catch Picasso like some sort of disease, I've only busted your balloon through pointing out that Picasso (a clever and talented guy) intentionally and willingly sought out and ran with these influences… moreover, he had to see the face masks in the museum before he got the idea, and his first attempts to incorporate that alternate stream were little more than copy-and-pasting Demoiselle faces from the masks he'd studied. He'd seen Cezanne's work, of course (also a historical fact) and he and Braque intended to expand upon it: but the African face masks blew his mind, as far as revealing where he could take things.
This is fundamental to modern art and its incorporation of distortions of realism to represent things unshowable by a single observer. The concept of relativity was highly relevant to Picasso's time, but more relevant to his Cubist explorations were Cezanne's earlier work, his buddy Braque who was on a nearly perfect parallel with him, and those amazing African masks he saw in a museum, that changed the course of art history just by existing and being copied. In no way did Picasso instinctively regress to an idealized, primitive form: he brought in abstractions and visual dislocations and synthesized them with Cezanne with the help of Braque, doing very conscious and intentional work.
There's more evidence to suggest Vermeer was a hack who traced all his best stuff using camera obscura. (I love Vermeer, by the way…) Point being, if the Dutch masters had truly mastered lenses and projection of an image onto a substrate, one could say all their jaw-dropping mastery of light and shadow and space and perspective is essentially tracing, nothing more than craftsmanship, and that the Cubists showed more skill and intentionality in depicting a 12-dimensional viewpoint onto the picture plane.
(this could get… lengthy. En garde!
)
4500697
I've read a respectable chunk of ancient philosophy primary texts when I was younger, yes. I've read bits and pieces of Plato when I was... twelve? Something like that, and I still like Plato the best. He's great fun to read. Aristotle is dense. But I didn't memorize that passage. I knew it had to exist because (a) I have a moderate working knowledge of Aristotle's philosophical system and knew that he couldn't have had the position that wholes are never more than merely their parts and (b) I recalled that the traditional quote is related to him in some way.
As for imagination and Aristotle being a mere dilettante I can only recall that he mentioned it in... um... De Anima, I think, where he takes pains to distinguish it from actually seeing things and thinking about them. However (and I am on thin ice), I think he purely thought of it as images not new thoughts, as such. So you could picture a unicorn (despite never having seen one) and that's imagination, sure enough, but if you formed in your mind the definition of one, that wasn't imagination, or not the way Aristotle thought about it, at any rate.
I haven't read the Poetics (see, there are things I haven't read) but I'd look there for his opinion on creativity as such. In philosophy, I find, there's so many axes that people grind that it's always a good idea to go back to the primary source. A lot of things that are ascribed to Aristotle are not only not things he's actually written but are antithetical to his way of thinking. Fr'instance the notion of Aristotelian philosophy as divorced from reality is utterly alien the man who, as is evident from his writings, has been peering at things and dissecting animals and such all his life. He got a lot of it wrong, obviously, but given what he had to work with...
No, like with most great thinkers, the sins of their fan clubs often obscure what they themselves did.
4500808
Those effectively mean the same thing. And everything I've seen of the explanations behind modern art are only further proof to me that explanations that are circulated within the art world, and sometimes by the artists themselves, are wrong. When you say Rothko believes he's delivering leftist manifestos in his work, that means he doesn't know what he's doing, or he's incompetent.
So, yes, people keep saying to me "You just don't get it!", but until one of these people can explain what it is I'm not getting in a way that makes as much sense as my own theories, I'm not going to take their word for it. In domains in which people know what they're talking about--even artistic domains--people are quickly able to explain what is so great about the things they like. Even quantum physicists can give me a sketch of what it is I've misunderstood. Modern artists, Gertrude Stein fans, creationists, and semioticians cannot. Again, when you are yet one more person telling me I don't get it, but you don't explain any particular thing I've failed to get, I just take that as more evidence that there is nothing there to get, because it further fits the common pattern of a domain that claims to have a logic to it but is really an anti-logic field set up to privilege those willing to memorize and internalize its arbitrary decrees.
I already did know that the faces of two of the Demoiselles (the 2 on the right) were repainted based on African face masks. That's part of my reason for saying the things I said. I even mentioned the influence of primitive art on Picasso in footnote 1; I just didn't want to go thru all the specific primitive art objects he looked at. (The Cycladic head is another.) I don't understand how you're interpreting that as saying that Picasso instinctively regressed, or whatever it is you're saying there.
4500907
The Poetics is what I know best of Aristotle. I still don't know it very well--swiss cheese memory of mine--but I'm pretty sure that's not in there. It's an analysis of plot, character, setting, music, audience response, and how they relate. I think it's quite good. Mostly wrong, but wrong in the right direction.
4500808 BTW, I use Google image search because it's the best tool that exists for assessing what the best-known paintings are of some artist or school. If you Google image search "Mark Rothko", it searches the entire Internet for images attributed to Rothko, then identifies and consolidates duplicates, then sorts them in decreasing importance according to Google's algorithm, which uses the number of inbound links and the importance of the sites those links come from. In Rothko's case, this allows you to see that the only pictures by Rothko that people actually look at are the ones with big blocks of color. You have to go down to about the 30th painting returned to find anything other than the big blocks of color, which means all his other paintings combined probably get 1/1000th - 1/100th as much attention as his big blocks of color.
Whereas if you looked at a web page, or any number of websites, on Mark Rothko, they usually start with those obscure old paintings that nobody cares about. You would get a completely distorted image of which of his paintings were important from traditional research, and it would take you a year to get the Google image search results by hand.
4500278
Thanks, I hope I'm not pestering with my comments but you have said I'd made some interesting questions so I hope it's worth it. It's after all the interest of any scientifical proposition to sustain some level of inquisition.
Also, I appreciated the Summary on the end, I insist that it makes things clearer.
This seems a rather arbitrary definition though. It's like saying, if you like your local pizzeria recipes, you have to like the fact that the owner hit it's women. Or, since highway were build by the nazy regime as a part of their ideology of total war, you better don't take the Interstate 41 you damn fascist. I like Borges work, but he was an insufferable reactionary snob. I fail to se and necessary conenction.
4501043
Ah yes, the Courtier's Reply.
Critic: The emperor has no clothes!
Courtier: How dare you?! You haven't even read [list of books written about the emperor's supposed clothes], so how can you possibly claim to know that he doesn't have any?
4501253
It's a matter of consistency. If some fascist build highways and some libertarians build highways, it means nothing. If all fascists build highways and no other governments build highways, then you could call highways fascist.
It sounds abstract, but I bet you can guess which of these were made in the most-totalitarian states.
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Totalitarian states always use art to focus the mind of the masses on the things they want the masses to think about, and to de-emphasize the things they don't want the masses to think about, and these are mostly the same things in all totalitarian states across the ages. For example, usually only leaders are individuals in totalitarian art. If there's a group of people, they will all look like copy-pastes of each other, with the same expressions and often standing in the same poses. One never homes in on one particular background person in a totalitarian scene and wonders what that person is thinking--the art is designed to avoid raising such questions. All people show only the approved emotions, which is generally either neutrality or fierce determination. It is no accident that the most-common Marxist critique of the novel is that it promotes a "bourgeois" individualism, and the ideology that individuals solve their own problems rather than by engaging in collective action. Totalitarian art always depicts either community action, or the acts of the great leaders, or one or two abstract ideal individuals who are not individuals but Platonic ideals (usually The Soldier or The Worker).
Totalitarian art usually has people in it. Totalitarians don't generally paint landscapes or still lifes. Beauty, free-floating and unanchored to emblems of the State, is dangerous. Beauty should be associated only with images of the State in totalitarian art.
4502091 I think you confused my point, I agree with your definition "Art, religion, literature, philosophy, & politics seem to be a package deal."
I understand your point about which art of the one you showed me comes from a totalitarian state and how it represent totalitarian tought.
What I don't agree it's with the part that says "I love medieval art, but I don't like burning people at the stake,".
To take exactly your same example, I don't see why liking medieval would make you like burning people on stakes. Look at the last two pictures you posted in your answer. The firs one it's a landscape, surely it's not product of a totalitarian state, and it's beatiful, I love it.
And then the second one (the last) it' clearly part of a totaliarian state... an it's also beatiful! Look at the composition, look at the games of lights and shadows with te heat of the furnice, it's clearly beatiful.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, because it's sound like you said that the coherent thing to do it's only to like (or considering good) the art of artist who politically agree with you, and I think that's not reasonable at all. I won't agree with the ideas of many reactionary monarchist artist of the barroque or the "classical" times, but their art it's simply gorgeous.
4502139
I break that down into two general cases. One is that a lot of the best architecture and music was made under totalitarians and absolute monarchs. That doesn't worry me so much, because I can say architecture and music are different because they're very abstract arts. It might be they're too abstract to communicate ideology, or it might be that communicating with them is so difficult that only the simplest ideologies communicate clearly through them.
The more-difficult question is whether representational totalitarian art can be good. Most of the time I think it's bad, or at least less-interesting than other art, but I see how you can make a case for that picture.
I suppose it must be taken on a case-by-base basis. That fourth picture celebrates the accomplishments of a group. It isn't negative or actively bad. But going case-by-case requires understanding everything, and that's much harder. I still think some aspects of totalitarian art are objectively bad, like its over-simplistic preachiness.
There is also something to be said about judging the balance of a period's art, rather than judging individual pieces. The uniformity of totalitarian art, and the elimination of other kinds of art, is a kind of badness about totalitarian art distinct from the badness of any one piece of it.
4501043
I could see doing this if you were paid to do it. Instead, people paid staggering sums to celebrate Rothko, and in economic terms there is almost nobody in existence with MORE evidence there's something there to get. Mind you, I'm usually quite happy to suggest that markets are insane and needn't bear any correlation to value, but in this case I do see a connection.
Rothko said (among many, many things):
This is what you call an anti-logic field, an intentional shuck which everyone is in on (is this not a paranoid viewpoint, that you're the only one who sees the truth, and everyone is conspiring to exclude you from their cabal?). I've got an alternate explanation for the interface between Rothko's intentions and the value set on his work by the marketplace.
I'll suggest instead that it's like this: Rothko, always deeply affected by his politics and moral views, and deeply shaken by living through the Holocaust from the safety of the United States, reacted by becoming obsessed with doing exactly what he says he does: expressing these moral and emotional points through pure abstraction (and, on top of that, almost featureless abstraction).
He worked with color, with color blending on the canvas to produce very subtle effects that can still be seen even on JPEGs but nevertheless lose a great deal in reproduction: that's self-evident if you understand how lossy compression works, and if you know Rothko's techniques. It's known that he continually blended and reblended the areas of color on the canvas: doing this literally gave him the capacity to take moderate variations of color and keep 'erasing' them by brush strokes back and forth until he could bring them to an arbitrary standard of subtlety. That's how paint works and it's consistent with peoples' reactions to direct experience of his work in the mode he recommended (up close, filling one's whole field of vision). People consistently react as if they're picking out shadings of color they didn't at first see, and on top of that, being unsettled or emotionally engaged. That's consistent with Rothko obsessing over color's ability to impart mood: any interior decorator knows that part.
So, the value of Rothko's work is not so much that it is innately an emotional wallop beyond the abilities of realism: the reason it fetches crazy prices and is seen as an apex of abstract expressionism is, he had this obsessive intent to express emotion and these deep topics through nothing more than areas of hand-painted color, which would seem impossible. And yet, to some extent he pulled it off.
That's where the value comes from. You can look at Guernica and go 'wow that's sad'. Screaming faces, tortured figures, the scale of the work: it's not mysterious where the 'sad' or pain comes from. But in Rothko, where does the sad come from? What the hell is tragic about maroon? It's not that his work is that much more "tragedy, ecstasy, doom" than anything else: it's that he has stripped away all obvious sources for such reactions, and yet manages to evoke them. The critic who did 'Power of Art', Simon Schama, speaks of disliking and being hostile to Rothko until he unintentionally wandered into a Rothko room in a gallery, and was physically confronted by the paintings… and was rocked by the experience, getting lost in the surfaces and the ghostly forms of barely perceptible event within the mass of color.
People pay $40 million, $42 million, $82 million, $86 million for Rothko not because they are thumbing their nose at you, but because they don't understand how this is done. It's superstitious: wanting to possess a magic artifact (combined with, yes, the power-law factor making the MOST valuable things impossibly valuable because they're valuable). In the absence of the latter, I think those Rothkos would be selling for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars… because of the 'mystery' factor, the reality that they evoke emotional reactions and mental states beyond logic. It doesn't take much of that kind of mystery to get a reaction, and Rothko worked for years and years trying to maximize exactly that, and channeled his own emotions into the process until it turned his canvases black.
The ability to do that AT ALL is so unusual that it produced a cult of personality around the guy, exacerbated by his tragic suicide, blowing it all up into 'greatest painter in all of history' according to some modernists (and the auction houses). Saying that the whole thing is just a big con is… a strong claim. I contest that claim. I'm very interested in what Rothko did, independent of the extraordinary celebrity it brought him.
4502460
I don't think the value of artwork today is supposed to represent its goodness or quality. It represents more a combination of rarity, historical importance, and current reputation. Current reputation is supposed to be a social construct.
This is also a very strong claim. It seems to me much less likely than the claim that Rothko's fame is a self-reinforcing social construct, particularly since the other paintings Rothko did show that he lacked basic drawing skills. I'll allow it's theoretically possible that Rothko developed some mind hack which enabled him to communicate strong emotions via subtle color variations, but knowing what I know about how color and shape are perceived and represented in the brain, this seems unlikely. The brain is very interested in lines, borders, and motion, and not so much interested in color contrasts otherwise, as far as I know. (Unfortunately, not as much is known about the representation of emotions.)
I think my skepticism seems more reasonable to me than to you because I don't find it at all unreasonable or unprecedented to say that someone is popular because he's popular, and that the most-popular artist is more likely someone promoted to that position as part of some coterie's political agenda, than because he is a good artist. It's how I expect humans to behave. James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake and Gertrude Stein's poetry are good examples. So is the music of Schoenberg, and the philosophy and criticism of Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Lacan, Lyotard, and Derrida. They were all accepted by approximately the same group of people at nearly the same time. So you see my priors were already strongly on the side of expecting Rothko to be a sham, just by virtue of who accepted and exhibited his work, before I ever saw his work. It would be a remarkable exception to the pattern if he were not a sham. The fact that the sort of people who like modernist poetry, Lyotard, and the things on exhibit in the MoMA also like Rothko is a very, very strong signal to me that it is more of the same sort of nonsense as all the other art, literature, and philosophy that those people like.
I appreciate your calmness in discussing it as I attack one of your heroes.
4502532
Finnegan's Wake is extraordinary, an amazing feat of write-only literature
I just can't go along with your cabal theory of humanity. Seems to me people get incredibly engaged in pursuing their little hobbyhorses, like Rothko with expressing emotion without content, like Joyce trying to refer to everything in the world through essentially hyperactive simultaneous punning, like Beckett writing in French because he was better at English and wanted to be forced to pick out his own exact meanings.
I do feel 'popular because he's popular' is a multiplier effect: without that, Rothkos would sell for 42 thousand rather than 42 million dollars. But they'd still sell for that rather than 42 cents, because he was doing something entirely orthogonal to drawing skills.
Having limited drawing skills myself, I am eager to embrace other approaches to fine art
and I may as well be calm, for I think you're off hunting the Illuminati and finding cabals in your cornflakes. Um, except yeah, I daresay Marx had a political agenda. Gold star! 
I'd still love to see your take on the Matthew Collings 'This Is Modern Art' series. I think a great many of the artists he seriously examines would seem impossibly degenerate to you, and I'm greatly curious to know which of them are the wickedest in your book.
4502460
As someone that feels very strongly against Modern/Post Modern art, I must ask: Were you unaware of Rothko's intent, or had he never said anything about what he wanted to portray, how confident would you feel in saying that the maroon is tragic? Additionally, how much of that goes beyond the simple fact that we tend to associate dark and muted colors with sadness?
Answering such questions is really important to understand whether Modernist Art is considered important due to some intrinsic value of the work, or whether cultural conditioning leads people to believe in that. After all, the cultural significance of a work of art can certainly influence people's emotional response to it – strongly religious people crying upon seeing a particularly important statue of the Virgin Mary, for instance.
(For the record, yes, I have seen Rothko's paintings up close, upon which I spent a good 5 minutes trying to understand just why something like that was being exhibited in a way that seemed to imply this was an important work.)
4523779 I don't believe in giving in to the negative connotations. That results in endless pointless changes to the language, which results in literature being thrown out because it innocently used the "wrong" term, because it's old. For instance, American teachers today would hesitate to assign a reading in class that used the terms "handicapped", "oriental", or "retarded", though they were simply the vocabulary of their day.