Do actually more people become artists, musicians, actors and writers than engineers, mathematicians, biologists or chemists?
What do you mean when you say that most people don’t understand paintings? My main impression of this phrase has long been that understanding art means ability to stand in front of a uniformly blue canvas and utter sentences like “the unique insight of neo-modernist school leads to seemingly incomprehensible but at the same time intricately elusive experiences that forever revolutionise the perception of color”. Is there something more to understanding paintings, something meaningful which I should infer from looking at Mona Lisa, for example?
Philosophy is a broad term. Lot of mainstream philosophy is either advanced topics or nonsense. When you say “people should learn philosophy”, the word philosophy will more likely be understood as “ideas of long dead famous men” rather than “ways how to think about the world”.
In response to (2), there are a lot of things you can learn about what makes a given painting interestingly distinct from other paintings, that are non-obvious to most people without someone pointing them out, and that (for some people under some circumstances) enhance the enjoyment of looking at the painting.
It can be a real pleasure to tour an art gallery with someone who knows a lot about the works there. I recall the first time anyone pointed out to me that, in a certain painting, a spot of bright color was used to draw the viewer’s eye toward the most interesting and detailed part of the painting. I have no gift for observations of that kind—without some help, I’d just be wandering around saying “Look, it’s a picture of a woman. Look, it’s a picture of a duck. Well, it’s been fifteen minutes now, I’m bored.”
Even with the uniformly blue canvas, looking at it can be an interesting opportunity to learn about who painted it and why they thought they were doing it (even if you don’t agree with their rationale or take it at face value), and maybe spend ten seconds trying to see it through their eyes. Even if you ultimately conclude that it sucks and that the painter was stupid and wrong about everything, it’s not less enjoyable than just seeing the blue canvas and spending ten seconds being baffled or bored by it and then moving on.
I’m surprised you don’t think there could be any more to art history/criticism than either “Look, it’s a picture of a duck” or postmodern babble. There is less postmodern babble in nearly all fields in the humanistic disciplines than most people around here seem to think.
I’m surprised you don’t think there could be any more to art history/criticism than either “Look, it’s a picture of a duck” or postmodern babble.
I am perhaps a bit oversensitive to the word “understanding”, which was what I was mainly pointing at. Every time I met this word in connection with art or literature, it was someone trying to impose her aesthetic preferences on me while signalling her superior cultural sophistication. I am not completely ignorant about history of art, I paint as a hobby and usually spend more than fifteen minutes in a gallery. But all my school experiences with learning to understand art or literature or music—as opposed to learning how to draw or write or sing—was a boring exercise in snobbery.
Even with the uniformly blue canvas, looking at it can be an interesting opportunity to learn about who painted it and why they thought they were doing it (even if you don’t agree with their rationale or take it at face value), and maybe spend ten seconds trying to see it through their eyes. Even if you ultimately conclude that it sucks and that the painter was stupid and wrong about everything, it’s not less enjoyable than just seeing the blue canvas and spending ten seconds being baffled or bored by it and then moving on.
This can be said about almost anything. Look at a chair, a railroad track or a dog’s leash and ponder about the maker’s intentions and motives. Almost any product of human effort is worth ten seconds of thought, usually more interesting than with a blue canvas. Singling out paintings for such an argument is privileging the hypothesis. And remember, modern art advocates even don’t tell us to think ten seconds about any object we happen to look at. They tell us to spend much longer time thinking about objects classified within the quite arbitrary category “art”, pretending that those are especially interesting or important. They aren’t. Rothko’s thoughts about colour fields on one of his paintings are no more interesting than my neighbour’s thoughts about the shape of his new flowerbed; after all, both are of comparable complexity and take about the same time to complete. I have had discussions about the blue canvas (I remember neither the author nor the name of the painting) when my friend said that I can’t pronounce the canvas worthless—perhaps the choice of the exact colour was the unique act of creativity and the precise uniformity reflects the author’s genius. It’s silly.
This can be said about almost anything. Look at a chair, a railroad track or a dog’s leash and ponder about the maker’s intentions and motives. Almost any product of human effort is worth ten seconds of thought, usually more interesting than with a blue canvas. Singling out paintings for such an argument is privileging the hypothesis.
Very good point—it’s interesting to imagine a guide giving tours in an ordinary city showing ordinary things like cars, fences, houses, lamp posts etc. talking about their design and manufacture. If well done, it may be more instructive and thought-provoking than the average art gallery visit! But it would be dreadfully low-status.
I’m surprised you don’t think there could be any more to art history/criticism than either “Look, it’s a picture of a duck” or postmodern babble. There is less postmodern babble in nearly all fields in the humanistic disciplines than most people around here seem to think.
My knowledge of art history specifically is limited to a single college course, but I’ve been exposed to literary criticism in a little more depth. At least in that field, the predominant failure mode seems not to be postmodern babble (there’s some of that in a lot of contemporary work, but it seems more in the nature of a stylistic tic than an actual fixture of thought) but what I might call promiscuous application: that is, readings of a work are decoupled from the needs of readers and writers generally and selected according to what looks fresh and interesting to the literary criticism community. This produces a lot of entertainingly hyperspecialized but ultimately sterile interpretations, a lot of ingroup pandering, and a lot of political grandstanding, but not—as a fraction of the whole—much insight into the actual mechanics of literature.
That’s not to say that I’ve gotten nothing out of it; I have. But it tends to take a lot of digging.
Interesting comment and I do agree. I think it’s only to be expected that in their research-level scholarship, literary critics/theorists are mostly talking amongst themselves (the same is the case with most academic specialties). But like you I’ve struggled to find interesting, accessible, eclectic/broadminded (i.e., not massively argument-driven, or as you put it “hyperspecialized”) readings by legitimate experts that really enhance my enjoyment of (especially) difficult works without trying to draw me down a rabbit hole of topics that are only of interest to lit-theorists.
There is a strange and not obviously sensible blending of cultural theory and literary criticism in academia. So often you end up reading an analysis of a work that exists to illustrate someone’s theory of culture rather than an analysis of a work that exists to illustrate important aspects of that work. Freud gets invoked far too often, too.
Huh? The number of people does not mean much. My point is that people should be educated in more areas, so that the scientist understands part of what the artist’s work, and the artist understands part of the scientist’s work.
I mean it the way that I realized I didn’t really understand paintings until I started thinking, especially artistically when so required (because art is one of my main hobbies). This applies much more to realistic paintings than conceptual works, admittedly. I also recognize that this phrase is vague, and less mathematical than something like decision theory. Part of it is recognizing that anyone can be a (realistic) artist, if they notice the world around them. Assuming, though, that art takes simple observational skills to the next level (e.g. trying to perfect reality), should people try to understand the reality first, or come to the painting, trying to understand what the artist was trying to say, without having thought about reality first?
Indeed it is. I meant it as more of “ways and process of thinking.”
Fine with me. I was under impression that you are implying that people become artists quite often, due to this apparently ironical statement
Because, obviously, they will be very important in our futures—especially if we become artists, musicians, writers, actors, and business people.
Sorry for misinterpretation.
My point is that people should be educated in more areas, so that the scientist understands part of what the artist’s work, and the artist understands part of the scientist’s work.
Note that the artists don’t usually understand much of science either.
Do actually more people become artists, musicians, actors and writers than engineers, mathematicians, biologists or chemists?
What do you mean when you say that most people don’t understand paintings? My main impression of this phrase has long been that understanding art means ability to stand in front of a uniformly blue canvas and utter sentences like “the unique insight of neo-modernist school leads to seemingly incomprehensible but at the same time intricately elusive experiences that forever revolutionise the perception of color”. Is there something more to understanding paintings, something meaningful which I should infer from looking at Mona Lisa, for example?
Philosophy is a broad term. Lot of mainstream philosophy is either advanced topics or nonsense. When you say “people should learn philosophy”, the word philosophy will more likely be understood as “ideas of long dead famous men” rather than “ways how to think about the world”.
In response to (2), there are a lot of things you can learn about what makes a given painting interestingly distinct from other paintings, that are non-obvious to most people without someone pointing them out, and that (for some people under some circumstances) enhance the enjoyment of looking at the painting.
It can be a real pleasure to tour an art gallery with someone who knows a lot about the works there. I recall the first time anyone pointed out to me that, in a certain painting, a spot of bright color was used to draw the viewer’s eye toward the most interesting and detailed part of the painting. I have no gift for observations of that kind—without some help, I’d just be wandering around saying “Look, it’s a picture of a woman. Look, it’s a picture of a duck. Well, it’s been fifteen minutes now, I’m bored.”
Even with the uniformly blue canvas, looking at it can be an interesting opportunity to learn about who painted it and why they thought they were doing it (even if you don’t agree with their rationale or take it at face value), and maybe spend ten seconds trying to see it through their eyes. Even if you ultimately conclude that it sucks and that the painter was stupid and wrong about everything, it’s not less enjoyable than just seeing the blue canvas and spending ten seconds being baffled or bored by it and then moving on.
I’m surprised you don’t think there could be any more to art history/criticism than either “Look, it’s a picture of a duck” or postmodern babble. There is less postmodern babble in nearly all fields in the humanistic disciplines than most people around here seem to think.
I am perhaps a bit oversensitive to the word “understanding”, which was what I was mainly pointing at. Every time I met this word in connection with art or literature, it was someone trying to impose her aesthetic preferences on me while signalling her superior cultural sophistication. I am not completely ignorant about history of art, I paint as a hobby and usually spend more than fifteen minutes in a gallery. But all my school experiences with learning to understand art or literature or music—as opposed to learning how to draw or write or sing—was a boring exercise in snobbery.
This can be said about almost anything. Look at a chair, a railroad track or a dog’s leash and ponder about the maker’s intentions and motives. Almost any product of human effort is worth ten seconds of thought, usually more interesting than with a blue canvas. Singling out paintings for such an argument is privileging the hypothesis. And remember, modern art advocates even don’t tell us to think ten seconds about any object we happen to look at. They tell us to spend much longer time thinking about objects classified within the quite arbitrary category “art”, pretending that those are especially interesting or important. They aren’t. Rothko’s thoughts about colour fields on one of his paintings are no more interesting than my neighbour’s thoughts about the shape of his new flowerbed; after all, both are of comparable complexity and take about the same time to complete. I have had discussions about the blue canvas (I remember neither the author nor the name of the painting) when my friend said that I can’t pronounce the canvas worthless—perhaps the choice of the exact colour was the unique act of creativity and the precise uniformity reflects the author’s genius. It’s silly.
Very good point—it’s interesting to imagine a guide giving tours in an ordinary city showing ordinary things like cars, fences, houses, lamp posts etc. talking about their design and manufacture. If well done, it may be more instructive and thought-provoking than the average art gallery visit! But it would be dreadfully low-status.
I’d love to take one of these tours while on a caffeine high.
I wonder if it might not catch on as a kind of performance art, actually.
My knowledge of art history specifically is limited to a single college course, but I’ve been exposed to literary criticism in a little more depth. At least in that field, the predominant failure mode seems not to be postmodern babble (there’s some of that in a lot of contemporary work, but it seems more in the nature of a stylistic tic than an actual fixture of thought) but what I might call promiscuous application: that is, readings of a work are decoupled from the needs of readers and writers generally and selected according to what looks fresh and interesting to the literary criticism community. This produces a lot of entertainingly hyperspecialized but ultimately sterile interpretations, a lot of ingroup pandering, and a lot of political grandstanding, but not—as a fraction of the whole—much insight into the actual mechanics of literature.
That’s not to say that I’ve gotten nothing out of it; I have. But it tends to take a lot of digging.
Interesting comment and I do agree. I think it’s only to be expected that in their research-level scholarship, literary critics/theorists are mostly talking amongst themselves (the same is the case with most academic specialties). But like you I’ve struggled to find interesting, accessible, eclectic/broadminded (i.e., not massively argument-driven, or as you put it “hyperspecialized”) readings by legitimate experts that really enhance my enjoyment of (especially) difficult works without trying to draw me down a rabbit hole of topics that are only of interest to lit-theorists.
There is a strange and not obviously sensible blending of cultural theory and literary criticism in academia. So often you end up reading an analysis of a work that exists to illustrate someone’s theory of culture rather than an analysis of a work that exists to illustrate important aspects of that work. Freud gets invoked far too often, too.
Huh? The number of people does not mean much. My point is that people should be educated in more areas, so that the scientist understands part of what the artist’s work, and the artist understands part of the scientist’s work.
I mean it the way that I realized I didn’t really understand paintings until I started thinking, especially artistically when so required (because art is one of my main hobbies). This applies much more to realistic paintings than conceptual works, admittedly. I also recognize that this phrase is vague, and less mathematical than something like decision theory. Part of it is recognizing that anyone can be a (realistic) artist, if they notice the world around them. Assuming, though, that art takes simple observational skills to the next level (e.g. trying to perfect reality), should people try to understand the reality first, or come to the painting, trying to understand what the artist was trying to say, without having thought about reality first?
Indeed it is. I meant it as more of “ways and process of thinking.”
Fine with me. I was under impression that you are implying that people become artists quite often, due to this apparently ironical statement
Sorry for misinterpretation.
Note that the artists don’t usually understand much of science either.