December 2010
2 posts
Paul Chan: What Art Is and Where it Belongs →
e-flux.com
»
Artists have always taken on the responsibility of reflecting on and manifesting the many facets of life. It is no different today. What is new is the speed and breadth at which life lives now. Increasingly, contemporary life has been dominated by the progress of a socioeconomic globalization that has woven an unprecedented and ever-expanding network of production and exchange between people, territories, and cultures. And what has emerged is a social and sensible reality that values above all else the power of interdependency, as both an ethical substance and a material goal. Contemporary art gives expression to how we welcome, ignore, resist, or try to change the forces that push this reality into and over our lives. The best works do this all at once. This is what art of the moment always tries to do: capture a flash of friction in time and make it burn as bright as the night is long.
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January 2010
6 posts
Art: by MILO SANTINI
[A synopsis of the project “Defining Art” on AFH Tumblr, using a simple blog format to pursue a web-based scan of the domain, to produce a unique document/not-document, mapping historic definitions of art with current ones, to complement and “bring to a momentary point” multiple - systematic or ongoing - comprehensive dimensional analyses for defining art, presented throughout the AFH network of sites]
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Art today is dimensional.
Dimensional art is an indicator - maybe even early evidence - of the next phase of humanity’s perceptual evolution. Let’s hope so! If mankind doesn’t figure this out, explicitly, WE’RE DOOMED (LOL)!
Art is an heatlh/sustainability indicator of free speech in a democratic society.
NOTATIONS
Creativity is a defining characteristic of humanity. Creativity is adaptation for the purposes of survival.
Art is the European form celebrating creativity. There’s a lot more to it than that, but this is a good point of origination for a dimensional analysis of art and creativity. Important contingencies include craft, preservation and conservation, art history and exhibition.
“Whatever-is-the-most-expensive” = Art/post 1968 [Deitch] is an obfuscation, and incorrect. This non-definition of art in favor of market controls and manipulation is an oppressive force.
Dimensionism is the most significant, overarching -Ism since the 1850s.
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Since the advent of Democracy [egalitarian, bottom>top representational government, the free speech republic, accountability - of, by and for the people], Art is for Everyone!
Everybody who can afford to, should try it! [Caution: It’s expensive, in every sense!]
This is good for everybody, and good for art! This encourages active participation and respect for best practices, when promoted in conjunction with excellent art education and society-spanning exposure to prime examples of accomplished art.
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FOR FOUNDATIONAL PURPOSES, ESPECIALLY: Art is painting and sculpture, in the Western tradition.
[All readers are encouraged to scan the domain and assess the non-definition, de-definition and un-definition of art. Some of the effects {of semiotics, for instance} are terrific and useful, primarily as additive context for content {or the “art set”}*] -
*CLARIFICATION: In dimensional analysis, ART is a dimensional set
[All readers are encouraged to consider the oppressive forces directed at art, and encouraged to question why and how they are being applied, and to what degree they are effective. What is the intention that motivates a campaign to disenfranchise Art from Western culture or civilization?]
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ANTITHESIS
[Management is not art.]
[Art is not private property.]
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TRANSTHESIS
[Maciariello’s Proof] = The optimal form for visionary/mobile society
What are the ethics of vision?
Episteme versus Techne [Dimensional solution]
+ MORE [See the Dimensionist Manifesto/Sirato]
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APPLICATIONS [ART AND TECHNOLOGY]
[See Cursor]
“Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.”
—Frank Zappa
Through History to Authenticity: John Millei’s Paintings by Donald Kuspit →
artnet.com
Maritime #4 (View from the Deck)
2004
Ace Gallery
For skeptical postmodernists, history, if it exists at all, is a humble discipline, dependent on the present… . The contemporary is the time frame that counts most… . History is important only to the extent that its traces have an impact on the present … it is sufficient to let “the present interrogate the past.”— Pauline Marie Rosenau
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John Millei’s “Maritime” paintings (2004–07) and “White Squalls” (2005) are enormous, magnificent paintings, mural-like in their panoramic scope and imposing scale, and executed in what can only be called a grand Abstract-Expressionistic manner.
Maritime #4 (View from the Deck)
2004
Ace Gallery
[John was one of my core faculty at Claremont Graduate University.]
December 2009
5 posts
Art and Economics by Frederick Turner →
nccsc.net
“…So what goes on in art auctions and those private conversations in the offices of celebrity art dealers is not irrelevant to the enduring questions of art and aesthetic philosophy. When hand and eye and ear are no longer engaged in artistic making, there is a danger that the spiderweb of meaning will break and tear across. The economic abstractions of the world of banking and derivatives trading seem to have infected the arts…”
The Artistic Device or, the Articulation of Collective Speech →
brianholmes.wordpress.com
[BY BRIAN HOLMES]
One of the strong possibilities of art today is to combine theoretical, sociological or scientific research with a feel for the ways that aesthetic form can influence collective process, so as to de-normalize the investigation and open up both critical and constructive paths. Projects carried out in this way have complex referential content, but they also depend on a highly self-reflexive and deeply playful exercise of the basic human capacities: perception, affect, thought, expression and relation.
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A crisis of art
Europe, later sixteenth century
Round about 1520 all lovers of art in the Italian cities seemed to agree that painting had reached the peak of perfection. Men such as Michelangelo and Raphael, Titian and Leonardo, had actually done everything that former generations had tried to do. No problem of draughtsmanship seemed too difficult for them, no subject-matter too complicated. They had shown how to combine beauty and harmony with correctness, and had even surpassed - so it was said - the most renowned statues of Greek and Roman antiquity. For a boy who wanted one day to become a great painter himself, this general opinion was perhaps not altogether pleasant to listen to. However much he may have admired the wonderful works of the great living masters, he must have wondered whether it was true that nothing remained to be done because everything art could possibly do had been achieved. Some appeared to accept this idea as inevitable, and studied hard to learn what Michelangelo had learned, and to imitate his manner as best they could. Michelangelo had loved to draw nudes in complicated attitudes - well, if that was the right thing to do, they would copy his nudes, and put them into their pictures whether they fitted or not. The result was sometimes slightly ludicrous - the sacred scenes from the Bible were crowded out by what appeared to be a training team of young athletes. Later critics, who saw that these young painters had gone wrong simply because they imitated the manner rather than the spirit of Michelangelo’s works, have called the period during which that was the fashion the period of Mannerism. But not all young artists of that period were so foolish as to believe that all that was asked of art was a collection of nudes in difficult postures. Man, indeed doubted whether art could ever come to a standstill, whether it was not possible, after all, to surpass the famous masters of the former generation, if not in their handling of human forms, then, perhaps, in some other respect. Some wanted to outdo them in the matter of invention. They wanted to paint pictures full of significance and wisdom - such wisdom, indeed, that it should remain obscure, save to the most learned scholars. Their works almost resemble picture puzzles which cannot be solved save by those who know what the scholars of the time believed to be the true meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphs, and of many half-forgotten ancient writers. Others, again, wanted to attract attention by making their works less natural, less obvious, less simple and harmonious than the works of the great masters. These works, they seem to have argued, are indeed perfect - but perfection is not for ever interesting. Once you are familiar with it, it ceases to excite you. We will aim at the startling, the unexpected, the unheard-of. Of course, there was something slightly unsound in this obsession of the young artists with the task of outdoing the classical masters - it even led the best among them to strange, sophisticated experiments. But in a way, these frantic efforts to go one better were the greatest tribute they could pay to the older artists. Had not Leonardo himself said: ‘A wretched pupil who does not surpass his master’? To some extent, the great ‘classical’ artists had themselves begun and encouraged new and unfamiliar experiments; their very fame, and the credit they enjoyed in their later years, had enabled them to try out novel, unorthodox effects in arrangement or colouring, and to explore new possibilities of art. Michelangelo in particular had occasionally shown a bold disregard for all conventions - nowhere more than in architecture, where he sometimes abandoned the sacrosanct rules of classical tradition to follow his own moods and whims. It was he himself who accustomed the public to admire an artist’s ‘caprices’ and ‘inventions’, and who set the example of a genius not satisfied with the matchless perfection of his own early masterpieces, but constantly and restlessly searching for new methods and modes of expression.
November 2009
7 posts
The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism - Daniel Bell →
books.google.com
The affluence of middle-class America in the 1950s had its counterpart in a widespread “middlebrow” culture. The term itself reflected the new style of cultural criticism. In effect, culture, as it came to be conceived in the mass middle-class magazines, was not a discussion of serious works of art but a style of life that was organized and “consumed.” Following suit, cultural criticism became a snob’s game, played by advertising men, magazine illustrators, home decorators, women’s magazine editors, and East Side homosexuals as one more fashionable amusement. The game of high-low-and-middle became demode once the middlebrows caught on, to be quickly replaced by the new game of in-and-out. To be “in” meant to be well ahead of the crowd in fashion, or, perversely, to like what the vulgar masses liked (the New York Daily News, fast-paced, grade-B movie thrillers, popular songs) rather than what the pretentious middle classes liked. When in-and-out was replaced by “camp,” the game was the same, except that fashion had become low fashion.
LA DIGITAL ART BETWEEN BERGSON AND DELEUZE →
digicult.it
Txt: Sandro D. Fossemò
It is difficult to define what “Computer Art” really is. At least for me. I think that currently there isn’t just a single and objective definition. There are many interpretations of works done with a computer which are catalogued under the general and sometimes anonymous denomination of “Digital Art”. Ithink Digital Art is a graphic representation of images made and coordinated with a computer aiming at expressing artistic dimensions .
Art/Critique →
pour15minutesdamour.blogspot.com
Metapainting, metacritique, French and the shoes and fur are off. [MGT]
Sharon Butler's terrific painting-centered artblog →
twocoatsofpaint.com
I started Two Coats of Paint because I was interested in exploring and sharing art criticism from regions other than my own. Each day, I read through my bookmarked sites for worthwhile reviews and articles about painting. I used to print them out and store them in a three-ring binder. Eventually I realized that other people might welcome a digest of painting criticism, especially painters, painting students, collectors and curators, so I started Two Coats of Paint.
