• Please use real names.

    Greetings to all who have registered to OPF and those guests taking a look around. Please use real names. Registrations with fictitious names will not be processed. REAL NAMES ONLY will be processed

    Firstname Lastname

    Register

    We are a courteous and supportive community. No need to hide behind an alia. If you have a genuine need for privacy/secrecy then let me know!
  • Welcome to the new site. Here's a thread about the update where you can post your feedback, ask questions or spot those nasty bugs!

Art Theory/Art Criticism

Ben Lifson

New member
I've been following the discussion here concerning definitions of art--a group discussion toward articulating a theory of art...One that can be applied to photography.

This is a difficult undertaking. It has defeated many wiser heads than ours. A very lucid, accessible and rigorously argued account of why it has defeated many critics and philosophers is given in the opening chapters of Susanne K. Langer's "Feeling and Form" -- a very important book for every one who at one time or another finds him/herself seriously asking the question, "What is art?"

In these same chapters (1 and 2) Langer (B.A., M.A. and Ph. D., Radcliffe, and a world-class expert in symbolic logic) explains why the question is so important -- why art as a symbolic language is so important to humanity that one should try to understand what it is...Why the question engaged so much of her career.

In Chapter 3 she gives her own theory. This, too, is clear, accessible to the layman, and rigorously argued. I have found no fault or flaw in it. Everything she says rings true to my experience of art (which began with my deep engagement with English literataure somewhere in my teens). (Please remember, I'm an artist, not a philosopher. Her argument reads perfectly to me and feels like everything I've ever felt about art. I don't know if the argument holds up to professional philosophical scrutiny. However, Langer's and her books' professional reputations are very, very high.)

In Chapter 4 she applies her theory to pictures. Everything she says about what a picture is rings true with everything I've learned in over 40 years of looking closely at photographs, paintings, drawings and prints.

Moreover, photographers who have read Chapter 4 have told me that it is almost impossible for them to read it to the end because it is so exciting, stimulating, inspiring and, according to their experience making pictures, true that at almost every page they want to put the book down and go out and make photographs.

As for strengthening our skills in looking at pictures and in putting what we see into words, and in having those words lead to more and better seeing, and that seeing leading, in turn, to more and better words -- better in the sense that they help us when we look through our viewfinders, or at our own work prints -- I can't think of anything better than Meyer Schapiro's short books (for the art publisher, Abrams) on Van Gogh and Cezanne.

In each of these books there is a general introduction (brilliant) and then a series of plates. The picture is on one page and a short text on the opposite page. The texts (also brilliant) are clear, specific, down to earth, plainly written, easy to follow, instructive and inspiring.

Meyer Schapiro is universally acknowledged as one of the greatest art historians of the 20th century. Some say he was the greatest. I heard him lecture once, at UCLA, on the South Tower of Chartres Cathedral. It was as though the whole medieval world had come on stage to tell us what that work of architecture really was.

Another good observer of art, who adopts the common viewer's point of view, is the British writer John Berger. His short essays on classic and 20th century painters in the book "Toward Reality" are classic instances of how good and illuminating untheoretical, common sensical, un-technical art criticism can be. No gobbledy-gook. No buzz words. No jargon. No allusions to obscure writers or ideas. Just an account of what an intelligent, observant, fairly well educated, socially aware, humanly thinking man sees when he looks at art. These short essays can teach us much about what to look for in our own photographs and in the photographs of others.

I strongly recommend all of the above texts to anyone who is seriously concerned with the question, What Is Art?

For just as there is such a thing as an internal combustion engine (as opposed to an external combustion engine) there is such a thing as art (as opposed to all the things that are not art.)

It is not in the eyes of the beholder.
 

Kevin Bjorke

New member
Thanks Ben, all four have been promptly reserved at the local library :)

fwiw, Geoffrey Miller's recent "Mating Mind" asserts that art is principally just one more elaborate twist on prowess as sexual display. Worked for Picasso :)
 

Alain Briot

pro member
You do want to be careful in considering semiotics --the study of signs-- as a viable way to explain art. While it is one methodology, it is far from being the only viable one. Personally, although I am from the land of Saussure --the father of semiotics-- I do not subscribe to it as a way to explain art, although I do agree that some aspects are nice to have, when it comes to details or what I call "supporting artistic evidence". I read Berger extensively, and while he is accessible and fun to read, he is also quite a generalist when it comes to his central message. And, while I like Barthes, who originates from the same land I do, I prefer him as a literary critic than as a photographic theorist. I do, however, very much like his "Fashion" book-- Critique de la Mode--. Sorry if I use the French names, I simply read these texts in their original language.

Finally, I have not read the Langer book Ben talks about. If someone can sum up her point in a nutshell, I think it would be useful to all of us. Being somewhat adverse to semiotics, I am not too inclined towards reading it. I would, however, be curious to know if she is saying anything new. Semiotics is somewhat dated as a field of study and it would be great if someone said something that hasn't already been said rather than sum up the points that have been previously made.
 

Ben Lifson

New member
Feeling and Form not semiotics

Not by a long shot.

Summed up?

"Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feelings."

The argument is cogent.

The application to pictures, sculpture, architecture, novels, drama also cogent.

A good read. Probably translated into French. She was a world class philosopher.

As for Berger, no, he's not a generalist, I'd say humanist. We can talk about this later. I don't see what's wrong with being either. At least he uses plain language, like "gaiety" for Dufy, "optimism" for Leger. This is more than most art critics will risk: to try to get to the human content of an artist's work. Berger is the only 2nd-half of the 20th-century art writer I've read who is carrying on the great tradition of 19th century and early 20th century criticism as exemplified by Henry James' literary criticism (and read his short essay on Daumier, a masterpiece of art criticism) and, for example, the scholar/writers who created the multi-volume Cambridge History of English Literature around 1912 or so, Saintsbury, Grierson, that crew.
 

Alain Briot

pro member
"Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feelings."

It does have a nice tone to it.

While we are on the subject of authors, let me state that my personal preferences are towards rhetorics, both modern and ancient. I tend to favor Cicero and Burke (Kenneth, not the British philosopher), and a few others. As to how it applies to art criticism, well it does apply though it has not been used widely. I wrote a dissertation on it, but I remain one of the few to have addressed the subject. This approach however goes a long way towards understanding motives. For me, being an artist and not a critic, it is the artist's intent and motives that I find fascinating.
 

Kevin Bjorke

New member
Some months back I made a point of tracking down all of Poore's books -- not just "Pictorial Composition" but the long-out-of-print companions. His 1913 definition, which I found awkward, was "Art is the expression of the essential character of a subject" but he also quoted (and dismissed) my second-favorite one-liner definition of art (first favorite: "whatever you can get away with"):

"Art is the revelation of the individuality of things." (anonymously credited to the Edinburgh Review)

My own personal theory of art has to do with the nature of brain structure, as revealed in more recent decades. We know that different parts of the brain handle different tasks, including among them speech. We have lots of thoughts which cannot be directly accessed as speech -- how would you describe the taste of a strawberry, for example? You can't do it directly. And yet we do know what a strawberry tastes like, and can freely describe it in less-precise yet more-descirptive language involving, say, running streams and a first spring kiss. But there is no direct description -- those parts of the brain involved with speech and those of taste (the limbic system, not so un-coincidentally involved with emotions) are only tenuously connected. It's these ill-defined and hence individualized expressions of the thoughts we have beyond our routine expression that I feel are at the heart of what we call "art."

(chicks dig it too, just the same, heh)
 
Last edited:

Kevin Bjorke

New member
I have taken a crack at these books and find them all to be good (not that I expected anything different!).

Langer's book, being pre-Derrida, pre-Chomsky, pre-Baudrillard... I'm not too surprised that it's not as well-known since the tide toward functionalism was so strong since she published in 1953. Her emphasis on direct experience, a more empirical approach, has been largely out of fashion since then (though now coming back with folks like Dennett, et al). I think her symbols in art map quite well onto the newer metaphorical cognitive model proposed by Lakoff & Co.

Shapiro is a good example of a critic who looks fairly directly at a painting, not trying to "decode" it through some modern-political prismatic viewer, but with a good sense of the elements that were there as the painter likely dealt with them -- the purely formal details of line and color, and the known circumstances of the painters and comparisons with their own works and those they were known to have seen. It's certainly useful to be able to think about pictures this way, to similutaneously accept the formal and representational aspects of the work.

A challenge that Langer deliberately says she does NOT approach, though: how does one use this knowledge -- CAN one use this knowledge? -- to make better art?
 
Last edited:

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
I agree with the symbolic nature of art.

I believe it is part of our language that predates language of man. It is primarily the language of response to the outside world of (first) an individual (and then a group) by primitive emotions that reptiles, mammals, apes and humans have developed. Overlayed on that are complexes of these responses, like compounds of elements in chemistry: an enormous vocabularly of compound emotions all coded in the brain, some made more important by cultural and envronmental influences codified in customs, stories, religion, metaphors, stories and currencies that go with human society.

However, ultimately, whether on a basic or constructed emotional basis, the human nervous system must respond for it to be art. The response may be emotional, challenging values, entertainment, merely be educational or backup cultural values or status like a coat of arms or a national anthem or flag. Most classic art is a combination of all of these. However, in some modern art we are even attempting to deconstruct or challenge the most basic symbols from which our reactions are programmed. It is as if we are giving the finger to our language origins.

One route to learning is to go to any major gallery where audio sets are provided and pick just a few paintings or photographs that appeal to you and listen several times to that description.

That at least, provides an insight as to what current curators consider to ber ART.

Asher
 
Top