"Let Observation with extesnive View..."
In his point # 4, Dierk Haasis says:
4. Defining Art observational will not work since at the heart of any piece of Art lies singularity.
This is demonstrably not true.
Not argumentably, demonstratably.
Careful observation of works of art in various mediums from various continents and cultures from, say, 3,000 B.C. to the present reveals that although each work of art is indeed singular all of them are made along the same principles.
The figure/ground relationship, for example, was important in 3,000 B.C. and is important now.
Composition was based on the same conditions in 3,000 B.C. as it is now.
Variation was the same then as now.
In flat works, line operated the same way then as it does now, the tension between line as line and line as shape was the same.
In flat works (including Abysinnian stone tablets, Greek funerary steles, Roman stone sarcophogai, fabrics, etc.) , the tension between the representation of volumes in deep space and the creation of patterns on the surface of the work, the handling of the forms considered both as representational imagery and as forms in patterns and compositions was the same in, say, ancient Egyptian bird paintings on fabric, the friezes in the ancient Egyptian tombs at Saqqara, the Parthenon friezes, Rubens' portrait of his 6 yr old daughter Clara Serena, Andy Warhol's silk screens, John Coplans' photographs and Chuck Close's most recent portraits.
Motif and variation was the same in Saqqara and throughout art as it is in Lucas Samaras' most recent work of 14,000 photographs -- variations on a small number of themes : a work that come as read-only scans sealed into a Mac system costing $16,000.
The moving composisitions of Jean-Luc Godard's films are based on the same principles of the compositions of Western painting all the way back, and farther.
Edward Weston's 1920s Mexican portraits are demonstrably constructed the same as are the portraits of the 15th Century Dutch painter Hans Memling, although it's not likely that Weston knew Memling's work.
In Weston's n---s (abbrev for unclothed) of Charis Wilson on the sand the tension between line as line and line as shape is as sustained and bold and beautifully handled as it is in Matisse's drawings of the n___ (abbrev unclothed) and in Rembrandt's graphic work, especially his self-portrait drawings and etchings.
Styles change over the millenia, centuries and decades. Subject matter comes and goes. But art remains the same.
Observation can show you this.
But you must observe.
You can't either concur or rebut this rhetorically.
You must look.
Obbservation can disclose all this and more.
You just have to know how to look, what to look at, how to see it and, once you see it, what to call it.
e.g. "figure/ground relationship" "motif and variation" "design" "decoration"
(From time to time in the 40-some pictures of
Tulsa it is obvious that Larry Clark was concentrating in part on decorating his frames and exploring the various ways his subject matter afforded him to decorate them. Kertesz' borders are, among other things, delicate, fanciful, surprising and beautiful decorative passages.)
yrs
ben
www.benlifson.com