On Dec 22, 2008, at 4:09 PM, William Conger wrote:
Actually, I think it's fair to infer that the cave artists did have
a theory of taste or aesthetics
Perhaps it's sort of like this
aesthetics : canon : art :: rhetoric : grammar : language
Both pictorial art and language are "free creative" acts, that is,
each of them forms and shapes its products (images, words) completely
separately from the things pointed at. Over time and within a
relatively contiguous community of recipients, norms of how these
forms should look or sound arise and are endorsed and retained--
canons, standards, conventions, grammars, preferred pronunciations ...
ta-da, taste!
Consider how often, and how unnoticed, it is that certain
constructions are almost entirely conventional, not truly imitative or
"representative," yet they don't arrest our attention. Outlines
themselves are an invisible convention; hatch marks for shading are
sometimes an invisible convention. In language (I'll use English,
which I'm most familiar with), structural words (prepositions,
conjunctions, etc.) tend to remain invisible until, through
repetition, odd locution, or misuse, the reader or listener becomes
aware of them.
Rules and guidelines eventually develop to describe how images or
language work, why certain forms or presentations can appear to be
defective and others quite extraordinary. I suspect the rules were
developed as teaching aids to instruct the student how to work
efficiently and what to avoid, as practical lore and folk wisdom based
on previous success or failure.
We are at the 20,000th year of a long process of teaching and refining
techniques, and the guidelines have become very detailed, extensive,
and complicated.
BTW, I've often run into the situation that a non-artist really likes
one of my paintings that I think is poor because of this and that--
things I can easily see but that the other person just isn't attuned
to. The other person isn't schooled in the conventions, and thus is
less aware of departures from a norm ... you know, those guidelines
that form part of the foundations of taste and aesthetics.
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Michael Brady
[email protected]
