I like how the word "intellectual" has only been appearing with scare quotes
in this discussion - except for when Michael introduced it into his statement
that "Beauty in artworks (those wholly independent creations) can be found in
striking or intriguing combinations of elements that appeal less to the sense
of pulchritude, per se, and more to intellectual engagement."
The small question --- is how this assertion might follow from the 5
dictionary definitions that Michael offered --- and I say it doesn't --
because none of those definitions establishes any relationship at all between
"sense of pulchritude" and "intellectual engagement" -- as say, a definition
of "spoke" relates a hub to a rim.
The large question -- is how these two ideas might be developed in relation to
each other -- and Michael has helpfully provided an example.(his response to
the swimming pool paintings of David Hockney)
I'm with William -- in that "I'm not sure one can separate the intellectual
from the emotional" -- at least when feeling that something is beautiful.
But once we begin a discussion about it -- that's when we're beginning what I
would call a distinctly intellectual activity -- which can be done better or
worse depending on the reasoning and scope of knowledge that is involved.
In my approach -- feeling comes first. If something feels right (or wrong)
no amount of subsequent intellectual activity is going to change it . (though
-- I might go back and experience something again, and who knows how I'll
feel the next time)
So -- to consider MIchael's example -- when I first looked at Hockney's
swimming pool ("Portrait of an Artist, Pool with two figures") - or, at least
a reproduction of it -- I liked it - with no thought whatsoever of
"intellectualizing the image" etc. I wanted to be at that beautiful
pool/country estate -- on a sunny summer day with the colorfully dressed
(or undressed) handsome young men. What excitement! Later on -- I might work
up some ideas about that vision -- the history of homoerotic art and how much
it reminds me of some 19th C. Hindu/Krishna painting -- and how it contrasts
with the Bacon/Freud ugliness that seems more characteristic of late 20th
British figure painting -- but that would only be because I enjoyed that
swimming pool so much to begin with.
And yes -- I do have a enormous bone to pick with any approach to the
imaginative arts that does not put intimate, personal feeling first -- and
it's my historical observation that with the rise of the secular university as
the pre-eminent cultural authority, we live in a period that rejects that
priority --- puts the cart before the horse - has the tail wagging the dog --
etc etc.-- and has ended up putting things with little or no aesthetic value
at the very top of the contemporary canon.
If some might condemn me for being sentimental -- so be it. I respect the
fans of Kinkade more that I do the erudite scholars of Jasper Johns and Andy
Warhol -- and "sentimental" is just a word to disparage people whose
sentiments are different from your own.
************
Michael wrote:
I was thinking of works of visual art that seem on first glance not to observe
the standards of conventional pictorial beauty. Hockney's swimming pools, for
example. They engaged me intellectually, first, more so than by immediate
visual recognition. I saw them as patterns and arrangements, initially, as
"cool" and aloof, as fundamentally detached from their referents by the linear
abstractions. I liken that to intellectualizing the image, to Hockney's
repositioning the mode of perceiving the scene from the almost immediately
pictorial to the analytical abstraction into flat color areas and schematic
proxies for the reflections in the water, etc. Compare Mondrian's early
paintings, where the portrayal of natural forms seems more natural, to the
later rectilinear grids of pure color and black lines. The change that occurs
shifts the way one grasps the image, again, from a more immediate reading of
tree to a more abstracted, more schematic, and thus more "intellectual"
reading. Also, compare Broadway Boogie Woogie or other late Mondrian's to
Motherwell's
Elegies. For me, there is no "reading" of the structure of the "Elegy." It's
all immediate.
____________________________________________________________
Get a degree and open new doors. Click to find flexible and affordable
programs now.
http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL2231/fc/PnY6rc147JvjI3Kt94VH4q3pPqbhbx
fjm5reH7PUUvuiXNwjuDq08/
