On this subject, one of my earliest art instructors repeatedly
cautioned us against sentimentality and as an excercise he brought
into drawing class several embalmed and flayed cats from the biology
department for us to draw. He said that there was no way we could be
sentimental about that subject matter.
Sentimentality seems to have to with content and I don't know why you
can't make a good work of art about sentimental subject matter.
Sent from my iPhone
On Jan 29, 2009, at 2:14 PM, William Conger <[email protected]>
wrote:
Yes, sentiment is different from sentimentality, as modern is from
modernistic. And sentimentality is a very complicated idea with
many facets. One is the replacement of reality with myth. Much of
art history relies on myth and its corruption as sentimentality.
One sentimental idea in modern art rests on the myth of artistic and
individual freedom. But in fact the reality is that most art is in
bondage to some prevailing concepts and their implementation in the
art discourse and markets.
here's a related analogy:
At one time in America, before 1865, a huge percentage of Americans
were in fact in bondage. That's not only the slaves but also the
native Indians who were being pushed into separate reserves. And
this doesn't even touch on the bondage created by group prejudice
against those whose ideas, political and religious, marked them as
misfits, disloyal, dangerous, etc. Yet most of our notions of
freedom and indiviualism were honed during that period and remain
glowing today. So it is with art as well. That's why we need to
continually confront and attack the myths that are erected against
reality. For me, sentimentality in its various iterations is the
signal of misleading myth.
Sentimentality is the pair of rose colored glasses. Once you put
them on, everything is sentimentalized and myth becomes the new
reality.
WC
--- On Thu, 1/29/09, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote:
From: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: History of 'Sentimentality'
To: [email protected]
Date: Thursday, January 29, 2009, 1:28 PM
In a message dated 1/29/09 12:14:01 PM,
[email protected] writes:
(and we might notice that neither Aristotle nor
Shakespeare offer any
social
or institutional or educational qualifications for
their preferred
audience
of aesthetes)
it is probable that neither Donald Trump nor Maya Angelou
would be among
their preferred audience.
Kate Sullivan
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