Yes, you should explain how jumbled the paintings are. You are entitled to experience the works as you please but it's one thing to experience the work and another to judge it, admitting that the two engagements are related. To experience the work we center on our one to one engagement and liking, which requires some sort of consonance between our personal history, both psychological and lived, but to judge a work is to explicate its merits and faults against a broad spectrum of historical literature of the work, the scholarship, and other work by its artist and others both contemporary and otherwise and also to relate one's personal experience of the work, and insights derived from that experience.
Actually, both paintings conform to the classical compositional format of the High Renaissance -- with the use of the triangular grouping of figures, and the dynamic composition involving lines that flow from one figure to the next, as if to unite them on the surface while they remain separated by the illusion of depth. And what brilliant color! It's extremely difficult to harmonize colors at nearly full saturation as Titian did. Further, his later work exploits texture and paint handling with dazzling virtuosity -- and that influenced generations of later artists down to the present. Further still , beautifully rendered flesh and other natural forms in Titian's works are simply unmatched until Velasquez. You need to acquire a taste for Venetian painting and the emergence of the baroque sensibility in the 16C Again, serious judgment of historical artworks requires deep familiarity not only with the work in question but with the artists' life and other work, including that of his/her contemporaries, and the scholarly and even popular literature concerning all of that both contemporary with the artist and afterwards. A judgment does not really require liking the work although one might reasonably expect that for the sake of sensitivity to nuance and sustained interest. Liking is personal enough to not require judgment in the fullest sense but only in the private experiential sense. Again, anyone may like or not like something but that is relevant to the experiencing personality alone, not to the something in question. Judgment is a different, far more complex matter. That's why it's common for art scholars who seek to rank art often devote their whole careers to one or a few artists whereas casual art lovers may like or dislike dozens or hundreds of works they experience and not feel the need to justify their experience as judgments. WC ________________________________ From: Chris Miller <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, April 2, 2009 8:57:07 AM Subject: Judging the late Titian Before launching an attack on Titian's late work -- I thought I'd take another look on the internet -- and realized that it was only a few pieces that I can't stand -- especially those two that were recently in the news: "Diana and Actaeon" along with "Diana and Callisto" -- as shown here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7584902.stm Do I really need to explain how jumbled these are? They should be cut up to protect the good areas from the bad. (and I also can't stand the two statues in the background of his last, probably unfinished, painting, "Pieta") Regarding the rest of William's assertions -- I do not agree that "one who is deeply informed about that artist and the literature examining him/her" is necessarily a better judge of aesthetic quality than anyone else -- although, I would also not say that "most ordinary judgment is equal to the most informed" We just have a different idea as to what qualifies as "most informed". I've been getting into the culture of Hindustani music a bit, lately, and in one memoir, the author wrote of an old man coming up to her and her teacher (a famous singer) and recalling a concert he had heard 30 years earlier, and then making a thoughtful, and very useful comment. He clearly was knowledgeable about the art, but he was nothing like a professional scholar. Could a non-professional scholar make a good judgment about some new findings in microbiology or astrophysics? I don't know - perhaps - but it seems less likely, because a good judgment in those fields requires familiarity with a large body of evidence and theory -- while the only evidence required to judge a painting is presented by the painting itself, and theory should be irrelevant except as a way to explain a judgment that's already been made. ____________________________________________________________ Internet Security Software - Click here. http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL2231/fc/BLSrjnxQZBmQ3C2rA5fXZw7G6HMxTc U7LLTEvafX9rHUC7N6ftnxRjm8pe4/
