I don't think I'd care in the situation under discussion, but otherwise I'm afraid I do care. Once, a collector wanted to hang one of my ptgs. sideways because of a space issue. I was very adamant that he should not even think about doing that. I've had my ptgs. reproduced backwards, upsidedown, cropped, and I am very vexed by such errors. Whenever one of my works is reproduced for a book cover or ad or some such, I stipulate that no text can obscure any part of the work and I insist on no cropping of the image. Black and white reproductions are ok, I suppose.
While all of that is different from someone actually twisting or stretching or shrinking the shapes in the composition, I guess I do have limits of tolerance. As for someone saying, "but the work is better if hung sideways, or cropped, etc.," I suppose I'd say ok for you but not for me, and still insist on having it my way, if I can, even if the person is right. So aesthetic response is one thing, and I can't object to whatever it might be, but to actually change the work to suit or improve a response, no. Art history is littered with those sorts of conflicts between patron and artist, where the patron, as owner, assumes the right to do whatever is desired to the work. Nowadays there are ample legal precedents protecting the work and the artist. Yet as a teacher of painting I regularly told students to change this or that and if they didn't do it I was annoyed, despite being wrong once in a while. As for the Arp test. There is one Arp and the rest are fake Arps. One might be able to improve a fake Arp, making it more like the real Arp, but one can't say a fake Arp is a better Arp. So the aesthetic test is a sham, measuring only whether or not people prefer fake Arps over a real Arp. It says nothing about Arp's art. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Chris Miller <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wed, January 20, 2010 1:15:53 PM Subject: Re: Beauty and the Brain: A Neural Approach to Aesthetics Why couldn't the experiment use a computer morphed variations of an abstract painting instead of sculpture? Wouldn't a Conger painting serve the one just as well as an Arp sculpture served the other? Now tell us, William, would you really care if the vast majority of responders got more pleasure from looking at variations instead of the original of your painting? What relevance would that "normative template for aesthetic response" have to whatever "art" means to you? BTW - hasn't research already established that the "blue landscape" (as Dutton calls it) serves as such a template? ____________________________________________________________ Diet Help Cheap Diet Help Tips. Click here. http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL2231/c?cp=UFu9-x8yamdYLVXemT2fCwAAJz6c l_zTaptgNR5c8Mer1v9kAAYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYQAAAAAA=
