ART WITH BAGGIES. Bruce Cayard sent me this link to the work of Joshua Allen Harris, which features sculptures made from garbage bags. They are inflated by the exhaust from subways, which also creates motion. One of the appeals for me is that it makes use of subway grates which are part of the texture of New York City, a part which I have walked by for years without noticing. The sculptures link the street and the activity at the level below it.
Archive for January, 2009
ART WITH BAGGIES.
Sunday, January 25th, 2009EICHMAN AND HEIDEGGER.
Saturday, January 24th, 2009EICHMANN AND HEIDEGGER. Hannah Arendt famously used the phrase “the banality of evil” in the title of her book about Adolf Eichmann’s trial for war crimes, EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM: A REPORT ON THE BANALITY OF EVIL. Eichman claimed that he had always tried to follow Kant’s categorical imperative. In her book Arendt shows that Eichman misunderstood Kant. She also remarked, according to this wikipedia article, on “Eichmann’s inability to think for himself” and that “Eichmann was in fact a highly unintelligent person.” These comments by Arendt cry out for a comparison of Eichman with the moral judgments of the brilliant philosopher Heidegger. I don’t know whether Hannah Arendt ever made such a comparison, whether in print or in her private thoughts.
THE STRANGE LOVE STORY OF HEIDEGGER AND HANNAH ARENDT.
Friday, January 23rd, 2009THE STRANGE LOVE STORY OF HEIDEGGER AND HANNAH ARENDT. As Adam Kirsch tells the story in the article I linked to yesterday, Martin Heidegger was Hannah Arendt’s teacher in the twenties and they became lovers. Arendt, who was Jewish, escaped from Germany in 1933 after Hitler took power. Later in 1933, Heidegger joined the Nazi party. In 1950, Arendt returned to Germany and met with Heidegger, the unapologetic Nazi. Kirsch says: “’This evening and this morning are the confirmation of an entire life,’ she wrote to him after their meeting. For the next two years, their love enjoyed a brief afterlife….” Kirsch points out that “Arendt’s unqualified support of Heidegger was important in establishing the convenient myth that his Nazi involvement had been, as she put it, a case of an unworldly man getting carried away by politics’, and thus ‘finally a matter of indifference.’” I really don’t understand this love story.
PHILOSOPHERS WHO ARE BAD PEOPLE.
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009PHILOSOPHERS WHO ARE BAD PEOPLE. . Philosophers are thought to have some idea of ethics and of how to live the good life. Reading this article about Hannah Arendt by Adam Kirsch in the January 12 New Yorker reminded me that philosophers can be guilty of monstrous things. Bertrand Russell, Sartre and de Beavoir and Martin Heidegger are some of the best-known philosophers of the last century and they did bad things. I posted here about Bertrand Russell’s betrayal of T.S.Eliot by establishing Eliot’s trust and then seducing Eliot’s bride. This review of Hazel Rowley’s joint biography of de Beauvoir and Sartre quotes Rowley that “these two advocates of truth-telling constantly told lies to an array of emotionally unstable young girls.” As this review of another joint biography by Carole Seymour-Jones says:”De Beauvoir became a glorified procuress, exploiting her profession as a teacher to seduce impressionable female pupils and then passing them on to Sartre, who had a taste for virgins.” As for Heidegger, Kirsch’s article describes how Heidegger was an unapologetic Nazi.
KITCHEN SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS.
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009KITCHEN SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS. Annalisa and Lee Bryant sent me this link to a series of experiments exploring what happens when various items are placed in a microwave. It answers some questions I’ve wondered about. I found myself inexplicably saddened by the experiment with gummi worms. I found the experiment with eggs very satisfying.
CHRISTINA’S WORLD—A CONCEPT, BUT NOT “CONCEPTUAL ART.”
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009CHRISTINA’S WORLD—A CONCEPT, BUT NOT “CONCEPTUAL ART.” One of the important trends in contemporary art is conceptual art, which this wikipedia article defines as: “art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns.” It is ironic that what seems to me a powerful concept underlies one of Wyeth’s best known works, CHRISTINA’S WORLD. It shows a cripple, a real person whom Wyeth knew and had seen struggling to cross a meadow. The immense care and skill that went into the painting of the grass has been a target for criticism, as in this article which notes “the way Wyeth painted each blade of grass, a mechanical and unremarkable kind of realism that was distinctive if only for going against the rising tide of abstraction in America in the late 1940’s.” Yet the painting shows that close familiarity with grass is part of the crippled woman’s world. Of necessity, she (and anyone who must crawl) sees grass with great exactitude.
ANDREW WYETH AND THE DEATH OF LANDSCAPE.
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009ANDREW WYETH AND THE DEATH OF LANDSCAPE. This obituary for Andrew Wyeth, who died on January 16, reflects what has happened to landscape and other forms of realistic art. In his comments on Wyeth in the obituary, the dean of the Yale School of Art “raised doubts about his choice of subject matter” and said about Wyeth’s work that “It is in many ways a futile exercise, but he did it with great energy and conviction.”
TWO SUGGESTIONS AS TO WHY LANDSCAPE IS DEAD.
Monday, January 19th, 2009TWO SUGGESTIONS AS TO WHY LANDSCAPE IS DEAD. This article (link via Arts & Letters Daily) suggests an answer to Jackie Wullschlager’s question about the death of landscape (the question was “Why?”). Theodore Dalrymple gives two reasons for the abandonment of past art. He begins with the lack of interest in art history on the part of art students, giving the example of a student who is in her second year of art school and is taking a course in art history—she is currently studying Roy Liechtenstein, whose art career began in the 1950’s. He then identifies what he believes are two errors: “The first is the overestimation of originality as an artistic virtue in itself….What the new art ideology means by originality is that which has the power to shock… Only the rebellious is original and creative.” Dalrymple’s second reason is “the false analogy that is often drawn between art and science in point of progress…..Art teachers and critics use the false analogy with science in order to deny the importance of tradition in artistic production.” He points out that science builds on tradition. Scientists rely on the discoveries of those who went before. He denies that there is progress in art, with those who came later being superior to earlier artists.
DOES EVOLUTION LEAD US TO LOVE LANDSCAPES?
Sunday, January 18th, 2009DOES EVOLUTION LEAD US TO LOVE LANDSCAPES? Jonah Lehrer reviews Dennis Dutton’s new book, THE ART INSTINCT, which argues that our instinct for art and desire for beauty are the result of the evolutionary process. Lehrer describes how Dutton takes as a starting point an experiment from the early 1990’s. People in ten countries were surveyed on what they liked in a painting. “In each country, people craved a painting that featured a large body of blue water, some open grass, a human figure and a few animals.” There were national difference in the details (Russians liked a brown bear; Kenyans liked a hippo). “According to Dutton, the survey results reveal our hard-wired preferences, which developed when we were Pleistocene hunter-gatherers roaming the African savannah.” If we are programmed by evolution to enjoy landscapes, then it is all the more remarkable that landscapes should have, as Jacki Wullschlager says, disappeared from the contemporary art scene. Lehrer concludes that the rejection of landscape invalidates Dutton’s evolutionary theory of art: “when everything in the Museum of Modern Art violates your theory of aesthetics, then it might be worth revising the theory.”
THE DEATH OF LANDSCAPE?
Saturday, January 17th, 2009THE DEATH OF LANDSCAPE? Jackie Wullschlager wrote in this article in the Financial Times that “Landscape in 20th and 21st century art is less than unfashionable – it has dropped off the radar screen. Why?” She notes that in a guide to the Tate Modern Museum, out of hundreds of works, “there are just three landscapes – by Matisse, Cézanne and Emil Nolde.” And a recent book, Thames & Hudson’s ART SINCE 1900,” includes only two landscape paintings among more than 1,000 featured works.” I had not noticed this trend. Landscapes from previous centuries–Ruisdael, Constable, the French and American Impressionists—are popular. Good landscapes can be found at local art shows. The article does not attempt to answer the question it asks (”Why?”).
