what subjects? Here are some goated ones real quick, spanning all different topics:
Open Architecture by Esra Akcan (will cover german modernist architecture / Bauhaus contexts and then zero in on public housing case studies in Berlin from a 1987 project)
The Mirror of the Artist by Craig Harbison
Ape to Apollo by David Bindman
Ways of Seeing - John Berger
About Looking - John Berger
The Art of Describing by Svetlana Alpers
Art in Renaissance Italy by Paoletti and Radke (standard university text of Italian renaissance for a survey course)
The others by Gombrich, namely Art and Illusion and Sense of Order. Also, Rudolf Arnheim (Visual Thinking, Art and Visual Perception, Entropy and Art, his essays on film...) and Panofsky (Iconology, Meaning in the Visual Arts).
Thanks! Those are great suggestions! I’ll add them to my list. What would you recommend on the respective art periods that “subdivide” the history of art?
2nd Gombrich's Art and Illusion; Arnheim in general's a little thick for my tastes but a good rec nonetheless
Sloterdijk's The Aesthetic Imperative's a wonderful book, but concerns music, architecture, the modern art 'scene' (or lack thereof) as well
The others by Gombrich, namely Art and Illusion and Sense of Order. Also, Rudolf Arnheim (Visual Thinking, Art and Visual Perception, Entropy and Art, his essays on film...) and Panofsky (Iconology, Meaning in the Visual Arts).
"The Shock of the New" by Robert Hughes is probably the best introduction to modern art that you can get as long as you account for Hughes being overly opinionated now and then. There's a television series too but the book has a significantly extended script compared to the TV show.
Plus some of you chudsters may like Hans Sedlmayr's "Art in Crisis : The Lost Center", it's a very culturally pessimist reading of modern art, primarily architecture, that you seldom see.
For me, it's an open concept that demands those who engage with it understand, and in that way the "everything is art" crowd were correct all along: art is just the "meaning" that you generate from experiencing something.
"Meaning" really is "understanding". Even if you understand something to be a bunch of degenerate garbage, that assumption entails an interior aesthetic mode that is being fed upon recognition, and with repeated recognition becomes coherent and fixed. In this way we're all constructing some interior mechanism for seeing
If "everything is art" is the ultimate answer, then everything demands understanding. So everything is art, and so nothing is art.
Art to me is either "observation" or "understanding". We can't observe without comprehending in some form, and so we're always looking upon "art" in some weird way. The "art" we see that we're familiar with it is really a confluence of particulars plucked from this universal substance and arranged in some way as to "communicate", so that we "understand".
If some pared down concept would be helpful, then I think art consists of seeing the same ol' same ol' in some radically different way; ideally, this 'radicalism' is a way in which contemporaries are already in the process of seeing or experiencing the world, they just haven't been able (or just haven't desired) to understand it yet. Something like that. Art attempts to make what's new articulate, even if 'what's new' is a more upgraded or downgraded version of something old.
what subjects? Here are some goated ones real quick, spanning all different topics:
Open Architecture by Esra Akcan (will cover german modernist architecture / Bauhaus contexts and then zero in on public housing case studies in Berlin from a 1987 project)
The Mirror of the Artist by Craig Harbison
Ape to Apollo by David Bindman
Ways of Seeing - John Berger
About Looking - John Berger
The Art of Describing by Svetlana Alpers
Art in Renaissance Italy by Paoletti and Radke (standard university text of Italian renaissance for a survey course)
Thanks! Those are great suggestions! I’ll add them to my list. What would you recommend on the respective art periods that “subdivide” the history of art?
2nd Gombrich's Art and Illusion; Arnheim in general's a little thick for my tastes but a good rec nonetheless
Sloterdijk's The Aesthetic Imperative's a wonderful book, but concerns music, architecture, the modern art 'scene' (or lack thereof) as well
Thank you!!
Still around.
>Sloterdijk's The Aesthetic Imperative's
Sounds great. Is it impenetrable like his other works?
It really isn't
>John Berger
Frick that proto-feminist commie moron.
He always struck me as a vulgarized Benjamin.
The others by Gombrich, namely Art and Illusion and Sense of Order. Also, Rudolf Arnheim (Visual Thinking, Art and Visual Perception, Entropy and Art, his essays on film...) and Panofsky (Iconology, Meaning in the Visual Arts).
Is OP still around?
"The Shock of the New" by Robert Hughes is probably the best introduction to modern art that you can get as long as you account for Hughes being overly opinionated now and then. There's a television series too but the book has a significantly extended script compared to the TV show.
Plus some of you chudsters may like Hans Sedlmayr's "Art in Crisis : The Lost Center", it's a very culturally pessimist reading of modern art, primarily architecture, that you seldom see.
What is art? Sort my shit out, boffins.
For me, it's an open concept that demands those who engage with it understand, and in that way the "everything is art" crowd were correct all along: art is just the "meaning" that you generate from experiencing something.
"Meaning" really is "understanding". Even if you understand something to be a bunch of degenerate garbage, that assumption entails an interior aesthetic mode that is being fed upon recognition, and with repeated recognition becomes coherent and fixed. In this way we're all constructing some interior mechanism for seeing
If "everything is art" is the ultimate answer, then everything demands understanding. So everything is art, and so nothing is art.
Art to me is either "observation" or "understanding". We can't observe without comprehending in some form, and so we're always looking upon "art" in some weird way. The "art" we see that we're familiar with it is really a confluence of particulars plucked from this universal substance and arranged in some way as to "communicate", so that we "understand".
>In this way we're all constructing some interior mechanism for seeing
Seeing and *understanding, I meant to say.
If some pared down concept would be helpful, then I think art consists of seeing the same ol' same ol' in some radically different way; ideally, this 'radicalism' is a way in which contemporaries are already in the process of seeing or experiencing the world, they just haven't been able (or just haven't desired) to understand it yet. Something like that. Art attempts to make what's new articulate, even if 'what's new' is a more upgraded or downgraded version of something old.
I have an intuitive sense of what is and isn't art, that's enough. Trying to define everything is both fricking gay and a waste of time.
Thoughts?
You gays need to read some Aby Warburg. The literal goat of art history in 20th century.
Wolheim is great too.