/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11184884]

>He doesn't read Art History/Art Criticism

You're never going to make it if you can't
understand aesthetics.

[Anonymous No.11184889]

i try to tell mother fuckers that but they dont listen, there is way too much "are all bachelors unmarried?" bullshit on here and not enough literary theory

[Anonymous No.11184958]

Where do I even start with art history?

[Anonymous No.11184964]

>>11184958
jansen's history of art both volumes and torrent that teaching company class by william kloss about history of european art, its a start then go from there

[Anonymous No.11185016]

>>11184958
>>11184964
Art Historian here, Gombrich's Story of Art, Jansen's or Gardner's is the standard.

Gombrich undervalues or outright dismisses the social history that the field is focused on in modern scholarship. Formalist analysis has been blown out or improved in most cases, but that era are still great foundational books in 'the canon' of Art History. See also: Panofsky, Winklemann, all the old guard. I wish there was more Formalism taught but most are Marx (and later Foucault) ivory tower theory. Formalism was at its limits anyway, connoisseurship can't engage the broader questions (academia needs to sustain itself). Still, learning what makes an image work (Compositionally, symbolically, etc) will make you a god among your 'muh feeling' peers.

There is no survey course that will be comprehensive or adequate if you have more than a required interest. Even split into multiple courses, the depth and breadth of the influences and styles only get more complicated as time progresses. Find an older edition of Gardner's or Jansen's and flip through it until you find something that really catches you.

The best way to truly study is to find a movement you're interested in and work from there. The Art History field is actually quite small, so many movements have their leading experts and seminal works. Once you find something you like, it's very easy to just follow that thread to the next tertiary movement and keep digging deeper.

I have Aesthetics from Classic Greece to Present by Monroe Beardsley. Really great, dives into the source material itself and is very explicit when it cuts the material short or forgoes a deeper study. Don't let that fool you, it's dense. I'm still wading through Saint Augustine myself. Good rec.

I'm also big fan of John Berger. Not that he says anything particularly profound, but Berger is great because he reminds me why I got into art in the first place. He's really optimistic, and his writing itself is very unacademic, lyrical even. His essays particularly are really grounded in the personal experience of seeing a (>)beautiful work and the influence a work or a movement can have on individuals and ideas on a human level. He has critical work too, that has actual theoretical merit even, although most of these ideas are retroactively obvious now, most famously 'Ways of Seeing' and it's BBC program. After burying myself in academic theory for years, Berger is really refreshing and comforting. He never loses sight of the human element in work. I'd recommend the 'Moment of Cubism' for a good insight into his way of thinking. Solid theory work that is still grounded in real life. It's in his last book, Landscapes, but probably findable online too.

I'm an idort and can only youtube:
Sir Kenneth Clark - Civilization
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6qYjisp51M

Berger - Ways of Seeing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk&list=PLlhSx0L1hpaGKfq1qXe1vWUhG1EgIN9Yf
See you in the research library archives, anon.

[Anonymous No.11185047]

>>11185016
Opinions on Roger Scruton?

[Anonymous No.11185064]

social climbing: the thread
you faggots are pathetic

[Anonymous No.11185315]

>>11185064
>this post

[Anonymous No.11185327]

[Anonymous No.11185569]

>>11185016
I only have a BFA with a minor in art history, but can confirm this is excellent advice.

[Anonymous No.11185579]

watch "the shock of the new" its p fuckin gud for a teevee show

[Anonymous No.11185741]

>>11185315
Culture vulture

[Anonymous No.11185762]

>>11184889
>"are all bachelors unmarried?"

At least acknowledge that "are all unmarried men bachelors" is the more illuminating question.

[Anonymous No.11185841]

>>11185016
>Formalist analysis has been blown out or improved in most cases
>Formalism was at its limits anyway

It's interesting that's you'd say this, because from what I've read of the formalists, I get the impression that they simply aimed to describe their impressions of Art as they saw it themselves. By this I mean that they seem to see art in a very specific way, in that they are acutely aesthetically sensitive to form in ways that many other people may not be, yet at the same time they seems to specifically lack the ability to cognitive the 'poetic' elements of Art (which I mention because they tend to describe even poetry in formalist terms, despite the prime importance of things like metaphor and how this 'carries forth' relations to worldly experience, which I experience but which they typically gloss over).

You can see this here:

http://www.denisdutton.com/bell.htm
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16917/16917-h/16917-h.htm

Bell specifically talks about specifically what works invoke aesthetic experience in him, which he finds to be not the case in other people who seem to lack the ability to apprehend 'significant form', but he also recounts the difficulty he has in apprehending other art forms like music, where he effectively admits he is incapable of understanding in its totality, and only has fragmentary aesthetic experience of.

So I feel that 'formalism' isn't something that should be termed 'obsolete', but simply it may be a more or less accurate description of how certain people apprehend art, which is both limited, and yet still completely truthful in its own right (though I don't perceive things in this way so I can't be sure).

[Anonymous No.11187190]

>>11185841
I'm speaking only in the academic sense, both that it is outdated in modern study and as a tool of formal analysis. Ultimately, Formalism is obsolete to the social-political venue the current research is beholden to.

That being said, understanding what compositionally, materially creates an evoccative work is a timeless tool I'd stress everyone to learn. You don't need any theory to understand how a good work leads your eye through its space, particularly when most courses focus on semantics and ideas and completely forgoe the work itself. A beautiful Trinity isn't beautiful because it evokes God, (to overstate) but because it is designed to be beautiful. Quality as a value gets lost in modern day 'objective' theory.

>>11185047
Never stood out to me. English walled-garden Academic whose Conservative (his own emphasis) views don't distinguish his views from the myriad of other aesthetic treatises.

[Anonymous No.11187235]

>>11187190
>English walled-garden Academic whose Conservative (his own emphasis) views don't distinguish his views from the myriad of other aesthetic treatises.
based

[Anonymous No.11187471]

>>11187235
rekt

[Anonymous No.11187560]

>criticism is mostly useless, it follows the works of the mind as the shadow follows the body
t. delacroix

[Anonymous No.11187582]

>>11185016
Why is modern art so bad?

[Anonymous No.11187594]

>>11187582
Be careful about what you are saying and why you are saying it. I assume you're using modern art as a catchall term for modern and post-modern/conceptual art?

[Anonymous No.11187608]

I really like Russian formalist literary critics associated with OPOJAZ like Schklovsky, Eichenbaum, Lidiya Ginzburg etc. How famous are they outside of Russia?

[Anonymous No.11187684]

>>11187582
>>11187594
Replying to the bait, it's gonna be another
>durr art discussions are just a proxy for political discussions and I lack the intellectual capacity to judge art as according to its own merits, theory, and context

It isn't as bad as the Realist factions would have you believe. Not that there isn't a push for maintaining technical skill to be found:
https://www.artrenewal.org etc

I've found you get out of modern pieces what you put in. The experience of color (and it's indexical relationship to the viewer) is subjective, but beyond muh theory, seeing a work like Rothko for me has always been a matter of investment. Even for the psudes, they're floored by a Rothko because they've invested all their (ego) fauxhype. For those who've studied the work itself, the knowledge of the intentions and process is the reward. When art became more conceptual, it (opened the door for the return of >connoisseurship and all the armchair psudes and bourgeois critics that come with it) required more than just visual investment to be appreciated than Gerome (read: Classicists that blurred/later became kitsch) provided. All that said, it still doesn't do anything for me, but learning about it helped me appreciate what it does instead of getting buttrekt by >muh squares.

tl;dr It isn't bad, you just can't appreciate (fun).

[Anonymous No.11187753]

>>11187684
>tl;dr It isn't bad, you just can't appreciate

I want to personally emphasize this this is important to understand and that more effort should be paid to this.

I have no doubt that:

a) Many people are not able to perceive certain things that allow them to experience art aesthetically on a deep level. As such, they will genuinely not see the value in a given masterpiece that others do see.
b) Because of this, it is likely that what certain people genuinely recognize to be great, purely on its own merits, will be seen as pointless crap by people who don't understand it, since what makes it great will bare no relation to their sense of beauty. These people are not wrong to point out what they honestly perceive to be a sham, since from their perspective it is genuinely rubbish, and the people who do see this differently are seldom capable of explaining to them what it is they are missing, since they don't seem to understand how differently they see things.
c) In spite of all this, there are a tons of works that have no real value as Art that are simply being passed off as being important by people who want to sell them or make a name for themselves according to some pretentious image or overly academic theory.

I feel that there should be more effort going in to separating things that come under C) from others. Just because some things may have real merit that's beyond you doesn't mean that everything that is being pushed as being important actually also has such merit simply because it seems like it could be something of the same nature.

[Anonymous No.11187790]

>>11187582
yep its bad. actually, what-you-say post modernist quite hate about the art isdustry being substantially dominated by several major critics. I think they are still not getting away from that.

one of my favorite quote by foucault.
What strikes me is the fact that the society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. Couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? why should the lamp or the house be an art, but not our life?

[Anonymous No.11187903]

>mfw this thread

[Anonymous No.11188795]

>>11187582
modern "art"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qXzdlJp_eQ&t=8s

[Anonymous No.11188883]

>>11188795
oh god. Several years ago I happened to visit an exhibition by Latifa Echakhch. They probably have quotas for arab "artists".

[Anonymous No.11188903]

>>11187582
Are there still good artists and craftsmen? Yes, but they aren't considered part of the fine art scene, and are working outside of the pathetic contemporary cultural elite shitshow. The few great artists alive today are accidents that show just how far everything else has fallen.
The last hundred years of visual art and architecture has been a slow-motion train wreck, a spiraling devolution of cultures too hypnotized by technology to appreciate tradition, too paralyzed by the need to be original to speak honestly, and too afraid of craftsmanship or skill to do anything but scorn and deride it. WW I was a fist through the face of the crumbling European aesthetic tradition, and artists have been fumbling around in the ruins ever since, mostly unable to embrace beauty or skill, and mistaking editorial cartoon-level political statements for profundity. The literary arts were energized by the fragmentation and breaking of custom, but new makers of visual arts lost their last noble patrons and educated collectors to the past and class breakdown.
I did a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a minor in Art History, and by the end of four years I understood why my fellow students were wasting their time and skill on meaningless "clever" shit they personally cared nothing about and that involved virtually no skill, and how we came to this sorry state. It's hard to admit you're living in the dark age of an artistic field, but it's idiocy to deny it in this case: almost everything that's happened since Art Deco killed off Art Nouveau, and Bauhaus killed ornament and classical grace is impoverished tasteless functional crap. We hate beauty and are proud of it. Perhaps we feel we no longer need art, but we certainly don't deserve it.

[Anonymous No.11188921]

>>11188903
you literally copypasted this from an earlier thread lol
>Are there still good artists and craftsmen? Yes, but they aren't considered part of the fine art scene
pic rel is one of the most famous italian contemporary painters

[Anonymous No.11189111]

>>11188921
It's true, but it's my words. They seemed to apply here as well.

[Anonymous No.11189307]

this is the peak male form

[Anonymous No.11190402]

>>11189307
This is the Ideal Art Historian. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

[Anonymous No.11190469]

Who cares about aesthetics? Just make $

[Anonymous No.11190491]

>>11190469
t.

[Anonymous No.11190502]

>>11185016
Have you read any Didi-Hubermann? After reading his book on Warburg I kinda lost my respect for Panofsky, from what little I've managed to read on Warburg in my native language (and secondary readings, mostly Didi-Hubermann's but also Agamben's), his project seemed much more ambitions and interesting if a bit more difficult and abstract.
Also, the man is kinda low key but if you haven't read him, I strongly recommend Lionello Venturi's History of Art Criiticism.

[Anonymous No.11190510]

>>11190491
Koons' genius lies well beyond his own grasp. Only after he is dead will we be able to see his whole opus as a huge fuck you to the art world, probably one of the most reactionary men in the scene right now, it's just that no one quite knows it. The thinking man's Romero Britto (itself the seeing man's Paulo Coelho)

[Anonymous No.11190559]

>>11190502
Only have read Didi-Hubermann in excerpts, but not in full. Panofsky and the old guard have been rightly lambasted where appropriate, but are still worth reading in most cases, if only to see how the ideas they pushed shaped the larger study.

Pic related, I'd recommend Art and Literature as well, as seen in this convenient corner of my shelf.

[Anonymous No.11190579]

>>11190510
He has no genius, he's just a clever salesman and for some reason art historians and critics think it's profound for someone to comment how on shitty the art world is and how "like, dude, money drives everything" WHILE making millions.

It's like saying wall street traders have artistic merit.

[Anonymous No.11191036]

>>11190469
Fuck off Minteu