This is a group for the Great Course on art. You can find the coursebook on Anna's Archive but I will also be posting each lecture's pages each week in the thread. You can access all the videos for the course through Kanopy if you are an American and have a library card but I will also post a link for video for each lecture for those who cannot access Kanopy. There are 36 lectures in the course and we are going at a rate of one lecture per week in order to keep it relaxing make it easy for people to catch up who fall behind.Pages and video to follow
>>25083025
>>25083028
>>25083031Video courtesy of Bilibili, basically Chinese YouTubehttps://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1t4411x7i2
>>25083024"art appreciation" is for talentless hacks that want to learn hifalutin phrases to describe shit they're too lazy to do themselves. It's a completely worthless endeavor. You gain appreciation by doing; not by reading..t /trad/ shitposter
>>25083150I am actually practicing, how are art appreciation and creating art, mutually exclusive? That's like saying music appreciation and composing are mutually exclusive, or literature appreciation and writing are.
>>25083159>how are art appreciation and creating art, mutually exclusive?I never said that. For a /lit/ poster you have surprisingly poor reading comprehension. They aren't mutually exclusive, but studying "Art Appreciation" is an ersatz form of art appreciation. It's time better spent actually painting instead of reading someone else's opinions. You'll truly appreciate art when you realize that painting is 90% practice 10% study; otherwise you'll be like every other old woman in an art museum self-assuredly describing the painting five feet away from her in painfully literal terms.
>>25083150thist.rad
>>25083188Art appreciation isn't art criticism. You can't even learn how to make sophisticated art without art appreciation
>>25083188>an hour a week of studying art takes up all the time you spend practicing drawing
>>25083207>You can't even learn how to make sophisticated art without art appreciationIf you don't have this naturally why are you trying to make """sophisticated""" art in the first place? Are you pretending to be something you aren't? You shouldn't need someone to tell you how to feel about something you're supposed to know by heart. If you approach art with that attitude everyone that isn't a clueless mom or a fellow hack will be able to tell that you're faking it.>>25083213An hour better spent studying painting, not "art appreciation". >seven year old frogAre you from mossad as well?
>>25083197nice upvote faggot
>>25083262Every single great artist studied the art of his peers and predecessors and was enormously influenced by them, you imbecile
>>25083272you clearly don't understand the concept being discussed before your very eyes.
>>25083277The concept you profess to know nothing about and disdain ever learning because of your inferiority complex?
>>25083150Art appreciation is a cornerstone of basic aristocratic knowledge and half the content of museums are purchases from the Grand Tour era of noble and upperclassmen traveling around Europe. It’s what art classes used to teach before it was just doodling and making “crafts”.
>>25083299Art is about expressing yourself and not trying to please aristocrats or art teachers. That's what trad art was about before it was corrupted
>>25083305>trad art is menstrual blood
>>25083358You're intellectually dishonest and pretentious. You can't understand what real art is because you're too busy huffing your own farts
>>25083150What redpilled me on art history and modern critique was actually reading Vasari.The worthiest, most insightful praise he ever gives to a painting or sculpture is>It's very niceOr maybe he uses beautiful, or pretty. And these are works of the utmost historical importance.Now you can have whole Guardian columns intellectualising a mannequin with a dildo for a mouth or whatever
>>25083305That mentality produces shitty art, art is creating something of value
I love TTC lectures. The Great Courses, what ever they're called now. Quality has declined. Try skimming one on a subject you actually know something about and see what I mean.
>>25083388Art appreciation isn't the same as art criticism. Art appreciation is mostly about understanding the techniques, their functions and purpose
>>25083408Their quality has always been a world class expert teaching something and with the presumption the viewer has zero knowledge of the subject. So if you're an expert in music theory then a course explaining music reading will be lacking in quality for you. TTC lectures are all rebranded as Great Courses
Just read Ruskin.
>>25083024LINK NIGGA
>>25083426>>25083037
intellectuals & scholars have held art hostage for centuries, I think you should be very protective of your own vision and trust your own ability to see a work of art as it really is, rather than spending your time groping for guidelines like what critics have said or might say about it, what movement it seems to fall into, where it seems to be aiming, whether its style strikes you as normal or not, above all whether it can be called important or not - which is far easier to decide than whether the thing is any good or not.
>>25083299>basic aristocratic knowledge
>>25083305> Art is about expressing yourself and not trying to please aristocrats or art teachers. You call yourself “trad” and have no fucking clue what the Western Tradition even is and you spout inspirational poster crap every dumbshit art teacher puts on the classroom wall. Actually that tracks completely. >>25083477Yes, it used to be aspirational to live up to an ideal, embodied by an upper class elite, but frankly even the middle class had educations that would make them more familiar with the classics and the major western artists and styles than even people taking classicist classes and art history would be today. Once again some delusional retard seems to think familiarity with this system is in the wrong somehow.
>>25083794>aspirational to live up to an idealis searingly ‘middle class’. and the middle is much further from the upper class than the working class. the working and upper are very similar in many ways. both rooted in tradition. both honest and unconcerned about their ‘position’. idolising an idea has a way of making you exaggerate or misapply its principles and the moment you start thinking in terms of ‘basic aristocratic knowledge’, you’ve already marked yourself as not being it.
>>25083818Working class are cattle without the the faculty to appreciate art (only applies to today when self-education is so accessible. Bourgeoisie are pretentious but also the only people keeping Beethoven and Wagner alive. Aristocrats are dead but were also flawedLike>>25083388Says. They treated Mozart like an entertainer or a servant, he wasn't a genius to them and the aristocracy could never conceive of an artistic genius, only the bourgeoisie could.
>>25084100the bourgeoise live(d) off bohemians and vice versa. Which do you want to LARP as?
>>25084108I don't identify with any group because I'm too misantrophic
>>25084112oh how special. So you do nothing all day but play video games, watch cartoons, work a meaningless job, and read
>>25084120I don't watch cartoons or play video games. I watch operas or ballets sometimes, and I do read. All jobs are meaningless
>>25084130>I watch operas or ballets sometimesfor roughly five years I presume>All jobs are meaninglessAll that tells me is that you have nothing you actually want to do in life. You just want to look smart to the right people
>>25084100the sneering classist vox pop betrays a misunderstanding of how class works. in england there was the whole ‘u and non-u’ thing, which found the upper class and working class often spoke plainly and directly, using the same words, while the middle class tended to use ‘fancier’, french words for things, in an attempt to sound more refined (and counterintuitively separating themself more from their betters).& mozart had a dominant entertainment motive. like every great artist. shakespeare wrote for the groundlings, the unscholarly globe patrons who walked in from the cockfight on the street. only those whose blood courses hot through their veins can understand these lines.
the best great courses courses on art are the old ones with william kloss, so good. i haven't seen these new ones so thanks for that tho op. also, i did a two semester history of western art or whatever survey in college fwiw.
>>25084136I don't care about people
>>25084162>also, i did a two semester history of western art or whatever survey in collegeyou couldn’t have tortured this information out of me.
>>25083408the old ones from the 90s were really good, the 2000s ones were still decent, but the most recent stuff is so bad. the only good recent one i liked was the "great piano works explained" only actually good music one from them
>>25084167keep watching infotainment, pleb
>>25084166qualified to be weighing in on the humanities!
you want some rad af art history/criticism on video? watch "the shock of the new" by some australian dude, super good, will help chuds and other dumbasses appreciate modern art.
>>25084177here peep this firehttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFtSvldL7Mh4ismj4BgH33pBR9hbtBkxz
tune in for rad af art history
>>25084174I am fond of humanity as an ongoing multicellular organism, just not fascinated by any particular human
>>25083818The majority of great English artists came from that "middle" (lower upper) you resent so much.
>>25084194kind of irrelevant. i’m talking about cultural authenticity. calliope is no snob about class. true poems have been written by oyster-dredgers and gangsters and cricketers.
>>25084201Ones who read a lot. Not idiots who said, I never read, I only write because I am too authentic to read
>>25083433You got obliterated the last time you tried to post about this, anon. I remember.
>>25084300like shakespeare’s ‘small latin and less greek’? & i’m not actually against reading in general (it should probably go without saying).
>>25084335i remember winning that one.
>>25084347Were you drunk? It was embarrassing, you were sperging out saying "Van Gogh said, Leonardo said..." And here you are making the same post like you haven't learned shit. Come on.
>>25084352>Van Gogh said, Leonardo saidsounds awful
>>25083150*highbrow phrases
>>25084344>small latin and less Greek meant he didn't read Most of his played are based on Ovid (presumably Golding's translation), Plutarch, and Geoffrey of Monmouth. In fact I don't think he wrote a single play that isn't adapted from a story in a book he readThe problem is you think lack of formal education in autodidacts (like Melville) in an age when formal education was unobtainable for most people, is the same as wilful lack of education in trailer trash or nogs.
I've gone on a bit of an art history / appreciation / interpretation kick recently. As I see it the fundamental problem is that it focuses so much on works that simply aren't available to most people. You have to get on a plane and go to some foreign museum to see Titian or John Martin. A painting or a sculpture simply isn't the same when seen with a photograph.To that point art history and criticism should focus way more on art that is available to everyone. Music, film, games, etc.
>>25084486Music that you don't listen to in concert or film that you don't see on a big screen is no different
>>25084201>calliope is no snob about classIs this an allusion to the opening of the beggar's opera?
>>25084152Shakespeare was patronized by the Queen and the King. He wrote the Merry Wives onf Windsor on commission from queen elizabeth. Trying to devaluate him to a cockfight is you being classist, it just means you are completely uncomfortable with anything someone other than a janitor could enjoy. A lot of the yokels appreciated shakespeare much more fully than we ever could but just as certainly many of his allusions to classical mythology were lost on themThe ruling class of England is descended from the French invaders but they would always change what was in vogue among them specifically to create new shibboleths to distinguish themselves from the middle class (those wealthy and powerful but NOT descended from the Normans). It isn't that the bourgeoisie were exaggerated but that they were kept strategically out of fashion. For example rhotic versus non rhotic accent, the first was originally considered proper (see its importance in My Fair Lady), but as the bourgeoisie became bred and born with it, the nobility started deliberately speaking in a non rhotic accent. Just like the bourgeoisie took longer to ditch the top hat because the nobility ditched it as a shibboleth
>>25084443>small latin and less Greek meant he didn't readjust means he was considered not that well studied among his (learned) peers. likewise he apparently cared little about syntax. double negatives ('not in love neither') and double superlatives ('most unkindest') are all over the place. he uses the wrong relative pronoun ('a lion who glared...'), singular verbs are used with a plural subject ('there is tears for his love') and vice versa...i don’t rate melville.
>>25084654the upper and lower classes are both rooted in tradition, they both name their children jack and charlotte (incl royalty), it's the middle that feel the need to give them names like percy and felicity. e.g. meghan markle’s handwriting next to the queen’s.>Trying to devaluate him to a cockfightthink you’re missing the nuance of my point.>you are completely uncomfortable with anything someone other than a janitor could enjoyany group that tries to seize hold of art for itself and defend it against the hordes of plain people is as offensive to me as simple snobbery. missing references to pyramus and thisbe is nothing next to missing the vitality; if you’re reading w.s. like a milton or dante, rather than a cervantes or homer, you’re doing him a great disservice. shakespeare’s later plays are life - tragedy salted with humour. & shakespeare to this day still brings money to producers and fame to actors.
>>25084725Double negatives and double superlatives weren't even solecisms then, it's like saying "Bro, did you know Shakespeare couldn't even spell? Not even his own name, he spelled it several ways". Chaucer also used double or even triple negatives. It's also in verse so the rules are much more flexible, like calling, "He thought so little they rewarded he," a solecism in Gilbert and Sullivan. Even Dante opens the Divine Comedy with a grammatical "error".>>25084731Snobs never tried to ban the beloved common man from making music or art. What you call "snobbery" is preservation, all the great wrt and the great music and the great literature maintains preservation and renown because some people thought it fit to acclaim and go to great efforts to preserve for the ages. If you burned it all, the common man would not care that much
>>25084486>gamesThis shit isnt art. Game is a DESIGN, not art; concept art, video game soundtrack, 3d model, etc are art, but when they composed into one single thing that is video game, then they have become a design. I refused to acknowledge the existence of manbabies digital toy made by fellow manbabies in the same pantheon of literatur, painting, musik, cinema, play, sculpture, and the rest of art up there
>>25085358have you tried not being pretentious?
>>25085361Tell that to video games people especially kojima, jeff guy who made video game awards, and the entire playstation santa monica 'director' (why would a program even need a director in the first place lol, ts wasnt even a thing in 2000s)
>>25085332High IQ post
>>25085364once sth becomes "art" it becomes corny anyways like when rappers start to take themselves seriously it become wack
>>25085332stands in stark contrast to the euphuism of the university wits. i’m sure i don’t have to repeat robert greene’s deathbed manifesto. jonson also said shakespeare ‘wanted arte’>the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, “Would he had blotted a thousand”>the common man would not care that muchnor would will, he never bothered to have any of them published in his lifetime…shakespeare might not be surprised to know that his plays are still bringing money to producers throughout the world. he'd be greatly surprised, however, to know that they are studied (by compulsion) in the classroom; they're conned by scholars, dissected by pedants, and fed in synthetic and quite distasteful doses to students.
>>25085402> euphuism>conned by scholars> he never bothered to have any of them publishedWhat are the quartos?
>>25085402Anyone, including me, who is honest about Shakespeare and admires him as the greatest genius of English letters, will also admit it wouldn't have hurt for him to trim some fat--we didn't need the whole spiel about the stomach in Coriolanus. Shakespeare is not of uniform quality, he actually improved considerably as he practiced his craft; I say this because I don't blindly love Shakespeare based acclaim, I love him not in a religious way but as someone who reads him plentifully and is routinely dumbstruck by his soaring talent. He produced many early masterpieces like Richard III but he also grew to give himself much more freedom in characterization and enjambment. And Shakespeare was not looked down on by "university wits," as you suggest, he was a celebrity that the King and Queen both personally met and invited for performances, and his family was ennobled, given the Shakespeare coat of arms, in recognition of his artistry. This is completely unheard of back then, for an actor and a playwright to be ennobled for acting and playwrightingShakespeare published his sonnets. He didn't publish his plays strictly because he wanted to prevent bootleg performances. Indeed we have many versions of his plays that were "pirated" by actors and sold to other performing groups.Shakespeare might have been surprised, or quite possibly not. Dante predicted right off the bat his work would be immortal, and it would not have been unreasonable for Shakespeare to have eventually felt that way and he wouldn't have been the only man of his day who did
>>25085462>coat of arms, in recognition of his artistry.it was bought with cold hard cash. >Shakespeare published his sonnetsthomas thorpe did. the accepted line is it was unauthorised. but you’re still missing my point. i’m aware he was loved ‘this side idolatry’, jonson was defending his character while simultaneously critiquing his lack of discipline, which has sort of been what i’m getting at.there’s a great gulf between shakespeare and someone like dante. the divine comedy is a work of almost superhuman eloquence, written for fame not profit, … and seldom read except as a solemn intellectual task. no true artist has designs on their own posterity.
>>25085524Hollander in his translation of Dante relates an anecdote of a rural Italian farmer he met who recited Dante (he had memorized the entire divine comedy) throughout his workday. Actually Dante is much more readily comprehensible to random Italians than Shakespeare is to random Anglophones because he is typically less formal. Dante's eloquence is deified but he and Homer use apocopation much more than Shakespeare does. >no true artist has designs on their own posterity.No response required
>>25085538sounds like scripture.‘it takes a grey-bearded professor to know what shakespeare is talking about.’ is wrong. it’s the professor that people can’t understand. anyone who’s asked you to read shakespeare with a pair of glasses smoked to a dull. put shakespeare where he belongs - on the stage - and schoolchildren still feel at home with him.
>>25085538> Actually Dante is much more readily comprehensible to random Italians than Shakespeare is to random Anglophones because he is typically less formal.The first part might be true but the second definitely is not. Shakespeare wrote for an audience of illiterates and was successful. If the assertion is even true to begin with it’s much more likely the way language evolved since then favours the italian, with english being the mutt of tongues, making what shouldn’t be difficult seem so.
>>25085550Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in the English speaking world and he is often performed by students. Shakespeare isn't even just performed in fancy theatres, he is performed in community theatres and even in public parks. "Case" is an Elizabethan term for mask but also slang for pussy, so "a case for my face" is a pun. There is no way I will understand that without academics explaining it
>>25085595you don’t need to get every joke.re for your first paragraph: that’s what i’ve been saying.
>>25085588You're using a priori reasoning instead of looking at simple facts. Please stop making assumptions about writers based on their audience. Shakespeare's slang and lowbrow passages are actually the ones most drastically affected by the evolution of the language, whereas his formal parts are the easiest to comprehend for anyone who reads. Please for THE LOVE OF GOD stop shoving this liberal shit down my throat about how Shakespeare wrote for the poor people. He wrote for a wide audience including royalty and the poor people were the ones who had the the worst seats. Shakespeare was a very wealthy moneylender with several noble patrons as well as royal patrons he put on private performances for, he wasn't some fucking folk hero who told his stories in taverns. And please, please, fucking stop using your reasoning to imagine how Dante wrote when there are a plethora of academics whose entire field is Dante who say he was much less formal than Shakespeare. And this is really a "no shit" point since if Dante wanted to be formal he would have written in Latin, he chose the vulgar tongue of everyday speech and wrote first-person which is never done in epics, he wanted something extremely immediate. Whereas Shakespeare wrote after the Bible was already being taught in English in seminary and used in English for liturgy.
>>25085609I don't even know what your point is anymore. If I READ Shakespeare I obviously want to get as much out of him as I can. If I watch Shakespeare then not every joke needs to hit. But, frankly, following Henry IV Part one would be absolutely impossible without context or commentary and should be read before seen. That's advisable with many of his plays
>>25085619that the theatre the pleasantest, speediest and safest way to that zealous and jealous love which most intelligent people, once exposed to him, must inevitably feel for shaxpy. though i’m not averse to reading them either, that’s not my main point.the average secondary school student reads three or four of his plays before graduation. do any of these millions of students develop a real appreciation? do any of them read these authors for pleasure later in life? of course some do. but an honest answer would probably set the number at an almost negligible minimum - surely much smaller than a few generations ago. and this in face of the fact that library methods have been tremendously improved. why?shakespeare has been a school book for 400 years, and what more cruel revenge could dullness take on genius?
>>25085648 I don't care about the masses and they will never care about me or Shakespeare, not today, because he is archaic. There is absolutely no way possible for Shakespeare to not seem boring to most kids or adolescents compared to netflix or social media. And I fail to understand this liberal obsession with needing their blessing to make art of value. It's elitism in reverse, art has to appeal to everyone in order to be valid. Ridiculous. How neurotic do you have to be to need every child to love Bach? It won't happen unless the child has a unique disposition, or is raised by parents who put a high emphasis on fine (that four-letter word) art. Shakespearean performances will never find their funding in the common man who only ever gives to charity if it's for church or maybe animals. Opera houses and museums and, yes, Shakespeare, are kept alive by snobs, as you call them, only they are not snobs because like you they have this obsession with making everything "accessible" to people with zero interest
>>25085662only a school could teach you something so absurd. montaigne said ‘every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.’ even children can feel at home in a mid-sixteenth-century english castle, or a bronze age galley, or late-eighteenth-century dublin thieves' kitchen. beyond historic interest, what does your ideation of art make but a dead bore to all but specialists?
>>25085671On the contrary, school teaches your ideology, which is an absolute disaster. It is completely disconnected with reality. Even most zealous Christian fundamentalists barely read the Bible because *they lack the brain* necessary and having to think makes them upset, it is painful and odious to them, it is extreme mental anguish. It is not exciting or rewarding, but confusing and disconcerting.Every man bears the stamp of mathematics, that does not mean you can make every man interested in number theory.
>>25085675>they lack the brainfurther than you have authority to go. reading plays aloud, seeing them performed, treating them as living drama rather than literary artefacts - that’s when students might actually fall in love with the work.>I don’t care about massesshakespeare did.writers like eliot and dickens raised people upward by giving them something to hold on to. once you train audiences to expect nothing from high art except difficulty, obscurity or ideological homework, they’ll naturally turn elsewhere. mass culture didn’t shift downward spontaneously; the upward pull disappeared.what has the erudition of the last 400 years done for shakespeare but to emend the letter in small things and to obscure the spirit in great ones?
>>25085683People already have netflix. You are never going to supplant that with theatre for demographic from hundreds of years ago except with the especially curious.Mass culture shifted downward because of people like you who demanded egalitarianism in art. Most art of every medium in every age was coal. "Snobs" preserved the best but that practice was decried by people like you as elitist.
>>25085688it’s not as though the english novel tradition suddenly died with austen. there were still post-war writers like evelyn waugh, kingsley amis and angus wilson who kept the line alive. and they were commercial successes. even P.G. wodehouse, who wrote with extraordinary verbal precision, had a massive audience.pamela hansford johnson wrote >In the 19th century the ordinary reader was happy because the great writers such as Dickens, Trollope and George Eliot wrote for him. In the 20th century he’s seriously worried, because what he reads is arid, unenjoyable, and not infrequently incomprehensible.
>>2508569999% of 19th Century English novels were dogshit and are already forgotten.
>>25085708you really make your argument shine through the ‘um actually’ wikipedia talk page way of speaking.
>>25085720This is just a reiteration of what I already said here>>25085688
>>25085722and that is that. i’ll give w.s. the final word:
>>25085731This is exactly why I don't give a damn about ensuring Shakespeare is blessed by democratic opinion
pseud thread
>>25085731Nta, but that's Tranio's speech. On what grounds can you assert that it reflects Shakespeare's own views? This is like quoting Iago and going, "see? Shakespeare said it!"
Half of the time I'd have no reaction to the stuff that Clark would stare at in Civilisation. Architecture especially.Maybe it's because I'm not religious so half of the stuff has no hope of pulling on my heartstrings.Like for example Creation of Adam will hit less hard if you aren't marvelling at perfection of the human body and who made it, every day.I do like picrel and school of athens tho
>>25085462>predicted right off the bat his work would be immortaldamn
>>25085731How is this an argument to try to force normies to enjoy Shakespeare?
>>25085615> liberal shit down my throat about how Shakespeare wrote for the poor people. He wrote for a wide audienceSo for poor people too then. Who wouldn’t have stuck around to watch material that went over their heads. Which gets us back to the language used, which is vulgar and bawdy as much as it attempts some elevation, which is the point and you’re too retarded to understand. > stop using your reasoning to imagine how Dante wrote when there are a plethora of academics whose entire field is Dante who say he was much less formalRight. Stop thinking and accept I’m right because <appeal to authority>. If you disagree you’re uneducated. Wait I can play that card too. > if Dante wanted to be formal he would have written in Latin, he chose the vulgar tongueDo you understand that the language itself doesn’t tell you at what level of formality something is written? But maybe you really are so stupid as to think anything written in latin is formal as your argument implies?
>>25086178"Vulgar" was not synonous with "bawdy" in Elizabethan times. Chaucer used the word "shitten". Shakespeare does have "vulgar" passages in the Elizabethan sense, they are often in prose. They are actually, as I said, the hardest for us today. Vulgar would mean the argot of the underclass Your argument doesn't have any basis but your own presuppositions about Dante whereas scholarly arguments actually have enormous substance behind them such as Dante using many everyday Italian words--various forms can be found in many dialects--for the first time in writing. Contrast this with Shakespeare coining new words from LatinIn Dante's time, Latin was absolutely the language of formal writing
Sup, whats this thread about?
>You sent for me to talk to you of art; and I have obeyed you in coming. But the main thing I have to tell you is,—that art must not be talked about. The fact that there is talk about it at all, signifies that it is ill done, or cannot be done. No true painter ever speaks, or ever has spoken, much of his art. The greatest speak nothing. Even Reynolds is no exception, for he wrote of all that he could not himself do, and was utterly silent respecting all that he himself did.>The moment a man can really do his work he becomes speechless about it. All words become idle to him—all theories.>Does a bird need to theorize about building its nest, or boast of it when built? All good work is essentially done that way—without hesitation, without difficulty, without boasting; and in the doers of the best, there is an inner and involuntary power which approximates literally to the instinct of an animal—nay, I am certain that in the most perfect human artists, reason does not supersede instinct, but is added to an instinct as much more divine than that of the lower animals as the human body is more beautiful than theirs; that a great singer sings not with less instinct than the nightingale, but with more—only more various, applicable, and governable; that a great architect does not build with less instinct than the beaver or the bee, but with more—with an innate cunning of proportion that embraces all beauty, and a divine ingenuity of skill that improvises all construction. But be that as it may—be the instinct less or more than that of inferior animals—like or unlike theirs, still the human art is dependent on that first, and then upon an amount of practice, of science,—and of imagination disciplined by thought, which the true possessor of it knows to be incommunicable, and the true critic of it, inexplicable, except through long process of laborious’ years. That journey of life’s conquest, in which hills over hills, and Alps on Alps arose, and sank,—do you think you can make another trace it painlessly, by talking? Why, you cannot even carry us up an Alp, by talking. You can guide us up it, step by step, no otherwise—even so, best silently. You girls, who have been among the hills, know how the bad guide chatters and gesticulates, and it is “Put your foot here;” and “Mind how you balance yourself there;” but the good guide walks on quietly, without a word, only with his eyes on you when need is, and his arm like an iron bar, if need be.
>>25087620The left can't meme
>>25087620You can still be a shit artist but be quiet about it
>>25087837True but good artists never talk about art
>>25087855not talking about art doesn't automatically make you a good artist. Being a good artist is separate from your habits that aren't directly painting
>>25087911No but talking about art does automatically make you a bad artist
>>25087620Art by definition means what is artful, what is artifice, what is artificial. Art will never be organic beauty because that is another sort of beauty. We might make art depicting organic beauty but we must make a clean distinction.
>>25089025Coming to the question of ‘what is art’ with a dictionary definition is already pretty clinical. A bit like saying ‘companion’ is by definition someone you eat bread with (latin com + panis). Regardless, ‘artifice’ is not a synonym of ‘art’. At what point does the instinct to create stop being natural?
>>25083433Based Susan Sonntagposter
>>25089066A beautiful mountain or a bird's nest isn't art. Art means man-made in a way that isn't biological instinct. While we might use a narrower definition of art than we did hundreds of years ago, when it basically meant craft of all kind, it still is a subset of that. You just attach a negative connotation
>>25089084You’re describing bad art. True art feels inevitable. Your definition makes it smaller and less significant than it is. Picasso said ‘God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.’
>>25089097I don't deify art. I love art. But like any woman I have loved, I don't think of her as a goddess. That is true lovePicasso is wrong because A, God doesn't exist, and B, if he does exist, literally everything is created by him meaning by your definition everything is art, which makes the term completely useless.
>>25089106From dictionary definitions to logical argument. Yes, I can see you clearly love art. Replace ‘God’ with ‘nature’ - Pablo also said something like an artist doesn’t copy nature he works as nature. By stripping art of its instinct, you’re actually loving a mannequin, not a woman.
>>25089115I love it more than you, certainly. Even if I am Cordelia about it. You say to love art is to disdain ever learning it or learning about it. That is not love. Love is the inverse impulse.I don't deify nature either.
>>25089120Cordelia’s love was silent, which circles back to >>25087620You have no choice but to deify nature. Nature created you. And Thomas Hardy said a lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.
>>25089130Cordelia's love was not silent, it was just straightforward and sincere.Nature, physis, is literally everything. To say everything is art renders the term art redundant. There is nothing wrong to speak of nature as mother or beautiful or so on, but using it as an argument to not study art is pathetic since we study nature and we make gardens from this study
>>25089135Nature is to a rose what an artist is to art. Picasso (again) said something about Bonnard; he studies the sky, first he paints blue, then he sees some mauve in it, then he adds a touch of pink, he never seizes power. Matisse paints a sky red.
>>25089120>You say to love art is to disdain ever learning it or learning about it. That is not love. Love is the inverse impulse.
>>25089146Picasso studied art >>25089193Puppies make shit art. Literally
>>25089198>It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child>Puppies make shit art. Literallylevel of banter on /lit/
>>25089205Puppies are babies, dude. They will literally eat art. Babies could never write the poetry you keep quoting neither could any man who didn't nake a study of poetry
>>25089228Very literal-minded for someone trying to talk about art. >babies can’t write poetryNeither can someone who isn’t a poet. Art is the instinct. The instinct is pre-rational, supra-rational.
>>25089193Puppies dissect the shit out of everything and scrutinize with their nose. That's natural curiosity and then study what they love and seek to learn about it to the best of their capabilities
>>25089246Art is an instinct for humans but moving beyond cave paintings took study. And art in the renaissance began a rigorous study of anatomy. Da Vinci was an engineer. Even abstract art is rooted in a rigorous study of color theory
>>25089251‘Following your nose’ has sort of been my point all along. You’re getting lost in that analogy by the way.Robert Graves said poets are born, not made>and if you're not born a poet, 10,000 creative writing courses won't turn you into one.
>>25089258When Picasso saw the cave paintings at Lascaux, he said ‘We have learned nothing in 12,000 years.’
>>25089264Poetry comes from intimate familiarity with the finest works of art humanity can ever produce: languages. While there might be prodigies in language just like chess, Mozart did not start composing as a toddler without having studied music
>>25089266That's not really here or there unless you are suggesting any art other than cave art is superfluous, in which case art study would be pointless. So is any use of language besides grunting
>>25089269Virgil - who made heavy use of Ennius - is said by Suetonius to have been asked what he was doing while reading one of his Ennius’ poems; he replied that ‘he was gathering gold from Ennius' muck, for this poet has outstanding ideas buried under not very polished words.’ Ennius is what i’d call a true poet, Virgil merely a remarkable verse-craftsman.
>>25089273
>>25089293Powerful. I'll be sure to take your opinion as a lover of Latin verse into consideration.>>25089294Powerful, but children depend on adults facing the cold and sacrificing and laboring and dying for them. Childhood is not free, it is a gift purchased by the love adults have foe children
>>25089298Powerful, but childhood (or, a child) is living proof of two people’s love for one another. It’s purchased by… sex. The strongest instinct.
>>25089308Sex reproduces a child but it doesn't provide for or protect the child. A child who gets raped or sexually abused or eaten or dies of starvation does not truly have a childhood. Even for much of human history in many parts of the world children were expected to go to war or get married or start engaging in full-time labor early on. Those cave men who made those painting ate and raped little girls
>>25089319Not sure why you felt the need to take the conversation in that direction, but - you’re looking at the wrong transaction. Back when this conversation was still about art, you kept trying to turn ‘art’ into a classroom, but even life itself refuses to be a student. A child is the result of an ancient, instinctive seizing of power.
>>25089325I don't know why you hate classrooms but I see them as exciting and wonderful places full of discussion and imagination. Stupid people generally don't because they hate thinking and it upsets them. Classrooms are the playground of the mind
>>25089326Think you’ll struggle to find an artists autobiography who enjoyed school. Montaigne said the Italian comedies were right to always portray schoolmasters as buffoons. Plutarch says that ‘scholar’ was a term of abuse among the Romans.
>>25089334Classrooms don't involve hours of route and beating the shit out of kids anymore, at least in the first world
>>25089337Rote*
>>25089337A nicer cage is still a cage.
>>25089341Nobody is forcing you to learn.
>>25089345Not sure what to say to this one… I was making a point.
>>25089351Your point is that tutors and schooling is le bad
>>25089353Lowering the tone a bit
>>25089360Browning the touch, no doubt
>>25089362This looks like a white flag.
>>25089363I don't think so, education isn't disappearing any time soon
>>25089375No, but you have no moves left.
>>25089383Do I need to? By simply writing you continually defeat your own arguments since writing is acquired by schooling
>>25089387Bold of someone leading the charge for scholasticism to come back with a fallacy.
>>25089393Hardly a fallacy when you argue writing is better without schooling
>>25089387
>>25089395Another fallacy: straw man.
>>25089400It isn't since you said study mars poetry
>>25089398You argue against improvement as a bad thing
>>25089401eh?
>>25089405You said poetry is an instinct, not a skill, and refining writing is fake poetry.
>>25089410For the record, what I said was>Virgil - who made heavy use of Ennius - is said by Suetonius to have been asked what he was doing while reading one of Ennius’ poems; he replied that ‘he was gathering gold from Ennius' muck, for this poet has outstanding ideas buried under not very polished words.’ Ennius is what I’d call a true poet, Virgil merely a remarkable verse-craftsman.If you have a gripe with it I’d prefer you respond directly rather than rewording it.
>>25089413>>25089246
>>25089416Intuitive thought should always reign supreme in poetry. Poetry, as the Greeks knew it when they adopted the drama as a cleansing rite of religion, is a form of psychotherapy - poets essentially being the descendants of witch doctors and priestesses who’d induce a sort of self-hypnotism and utter an oracle.
>>25089418Poetry is innately linguistic and impossible without being taught a language. And language deeply shapes the way we think. A human raised in absence of any language would be smarter than other primates but barely mentally a human
>>25089422Very prosy way of looking at poetry. If this were the case the most linguistically shaped person - the scholar - would be the greatest poet.
>>25089425If I were a reductionist like you, maybe. Fortunately I am not and can recognize that Mozart needed to be extremely well-studied to compose his music, without believing being as studied as he was will make ine Mozart
>>25089427therefore … it doesn’t ‘come from’ study >>25089264>Robert Graves said poets are born, not made ‘and if you're not born a poet, 10,000 creative writing courses won't turn you into one.’
>>25089442Having the genetics is required, so is having the education. Neither by itself is sifficient
>>25083024Nice to see someone trying to improve this shithole, nice one anon and godspeed
>>25089838Mozart without any tutoring would’ve still been Amadeus. Samuel Butler once said something good about how ‘we must judge men not so much by what they do, as by what they make us feel that they have it in them to do to.’ Genius is a Latin (not Greek) word and implied the primitive creative power which a man is born with and accompanies him throughout life. His sense of love and power of instinctive thought.
>>25089904Mozart without any tutoring would have still presumably had the middle name Amadeus but he would not have been a composer or even a musician
>>25089914He would’ve been a genius, had the involuntary power, and therefore an artist in the final sense.
>>25089930No he wouldn't. He would have probably been a lower class of servant, possibly illiterate
>>25089931He could’ve been a village carpenter and wouldn’t’ve scamped a job in his life. >possibly illiterateGeniuses at work think largely in pictorial images.
>>25089398>that meme is this how some Starbucks communist fired back after someone made fun of his slave labor iPhone?
>>25089933Music is aural and the brains of accomplished musicians, unlike other sorts of artists, can typically be identified through scans
>>25089959>Music is auralno, really?If a musician’s brain is physically different, then my argument holds more weight.
>>25089978 Van Gogh was always mentally disturbed and always made an intense study of art. His drastic change in color usage was a process based on intricate study of color theory and the study and techniques of paintings by other artists, we know because he talks about it in his letters to his brother. His mental illness didn't benefit him in any way, it tormented him and he saw it is a constant obstruction and hindrance to his art
>>25089959>It is not what the artist does that counts. But what he is. Cézanne would never have interested me if he had lived and thought like Jaques-Emile Blanche, even if the apple he had painted had been ten times more beautiful. What interests us is the anxiety of Cézanne, the teaching of Cézanne, the anguish of Van Gogh, in short the inner drama of the man. The rest is false.Picasso
>>25090021>>25089986
>>25090021It has been recognized since ancient times that artists say weird shit that has no bearing on the quality of their art or the value people see in it.
>>25090031So do dialectical, dry-as-dust sort of people like the one I’m addressing.
>>25090021Time to throw out Homer and Shakespeare since we know very little about them. Oof
>>25090026Then read his letters, retard.
>>25090071It’s all there in what they wrote. All that counts, anyway.>>25090072Art is a conversation with the artist.
>>25090189You seem to only be able to think in platitudes. It's like talking with Polonius
>>25090215 Never be afraid of a good platitude.
>>25090251Platitudes function to terminate thought. Someone can say, "When I listen to Mozart, I am in flight," and say it a thousand times but only Polonius as a comical figure will suggest Mozart's music is a plane
>>25090261It happens to be true. However much you think you're not writing about yourself, in fact every page you write - every scene, even if it's about people quite unlike yourself - says something about you, the writer. At the end, there is a very fair sense of the writer in the reader's mind. If a novel is readable at all, he or she will say just what sort of person is doing the writing.
>>25090281Everything I do any say says something about, including what I never share with anyone else, which probably says the most about me
>>25090284No argument there.
>>25090297But 99% hardly says anything about me and what that is would be highly speculative and subjective for anyone who hadn't made quite a study of me
>>25090302If someone is any good of a writer at all, it will come out of them willy nilly. Novels teach you about the author - his own weaknesses and follies - and, since you must know that no failings are unique, you may be helped to acquire tolerance for them in others. If a novel comes off at all, the reader will accompany the writer in some parallel process of self-discovery.
>>25090400Writing takes a lot of practice and novels are only a chronologically brief portion of the history of writing.What did you learn about Nabokov from reading Lolita? What did you learn about Bram Stocker from reading Dracula?
>>25090424>What did you learn about NabokovDon’t rate him>Bram Stocker[sic]He hated Henry Irving lol
>>25090435So nothing
>>25090460That was tongue-in-cheek. Take Quixote: Cervantes started out to write a novella sceptical of old romances and ended up creating the most beautiful apology for them that can be found in literature. He ended up writing a story about a knight, a real one. When you finish up with Quixote you know that he's the most perfect knight who ever rode out against a dragon. Under the scepticism, there was a man who loved the knights as much as Don Quixote himself. Above all, he was Spanish.
>>25090654Didn't Cervantes have a married woman for a lover who bore him kids? I guess thay's kind of courtly love
>>25090760A higher morality than the current is entailed on all artists: the morality of love. Without love he cannot be an artist in the final sense. Shakespeare sinned greatly against current morality, but he loved greatly. Milton's sins were petty by comparison, but his lack of love, for all his rhetorical championship of love against lust, makes him detestable.
