Mani - your Pantheon
Edward G. Nilges
Peter Bloome-don't know him
Paul Cadmus-good at yegg tempera, limited range.
R. Crumb-we agree. My take is that the Crumbster never put much store
on accurate representation per se. Like many real artists, he
struggled, in the early 1960s, to break the chains of representation.
Your boy Boogeroo would not have understood the Crumbster, which to me
shows that your entire philosophy of art is without foundation.
Dali-yechh
Walt Disney-was not an artist, a businessman who used and discarded
the actual producers of intellectual property right down to Annette
Funnicello.
Estes-don't know him
Mat Groening-inclusion shows that your entire philosophy of art
self-deconstructs. Groening has none of the "skill" yet here he is in
the Pantheon. This shows that your "skill" is an ex-post-facto
explanation for your likes and your dislikes not as an artist, but as
a consumer of entertainment. You have dignified low taste as an
entire philosophy of art. The mind boggles.
He had a certain originality early on. But note what
commercialization does to art, for his customers in the media do not
accept development as did Cezanne's dealers. Indeed, many episodes of
the Simpsons are created not by Groening but by anonymous Korean
animators.
Al Hirschfield-Another hack.
J.C. Lyendecker-don't know him.
Norman Rockwell-again, you feel the necessity to justify entertainment
outside of art, mere story telling, as an aesthetic.
Maxfield Parrish-superficial glamor, no depth.
Tanguey-shapeless forms rendered precisely. Like Stravinsky a doomed
retreat from Modernism by way of a path of craft that is an
anachronism in an industrial society that wars on craft.
George Tooker-good choice. And, Tooker's middle and later work happen
to be a critique of modern society. Here in Chicago, we have at the
Terra museum Tooker's image of the modern car, ca. 1949. He made the
grilles into the mouths of monsters which demonstrated that technical
precision can be as Expressionistic as Franz Kline. Unfortunately,
guys like Charles Sheeler and countless technical draughtsmen *maudit*
got sucked into the technology and did not stand apart from it as did
Tooker. These clowns are now, at best, servants of the Disney factory
of dreams.
Which is to say that the real heroism is to paint precisionistically,
or to program computers, not as an auto da fe towards the factories
represented or the official ideology of computer science, but
critically.
This is the difference between the 1920s film Metropolis, and HR
Geiger. Geiger seems to prefer and indeed celebrate the aliens who
bully Sigourney Weaver. Whereas Metropolis takes the side of humanity
as against the robot. I may be naive but I doubt it. Humans should
celebrate humanity, there being for me a sort of tunnel between ethics
and aesthetics represented by Adorno's question about the possibility
of poetry after the Holocaust.
We are all afraid of what might come out if we just threw paint on a
canvas or tried to make a dance. Abstraction, like the thought of an
afterlife, fills us with fear as the fear of making an improvisation
or a dance where the modal state of hostility, filling people in an
industrial society, causes other people to call security.
In industrial society as opposed to a society based on honest craft,
"discipline" and "tradition" are faery fetters to which we chain
ourselves to the mast as did Odysseus' men leeward of the Islands of
the Sirens. But I tell you, dear boy, that we all need to get back to
the Garden, and, if you are afraid of what might come out, then play
sports with other guys.
I mean, you are probably a good person. What puzzles me is your
insistence on "no skill no art." Lighten up (I need to take my own
advice.)
Vargas-I like to look at pretty ladies. However I do not confuse this
instinct with a philosophy of art. Vargas presents Woman as a
commodity and of course the hope of Eros is to escape the market, to
be appreciated "for oneself" independent of one's position in life.
In this connection and in my researches in the Sports Illustrated
Swimsuit Issues, I found an essay last year, in the SISI which
declared with amazing frankness that the wimmen in the SISI should be
considered, by the ordinary reader of the SISI, as goddesses
unattainable in this life or the next.
I admired their editorial honesty, for it placed in plain view the
existence, in post-modern society, of a completely bifurcated society
consisting, on the one hand, goddesses and dotcom billionaires, and
the rest of us ordinary slobs. It was of course racist, sexist, and
neo-colonialist, not least because SI uses tropic lands for its photo
shoots while making the locals, make themselves scarce except as hired
hands.
In fine, Vargas' images are racist (100% lily white, for starters),
sexist (obviously) and neo-colonialist because they declare that long
legs and in general Nordic features are the norm, and everything else
is "exotic." Adorno's question about poetry after the Holocaust is
apropos because these images made a slow-motion holocaust in people's
lives. Say what you like about Cezanne, his art never did any such
thing.
Cezanne's Bathers were in part an ethical resolution between his
desire not to anger the local priests and his helplessness before the
image of Woman. For Cezanne's Catholic faith teaches in fact that the
body is a temple of the Holy Spirit and will in its own skin see God
at the latter day. Like many Catholic men before and since, the
strict prohibitions on sexuality warred with this message.
Cezanne's resolution was almost a Pantheism in which the "unclean"
thought of a bunch of gals by the Garonne was heroically merged with
the cleanness of the sun-washed landscape of Provence.
Compare your boy Boogeroo, or indeed your boy Vargas. Landscape in
Boogeroo is merely a background for the leer permitted, but only to
the wealthy and powerful men who funded the goddamn Salon.
There is no poetry after the Holocaust. Rembrandt, Beethoven and
Jackson Pollock's work contain no appeal to the partial desire which
is never sated. Matt Groening, HR Geiger and to an extent Norman
Rockwell were instead chained to sating an unsatiable demand, for
familial mockery, transformation into monstrosity, or American
reassurance.
G*rd*n
| ...
| canvas or tried to make a dance. Abstraction, like the thought of an
| afterlife, fills us with fear as the fear of making an improvisation
| or a dance where the modal state of hostility, filling people in an
| industrial society, causes other people to call security.
That might have been true at one time. But for abstraction
(as in abstract expressionism) to retain that potency, it
would have to constantly bring forth new things. However, in
its most severe forms, it abjured reference and figuration,
and, like 12-tone music, having destroyed most of its
potential resources, became more and more like itself; more
and more, one might say, mere decor.
Hence its adoption by, not only art stores in malls, but the
U.S. State Department, which must indicate a certain loss of
revolutionary valence, eh?
--
(<><>) /*/
}"{ G*rd*n }"{ g...@panix.com }"{
{ http://www.etaoin.com | latest new material 11/14/02 <-adv't
William Palmer
> Mani Deli <ma...@sympatico.ca> wrote in message news:<8160uu8nnilgf7f4a...@4ax.com>...
>
>
> Peter Bloome-don't know him
>
Definitely. I much prefer Maynard W. Dixon,
the artist of the Southwest. Not a whole
lot of connection, except that they are of
the same general period, and are both
representational artists. And as far as
artists of Cadmus' period who painted mostly
people, I favor a relatively unknown artist
named John Carrol. He did a portrait called
"Wendy" that is one of the most striking
paitings of a young woman I have ever seen.
Don't get me wrong, this is not some Playboy/
Vargas thing. There is a purity present in
this lovely depiction. It is a profound and
innocent facial portrait that would be as
interesting to a woman as to a man. Wendy
could be in high school or in college, she
is everyday "girl next door" pretty yet
stunningly beautiful, and the picture is
infused with a romantic spirit that is truly
remarkable. I would love to walk into an art
bookstore some time and see a book on Carroll,
but I don't know if that will ever happen.
He seems to have faded from view, though
his work could always re-emerge. It is
just that he did a lot of basically
realistic portraits, and that really
isn't the sort of thing that causes a
stir in the art world. (I would love
to see an actual exhibit of his work,
of course, though I don't count on one
coming soon.
>
> R. Crumb-we agree. My take is that the Crumbster never put much store
> on accurate representation per se. Like many real artists, he
> struggled, in the early 1960s, to break the chains of representation.
> Your boy Boogeroo would not have understood the Crumbster, which to me
> shows that your entire philosophy of art is without foundation.
His place is in humor comics, and he deserves
a high place there. As far as being a master
story-teller in the comic medium, my belief is
that many others, including Bernie Krigstein and
Graham Ingels, are far better.
>
> Dali-yechh
Only the greatest artist of the Twentieth Century,
that's all.
>
> Walt Disney-was not an artist, a businessman who used and discarded
> the actual producers of intellectual property right down to Annette
> Funnicello.
True. The greatest comic book genius behind Disney
was Carl Barks. Disney paid him a bag of peanuts a
week for decades. (Not literally, but you know what
I mean.) Finally, long after Walt was dead and
Barks was rather ancient, so many fans complained,
that Disney Company finally--according to highly
reliable sources--coughed up some real money for
Barks, more for public relations than for legal
reasons, since Disney's lawyers had the rights
to Bark's work sewed up tighter than a drum.
Disney, now that so much has come out about him,
seem to have been a bit like Martha Stewart:
warm and wonderful in his public image, and
tough-as-nails and very grasping in reality.
The only difference was, Walt never got "outed"
when he was alive, the way Martha did. a.g.b-p
Edward G. Nilges
> spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges):
> | ...
> | We are all afraid of what might come out if we just threw paint on a
> | canvas or tried to make a dance. Abstraction, like the thought of an
> | afterlife, fills us with fear as the fear of making an improvisation
> | or a dance where the modal state of hostility, filling people in an
> | industrial society, causes other people to call security.
> | ...
>
> That might have been true at one time. But for abstraction
> (as in abstract expressionism) to retain that potency, it
> would have to constantly bring forth new things. However, in
> its most severe forms, it abjured reference and figuration,
> and, like 12-tone music, having destroyed most of its
> potential resources, became more and more like itself; more
> and more, one might say, mere decor.
>
How so? Even if perception is digital as opposed to analogue, there
still is an infinity of combinations of "pixels", unrelated to scenes
of nature, as yet unpainted. One would be able to say the SAME thing
about tonal music and representational art. Once you've seen one
Boogeroo you've seen them all.
> Hence its adoption by, not only art stores in malls, but the
> U.S. State Department, which must indicate a certain loss of
> revolutionary valence, eh?
Not necessarily, for you are referring to a practice of an older and
more liberal State department that at a minimum tried to generalize
appeal of US values using abstract painting and abstract sculpture in
embassies. In particular this made sense in conservative Moslem
countries and showed an older care for international sensitivies which
is missing today.
G*rd*n
| > | ...
| > | We are all afraid of what might come out if we just threw paint on a
| > | canvas or tried to make a dance. Abstraction, like the thought of an
| > | afterlife, fills us with fear as the fear of making an improvisation
| > | or a dance where the modal state of hostility, filling people in an
| > | industrial society, causes other people to call security.
| > | ...
g...@panix.com (G*rd*n):
| > That might have been true at one time. But for abstraction
| > (as in abstract expressionism) to retain that potency, it
| > would have to constantly bring forth new things. However, in
| > its most severe forms, it abjured reference and figuration,
| > and, like 12-tone music, having destroyed most of its
| > potential resources, became more and more like itself; more
| > and more, one might say, mere decor.
spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges):
| How so? Even if perception is digital as opposed to analogue, there
| still is an infinity of combinations of "pixels", unrelated to scenes
| of nature, as yet unpainted. One would be able to say the SAME thing
| about tonal music and representational art. Once you've seen one
| Boogeroo you've seen them all.
Not so. For one thing, Boug painted in more than one style.
He alternates between surrealism (_Le_Ravissement_de_Psyche_,
_Biblis_) and what I could call naturalism (most of the
stuff). There's also a Klimtish excursion in _Pietā_ --
I don't know the proper Art-History term for that sort of
thing. But besides that, let us imagine that Boug had an
evil twin who painted parodies of _LRdP_, but using Africans,
or displaying the genitalia frankly, or making the bodies
purple, or covering them with Renaissance costumes, or whatever.
All of these variations would profoundly affect our experience
of the work, and each would be different from each other and
the "original" work (which is, I believe, a parody of prior
works on the same theme). The fact is, Boug and his
putative evil twin could drag in a great armamentum of tools
and techniques.
By comparison, once one has done a few paintings like
Pollock's _Silver_Over_Black_, it becomes difficult to
make new works which are effectively different from the ones
one has already done -- because one has forgone so many of
the possible resources of difference, such as reference,
perspective, figure, and so on. While the additional works
might be digitally different from one another, they would
not be apprehended as different by the human eye and mind.
(If I take a series of digital photographs of the same
painting from the same position, with even slight changes of
light, every one will be almost totally different from the
others with regard to each pixel, but the difference will be
unrecognizable because human beings do not see the way
digital cameras see.) The upshot is that from the initial
axioms, only a few interesting propositions can be drawn.
This is why, today, new AbEx seems to be dry, academic, and
tending very much toward decor, like wallpaper design. Or
at least, it does to me.
Of course, this doesn't explain why it's so exciting to the
excited -- but I don't think they're looking at it. It's
not the art itself that excites them but its failure to
proffer objects.
g...@panix.com (G*rd*n):
| > Hence its adoption by, not only art stores in malls, but the
| > U.S. State Department, which must indicate a certain loss of
| > revolutionary valence, eh?
spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges):
| Not necessarily, for you are referring to a practice of an older and
| more liberal State department that at a minimum tried to generalize
| appeal of US values using abstract painting and abstract sculpture in
| embassies. In particular this made sense in conservative Moslem
| countries and showed an older care for international sensitivies which
| is missing today.
Because the cop is the soft cop as opposed to the hard cop
does not make him less of a cop.
William Palmer
> Estes-don't know him.
That's a real shame. Quite a few posters in
this group have a very high regard for realism,
and as far as I am concerned, Richard Estes is
one of the few artists of our time who helped
take realism in new and creative directions. In
other posts I have suggested that 19th Century
realism did not seem to have very interesting
descendents in the 20th Century, but I need to
qualify that because Estes and the other great
"photorealists" (I know some people question the
appropriateness of that term) represent one of
the few U. S. schools of art which took realism
in exciting new directions after the 19th century.
Anyway, Richard Estes has painted many fascinating
city scenes. He seems to be most interested in
facades, signs, windows, etc. You don't see that
many people in his paintings, at least the ones
I've seen. I also like Robert Cottingham. One
way that he seems to differ from Estes is that
Cottingham does "close ups" of signs, "zooms,"
sort of, while Estes seems to prefer doing
buildings the way they might look if you were
standing across the street. Both artists
exemplify the way realism has evolved in some
very creative ways regarding subject.
I might add that in my recent tour of the
La Jolla commercial galleries, it struck me
that many artists the galleries seem to favor
are simply doing 19th century realistic art
without taking realism in any new directions.
On my tour, I saw nothing even suggestive of
the sort of art that people like Estes and
Cottingham do. Instead, while there were
many works done in a realistic style, most
of them, as I have suggested, were simply
pretty, and not at all challenging to the
viewer. I suppose it is that way in most
of the large U, S. commercial galleries.
Probably their average customers who are willing
to shell out a few thousand clams for a painting
want something pretty in the traditional sense.
There certainly was no shortage of pretty women,
pretty children, pretty animals, and pretty
landscapes on the walls of the galleries I
visited, but I remind you that the galleries
you find in downtown La Jolla are for the
most part the traditional, "big bucks," ones,
not the advant garde places... a.g.b-p.
>
> Mat Groening-inclusion shows that your entire philosophy of art
> self-deconstructs. Groening has none of the "skill" yet here he is in
> the Pantheon. This shows that your "skill" is an ex-post-facto
> explanation for your likes and your dislikes not as an artist, but as
> a consumer of entertainment. You have dignified low taste as an
> entire philosophy of art. The mind boggles.
>
> He had a certain originality early on. But note what
> commercialization does to art, for his customers in the media do not
> accept development as did Cezanne's dealers. Indeed, many episodes of
> the Simpsons are created not by Groening but by anonymous Korean
> animators.
As someone who enjoys fine comic art, my
opinion is that Groening is warm, fuzzy
and mediocre. How ironic that a genuine
comic artist like Graham Ingels (in many
ways the equal in illustration to what
Poe and Lovecraft are in literature)
was so vilified and under-appreciated
that he was ashamed of his own art and
passed many years as an alcoholic wreck.
But Ingels was not warm and fuzzy like
Schultz and Groening. In fact, I will
go as far as saying is one of the most
absolutely terrifying illustrators in
the history of illustration. I DEFY
you to read, before going to bed, a
few of the stories Ingels illustrated.
And they are not gross-fests. There
is an element of that lurking there,
but the mood Ingels creates that
is where the fear really comes from...
>
> Al Hirschfield-Another hack.
He makes me yawn too.
>
> J.C. Lyendecker-don't know him.
One of America's leading commercial
artists of the past. While I admire his
art, I don't spend much time looking at it,
because men's apparel ads are not really
my cup of tea. And don't get snooty
about commercial art, Mr. Fox or Mr.
Mattila: I would not trade ONE Mucha
cookie ad (er, "biscuit ad" to some
here) for "fine art" in the sum of five
de Koonings and five Rothkos.
>
> Norman Rockwell-again, you feel the necessity to justify entertainment
> outside of art, mere story telling, as an aesthetic.
He doesn't do much for me personally. However,
you have to respect his impact on American
culture. Few artists can ever hope to achieve
anything close to that.
>
> Maxfield Parrish-superficial glamor, no depth.
Horsefeathers! Parrish is an outstanding artist.
He shows a superb imagination and an exquisite
talent. I greatly perfer him to Rockwell.
>
> Tanguey-shapeless forms rendered precisely. Like Stravinsky a doomed
> retreat from Modernism by way of a path of craft that is an
> anachronism in an industrial society that wars on craft.
I like Tanguey. And he had his effect on others.
You can see that, for instance, in some of the work
of Richard Powers, a great 20th century illustrator
who revolutionized science fiction paperback conver
design in the 1950's.
>
> George Tooker-good choice. And, Tooker's middle and later work happen
> to be a critique of modern society. Here in Chicago, we have at the
> Terra museum Tooker's image of the modern car, ca. 1949. He made the
> grilles into the mouths of monsters which demonstrated that technical
> precision can be as Expressionistic as Franz Kline. Unfortunately,
> guys like Charles Sheeler and countless technical draughtsmen *maudit*
> got sucked into the technology and did not stand apart from it as did
> Tooker. These clowns are now, at best, servants of the Disney factory
> of dreams.
>
> Which is to say that the real heroism is to paint precisionistically,
> or to program computers, not as an auto da fe towards the factories
> represented or the official ideology of computer science, but
> critically.
>
> This is the difference between the 1920s film Metropolis, and HR
> Geiger. Geiger seems to prefer and indeed celebrate the aliens who
> bully Sigourney Weaver.
As a science fiction illustrator, he doesn't hold
a candle to Richard Powers, Frank Kelly Freas,
Virgil Finley, and a lot of others. He's
talented but mediocre in imagination.
Whereas Metropolis takes the side of humanity
> as against the robot. I may be naive but I doubt it. Humans should
> celebrate humanity, there being for me a sort of tunnel between ethics
> and aesthetics represented by Adorno's question about the possibility
> of poetry after the Holocaust.
>
> We are all afraid of what might come out if we just threw paint on a
> canvas or tried to make a dance. Abstraction, like the thought of an
> afterlife, fills us with fear as the fear of making an improvisation
> or a dance where the modal state of hostility, filling people in an
> industrial society, causes other people to call security.
>
> In industrial society as opposed to a society based on honest craft,
> "discipline" and "tradition" are faery fetters to which we chain
> ourselves to the mast as did Odysseus' men leeward of the Islands of
> the Sirens. But I tell you, dear boy, that we all need to get back to
> the Garden, and, if you are afraid of what might come out, then play
> sports with other guys.
>
> I mean, you are probably a good person. What puzzles me is your
> insistence on "no skill no art." Lighten up (I need to take my own
> advice.)
>
> Vargas-I like to look at pretty ladies. However I do not confuse this
> instinct with a philosophy of art. Vargas presents Woman as a
> commodity and of course the hope of Eros is to escape the market, to
> be appreciated "for oneself" independent of one's position in life.
Vargas is okay. But for that sort of art, I prefer Gil
Elvgren or Rolfe Armstrong.
>
> In this connection and in my researches in the Sports Illustrated
> Swimsuit Issues, I found an essay last year, in the SISI which
> declared with amazing frankness that the wimmen in the SISI should be
> considered, by the ordinary reader of the SISI, as goddesses
> unattainable in this life or the next.
>
> I admired their editorial honesty, for it placed in plain view the
> existence, in post-modern society, of a completely bifurcated society
> consisting, on the one hand, goddesses and dotcom billionaires, and
> the rest of us ordinary slobs. It was of course racist, sexist, and
> neo-colonialist,
Oh, stop chewing that boring ol' cud!
not least because SI uses tropic lands for its photo
> shoots while making the locals, make themselves scarce except as hired
> hands.
>
> In fine, Vargas' images are racist (100% lily white, for starters),
> sexist (obviously) and neo-colonialist because they declare that long
> legs and in general Nordic features are the norm, and everything else
> is "exotic."
Silliest bunch of twaddle I've read this week!
Vargas was no more racist than other illustrators
and photographers of his day. It was a sad but
simple fact that publishers would not allow very
many minorty portrayals because they felt that
readers were not ready for that. It is foolish
to attack one artist working at a time when
so many entire industries were nearly or
completely "lily white." Further, Vargas was
from a minority himself. Stop trying to be
so gosh-darn politically correct. If you
are white and from the U. S. the odds are
that your own grandparents were at least
twice as racist as Vargas likely ever was.
(And, let me tell you, Vargas did a 1943
illustration of a "minority," a Latin lady
who will knock the socks off any man with red
blood in his veins! Stop picking on Vargas,
you silly old hen.)
Adorno's question about poetry after the Holocaust is
> apropos because these images made a slow-motion holocaust in people's
> lives. Say what you like about Cezanne, his art never did any such
> thing.
>
> Cezanne's Bathers were in part an ethical resolution between his
> desire not to anger the local priests and his helplessness before the
> image of Woman. For Cezanne's Catholic faith teaches in fact that the
> body is a temple of the Holy Spirit and will in its own skin see God
> at the latter day. Like many Catholic men before and since, the
> strict prohibitions on sexuality warred with this message.
>
> Cezanne's resolution was almost a Pantheism in which the "unclean"
> thought of a bunch of gals by the Garonne was heroically merged with
> the cleanness of the sun-washed landscape of Provence.
>
> Compare your boy Boogeroo, or indeed your boy Vargas. Landscape in
> Boogeroo is merely a background for the leer permitted, but only to
> the wealthy and powerful men who funded the goddamn Salon.
>
> There is no poetry after the Holocaust. Rembrandt, Beethoven and
> Jackson Pollock's work contain no appeal to the partial desire which
> is never sated. Matt Groening, HR Geiger and to an extent Norman
> Rockwell were instead chained to sating an unsatiable demand, for
> familial mockery, transformation into monstrosity, or American
> reassurance.
.
You should get a rec.arts.fine "Twaddle Award"
or something for your nutty screeds! a.g.b-p
William Palmer
> spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges):
> | > | ...
> | > | We are all afraid of what might come out if we just threw paint on a
> | > | canvas or tried to make a dance. Abstraction, like the thought of an
> | > | afterlife, fills us with fear as the fear of making an improvisation
> | > | or a dance where the modal state of hostility, filling people in an
> | > | industrial society, causes other people to call security.
> | > | ...
>
> g...@panix.com (G*rd*n):
> | > That might have been true at one time. But for abstraction
> | > (as in abstract expressionism) to retain that potency, it
> | > would have to constantly bring forth new things. However, in
> | > its most severe forms, it abjured reference and figuration,
> | > and, like 12-tone music, having destroyed most of its
> | > potential resources, became more and more like itself; more
> | > and more, one might say, mere decor.
>
> spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges):
> | How so? Even if perception is digital as opposed to analogue, there
> | still is an infinity of combinations of "pixels", unrelated to scenes
> | of nature, as yet unpainted. One would be able to say the SAME thing
> | about tonal music and representational art. Once you've seen one
> | Boogeroo you've seen them all.
Not totally correct, yet there is more than
a grain of truth in what you state. That is
another reason why Alphonse Mucha was a far
greater all-around artist than Bouguereau.
Mucha, while I am not going to argue he was
quite as masterful a painter as Bouguereau,
excelled in so many areas of artistic
endeaver that the scope of his work is
almost breathtaking. People who know little
about him think he was someone who could
only do posters, calendars, and commercial
art, since he brought innovation to all three.
But if that is all you know about Mucha, you
haven't even scratched the surface regarding
his immense talents. He designed stunningly
beautiful sculptures, jewelry, dinnerware, all
sorts of things. And he WAS a first rate
painter as well. For instance, check out
his Slav epic paintings which he did in the
later stages of his life. They may well offer
the greatest examples of historical painting
done in the 20th century. In the Western
world, we don't know so learn so much about
the Slavic peoples, but if you look at those
paintings and then do just a little research
you will be awed by the astonishing panorama
of Slave history. You will never be the same,
as a matter of fact,` because if you are a
typically educated Western Worlder, you will
only be vaguly aware of any "Slav epic."
Anyway, my point is that Alponse Mucha was
a greater all-around artist than Bouguereau.
a.g.b-p.
>
[...]
Edward G. Nilges
Well, there are many artists better than Boogeroo. And I don't think
that Slavic art, from Andrei Rublev to Stravinsky, is underappreciated
in places like Paris.
> a.g.b-p.
> >
> [...]
Edward G. Nilges
We only "see" people like Berks when their claim is asserted and won
in a court of law, and the producers of valuable intellectual
property, who choose not or cannot assert their claims in a court, are
genuinely forgotten.
For example, see my (published) Amazon review of Martin Davis' book
The Universal Computer. During the 1973 quarrel between the heirs of
J. Presper Eckert, and those of Atanasoff at Iowa State, I sent a
letter to Computerworld asking why Alan Turing was not getting the
credit for "inventing" the "computer", for as in the case of David
Hockney's discovery of "my" 1997 thesis that the old masters used
crutches, I have long been an irritating autodidact.
Turing's heirs could not press his case in 1973 for at that point,
international intellectual property law had not grown to the point
where one could press such an international claim, and very few judges
or attorneys would have understood the concept of an abstract machine.
We literally cannot know, in the case of animated characters, just who
produced Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse. Disney would say, with some
justice, that like the realization of the Turing machine, it is
undemocratic to rescue some individual like Berks or like Turing from
obscurity and to forget the hundreds of people in a real organization
who work as a team.
Furthermore, Disney never to my knowledge claimed to be an artist.
His writings present him as a struggling business guy. It was
pretentious critics that made him into an artist so they could make
money publishing coffee table art books with one man's name on them.
Interesting comparision to Martha Stewart but it seemed to me that
unlike Disney she actually did some of the things she sells, for she
sells handicrafts and not an industrial product shown in a theater or
on TV. Indeed what is persecuted in lieu of genuine criticism of
corporations is residual individuality such as Ms Stewart's
personality which seems to be that of an overworked gal over her head.
The result is that the corporation gets to persist while signs of
individuality within the corporation are stamped out.
William Palmer
> willia...@prodigy.net (William Palmer) wrote in message news:<cbc76035.02112...@posting.google.com>...
> > spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges) wrote in message news:<f5dda427.0211...@posting.google.com>...
> > > Mani Deli <ma...@sympatico.ca> wrote in message news:<8160uu8nnilgf7f4a...@4ax.com>...
[...]
Interesting comments, though I should point
out that the Disney cartoonist was Carl B*a*rks,
not Berks. Anyway, it seems as though it is
more difficult for companies to take as flagrant
advantage of artist-employees nowadays, though
I can't say that I know that to be a fact.
Of course, the Superman case is legendary
too, regarding the way DC Comics supposedly
acquired all the rights from creators
Siegal and Shuster for $130. Supposedly,
the artists never meant that to include
the rights to the movies and everything
else, but DC claimed they had everything.
About forty years later the Superman
creators accepted a legal settlement
from DC, but that was after many decades
of hardship, grief and legal struggle, so it
is questionable as to how much they were able
to enjoy their remuneration by the time
they finally had wrung it out of DC.
Somewhat of a parallel case in literature
exists with Nancy Drew. Mildred Wirt, the
woman who wrote the original Nancy Drew
stories, had to sign an agreement with the
Stratemeyer syndicate to the effect that she
would never divulge that she was the writer.
Later, after the juvenile book series became
so popular, Stratemeyer went as far as
claiming that he wrote the early Drews.
On top of that, later his daughter joined
the firm, and claimed that SHE wrote the
Drews. The truth was a long time in coming,
and I am not reporting some canard, this is
a fact. For instance, the ENCYCLOPEDIA
MYSTERIOSA reported "Stratemeyer, under
the name Carolyn Keene, wrote the first
three volumes himself." That was an
out and out lie, but when the E. M.
and other references reported it, they
were acting on information furnished
to them by the syndicate. Other reference
books on detective and juvenile series
stories made the same error. Now, it
is very well-documented that Mildred
Wirt Benson was the actual author. The
matter is rather complicated to document
in a short post, but people who want to
my verify my assertions hare are referred
to REDISCOVERING NANCY DREW, edited by
Carolyn Stuart Dyer and Nancy Tillman
Romalov, University of Iowa Press, 1995.
Anyway, while there is nothing inherently
wrong about a syndicate creating "house
characters" and having different authors
write them, it strikes me as rather shabby
behavior for the syndicate owners actually
to claim to have authored books they did
not, after the books became so famous.
Just imagine having the publishers who
had gotten rich off your work caiming
they had actually written it themselves!
As for Ms. Wirt, by all accounts she
was a wise enough person to have a happy
life anyway. She worked for many
years as a reporter for a Midwestern
newspaper.
> We only "see" people like Berks when their claim is asserted and won
> in a court of law, and the producers of valuable intellectual
> property, who choose not or cannot assert their claims in a court, are
> genuinely forgotten.
>
> For example, see my (published) Amazon review of Martin Davis' book
> The Universal Computer. During the 1973 quarrel between the heirs of
> J. Presper Eckert, and those of Atanasoff at Iowa State, I sent a
> letter to Computerworld asking why Alan Turing was not getting the
> credit for "inventing" the "computer", for as in the case of David
> Hockney's discovery of "my" 1997 thesis that the old masters used
> crutches, I have long been an irritating autodidact.
Are you saying it is not possible he could
not have acquired the information elsewhere?
(I am only asking because I honestly don't
know.)
>
> Turing's heirs could not press his case in 1973 for at that point,
> international intellectual property law had not grown to the point
> where one could press such an international claim, and very few judges
> or attorneys would have understood the concept of an abstract machine.
>
> We literally cannot know, in the case of animated characters, just who
> produced Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse. Disney would say, with some
> justice, that like the realization of the Turing machine, it is
> undemocratic to rescue some individual like Berks or like Turing from
> obscurity and to forget the hundreds of people in a real organization
> who work as a team.
>
> Furthermore, Disney never to my knowledge claimed to be an artist.
> His writings present him as a struggling business guy. It was
> pretentious critics that made him into an artist so they could make
> money publishing coffee table art books with one man's name on them.
>
> Interesting comparision to Martha Stewart but it seemed to me that
> unlike Disney she actually did some of the things she sells, for she
> sells handicrafts and not an industrial product shown in a theater or
> on TV. Indeed what is persecuted in lieu of genuine criticism of
> corporations is residual individuality such as Ms Stewart's
> personality which seems to be that of an overworked gal over her head.
>
Well, I certainly don't know any more about
her case than I read in the papers. Further,
the general public seems to take a perverse
delight in "Ms. Nicey-Nice" being exposed,
or at least characterized, as a greedy, grasping,
brass-balled bitch. (And I am certainly not
saying I know for a fact that such a portrayal
is an accurate or fair one.) a.g.b-p
> The result is that the corporation gets to persist while signs of
> individuality within the corporation are stamped out.
a.g.b-p.
William Palmer
Another artist I believe deserves to be in
the "Mani-Pantheon" is Don Eddy. Don Eddy
is one of the world's great car artists
(I mean painters of pictures with cars
in them, of course). He is another artist
I would contrast with Robert Bechtle, I
might add. Bechtele is flat-affect,
every day L. A. with a twist, while Don
Eddy gives his cars glitz and glamour.
Both artists are fascintating. Yet
Eddy does not stop with cars. He
does buildings and storefronts too,
and does them with an astonishingly
magic realism, however oxymoronic
that may strike you. For instance,
I refer you to "New Shoes for H," and
"Silver Shoes." If those two masterpieces
from the early 1970's don't knock the
socks off your feet, I can't imagine
what could.
By the way, over the past few days I have
begun to develop a thesis that the best
representives of the tradition of 19th
century realism are people like Audry
Flack, Ralph Giongs, Richard Bechtel,
Richard Estes, Robert Cottingham, and
a few others. Why? Because they have
a high degree of skill for realistic
painting, but instead of merely doing
19th century art over and over (the way
some artists represented in the big
commercial galleries do, and do it for
serius bucks) this school of artists
moved realism into new territory,
and that is what real artists always
do. So, I admit to being wrong last
month when I said that 20th century
realism only had boring "heirs" like
the Nazi heroic realism artists and
the Commmunist artists. Viewing
great art is a humbling experience.
Because I was fortunate enough to
slow down and really take a serious
look at the works of these great
realists, I have no problem about
admitting my past error, in not giving
20th Century realism enough credit. I
was simply looking at the wrong pictures.
the alt.genius.bill-palmer
(Temporary office: upstairs at rec.arts.prose)
wil...@ix.netcom.com
William Palmer
[...]
>
> Dali-yechh
That's a rather unintelligent thing to say about
the greatest artist of the Twentieth century.
All your remark does is suggest that you find
Dali's art disturbing and you can't deal with
it. Good. Dali did not see the first duty
of an artist as one of making smug folks like
you feel comfortable.
> Estes-don't know him
That's where you and some others give yourself
away. There has been a lot of scuttlebutt about
realism bandied back and forth in this group by
people who claim to have a high regard for reallism,
yet what amazes me is the way that some of these
chatterboxes appear to be nearly totally ignorant
of the very artists who have actually been advancing
realism into a new age with genuine art that is
challenging, creative, and highly original.
I get the distinct idea that certain people in
this group have no interest in creativity and
originality. What they seem to believe is the
highest form of art involves painting pictures
that look like they might have been done by
second rate 19th century artists. (I say second
rate because you are not going to find anyone
these days with the painting talent of Bouguereau,
Gerome, or Khnopff.) The people in this group I
refer to don't want ART (which is always new),
they want cud-chewing done in a realistic style!
While I agree that much abstract art you see
being done today is atrocious, I really did
not see much of that when I made the "grand
tour" of those downtown La Jolla galleries.
What I saw, in addition to the expected
Disney and Dr. Suess stuff, of course, was
a lot of pretty pictures, many of which would
have been perfectly at home in the home of a
19th century middle-class person. That's
nice. That's NICEY-nice. But I expect a
great deal more challenge from what I prefer
to call art. Then, when people in this forum
start getting up on their hindlegs and braying
about realism, and then make it very clear
that they don't have a clue as to which artists
today have taken realism in creative and
exciting directions, I get a bit annoyed.
As far as I am concerned, if you are unaware
of Cottingham, Estes, Flack, Don Eddy, and
a few others, you had better SHUT UP about
realism until you educate yourself. Don't
get me wrong. If your idea of art is
re-doing the Hudson river school, or
re-doing Frederic Remington, or imitating
French academy art in a second rate fashion,
fine. If you are good at it you can easily
sell your pictures for thousands in a downtown
La Jolla gallery. More power to your
"profitable cud chewing." On the other
hand, art means much more than that to me,
and I have to believe it does to many readers
of this group, however much cluelessness I
have noted in recent postings...
[End of rant. I might that these are
recent revelations. You can follow my
thought processes in my posts over the
last couple of weeks and see the way
I arrived at the above assertions.
So, it is not only me, it is you, too,
and I thank all those who have helped keep
my mind percolating regarding the matter of
recent developments in realism. I may be
wrong in my conclusions above, but if I am
someone will set me straignt. This is what
I call life in Usenet thoughtstream.]
alt.genius.bill-palmer
(Temporary publishing headquarters: upstairs at rec.arts.prose)
wil...@ix.netcom.com
Edward G. Nilges
>
> [...]
> >
> > Dali-yechh
>
> That's a rather unintelligent thing to say about
> the greatest artist of the Twentieth century.
> All your remark does is suggest that you find
> Dali's art disturbing and you can't deal with
> it. Good. Dali did not see the first duty
> of an artist as one of making smug folks like
> you feel comfortable.
:-). That is rather amusing, for the greatest Modernist artists, who
genuinely disturb by breaking new ground as in Picasso's Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon, are rejected but the idea of a merely negative
disturbance is retrieved.
This is a Fascist gesture, for it structurally resembles the way in
Fascist parties precipitate out the negative feelings of the working
and lower middle class, while failing to make any constructive
proposals. The negativity is pandered to by the wealthy who stay that
way while the working and lower middle class is sold down the river,
damning the Jews and trumpeting their disturbance to no end.
Which is to say that as in the Chinese cultural revolution, the angry
young men (known literally as Elder Brothers in the cultural
revolution) are deflected away from the real swine (in the CCR, Mao
and his henchmen) onto safe "smug" targets like public intellectuals
and college professors.
With the result, of course, that in Chinese society power continues,
to this day, to remain in the hands of the few, as it did through the
Nazi regime.
Dali doesn't disturb me except insofar as he does not know composition
at all and he was a total jerk.
Oh dear.
> realism until you educate yourself. Don't
> get me wrong. If your idea of art is
> re-doing the Hudson river school, or
> re-doing Frederic Remington, or imitating
> French academy art in a second rate fashion,
That's Mani, not me.
> fine. If you are good at it you can easily
> sell your pictures for thousands in a downtown
> La Jolla gallery. More power to your
I think you need to get out of La Jolla.
> "profitable cud chewing." On the other
> hand, art means much more than that to me,
> and I have to believe it does to many readers
> of this group, however much cluelessness I
> have noted in recent postings...
>
> [End of rant. I might that these are
> recent revelations. You can follow my
> thought processes in my posts over the
> last couple of weeks and see the way
> I arrived at the above assertions.
> So, it is not only me, it is you, too,
> and I thank all those who have helped keep
> my mind percolating regarding the matter of
> recent developments in realism. I may be
> wrong in my conclusions above, but if I am
> someone will set me straignt. This is what
> I call life in Usenet thoughtstream.]
>
>
> alt.genius.bill-palmer
> (Temporary publishing headquarters: upstairs at rec.arts.prose)
> wil...@ix.netcom.com
Mani thinks there is a cabal of dealers and artists in New York who
discriminate against commercial and regional artists (is that correct,
Mani? If not, replace "mani" by "many artistic conservatives."
What they don't see is that art is like the classical ballet and there
is an inescapable oral transmission that has to be transmitted
locally.
Even in 1972, I knew when I wrote a letter to Computerworld during the
argument between Eckert's estate and that of Atanasoff, stating that
Alan Turing invented the computer (in 1936 and in the construction of
the Turing machine, a mathematical abstraction) I knew that I had not
created new knowledge at all. Nor did I create knowledge when in 1997
I stated my view that old masters relied on technical tricks for their
skill in the process of hammering Mani into the long grass. I had
merely stated for the record an opinion.
Martin Davis created the KNOWLEDGE that Turing "invented the computer"
in his recent book The Universal Computer. David Hockney created the
KNOWLEDGE that the old masters used the camera *obscura* and technical
tricks to create the appearance of Mani's "skil" in his 1999 book.
This is because knowledge is social, as is art. At best, in 1972 and
1997, I was a smart guy, but I knew that. I did not create KNOWLEDGE,
only high class OPINION, useful then and now in meeting women :-).
Had I wanted to create KNOWLEDGE in 1972, I would have gone to the
Univ of Chi, and written a dissertation on Turing, because this
creates social knowledge vetted by a community of scholars, if only
those bums down in Hyde Park.
This is because of the social construction of knowledge and of art.
You have identified people important in your *kreis*, your circle, and
while I only have a layperson's knowledge of art history, my instinct
is that an artist who works outside tradition (in the sense that
Jackson Pollock was solidly a part of tradition, in the sense of
reacting to it) cannot meaningfully say his art is "better" than art
made in Greenwich Village as part of a local movement.
Cezanne's greatness is that he knew about Poussin and reacted to
Poussin. Pollock knew about the Sistine Chapel and reacted to it, by
creating a secular version in the sense that he showed how an American
monumentality could be a match for the cathedrals of Europe.
An artist or creator of knowledge who works in isolation is like that
tree falling in the forest. It simply is not meaningful to say that
he is better or worse than the tradition.
Regional artists are uncomfortably close to conspiracy theorists in
that a conspiracy theorist may be RIGHT about the assassination of
JFK. But his epistemology, his theory of knowledge, is so WRONG as to
render his theory useless and pragmatically unworkable. When the guy
writes a letter to the editor, claiming "special" knowledge denied to
the public, our first instinct is to say he's a nutbag, not because
we're intolerant but simply because the nut bag has failed at an
important task.
That task is summed up in the poet's phrase "only connect." Before
you make art, or a damn Web page proclaiming your damn "no skil no
art" theory, consider instead connecting with your fellow man. The
problem with the internet (to which I am subject as much as the next
man) is that it makes us all self-contained proclaimers of knowledge
and the FIRST reaction of the Other is to look at our damn Web page
and say what a nut.
Ny first reaction to Mani's Web page was, what a nutbar and as it
happens Mani is not a nut. He is linked with a community which
includes a large number of artistic conservatives. The problem with
the community is that it is somewhat of a Fascist community in a
technical sense: its linkage is based on hatred and not solidarity.
In the 1930s, Surrealist art was despised by the same people who
despised Cubism. In order to gain acceptance by the sort of wealthy
people who supported the demi-Fascist Franco regime, Dali tore
Surrealism away from the rest of Modernismus. The result is that
today artistic conservatives are united only by hatred of art which to
them lacks "skill", a "skill" which they are in constant process of
redefining.
For note that Mani considers one of his natural allies, Huntington
Hartford, a nut bar: Huntington Hartford was a wealthy man who built a
gallery of representational art in the 1960s on Columbus Circle in New
York.
This lack of solidarity was identified by Klaus Theweilt, a German
author who analyzed the social psychology of Fascist movements in his
book Male Fantasies.
Theweilt shows that after the collapse of the Nazi regime, no Nazi
"guerrilla" movement was formed despite the fears of the Allies. It
appears that the surviving Nazis so despised each other that they were
not about to do any male bonding in the *Schwarzer Wald* or Bavarian
Alps while fighting off Omar Bradley. Instead they scuttled off to
safe havens as individuals.
On the political left the 1789 ideals of liberte, egalite, fraternite
contained within themselves the basic foundation for guerrilla
movements and "male bonding." But as opposed to traditional Tory
political and artistic conservatism, artistic reactionary movements
like "no skil no art" don't have a unifying central theme which I
think caused Mani to reject his natural buddy Hartford.
The collection of artists Mani despises has no common unifying theme
for what he calls "skill" is completely incoherent. Dali was thought
to have no "skill" for the very good reason that he doesn't know how
to compose a space: his "skill" is not in breaking new ground but in
taking traditional forms and "morphing" them in an automatic
fashion...which could be simulated today using a computer.
This is where I think art reduces to ethics. A negative critique of
society with no redemption sours to Dali's psychoanalytic fascism for
the very good reason that unlike Picasso there is no suggestion of
Utopian possibilities.
Which is to say that Picasso could "distort" the form of a woman and
child at the beach without once losing the idea that this woman and
child were related to a specific beach-on-earth. Dali is more like
science fiction in which human reality is torn away from connection
with the earth. His paintings of his wife are therefore absurd for
they decontextualize her as if to form messages from another planet.
The nice thing about "skill" is that it can be understood and
commodified which assuages the basic material anxiety of the artist
(which in most times and places is paying the rent.)
William Palmer
> willia...@prodigy.net (William Palmer) wrote in message news:<cbc76035.02112...@posting.google.com>...
> > spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges) wrote in message news:<f5dda427.0211...@posting.google.com>...
> >
> > [...]
> > >
> > > Dali-yechh
> >
> > That's a rather unintelligent thing to say about
> > the greatest artist of the Twentieth century.
> > All your remark does is suggest that you find
> > Dali's art disturbing and you can't deal with
> > it. Good. Dali did not see the first duty
> > of an artist as one of making smug folks like
> > you feel comfortable.
>
> :-). That is rather amusing, for the greatest Modernist artists, who
> genuinely disturb by breaking new ground as in Picasso's Les
> Demoiselles d'Avignon, are rejected but the idea of a merely negative
> disturbance is retrieved.
>
> This is a Fascist gesture,
Right there my hackles go up a bit,`because, as
a hardened veteran of many flame wars, I can tell
you there is a Usenet truism that says when you
start calling people Fascists, you are losing the
argument. Even so, you certainly seem like an
articulate, well-educated soul, so I will hear
you out.
for it structurally resembles the way in
> Fascist parties precipitate out the negative feelings of the working
> and lower middle class, while failing to make any constructive
> proposals. The negativity is pandered to by the wealthy who stay that
> way while the working and lower middle class is sold down the river,
> damning the Jews and trumpeting their disturbance to no end.
That may well be the tragic truth.
>
> Which is to say that as in the Chinese cultural revolution, the angry
> young men (known literally as Elder Brothers in the cultural
> revolution) are deflected away from the real swine (in the CCR, Mao
> and his henchmen) onto safe "smug" targets like public intellectuals
> and college professors.
Sure. The Red Guard were just chumps, in other words.
And later, the ones who took their own nonsense too
seriously ended up getting executed or sent to
"re-education camps." It was sort of like the
Taliban using the idealistic but gullible John
Walker, but it was on a massive scale.
>
> With the result, of course, that in Chinese society power continues,
> to this day, to remain in the hands of the few, as it did through the
> Nazi regime.
>
> Dali doesn't disturb me except insofar as he does not know composition
> at all and he was a total jerk.
I just can't see that at all. Dali is the greatest
artist of the Twentieth Century. Of course, it is
a cliche to say that it's a matter of taste, but that
is really what it boils down to. And as far as his
being "a jerk," that's silly. Actually, he was an
incredibly hard worker. He certainly was not what
anyone would call an "ordinary Joe," if that is what
bothers you. And I do know that some Surrealists
hated him for not supporting Communist Russia, but
he was right and they were wrong, as history shows.
I think that just about all the artists and writers
who supported Stalinist Russia out of a misguided
idealism came to regret it when they learned about
the millions that Stalin murdered or otherwise
cruelly victimized. I'm delighted that Dali had
the good sense to stay away from the Stalinist
bandwagon, because it was headed straight to hell.
And apart from the human misery, look at the art
produced during the Stalin era. As I have argued
in other posts, it is a "bad heir" of 19th
century realism. It does not take realism
anyplace new, and it is generally boring for
that reason. By the way, I don't hold
any brief for Franco. He was responsible for
the murders of some wonderful people, such as
Federico Garcia Lorca, and in fact I've always
hated Franco's guts for that murder because I
have experienced Lorca's poetry. But
compared to Stalin, Franco was very small
potatoes. The fact that Dali lived under Franco
really should not be held against him. After all,
MILLIONS of people lived under Franco. It was
their country too, after all, even though most of
them did not give two hoots for Fascism. Franco
just happened to be the jerk running the place,
and Dali needed his own country in order to
funtion at his creative best. And, of course,
if you live under a Franco, you don't oppose him
if you want to stay alive. I see nothing wrong
about what Dali did at all, although it caused
quite a bit of controversy.
Well, that's enough for this post, but I may
reply to part of the rest of your message later.
Anyway, thanks for responding. a.g.b-p.
William Palmer
> willia...@prodigy.net (William Palmer) wrote in message news:<cbc76035.02112...@posting.google.com>...
> > spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges) wrote in message news:<f5dda427.0211...@posting.google.com>...
[...]
>
> I think you need to get out of La Jolla.
>>>
> You have identified people important in your *kreis*, your circle,
Not exactly. I have identified a number of amazing
realists WHOSE PICTURES I SAW REPRODUCED IN A BOOK!
I have no such important circle of friends, and
since Usenet has too many phonies and poseurs now,
I want to set the record straight.
There you go again with that Fascist-calling stuff.
You sound terribly "Sixties." I mean, are you implying
there is community Mani is part of where people are
running around with black uniforms and those "gendarme
hats" with the bills on them? I can't see Mani Deli
as being any more of a Fascist than the man on the
moon. I think you should challenge yourself
to try to get through your next one-dozen posts
without calling anyone a Fascist. Betcha can't
do it!
in a
> technical sense: its linkage is based on hatred and not solidarity.
"Solidarity?" What, are we all supposed to sing
Cumbaya now? I am suspicious of that word
"solildarity" because the way Communists misused
it. How much solidarity was there in the Gulag?
>
> In the 1930s, Surrealist art was despised by the same people who
> despised Cubism. In order to gain acceptance by the sort of wealthy
> people who supported the demi-Fascist Franco regime, Dali tore
> Surrealism away from the rest of Modernismus.
I dealt with some of this in my other post. In my
view, it was to Dali's credit that he had the perception
to know where Communism was going. He didn't want any
part of it. You can criticize Dali, but what he did
was far better than being a party to supporting
Russian communism. How would YOU feel to be freezing
your butt and starving in the Gulag, and then hearing
the way bigshot artists and writers from other countries
were kissing Stalin's fanny? And, as I also said
in the other post, while I hold no brief for Franco,
when it came to murder and oppression he was a small
fry compared to Stalin.
The result is that
> today artistic conservatives are united only by hatred of art which to
> them lacks "skill", a "skill" which they are in constant process of
> redefining.
>
> For note that Mani considers one of his natural allies, Huntington
> Hartford, a nut bar: Huntington Hartford was a wealthy man who built a
> gallery of representational art in the 1960s on Columbus Circle in New
> York.
From all accounts, it was an amazing museum, filled
with excellent art. Exactly what did happen to it?
>
> This lack of solidarity was identified by Klaus Theweilt, a German
> author who analyzed the social psychology of Fascist movements in his
> book Male Fantasies.
Look, if I see "solidarity" and "Fascist" one more
time, I am going to fall asleep.
>
> Theweilt shows that after the collapse of the Nazi regime, no Nazi
> "guerrilla" movement was formed despite the fears of the Allies. It
> appears that the surviving Nazis so despised each other that they were
> not about to do any male bonding in the *Schwarzer Wald* or Bavarian
> Alps while fighting off Omar Bradley. Instead they scuttled off to
> safe havens as individuals.
I certainly am not going to argue they had any
humanitarian awards coming to them.
>
> On the political left the 1789 ideals of liberte, egalite, fraternite
> contained within themselves the basic foundation for guerrilla
> movements and "male bonding."
Sure, but look what happened in '93. They were
male-bonded right onto the guillotine! They
had no mercy on others, and they were shown
none themselves.
But as opposed to traditional Tory
> political and artistic conservatism, artistic reactionary movements
> like "no skil no art" don't have a unifying central theme which I
> think caused Mani to reject his natural buddy Hartford.
There's a lot I don't know about that situation,
regarding what happened to the Hartford Huntington
and where all the art went.
>
> The collection of artists Mani despises has no common unifying theme
> for what he calls "skill" is completely incoherent. Dali was thought
> to have no "skill" for the very good reason that he doesn't know how
> to compose a space: his "skill" is not in breaking new ground but in
> taking traditional forms and "morphing" them in an automatic
> fashion...which could be simulated today using a computer.
If that is true, where does it put Mark Rothko
or Mondrian? Even a dumb chunk of software could
simulate them. (And actually, I am just being
argumentative here to make a point. I enjoy
some of Mondrian's work. Clever fellow.)
>
> This is where I think art reduces to ethics. A negative critique of
> society with no redemption sours to Dali's psychoanalytic fascism
zzzzzzzzzzz........
Edward G. Nilges
Yes, there I go again. I will do so until it penetrates your skull:
the canonical Fascists, the Nazis, were not Space Monsters from the
Planet Zork.
Instead, they arose from a society similar to ours by mechanisms which
operate in ours. To examine these mechanisms is not to "call" people
"Nazis." It is to examine these goddamn mechanisms in order to
prevent a recurrence of Fascism.
Mike Godwin has said "on the Internet, the probability of comparision
to Hitler approaches unity." He may fail to see that this may be not
due to rhetorical excess but to the fact that Hitler's interesting
personality, which combined features of the artistic layabout with a
streak of barbarism, may be quite common in urban environments,
including (and perhaps especially) in so-called "hip" urban
environments, with which the Internet has joined.
> You sound terribly "Sixties." I mean, are you implying
Oh, good.
> there is community Mani is part of where people are
> running around with black uniforms and those "gendarme
> hats" with the bills on them? I can't see Mani Deli
> as being any more of a Fascist than the man on the
> moon. I think you should challenge yourself
> to try to get through your next one-dozen posts
> without calling anyone a Fascist. Betcha can't
> do it!
>
An examination of my language will show you, of course, that I did not
"call" anyone a "Nazi."
Are you even aware that structurally similar parties to the National
Socialists have appeared in EVERY developed nation during the course
of the Twentieth century, including the KKK in the USA, the "King and
Country" movement of the 1930s in Britain, many parties in France, the
Falange in Spain, of course the Italian Fascisti and even a form of
fascism in the former USSR which reveres the memory of Uncle Joe
Stalin?
Are you even aware that the reputation of artists in the USA and
Europe for liberal or left sympathies is, as far as I can determined,
statistically unwarranted? Many USA and European artists, from TS
Eliot to Dali, have traditionally conservative or right-nutbar
sympathies. This is exacerbated by the unwilling position of most
artists in the struggling lower middle class, which is instructed by
Fascisti to blame those lower in the pile.
> in a
> > technical sense: its linkage is based on hatred and not solidarity.
>
> "Solidarity?" What, are we all supposed to sing
> Cumbaya now? I am suspicious of that word
> "solildarity" because the way Communists misused
> it. How much solidarity was there in the Gulag?
Actually, quite a lot. If you would actually trouble to READ
Solhenystyn you would learn that the *zeks* or inmates did show a
great deal of solidarity, which they'd learned when "free" in the
Communist society, against the guards who they regarded as
petit-bourgeois thugs. Furthermore, many *zeks* preserved their
Commie or socialist sympathies even AFTER being thrown in the clink.
> >
> > In the 1930s, Surrealist art was despised by the same people who
> > despised Cubism. In order to gain acceptance by the sort of wealthy
> > people who supported the demi-Fascist Franco regime, Dali tore
> > Surrealism away from the rest of Modernismus.
>
> I dealt with some of this in my other post. In my
> view, it was to Dali's credit that he had the perception
> to know where Communism was going. He didn't want any
> part of it. You can criticize Dali, but what he did
Nor do I.
> was far better than being a party to supporting
> Russian communism. How would YOU feel to be freezing
> your butt and starving in the Gulag, and then hearing
> the way bigshot artists and writers from other countries
> were kissing Stalin's fanny? And, as I also said
Commencing about 1936, many of these people began to depart the
Communist camp as more details about the show trials came out and in
France these FORMER sympathizers formed an intellectual resistance to
Communism in the form of European social democracy.
If you are thinking of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, note that they
sheltered Leon Trotsky which is not quite "kissing Stalin's butt."
Indeed, during the period 1930..1990 CPUSA members were NOT writers or
artists but instead small-time clerks, shopowners, importers and of
course FBI agents.
> in the other post, while I hold no brief for Franco,
> when it came to murder and oppression he was a small
> fry compared to Stalin.
Well, try telling that to the families of the people Franco killed
after his victory. Also, try telling that to the Latin American thugs
who in the 1970s used Franco as a role model and disappeared thousands
in the name of the same authoritarian, where not Fascist, model.
>
> The result is that
> > today artistic conservatives are united only by hatred of art which to
> > them lacks "skill", a "skill" which they are in constant process of
> > redefining.
> >
> > For note that Mani considers one of his natural allies, Huntington
> > Hartford, a nut bar: Huntington Hartford was a wealthy man who built a
> > gallery of representational art in the 1960s on Columbus Circle in New
> > York.
>
> From all accounts, it was an amazing museum, filled
> with excellent art. Exactly what did happen to it?
I would like to know. The building was there in the 1980s when I
lived in the NYC region but was closed.
> >
> > This lack of solidarity was identified by Klaus Theweilt, a German
> > author who analyzed the social psychology of Fascist movements in his
> > book Male Fantasies.
>
> Look, if I see "solidarity" and "Fascist" one more
> time, I am going to fall asleep.
Well, sure, you have not acquired the learning to understand it. I
understand your boredom.
> >
> > Theweilt shows that after the collapse of the Nazi regime, no Nazi
> > "guerrilla" movement was formed despite the fears of the Allies. It
> > appears that the surviving Nazis so despised each other that they were
> > not about to do any male bonding in the *Schwarzer Wald* or Bavarian
> > Alps while fighting off Omar Bradley. Instead they scuttled off to
> > safe havens as individuals.
>
> I certainly am not going to argue they had any
> humanitarian awards coming to them.
> >
> > On the political left the 1789 ideals of liberte, egalite, fraternite
> > contained within themselves the basic foundation for guerrilla
> > movements and "male bonding."
>
> Sure, but look what happened in '93. They were
> male-bonded right onto the guillotine! They
> had no mercy on others, and they were shown
> none themselves.
Actually, my information is that Robespierre and Ste-Juste went hand
in hand to the guillotine, saying "you may now scatter our limbs to
the four winds! Republics will rise from them!", which is only
something a Frenchman would say.
>
> But as opposed to traditional Tory
> > political and artistic conservatism, artistic reactionary movements
> > like "no skil no art" don't have a unifying central theme which I
> > think caused Mani to reject his natural buddy Hartford.
>
> There's a lot I don't know about that situation,
> regarding what happened to the Hartford Huntington
> and where all the art went.
>
> >
> > The collection of artists Mani despises has no common unifying theme
> > for what he calls "skill" is completely incoherent. Dali was thought
> > to have no "skill" for the very good reason that he doesn't know how
> > to compose a space: his "skill" is not in breaking new ground but in
> > taking traditional forms and "morphing" them in an automatic
> > fashion...which could be simulated today using a computer.
>
> If that is true, where does it put Mark Rothko
> or Mondrian? Even a dumb chunk of software could
> simulate them. (And actually, I am just being
No: because it would probably not generate Mondrian's CHANGES, whether
from imagery to abstraction in the 1930s, or the lightened pallette
and livelier compositions he started using after moving to New York in
1945.
You can program a computer to essentially copy/forge Mondrian, to make
a "Mondrian" of let us say his most severe style. You can NOT program
a computer to react to New York City of 1945 with "Broadway Boogie
Woogie", for in fact many scenes in New York are just as dreary and
rectilinear as those in Holland.
Therefore Mondrian, just like Vermeer, can be copied and forged but
not made into a Lisp program. This demolishes arguments that use
computer-programmability to disprove the "art" of modern art.
> argumentative here to make a point. I enjoy
> some of Mondrian's work. Clever fellow.)
> >
> > This is where I think art reduces to ethics. A negative critique of
> > society with no redemption sours to Dali's psychoanalytic fascism
>
> zzzzzzzzzzz........
I am aware that it is somehow hip to be attention-disordered. It is
the new conformity.
William Palmer
[...]
Well, Celine was an out-and-out Hitler supporter and
I think he was one of the 20th century's best novelists.
Now, before anyone draws any hasty and unwarranted
conclusions about ME, I would ask them to reflect on
the reason that Allen Ginsberg, a favorite poet of
mine, actually went to Paris to pay homage to Celine
in the late 1960's. If you know anything about
Ginsberg, you know he held no brief for Nazis.
Yet, he was paying homage to Celine's achievements
as a novelist, not approving in any way Celine's
actions before and during World War II. I might
add that the beastly Nazi's were responsible for
mudering a lot of favorite people of mine,
including poets Max Jacob, Robert Desnos, and
Saint-Pol Roux. Yet, were I to refuse to read
Celine because of his detestable politics, I
would be depriving myself of some great
20th century literature.
He was an A & P Grocery chain heir. He was quite
the womanizer, too, and at one time he actually
bought into a famous modeling agency for the
"social opportunities" he thought it would
provide. Quite a character.
You have obviously being reading a spurious
account by someone with a political agenda.
The truth was not so pretty. Robespierre
could not speak because his jaw was bandaged
because of the damage caused by a bullet he
had fired in his half-assed attempted to shoot
himself, once he had seen the way the cards
were falling. When the executioner pulled
off the wrapping, Robespierre let out a horrible
scream of pain. This miserable fanatic had no
mercy on others and--while his end was pitiful--
he simply got sliced up in the monstrous killing
machine he had such a major part in unleashing
in the first place.
Well, no offense, but I was not so "attention-disordered"
as to report, as if true, some French political hack's
canard about the end of Robespierre. And I really think
you are relying far too heavily on worn-out buzzwords
like "Fascist" and "solidarity." You need to get
yourself a new set of buzzwords! Anyway, I did read
your post, and I did find many of your thoughts
interesting and informative. a.g.b-p
Mani Deli
Nilges) wrote:
>You can program a computer to essentially copy/forge Mondrian, to make
>a "Mondrian" of let us say his most severe style. You can NOT program
>a computer to react to New York City of 1945 with "Broadway Boogie
>Woogie",
The painting is on the level of a lousy patch quilt and I suspect a
program can be written to simulate similar crap. However one needn't
write a program. I can knock of similar crap with photoshop in very
little time.
>Therefore Mondrian, just like Vermeer, can be copied and forged but
>not made into a Lisp program. This demolishes arguments that use
>computer-programmability to disprove the "art" of modern art.
No one disproves such art. One shows that it is easily imitated with a
computer or in the case of Mondrian's nothings., easily imitated with
paint. I don't believe that what constitutes great art is easily
imitated.
>> argumentative here to make a point. I enjoy
>> some of Mondrian's work. Clever fellow.)
I never found anything by Mondrian to be any more then idiotic hype,
especially his writing and critical BS about it.
PS the closest Mondrian came to Vermeer was when he was standing next
to one.
...no skill no art!
Want to get away from the indecipherable imbecilities and absurd pretensions of the modern art establishment?
Check out my web page http://www3.sympatico.ca/manideli/
Edward G. Nilges
> On 29 Nov 2002 16:23:01 -0800, spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G.
> Nilges) wrote:
>
> >You can program a computer to essentially copy/forge Mondrian, to make
> >a "Mondrian" of let us say his most severe style. You can NOT program
> >a computer to react to New York City of 1945 with "Broadway Boogie
> >Woogie",
>
> The painting is on the level of a lousy patch quilt and I suspect a
> program can be written to simulate similar crap. However one needn't
> write a program. I can knock of similar crap with photoshop in very
> little time.
That is of course to say that any labor, artistic or not, was without
moral worth because now we can do it with automatic tools. This is
nonsense and also contrary to an increasing confirmation of the labor
theory of value: content produced quickly on a computer (such as
electronic greetings) is seen to be without value, and a nonelectronic
greeting seems to us to have more value.
You completely failed to see the point. We can simulate a phase of
Mondrian, but not his open-ended development.
>
> >Therefore Mondrian, just like Vermeer, can be copied and forged but
> >not made into a Lisp program. This demolishes arguments that use
> >computer-programmability to disprove the "art" of modern art.
>
> No one disproves such art. One shows that it is easily imitated with a
> computer or in the case of Mondrian's nothings., easily imitated with
> paint. I don't believe that what constitutes great art is easily
> imitated.
This is nonsense. I can photograph the Sistine chapel and use a
projector to project the creation of man on a canvas. I can then
paint by numbers. But I cannot conclude that this means Michelangelo
was a bum. The IDENTICAL argument applies to modern art.
>
> >> argumentative here to make a point. I enjoy
> >> some of Mondrian's work. Clever fellow.)
>
> I never found anything by Mondrian to be any more then idiotic hype,
> especially his writing and critical BS about it.
>
Being filled with hatred is not an argument.
> PS the closest Mondrian came to Vermeer was when he was standing next
> to one.
>
It is plain that Vermeer used a camera obscura and then (as a part
time baker) baked his partly dried canvases and panels to get a unique
look. In terms of the 17th century, he "automated" part of the
process.
Your argument is without merit, for, as Hockney has shown, the "can be
automated" argument applies to ancients and moderns. There is an
artistic genius distinct from technique, and this is SHARED by Vermeer
and Mondrian, in part because neither wasted their time spewing their
hatred of other artists. They worked.
John Ng
painting.
Creating images on screen and on the printer is not good enough. A
(simple) robotics must be created in which the arm will brush with
real paint and sensors will feedback to the computer the result.
Copying paintings is just one of the aspect of this robot. However, a
relatively simple AI program can be written to allow the robot to
CREATE a painting that would baffle even the hardcore Modern Art
lover. This program includes basic art principles on color, line etc
which the computer will use randomly. The program would be
self-learning in which it would produce several pieces where humans
could reply whether they like it or not (much like an apprenticeship).
From this, the robot will learn what to do and what not to do. It
will be truly creative, not just an emulator.
However, to do a realistic painting (to the quality of Bouguereau) is
impossible using real brush and paint. The reason is because the
robot maybe able to take a photo and evaluate the tones and values of
the image, but it will in no way be able to execute the painting.
That is because, in order to do so, it has to know the size of brush
to use, the pressure that it must exert, the way it must blend etc.
Although these things do apply to exceuting a Modern Art, it does not
matter if the robot does not get it completely right because there is
no right or wrong. However, if it doesn't get it right for a
realistic painting, we will know.
John Ng
ART RENEWAL ADVOCATE
http://community.webshots.com/user/pigsmayfly
Updated 25Nov2002
Mani Deli
fartzies to make a living. One only needs a camera obscura ( an opaque
projector) and a large stove..
With this simple equipment on can imitate Vermeer which I'm sure would
sell to philistines, fascists and assorted bourgeois in realist
galleries.
With all the cash you earn you can now pay tuition to art college and
take four years to learn how to express yourself, do stripes like
Mondrian, drip like Pollock, schmier like de Kooning and get a degree
which you can use to paint as well as Fox.
(Edward G. Nilges) wrote:
>It is plain that Vermeer used a camera obscura and then (as a part
>time baker) baked his partly dried canvases and panels to get a unique
>look. In terms of the 17th century, he "automated" part of the
>process.
> as Hockney has shown, the "can be
>automated" argument applies to ancients and moderns. There is an
>artistic genius distinct from technique, and this is SHARED by Vermeer
>and Mondrian, in part because neither wasted their time spewing their
>hatred of other artists. They worked.
So get that equipment and get to WORK.
Hot tip from Marilyn Yente Welch: You can also paint like Bouguereau
by pasting down large photographs.
( This could of course be expensive so I would suggest investing in a
large stove and imitate Vermeer for starters. )
G*rd*n
I don't see why an expensive enough robot couldn't execute
"realistic" paintings. Delicate physical maneuvers involving
feedback of various kinds have already been successfully
implemented in some systems. I think the only problem for
the robot might be defining what "realistic" means -- this is
a rather vague term. If you confined the task to having the
machine parody a particular artist, I don't think there would
be any insuperable difficulty. This sort of thing has been
done already in classical music -- there are programs that
will write a "Beethoven symphony" for you. Of course, the
music won't really sound like a Beethoven symphony, except in
superficial texture and structure, but there is no explicit
rule by which one could differentiate the artificial Beethoven
symphony from the real ones, because if there were, one could
just put it into the program and the output would thereafter
conform. The difference between the authentic Beethoven and
the parody is sensed at a much more abstract level than rules
can be written for (yet). Just so, one could feed Bouguereau,
Picasso, Giotto, Van Gogh, etc. to the system and it would
produce (probably) boring parodies of the source material.
They could be good enough so that one might not be quite
sure whether it wasn't the artist on an off day.
It doesn't seem very useful, but maybe tourists would buy the
stuff. "Have your Portrait done in Ten Minutes by your
Choice of Great Master!!! Collaboration of extra Great
Masters, $4.99 per Master!!!"
John Ng
> I don't see why an expensive enough robot couldn't execute "realistic" paintings.
Think about it.
I admit there is a qualification to "realistic". I am saying,
"realistic" as it the way that human painters have painted. Also, I
am taking about robot which is truly creative, not emulators.
How can you get an AI to decide that that patch there needs to be
lighter and more intense, this place needs a faint 30 degree stroke,
and that place needs glazing? However, for an unrealistic image, the
AI could be trained to do those principles, but because we cannot
ascertain whether the result is right or wrong, it becomes so-call
creative, just like creative primitive art.
(Never say never. So I can admit that it would be a long while (a
really long long while) before it can do realistic paintings. The
costs will thus be uneconomically foreboding.)
The real point I am making is that because good "realistic" paintings
are clearly the higher form of painting by a long shot.
> Of course, the music won't really sound like a Beethoven symphony, except in
> superficial texture and structure,
You need to qualify this a bit. Did you mean you are asking the
machine to play Beethoven or are you said it follows Beethoven in
style? Are you also taking about the machine using real instruments
or synthesizing the sounds? There is a big difference, synthesized
sounds will not sound like real instruments as synthesized inks will
not look like oil paint.
> The difference between the authentic Beethoven and
> the parody is sensed at a much more abstract level than rules
> can be written for (yet).
YET, is the key word. It is really down to how much time you want to
invest into teaching the AI. Computer chess took a little while to
outdo the Chess Masters but recently I heard about their triumph. Not
only the Chess Master found it very creative and intelligent.
John Ng
frankvo...@web.de
>g...@panix.com (G*rd*n) wrote in message news:<asgevs$dbv$1...@panix1.panix.com>...
>
>> I don't see why an expensive enough robot couldn't execute "realistic" paintings.
>
>Think about it.
>
>I admit there is a qualification to "realistic". I am saying,
>"realistic" as it the way that human painters have painted. Also, I
>am taking about robot which is truly creative, not emulators.
>
>How can you get an AI to decide that that patch there needs to be
>lighter and more intense, this place needs a faint 30 degree stroke,
>and that place needs glazing? However, for an unrealistic image, the
>AI could be trained to do those principles, but because we cannot
>ascertain whether the result is right or wrong, it becomes so-call
>creative, just like creative primitive art.
>
>(Never say never. So I can admit that it would be a long while (a
>really long long while) before it can do realistic paintings. The
>costs will thus be uneconomically foreboding.)
>
>The real point I am making is that because good "realistic" paintings
>are clearly the higher form of painting by a long shot.
>........
>John Ng
Reading your discussion I got the impression that you never really
programmed a computer. A computer or robot would not paint in a manner
like a human being. Why should a program do so when there are better
methods.
To produce realistic paintings I would at first make the computer
"see". That means to construct a three dimensional model in its
storage of the scene it views (for example via digital cameras).
Second the program would need a lot of representation rules to
alienate the textures and structures which are stored in its model.
Otherwise you would get something like a photo which would be too
realistic.
At third I would produce the painting using these mentioned rules in a
single process on a very small raster base directly on a plotter
instead of moving a brush or pencil.
Frank
_______________________
http://www.opartandmore.de
G*rd*n
| > I don't see why an expensive enough robot couldn't execute "realistic" paintings.
pigsm...@hotmail.com (John Ng):
| Think about it.
I did. It's an interesting problem.
pigsm...@hotmail.com (John Ng):
| I admit there is a qualification to "realistic". I am saying,
| "realistic" as it the way that human painters have painted. Also, I
| am taking about robot which is truly creative, not emulators.
That's a different subject, is it not? We started out with
copies and then imitations. The proposition was that a computer
would find it harder to produce a credible imitation of a
"realistic" artist's work than a absractionist's. This may
be true, but it's a problem of replicating fairly superficial
aspects of the work. In any case, imitating the work of
another is not what we usually mean by _creative_, so that's
not at issue.
pigsm...@hotmail.com (John Ng):
| How can you get an AI to decide that that patch there needs to be
| lighter and more intense, this place needs a faint 30 degree stroke,
| and that place needs glazing? However, for an unrealistic image, the
| AI could be trained to do those principles, but because we cannot
| ascertain whether the result is right or wrong, it becomes so-call
| creative, just like creative primitive art.
|
| (Never say never. So I can admit that it would be a long while (a
| really long long while) before it can do realistic paintings. The
| costs will thus be uneconomically foreboding.)
|
| The real point I am making is that because good "realistic" paintings
| are clearly the higher form of painting by a long shot.
That hasn't been shown. First, you have to define what you
mean by "higher" -- unless we all happen to have the same
intuitions, which I don't think has been shown. "Realistic"
paintings tend to have more detail than Mondrian's (later)
paintings, so the machine would have to go to more trouble to
imitate the style, but this is merely a mechanical problem.
All we can guess about the mysterious higher form in this case
is that it will probably be missing from the work done by the
machine. There are people who claim to get a sense of some
higher form from apparently simple works by Mondrian, Rothko,
and the like. I know some personally, and I have no doubt
that they are sincere.
g...@panix.com (G*rd*n):
| > Of course, the music won't really sound like a Beethoven symphony, except in
| > superficial texture and structure,
pigsm...@hotmail.com (John Ng):
| You need to qualify this a bit. Did you mean you are asking the
| machine to play Beethoven or are you said it follows Beethoven in
| style? Are you also taking about the machine using real instruments
| or synthesizing the sounds? There is a big difference, synthesized
| sounds will not sound like real instruments as synthesized inks will
| not look like oil paint.
It writes the music, which can be played using conventional
instruments, or synthesized. Real Beethoven symphonies can
also be played using a synthesizer. It doesn't sound as good
as a real-live orchestra, but I've been told the sound is
passable. There's just not much point in doing it. The use
of synthesizers to play music composed for orchestras is mostly
of use to composers for conventional orchestras, who can hear
what they have written sounds like without having to assemble
an orchestra or rely entirely on their imaginations. But
then, of course, being wise guys, they start writing for the
synthesizer directly, and the rest is history.
| ...
John Ng
> Reading your discussion I got the impression that you never really
> programmed a computer.
Hmm... how could you tell? I am a programmer by profession since
1986. But you convinced me... (maybe I am not who I am... maybe I am
just a machine).
> A computer or robot would not paint in a manner like a
> human being. Why should a program do so when there are better methods
What other methods? I am making the point that robot can paint in the
manner of Kadinsky but can never do so in the manner of Bouguereau.
In other words, a robot can paint like a human if the painting has no
right or wrong.
> To produce realistic paintings I would at first make the computer "see"….
Sure, the machine must see and understand but there are insurmountable
problems when it comes to the execution of the painting. One way a
computer can apply oil-paint is to jet it very much like a printer but
you wouldn't get nice delicate textured lines like those painted using
brushes in a single stroke. Also, as you mentioned, that would
produce too photographic a result. There is also the problem of using
oil-paint colours as opposed to the three-colour (no five) system.
The solution is still to introduce a supple robotic arm that will use
real brushes and paints. To paint like Kadinsky, the computer need
only be given the basic art principles as I suggested before. There
will still be a need for visual feedback.
Andrew D
This is still far more complex than simply writing a dozen lines of
arithmetic code in BASIC to create a program which "randomly" draw lines
and boxes on the screen according to a simple colour:size:placement
algorithm.
Andy D.
"I'm a great speller - but a hopless tpyist!"
frankvo...@web.de
.
>
>
>> A computer or robot would not paint in a manner like a
>> human being. Why should a program do so when there are better methods
>
>What other methods? I am making the point that robot can paint in the
>manner of Kadinsky but can never do so in the manner of Bouguereau.
>In other words, a robot can paint like a human if the painting has no
>right or wrong.
>.......
>The solution is still to introduce a supple robotic arm that will use
>real brushes and paints. To paint like Kadinsky, the computer need
>only be given the basic art principles as I suggested before. There
>will still be a need for visual feedback.
>
>
>John Ng
Agreed. If you really want to have oil on a canvas you need a robotic
arm that uses brushes and so on.
But in my opinion the next decade will be a time of virtuality. Using
computers for producing fine visual arts will often result in virtual
images or videos looked at a screen which may be very realistic even
with surreal scenes.
Frank
__________________
http://www.opartandmore.de
Chris
since it would appear that Pollock's work is well defined by its approximate
fractal dimension. (for those interested, there's an article on this in the
December Scientific American). This is a relatively simple measure to
calculate; and certainly doable with a not too complicated video system,
while programming a computer to learn to create such a pattern might be an
interesting problem in AI. Even working up a basic simulation might be fun.
Any takers?
Cheers;
Chris
"John Ng" <pigsm...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:d1bb492a.02120...@posting.google.com...
John Ng
> But in my opinion the next decade will be a time of virtuality.
Ah, that is a totally different problem and is where arts will be
going to, even today. However, the question is really where it is the
very same line of arts that has come down from Leonardo, and whether
it would render painting an archaic art form. Is the result going to
be better, or just different?
Computer art is really a different ball game. Copying from nature is
out of the question... too easy... even Photoshop can do a very fine
job now (no need for improvement). I am not talking about virtual
art. There is a lot of possibility but I find it just too different
to relate the two. A very close analogy is the automobile and the
horse. Does an automobile render a horse obsolete? Some functions
are superceded, but I think the answer is still "No".
John Ng
G*rd*n
| > But in my opinion the next decade will be a time of virtuality.
pigsm...@hotmail.com (John Ng):
| Ah, that is a totally different problem and is where arts will be
| going to, even today. However, the question is really where it is the
| very same line of arts that has come down from Leonardo, and whether
| it would render painting an archaic art form. Is the result going to
| be better, or just different?
|
| Computer art is really a different ball game. Copying from nature is
| out of the question... too easy... even Photoshop can do a very fine
| job now (no need for improvement). I am not talking about virtual
| art. There is a lot of possibility but I find it just too different
| to relate the two. A very close analogy is the automobile and the
| horse. Does an automobile render a horse obsolete? Some functions
| are superceded, but I think the answer is still "No".
One still must (re)present dreams and visions -- some of
which may be pretty "realistic"!
Andrew D
pigsm...@hotmail.com (John Ng) wrote:
>frankvo...@web.de wrote in message news:
>
>> But in my opinion the next decade will be a time of virtuality.
>
>Ah, that is a totally different problem and is where arts will be
>going to, even today. However, the question is really where it is the
>very same line of arts that has come down from Leonardo, and whether
>it would render painting an archaic art form. Is the result going to
>be better, or just different?
On a similar subject... I've seen Photoshop manipulated images - digital
prints - turning up in exhibitions lately. One or two have even won awards
despite the fact that the end result was achieved with a standard PS
filter with no creative input from the 'artist'.
>Computer art is really a different ball game. Copying from nature is
>out of the question... too easy... even Photoshop can do a very fine
>job now (no need for improvement). I am not talking about virtual
>art. There is a lot of possibility but I find it just too different
>to relate the two. A very close analogy is the automobile and the
>horse. Does an automobile render a horse obsolete? Some functions
>are superceded, but I think the answer is still "No".
Photoshop cannot "create" an artistic landscape, not even with the aid of
a digital camera. When I paint a landscape - and I'm hardly alone in this
- I make "executive decisions" about what to leave in and what to leave
out. These decisions relate not only to simple composition rules but also
to "the story" being told by the painting. In order to leave something
out, I have to either take a look at what is behind that item or invent
something to fill that space on the surface. No amount of "cloning" in PS
will ever come close to filling these spaces satisfactorily.
Chris
of identifying a true Mondrian pattern from a pseudo-Mondrian? I.e., are
there art experts who could generally pick Mondrian's out of a random
collection of similar patterns? Or at least claim to be able to? Like any
other learning process, and AI program needs information not only on what is
right, but what is wrong. It would be sad if just some random lines & boxes
was all there was to it...
Cheers;
Chris
"Thur" <a@spamless.z> wrote in message
news:HiFH9.3681$Cu.4...@newsfep2-win.server.ntli.net...
> x-no-archive: yes
> This page seems to be relevant to some of this discussion:_
> "1) In my opinion, Mondrian's abstract compositions are beautifully simple
> understated, totally abstract, and happen to be relatively
> easy to simulate via computer :-) "
> http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~dcw/webprogs/mondrian.html
> Best of luck with it..
> Thur
>
Chris
Shapiro talk about it? (Is that the essay on the humanity of abstract art?)
I'm not deeply familiar with his writing, what I have read seems tediously
dated & Marxist.
If you know anyone who claims to be able to do this (separate real from
pseudo Mondrians accurately), let me know. For me it's a question of
intellectual curiosity - how much of Mondrian (for example) is rule based
(and hence reducible/abstractable/formulaic to the level of a computer
program), and how much of it is really intuitive or inventive and highly
personal? I don't know.
I'd also hasten to add that I'm not here to disparage abstract art (at least
not in this thread :); I'm very aware that one of the main reasons that
there is a significant amount of confusion about the work of many great
classical artists is that they - just like everyone else - worked using a
relatively small set of 'tools'. For example, if you go back to the 1600's,
you'll find that many Dutch artists learned from similar workbooks - they
learned to draw eyes and hands etc. in a relatively standardized fashion;
they followed the same rules of composition and expressionist, etc.In a
sense they spoke a shared visual language (which is largely closed to us
today), and great art was built on (often minor) variations of that
language.
Back to Mondrian; one aspect of his work makes it particularly attractive
for this sort of thing - his geometric work is primarily noted for
composition. That doesn't really get lost in the translation to the computer
screen, unlike brushwork or subtle tonal relationships.
Cheers;
Chris
.
"Dan Fox" <danf...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:20021205084119.195$A...@newsreader.com...
> "Chris" <n...@this.address> wrote:
> > Thanks, that was rather fun...An interesting question then is there any
> > way of identifying a true Mondrian pattern from a pseudo-Mondrian? I.e.,
> > are there art experts who could generally pick Mondrian's out of a
random
> > collection of similar patterns? Or at least claim to be able to? Like
any
> > other learning process, and AI program needs information not only on
what
> > is right, but what is wrong. It would be sad if just some random lines &
> > boxes was all there was to it...
> > Cheers;
> > Chris
>
> Art experts can pick a Mondrian out of a group of similar paintings as
> easily as they can pick a Pollack, Rothko, Tapies, Twombly - or a Van
Gogh,
> for that matter. Contrary to ignorant opinions often expressed here, this
> work is almost impossible to copy convincingly. Those who can't tell the
> difference are in the same league as folks who can't tell the difference
> between a recorded symphony and musak.
>
> For an excellent short essay on composition in Mondrian's work, see Meyer
> Shapiro's essay on the artist.
>
> --
> Dan
> http://www.danfoxart.com
Mani Deli
>Art experts can pick a Mondrian out of a group of similar paintings as
>easily as they can pick a Pollack, Rothko, Tapies, Twombly -
Wishful thinking. They can't. They go on documentation and signatures.
>for that matter. Contrary to ignorant opinions often expressed here, this
>work is almost impossible to copy convincingly.
For Fox!
. In fact that is why his work is such a miserable rehash of 1950's
ersatz.
>For an excellent short essay on composition in Mondrian's work, see Meyer
>Shapiro's essay on the artist.
You can read my opinion of Shapiro's Artspeak at
http://www3.sympatico.ca/manideli/FebArtspeak.htm
Mani Deli
>Hi, Thur. Thanks for the link - very cool! The key word in the sentence
>above is 'simulate.' The simulations remind me of one writer's statement -
>'comparing modern art originals to copies is like comparing a living
>person to a corpse.'
>
Most any computer generated fractal if far more interesting then 98%
of Modern Academic Art, original or simulated.
Mani Deli
>Thanks Dan; I have heard this too, but I have never seen it tested. Does
>Shapiro talk about it? (Is that the essay on the humanity of abstract art?)
>I'm not deeply familiar with his writing, what I have read seems tediously
>dated & Marxist.
and stupid!
>I'd also hasten to add that I'm not here to disparage abstract art (at least
>not in this thread :); I'm very aware that one of the main reasons that
>there is a significant amount of confusion about the work of many great
>classical artists is that they - just like everyone else - worked using a
>relatively small set of 'tools'. For example, if you go back to the 1600's,
>you'll find that many Dutch artists learned from similar workbooks
This is true for all art. However in order to follow today's so called
rules one needs almost no skill. That is why there is such a huge
population of failure artists.
>
>Back to Mondrian; one aspect of his work makes it particularly attractive
>for this sort of thing - his geometric work is primarily noted for
>composition.
There is no composition in Mondrian. It is decorative pattern not
complex enough to consider as an example of composition.
Andrew D
Fox) wrote:
>"Chris" <n...@this.address> wrote:
>> Thanks, that was rather fun...An interesting question then is there any
>> way of identifying a true Mondrian pattern from a pseudo-Mondrian? I.e.,
>> are there art experts who could generally pick Mondrian's out of a random
>> collection of similar patterns? Or at least claim to be able to? Like any
>> other learning process, and AI program needs information not only on what
>> is right, but what is wrong. It would be sad if just some random lines &
>> boxes was all there was to it...
>> Cheers;
>> Chris
>
>Art experts can pick a Mondrian out of a group of similar paintings as
>easily as they can pick a Pollack, Rothko, Tapies, Twombly - or a Van Gogh,
>for that matter.
The question is not whether one artist, or a computer, can convincingly
copy an existing, well-documented Mondrian but whether they can produce a
new piece which, if Mondrain was still alive and painting, would be easy
to pass off as a Mondrian original.
In other words, if you randonly placed ten never before seen paintings in
a room, two Mondrians and eight fakes from four different sources - all
with different compositions - would experts be able to reliably pick the
genuine articles? If so, can you suggest what might give them away?
Andrew D
Fox) wrote:
[snip]
>Take a look at the Mondrians and the computer copies shown on the site that
>someone posted earlier. This is a good example: the copies are 'furniture
>store abstraction' - the visual equivalent of muzak. If you study the real
>thing and the copies together, objectively, I'm sure you'll be able to see
>the difference, too.
The most o=bvious difference, even for a complete novice, is that the
copies are too "clean". They are pure colour on pure white. This is due to
the simplicity of this algorithm. It is also unlikely that the algorithm
uses any "rules" of composition but is simply placing random lines and
boxes within a given space. Whack a "golden mean" check in there and the
output would differ considerably, Then, print them out on off white stock
or canvas and rescan them in for a better comparison with the original
samples.
gaynorgallagher
>
> >Take a look at the Mondrians and the computer copies shown on the site that
> >someone posted earlier. This is a good example: the copies are 'furniture
> >store abstraction' - the visual equivalent of muzak. If you study the real
> >thing and the copies together, objectively, I'm sure you'll be able to see
> >the difference, too.
> The most o=bvious difference, even for a complete novice, is that the
> copies are too "clean". They are pure colour on pure white. This is due to
> the simplicity of this algorithm. It is also unlikely that the algorithm
> uses any "rules" of composition but is simply placing random lines and
> boxes within a given space. Whack a "golden mean" check in there and the
> output would differ considerably, Then, print them out on off white stock
> or canvas and rescan them in for a better comparison with the original
> samples.
>
> Andy D.
I once saw a film about what makes Mondriaan different to a perfect copy (BBC or Channel 4). the crux of it was that the pictures
are full of imperfections which you can see if you stand up close to them. this produces a totally different quality to that which
you get from the machine like quality in the copies. the white is not pure white and there is a variation in the tone across one
block of colour. the black lines are not perfect, they have lots of bumps and dents as well as variation in thickness. they are also
not consistently black, there are underlying tones of blue and red and yellow. the computer generated copies are so perfect and flat
as to produce a harsh look. the originals in squidgy oils are really quite soft. the result is that an original mondriaan has unique
features akin to that of handwriting.
gaynor
--
less heat to reply
NOSPAM
>One hour, to the minute, from my post. What's it like to live at the
>computer? Get your meals there, too?
>
>--
>Dan
>http://www.danfoxart.com
absurd or what? not the most intelligent soul ;-)
NOSPAM
frankvo...@web.de
<gaynorg...@boilingmail.com> wrote:
>
>> The most o=bvious difference, even for a complete novice, is that the
>> copies are too "clean". They are pure colour on pure white. This is due to
>> the simplicity of this algorithm. It is also unlikely that the algorithm
>> uses any "rules" of composition but is simply placing random lines and
>> boxes within a given space. Whack a "golden mean" check in there and the
>> output would differ considerably, Then, print them out on off white stock
>> or canvas and rescan them in for a better comparison with the original
>> samples.
>>
>> Andy D.
>
>I once saw a film about what makes Mondriaan different to a perfect copy (BBC or Channel 4). the crux of it was that the pictures
>are full of imperfections which you can see if you stand up close to them. this produces a totally different quality to that which
>you get from the machine like quality in the copies. the white is not pure white and there is a variation in the tone across one
>block of colour. the black lines are not perfect, they have lots of bumps and dents as well as variation in thickness. they are also
>not consistently black, there are underlying tones of blue and red and yellow. the computer generated copies are so perfect and flat
>as to produce a harsh look. the originals in squidgy oils are really quite soft. the result is that an original mondriaan has unique
>features akin to that of handwriting.
>gaynor
>--
>less heat to reply
>
>
The copies which you normally will find are too "clean". That's right.
But this depends on the art of programming. It is possible to paint a
line by a program which is not completely straight and contains some
"faults". And it is possible to fill an area with a color with very
small variations in it and "faults" at the border. But you have to
take great pains over this kind of programming so that nearly nobody
is using such methods.
Frank
__________________________
http://www.opartandmore.de
Mani Deli
of Van Gogh) "Fish soup for fish soups sake.
As to Pollock, "The same fish-soup as Monticelli, but far less tasty,
merely the indigestion that goes with it."
Edward G. Nilges
> Niglges' brilliant observations
Thank you. However, you misspelled my name. A minor error.
>>suggest a perfect way for artzy
> fartzies to make a living. One only needs a camera obscura ( an opaque
> projector) and a large stove..
>
> With this simple equipment on can imitate Vermeer which I'm sure would
> sell to philistines, fascists and assorted bourgeois in realist
> galleries.
>
> With all the cash you earn you can now pay tuition to art college and
> take four years to learn how to express yourself, do stripes like
> Mondrian, drip like Pollock, schmier like de Kooning and get a degree
> which you can use to paint as well as Fox.
>
Anger, hatred and bile are not arguments.
Mani, if one unpacks "no skill no art" to mean that "skill" is a
NECESSARY but not SUFFICIENT condition for "art", then an interesting
equation results.
SKILL + X -> ART
You seem to mistake me as saying that the tricks Hockney described
make great art, which is a laughable reading of what I said, which
really was to change the above equation to
X -> ART
or really just ART (as in the name of the Abstract Expressionist
journal of the 1950s, It Is: as in the line from Glengarry Glen Ross,
"my name is F*ck You.")
That is, by showing that skill can be completely automated, one shows
that your philosophy is completely wrong: skill has nothing to do with
art at all.
To show this in more detail, indeed to hammer you down in detail, let
us return to the Mani Thesis:
SKILL + X -> ART
This is in common parlance the common idea that "art results from
talent and skill", or "you must have technical skill but it don't mean
a thing if it ain't got that swing (where x==swing.)
The problem with the common notion as expressed in my symbolic
notation which summarizes your foolish ideas is apparent if we look at
X.
For we see that the equation is recursive and should be rewritten as
SKILL + ART -> ART
In other words, ordinary language is ambiguous as well as recursive.
The ordinary person believes like you in the Foolish Idea: "I refuse
to appreciate the art, I refuse to be open to it, UNLESS I can see a
skillful labor process in the making of the art."
But at the same time, X is art, too, for it occupies the SAME
conceptual space that "good will" occupies for Kant's ETHICS in Kant's
Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. Ethics often runs parellel to
aesthetics.
Which is to say that Kant shows that all sorts of pragmatic "skills"
such as courage, magnamity and so forth can lead to ethical wrong such
as war in the case of courage (the courageous man is willing to
conduct war unjustly) or overspending in the case of magnamity (the
magnaminous man may be like Shakespeare's Timon and spend too much on
friends.)
In a parallel manner, all sorts of artistic skill at drawing and
painting can produce stunningly bad results, whether under my Adornian
test (poetry could not be written by a concentration camp commandant)
or on simple artistic evaluations. Auctions are full of unsaleable
paintings painted without oomph but with skill. Your childish
Mondrian bathroom wall used skill to produce a vile piece of garbage
on both the ethical and artistic plane (it also sucks and I ask you to
remove it: it insults the memory of a better man.)
This means that if you believe SKILL + x -> ART, you must believe that
SKILL + ART -> ART, and this is nonsense UNLESS skill is zero or the
first art term is zero.
Picasso was a natural draftsman at the age of four, and he aced his
exams at the Madrid academy in his teens: the Madrid academy was
completely committed to traditional skill.
But when Picasso produced "skillful" drawings at the age of four, he
was not exercising skill at all. When a child this age does this the
act is midway between what a truly skillful artist does and what
Photoshop does. It is not what we mean by human skill which I think
you would say is in part the result of art school training at a
traditional *atelier*.
What I conclude is parallel to both Kant and GE Moore. It is that
just as you cannot explain, eliminate The Good, Art and art-quality is
a primitive term that exists. The fact is that it is pernicious
nonsense to say, as you claim, that there can be any explanation for
Art, or any criteria for art that breaks it down.
The reason, as Kant saw on the ethical plane, is that if you do this
you reduce the meaning of what it is to be human. In ethics if you
have an explanation of what it is to be good, an algorithm or set of
rules, then you dehumanize because you eliminate FREEDOM. In ethics
if you have the weaker necessary but insufficient condition you also
eliminate FREEDOM. For example, if you say "all good men are always
faithful to their wives" you eliminate the possibility that being
unfaithful in some context might actually be good.
Lincoln showed no writing skill in the Gettysburg Address, and
Microsoft Word points out that its sentences are overlong. Yet the
address is a work of literary art.
You may want to eliminate FREEDOM. Fine. But what Kant shows is that
you then should leave the room because freedom is part of being human
and indeed joining the discussion in the first place.
Many people today are tired of being human and want therefore to
eliminate FREEDOM in place of the market valuation or what ev er. But
these people should not join what are in fact discussions of
aesthetics. The ability to do philosophy presupposes, in Kant's
transcendental sense, FREEDOM.
The French Academy's wrong was to close the bar to what we now know is
the art of Monet based on mechanistically applied criteria...the
satisfaction of which can now be accomplished using Photoshop.
I realize this is complicated. It is warranted by the fact that your
Web site attempts to do aesthetics, a division of formal philosophy,
and it is obvious to me that you have no training in philosophy at
all. This would be completely forgiveable were it not for the fact
that you at a mininum appear to be motivated by hatred and bile, and
you have insulted me repeatedly.
Thank you for your attention, dear Mani.
Mani Deli
D) wrote:
>In article <d1bb492a.02120...@posting.google.com>,
>pigsm...@hotmail.com (John Ng) wrote:
>
>Photoshop cannot "create" an artistic landscape, not even with the aid of
>a digital camera.
Learn Bryce, or Lightwave.
Dr. Slick
> Most any computer generated fractal if far more interesting then 98%
> of Modern Academic Art, original or simulated.
> ...no skill no art!
>
just really hate Modern Academic Art.
I still think computer animation has a long way to go, versus Ray
Harryhausen ("Clash of the Titans", "Jason and the Argonauts", etc..)
and the old Disney stuff ("Fanstasia") and Chuck Jones.
...no Brain no Taste!
Slick
Edward G. Nilges
> On 29 Nov 2002 16:23:01 -0800, spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G.
> Nilges) wrote:
>
> >You can program a computer to essentially copy/forge Mondrian, to make
> >a "Mondrian" of let us say his most severe style. You can NOT program
> >a computer to react to New York City of 1945 with "Broadway Boogie
> >Woogie",
>
> The painting is on the level of a lousy patch quilt and I suspect a
> program can be written to simulate similar crap. However one needn't
> write a program. I can knock of similar crap with photoshop in very
> little time.
I can, with training and tools, go to the Louvre and copy Poussin.
This reduces your argument to absurdity.
van Meegeren was able to knock off Vermeer in this manner, and, with
Photoshop and supplemental tools such as a projector, he would not
take as long as he actually did.
Because your foolish argument applies to BOTH schools, it is nonsense.
What you cannot do is replicate the life of Mondrian, as such. For
you would have to do so, not by emulating in your biography and art
the biography of Mondrian, you would actually have to be the "first"
Mondrian, existing from about 1890 to about 1950, who unlike you had
no "Mondrian" to imitate.
This is a logical absurdity: yet you are filled with rage that
Mondrian happened to be seen as in his personal evolution expressive
of the spirit of his times.
>
> >Therefore Mondrian, just like Vermeer, can be copied and forged but
> >not made into a Lisp program. This demolishes arguments that use
> >computer-programmability to disprove the "art" of modern art.
>
> No one disproves such art. One shows that it is easily imitated with a
> computer or in the case of Mondrian's nothings., easily imitated with
> paint. I don't believe that what constitutes great art is easily
> imitated.
>
Great art is easily copied literally and has been for hundreds of
years. To do so takes zero art but much skill. The copyists in the
Louvre may be inspired artists (and may become both learned and
inspired by the act of literal copying from which one learns much.)
But we never call an artist great who copies literally, do we.
You are trying to square the circle, for when you say "imitated" you
don't mean "imitated" in the sense of "copied." What you want is a
"greatness" which consists for you in a random collection of
attributes including pre-existing commercial success and "skill" such
that you can recognize a school.
This is the narcissism of the bourgeois identified by Adorno in his
essays on music who is as a result of material relations literally
unable to recognize art as such but who needs to celebrate it
second-hand. In Adorno, he searches for the *leitmotif*. You I am
afraid search for skill.
> >> argumentative here to make a point. I enjoy
> >> some of Mondrian's work. Clever fellow.)
>
> I never found anything by Mondrian to be any more then idiotic hype,
> especially his writing and critical BS about it.
Could the problem be you? Just asking.
>
> PS the closest Mondrian came to Vermeer was when he was standing next
> to one.
Edward G. Nilges
> spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges) wrote in message news:<f5dda427.02112...@posting.google.com>...
>
> [...]
>
> > > There you go again with that Fascist-calling stuff.
> >
> > Yes, there I go again. I will do so until it penetrates your skull:
> > the canonical Fascists, the Nazis, were not Space Monsters from the
> > Planet Zork.
> >
> > Instead, they arose from a society similar to ours by mechanisms which
> > operate in ours. To examine these mechanisms is not to "call" people
> > "Nazis." It is to examine these goddamn mechanisms in order to
> > prevent a recurrence of Fascism.
> >
> > Mike Godwin has said "on the Internet, the probability of comparision
> > to Hitler approaches unity." He may fail to see that this may be not
> > due to rhetorical excess but to the fact that Hitler's interesting
> > personality, which combined features of the artistic layabout with a
> > streak of barbarism, may be quite common in urban environments,
> > including (and perhaps especially) in so-called "hip" urban
> > environments, with which the Internet has joined.
> >
> > > You sound terribly "Sixties." I mean, are you implying
> >
> > Oh, good.
> >
> > > there is community Mani is part of where people are
> > > running around with black uniforms and those "gendarme
> > > hats" with the bills on them? I can't see Mani Deli
> > > as being any more of a Fascist than the man on the
> > > moon. I think you should challenge yourself
> > > to try to get through your next one-dozen posts
> > > without calling anyone a Fascist. Betcha can't
> > > do it!
> > >
> > An examination of my language will show you, of course, that I did not
> > "call" anyone a "Nazi."
> >
> > Are you even aware that structurally similar parties to the National
> > Socialists have appeared in EVERY developed nation during the course
> > of the Twentieth century, including the KKK in the USA, the "King and
> > Country" movement of the 1930s in Britain, many parties in France, the
> > Falange in Spain, of course the Italian Fascisti and even a form of
> > fascism in the former USSR which reveres the memory of Uncle Joe
> > Stalin?
> >
> > Are you even aware that the reputation of artists in the USA and
> > Europe for liberal or left sympathies is, as far as I can determined,
> > statistically unwarranted? Many USA and European artists, from TS
> > Eliot to Dali, have traditionally conservative or right-nutbar
>
> Well, Celine was an out-and-out Hitler supporter and
> I think he was one of the 20th century's best novelists.
> Now, before anyone draws any hasty and unwarranted
> conclusions about ME, I would ask them to reflect on
> the reason that Allen Ginsberg, a favorite poet of
> mine, actually went to Paris to pay homage to Celine
> in the late 1960's. If you know anything about
> Ginsberg, you know he held no brief for Nazis.
> Yet, he was paying homage to Celine's achievements
> as a novelist, not approving in any way Celine's
> actions before and during World War II. I might
> add that the beastly Nazi's were responsible for
> mudering a lot of favorite people of mine,
> including poets Max Jacob, Robert Desnos, and
> Saint-Pol Roux. Yet, were I to refuse to read
> Celine because of his detestable politics, I
> would be depriving myself of some great
> 20th century literature.
A responsible philosophy of art would start with an ethical
precommittment, that would recognize that the appreciation of the
sublime may be at the apex of aesthetic experience but should be
ranked below the ethical impulse. However, refusing to read Celine
has no ethical consequences.
Celine is only one author, who proves nothing, in general. Beethoven
was an unpleasant and anti-Semitic character.
But this does not remove art's ethical precommittments.
>
> > sympathies. This is exacerbated by the unwilling position of most
> > artists in the struggling lower middle class, which is instructed by
> > Fascisti to blame those lower in the pile.
> >
> > > in a
> > > > technical sense: its linkage is based on hatred and not solidarity.
> > >
> > > "Solidarity?" What, are we all supposed to sing
> > > Cumbaya now? I am suspicious of that word
> > > "solildarity" because the way Communists misused
> > > it. How much solidarity was there in the Gulag?
> >
> > Actually, quite a lot. If you would actually trouble to READ
> > Solhenystyn you would learn that the *zeks* or inmates did show a
> > great deal of solidarity, which they'd learned when "free" in the
> > Communist society, against the guards who they regarded as
> > petit-bourgeois thugs. Furthermore, many *zeks* preserved their
> > Commie or socialist sympathies even AFTER being thrown in the clink.
> >
> > > >
> > > > In the 1930s, Surrealist art was despised by the same people who
> > > > despised Cubism. In order to gain acceptance by the sort of wealthy
> > > > people who supported the demi-Fascist Franco regime, Dali tore
> > > > Surrealism away from the rest of Modernismus.
> > >
> > > I dealt with some of this in my other post. In my
> > > view, it was to Dali's credit that he had the perception
> > > to know where Communism was going. He didn't want any
> > > part of it. You can criticize Dali, but what he did
> >
> > Nor do I.
> >
> > > was far better than being a party to supporting
> > > Russian communism. How would YOU feel to be freezing
> > > your butt and starving in the Gulag, and then hearing
> > > the way bigshot artists and writers from other countries
> > > were kissing Stalin's fanny? And, as I also said
> >
> > Commencing about 1936, many of these people began to depart the
> > Communist camp as more details about the show trials came out and in
> > France these FORMER sympathizers formed an intellectual resistance to
> > Communism in the form of European social democracy.
> >
> > If you are thinking of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, note that they
> > sheltered Leon Trotsky which is not quite "kissing Stalin's butt."
> >
> > Indeed, during the period 1930..1990 CPUSA members were NOT writers or
> > artists but instead small-time clerks, shopowners, importers and of
> > course FBI agents.
> >
> >
> > > in the other post, while I hold no brief for Franco,
> > > when it came to murder and oppression he was a small
> > > fry compared to Stalin.
> >
> > Well, try telling that to the families of the people Franco killed
> > after his victory. Also, try telling that to the Latin American thugs
> > who in the 1970s used Franco as a role model and disappeared thousands
> > in the name of the same authoritarian, where not Fascist, model.
> > >
> > > The result is that
> > > > today artistic conservatives are united only by hatred of art which to
> > > > them lacks "skill", a "skill" which they are in constant process of
> > > > redefining.
> > > >
> > > > For note that Mani considers one of his natural allies, Huntington
> > > > Hartford, a nut bar: Huntington Hartford was a wealthy man who built a
> > > > gallery of representational art in the 1960s on Columbus Circle in New
> > > > York.
>
> He was an A & P Grocery chain heir. He was quite
> the womanizer, too, and at one time he actually
> bought into a famous modeling agency for the
> "social opportunities" he thought it would
> provide. Quite a character.
> > >
> > > From all accounts, it was an amazing museum, filled
> > > with excellent art. Exactly what did happen to it?
> >
> > I would like to know. The building was there in the 1980s when I
> > lived in the NYC region but was closed.
> > > >
> > > > This lack of solidarity was identified by Klaus Theweilt, a German
> > > > author who analyzed the social psychology of Fascist movements in his
> > > > book Male Fantasies.
> > >
> > > Look, if I see "solidarity" and "Fascist" one more
> > > time, I am going to fall asleep.
> >
> > Well, sure, you have not acquired the learning to understand it. I
> > understand your boredom.
> > > >
> > > > Theweilt shows that after the collapse of the Nazi regime, no Nazi
> > > > "guerrilla" movement was formed despite the fears of the Allies. It
> > > > appears that the surviving Nazis so despised each other that they were
> > > > not about to do any male bonding in the *Schwarzer Wald* or Bavarian
> > > > Alps while fighting off Omar Bradley. Instead they scuttled off to
> > > > safe havens as individuals.
> > >
> > > I certainly am not going to argue they had any
> > > humanitarian awards coming to them.
> > > >
> > > > On the political left the 1789 ideals of liberte, egalite, fraternite
> > > > contained within themselves the basic foundation for guerrilla
> > > > movements and "male bonding."
> > >
> > > Sure, but look what happened in '93. They were
> > > male-bonded right onto the guillotine! They
> > > had no mercy on others, and they were shown
> > > none themselves.
> >
> > Actually, my information is that Robespierre and Ste-Juste went hand
> > in hand to the guillotine, saying "you may now scatter our limbs to
> > the four winds! Republics will rise from them!", which is only
> > something a Frenchman would say.
>
> You have obviously being reading a spurious
> account by someone with a political agenda.
> The truth was not so pretty. Robespierre
> could not speak because his jaw was bandaged
> because of the damage caused by a bullet he
> had fired in his half-assed attempted to shoot
> himself, once he had seen the way the cards
> were falling. When the executioner pulled
> off the wrapping, Robespierre let out a horrible
> scream of pain. This miserable fanatic had no
> mercy on others and--while his end was pitiful--
> he simply got sliced up in the monstrous killing
> machine he had such a major part in unleashing
> in the first place.
My information is that the words are St-Juste's, not Robespierre's.
> >
> > >
> > > But as opposed to traditional Tory
> > > > political and artistic conservatism, artistic reactionary movements
> > > > like "no skil no art" don't have a unifying central theme which I
> > > > think caused Mani to reject his natural buddy Hartford.
> > >
> > > There's a lot I don't know about that situation,
> > > regarding what happened to the Hartford Huntington
> > > and where all the art went.
> > >
> > > >
> > > > The collection of artists Mani despises has no common unifying theme
> > > > for what he calls "skill" is completely incoherent. Dali was thought
> > > > to have no "skill" for the very good reason that he doesn't know how
> > > > to compose a space: his "skill" is not in breaking new ground but in
> > > > taking traditional forms and "morphing" them in an automatic
> > > > fashion...which could be simulated today using a computer.
> > >
> > > If that is true, where does it put Mark Rothko
> > > or Mondrian? Even a dumb chunk of software could
> > > simulate them. (And actually, I am just being
> >
> > No: because it would probably not generate Mondrian's CHANGES, whether
> > from imagery to abstraction in the 1930s, or the lightened pallette
> > and livelier compositions he started using after moving to New York in
> > 1945.
> >
> > You can program a computer to essentially copy/forge Mondrian, to make
> > a "Mondrian" of let us say his most severe style. You can NOT program
> > a computer to react to New York City of 1945 with "Broadway Boogie
> > Woogie", for in fact many scenes in New York are just as dreary and
> > rectilinear as those in Holland.
> >
> > Therefore Mondrian, just like Vermeer, can be copied and forged but
> > not made into a Lisp program. This demolishes arguments that use
> > computer-programmability to disprove the "art" of modern art.
> >
> > > argumentative here to make a point. I enjoy
> > > some of Mondrian's work. Clever fellow.)
> > > >
> > > > This is where I think art reduces to ethics. A negative critique of
> > > > society with no redemption sours to Dali's psychoanalytic fascism
> > >
> > > zzzzzzzzzzz........
> >
> > I am aware that it is somehow hip to be attention-disordered. It is
> > the new conformity.
>
> Well, no offense, but I was not so "attention-disordered"
> as to report, as if true, some French political hack's
> canard about the end of Robespierre. And I really think
It was St Juste, and it was in a speech at the assembly during which
he and Robespierre were removed...not at their execution.
> you are relying far too heavily on worn-out buzzwords
> like "Fascist" and "solidarity." You need to get
> yourself a new set of buzzwords! Anyway, I did read
> your post, and I did find many of your thoughts
> interesting and informative. a.g.b-p
Fascist may only be a buzzword, but to regard it as only a buzzword
interestingly deprives us of a language for describing political
pathology on the right...including Internet pathology. The left is
accused of complicity in left pathology in a language kept alive by
neoconservative pundits after the passage of Communism, but if anyone
responsibly compares actions to those of midcentury European fascists
and is accused of using a worn-out language, I can only conclude that
the desire is not so much discussion, as to deprive people of a
language.
Thus, American radio features hate-filled commentators who are coded
as merely conducting "healthy debate" when they engage in pure
fantasies about "tenured radicals" in universities where centre-right
committments are de facto requirements for employment, let alone
tenure. No-one has the historical memory to recall that Hitler used
radio in the same manner, or the language to articulate this thought.
However, if a politician proposes single-payer health insurance, the
language of near-totalitarian big government and "lack of choice" is
oiled, waxed and ready to go.
This is because concepts like Fascism and Communism don't exist
independent of mass behavior, and they have no pre-existing meaning.
What's important is the use.
I suggest that the media, since the election of Reagan, has
systematically used a bogus form of technological language to code
social justice as something we could afford yesterday. It plays on
peoples' sense of ecological and spiritual malaise, to suggest that
new computer-like political technology, more adapted to "reality"
considered as hypostatized and unchangeable, and not constructed.
Acting in relatively unconscious ways in the manner of a neural net
searching for a best result, and not as the result of conscious
conspiracy, we may say that the media, considered as an automaton, has
"discovered" that in the increasing behavioral sink of the modern
city, people tend to be both ignorant, and cynical. The pollsters'
numbers reveal that the expectation is that solidarity will be
exploited in a trashing of the commons, therefore what's presented as
a viable alternative has a gloss of technocracy and an apparent
value-freedom.
No discussion is made of the moral worth of, say, funding universal
health insurance in preference to a pre-emptive invasion of an Iraq
where weapons inspectors have found that the Iraqis are apparently and
at this time most enthusiastic about making and swilling hooch as
opposed to bombs.
Instead a technocratic language of feasibility and pragmatism decides
all questions. Stealing a gloss from the language of math and
technology, the language dissolves upon examination into
meaninglessness.
Fascist politicians discovered that there mass appeal was not in
general to the informed voter who is so foolish as to think himself
engaged in a democratic dialog with his leaders. They discovered
instead a technology for marshaling the attention disorders of the
ordinary person in such a way to achieve the desired result. The
result, as discovered by Herbert Marcuse working on behalf of the
American proto-CIA (the OSS) was that by 1945, the ordinary German
slob did not believe his leaders, but followed them any way.
Modern political technology including focus groups and polls gains its
power by a sort of just-in-time methodology which is concerned to
manufacture just one result, and that is of course election in the
manipulated system. To its insiders, to its players, it is known to
be a circle jerk all the way down. Low-level operatives, for example,
manufacture desired conclusions for higher-level by in many cases
paying people to take part in focus groups and manipulating them to
deliver one of a predefined set of desired results. The higher-level
operatives further massage the data which they already know is bad in
order to please their own superiors.
This is similar to the betrayals that occured in the Nazi party and
similar organizations as a consequence of the original misunderstood
Nietszchean ideology, which applies within and without the
organization. Apart from the Fuhrerprinzip, Naziism was a
bureaucratic circle-jerk all the way down and Commandant Klink may
have been the reality as seen in Bob Crane's Hogan's Heroes. Apart
from the Holocaust, Naziism was a circle-jerk in which precisely those
ignorant thugs who should not have power had power exercised what they
thought was their cunning upon each other as well as the ordinary
slob. The Holocaust shows that there is a critical point in these
circle jerks in which they are capable of evil, as was Captain
Medina's company at My Lai.
Before My Lai, Medina's company was a garden variety military circle
jerk. The problem is that we find these amusing and don't realize, as
did Hannah Arendt, the banality of evil and how ordinary slobs are
capable of it under pressure. Arendt's examination of the way that
even on trial in Jerusalem Eichmann thought he was a good man
following the Kantian categorical imperative shows us that we do need
to use Fascism if only to warn good men about to become very bad men
that this road was traveled before.
Cognitive psychology has something called "the fundamental attribution
error" and this is the language that generalizes from a good or bad
act to the idea that so and so is a good, or bad, man, in all
circumstances. Of course, there is survival value in snap judgements:
Ugh Fanug, back in the stone age, had to decide quickly who was and
was not a stand-up guy able to join him in the hunt. Nonetheless this
language hides the fact that Hitler was not "bad" at six months.
If we can't use the F or Fascist word then good but unimaginative men
simply repeat at first mere idiocy (such as Germany's declaration of
war on the US) and then crime. They then stop being good and start
being evil. If we can hiss "Fascist" at them they might knock off
their BS.
If we do not label stuff as Fascist and do not counterpose words like
solidarity, then over time, human nature becomes insect-like and
manipulative. We already saw this in the nasty trashing of Sen.
McCain based on his being a prisoner of war: the Bush team suggested
that Sen. McCain's service to his country had left him unequal to the
demands of the presidency and insulted all veterans thereby. The
trashing was an example of the value-free vernacular Fascism of the
Washington beltway in which the game has been predefined as win at all
costs. It was a character assassination reminiscent of the treatment
of Jewish veterans of WWI by the Nazis.
If we lack the word "fascist" it becomes impossible to set ourselves
at arm's length from the systematic willed coldness that Adorno
thought characteristic of Fascist movements. Theodore Adorno was
genuinely concerned with understanding the genesis of Fascism because
his relatives died in the camps: if you were to tell him not to use
the F word he would be unable to understand the F thing.
As a result and in the behavioral sink of the modern city, the
Internet, and in political discourse, people don't set themselves at
arm's length from Adorno's "coldness." Patterns of thought become
thought of as human nature, as in the case where we code the sqeegee
man as an annoyance and do not have the language for considering
alternatives (such as the fact that our car window is dirty and the
sqeegee man might be useful.) Then, on Sep 11, we get a little taste
of the old cold steel and have, in reciprocal fashion, no language for
grief.
How could this happen to me. Why me.
The Nazis did not think of themselves as "fascists." They thought
they were patriots doing there bit for Germany. This is in part
because there was no boundary, constructed by a word like "fascist" as
used since the war, drawn for them. Lower-level apparatchiks thought
that the Jews were being relocated, or something. People living near
the camps thought only criminal elements of the Jews were being
eliminated.
Nobody was able to send these people emails that said "you is a
fascist" because in the sense of a boundary between good and evil,
"fascist" did not exist. Joseph P. Kennedy, JFK's father, and William
Randolph Hearst, thought some of Hitler's behavior regrettable, but
nothing special if he could be appeased and made into one of "our sons
of bitches."
Because the word was not used in 1938, and could not be used because
it did not have its post-Holocaust meaning, well-meaning liberals in
the UK and America applauded appeasement because their cognitive net
foregrounded peace and had no node, no word, for "fascist" which at
that time meant "buffoon, but he keeps the trains running on time."
To call as you seem to do for nonuse of the word is I think to call
for removal of a moral distinction.
"Solidarity" is pragmatically out of date simply because there is so
little of the spirit that declares that certain betrayals are simply
not acceptable because of the needs of some group. In the behavioral
sink of the modern city, the elite spread the fantasy that the
individual will, at any moment, be transformed from a frog into a
prince, or princess...like Jennifer Lopez.
But even recent history, such as that of the Gdansk shipyards in 1980,
shows what Solidarity can perform.
William Palmer
> willia...@prodigy.net (William Palmer) wrote in message news:<cbc76035.02113...@posting.google.com>...
> > spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges) wrote in message news:<f5dda427.02112...@posting.google.com>...
>
is used so much as a general put-down that it has
little actual meaning and, I suspect, merely causes
readers to tune out your argument.
I am far more comfortable confining the term to
discussions about people like Franco and "Mus."
Sometimes I see posters going though history
and calling Napoleon a fascist, Lois the Fourteenth
a fascist, George III a fascist, etc. They simply toss
the term at anyone who strikes them as a totalitarian
or even an authoritarian figure. Yet, what meaning
can such use of the word possibly have when referring
to the large part of recorded human history when most
if not all governments were authoritarian if not
totalitarian?
> > > Are you even aware that structurally similar parties to the National
> > > Socialists have appeared in EVERY developed nation during the course
> > > of the Twentieth century, including the KKK in the USA, the "King and
> > > Country" movement of the 1930s in Britain, many parties in France, the
> > > Falange in Spain, of course the Italian Fascisti and even a form of
> > > fascism in the former USSR which reveres the memory of Uncle Joe
> > > Stalin?
> > >
> > > Are you even aware that the reputation of artists in the USA and
> > > Europe for liberal or left sympathies is, as far as I can determined,
> > > statistically unwarranted?
I just don't think it matters, regarding appreciation
of their art. At one time, Stuart Davis was a card-
carrying Communist. I still consider him one of the
greatest of all abstract artists, and in fact I think
U. S. abstract art went downhill after Davis made his
impact. On the other hand, Dali has been called a
Fascist for his living peacefully in his native Spain
under the Franco regime. In no way does that stop
me from enjoying Dali's art or from concluding that
he was the greatest painter of the Twentieth century.
[...]
> Cognitive psychology has something called "the fundamental attribution
> error" and this is the language that generalizes from a good or bad
> act to the idea that so and so is a good, or bad, man, in all
> circumstances. Of course, there is survival value in snap judgements:
> Ugh Fanug, back in the stone age, had to decide quickly who was and
> was not a stand-up guy able to join him in the hunt. Nonetheless this
> language hides the fact that Hitler was not "bad" at six months.
There is an old saying that "the devil is never so
black as he is painted." Imagining that Hitler had
horns and a tail, or at least that he spent his youth
setting German shepards' tails on fire while not
lurking in the bushes near the elementary school
playground with a bag of candy, does nothing to explain
his amazing rise to power. It is not that anyone is
going to seriously object to demonizing anyone
responsible for as much evil as Hitler, but it is
just that forgetting he had his human side, even
his good side, does not advance understanding how
he was able to become the leader of Germany in the
first place.
[...]
a.g.b-p
>>
Edward G. Nilges
> spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges) wrote in message news:<f5dda427.02120...@posting.google.com>...
> > willia...@prodigy.net (William Palmer) wrote in message news:<cbc76035.02113...@posting.google.com>...
> > > spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges) wrote in message news:<f5dda427.02112...@posting.google.com>...
> >
> [...] I still think you overuse the term fascist. It
> is used so much as a general put-down that it has
> little actual meaning and, I suspect, merely causes
> readers to tune out your argument.
>
> I am far more comfortable confining the term to
> discussions about people like Franco and "Mus."
> Sometimes I see posters going though history
> and calling Napoleon a fascist, Lois the Fourteenth
> a fascist, George III a fascist, etc. They simply toss
> the term at anyone who strikes them as a totalitarian
> or even an authoritarian figure. Yet, what meaning
> can such use of the word possibly have when referring
> to the large part of recorded human history when most
> if not all governments were authoritarian if not
> totalitarian?
(Sigh.) My use of the term was precise. You are comparing me to
people who use the term anachronistically. One thing one CANNOT do
with the word "fascist" is use it to refer to ANY leader, with the
possible exception of Napoleon Bonaparte, a possible proto-fascist,
prior to Mussolini.
Napoleon was a proto-fascist unable to be a REAL fascist because
fascism involves the manipulation of media which Napoleon could not
access. Napoleon's assassination of the duc d'Enghien and other
high-handed actions prefigure Hitler's assassination of Rohm but on
the whole it is incorrect to refer to him as a Fascist.
Furthermore, I did not "call" anyone a "Fascist." Instead, I showed
how media like radio and the Internet bias discourse towards the Right
because the Right is more invested in the hypostatization of the word
as a thing. On radio, words are compressed by advertising
considerations into brutally short segments and in the absence of
publically funded media this means that Fascist solutions and Fascist
oversimplifications like "Feminazis" are favored.
On the internet, the fact is that although bandwidth is readily
available, all sorts of considerations make posters conscious that
their words are things which can be replicated and take up
space...whether on servers or on hard disks. Empirical research is
needed but what I see is a demi-Fascist dislike of complexity and
verbosity, an anti-intellectualism based on the idea, in the back of
everyone's minds, that (1) we are NOT in a commons, but on someone's
private property and (2) Big Brother is watching, or might at some
future date.
>
>
> > > > Are you even aware that structurally similar parties to the National
> > > > Socialists have appeared in EVERY developed nation during the course
> > > > of the Twentieth century, including the KKK in the USA, the "King and
> > > > Country" movement of the 1930s in Britain, many parties in France, the
> > > > Falange in Spain, of course the Italian Fascisti and even a form of
> > > > fascism in the former USSR which reveres the memory of Uncle Joe
> > > > Stalin?
> > > >
> > > > Are you even aware that the reputation of artists in the USA and
> > > > Europe for liberal or left sympathies is, as far as I can determined,
> > > > statistically unwarranted?
>
> I just don't think it matters, regarding appreciation
> of their art. At one time, Stuart Davis was a card-
> carrying Communist. I still consider him one of the
> greatest of all abstract artists, and in fact I think
> U. S. abstract art went downhill after Davis made his
> impact. On the other hand, Dali has been called a
> Fascist for his living peacefully in his native Spain
> under the Franco regime. In no way does that stop
> me from enjoying Dali's art or from concluding that
> he was the greatest painter of the Twentieth century.
>
Look, I agree. I love Tom Eliot's poems but think the British
monarchy should be sent to the knacker's yard along with American
anglophiles.
I dislike Dali because his work sucks and contains no original
artistic ideas.
> [...]
>
> > Cognitive psychology has something called "the fundamental attribution
> > error" and this is the language that generalizes from a good or bad
> > act to the idea that so and so is a good, or bad, man, in all
> > circumstances. Of course, there is survival value in snap judgements:
> > Ugh Fanug, back in the stone age, had to decide quickly who was and
> > was not a stand-up guy able to join him in the hunt. Nonetheless this
> > language hides the fact that Hitler was not "bad" at six months.
>
> There is an old saying that "the devil is never so
> black as he is painted." Imagining that Hitler had
> horns and a tail, or at least that he spent his youth
> setting German shepards' tails on fire while not
> lurking in the bushes near the elementary school
> playground with a bag of candy, does nothing to explain
> his amazing rise to power. It is not that anyone is
> going to seriously object to demonizing anyone
> responsible for as much evil as Hitler, but it is
> just that forgetting he had his human side, even
> his good side, does not advance understanding how
> he was able to become the leader of Germany in the
> first place.
>
No, that understanding is social. Hitler would have been a layabout
and a slacker were it not for his induction into a Bavarian regiment,
in which he "found himself", for he liked serving with Germans and
hated the idea that he might get drafted into the Austro-Hungarian
mob. He also turned out to be a good soldier. Like the promises of
the modern US Army, Hitler found he could be all he could be.
The problem is that his bitterness at the surrender and Versailles was
readily marshaled by right thugs in the pay of industrialists who were
frightened of the Left revolution of 1917 and he was aided in his rise
by these people.
But as an essentially banal and unimaginative man, I think Hitler
became genuinely evil in the 1920s without every stepping back and
asking himself if he was on the true path. In the trenches, he may
have shared the anti-Semitism of non-Jewish Germans but at worst he
probably was just an overzealous pain in the ass, like Tim McVeigh
apparently was.
Indeed, the type is familiar: the Bohemian who finds himself in the
military or a technical field and becomes overzealous by compensation.
I happen to believe that the overzealousness of a mcVeigh is
compensation for the fact that modern society is what Adorno calls an
"administered world." Bureaucracies like armies and corporations
claim they want zealous, bouncy, go-ahead chaps. But in actuality
they are designed to function using the worst in us.
Hitler never mastered what was called in Vienna *schlamperei*, that
spirit which goes along to get along and which is alert to management
so that it never does more than what is wanted. Likewise from the
record Tim McVeigh.
The problem is that human beings aren't designed, in my opinion, to go
along to get along. We're designed to run after game for miles on the
savannah, drag it home, and dance for hours. Most of us handle the
need to be less than we can be with *schlamperei* and a stiff drink.
Unfortunately, neither Hitler nor McVeigh mastered this art.
And, more germane to this newsgroup, those of us who can paint, or
think we can, should never, ever be discouraged from this invaluable
outlet by clowns who say "no skill no art." Somebody should have
taken Hitler in hand and assured him that the Vienna academy was not
the last word. The saddest thing Hitler ever said was recorded by his
secretary shortly before the end of the war at Berchtesgaden: "I
should have been an unknown painter, tramping around Italy."
> [...]
>
> a.g.b-p
> >>
Andrew D
<mwe...@xxxxxxislandnet.com> wrote:
>x-no-archive: yes
>Dan Fox wrote:
>
>> "Chris" <n...@this.address> wrote:
>> > Thanks, that was rather fun...An interesting question then is there any
>> > way of identifying a true Mondrian pattern from a pseudo-Mondrian? I.e.,
>> > are there art experts who could generally pick Mondrian's out of a random
>> > collection of similar patterns? Or at least claim to be able to? Like any
>> > other learning process, and AI program needs information not only on what
>> > is right, but what is wrong. It would be sad if just some random lines &
>> > boxes was all there was to it...
>> > Cheers;
>> > Chris
>>
>> Art experts can pick a Mondrian out of a group of similar paintings as
>> easily as they can pick a Pollack, Rothko, Tapies, Twombly - or a Van Gogh,
>> for that matter.
>
>I'm not an expert but I have looked at a Mondrian painting close up and have
>seen his layers of colour and somewhat uneven edges. His lines show the
>human hand in a similar way to Agnes Martin's lines. His work is far from
>pixelated computer printouts.
Sure, the brushstrokes make it human but that is not what supposedly make
his art great. It's all about composition - not brushstrokes.... isn't it?
If it was just a matter of imperfections in brushstrokes then all hand
painted art is great art since it all has those same imperfections.
But gettihng back to the issue, if Mondrian's "greatness" comes merely
from composing lines and boxes then it would be possible to program a
computer to make similar works which could not be dismissed as great art
for all the same reasons.
[snip]
>Only those who have not seen the real Mondrian paintings up close
>would think that they are easy to copy.
Brush-painted imperfections are par for the course for every artist (and
non-artist for that matter) - it's even tones that are difficult.
Mani Deli
>>Dan Fox wrote:
>>I'm not an expert but I have looked at a Mondrian painting close up and have
>>seen his layers of colour and somewhat uneven edges. His lines show the
>>human hand in a similar way to Agnes Martin's lines. His work is far from
>>pixelated computer printouts.
>
And what makes you think that this can't be simulated on a computer?
Mani Deli
fartzies to make a living. One only needs a camera obscura ( an opaque
projector) and a large stove..
With this simple equipment on can imitate Vermeer which I'm sure would
sell to philistines, fascists and assorted bourgeois in realist
galleries.
With all the cash you earn you can now pay tuition to art college and
take four years to learn how to express yourself, do stripes like
Mondrian, drip like Pollock, schmier like de Kooning and get a degree
which you can use to paint as well as Fox.
(Edward G. Nilges) wrote:
>It is plain that Vermeer used a camera obscura and then (as a part
>time baker) baked his partly dried canvases and panels to get a unique
>look. In terms of the 17th century, he "automated" part of the
>process.
> as Hockney has shown, the "can be
>automated" argument applies to ancients and moderns. There is an
>artistic genius distinct from technique, and this is SHARED by Vermeer
>and Mondrian, in part because neither wasted their time spewing their
>hatred of other artists. They worked.
So get that equipment and get to WORK.
Hot tip from Marilyn Yente Welch: You can also paint like Bouguereau
by pasting down large photographs.
( This could of course be expensive so I would suggest investing in a
large stove and imitate Vermeer for starters. )
Mani Deli
John Rune
....
>Always, it is the genius of the artist, whether it is
>Vermeer or Rothko, that makes the piece great art.
....
Always, it is the nature of the beast that makes it unpalatable.
The Uncommon Shaman,
John the Red
Edward G. Nilges
> On Thu, 05 Dec 2002 14:44:37 GMT, "Chris" <n...@this.address> wrote:
>
> >Thanks Dan; I have heard this too, but I have never seen it tested. Does
> >Shapiro talk about it? (Is that the essay on the humanity of abstract art?)
> >I'm not deeply familiar with his writing, what I have read seems tediously
> >dated & Marxist.
>
> and stupid!
>
>
> >I'd also hasten to add that I'm not here to disparage abstract art (at least
> >not in this thread :); I'm very aware that one of the main reasons that
> >there is a significant amount of confusion about the work of many great
> >classical artists is that they - just like everyone else - worked using a
> >relatively small set of 'tools'. For example, if you go back to the 1600's,
> >you'll find that many Dutch artists learned from similar workbooks
>
> This is true for all art. However in order to follow today's so called
> rules one needs almost no skill. That is why there is such a huge
> population of failure artists.
What you seem to want is a common Academy that defines "skill" as did
the French Academy define "skill" as careful preparatory drawing in
Conte crayon, followed by grisaille underpainting and finally the
application of transparent and translucent color with no visible
brushstrokes.
The problem is that this can be done by a well-trained, pissed-off
oyster on the half shell.
This is true even if that well-trained, pissed-off oyster on the half
shell does not have modern tools.
With sufficient application he can LEARN to produce drawing of
acceptable quality. If our crustacean friend has palsy he can use a
damn camera *obscura*.
You find Boogeroo "beautiful" not, in my view, as anything like a
primary aesthetic reason but because of a sort of profoundly
anacronistic historical time-warp which corresponds to an equivalent
warp, in your mind.
That is, you fail to see that Boogeroo influenced American art because
his nudes were a favorite item of "fahn art" for Western saloons in
which Nausicaa or Venus made bad whiskey go down easier.
Then, early Hollywood directors tried to imitate the sheen of Boogeroo
to appeal to the sons and daughers of cowpokes with the result that
early silent films replicate his look and feel. This became modern
Hollywood product which emphasises the absence of any trace of
manufacture (like the elimination of the brush-stroke on Boogeroo) in
order to give the consumer the feeling that he has been sufficiently
pandered-to.
Kitsch and porn present as primary, "atomic" experience experiences
with unanalyzed historical complexity. For example, if I salivate
over the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, or indeed use it as a home
hydraulic aid, the fundamental LIE is that I am having a deep and
primary experience of Eros while looking at a woman of acceptable race
and social class. I am 'consuming' a set of social attitudes such as
the attitude that white folk deserve to frolic in the tropics.
Thus you look at Boogeroo, whose paintings could be manufactured as I
have said by well-trained, pissed-off oysters on the half shell and
mistake a false consciousness for a primary experience of beauty.
Whereas if one walks into the presence of one of Pollock's paintings,
and lays oneself open to the mere fact of an object with no apparent
use other than to command one's attention, the false consciousness
disappears and becomes attention to something that asks only for
attention. My experience is that modern society and TeeVee destroy
attention and for this reason I often took my kids to the art museum.
Before a certain age, they responded to art on its own terms, pointing
their grubby fingers at the work and saying what dat. Of course,
later on I practically had to pay them to go, but even then they
preferred modern art to dreary pictures of churches and old guys, for
the simple reason that MTV mediates modernism.
The only "skill" in art is Adorno's and exemplified by his buddy
Schoenberg's twelve-tone row: the subject refuses to be objectified
and brutalized by external demands, whether from the market or Salon,
and instead imposes upon himself an artistic vision which he then
follows. If everybody thinks his work sucks, if our boy is a real
artist as opposed to a well-trained, pissed off oyster on the half
shell, he persists in following his dream.
> >
> >Back to Mondrian; one aspect of his work makes it particularly attractive
> >for this sort of thing - his geometric work is primarily noted for
> >composition.
>
> There is no composition in Mondrian. It is decorative pattern not
> complex enough to consider as an example of composition.
The first problem, addressed by artists in California, is your
unexamined privilege of art over decoration. A Chinese vase of
first-rate quality is considered first class art and "decoration" only
for taxonomic convenience.
Mondrian's composition is actually subtle and refined and needs only
to be compared to Theo van Doesburg. In his high period work he
selects particular sizes of the gridded area which imply a vast space
outside the frame whereas it is a typical failure in this school to
present a "closed system" in which each shape is fully accounted for.
This is what gives Mondrian his liturgical air as opposed to similar
artists whose work is closer to the machine shop. The viewer gets the
sense, when looking at a Mondrian, of being welcomed into a space
constituted by the immediate neighborhood of the painting in which the
sordid concerns of ordinary life need to be suspended.
In fact, Mondrian taught moderns of his now-distant era that
transcendance was possibly even in a world of machined surfaces. As
such Mondrian speaks to people on the bus who cannot go to an ashram
for three months, teaching them how to connect with the mystical in a
world apparently operational.
Now, all this is pretty high-class writing. It also happens to be
true. You may think it's bullshit but my experience is that when
looking at art you need to let bullshit thoughts come and go as they
please. This is art appreciation, not looking for kitschy
catch-images and catch-phrases on which to hang the hat of an
attention span disordered by les temps modernes.
> ...no skill no art!
Oh, shut up...
Mani Deli
>What you seem to want is a common Academy that defines "skill" as did
>the French Academy define "skill" as careful preparatory drawing in
>Conte crayon, followed by grisaille underpainting and finally the
>application of transparent and translucent color with no visible
>brushstrokes.
You know as much about the French academy as a well-trained,
pissed-off oyster on the half shell.
>
>The problem is that this can be done by a well-trained, pissed-off
>oyster on the half shell.
Lets see some of your work to see if we can all agree with you.
>
>With sufficient application he can LEARN to produce drawing of
>acceptable quality. If our crustacean friend has palsy he can use a
>damn camera *obscura*.
Try it!
>You find Boogeroo "beautiful" not, in my view,
We all know you hate Bouguereau and love Pigasshole.
>Thus you look at Boogeroo, whose paintings could be manufactured as I
>have said by well-trained, pissed-off oysters on the half shell and
>mistake a false consciousness for a primary experience of beauty.
Perhaps you know this oyster's net address.
>
>Mondrian's composition is actually subtle and refined and needs only
>to be compared to Theo van Doesburg. In his high period work he
>selects particular sizes of the gridded area which imply a vast space
>outside the frame whereas it is a typical failure in this school to
>present a "closed system" in which each shape is fully accounted for.
>
>This is what gives Mondrian his liturgical air as opposed to similar
>artists whose work is closer to the machine shop. The viewer gets the
>sense, when looking at a Mondrian, of being welcomed into a space
>constituted by the immediate neighborhood of the painting in which the
>sordid concerns of ordinary life need to be suspended.
>
>In fact, Mondrian taught moderns of his now-distant era that
>transcendance was possibly even in a world of machined surfaces. As
>such Mondrian speaks to people on the bus who cannot go to an ashram
>for three months, teaching them how to connect with the mystical in a
>world apparently operational.
>
>Now, all this is pretty high-class writing.
Its university level Artspeak Bullshit.
>> ...no skill no art!
>
>Oh, shut up...
>>
...no skill no art!
Mani Deli
fartzies to make a living. One only needs a camera obscura ( an opaque
projector) and a large stove..
With this simple equipment on can imitate Vermeer which I'm sure would
sell to philistines, fascists and assorted bourgeois in realist
galleries.
With all the cash you earn you can now pay tuition to art college and
take four years to learn how to express yourself, do stripes like
Mondrian, drip like Pollock, schmier like de Kooning and get a degree
which you can use to paint as well as Fox.
(Edward G. Nilges) wrote:
>It is plain that Vermeer used a camera obscura and then (as a part
>time baker) baked his partly dried canvases and panels to get a unique
>look. In terms of the 17th century, he "automated" part of the
>process.
> as Hockney has shown, the "can be
>automated" argument applies to ancients and moderns. There is an
>artistic genius distinct from technique, and this is SHARED by Vermeer
>and Mondrian, in part because neither wasted their time spewing their
>hatred of other artists.
Like Nilges does on Bouguereau!
So get that equipment and get to WORK.
Hot tip from Marilyn Yente Welch: You can also paint like Bouguereau
by pasting down large photographs.
( This could of course be expensive so I would suggest investing in a
large stove and imitate Vermeer for starters. )
John Ng
> The problem is that this can be done by a well-trained, pissed-off
> oyster on the half shell.
Yes, true enough. Skills as defined by Mani, and also defined by me,
and also defined by Salon, and also defined by Fred Ross, and also
defined by most modern critics, ARE obtainable by a low-grade artist.
However, applying that skill is another problem, and not at all easily
achievable. This can be seen by looking at low-grade artiste like
Mondrian etc who have mastered painting techniques but could only
apply it to squares and primitive shapes.
But, can that skill be successfully applied to the ENTIRE picture
> With sufficient application he can LEARN to produce drawing of
> acceptable quality. If our crustacean friend has palsy he can use a
> damn camera *obscura*.
Is that right? How come there are still relatively few good artists
since the device was produced? You have never painted before so you
do not know the problem. Even if you take a prepared line drawing in
children's books, you would be hard pressed to paint properly, let
alone trace from the optic device.
> That is, you fail to see that Boogeroo influenced American art because
> his nudes were a favorite item of "fahn art" for Western saloons in
> which Nausicaa or Venus made bad whiskey go down easier.
Empty allegations! Make better nonsensical statements like: "John
Constable's landscapes are famous because people in NYC can't get
enough country air", or "Van Gogh's art is a favourite because it
brightens up the otherwise drab interior of a billiard parlour.
Sorry, but I can't pore anymore through your post as it contains empty
ranting.
John Ng
Leo Papandreou
<snip l'idée fixée>
Oh brother, not again. How many innocent computrons must
perish in your vendetta against Nilges? This is the third
time I've read this exact same message.
<cue meaningless albeit stupid sig>
> ...no skill no art!
>
> Want to get away from the indecipherable imbecilities and absurd pretensions of the modern art establishment?
>
> Check out my web page http://www3.sympatico.ca/manideli/
Dear Gruppenfuhrer und Generaleutnant der Kunstpolizei Mani Deli,
What is your purpose, you ridiculous man? I find it frankly absurd
that discussion on r.a.f has been hijacked into apologizing to your
ceaseless unreasoned assertions of parochial taste. It is obvious to
anyone who has spent any time here at all that you are incapable of
stepping outside your insular presumptions long enough to make an
effort to see the world differently. It is obvious that you will not
scruple to frame your rhetorical questions so that you "win" before
anyone can even attempt to answer them. It is obvious you are belli-
gerent crank uninterested in honest debate or discussion.
You want to be told you are a very fine fellow for admiring
Bougie's mawkish paintings of little girls who there for the price
of pubescence and a staple through the navel adorn the pages of
Playboy--fine, here's a cookie to go with that pat on the back.
But that we should also surrender to your definitions of 'no',
'skill', and 'art'--that shall never pass, my mule-headed friend,
no matter how many times your weary dull and dreary ad hominem gambits
insult our intelligence.
Please, for the love of Dog, stop posting identical copies of your
unregenerate diatribes. Put them on your website between nested
<sputter> and <fucking idiot> tags. Your taste--and that is all you
have ever demonstrated on this newsgroup--does not matter. No, it
is does not matter at all. (Attention Richard and John Ng: ditto.)
Sheesh.
--
Leo Papandreou
"They are love. Fuck the war."
G*rd*n
| ...
| that discussion on r.a.f has been hijacked into apologizing to your
| ceaseless unreasoned assertions of parochial taste. It is obvious to
| anyone who has spent any time here at all that you are incapable of
| stepping outside your insular presumptions long enough to make an
| effort to see the world differently. It is obvious that you will not
| scruple to frame your rhetorical questions so that you "win" before
| anyone can even attempt to answer them. It is obvious you are belli-
| gerent crank uninterested in honest debate or discussion.
Haven't been on the Net very long, have you? Most newsgroups
about anything political or cultural are dominated by people
one might as well call "fundamentalists". They share with
religious fundamentalists strict adherence to rigid and narrow
doctrine, literalism, a binary, low-res view of the world,
and a conviction that everyone must hear, know and obey their
beliefs -- those who do not are crooks, infidels, or devils.
There are usually about half a dozen of them in any given
newsgroup, and they operate as a "team" or "side" in attacking
whatever they don't like. The technical peculiarities of
the Net magnify their apparent number, so that they often
become convinced that their rather minoritarian views
represent a majority or consensus, at least of all right-
thinking folk.
There is no use arguing with them -- it's like arguing with
a broken record. You must either ignore them, play with
them, or forget about using Usenet. Most intelligent people
I know choose the third way. I don't know what _my_ problem
is.
--
(<><>) /*/
}"{ G*rd*n }"{ g...@panix.com }"{
{ http://www.etaoin.com | latest new material 11/14/02 <-adv't
Edward G. Nilges
> spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges) wrote in message
>
> > The problem is that this can be done by a well-trained, pissed-off
> > oyster on the half shell.
>
> Yes, true enough. Skills as defined by Mani, and also defined by me,
> and also defined by Salon, and also defined by Fred Ross, and also
> defined by most modern critics, ARE obtainable by a low-grade artist.
> However, applying that skill is another problem, and not at all easily
> achievable. This can be seen by looking at low-grade artiste like
> Mondrian etc who have mastered painting techniques but could only
> apply it to squares and primitive shapes.
Of course, if you knew Mondrian, you would not say this. This is
because his early work was figural and representational. It was not
that he "could not" apply technique to more complex figures, it was
that he followed a reductionist artistic vision without this silly
anxiety about "skill".
When you demand that the artist apply this skill in a way that panders
to your prejudices, you are demanding that the artist cease being an
artist and commence being a tradesman.
Mondrian's and van Doesburg's reductionism was an ARTISTIC gesture
because by their time, they sa correctly that photographs had
eliminated the "x" or art component of skill+x=art. To be brutal, the
fact that a Boogeroo style effect could be obtained in a photographic
studio MEANT that Boogeroo was NOT AN ARTIST in the sense that he did
not think up anything original, rather followed the already-existing
technologies of black and white photography and steel engraving.
Artistic reductionism, from the twelve-tone system of Schoenberg to
the school of Mondrian and van Doesburg, is simply the attempt to show
that the artist-as-subject is still viable in a technical environment
in which apparently "artistic" effects can be mechanically reproduced.
It makes the artwork conform to a reduced set of operations.
Dialectically, this produces new effects since the technology has
passed it by.
No artifact available in a shopping mall has what Walter Benjamin
calls an "aura" for the very good reason that the humanity attendant
on its creation is eliminated. The operator of the lithography press
literally does not care about the output except insofar as it meets
the client's needs.
Whereas examination of a Mondrian shows how this aura can be restored.
For one thing the aging of the paint itself, which was probably
intended by Mondrian or at a minimum something of which he was aware
would happen, shows that the Mondrian is NOT a "copy of a Mondrian" or
a swatch of bathroom tiling. Mondrian's participation, as an artist,
in the object is reflected by the fact that he knew very well that the
paints he used would age over time.
And even when the work was created he made minor errors and visible
brush-strokes. To Mani, these probably detract from a work for the
"artist" in Mani's strange world is inhuman, a daemon or a god with
skill but no past or future, or memory for that manner.
But for the half-aware viewer, the plain fact that a Mondrian is on
FIRST glance an industrial product, and on SECOND look a "Mondrian"
communicates a profoundly moving truth about industrial society in
general. For the "Mondrian" declares that technology and industrial
society in general is a HUMAN artifact and in no way escapes time and
history.
>
> But, can that skill be successfully applied to the ENTIRE picture
>
>
> > With sufficient application he can LEARN to produce drawing of
> > acceptable quality. If our crustacean friend has palsy he can use a
> > damn camera *obscura*.
>
> Is that right? How come there are still relatively few good artists
> since the device was produced? You have never painted before so you
> do not know the problem. Even if you take a prepared line drawing in
> children's books, you would be hard pressed to paint properly, let
> alone trace from the optic device.
>
I have painted before, with more or less skill, in fact. And, the
reason for there being so few "good" artists is exclusively material,
and indeed talked about in this ng. It is in the market's interest to
make "good" art rare.
>
> > That is, you fail to see that Boogeroo influenced American art because
> > his nudes were a favorite item of "fahn art" for Western saloons in
> > which Nausicaa or Venus made bad whiskey go down easier.
>
> Empty allegations! Make better nonsensical statements like: "John
> Constable's landscapes are famous because people in NYC can't get
> enough country air", or "Van Gogh's art is a favourite because it
> brightens up the otherwise drab interior of a billiard parlour.
>
Oh, I see. We must mystify, mustn't we, the artistic *frisson*. In
fact, landscape as a genre as opposed to a backdrop and apart from
Ruisdael COINCIDED with the Industrial Revolution. And the dutch
interest in pure landscape probably resulted from the
demi-industrialization of parts of the Netherlands in the Seventeenth
cent.
You regard as "nonsense" a critical tradition, that of John Berger,
which is broader than the mystifications of art dealers who no little
outside of art itself and as a result, during the art boom of the
1990s, were hornswoggled repeatedly. Their narrowness caused them,
for example, to rate Warhol over Lichtenstein because they could not
see how Lichtenstein worked in the tradition whereas Warhol was an
interior decorator with good PR.
Mani Deli
>
>Oh brother, not again. How many innocent computrons must
>perish in your vendetta against Nilges? This is the third
>time I've read this exact same message.
Every time Nilges repeats his Bouguereau and optical aid bunk I'll
repeat his method for painting like Vermeer. I'm only trying to help
artzy fartzies here who might just want to paint something a little
different.
Instead of being irritated why not take his suggestions. Get his
required equipment and paint like Vermeer yourself. You'll be the envy
of your block.
Mani Deli
> Most newsgroups
>about anything political or cultural are dominated by people
>one might as well call "fundamentalists".
Like the Modern Academic Fundamentalists who also dominate the media.
> They share with
>religious fundamentalists strict adherence to rigid and narrow
>doctrine, literalism, a binary, low-res view of the world,
>and a conviction that everyone must hear, know and obey their
>beliefs -- those who do not are crooks, infidels, or devils.
This is the sort of idiocy you imagine from all who disagree with you.
I'd call it paranoia.
>There are usually about half a dozen of them in any given
>newsgroup,
This guy has been pooped on for years in the Post Modern conference.
>and they operate as a "team" or "side" in attacking
>whatever they don't like.
A Team? Of course the Artzy Fartzies here never agree with one another
and never attack anything they don't like. I wonder what this idiot
thinks newsgroups are for?
> The technical peculiarities of
>the Net magnify their apparent number, so that they often
>become convinced that their rather minoritarian views
>represent a majority or consensus, at least of all right-
>thinking folk.
Wishful thinking!
>There is no use arguing with them -- it's like arguing with
>a broken record. You must either ignore them, play with
>them, or forget about using Usenet. Most intelligent people
>I know choose the third way. I don't know what _my_ problem
>is.
Lets hope hereafter that you only read and answer the artzy fartzies
who agree with you. This should make Marilyn Yente Welch ecstatic.
- I may have said the same thing before... but my explanation, I am
sure, will always be different - Oscar Wilde
Edward G. Nilges
> On 16 Dec 2002 14:25:44 -0500, g...@panix.com (G*rd*n) wrote:
> > Most newsgroups
> >about anything political or cultural are dominated by people
> >one might as well call "fundamentalists".
>
> Like the Modern Academic Fundamentalists who also dominate the media.
This is simply untrue. A variety of styles, and no single style, is
promoted by the arts media and unlike the Salon, no common core (apart
from the brute fact of your infantile rage, and which targets it
selects) can be found in what is promoted. American art, accepted by
some "academy" or other, ranges from extremely precisionist realism to
abstraction.
>
> > They share with
> >religious fundamentalists strict adherence to rigid and narrow
> >doctrine, literalism, a binary, low-res view of the world,
> >and a conviction that everyone must hear, know and obey their
> >beliefs -- those who do not are crooks, infidels, or devils.
>
> This is the sort of idiocy you imagine from all who disagree with you.
> I'd call it paranoia.
You have become a magic faery mirror. Are you a Lisp program?
>
> >There are usually about half a dozen of them in any given
> >newsgroup,
>
> This guy has been pooped on for years in the Post Modern conference.
>
> >and they operate as a "team" or "side" in attacking
> >whatever they don't like.
>
> A Team? Of course the Artzy Fartzies here never agree with one another
> and never attack anything they don't like. I wonder what this idiot
> thinks newsgroups are for?
>
> > The technical peculiarities of
> >the Net magnify their apparent number, so that they often
> >become convinced that their rather minoritarian views
> >represent a majority or consensus, at least of all right-
> >thinking folk.
>
> Wishful thinking!
>
> >There is no use arguing with them -- it's like arguing with
> >a broken record. You must either ignore them, play with
> >them, or forget about using Usenet. Most intelligent people
> >I know choose the third way. I don't know what _my_ problem
> >is.
>
> Lets hope hereafter that you only read and answer the artzy fartzies
> who agree with you. This should make Marilyn Yente Welch ecstatic.
>
> - I may have said the same thing before... but my explanation, I am
> sure, will always be different - Oscar Wilde
You have combined irony with Oedipal rage against Modernist fathers so
as to render yourself incoherent: for at times, you attempt to be
ironic yet wind up speaking the opposite of what you mean, which isn't
irony.
G*rd*n
| ...
| who agree with you. This should make Marilyn Yente Welch ecstatic.
If you say something worth making fun of, I might have a go
at it, although I think I worked the vein out on my previous
visitation to this realm.
G*rd*n
| > > Most newsgroups
| > >about anything political or cultural are dominated by people
| > >one might as well call "fundamentalists".
Mani Deli <ma...@sympatico.ca>:
| > Like the Modern Academic Fundamentalists who also dominate the media.
|
spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges):
| This is simply untrue. A variety of styles, and no single style, is
| promoted by the arts media and unlike the Salon, no common core (apart
| from the brute fact of your infantile rage, and which targets it
| selects) can be found in what is promoted. American art, accepted by
| some "academy" or other, ranges from extremely precisionist realism to
| abstraction. ...
Fundamentalists do not deal with the same world, the same
reality, as non-fundamentalists. For them, there is only the
Good and the Evil, the sheep and the goats; if the sheep and
goats are mixed, they must be separated; if they have bred
together and produced that which is neither a sheep nor a
goat, then they are together an abomination and must be all
eradicated. You cannot argue them out of this view because
the fact of argument or dissent with this sure knowledge of
the Good and the Evil is an argument with the Good and is,
therefore, Evil.
The present fine-arts scene mixes what would be Good if taken
by itself in some totalitarian isolation with what is Evil;
therefore, it is all Evil, i.e. "Modern Academic Fundamentalists
who also dominate the media." That is, the fundamentalist
projects his own totalitarian impulses on his environment.
Mani Deli
>g...@panix.com (G*rd*n):
>| > > Most newsgroups
>| > >about anything political or cultural are dominated by people
>| > >one might as well call "fundamentalists".
>The present fine-arts scene mixes what would be Good if taken
>by itself in some totalitarian isolation with what is Evil;
>therefore, it is all Evil, i.e. "Modern Academic Fundamentalists
>who also dominate the media." That is, the fundamentalist
>projects his own totalitarian impulses on his environment.
This guy reasons like an 8 year old. Art has hardly anything to do
with good and evil, totalitarian isolation etc.
Mani Deli
Nilges) wrote:
>Mani Deli < wrote in message
>> >about anything political or cultural are dominated by people
>> >one might as well call "fundamentalists".
>>
>> Like the Modern Academic Fundamentalists who also dominate the media.
>
>This is simply untrue. A variety of styles, and no single style, is
>promoted by the arts media and unlike the Salon,
Which goes to show that you haven't looked at that artwork.
> no common core (apart
>from the brute fact of your infantile rage, and which targets it
>selects) can be found in what is promoted.
rage?
>American art, accepted by
>some "academy" or other, ranges from extremely precisionist realism to
>abstraction.
However with few exceptions only one side of that is represented in
major museums or mentioned in the media.
>> > They share with
>> >religious fundamentalists strict adherence to rigid and narrow
>> >doctrine, literalism, a binary, low-res view of the world,
>> >and a conviction that everyone must hear, know and obey their
>> >beliefs -- those who do not are crooks, infidels, or devils.
>>
>> This is the sort of idiocy you imagine from all who disagree with you.
>> I'd call it paranoia.
>
>You have become a magic faery mirror. Are you a Lisp program?
You are just plain stupid.
Edward G. Nilges
>...ba da bing...ba da boop...be bop a lu la...no skill no art...
We have a name for preaching "to the choir." Because of the filtering
capabilities of the Internet, many groups are restricted to people who
agree with each other.
But there is no name for what I am trying to do, which is to dislodge,
topple, erase and indeed eradicate the hyper-troll Mani Deli and his
goddamn Boogeroo from rec.arts.fine, as a service to humanity.
This is thought in polite circles to be itself bad behavior, and a
form of farting in the church of the bien pensant who foreground
tolerance and who is systematically taken advantage of, in third tier
universities and community colleges, by the likes of Mani Deli.
Because the good lack all conviction, because the worst are filled
with a passionate intensity, bandwidth is filled with garbage, not
from any technical necessity.
Therefore I begin with a paragraph from the old monster of Highgate
cemetary, Karl Marx, as germane to this discussion, without apology.
"The exclusive concentration of artistic talent in particular
individuals, and its suppression in the broad mass which is bound up
with this, is a consequence of the division of labor. If, even in
certain social conditions, everyone was an excellent painter, that
would not at all exclude the possibility of each of them being also an
original painter, so that here to the division between 'human' and
'unique' labor amounts to sheer nonsense."
The art school bum claims that his labor should be valued
differentially from the actual and potential labor of all others
because he has "talent." Of course, "talent" is hard to confirm when
undefined, so often it is reduced to the ability and draw and paint
realistically.
The art school bum (of which one prototype was young Hitler) fails to
see that he is imposing, upon himself and his fellow misfits, a test
he has taken without reflection from commercial society. Being able
to draw one's hand accurately becomes ersatz for knowledge of typing,
Morse code, or shorthand, to name three skills needed about the time
of Hitler.
The art school bum fails to realize, as young Mr. Hitler failed to
realize with world-historical and tragic consequences, that what
American artist Robert Henri called the Art Spirit is a matter of that
will which exists apart from our machinelike capabilities. Hitler
responded to the judgement of an external body, the Vienna school,
with a rebellion that was profoundly incomplete, for many of his
compatriots in Germany and France at the time did NOT accept the
judgement of ateliers and schools and INSTEAD formed their own schools
and their own movements, for by that time it was clear that while art
remains in part rule-following, the legislation of the rules was seen
to be possible as endogenous, and the artist could be at once the
legislator and the executive.
The art school bum, however, like Hitler, has an unexamined
authoritarian personality afraid to reject the rejection of external
bodies. And, Godwwin's Law is the theory, that comparision to Hitler
approaches unity in probability: but Nilges' Thesis is that the
Internet is a medium that allows Authoritarian Personalities to get
away with their bullshit in peace, and this is why Godwin's law is
True.
Empirical research, reviving Theodore Adorno's F-scale (a
psychological measurement of Fascist and authoritarian tendencies, may
confirm that the high degree of filtering capability, as described by
Cass Sunstein in his book Republic.COM, allows people already high in
their F-quotient to converge on the maximum score, and this may be why
Godwin's Law is true. People may be recognizing the truth.
The art school bum, like Hitler, wants to be culled out (like Robert
Crumb's Mister Sensitive, walking away from the Auto Insurance office
with bad news, he "can't take it" and he says in his heart "I wuz
meant to be culled out.") When in fact all of humanity has untapped
capability which is systematically short-circuited by thugs, the art
school bum wants a free ride, courtesy of a division of labor, in his
favor. As Robert Crumb's father would say, the only cure outside of
philosophy itself is a couple of years in the United States Marine
Corps, but unfortunately, the jar heads don't accept art school bums.
For Marx labor as the source of value was not at base something
different from different people. The truth of the Marx of the
nightmare was the belief that all people's labor is of equal value, as
opposed to the division of labor in which we say that the CEO's pay is
justified because of his talent…even after the CEO refers questions,
as to the mismanagement on his watch, to underlings, and cannot draw a
straight line with Powerpoint.
This is Marx of the nightmare because one application occurred
attendant on the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer
Rouge applied a brutally oversimplified reading of Marx to the urban
artists, writers, intellectuals and and clerks of Cambodia and with
Marxist fundamentalism forced these classes to labor and to live
exactly the same way as the people of the forest.
But this does not show Marx was wrong. It shows that considered as a
second-order way of reading any text, whether Holy Writ or Marx,
Fundamentalism is really stupid, but we knew that, did we not,
children?
Marx did not claim that under current arrangements all labor was of
equal value but he did prophesy a time when this would be so. He
believed that people were, at one and the same time, forced to work
"hard" in the sense of speedups and long hours, but under the level of
their capabilities. Because Marx happened to believe that not all
differences could be quantified, he believed that it is possible to
work 16 hours a day, but use only a fraction of your capabilities, in
part because of the brutalization implicit in the 16 hour day.
Marx would probably contrast the care that is taken of machines which
are brought down for maintenance, and, in the case of machines like
cars and trucks which consume energy, allowed both break-in and rest
periods, when the operators are not unless the law or union
intervenes. Absent the Teamsters, trucks would be given rest periods
but drivers would be assigned fresh trucks and forced to work 24/7,
and fed crystal meth BY THEIR EMPLOYERS as a health benefit.
The artist knows that there is a zone of "flow" in which he works
"hard" without any supervision, but most people quantify hard work,
and treat one job as pretty much equivalent to any other. We
"naturalize" the idea that any one job in a particular field can only
be compared to another on the basis of salary alone; when we compare
nonsalary factors, we tend to focus on features of the position which
can be readily cashed out, from benefits to work hours.
But we have to train ourselves (by reading excellent books such as
What Color is Your Parachute?) to do what men in former times, whether
in primitive cultures in temperate climates, or in the haute bourgeois
of more recent times, did instinctively, which is to treat a job not
as a quantitative paycheck, but as a calling or vocation.
The artist wants the former but feels he has to justify a natural
human desire (that was fulfilled by default for primitive men living
in friendly climates) by speaking of talent, or ability to draw.
He feels he must do so because of an elephant in the living room. In
recent, historical memory, most middle class people have been
increasingly trained to accept, not only the equivalence of any job
within a single field, but since Reagan, career changes not under
their control, in which any old job becomes reified and that to which
we must aspire.
To want To Paint is coded as a slacker exceptionalism to the
naturalized rule, but it may be instead more natural in the sense of
more human. Marx's ideal society, which he consciously formed in
reaction to the increasing regimentation and resulting immiseration of
life in the industrial revolution, would revert, he thought to an
ideal primitive situation, for it is said, somewhat idealistically and
probably at variance with checkable empirical facts, that in primitive
society, everyone was an artist.
In temperate climates with good game, perhaps even in the Arctic, this
obtained, probably, when in the latter case the Inuit folk evolved
adaptation to the colder clime. Marx believed that the accumulation
of scientific knowledge would restore the ideal of a man adapted, like
the Inuit, to an environment improved by his accumulated wisdom.
In this society, there would be no art because art would converge with
survival. Of course, the expressive arts would persist because part
of survival happens to be telling stories and making dances. But in
Marx's picture, the storyteller or the dancemaker might also herd
cattle in the morning. Art as a privilege would disappear and be
replaced by a right.
It may be said that this rosy scenario did not apply in actually
existing socialism. However, the facts are (as exemplified by the
procedures at the Kirov ballet before 1989) that a reasonably fair
competitive examination opened scarce admission to all people in the
Soviet Union and under conditions of scarcity, competitive exams are
fairer than happening to have a wealthy parent. The former Soviet
Union never arrived at, and never claimed to arrive at, the end of
scarcity: Ronald Reagan's defense buildup made sure of this.
The artist indirectly wants non-artists to assent to labor, in part
for him, to hew his wood and draw his water. The non-artists refuse
to accept "talent" but production of realistic art satisfies them so
the artist is anxious to display these skills.
"Realism" is hypostatized by Maniac's Delight, and there is a shadowy
idea that it is one basic style. But if you look at American art of
the Colonial period you find that the canons of "realism" change.
Americans of the Colonies disliked chiarascuro and wanted their Yank
money's worth, therefore for them "realism" was a flat style…while at
the same time, Gainsborough and Reynolds painted in a style both
looser, and with chiaroscuro.
To artists of the school of Grandma Moses, "realism" was in fact a
textual truth in which the painting was a book, and therefore
responsible to enumerate whose barn was what as well as to situate it
in space. Her predecessors in Colonial times, after all, often had
the responsibility, in a still somewhat preliterate society, to
document land ownership and marriage in the way Jan van Eyck may have
in his Arnolfini portrait.
Therefore "realism" is no basis on which to judge artistic quality.
Marx is saying that art school bums who reify their will into an
external skill are merely trying to cut themselves a sweet deal so
they can make art as opposed to work at McDonald's. They feel
themselves a dime a dozen, and don't want to do the real work of
discovering in what precise way they are not a dime a dozen.
Therefore they prematurely yawp that they can draw freehand.
He is saying that "talent" is mystification, reification and
fetishisation of a valid desire, for of course, no one wants to work
at McDonald's. Who would not wish like Mr Slick to be an artist with
a studio in which women would remove their clothes, to get up at a
civilised hour like 1:00 in the afternoon, work two hours and stroll
to the beach?
The French students of 1968 said, under the paving stones lie the
beach. They were a tocsin because they warned us all that our libido
was about to get shitcanned, as a basis for decision making, or for
the fortunate to be restricted to spring break.
We need like Mr Slick, or any kid on spring break, to realize that it
is profoundly unnatural to agree to work like a dog for peanuts when
under the paving stones lie the beach.
Much of modern media, purporting to advise the young person on the
selection of a career, walks a fine line. In order to be marketable
as a commodity, "self-help" and career planning has to at a minimum
pretend that it is on the side of the job seeker, and promise that
under the paving stones lie the beach.
We would not want to pay the priest to hear our confession, nor to
advise us in the absence of near-term pay-off to work like a dog and
not have sex. Career planning has to speak to everyone's desire to
have a cozy job in which one's personality, one's uniqueness, makes us
the only fit in that sinecure.
But career planning has the necessary social task of somehow
reproducing willingness to settle for less, and often, a lot less.
Therefore it will describe the automated workplace of the commercial
artist as a friction-free paradise, where all the latest tools are
used to make it easy for the highly paid and valued artist to produce
unique content for which he is credited in the near term, and indeed
recorded in books on popular culture for his children's children to
admire.
The reality is different in this employment situation alone.
For example, some commercial artists complain of being forced to draw
freehand with the mouse. In a situation, where it "makes business
sense" for the art director to underinvest, the commercial artist may
very well have to draw free-hand with the mouse. He may be literally
denied access to a scanner or digitizer in a real situation where (let
us say) no money exists for a scanner at his location, the scanner's
software is for some silly (but commonly seen) reason incompatible
with the precise operating system, or the installation of the
digitizer conflicts with some unrelated driver or piece of hardware.
Of course, most commercial art installations may not force the artist
to draw with the mouse. My information is anecdotal. However, the
reality of competition in both the commercial art market, and the
software market, is extreme differentiation.
Software vendors find that they do not have a viable business model
unless they "innovate" in an overhasty way, that is so hasty that they
often create unintended consequences…such as conflicts between
software drivers. The business model of many small commercial art
ateliers combines with this to create, I believe, systematic
underinvestment, given the offerings of vendors, in what the artist
actually needs.
The common theme in any private business is that the employee cannot
be permitted to identify and control the means of production. If an
artist sets up an atelier on his own dime, he can decide, within the
constraints of his funds, exactly what he needs.
But if he is hired by an atelier he cannot under our law have any say
whatsoever in the choice of his tools, and if the boss says use a
mouse to draw freehand, the commercial artist must say, yes sir you
betya with bounce and side.
Again: I am not saying that many art directors do in fact command
artists to draw freehand with the mouse. What I am saying is that in
our society they CAN and the commercial artist CAN NOT refuse without
being terminated.
Farm-owners in southern California in the 1920s had a choice between
buying shovels in bulk with long or short handles, the short handled
shovel being a better deal. Most of them were only one step above
their desparate Grapes of Wrath laborers and as a result most of them
went for the short-handled variety, asking their laborers to work,
stooped, for 16 hours a day, a regimen which crippled many.
It made at no time no "business sense" for them to humanely spend a
few dollars more for longer shovels and it was only until Cesar Chavez
and the much needed grape boycott (so maligned, so mocked, by the
conservative press as chichi liberal PC-ism when in fact it was only
good will) that farm workers were no longer asked to become the
Hunchback of Notre Dame as a condition for getting a minimum wage job.
For precisely the same reasons, art directors may very well ask to use
employees to help them save hard dollars by drawing with the mouse, or
giving up their product, zipping it to Thailand for finishing even
when the artist wants to and is willing to do retouch himself;
although it is a characteristic of a truly "fine" artist to want to be
involved in all phases of production and to find God in the details,
it is with equal force in the modern workplace of any sort to mock and
degrade and despoil this instinct, for a good reason, a bad reason, or
no reason at all.
Mani's utter nastiness is what you get when you completely ignore Marx
or indeed the whole 19th century critique of a society which produced
wealth, at first only for the few, at the cost of a Holocaust so vast
as to be unnameable.
This society is portrayed in Martin Scorsese's new film Gangs of New
York. Our bourgeois picture of the society in which Marx lived in is
of well-dressed, well-fed people looking at Meissonnier and Bouguereau
and innocent of course of Monet. Until Scorsese, our image of the
draft riots, or the Paris Commune (a rebellion, in part, against the
idiot empire of Napoleon II and its goddamn Salon) was restricted to
steel engravings.
Scorsese is my kind of cinematic Boogeroo for he uses a realism
unattainable to Boogeroo to show the reality in which girls got naked
in order to eat. Indeed the fact that Marty Scorsese can paint, with
motion and sound, what New York City looked like from the air in 1863
MEANS that to want to paint like Boogeroo is utter folly and a waste
of time.
This was a society in which a woman did not dare get butt naked as
seen in Boogeroo, for to do so was still pretty much the same it was
in the middle ages: a death sentence. It would of course encourage
any Frenchman hanging around to impregnate the poor girl or give her a
mortal disease. Shakespeare's Ophelia said, after all, in her
madness, men will do it when they come to it.
Norman Mailer recently pointed out that the truth of the AIDs virus is
that it returned the threat of death which is really the only thing
that gives sex any zing and pep.
Boogeroo's immorality, which relates to the simple fact that his work
sucks and should be destroyed, is that in a society in which actual
French men and women were told by the clergy that sex was mystery and
sin, was in the sudden violation of that rule without foundation.
Modern French intellectuals have identified a deep corruption,
artistic and ethical, in French society after 1789. This is not its
political correctness and only in part its persistent idea of the
mission civilatrice.
It is that in 1789 French society decided that the contract between
man and society could be as transparent and open as the United States
Constitution, and that man had grown to the point where he need not
fear hidden agendas, human or divine. This was not the corruption.
Instead, I happen to regard it as a new covenant.
The very secularity of the Oath of the Tennis Court or the signing of
the Declaration of Independence made it a modern sacred event. The
Oath of the Tennis Court, America's 1776 and the Gettysburg Address
gain sacred power precisely because in a Taoist fashion they failed to
mention that G-d which is usually only his distorted image.
Representational art insists on dragging in old symbols, such as
Bouguereau's Jeanne d'Arc and it insists that they be historically
accurate. But it forgets what Abe Lincoln said at Gettysburg: we can
not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground.
As a modern secular/sacred event, Abe's address is highly abstract,
and in an abstracted way, Honest Abe failed to paint a word picture.
This was because so many Irish Catholics had fallen alongside so many
Baptists at Gettysburg, Abe could only affirm that some time ago, not
"time out of mind", we had formed a new nation, conceived in liberty
and dedicated to the proposition (the text) that all men are created
equal.
The overrated Tom Wolfe thinks it a drawback that modern art converges
to what he calls, The Painted Word. This jerk thinks that the moderns
paint texts because it is easy. What he does not realize is that, to
a greater extent than a Lincoln, an artist realizes, as even the
conservative T. S. Eliot realized, that "we cannot revive old
policies…or follow and antique drum."
Thus Bouguereau's image of Jehan d'Arc, or Hollywood's image of
American John Wayne masculinity is really the problem for a simple
mathematical reason (what part of diversity don't you understand?)
I would suggest that reviving old policies, painting like Boogeroo,
and vowing loyalty to the Pope as part of Opus Dei, or loyalty to some
retardo Ayatollah, or loyalty to Serbia's church and country, is the
real blasphemy and literal idolatry of our time. It would have been
obscene for Mondrian to paint windmills and tulips on the ground in
Holland in the 1940s. I mean, details at eleven: the Germans had
enthusiastically flattened much of Holland and an artist who does not
somehow confront this fact is not an artist at all, if I am right
about the nexus between the ethical and the artistic.
I realize that many artists painted realistic combat scenes, and
Norman Rockwell painted the Home Front. The problem is one of scale.
There is no image worthy of my own uncle who was killed because he was
6 feet tall and led shorter Nisei troops, because no image could tell
the story of how he returned to his unit of his own volition after he
learned what combat meant in the south of France.
Realismus and in general anti-Modernism denies the possibility that by
1789 humanity had actually progressed to the point where the men of
France's Third Estate, or of Philadelphia had learned how to keep many
promises as a side-effect of commercial relations. The entrepreneurs
of the Thirty Years War caused widespread chaos because of the
primitive way they made and broke contracts to man and feed armies.
The Oath of the Tennis Court was based on experience subsequent to the
Thirty Years War in which the bourgeoisie of France discovered how to
make and keep promises in business and which was outraged by the
failure of France's First and Second estates to do so: for the general
assembly of 1789 was called because of the failure of the monarchy to
pay its credit card bill.
This makes the secular sacred in the literal sense for it (explicitly
in the case of the US Constitution, implicitly in the Declaration of
the Rights of Man) achieves closure only by relegating the sacred to
its newly proper place, an unavoidably theological move that has been,
in fact, more successful, over the last 200+ years, than
counter-revolution.
What I am trying to express is a large point, to vast, perhaps, for my
poor power to add or detract. The Modernist impulse in art was the
SAME impulse that caused Lincoln at Gettysburg to say "we can not
hallow this ground", and to write to the mother of five slain sons in
a similar fashion, saying that no words would be equal to what she
must be feeling. But what this means is that Mani's ilk were cursed
on the ground by Wilfred Owen, for they are children eager for some
desparate glory out of the past.
What I am saying is that the turn AWAY from abstraction is like the
hunter who feels incomplete unless he kills something, a failure of a
worthy ascetic impulse.
A computer can copy a Mondrian but it also can photo and copy Vermeer.
No computer, however, can "simulate" what Mondrian discovered in
paint, which was the journey from Cezanne to a mystical and
rectilinear world, worthy in its own way as Einstein's discoveries.
There is a holiness at the other extreme from Mondrian, in which the
artist or writer (like me) just piles on, "whole intellects disgorged,
meat for the Synagogue hurled on the pavements" as I think Ginsberg
put it. But painting with "skills" that can be attained using a
camera obscura simply refuses to make the journey, in either
direction.
Admiration of Bouguereau and other conservatives is inextricably
linked with the fact that the realism of Bouguereau is not in a
vacuum. Instead Bouguereau re-asserted values that have continually
been thought of as (1) predating 1789 and (2) "French" to the complete
exclusion of Republicanism…despite the fact that the very position of
the haute bourgeois depended on 1789, which freed his ancestors up to
start businesses and construct factories.
The corruption was in denial, here and in France. Bernard Henri Levy,
a French public intellectual, says he worries whenever France turns
against the United States because this is when France, and French men,
start raving and havering on about an ancient time out of mind, as
seen in Boogeroo's mediaeval contemporaries who painted Roland at the
pass at Roncevalles. To Levy, Davy Crockett, unlike Roland,
post-dated a more important text (which, of course, Davy Crockett's
spiritual heirs down in Tex-my-ass and up in DC are trying to tear up
these days) while Roland can be presented as canceling the rights of
man when inconveniently extended to the paynim (including latter day
Moslems already in France, having crossed the Pyrenees legally.)
Bouguereau in France, and Hollywood in the United States, replace the
nonvisual text with the false promise of return. In Bouguereau this
is the false promise of return to an enchanted France of Jeanne d'Arc
and naked and complaisant girls, as opposed to the hard reality of Le
Pen and uppity females. In Hollywood this is John Wayne playing Davy
Crockett at the Alamo, and replacing the Constitution with a gun.
Politically, Boogeroo represented the corrupt reaction to and denial
of a genuinely new covenant, which was religious in a negative sense
in that it excluded the Deity.
That is because Boogeroo painted in a society in which people believed
that to look at a woman's body with lust was an evil. His paintings
encoded a lack of seriousness about a semi-established state religion,
Roman Catholicism. In terms of modern-day Islam, they were blasphemy.
Stendhal, fifty years before Bouguereau, named this corruption in his
novel The Red and the Black: and Zola, twenty five years after
Bouguereau, said, j'accuse. Stendhal was disgusted by the dishonesty
and pettiness of the French clergy who used morality for social
control and Zola saw the readiness to lie about Dreyfus as endemic to
the Third Republic.
Now, Plato thought realistic painting deceptive as do modern
fundamentalists of Islam. I think there are contexts in which this is
true. After all, Bouguereau was not in a vacuum but instead presented
as the "best" by a state-funded Salon, therefore the ideas in his
paintings (thin as they were) were officially sanctioned.
Maidens of France SHOULD be complaisant. Children should be barefoot
and shy (it is good to be poor, especially if you are someone else.)
Joan of Arc was demure and not a revolutionary mounting a jacquerie
not only against England but also against the Valois. Men are satyrs
and there's nothing for it.
Of course, I am not saying that Boogeroo sucks because he was a
pornographer even though his works had a pornographic finish, and
functioned as pornography in the saloons and the gin-mills of the
American West, and Tex-my-butt.
What I am saying, however, is iconoclastic in the sense that I am
speaking to the "text" of Boogeroo. It is the ultimate lack of moral
and artistic seriousness in which the tyro is welcomed into the temple
of the adept, only by denying the worth of what we tell the folk
outside the temple.
The bourgeois is he, who travels to the Breton coast (or Costa Rica)
and longs for the life of the simple folk. In America of today, it is
he who can afford primitive voyages down the Amazon. The lie, of
course, is that the locals, whether in Bretagne or in Maracaibo, would
be delighted to get the hell to some place with running water and
labor unions. The lie is that the bourgeois knows he can leave at any
time.
In a similar fashion, we can gaze at Bouguereau's girls on the coast
without reflecting that under the paving stones should lie the beach.
Painting's ancient functions, after all, were twofold: to open up the
wall to some other place, and also to enable the viewer to PROTECT
himself from whatever mayhem is taking place, in some other place.
In context, painting can open up to the truth of one's life. A
Mondrian still confronts us with how much excess shit we seem to need
when in fact any child knows that the primary colors suffice. A
Pollock can serve as a temple bell, reminding us that from chaos we
came crying into this world, and to it, we return.
After all, the intelligent Moslem is not driven crazy by the Sports
Illustrated Swimsuit issue as a mere series of images. He is instead
driven batshit by the Western claim that the West alone speaks with
unforked tongue about the infinite worth of the human person, while
commodifying Cindi Crawford's toned bod as worth a large-but-finite
number, and, by implication, your dump truck Texas girl-friend's huge
ass as worth less.
French men died like flies at Sedan, Verdun, Dien bien Phu and Oran in
the name of a "France", the image and idea of which was manufactured
under state and Salon control by men referred to in the United States
army as rear echelon mother frs (I would be delighted to learn the
French poilu's cognate for REMF, by the way, from any grognards
listening in.) The lack of fit between the Jansenism and the
Puritanism of the French middle class, and the Gaite Parisienne of
Offenbach and Boogeroo, is structurally identical to the lack of fit
between Petain and the poilu: for in fact ordinary French gals did not
get butt naked at the beach, or fly through the air, or do anything
but flee randy satyrs at the river, but had to assent to being models
for this garbage, for the same reason that chateau generals in WWI
could tell the grognards, with a straight face, that they had to
charge the German line, and not the brass.
Viatorian priests, from a French order, told me and my school-fellows
in Arlington Heights in 1965 that "self-abuse" was prohibited for the
SAME reason we were expected to serve in Vietnam when the Reserve
could not be conveniently activated because the sons of the wealthy
(including the current President) might be discommoded thereby.
Boogeroo's France is the ugly old France of men excited by women's
timidity and fear and who mocked that timidity and that fear when they
emerged in men at Verdun, where it was the only sane reaction at Mort
Hommes. It is the France of the unconscious but real abuse that is
buried in Maurice Chevalier's grace a dieu for leetle girls.
It is the France of the 1920s documented by Jean Paul Sartre in which
it was standard operating procedure for the peasant wedding night to
end in a morning with the new bride (having been told nothing by the
Jansenist maman) to wind up "nude and mad" and crouched in a corner.
This is a France still so sexist that its educational authorities
waste their time, in France's own war against "terror" forcing good
Moslem women to remove head-scarves while the boys plot attacks on
synagogues.
This is basically a moral critique of Bouguereau which side-steps
artistic considerations because I take it as axiomatic that ethical
considerations are prior to the purely esthetic, but not in a simple
way. That is, art can neither teach us to be good, nor avoid evil, in
the manner of the censor because it then would reduce to a simple
normative text and this would not be art.
I do not know Celine but chances are that there is an artistic
presentation of the life of the small man, like James T Farrell, which
sublimely, in Kant's sense, presents his despair in such a way as to
suggest the opposing redemption. Certainly the artist has to access
his shadow side (and oh yeah, where is the shadow in Bouguereau? Just
asking.)
Perhaps the popularity of Islam in France and elsewhere is based on a
deep need for a fit between officially pronounced secular and
spiritual ideals. The ordinary Arab slob, selected for a terrorist
mission, feels after all that his goals on that day have
world-historical significance whereas Western societies rest on
alienation.
That is, the feeling of disconnection from great events is so common
in what MTV calls the Real World, that is the West and the USA, that
to claim association with great events is a sign of mental illness in
a pragmatic sense. Purely by accident, for example, I was privileged
to assist the real-life protagonist of the recent film A Beautiful
Mind. As an ordinary slob, I have to be careful how I document this,
for in the Real World there is a sharp cultural divide between
ordinary slobs (computer programmers and air traffic controllers) and
an elite which is increasingly remote, in a material sense, from the
canaille.
I'd hazard that the Arab street experiences what we laughingly call
development as a rapid alienation, as opposed to the slow-motion
alienation in which my Grandfather could genuinely feel himself a
confederate of Mark Hanna and Bill McKinley, in which my father was
eased into early retirement when he critiqued medical ethical praxis,
and in which I was expected at best to be seen and not heard at
Princeton.
For example, the overthrow of Mossadegh by the CIA in Iran in 1954
accomplished overnight the transition from feudal times (in which the
serf could at best feel himself part of the lord's plans) to our
times, in which we, as Americans, accept the default situation of
being able, at best, to write letters to the editor, and prophesy to
the wind.
The street Arab finds himself rapidly, in one or two generations, in a
situation of a lack of fit between secular and spiritual ideas. It
becomes accepted overnight that his prince will be able to drink it up
in secret but he cannot. This may have resulted in the suicide
bombings in Israel in which the alienation is reversed for the
ordinary Arab slob: for in suicide bombing, he becomes an organ donor
to dear old Islam high and as such regains world-historical
significance. He loses his sense of alienation in the same way Arthur
Miller's Willy Loman crashes his car for Biff.
In this context, celebrating Bouguereau is a form of
stop-the-world-I-want-to-get-offism because Bouguereau not only fails
to speak to genuine needs he was a damn lie in 1870, because ordinary
French slobs did not live in his fantasy world. They lived instead
the world I grew up in the 1950s, the Jansenist, transmontaine Roman
Catholic church, which the French bourgoisie sullenly counterposed to
the superstructural antics at Versailles. This world used sexual
repression to reproduce small holdings, in France, Quebec, and the
rural US, held in papa's death grip, and getting butt naked was not on
until the 1960s.
Therefore these childish arguments about who kin draw gude are
sickening. They are the exactly wrong reaction to the simple fact
that in Boogeroo's time a skilled photographer like Atget could attain
better results faster than Boogeroo, who was an example of government
waste on outdated technology and no more.
The human spirit, including what Robert Henri called the Art Spirit,
must always be BEYOND the wave of technology.
To sit with your thumb up your ass and claim that artists must have
skil to be artists is to want simultaneously to have the privilege
accorded by the division of labor while giving society no reason to
extend it to you. I mean, big deal: you can draw your own hand, or
your own dick, freehand. Mani, I would rather you became human and
tried to treat other posters with a little compassion. This is the
skill I don't see in you.
This has been without apology a first-class flame. I love the smell
of Mani in the morning. It's the smell of victory.
Edward G. Nilges
>
> > The problem is that this can be done by a well-trained, pissed-off
> > oyster on the half shell.
>
> Yes, true enough. Skills as defined by Mani, and also defined by me,
> and also defined by Salon, and also defined by Fred Ross, and also
> defined by most modern critics, ARE obtainable by a low-grade artist.
> However, applying that skill is another problem, and not at all easily
> achievable. This can be seen by looking at low-grade artiste like
> Mondrian etc who have mastered painting techniques but could only
> apply it to squares and primitive shapes.
This argument, as I have said, reduces to
skill + x -> art
And as I have shown, the argument fails to be serious aesthetic
theory.
This is because it fails to define the necessary x which happens to be
the job of aesthetics.
That is: Mani presents a theory of art which is false and fails to
accomplish the job.
EVEN IF
skill + x -> art
this means that Mani has to say, at the critical point (the transition
from skill to art) "a miracle happens" as in the old cartoon of a
scientist, who has written two sets of equations on a board, and
connected them only by the inscription "a miracle happens."
The gesture is succinctly expressed by Peter Schickele: "it don't mean
a thing if it don't got that certain je ne sais quoi."
My argument elegantly and to my knowledge uniquely expresses the
problem of bourgeois ethics and thought.
Philosophy majors are figures of fun for precisely the reason that in
bourgeois society, the gesture of failure, and mystification, is a
critical motion, for it is used to forestall liberation, and it don't
mean a thing if it ain't got that certain je ne sais quoi.
I love the smell of Mani in the morning. It's da smell of victory.
Maniac Deli
> We have a name for preaching "to the choir." [snip]
Absolutely brilliant posting, that was! And after reading Usenet daily for
many years, I say that with a certain amount of authority.
I like you, Edward Nilges. :)
Mani Deli
fartzies to make a living. One only needs a camera obscura ( an opaque
projector) and a large stove..
With this simple equipment on can imitate Vermeer which I'm sure would
sell to philistines, fascists and assorted bourgeois in realist
galleries.
With all the cash you earn you can now pay tuition to art college and
take four years to learn how to express yourself, do stripes like
Mondrian, drip like Pollock, schmier like de Kooning and get a degree
which you can use to paint as well as Fox.
G*rd*n
| >...ba da bing...ba da boop...be bop a lu la...no skill no art...
spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges):
| We have a name for preaching "to the choir." Because of the filtering
| capabilities of the Internet, many groups are restricted to people who
| agree with each other.
|
| But there is no name for what I am trying to do, which is to dislodge,
| topple, erase and indeed eradicate the hyper-troll Mani Deli and his
| goddamn Boogeroo from rec.arts.fine, as a service to humanity.
| ...
I think the problem is not the presence of fundamentalists,
but the fact that non-fundamentalists pay so much attention
to them, other than as a source of low humor.
D Poinsett
I have been following your postings for the past several weeks and have
visited your web site. You make an interesting case for conceptual
obscurity, confusion, and arrogance as a substitute for talent.
Do you ever perceive your postings here as having many of the same qualities
that you ascribe to "modern" art? Do you ever perceive your postings as
lacking the qualities the you would like to see represented in the visual
arts? If others perceive your postings this way, might this undermine
respect for your ideas and worthy debate?
Dave
"Mani Deli" <ma...@sympatico.ca> wrote in message
news:0con0v49p328l8age...@4ax.com...
Mani Deli
>Mani Deli <ma...@sympatico.ca>:
>|
>| >...ba da bing...ba da boop...be bop a lu la...no skill no art...
>
>spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges):
>| We have a name for preaching "to the choir." Because of the filtering
>| capabilities of the Internet, many groups are restricted to people who
>| agree with each other.
>|
>| But there is no name for what I am trying to do,
There is! Its called stupidity
>which is to dislodge,
>| topple, erase and indeed eradicate the hyper-troll Mani Deli and his
>| goddamn Boogeroo from rec.arts.fine, as a service to humanity.
>| ...
>
>I think the problem is not the presence of fundamentalists,
>but the fact that non-fundamentalists pay so much attention
>to them, other than as a source of low humor.
There is no problem and you are a fundamentalist.
Edward G. Nilges
Unless you are being sarcastic and ironic, and perhaps even then,
thanks.
But note that it is unlikely that you are being sarcastic and ironic,
and note that it is possible, on flamenet, to actually make a case,
with a lot of negative points, without angering lurkers and
bystanders.
Whereas a basically negative stance, such as a rejection of Mani that
does no show love or knowledge of modern art, creates flame war.
Perhaps we can neutralize Mani Deli.
Edward G. Nilges
> Niglges' brilliant observations suggest a perfect way for artzy
> fartzies to make a living. One only needs a camera obscura ( an opaque
> projector) and a large stove..
He's automated the reply in an effort to show contempt and scorn, but
what the automation shows is cowardice.
He knows that he's met, and I say this with all humility, somebunny
who knows far more than he and he is afraid to make a non-automated
reply.
I love the smell of Mani in the morning, and I mean no homo-eroticism
thereby.
Edward G. Nilges
> Mani Deli <ma...@sympatico.ca>:
> |
> | >...ba da bing...ba da boop...be bop a lu la...no skill no art...
>
> spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges):
> | We have a name for preaching "to the choir." Because of the filtering
> | capabilities of the Internet, many groups are restricted to people who
> | agree with each other.
> |
> | But there is no name for what I am trying to do, which is to dislodge,
> | topple, erase and indeed eradicate the hyper-troll Mani Deli and his
> | goddamn Boogeroo from rec.arts.fine, as a service to humanity.
> | ...
>
> I think the problem is not the presence of fundamentalists,
> but the fact that non-fundamentalists pay so much attention
> to them, other than as a source of low humor.
Excuse me, my experience as a consultant in the software industry is
that one must pay respectful attention to all levels of reading and
all levels of logic.
For example, I taught a class in logic at DeVry. Many of the students
could not comprehend symbolic logic because its crotchets and
conveniences are so remote and so apparently useless.
But what they did seem to appreciate was my attempt to convey the idea
that the business world has its own "logic" which is constituted, in
approximately equal measure, of logic and illogic, reading and
misreading.
Thus for example a second-order fundamentalism is used in the business
world as a way of ending discussion...for a good reason, a bad reason
and no reason at all.
If we ignore Fundamentalists, whether they read the Bible, the Koran
or das Kapital in a Fundamentalist way, then we tend to lose terrain
to them.
The fact is that most people on earth are so brutalized that a
fundamentalist reading, in former times of Marx and now of the Koran
and Bible, is literally the only way they have to access spiritual
relief or promise of liberation in the 8 hours that their 16 hour
shift leaves them.
G*rd*n
g...@panix.com (G*rd*n) wrote:
| >I think the problem is not the presence of fundamentalists,
| >but the fact that non-fundamentalists pay so much attention
| >to them, other than as a source of low humor.
Mani Deli <ma...@sympatico.ca>:
| There is no problem and you are a fundamentalist.
Echolalia is a common symptom or feature of fundamentalism,
by the way.
Now you're supposed to say, "You're the guy with the echolalia!"
G*rd*n
| > |
| > | >...ba da bing...ba da boop...be bop a lu la...no skill no art...
spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges):
| > | We have a name for preaching "to the choir." Because of the filtering
| > | capabilities of the Internet, many groups are restricted to people who
| > | agree with each other.
| > |
| > | But there is no name for what I am trying to do, which is to dislodge,
| > | topple, erase and indeed eradicate the hyper-troll Mani Deli and his
| > | goddamn Boogeroo from rec.arts.fine, as a service to humanity.
| > | ...
g...@panix.com (G*rd*n):
| > I think the problem is not the presence of fundamentalists,
| > but the fact that non-fundamentalists pay so much attention
| > to them, other than as a source of low humor.
spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges):
| Excuse me, my experience as a consultant in the software industry is
| that one must pay respectful attention to all levels of reading and
| all levels of logic.
|
| For example, I taught a class in logic at DeVry. Many of the students
| could not comprehend symbolic logic because its crotchets and
| conveniences are so remote and so apparently useless.
|
| But what they did seem to appreciate was my attempt to convey the idea
| that the business world has its own "logic" which is constituted, in
| approximately equal measure, of logic and illogic, reading and
| misreading.
|
| Thus for example a second-order fundamentalism is used in the business
| world as a way of ending discussion...for a good reason, a bad reason
| and no reason at all.
|
| If we ignore Fundamentalists, whether they read the Bible, the Koran
| or das Kapital in a Fundamentalist way, then we tend to lose terrain
| to them.
|
| The fact is that most people on earth are so brutalized that a
| fundamentalist reading, in former times of Marx and now of the Koran
| and Bible, is literally the only way they have to access spiritual
| relief or promise of liberation in the 8 hours that their 16 hour
| shift leaves them.
Well, as a friend of mine says, "Smart people need smart
theories, and stupid people need stupid theories." I agree:
there is no doubt that low-res, high-contrast, narrow-field,
low-dimensional theories serve a purpose in this world,
although I am not sure it is a very good purpose.
However, it seemed above that one promoter of such theories
constituted such a problem for you that you felt a need to
_eradicate_. Earnest engineer that I am, I put my mind to
diagnosis, as a preliminary step toward discovering a
solution. However, now you say there is no problem. Very
well then: there is no problem. First there is a problem,
then there is no problem, then there is. I understand
perfectly.
As for losing terrain to fundamentalists, as one who witnessed
the World Trade Center buring with his very own eyes and not
long after saw Monkey Boy laughing on television, I am not
worried about losing terrain to fundamentalists; I am just
thankful they have not yet gotten my coordinates. Gather ye
rosebuds while ye may, and keep moving, I guess.
Mani Deli
>>Mani Deli wrote.
>> Nilges' brilliant observations suggest a perfect way for artzy
>> fartzies to make a living. One only needs a camera obscura ( an opaque
>> projector) and a large stove..
>
>He's automated the reply in an effort to show contempt and scorn, but
>what the automation shows is cowardice.
No Way! I love your suggestion. Its the best artzy fartzy suggestion I
ever read barring none.
When I went to art school the artzy fartzy word was simply that the
old masters were able to paint that way because they used small
brushes. Your brilliant suggestion is a great advance because anyone
knows that the addition of a camera obscura and a large oven will get
you places.
You suggestion is worth endless repeats, especially for Dan Fox who
has no place to advance. Think of how different his schmiers would
look should he take your advice and fry them .
>I love the smell of Mani in the morning, and I mean no homo-eroticism
>thereby.
As I live miles from your outhouse I think you are deluding yourself.
Try wiping your ass more often perhaps the this will cause the smell
to subside somewhat.
Edward G. Nilges
> (Edward G. Nilges) wrote:
>
> >>Mani Deli wrote.
> >> Nilges' brilliant observations suggest a perfect way for artzy
> >> fartzies to make a living. One only needs a camera obscura ( an opaque
> >> projector) and a large stove..
> >
> >He's automated the reply in an effort to show contempt and scorn, but
> >what the automation shows is cowardice.
>
> No Way! I love your suggestion. Its the best artzy fartzy suggestion I
> ever read barring none.
>
> When I went to art school the artzy fartzy word was simply that the
> old masters were able to paint that way because they used small
> brushes. Your brilliant suggestion is a great advance because anyone
> knows that the addition of a camera obscura and a large oven will get
> you places.
>
> You suggestion is worth endless repeats, especially for Dan Fox who
> has no place to advance. Think of how different his schmiers would
> look should he take your advice and fry them .
>
> >I love the smell of Mani in the morning, and I mean no homo-eroticism
> >thereby.
>
> As I live miles from your outhouse I think you are deluding yourself.
> Try wiping your ass more often perhaps the this will cause the smell
> to subside somewhat.
Susan Sontag was only half right. Fascism is the denial of shit: but
this denial emerges in these explosions.
Mani Deli
>spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges) wrote:
>
>>
>> Perhaps we can neutralize Mani Deli.
>
>Edward - I'm confused. In a post to me not long ago, you said that 'even
>mani has much to contribute.' Now, in several posts, you say you want to
>eradicate him from usenet. How come the apparent contradiction?
Because he's irritated no end.
> There
>are moderated groups, and they have their place (I heard that mani has been
>kicked out of at least one moderated list or group for his crackpot
>views...).
-In the voices you've been hearing.
Not only does this jerk misquote me frequently but he feels compelled
to lie about me. As I said, pompous asses like Fox are not accustomed
to being contradicted. They need to be surrounded by yes-men otherwise
their depression worsens and they need to succumb to fantasies which
make them feel better.
>
>Second, I've come to the conclusion that Mani and others like him have one
>goal on usenet: to get the attention they've never before had.
I suspect its you who needs attention for your uninspired schmiers.
Try to get Edward to send you some love and kisses and a compliment
for your work. It should lift you out of your depression for a few
minutes.
Edward G. Nilges
> On 28 Dec 2002 00:40:31 GMT, danf...@yahoo.com(Dan Fox) wrote:
>
> >spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges) wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> Perhaps we can neutralize Mani Deli.
> >
> >Edward - I'm confused. In a post to me not long ago, you said that 'even
> >mani has much to contribute.' Now, in several posts, you say you want to
> >eradicate him from usenet. How come the apparent contradiction?
I am like Walt Whitman, I am large, I contain multitudes, I got on the
rag, he pissed me off.
>
> Because he's irritated no end.
>
> > There
> >are moderated groups, and they have their place (I heard that mani has been
> >kicked out of at least one moderated list or group for his crackpot
> >views...).
Would not surprise me. However, do note that I was eighty-sixed
temporarily last March from Google as a result of going over the top
with a Hustler-like comment. I did demonstrate to the satisfaction of
Google's admin that it was an exceptional case and was readmitted.
The bald fact that Mani was, or was not, eightysixed from a moderated
group may or may not indicate that he is a nut bag. If the group is
deviant then they are Chock full o' Nuts and Mani is a stand-up guy.
This is a Nilges law: the group does NOT call the shots.
But I do know that Mani is not a stand-up guy because I have proved to
my satisfaction that his aesthetic is horse puckey.
>
> -In the voices you've been hearing.
>
> Not only does this jerk misquote me frequently but he feels compelled
> to lie about me. As I said, pompous asses like Fox are not accustomed
> to being contradicted. They need to be surrounded by yes-men otherwise
> their depression worsens and they need to succumb to fantasies which
> make them feel better.
>
Cheer up, dear heart. It is ok with me if you were eighty-sixed.
Change your views and learn some art history and you shall be Saved.
> >
> >Second, I've come to the conclusion that Mani and others like him have one
> >goal on usenet: to get the attention they've never before had.
>
> I suspect its you who needs attention for your uninspired schmiers.
> Try to get Edward to send you some love and kisses and a compliment
> for your work. It should lift you out of your depression for a few
> minutes.
>
This is homo pho bi a.
Yoo hoo, Dan, snuggums, xxx and kisses.
> ...no skill no art!
Oh, fart in a bottle and paint it. That would take skill. That would
be art.
Mani Deli
>But I do know that Mani is not a stand-up guy because I have proved to
>my satisfaction that his aesthetic is horse puckey...Change your views and learn some art history and you shall be Saved.
>It is plain that Vermeer used a camera obscura and then (as a part
>time baker) baked his partly dried canvases and panels to get a unique
>look. In terms of the 17th century, he "automated" part of the
>process.
> as Hockney has shown, the "can be
>automated" argument applies to ancients and moderns. There is an
>artistic genius distinct from technique, and this is SHARED by Vermeer
>and Mondrian, in part because neither wasted their time spewing their
>hatred of other artists.
Like Nilges does on Bouguereau!
Mani Deli
It is clear that on the basis of your technical art expertise that
Vermeer used a large oven to get as you say his, "unique look." You
also mention his strong relationship to Mondrian. Please answer the
following question.
If someone here would do a perfect oil copy of a Mondrian and put it
in a large oven would he get a "unique look" even closer to Vermeer?
AND..
Marilyn Yente Welch believes that Bouguereau paintings are done over
large photographs. On the basis of your vast technical expertise, can
you tell us whether this is factually correct and put any further
questions on this matter to rest.
Nilges wrote:
>It is plain that Vermeer used a camera obscura and then (as a part
>time baker) baked his partly dried canvases and panels to get a unique
>look. In terms of the 17th century, he "automated" part of the
>process.
I believe this discovery is to art, what quantum mechanics is to
physics.
...no skill no art!
Richard
Nilges has yet to reveal the dirtiest secret of all: that the old
renaissance masters took photographs with Sony digital cameras and
traced them onto canvases using printing machines that printed with
oil paint. This is a lost technology. There was actually no skill
involved in anything they did. They were also child molesters and
cocaine addicts. They spent most of their time doing that. These are
the "traditions" that Picasso and his fellow saints were rebelling
against.
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Maniac Deli
> Question for Nilges:
>
> It is clear that on the basis of your technical art expertise that
> Vermeer used a large oven to get as you say his, "unique look." You
> also mention his strong relationship to Mondrian. Please answer the
> following question.
>
> If someone here would do a perfect oil copy of a Mondrian and put it
> in a large oven would he get a "unique look" even closer to Vermeer?
Mr Maniac, may I ask *you* a question? What do you find so hard to believe
that Vermeer used a camera obscura? Hockney has put forward a very
convincing and persuaive (to me) argument about its use in the period. Don't
forget that Holland was full of talk about lenses, microscopes, telescopes
and optics at the time. As you know, the Dutchman Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
(1632-1723) discovered the first microscope. Vermeer (1632-1675) was exactly
the same age as Van Leeuwenhoek, and was a good friend of his. When Johannes
Vermeer died in 1675, van Leeuwenhoek, who also lived and worked in Delft
and worked for the city council, was appointed trustee for his estate. So I
think you are making a fool of yourself by challenging Mr Nilges on this
point.
> AND..
>
> Marilyn Yente Welch believes that Bouguereau paintings are done over
> large photographs. On the basis of your vast technical expertise, can
> you tell us whether this is factually correct and put any further
> questions on this matter to rest.
I think it is clear that you merely wish to poke fun with this waggish
comment, in much the same way as your silly website and absurd Art Revival
movement does. You lower the tone of the debate, Mr Maniac!
.only Skill? No Art!
Look at a great abstract painting:
http://www.nga.gov/feature/pollock/lm1024.jpg
Edward G. Nilges
> Question for Nilges:
>
> It is clear that on the basis of your technical art expertise that
> Vermeer used a large oven to get as you say his, "unique look." You
> also mention his strong relationship to Mondrian. Please answer the
> following question.
>
> If someone here would do a perfect oil copy of a Mondrian and put it
> in a large oven would he get a "unique look" even closer to Vermeer?
Lighten up, Otto.
>
> AND..
>
> Marilyn Yente Welch believes that Bouguereau paintings are done over
> large photographs. On the basis of your vast technical expertise, can
> you tell us whether this is factually correct and put any further
> questions on this matter to rest.
>
> Nilges wrote:
> >It is plain that Vermeer used a camera obscura and then (as a part
> >time baker) baked his partly dried canvases and panels to get a unique
> >look. In terms of the 17th century, he "automated" part of the
> >process.
>
> I believe this discovery is to art, what quantum mechanics is to
> physics.
(...well-targeted eraser...)
Edward G. Nilges
> Edward G. Nilges) art history expert wrote:
Shucks, you say the nicest things...
>
> >But I do know that Mani is not a stand-up guy because I have proved to
> >my satisfaction that his aesthetic is horse puckey...Change your views and learn some art history and you shall be Saved.
>
> >It is plain that Vermeer used a camera obscura and then (as a part
> >time baker) baked his partly dried canvases and panels to get a unique
> >look. In terms of the 17th century, he "automated" part of the
> >process.
>
> > as Hockney has shown, the "can be
> >automated" argument applies to ancients and moderns. There is an
> >artistic genius distinct from technique, and this is SHARED by Vermeer
> >and Mondrian, in part because neither wasted their time spewing their
> >hatred of other artists.
>
> Like Nilges does on Bouguereau!
>
Dear heart, mon coeur, Mein Herz, the thread's collective wisdom has
long since named the phase you seem to be in.
It is that of the child who discovers his image in the mirror. "Hey,
lookit dat, dat ME. Is dat cool or what. Yay!" Lacan le professeur,
he my homey here.
Therefore you proceed as did the crab of legend, backwards and by
reversal.
In fact I do indeed, how you say, make the water on le Boug.
Just as you ATTEMPT to how you say pass zee yellow stuff on mon
Mondrian Hollandaise, she le Marseillais oomph booga chukka.
But, mein gnadige Herr, you forget. You are without zee basic
knowledge or heart to do other than something even worse than the
fabular horseman of the desert, who made relief of himself in the wind
and was bespattered with his own soil in consequence.
This Reagan, big President Americaine, he call, how you say, la
theorie de la trickle she down go, aufsdemtrickeleinem, next stop,
your papers pliz.
You attempt to p*ss UP in defiance not of the wind but of gravity, une
force shall we say eleementaire.
From whatever mental hole you have dug the force of Milord Newton she
press down upon you and you make the nasty water on votre chapeau.
Whereas from Olympus, and my Olympian knowledge and great heart, I arc
a mighty stream that flows down as would justice, cher Monsieur, je
regrette auf wiedersein...
(Cackles and thunder from the mountain.)
Mani Deli
>Mr Maniac, may I ask *you* a question? What do you find so hard to believe
>that Vermeer used a camera obscura?
I am fully aware that everyone including Mondrian and some cavemen
used a camera obscura. However its the OVEN that puzzles me.
you wrote.--
>It is plain that Vermeer used a camera obscura and then (as a part
>time baker) baked his partly dried canvases and panels to get a unique
>look. In terms of the 17th century, he "automated" part of the
>process.
And you didn't answer the questions.
If someone here would do a perfect oil copy of a Mondrian and put it
in a large oven would he get a "unique look" even closer to Vermeer?
AND..
Marilyn Yente Welch believes that Bouguereau paintings are done over
large photographs. On the basis of your vast technical expertise, can
you tell us whether this is factually correct and put any further
questions on this matter to rest.
> Hockney has put forward a very
>convincing and persuaive (to me) argument about its use in the period.
To a pinhead like you
> the Dutchman Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) discovered the first microscope. Vermeer (1632-1675) was exactly
The microscope was invented not discovered and not by Leeuwenhoek. .
Historians disagree as to who invented the microscope. Spectacles were
known in Florence, Italy in the late 1200's. As early as 1625 a
member of the Academy of the Lynxes, the physician-naturalist John
Faber had a name for the new device. "the optical tube... it has
please me to call, after the model of the telescope, a "microscope,"
because it permits a view of minute things."
You might try verifying your facts before gassing off in your blowhard
lectures on subjects you know little about.
The next time you go to the library try spending less time jerking off
in the mens room.
Edward G. Nilges
This is a great example of Pollock's work.
On first glance the space of this painting seems to be impenetrable.
But if you sit with it, it becomes clear that the left side opens up
to a Delft blue space which raises new possibilities. This space is
balanced by a leaning group of black lines in the center and shows a
ay out of a wilderness.
This painting could only have been done by an American artist. I was
hiking in Idaho a few years ago and reflected that "impenetrable
wilderness" was not a mere phrase.
Perhaps, the artist was reflecting on the experience, over several
hundred years, of making sense of what in fact was impenetrable in a
sense we can only imagine.
But he did not stand outside nature. The paintings of the Hudson
River school are "European" in the sense that the land and its people
become objects, for the European subject like de Tocqueville to
examine as it were, through a microscope.
But just as the land resisted taming, Americans have never been
comfortable, as people with the sort of pernicious racial and ethnic
taxonomies that form the dark underside of European theory.
American weather is participatory. An ordinary Midwestern blizzard is
recounted not by Americans as sitting and watching the snow fall, but
as the journey home from work in which the meaning of the weather is
its effect on daily life. The "wind chill" factor as experienced
becomes more important than the objective temperature.
Of course, this has the flaw in that the American cannot observe
himself. Perhaps this is where Pollock reached a dead end in the late
1950s, for as he said, "I am nature" and nature is not self-reflexive.
No message about the act appears, only the trace of the act as an
Absolute, in which the painting, like the storm, wants less to be an
opening as a live electrical cable in the middle of the road. The
style is confrontational with the macho confrontation that admits of
no self-doubt.
Edward G. Nilges
> *** post for FREE via your newsreader at post.newsfeed.com ***
>
>
> Nilges has yet to reveal the dirtiest secret of all: that the old
> renaissance masters took photographs with Sony digital cameras and
> traced them onto canvases using printing machines that printed with
> oil paint. This is a lost technology. There was actually no skill
> involved in anything they did. They were also child molesters and
> cocaine addicts. They spent most of their time doing that. These are
> the "traditions" that Picasso and his fellow saints were rebelling
> against.
This work may be safely identified as hack work by a follower of
Maniac's Delight. In attempting pastiche without skill, it becomes
self-mockery.
The content of the mind is dumped, steaming, on the .Net. The
*cognoscenti* of rec.arts.fine shudder, and dangle fragrances before
their noses. Security is called and the drunk is escorted into the
snow, which falls silently in the American night.
Maniac Deli
> I am fully aware that everyone including Mondrian and some cavemen
> used a camera obscura. However its the OVEN that puzzles me.
Well, now you concede the role of the camera obscura. Good! We are making
slow progress... BTW I am not Mr Nilges. If you still harbour doubts about
the camera obscura issue, I suggest you read Professor Steadman's work on
this issue. Here's a link to start you:
http://www.grand-illusions.com/vermeer/vermeer3.htm You can also discuss
this issue with Prof Steadman at J.P.St...@open.ac.uk
You ask about the oven. I must say that surprised me too, but then I thought
about it and was suddenly taken with the brilliance of the suggestion! If
you have been to Holland, as I have many times, you will know how damp and
cold the place can be. Getting a painting to dry in that climate might take
an inordinately long time. Now I know I have resorted to using a hairdryer
on some of my (water-based) works, to get them to dry more quickly, so I can
quite imagine that Vermeer, who gave some of his rare paintings to bakers,
may have used a warmish oven to facilitate drying too. If the oven was warm
enough, the oils may have "laid down" or relaxed into a soft, flat state,
thus giving the works their unusual finish and surface panache.
So, Mr Maniac, would you be so kind as to stop posting silly stuff here and
go away to make an experiment on this issue for us? Thank you, dear vassal!
I look forward to hearing if Mr Nilges is indeed totally correct, as I
suspect he is!
...only Skill? No Art!
Ivor E. Black
laug...@your.tinybrain says...
>so I can
>quite imagine that Vermeer, who gave some of his rare paintings to bakers,
>may have used a warmish oven to facilitate drying too. If the oven was warm
>enough, the oils may have "laid down" or relaxed into a soft, flat state,
>thus giving the works their unusual finish and surface panache.
Certainly the oldest of known paintings, in
encaustic, benefit from such a method. And
I know of artists who put their paintings
out in the hot sun in order to hasten the
drying time (works for water-based too, come
to think of it).
The opposite side of this argument
is that artists who work in oil mediums also
sometimes preserve their palettes of color
by placing them in a freezer compartment
between uses.
Mani Deli
>On first glance the space of this painting seems to be impenetrable.
>But if you sit with it, it becomes clear that the left side opens up
>to a Delft blue space which raises new possibilities. This space is
>balanced by a leaning group of black lines in the center and shows a
>ay out of a wilderness.
large snip
>Of course, this has the flaw in that the American cannot observe
>himself. Perhaps this is where Pollock reached a dead end in the late
>1950s, for as he said, "I am nature" and nature is not self-reflexive.
>No message about the act appears, only the trace of the act as an
>Absolute, in which the painting, like the storm, wants less to be an
>opening as a live electrical cable in the middle of the road. The
>style is confrontational with the macho confrontation that admits of
>no self-doubt.
Peter H.M. Brooks
>
something that is indecipherable can't be known to be anything, imbecility
of wisdom, by virtue of it not being possible to decipher it.
Still, if you are presenting your sentence above as the 'artspeak of the
day', I take your point - it makes no sense and is not about art.
--
Naturally base, raised by imaginary and unrepeating, cyclic, aeternity, with
unity we are mere nothing! My six glyphic friends and I.
Mani Deli
formula camera obscura + large oven = Vermeer, wrote:
>"Mani Deli" <ma...@sympatico.ca> wrote
>
>> I am fully aware that everyone including Mondrian and some cavemen
>> used a camera obscura. However its the OVEN that puzzles me.
>
>Well, now you concede the role of the camera obscura. Good! We are making
>slow progress.
I'm happy you are convinced that everyone used camera obscuras. I'm
also sure that you keep two in your outhouse.
.. BTW I am not Mr Nilges.
We all know you are Maniac Deli and other names because you don't want
others to find out who is really behind your babbling stupidity as it
might prevent you from coming off unemployment.
> If you still harbour doubts about
>the camera obscura issue, I suggest you read Professor Steadman's work on
>this issue.
Read the criticisms of Steadman.
>You ask about the oven. I must say that surprised me too, but then I thought
>about it and was suddenly taken with the brilliance of the suggestion!
Ask Fox for a medal.
>Here's your statement
>It is plain that Vermeer used a camera obscura and then (as a part
>time baker) baked his partly dried canvases and panels to get a unique
>look. In terms of the 17th century, he "automated" part of the
>process.
Check out the "unique look." and the "automated."
>..., so I can
>quite imagine that Vermeer, who gave some of his rare paintings to bakers,
>may have used a warmish oven to facilitate drying too. If the oven was warm
>enough, the oils may have "laid down" or relaxed into a soft, flat state,
>thus giving the works their unusual finish and surface panache.
So how did he get the "unique look" if anyone can get an oven and do
it? If you ever get enough money to invest in a large oven and show us
your unique look.
>So, Mr Maniac, would you be so kind as to stop posting silly stuff here and
>go away to make an experiment on this issue for us?
Yes, Mr. Edfart Gasbag Nilges I hope you continue to post your
theories. I always enjoy reading your squirming in order to justify
them.
>Thank you, dear vassal!
>I look forward to hearing if Mr Nilges is indeed totally correct, as I
>suspect he is!
You are 100% correct 1% of the time.
Question:
Does Mondrian + large oven = Vermeer ??
I'm looking forward to a long paper on the matter. And don't forget to
mention the relationship between Hitler, the bourgeoisie and all those
perverts running 19th century academic schools.
You also forgot to tell us whether you noticed more Hitlers then usual
in your neighborhood lately. Large reply expected.
Edward G. Nilges
When I decided to post under my actual full name "Edward G. Nilges" I
realized that in the context of the Internet, it sounds antique and
pompous to use a first name, middle initial and last name, rather like
Hiram G. Puffenup or Josephina Q Erfurt. Victorian, overstuffed.
Germanic.
This is because it is far cooler to use a single name, often de plume,
such as Rock, or Biff, or Mustang Sally.
However, I was concerned about two issues.
(1) The weightlessness, lack of import, to views posted anonymously.
The Declaration of Independence, an Enlightenment document, was not
signed by Chuck or Dave or Indiana Jones, but by guys who used their
true names so the British could find them in New Jersey and they could
have it out on the bloody field of fame.
To use an assumed name is to manufacture a virtualized citizenry. It
ultimately leads to the manipulation of the electorate by cybernetic
means as seen in the 2000 election, for the manipulators regard the
electorate as felons to a man, who have stolen identities and may as
well vote for a leader of felons (GWB) who needed a felonious assist
from the Supreme Court to boost him into high office.
(2) The implication by a single name that one is disconnected from a
chain of being, which is shown by the Western scheme, the Russian
scheme (as in Alexei Alexandrovich, Alexei son of Alexander) or
schemes of the east.
Rock and Biff and Mustang Sally ultimately are fatherless and
motherless cartoon characters in a pornographic American movie which
has since Reagan confused freedom with complete political
irresponsibility and a recreational made-for-TV foreign and domestic
policy...as seen in the President's speech on the economy today.
George Bush is now dubya, a pizza delivery man in a pornographic film.
Thus I decided to use an easily traceable name so as to take full
responsibility for my views, and to include the middle initial to
avoid any confusion with people sharing the first and last name, so
that when they come for me they get the right man.
But the result is easily lampooned by cartoon characters. Now, Mani's
name may well be his own and to his credit he takes responsibility for
his views (which is not the whole ball game, since his views are
silly.)
But the lampoon in the title is quite lame and derives from Saturday
morning cartoons that were made in the 1930s to narcotize discontent
and to turn it against itself, in which the discontented were taught
to regard themselves, and not the powerful, as cartoon characters in a
pornographic film.