The Mani Poem
Dilettante
1.
Go far away, Mani
Or I'll spank your fanny
Spank it so hard
that you won't have any.
Dilettante
Neil Maxwell
Intolerance rules
Where Dilettante drools
He constantly loses
his internet duels.
Neil Maxwell - I don't speak for my employer
DNALJM
Mani the martyr
Who realizes that artists are getting dumber and not smarter
Who is crucified for his passion
Defending talented artists whose work is merely out of fashion
Jane
Dilettante
> Mani the martyr
> Who realizes that artists are getting dumber and not smarter
> Who is crucified for his passion
> Defending talented artists whose work is merely out of fashion
You fail to note that Mani posts over and over for no reason except to
attack. If you call that defending, then show me the names of artists
he is defending. I am not following Mani or you, for that matter,
doing this. Mani is doing this. Someone missed the course on having a
brain at cooper-union.
D
Dilettante
It is not I that am intolerant, but Mani in post after post he comes
on simply to attack. I do not want to post in such manner to me. If
he or you have constructive things to say, then fine but he does not.
Look at his posts on the thread about starting a new artistic
movement. If you can't find evidence to back up your assertion, then
don't post to me again.
D
Mani Deli
>You fail to note that Mani posts over and over for no reason except to
>attack. If you call that defending, then show me the names of artists
>he is defending.
>
>D
Here's one and some mentions and I'll follow it up with more. You can
see B'S work and some of the artists mentioned below in hi-rez at
http://www.artrenewal.org/
I saw the Bouguereau show in Montreal many years ago. It was among the
finest I have ever seen. When I visited Paris in the 70's he was not
to be seen. This show had his greatest large pieces. They are unique,
entirely original, and technically unmatched by anybody.
What you see of B's work on the web or in books is a mere indication
of the quality of his work. Unfortunately looking at detail is out of
fashion. If books or the net showed detail one would get some sense of
the painterly quality in his and much of the best 19th cent. work.
The best of B. is in his amazing detail. Nobody, and this can only be
seen in the original, painted flesh like B. Not Rubens, Ingres, David,
Raphael, or any 19 cent. academician, etc..
Look at his masterly drawings or the preliminary studies for his
paintings (many are pure impressionism) Compare them to Picasso and
Matisse.
The student of modern art learns to rant about the awfulness of B. and
19th cent academic art by seeing a slide and listening to some utter
nonsense about academic evil and the lurking dangers of kitsch in
politically correct art history courses. Few can name ten academic
painters or have ever seen any of their work. About all they learn is
that it was evil and the Impressionists revolted against it and held
separate shows. Little known to artzy fartzies is that many academics
also took up Impressionism and exhibited it in the in the salons.
As I indicate in my book, the present view of nineteenth cent. art
history carefully avoids mentioning about 98% of its artists. It is as
if a history of the 20th century contained one paragraph each about
Hitler and Stalin and only got into detail about America's triumphs
over communism.
It is no wonder Picasso and Matisse hated B. By the way a load of
Academic paintings were found among Picasso's art collection. Dali
also owned a B. and admired the finest of 19th cent. technique.
There are hundreds of very fine Academic painters. Among the best are
Gerome, Bonheur, Meissonier, Bargue. Vibert. Detaille, Fortuney. There
are so many more. They are hidden away and are as hard to find as
originals by Norman Rockwell or Leyendecker's are in any museum. The
artzy fartzy curators of most major museums keep these artists out of
eyes reach lest the viewer stray from Modern Academic Art or
Impressionism.
B. is a kind of immortal zombie of modern art. He keeps popping up.
Book covers, post cards, puzzles, posters, etc.; (On stuff that sells)
and an occasional a well attended show. He is popular without a well
known name. His paintings haven't earned a Modern critic's word in his
favor. They don't need one.
>I am not following Mani or you, for that matter,
>doing this. Mani is doing this. Someone missed the course on having a
>brain at cooper-union.
Tired of Modern Art? check
http://www3.sympatico.ca/manideli/
Mani Deli
> Mani posts over and over for no reason except to
>attack. If you call that defending, then show me the names of artists
>he is defending.
I wrote a bit before but check out Tamara's work. Here's is a good
example of artwork which is familiar while the artist's name is
unfamiliar. One can see 2 originals at the Royal Ontario Museums at
the Art Deco exhibit. It is interesting to stand and watch viewers
take careful notice of an artist I'm sure most have never heard and
see how fast they bypass Picasso and Leger. Ideas and beautiful
technique don't need fashionable Artspeak to attract the viewer.
http://www.goodart.org/artoftdl.htm
"Tamara deLempicka is perhaps the most famous painter of the art deco
period. She was born in Poland and moved to Russia where she lived
until the Bolsheviks arrested her husband during the Russian
revolution. She secured his release and they fled to Paris. there she
learned to paint, enrolling at the Academie de la Grand Chaumiere and
studying privately. She was quite a prolific artist (in part
facilitated by her spare simple style) and was much sought after as a
portrait artist. If you are interested in learning more about Tamara
deLempicka I highly recommend Passion by Design by her daughter,
Kizette deLempicka-Foxhall."
Modern art at its best!
max
>It is not I that am intolerant, but Mani in post after post he comes
>on simply to attack. I do not want to post in such manner to me. If
>he or you have constructive things to say, then fine but he does not.
>Look at his posts on the thread about starting a new artistic
>movement. If you can't find evidence to back up your assertion, then
>don't post to me again.
Hee hee! You crack me up! What you posted is constructive? Posting
on usenet is posting to you? "Anyone can contribute to this poem" -
does this ring a bell? Do you know how to use a killfile? What are
you, the moderator of RAF? I'd keep going, but it seems pointless.
Do you ever think about this stuff before it pours from your fingers
to your keyboard? It's about time for another name change; this one's
lost all its credibility. You post reasonable things sometimes, but
then you totally blow it with posts like this or your child-abuse
rationalizations.
You're free to post whatever you want, of course, but If you're going
to kick sand in the sandbox, don't be surprised if you get sand in
your eyes.
max
max
wrote:
>
>Modern art at its best!
This is true, and far more appealing to me than Boug (not that he's
modern). She's one of the more under-appreciated artists of the last
century, IMO.
Taschen has a reasonably priced book of her work by Gilles Neret.
DNALJM
>attack. If you call that defending, then show me the names of artists
>he is defending.
They are listed on his website. The presentation [of his ideals] on the
newsgroup is a little harsh sometimes but they are my values that he is
defending.
>Someone missed the course on having a
>brain at cooper-union.
Totally ironic that you would have to break out with this after faulting
Mani for attacking.
Jane
Leo Papandreou
B.'s painting is technically fabulous. No one debates the wow factor in his
work - NO ONE DOES THAT, MANI -- though many say his work is saccharine and
dull, which I think is true but beside the point.
The point is if you want to become a famous realist, you learn photography,
cinema, computer animation -- modern visual arts that require more skill,
creativity and imagination than is demonstrated painting plaster casts,
reclining nudes and still life with a pitcher.
Show someone a Bouguereau and they'll tell you earnestly, "wow." Then they'll
rent and watch _The Matrix._
Their behavior is not a plot against you by the modern art cabal. It is
technology. Progress has marginalized the representational and story-telling
function of traditional visual arts. Painting is become an antiquated art
threatening obsolescence. Create something radically new with your paints
and brushes or languish in obscurity, a hobbyist, irrelevant.
Problem is it is very hard to create something new. It is much easier to paint
plaster casts, reclining nudes and still life with a pitcher. There might be a
market for that kind of visual muzak in K-Mart (in which case carpe diem) but
in my opinion illustration is more profitable (because representation and
story telling serve important visual functions in ads and children's books)
and "artistic" (because I like to look at ads and children's books.)
You cannot stuff the genie back inside the bottle. In the 21st century, science
is very advanced, but not so advanced you can travel back in time and become a
famous artist in the 19th.
Sorry.
> The student of modern art learns to rant about the awfulness of B. and
> 19th cent academic art by seeing a slide and listening to some utter
> nonsense about academic evil and the lurking dangers of kitsch in
> politically correct art history courses.
You are pummeling a straw man. The only art hate group I know of is ARC:
http://www.artrenewal.com/articles/2001/ASOPA/bad_art_good_art1.asp. That Fred
Ross, he is a bitter crank.
Paul Mesken
wrote:
>I wrote a bit before but check out Tamara's work. Here's is a good
>example of artwork which is familiar while the artist's name is
>unfamiliar. One can see 2 originals at the Royal Ontario Museums at
>the Art Deco exhibit. It is interesting to stand and watch viewers
>take careful notice of an artist I'm sure most have never heard and
>see how fast they bypass Picasso and Leger. Ideas and beautiful
>technique don't need fashionable Artspeak to attract the viewer.
>
>http://www.goodart.org/artoftdl.htm
Thanks for the link Mani. I've forgotten her name and it came at the
right moment. At the oil painting forum of WetCanvas we'll be doing a
so called "Master of the Month" (starting at January 2004 with Zorn)
in which we'll copy a selected painting of a master to collectively
study the technique (sounds like a pretty good idea to me). I've added
her name to the suggestions and I think she has a good chance.
Just for fun, here's the list of suggestions so far :
Alma-Tadema
Beaux
Botticelli
Bouguereau
Caravaggio
Dali
van Dyck
Dürer
El Greco
Fechin
Holbein
Hopper
Ingres
Leighton
Lempicka
Manet
Matisse
Morisot
Picasso
Rembrandt
Rosetti
Rubens
Sargent
Schmid
Serow
Sorolla
Titian
Velasquez
Waterhouse
Weistling
Zorn
Could be interesting, at least 90% is worth studying IMO :-)
Paul Mesken
wrote:
>Progress has marginalized the representational and story-telling
>function of traditional visual arts. Painting is become an antiquated art
>threatening obsolescence.
I don't agree. Sprinters cannot outrun a car but still people pay to
watch them run. This is all about how good people can perform, not how
much better technology is.
Flying_Naked_People
koan...@earthling.net says...
> B.'s painting is technically fabulous. No one debates the wow factor in his
> work - NO ONE DOES THAT, MANI -- though many say his work is saccharine and
> dull, which I think is true but beside the point.
>
> The point is if you want to become a famous realist, you learn photography,
> cinema, computer animation -- modern visual arts that require more skill,
> creativity and imagination than is demonstrated painting plaster casts,
> reclining nudes and still life with a pitcher.
>
> Show someone a Bouguereau and they'll tell you earnestly, "wow." Then
they'll
> rent and watch _The Matrix._
>
> Their behavior is not a plot against you by the modern art cabal. It is
> function of traditional visual arts. Painting is become an antiquated art
> and brushes or languish in obscurity, a hobbyist, irrelevant.
>
> Problem is it is very hard to create something new. It is much easier to
paint
> plaster casts, reclining nudes and still life with a pitcher. There might be
a
> market for that kind of visual muzak in K-Mart (in which case carpe diem)
but
> in my opinion illustration is more profitable (because representation and
> story telling serve important visual functions in ads and children's books)
> and "artistic" (because I like to look at ads and children's books.)
>
> You cannot stuff the genie back inside the bottle. In the 21st century,
science
> is very advanced, but not so advanced you can travel back in time and become
a
> famous artist in the 19th.
>
> Sorry.
>
>
Boy! I think this is one your most "readable," focused, and comprehensible
posts yet!
Good response.
max
wrote:
>
>Thanks for the link Mani. I've forgotten her name and it came at the
>right moment. At the oil painting forum of WetCanvas we'll be doing a
>so called "Master of the Month" (starting at January 2004 with Zorn)
>in which we'll copy a selected painting of a master to collectively
>study the technique (sounds like a pretty good idea to me). I've added
>her name to the suggestions and I think she has a good chance.
She's popular with the Asian art-factory copy centers; most of them
offer Lempicka pieces. "Adam and Eve" and "Andromeda" are common
ones. It appears her work is somewhat of a challenge to copy
effectively; when they post pictures of their actual works for sale
rather than images of the original, it's invariably a blunt and
heavy-handed imitation. Maybe not a surprise, given the assembly-line
aspect.
A friend of mine came back from Thailand with a copy of a Kandinsky
piece that was very nicely done, but copies of abstracts are not so
obvious unless held up next to the original.
max
Flying_Naked_People
says...
> x-no-archive: yes
> Aside from the paintings, is that really a true picture
> of a successful painter's studio?
> How many have such space, and how many clean up
> so thoroughly?
>
> I find nearly all the paintings interesting, but after a short
> while, fairly empty.
It's mind-boggling why Mani prefers this artist over Picasso - they're both
the nearly same except that one uses smoother transitions in differences of
shape, texture and color. (Picasso using "rougher" and more obvious
transitions!) Perhaps Mani prefers this artist to Picasso because her "style"
obviously leans toward surrealism.
Other than that, what's the diff? Imo, her transitions (in shape) are not
violent enough to convince me they were done as a "style." In fact, I could go
further and admit that I've seen this "play" on shapes before from people who
sterilize amorphous shapes (like me). Not sure it was done "on purpose" if you
catch my drift.
> Perhaps this is my take on the whole style.
> Thur
It's "crisp" and "clean"... clean lines, stark constrast, metallic texture...
That contrast... it's too much. There is "art" and comfort in subtlety -
subtlety absorb sound waves - the lack of it produces loud bangs or echoes - a
possible reason for your feeling "empty?"
Oh God, I'm "hearing" art now. Time to lay off the Excedrin.
> "Mani Deli" <ma...@sympatico.ca> wrote in message
> news:1hpcrv0ei89d2u00b...@4ax.com...
> > The (Dilettante) wrote:
> > > Mani posts over and over for no reason except to
> > >attack. If you call that defending, then show me the names of artists
> > >he is defending.
> >
> > I wrote a bit before but check out Tamara's work. Here's is a good
> > example of artwork which is familiar while the artist's name is
> > unfamiliar. One can see 2 originals at the Royal Ontario Museums at
> > the Art Deco exhibit. It is interesting to stand and watch viewers
> > take careful notice of an artist I'm sure most have never heard and
> > see how fast they bypass Picasso and Leger. Ideas and beautiful
> > technique don't need fashionable Artspeak to attract the viewer.
> >
> >
> >
> > http://www.goodart.org/artoftdl.htm
> >
> > "Tamara deLempicka is perhaps the most famous painter of the art deco
> > period. She was born in Poland and moved to Russia where she lived
> > until the Bolsheviks arrested her husband during the Russian
> > revolution. She secured his release and they fled to Paris. there she
> > learned to paint, enrolling at the Academie de la Grand Chaumiere and
> > studying privately. She was quite a prolific artist (in part
> > facilitated by her spare simple style) and was much sought after as a
> > portrait artist. If you are interested in learning more about Tamara
> > deLempicka I highly recommend Passion by Design by her daughter,
> > Kizette deLempicka-Foxhall."
> >
> > Modern art at its best!
> >
> >
Dilettante
Not ironic at all, and you might try learning the meaning of the word.
Mani should stop answering my posts. If he does that I will have no
contact with him and no more to say about him.
My post was addressing you. You don't seem to recognize what he is
doing on this thread. I repeat that you can go through his posts and
see whether he is innocently defending neglected painters, and if I am
maliciously attacking him for that. That really is not the case.
You simply have an affinity for his attitude so anyone who does not
care for him you invent attacks.
I will prove this to you now. This will be the last you hear from
me and I suggest you demonstrate that you are not another neurotic
crank by emulating my conduct.
D
Dilettante
> > Mani posts over and over for no reason except to
> >attack. If you call that defending, then show me the names of artists
> >he is defending.
>
> I wrote a bit before but check out Tamara's work.
I do not object to Mani or anyone else lauding an artist they respect,
except that Mani jumps over to other people's thread for no reason
except to attack. there is a difference.
And, since Mani was so kind as to preface this thread with a quote of
mine, he and everyone else can be informed that Lempika is a
commercial illustrator, but not a fine artist.
Dilettante
Dilettante
Palo Meano
>That Fred Ross, he is a bitter crank.
YHIHF - Better bitter than totally tasteless!
Even saccharine silliness outranks tasteless titty-lation.
Palo Meano
says...
>
>x-no-archive: yes
>Try some new stuff.
>That shit is doing your brains in.
>Thur
Mani can do that if you let her, to wit:
Hark! It's Mani.
Netnanny.
Lark! As in shark.
She's a granny.
Bark! The gnashing.
Granny gear thrashing.
Dark! Ass in thrust.
She's apt to bust.
Park! As in curbing.
Scuffing, perturbing.
Hark! It's only Mani.
Netnanny.
Chris
"Dilettante" <hu...@myself.com> wrote in message
news:ba63903f.03111...@posting.google.com...
> And, since Mani was so kind as to preface this thread with a quote of
> mine, he and everyone else can be informed that Lempika is a
> commercial illustrator, but not a fine artist.
>
A curious position indeed. How did you arrive at that?
Chris
DNALJM
>cinema, computer animation -- modern visual arts that require more skill,
>creativity and imagination than is demonstrated painting plaster casts,
>reclining nudes and still life with a pitcher.
>
If you want to make movies then I would suggest that painting is not for
you. It would take a very talented photographer to come close to the editing
decisions that the sensitive human eye can.
And as far as becoming "famous" Odd Nerdrum is "famous" and will probably
remain so. Do you know of the English film "Threads?" It was the first movie
to deal frankly with the impact of nuclear war. However, I am sure more people
have never even heard of it or can say who made it. More people can name the
less impressive and derviative "Day After" but also I would say not be able to
name the poeple who made it, just the big money actors in it. Yes, the name of
Odd Nerdrum will endure longer in art history than novel films and computer
animation tricks. Also, to make convincing computer animation you have to know
how things act in real life, through observation.
>Show someone a Bouguereau and they'll tell you earnestly, "wow." Then they'll
>rent and watch _The Matrix._
>
Or you could say that they read a book and then go watch a movie, whereas in
reading the book you have to manufacture your own visuals and in watching the
movie you get to see someone else's. It's not really a fair comparison. People
generally like to take craft classes and read books to use their own
imagination and find that they are frustrated if they can only do so
marginally. A movie represents someone else's vision, it doesn't speak to your
own.
>Their behavior is not a plot against you by the modern art cabal. It is
>technology. Progress has marginalized the representational and story-telling
>function of traditional visual arts. Painting is become an antiquated art
>threatening obsolescence.
I find this is a view espoused by people who have an investment in
non-representation, either they make it or [try to] sell it. Most traditional
artists have no problem getting attention or consideration with each-other, in
educational venues, or with the public. Face it, nobody wants to wake up and
look at painted styrofoam in their living room every morning. People like
novel things but they also like things to remain the same. They want the
comfort of the sun setting every day but not the exact same way. And this is
what traditional art provides, skill and attention to detail in a time of mass
production. I've never met anyone who said, "I wish you bought me something
made with slave wages in Red Star China that will fall apart in six months
rather than make me this painting/chair/quilt."
Create something radically new with your paints
>and brushes or languish in obscurity, a hobbyist, irrelevant.
New and radical. /yawn Just about everything is derivative now a days, so
why make it worse by not having any skills?
>
>Problem is it is very hard to create something new. It is much easier to
>paint
>plaster casts, reclining nudes and still life with a pitcher.
I'll bet I could come up with something that nobody's done before easier
than, well, I don't like to paint nudes but let's say a figure in an interior.
There might be
>a
>market for that kind of visual muzak in K-Mart (in which case carpe diem) but
>in my opinion illustration is more profitable (because representation and
>story telling serve important visual functions in ads and children's books)
>and "artistic" (because I like to look at ads and children's books.)
Surely you must think that good illustrators have traditional drawing
skills and are familiar with the materials? The things in the CA catalogue
would be really weak and unmoving if that were the case.
>
>You cannot stuff the genie back inside the bottle. In the 21st century,
>science
>is very advanced, but not so advanced you can travel back in time and become
>a
>famous artist in the 19th.
>
>Sorry.
>
>> The student of modern art learns to rant about the awfulness of B. and
>> 19th cent academic art by seeing a slide and listening to some utter
>> nonsense about academic evil and the lurking dangers of kitsch in
>> politically correct art history courses.
>
>You are pummeling a straw man. The only art hate group I know of is ARC:
>http://www.artrenewal.com/articles/2001/ASOPA/bad_art_good_art1.asp. That
>Fred
>Ross, he is a bitter crank.
Jane
DNALJM
>offer Lempicka pieces. "Adam and Eve" and "Andromeda" are common
>ones.
I went and got my copy of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" thinking that
they maybe used one of the paintings for the cover but it was done by a modern
painter. A catchy style indeed.
Jane
DNALJM
>Mani should stop answering my posts. If he does that I will have no
>contact with him and no more to say about him.
Yeah, think of how much attention you would get if you initiated a thread
with his name in it and a puerile poem inside attacking him! But you know
what? You played it trashy and he played it classy, he pointed out the artists
he was defending leaving you the only one making personal attacks.
>My post was addressing you. You don't seem to recognize what he is
>doing on this thread.
I followed the entire thread.
>You simply have an affinity for his attitude so anyone who does not
>care for him you invent attacks.
> I will prove this to you now.
I have to quesntion your sanity when my response was to defend him and not
attack you.
>This will be the last you hear from
>me and I suggest you demonstrate that you are not another neurotic
>crank by emulating my conduct.
If you can't handle the exchange of ideas on Usenet then why are you here?
Do you honestly think that you can start a thread attacking someone, even for
reasons you think God smiles on you for, and attack my education, and not get a
response?
Jane
Paul Mesken
Must have read it somewhere. Besides : I think those "commercial
illustrators" are darn fine artists :-)
Mani Deli
>B.'s painting is technically fabulous.
That's a key factor for me, especially when the so called great Modern
art is so technically impoverished. For me great art starts with "
technically fabulous."
> No one debates the wow factor in his
>work - NO ONE DOES THAT, MANI -- though many say his work is saccharine and
>dull, which I think is true but beside the point.
I prefer saccharine to the philosophy of the gutter and charlatan
decoration passed off as great art. B. did lots more than his so
called saccharine work.
>The point is if you want to become a famous realist, you learn photography,
>cinema, computer animation -- modern visual arts that require more skill,
>creativity and imagination than is demonstrated painting plaster casts,
Like Picasso and Matisse etc..
>reclining nudes
Like Manet and Cezanne Balthus etc.
> and still life with a pitcher.
like Matisse and Cezanne, most impressionists, etc.
Quality in art is not a function of subject matter.
>Show someone a Bouguereau and they'll tell you earnestly, "wow."
That's far more than what most honestly say about Picasso and Cezanne
and its a wow without any Modern Academic art indoctrination, on as a
matter of fact , derision.
> Then they'll
>rent and watch _The Matrix._
>
>Their behavior is not a plot against you by the modern art cabal.
Right, its an honest uniformed wow caused by a master painter who has
been poo poohed by critics for about a century.
It is
>technology. Progress has marginalized the representational and story-telling
>function of traditional visual arts.
It hasn't. Subject matter depends on ideas and execution. Bad
imitations of floor covering and towel design just doesn't wow the
unindoctrinated.
> Painting is become an antiquated art
>threatening obsolescence. Create something radically new with your paints
>and brushes or , a hobbyist, irrelevant.
Most who don't know their craft " languish in obscurity," and earn
purely abstract money, with good reason. New artwork good and bad
hangs all over the place.
>Problem is it is very hard to create something new.
Doing something new badly is no big deal. Very little great art is
something very new most is doing something very well.
>It is much easier to paint
>plaster casts, reclining nudes and still life with a pitcher.
-then trying to sell imitation floor covering and bed sheets and house
painter's drop cloths for big money while claiming it is art.
> There might be a
>market for that kind of visual muzak in K-Mart (in which case carpe diem) but
>in my opinion illustration is more profitable (because representation and
>story telling serve important visual functions in ads and children's books)
>and "artistic" (because I like to look at ads and children's books.)
-and because people happen to like it.
>You cannot stuff the genie back inside the bottle. In the 21st century, science
>is very advanced, but not so advanced you can travel back in time and become a
>famous artist in the 19th.
Like Cezanne and the Impressionists who among other are imitated ad-
nauseum because it requires little skill.
>
>Sorry.
>
>> The student of modern art learns to rant about the awfulness of B. and
>> 19th cent academic art by seeing a slide and listening to some utter
>> nonsense about academic evil and the lurking dangers of kitsch in
>> politically correct art history courses.
>
>You are pummeling a straw man.
Take a college art history course and then tell me I'm wrong.
The only art hate group I know of is ARC:
>http://www.artrenewal.com/articles/2001/ASOPA/bad_art_good_art1.asp. That Fred
>Ross, he is a bitter crank.
I advise all here to take a look and decide for themselves.
I suspect that a century of writing denigrating Bouguereau and the
best 19th C. academics and the complete distortion of its history is
bitter crankery.
Mani Deli
>dna...@aol.com (DNALJM) wrote in message news:<20031115193359...@mb-m07.aol.com>...
>> >You fail to note that Mani posts over and over for no reason except to
>> >attack. If you call that defending, then show me the names of artists
>> >he is defending.
>>
>> They are listed on his website. The presentation [of his ideals] on the
>> newsgroup is a little harsh sometimes but they are my values that he is
>> defending.
>>
>> >Someone missed the course on having a
>> >brain at cooper-union.
>>
>> Totally ironic that you would have to break out with this after faulting
>> Mani for attacking.
>>
>> Jane
>
>
>Not ironic at all, and you might try learning the meaning of the word.
and you might try pondering the meaning of the sentences you wrote
about me.
"You fail to note that Mani posts over and over for no reason except
to attack. If you call that defending, then show me the names of
artists he is defending.
>Mani should stop answering my posts.
I'll answer any post I like.
> If he does that I will have no
>contact with him and no more to say about him.
Think of what this jerk is saying. He allows himself to say anything
about me he wishes and then expects me not to answer him.
> My post was addressing you. You don't seem to recognize what he is
>doing on this thread.
and what's that besides irritating the hell out of you.?
>I repeat that you can go through his posts and
>see whether he is innocently defending neglected painters, and if I am
>maliciously attacking him for that. That really is not the case.
> You simply have an affinity for his attitude so anyone who does not
>care for him you invent attacks.
> I will prove this to you now.
I'm waiting?
> This will be the last you hear from
>me and I suggest you demonstrate that you are not another neurotic
>crank by emulating my conduct.
>
Sounds like the usual tearful good bye. I guess he will have to change
his name again.
Mani Deli
>She's popular with the Asian art-factory copy centers; most of them
>offer Lempicka pieces. "Adam and Eve" and "Andromeda" are common
>ones.
and why do you think that is ?
> It appears her work is somewhat of a challenge to copy
>effectively; when they post pictures of their actual works for sale
>rather than images of the original,
Because superior technique is hard to imitate.
>it's invariably a blunt and
>heavy-handed imitation. Maybe not a surprise, given the assembly-line
>aspect.
I've seen some fine factory painting. I did some myself between my
larger serious work at times when money ran low. I wrote an amusing
chapter about it in my book.
>A friend of mine came back from Thailand with a copy of a Kandinsky
>piece that was very nicely done, but copies of abstracts are not so
>obvious unless held up next to the original.
>
Seen lots of Miro copies?
DNALJM
>
>and you might try pondering the meaning of the sentences you wrote
>about me.
Given Dilettante's pronoun agreement I would say he would be pondering for a
long time.
Jane
Thur
"Flying_Naked_People" <http://www.rcip.com/nerdgerl/email.htm> wrote in
message news:vremqbi...@corp.supernews.com...
texture...
>
>
> That contrast... it's too much. There is "art" and comfort in subtlety -
> subtlety absorb sound waves - the lack of it produces loud bangs or
echoes - a
> possible reason for your feeling "empty?"
>
> Oh God, I'm "hearing" art now. Time to lay off the Excedrin.
>
I thought about it a little more. When I see a painting that pleases me,
I usually stare for a few minutes to absorb what it is that my eyes like.
It's the simplicity that fails most of these for me.
The rendering of light and shade reminds me of the new-age cartoons
which blended hand drawn figures with computer software, to produce
cartoons with a "3D" look. They all failed to achieve a look that was
anywhere near as good as the totally hand drawn frames.
I think it was that I recognised this mechanical look.
I think that "Girl in a Green Dress 1930" is one of her better ones.
I compare it with Kees Van Dongen "Woman in a black hat".
http://www.tigtail.org/TIG/L_View/TVM/B/European/a.%20pre%20WW%20I/Low-Lands/van-dongen/M/van-dongen_green_dress.jpg
[remove the word wrap and rejoin]
This image does not do it real justice, by the way.
Or even Woman in a Green Hat
http://www.noma.org/html_docs/cont_me.html
I like van Dongen (not his Fauvist stuff off course), and I see much
more in it.
>snip<
Thur
Flying_Naked_People
says...
> I thought about it a little more. When I see a painting that pleases me,
> I usually stare for a few minutes to absorb what it is that my eyes like.
> It's the simplicity that fails most of these for me.
> The rendering of light and shade reminds me of the new-age cartoons
> which blended hand drawn figures with computer software, to produce
> cartoons with a "3D" look.
Um... like Nintendo 64's Super Mario?? I disagree - I don't think her
transitions are as smooth as computer generated "cartoons." But I understand
what you're saying.
> They all failed to achieve a look that was
> anywhere near as good as the totally hand drawn frames.
There is an interesting line between what is acceptable as hand-art vs.
other-art. There seems to be comfort in seeing evidence of the human hand at
work... and that evidence somehow qualifies a picture as, "art" more-so than a
super-photo-realistic painting. I dunno why.
> I think it was that I recognised this mechanical look.
>
> I think that "Girl in a Green Dress 1930" is one of her better ones.
>
> I compare it with Kees Van Dongen "Woman in a black hat".
>
http://www.tigtail.org/TIG/L_View/TVM/B/European/a.%20pre%20WW%20I/Low-Lands/van-dongen/M/van-dongen_green_dress.jpg
> [remove the word wrap and rejoin]
> This image does not do it real justice, by the way.
> Or even Woman in a Green Hat
> http://www.noma.org/html_docs/cont_me.html
Yes, I can see that the color in your references offer more visual
entertainment... Same thing is evident in Mr. Boogaroo's paintings as well,
where in Ms. Lepicka's work, it is not.
Another problem I have with her work is that the degree of distortion is not
easily determined as being purposeful, or "something else." Of course, this is
a fine line too - but I say why leave the question in the air (question being,
"Did she **mean** to do that?!?"). In Picasso's work, there is no doubt that
he meant to distort his figures. In Tamara's work, I have to wonder because
they are not distorted enough.
I have interpreted certain passages in her paintings as "compensation" - or
"design-work" to cover up what could not have been seen (from a model) or
simply, rendered. Hell, I've used the same strategy myself - So I know! (Note
the painting of the Nun with tears - note the unrealistic [read -
compensated/"designed"] shadows...)
I wouldn't call these works masterful. Had they been in an artshow, I would
have taken a look at 2 or 3, noticed the "lack of"'s, and kept walking.
> I like van Dongen (not his Fauvist stuff off course),
Of course?? Lol.
Mani Deli
>And, since Mani was so kind as to preface this thread with a quote of
>mine, he and everyone else can be informed that Lempika is a
>commercial illustrator, but not a fine artist.
When used by a modern art fundamentalist as a derogatory term the
word "illustration" implies that an artwork is politically
incorrect.
Three terms, kitsch, commercial and illustration are used by critics
to denigrate any artwork that doesn't conform to the dogma of Modern
Academic Art Theology. When thus used it usually means blasphemy,
don' t look, end of discussion. This power of this dogma is beginning
to fade.
There really is no concrete aesthetic distinction between fine art and
illustration. An original done in art media is a painting or a
drawing.
The non-judgmental meaning of the term Illustration is for artwork
usually done to convey very specific ideas or accompany text, usually
for a commercial purpose. It falls into the category of Commercial
Art. Commercial art is artwork done for payment. However, most all
artwork with minor exceptions, is done for payment and is thus
commercial. The word commercial refers to economics. Intent has
nothing to do with its merits
Mani Deli
<http://www.rcip.com/nerdgerl/email.htm> wrote:
>It's mind-boggling why Mani prefers this artist over Picasso - they're both
>the nearly same except that one uses smoother transitions in differences of
>shape, texture and color.
and drawing, conception and technique.
> (Picasso using "rougher" and more obvious
>transitions!) Perhaps Mani prefers this artist to Picasso because her "style"
>obviously leans toward surrealism.
It doesn't. Picasso can't draw well. He is when it comes to expressing
the third dimension a clumsy clod.
>
>Other than that, what's the diff?
To someone who draws as poorly as you do probably none.
> Imo, her transitions (in shape) are not
>violent enough to convince me they were done as a "style."
?
>In fact, I could go
>further and admit that I've seen this "play" on shapes before from people who
>sterilize amorphous shapes (like me). Not sure it was done "on purpose" if you
>catch my drift.
?
I doubt that anyone even with no familiarity at all would say that a
Picasso and a Tamara were done by the same hand.
Edward G. Nilges
> says...
> > x-no-archive: yes
> > Aside from the paintings, is that really a true picture
> > of a successful painter's studio?
> > How many have such space, and how many clean up
> > so thoroughly?
> >
> > I find nearly all the paintings interesting, but after a short
> > while, fairly empty.
>
> It's mind-boggling why Mani prefers this artist over Picasso - they're both
She was a Fascist, probably. And, her work looks like something that
could be bought in a shop.
The attraction of Surrealism, after all, is that the pictures appear
to the petit bourgeois as if they are assemblages, of finished
commodities.
The petit bourgeois, precisely to the extent he is brutalized by
industrial relations, is mind-boggled by any work of art, such as Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon, that is an organic whole.
He thus prefers Dali because although the images are distorted, he can
separate their function in a virtual world. He doesn't have to spend
to much time looking at the art work and can sum it up "in a
nutshell", remembering the work after his weekend tour of the picture
gallery in a small number of words, such as "that rilly cool melting
watch by Dali".
Anything more complex, anything that forms an organic whole that
cannot be reduced into words, is to our boy something explainable only
by "Artspeak" that, typically, uses psychoanalytic terminology beat
out of the petit bourgeois by the media, which is psychoanalysis in
reverse.
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon establishes a rythym throughout the painting
based, probably, on Picasso's response to one whore after another (it
was based on whores displaying their wares). It is in fact a comment
on self-massification in which the whore has to make herself over into
a commodity "like" another whore to satisfy a customer who doesn't
have the time, brutalized as he is in turn by his own job, to get to
know the gal as a person.
The artist in other words has to paint what he sees, and by Picasso's
time, he "saw" through the lens of social relations.
In the 17th century, the Prince was fixed and unchanging, but an art
dealer, or whore, of the early 20th century might change into a
different role.
Art in the Renaissance and Baroque was, as experienced by the artist,
an attempt not at immortality but instead to construct, as did
Poussin, a coherent biography. The artist did not care so much to be
remembered in ages to come, as to have a set of patrons and a coherent
biography. Ages to come would not, after all, be experienced by him.
Today, people want to be "artists" for the same reason, merely to
"have a life" and not be blown by the economy into alienated roles.
But, their subjects, like Elvis, have left the building.
The vanity of wanting to be an artist is the refusal of
self-sacrificial alienation. Where I am now, in Silicon Valley,
alienation is pervasive in the sense that I have at all times to solve
someone else's problem. Dialectically I have to go "through" (in
George Gilder's Christian sense) complete alienation if I would come
out to a redemptive other side.
Real artists, in other words, ship. They don't, like Mani, sit with
their thumb up their ass insisting on how their drawing ability makes
them artists, any more than my ability to write a compiler makes me a
solution provider.
I can in other words look at neo-traditional art and move on. While
Picasso points outside the world of art and to social relations and
these happen to matter in a way that Bouguereau's candybox fantasies
don't. In fact, the solitude of the museum is precisely where I get
straight, not about my "soul" but about the only thing that matters at
the end of the day, and this is my relations with my own kind.
Solitude, pursued for its own sake, is just...solitude. Whereas a
dialectic of solitude treats it as down time and preparation for the
real tasks of life which is connection.
It is, I conclude, obscene to diss an artist for lack of "skill"
unless you answer the question as to what the art does.
When millions of people all over the world are thrown out of work
because their skills are marginally out of date, it is an obscenity to
insist that you are superior because you can draw like Michelangelo. I
can write an Algol compiler. This and ten cents will buy me a stick of
gum.
Flying_Naked_People
says...
> It doesn't. Picasso can't draw well. He is when it comes to expressing
> the third dimension a clumsy clod.
Hey STUPID - It's ALREADY been established that Picasso was drawing at master
level in his PRE-Teens! Can you GET that through your thick head? And unlike
YOU, he didn't need a Computer to do it!
> >Other than that, what's the diff?
>
> To someone who draws as poorly as you do probably none.
You sound so pathetic. This comes through as Nothing but jealousy from a Pixel
Addict as yourself.
> > Imo, her transitions (in shape) are not
> >violent enough to convince me they were done as a "style."
>
> ?
Tsk Tsk. If you KNEW how to draw, you would know wtf I was talking about. The
more you spout off at the keyboard, the more you reveal how LITTLE you know
about the drawing process.
> >In fact, I could go
> >further and admit that I've seen this "play" on shapes before from people
who
> >sterilize amorphous shapes (like me). Not sure it was done "on purpose" if
you
> >catch my drift.
>
> ?
A natural response from a person who needs electricity to draw.
> I doubt that anyone even with no familiarity at all would say that a
> Picasso and a Tamara were done by the same hand.
Oh... I GET it!! It's a GAME... and It's called, "Check Out The Dumb Shit Mani
Types"
- I LIKE games... Pick Me! Pick Me!
Flying_Naked_People
spino...@yahoo.com says...
> The attraction of Surrealism, after all, is that the pictures appear
> to the petit bourgeois as if they are assemblages, of finished
> commodities.
>
The attraction to the Surrealistic art by incompetents such as Mani is that
his lack of skill can be manipulated into any piece of bullshit and be passed
off as art.
E.g. The misshapen hand - mutated into a bunch of lead pencils cause the poor
bastard couldn't draw fingers!
"Oh, it's supposed to look like that because is Su-u-u-u-u-urealism"
Yeah. Mani can fool SOME of the people some of the time. To those who know how
to draw, Mani merely looks like a fool.
Leo Papandreou
> >The point is if you want to become a famous realist, you learn photography,
> >cinema, computer animation -- modern visual arts that require more skill,
> >creativity and imagination than is demonstrated painting plaster casts,
> >reclining nudes and still life with a pitcher.
> >
>
> If you want to make movies then I would suggest that painting is not for
> you. It would take a very talented photographer to come close to the editing
> decisions that the sensitive human eye can.
>
I argue the realist function in painting has been assumed by modern forms of
art, photography, cinema and computer graphics, and you tell me it is a rare
photographer that can challenge "the editing decisions that the sensitive
human eye can [make.]" I don't get it.
I think Diane Arbus has eyes as sensitive as Bouguereau's. I don't think we can
negotiate that proposition so I'm left unsure what the metaphor is supposed to
mean exactly. I'll assume that you are rebutting an analogy between photography
and painting. The problem is analogies are inexact comparisons made for
understanding, not relations of identity. No one suggested painting is
photography or that the demands of either are the same.
I think you are suggesting it is very hard to paint reclining nudes that look
like nudes reclining.
I think it is very hard to extract cube roots inside your head. So what? We
have calculators. What is more, calculators have helped us write advanced image
processing and 3D software, which have led to _Finding Nemo_. Are reclining
nudes "harder" than _Finding Nemo_? There are aspects of reclining nudes that
are more difficult than computer animation. Again, so what?
I think it is very hard to get photographs reviewed in the Art & Design section
of the NY Times. It must be harder than you think to take a decent photo. So
what? We can paint kitsch instead, like ARC's so-called "Living Masters,"
[link: http://tinyurl.com/vaoo] and become footnotes in art history. It's not a
crime to be a classical artzy-fartzy painting nudes. [http://tinyurl.com/vaom]
It's OK to live life inside a 19th century art history book, seemingly
oblivious to the fact that tits and ass are modern culture's background visual
chatter. [http://tinyurl.com/px4]
I guess my question is, why does the NY Times discuss photography but
never "Living Masters?" I don't think it has very much to do with "editing
decisions that the sensitive human eye can [make.]" I think it might have
something to do with calculators -- we can't brush off one hundred years of
art history in the shadow of technology -- but I'm prepared to listen to
another explanation.
Perhaps it is the case the NY Times is unaware that there exist ateliers
throughout the world advertising courses in "contemporary classical realism,"
their graduates churning out indistinguishable pictures of plaster casts that
look like plaster casts, reclining nudes that look like nudes reclining, and
still life with a pitcher. Someone should write a letter to the editor. "Oh my
God stop the presses call salon.com someone got the bright idea of painting a
reclining nude!"
You know what I'm saying?
You would suggest to me that if I want to make movies then painting is not for
me. I do not want to make movies. I was wondering if you would suggest the same
to Gerhard Richter? If so, he might suggest you learn to play chess
blindfolded, which takes an enormous amount of skill, or collect stamps, which
takes an enormous amount of passion for colored rectangles.
How about Anthony J. Ryder. Would you suggest Anthony J. Ryder made movies
instead of paintings? Anthony J. Ryder is an outstanding contemporary classical
realist. [Link: http://tinyurl.com/vaq8] His work embodies the representational
and story-telling function of traditional visual arts. Except it doesn't. None
of the work in ARC's "living masters gallery" does.
If you want a "classical", story-telling view of life, with crowds of people,
rearing horses, hungry lions, slaves and harems, Napoleon in Egypt and a guy
that looks like Jesus Christ, you go to the movies. That's what Ryder does.
Contemporary classical realists -- "Living Masters" -- paint studies: plaster
casts, reclining nudes, and still life with a pitcher. The difference between
Ryder's work and that of Yousuf Karsh, to a contemporary audience, is pigment.
> And as far as becoming "famous" Odd Nerdrum is "famous" and will probably
> remain so. Do you know of the English film "Threads?" It was the first movie
> to deal frankly with the impact of nuclear war. However, I am sure more people
> have never even heard of it or can say who made it. More people can name the
> less impressive and derviative "Day After" but also I would say not be able to
> name the poeple who made it, just the big money actors in it. Yes, the name of
> Odd Nerdrum will endure longer in art history than novel films and computer
> animation tricks. Also, to make convincing computer animation you have to know
> how things act in real life, through observation.
Nerdrum is an altogether different kind of kitsch. Modernism never flourished
except in consumer societies, where it merged with rejected consumer culture to
form "postmodernism." That's Nerdrum, intentionally kitsch. If that's
contemporary classical realism, someone should inform Fred Ross because Nerdrum
is conspicuously absent from the Art Renewal Center. I think it is because he
paints "ugly" pictures.
I don't share your opinion of Nerdrum, who's name recognition you exaggerate.
I think Attila Lukacs and Lucien Freud are better figurative painters. (Can we
distinguish figurative painting from a slavish devotion to detail and classical
technique?)
I don't know what you mean by computer animation tricks. I'll counter by saying
everything you learn in an atelier is a "trick."
>
> >Show someone a Bouguereau and they'll tell you earnestly, "wow." Then they'll
> >rent and watch _The Matrix._
> >
> Or you could say that they read a book and then go watch a movie, whereas in
> reading the book you have to manufacture your own visuals and in watching the
> movie you get to see someone else's. It's not really a fair comparison. People
> generally like to take craft classes and read books to use their own
> imagination and find that they are frustrated if they can only do so
> marginally. A movie represents someone else's vision, it doesn't speak to your
> own.
I do not dispute any of this.
The problem with extracting sentences from contiguous text and rebutting them
individually as if they were disconnected propositions is it fails to address
or understand the argument.
I understand that we aren't a gang of ponderous academics debating for blood
and money. We're just chatting here. But what does that have to do with a
renaissance in classical realism, which is what Mani and ARC propose should
happen, or that renewed activity and prominence of "contemporary classical
realism" is a Luddite fantasy, which is my position?
People paint. They attend classes. They square dance. They collect stamps.
They read American Artist Magazine.
> >Their behavior is not a plot against you by the modern art cabal. It is
> >technology. Progress has marginalized the representational and story-telling
> >function of traditional visual arts. Painting is become an antiquated art
> >threatening obsolescence.
>
> I find this is a view espoused by people who have an investment in
> non-representation, either they make it or [try to] sell it. Most traditional
> artists have no problem getting attention or consideration with each-other, in
> educational venues, or with the public. Face it, nobody wants to wake up and
> look at painted styrofoam in their living room every morning. People like
> novel things but they also like things to remain the same. They want the
> comfort of the sun setting every day but not the exact same way. And this is
> what traditional art provides, skill and attention to detail in a time of mass
> production. I've never met anyone who said, "I wish you bought me something
> made with slave wages in Red Star China that will fall apart in six months
> rather than make me this painting/chair/quilt."
>
> Create something radically new with your paints
> >and brushes or languish in obscurity, a hobbyist, irrelevant.
>
> New and radical. /yawn Just about everything is derivative now a days, so
> why make it worse by not having any skills?
>
Skill at what?
Everything you said is all well and good but it behooves me to remind you
the little people absorb a lot more photos, movies and computer graphics than
ersatz classical realism churned out in ateliers. We pay for postmodern art and
culture. I assure you classical realism doesn't make a blip on the economy or
culture's radar by comparison.
Miriam
> > while, fairly empty.
>
>
> Other than that, what's the diff? Imo, her transitions (in shape) are not
> violent enough to convince me they were done as a "style." In fact, I could go
> further and admit that I've seen this "play" on shapes before from people who
> sterilize amorphous shapes (like me). Not sure it was done "on purpose" if you
> catch my drift.
>
I don't know much about Tamara, but I have looked upon these paintings
on the net now. From a technical point of view my reaction was the
same as yours, but it's difficult to figure out what's wrong. I
believe she for instance prolongs bodyparts, and then sometimes gets
it slightly wrong. I think her intention is the opposite of distortion
- she's perfecting (based on a certain ideal of beauty). She don't
manage to make the perfect perfect, so to say.
Dilettante
> A curious position indeed. How did you arrive at that?
>
> Chris
By looking. For example, look carefully at the expressions and
postures of Lempika's figures. Are they really saying anything to you?
She has a pleasant style for a poster or a book cover, and that is
all.
Picasso said art is not meant to hang in the living room, meaning
that good art does not have to be pretty. But this is all an
illustrator wants to be.
Dilettante
Dilettante
> Must have read it somewhere. Besides : I think those "commercial
> illustrators" are darn fine artists :-)
No, I arrived at the the notion by looking at pictures. Of course many
illustrators are skilled and interesting and pleasant to look at, but
there is a difference in styles of art due to difference in function
and purpose. Matisse worked in fine art, Wyeth the elder worked in
illustration.
Dilettante
Paul Mesken
Nilges) wrote:
>She was a Fascist, probably.
You know what I like a post like this one? By reading the very first
sentence you know it's of no use to read any further :-)
Paul Mesken
>"Chris" <n...@this.address> wrote in message news:<cqMtb.1027
>
>> A curious position indeed. How did you arrive at that?
>>
>> Chris
>
>By looking. For example, look carefully at the expressions and
>postures of Lempika's figures. Are they really saying anything to you?
You know Chris, I rather read Mani's rants, they make more sense :-)
Chris
>
> > A curious position indeed. How did you arrive at that?
> >
> > Chris
>
> By looking. For example, look carefully at the expressions and
> postures of Lempika's figures. Are they really saying anything to you?
> She has a pleasant style for a poster or a book cover, and that is
> all.
Ahhh, I see. You remind me of the Francophobes we have in Canada who figure
that since French all sounds the same to them, French people aren't saying
anything worthwhile....Do you really thnk that "Lady In Blue" looks the same
as "Mother Superior" looks the same as "Portrait of Andre Gide" looks the
same as "Auto-Portrait" (probably her most famous picture) looks the same as
"Kizette on the Balcony"? Hardly.. Certainly they are done in her own rather
inimitable style; do you find that a problem? Is it simply the styling that
you don't like? It was done in the vernacular of an era - but then again, so
was Rembrandt's work.
> Picasso said art is not meant to hang in the living room, meaning
> that good art does not have to be pretty. But this is all an
> illustrator wants to be.
>
Why would anyone care what Picasso said - or didn't say?. It's not like he
ever showed any symptoms of being a perceptive or particularly intelligent
person....
Chris
Chris
I agree. Actually, I don't know why Mani gets dismissed so often; after all
he rarely says anything more challenging than "if you don't learn your basic
skills don't be surprised when you wind up flipping burgers..." (BTW, what
do say to a recent fine arts grad? "I'll have fries with that.."). Of course
he does "attack" the unwary and innocent posters (yer so nasty, Mani), and
in our PC world, that's really not acceptable behaviour.
Cheers;
Chris
New auction stuff: http://www.tinyurl/shat
Edward G. Nilges
Oh? And why is that?
Has Fascism become somehow unmentionable, and why?
Flying_Naked_People
says...
> I agree. Actually, I don't know why Mani gets dismissed so often; after all
> he rarely says anything more challenging than "if you don't learn your basic
> skills don't be surprised when you wind up flipping burgers..."
I really don't know what happens to logic in this forum. What you may deem as
a highly skilled artist is the same person who pays his or her bills by
standing in the factory line.
What you deem as an unskilled artist is the same person who directs the art
department at your favorite magazine.
These two Real-World examples immediately dismiss Mani's ignorance about they
dynamics of the "art" career.
> (BTW, what
> do say to a recent fine arts grad? "I'll have fries with that.."). Of course
> he does "attack" the unwary and innocent posters (yer so nasty, Mani), and
> in our PC world, that's really not acceptable behaviour.
Mani attacks anyone who threatens his false sense of skills. If he were
forced to draw something without a computer at gun point, he'd be laying in
his own pool of blood.
Mani Deli
> Picasso said art is not meant to hang in the living room, meaning
-meaning that I have another stupid Picasso statement to add to my
collection..
>that good art does not have to be pretty.
Paul Mesken
Nilges) wrote:
>Paul Mesken <usu...@euronet.nl> wrote in message news:<nlrhrvs52v9cbmaga...@4ax.com>...
>> On 16 Nov 2003 21:57:48 -0800, spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G.
>> Nilges) wrote:
>>
>> >She was a Fascist, probably.
>>
>> You know what I like a post like this one? By reading the very first
>> sentence you know it's of no use to read any further :-)
>
>Oh? And why is that?
>
>Has Fascism become somehow unmentionable, and why?
Nope. It's just very funny to see how easily you pass judgement on
mere appearances (much like how certain people like to pass judgement
on people based on religion or skin color). Not to mention how you
project your own political convictions on about everything (Art,
programming languages, etc.). You should write a book about it and
call it "The 214 tell tale signs of fascism".
You know, something like :
"You know you're dealing with a fascist if he/she paints in Art Deco
Style like Tamara de Lempicka" or
"You know you're dealing with a fascist if he/she chooses the
programming language C over MS Visual Basic.".
Etc.
It will be a bestseller, trust me ;-)
Thur
> On 17 Nov 2003 10:55:30 -0800, spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G.
> Nilges) wrote:
>
> >Paul Mesken <usu...@euronet.nl> wrote in message
news:<nlrhrvs52v9cbmaga...@4ax.com>...
> >> On 16 Nov 2003 21:57:48 -0800, spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G.
> >> Nilges) wrote:
> >>
> >> >She was a Fascist, probably.
> >>
> >> You know what I like a post like this one? By reading the very first
> >> sentence you know it's of no use to read any further :-)
> >
> >Oh? And why is that?
> >
> >Has Fascism become somehow unmentionable, and why?
>
Not to mention how you
> project your own political convictions on about everything (Art,
> programming languages, etc.). You should write a book about it and
> call it "The 214 tell tale signs of fascism".
>
> You know, something like :
>
> "You know you're dealing with a fascist if he/she paints in Art Deco
> Style like Tamara de Lempicka" or
>
> "You know you're dealing with a fascist if he/she chooses the
> programming language C over MS Visual Basic.".
>
> Etc.
>
> It will be a bestseller, trust me ;-)
Oh, no!
It's all coming true!
Edward G., mention of programming, facism, writing books.
I see a 20 post plus thread of many many pages, quoting every
philosopher, loads of minor artists, the history of art according to
Edward G., Visual Basic as an art form, a subsequent flame war
conducted upon those who dare to disagree, etc.
Life is too short.
Thur
Chris
Of all the posters here, I tend to think of Nilges as the closest to being
truly fascistic (maybe that's why he's so busy pointing the finger
elsewhere). Fascism is based on the total disregard for individual worth -
so one way it commonly surfaces is in the labelling of people on the very
weakest of grounds, and then determining their worth by those labels. (Toss
in going on a great length e.g. Hitler, Stalin, Castro, Mao, none of whom
were particularly pithy - our Nilges is in good company...)
Personally, I couldn't care less wheter Lempicka was - or wasn't - a
fascist. Ezra Pound was (and a very active one at that) - yet we still read
his poetry. Carl Orff probably had strong leanings in that direction; his
work Carmina Burana - based as it was on Medieval German drinking songs)-
was quite a hit with the Nazi's. But there's still a good deal to gain from
listening to it. We read Sartre (well, it's hard to without laughing, but
what the hell) - and that guy became an active Communist in the 50's - at
the same time Stalin's crimes against humanity were coming to very public
light. Ditto for the big P (though he became one earlier than Sartre),
though at least in Picasso's case we can't make an argument that he was
bright enough to know better....
Cheers;
Chris
Auctions: http://tinyurl.com/shat
>
Paul Mesken
>Oh, no!
>It's all coming true!
>Edward G., mention of programming, facism, writing books.
THE PROPHECY! THE PROPHECY!
Now if finally the moon turns red then we'll be in deep shit! ;-)
Chris
"Thur" <a@spamless.z> wrote in message
news:1Faub.1810$4Y6....@newsfep4-winn.server.ntli.net...
> Oh, no!
> It's all coming true!
> Edward G., mention of programming, facism, writing books.
>
> I see a 20 post plus thread of many many pages, quoting every
> philosopher, loads of minor artists, the history of art according to
> Edward G., Visual Basic as an art form, a subsequent flame war
> conducted upon those who dare to disagree, etc.
> Life is too short.
LOL...Ok. Thur, I got your point; I'll leave Ed to his nilgism :)
Chris
Miriam
It's the upperclass decadense of the 20s she's portraying in the
paintings shown in the link here - like it or not. It is quite
unlikely that she was a fascist or a nazist. Went to the USA in 1939,
together with her german husband.
Mani Deli
I'll show the finished painting when its ready.
Only bad opinions please. Artzy Fartzies here take note that I'm not
the only one here who writes somewhat negative stuff about the
paintings of others.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/manideli/reference_pictures/sketch.jpg
Mani Deli
show the finished painting when its ready. Hope it irritates you as
much as my other work.
Only bad opinions please. Artzy Fartzies here take note that I'm not
the only one here who writes somewhat negative stuff about the
paintings of others.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/manideli/reference_pictures/sketch.jpg
> Turdgirl wrote:
>Mani attacks anyone who threatens his false sense of skills. If he were
>forced to draw something without a computer at gun point, he'd be laying in
>his own pool of blood. You sound so pathetic. This comes through as Nothing but jealousy from a Pixel Addict as yourself.
>The attraction to the Surrealistic art by incompetents such as Mani is that his lack of skill can be manipulated into any piece of bullshit and be passed off as art.
>E.g. The misshapen hand - mutated into a bunch of lead pencils cause the poor bastard couldn't draw fingers!
>"Oh, it's supposed to look like that because is Su-u-u-u-u-urealism"
>Yeah. Mani can fool SOME of the people some of the time. To those who know how
>to draw, Mani merely looks like a fool.
>Oh... I GET it!! It's a GAME... and It's called, "Check Out The Dumb Shit Mani Types"
Chris
if you don't want the nosy parkers like myself poking around in your
directory http://www3.sympatico.ca/manideli/reference_pictures then you
ought to put in a blank "index.html" file. But in the meantime, there's some
really nice work in there.
Chris
"Mani Deli" <ma...@sympatico.ca> wrote in message
news:rdkirvscvta9a6nel...@4ax.com...
Flying_Naked_People
says...
> Here's an acrylic working sketch ready for computer enhancement. I'll
> show the finished painting when its ready. Hope it irritates you as
> much as my other work.
Why should it irritate me? It only makes Mine look BETTER.
> Only bad opinions please.
It's fucked up in the beginning stage already. When you're ready to deal with
the FACTS and not *opinions*, maybe I'll "help you along."
> Artzy Fartzies here take note that I'm not
> the only one here who writes somewhat negative stuff about the
> paintings of others.
Waaa- waaa- see <sniff sniff and childish finger pointing>
"'M not da only one!"
> http://www3.sympatico.ca/manideli/reference_pictures/sketch.jpg
>
>
DNALJM
>I argue the realist function in painting has been assumed by modern forms of
>photographer that can challenge "the editing decisions that the sensitive
>human eye can [make.]" I don't get it.
Here I am talking about how human perception differs from that which a
machine can do. The most expensive, sophisticated camera still trashes
sensitive gradations in shadow areas and does not make editing choices with
regards to what is in focus and what is not. It is the biology of the human
eye and the mind behind it that works to make painting something different from
other images.
>I think it is very hard to extract cube roots inside your head. So what? We
>have calculators.
What I am trying to say is that you can add five plus four in your head
and get the same answer as a calculator, but a movie camera will not get the
same answer as someone who makes their own images with skill.
>Are reclining
>nudes "harder" than _Finding Nemo_? There are aspects of reclining nudes that
>are more difficult than computer animation. Again, so what?
That computer animation is extrapolated from reality and observation.
Everyone at Disney spends their days off drawing at the zoo to know how animal
anatomy works. It is the same as the illustrations that appear in my turn of
the century copy of "A Little Princess." It is always a pleasure to interact
with good ideas presented with good skills.
>"Oh my
>God stop the presses call salon.com someone got the bright idea of painting a
>reclining nude!"
>
>You know what I'm saying?
Yes I do but I think you are confused as to the purpose of nudes, vases,
and still-lifes. When you are in school you have to master these skills so
that you can build on them and take them to the next level. I like to explore
some childhood and biochemical issues within my own personal mythology when I
paint or draw.
But I still like to draw a girl with her clothes off too. It is slightly
different than anyone has ever seen her, like handwriting or a human retina or
fingerprint. I think that is an awesome thing, and other people seem to react
warmly to it too, although I can certainly sympathize with people who say "so
what" or "I can't eat it, fuck it." It doesn't matter to me that people have
done it five hundred years ago. I am doing it now and this is the first time I
have been alive to learn about it. It puts me in a peaceful, happy place too.
I know that increasingly people do not care about this but I think that's
unfortunate. I also think that stems from someone's agenda being pushed
through art schools. What a shame to spend big money to go to school and not
learn anything but how to write a defensive essay!
>I don't share your opinion of Nerdrum, who's name recognition you exaggerate.
>I think Attila Lukacs and Lucien Freud are better figurative painters. (Can
>we
>distinguish figurative painting from a slavish devotion to detail and
>classical
>technique?)
Certainly fame is not something that I would care to argue or defend, as I
think it is best a function of retroactive examination. However, you mentioned
that in order to be a "famous realist" you had to work with film, photograhpy,
anything but a plaster cast. I just merely picked a name from a book of art
history [Nerdrum] and tried to show how his name was more recognizable than
that of a person who made a very important and influential cultural film. I
did not discuss his skill or merit as a painter.
>Everything you said is all well and good but it behooves me to remind you
>the little people absorb a lot more photos, movies and computer graphics than
>ersatz classical realism churned out in ateliers.
People say "wow" at watching the Matrix but they also say "wow" when looking
at a drawing I spent six months on. That they spend two hours watching the
movie and aprox. five seconds looking at the drawing or that thirty will see
the drawing and millions will see the movie does not take away my sense of
pride. I've also written a book which I've not tried to get published but have
shared on a very limited basis, which has also given me a great deal of pride
from the reactions that I've gotten [from people whose opinion anyone would
respect on the matter]. Maybe in the future it will be valued slightly more
than squaredancing and slightly less than the second Matrix movie, but what
slot if any it falls in is not my place of concern.
Jane
Dilettante
> I agree. Actually, I don't know why Mani gets dismissed so often; after all
> he rarely says anything more challenging than "if you don't learn your basic
> skills don't be surprised when you wind up flipping burgers..."
You could try to make your statements factually correct. If Mani has
done what he says, i.e., learn his basic blah blah, then why does he
need to come on to this forum and wage a crudade against "modern art"?
He acts more like a neurotic crank.
He jumps on to others people's threads like mine uninvited and trashes
modern painters.
So are you so sure that "he rarely says anything more challenging
than..."?
In history actually some of the greatest painters, like Rembrandt died
completely broke and they learned their basic skills.
Dilettante
Dilettante
Do you really thnk that "Lady In Blue" looks the same
> as "Mother Superior" looks the same as "Portrait of Andre Gide" looks the
> same as "Auto-Portrait" (probably her most famous picture) looks the same as
> "Kizette on the Balcony"? Hardly..
Decide if you want to answer your own questions, or if they are
sincerely asked.
Certainly they are done in her own rather
> inimitable style;
Yes, it is a style but a rather cheap one. And try looking up
inimitable before you use what you think are $10 words. Her style is
quite imitable. She merely makes showy magazine illustrations, and
that is probably who commissioned all or most of the works you cited.
do you find that a problem? Is it simply the styling that
> you don't like?
As if you really cared to know my feelings at this point. But I will
tell you anyway in case some light may get through. The answer is that
her style is more pleasant than Picasso's but it has no content. I do
not fault it for what it is, but we cannot prop her up equal to or
above Picasso, who created piece after piece that knock your socks
off.
It was done in the vernacular of an era - but then again, so
> was Rembrandt's work.
So we can say, so was Fragonard or Boucher, but Rembrandt, who died
broke is so obviously more profound than the first two who lived very
well painting fluff for aristocrats.
>
> Why would anyone care what Picasso said - or didn't say?. It's not like he
> ever showed any symptoms of being a perceptive or particularly intelligent
> person....
Well, yes he did and it was evident in his works, of which his
statements are mere reflections.
Dilettante
Dilettante
> Everything you said is all well and good but it behooves me to remind you
> the little people absorb a lot more photos, movies and computer graphics than
> ersatz classical realism churned out in ateliers.
It would behoove you to learn English before using phrases like, the little people.
Dilettante
Dilettante
> Hee hee! You crack me up! What you posted is constructive? Posting
> on usenet is posting to you? "Anyone can contribute to this poem" -
> does this ring a bell? Do you know how to use a killfile? What are
> you, the moderator of RAF? I'd keep going, but it seems pointless.
Yes, it was pointless. Why did you keep going (see below).
D.
>
> Do you ever think about this stuff before it pours from your fingers
> to your keyboard? It's about time for another name change; this one's
> lost all its credibility. You post reasonable things sometimes, but
> then you totally blow it with posts like this or your child-abuse
> rationalizations.
>
> You're free to post whatever you want, of course, but If you're going
> to kick sand in the sandbox, don't be surprised if you get sand in
> your eyes.
>
> max
Dilettante
> Where Dilettante drools
> He constantly loses
> his internet duels.
If I had a boring name like Maxwell, I'd write a poem like this too.
>
>
>
>
> Neil Maxwell - I don't speak for my employer
because he'd fire you if you did.
D
max
Nilges) wrote:
>She was a Fascist, probably. And, her work looks like something that
>could be bought in a shop.
Ya know, it's great that the first lines are so hilarious, because the
remaining hundred or so are the usual cross-eyed wandering twaddle.
Sometimes worth a quick skim to see if there's anything painfully
funny, but it seems unimaginable that anyone actually reads this
stuff.
The Edbot. Now there's a programming feat.
Edward G. Nilges
> "Paul Mesken" <usu...@euronet.nl> wrote in message
> news:o4birv45ffu2d2khl...@4ax.com...
> > On 17 Nov 2003 10:55:30 -0800, spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G.
> > Nilges) wrote:
> >
> > >Paul Mesken <usu...@euronet.nl> wrote in message
> news:<nlrhrvs52v9cbmaga...@4ax.com>...
> > >> On 16 Nov 2003 21:57:48 -0800, spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G.
> > >> Nilges) wrote:
> > >>
> > >> >She was a Fascist, probably.
> > >>
> > >> You know what I like a post like this one? By reading the very first
> > >> sentence you know it's of no use to read any further :-)
> > >
> > >Oh? And why is that?
> > >
> > >Has Fascism become somehow unmentionable, and why?
> >
> > Nope. It's just very funny to see how easily you pass judgement on
> > mere appearances (much like how certain people like to pass judgement
> > on people based on religion or skin color). Not to mention how you
> > project your own political convictions on about everything (Art,
> > programming languages, etc.). You should write a book about it and
> > call it "The 214 tell tale signs of fascism".
> >
> > You know, something like :
> >
> > "You know you're dealing with a fascist if he/she paints in Art Deco
> > Style like Tamara de Lempicka" or
This is how you rephrase it. Of course, the analysis is at a deeper
level.
Wealthy collectors demand, at one and the same time, a form of
Modernism-as-novelty while an absence of social or psychological
challenge. Artists who cater to this taste tend to have right-wing
politics. And, because artists tend to be extremists in their
politics, this biases them towards Fascist policies.
I realize, of course, that the situation is rather complex. Many
artists who admired Franco, for example, did so not because of
conscious Fascist tendencies but rather conservative, clerical, and
authoritarian tendencies.
But to refuse the label Fascist to the Franco regime, and Franco's
ideology, is to obscure the fact that Hitler supported Franco's
regime, while the West failed to supportthe Loyalists.
Many socialists are called Communistic in what happens to be an honest
effort to embed in the language the inevitability of a slide towards
Communism built into non-Communist socialism.
It is of course false that non-Communist socialism leads to Communism.
But for the people of Guernica, non-Fascist authoritarianism became an
attack by Fascists and Franco supporters armed by Fascists. This gave
Franco's opponents then and now the moral right to class him, despite
his Catholicism, with Hitler because his conservatism, in the context
of modern Spain, was a "mild" form of fascism.
The desire to restrict the label "Fascist" ONLY to the Hitler regime
is inescapably an assertion that "it can't happen here." The problem
is it can. Just as non-confessional German Protestants failed to stop
Hitler because they were in partial agreement with his goals, many
Americans do not recognize detention without trial, etc., for what it
MIGHT represent.
George Orwell was right. You cannot make political words mean what you
want them to mean, and I am not trying to redefine Fascism here, and
apply it too broadly. The German Communists failed to stop Hitler
because they were busy labeling Social Democrats "social Fascists".
But George Orwell failed to see that political words do not after all
have a fixed and unchanging meaning. Their usage is a moral choice and
if I choose to use the Fascist label more broadly than commonly done
today (but about as broadly as recently as the 1960s) this is because
I see the RETURN, in this newsgroup, of the systematic cultivation of
hatred for art and life that was characteristic of German fascism.
You have only to read Mani's ravings to see that the systematic
cultivation of what Adorno called "coldness" has returned and is quite
fashionable among losers as it was in prewar Vienna, and men, maddened
by false promises and soured by true miseries, turn their hatred, as
does Mani, on modern art, primarily because it can't hit back.
You can oversimplify this into your own brutalized language if you
like, but that of course is only a mild instance of what I am talking
about.
> >
> > "You know you're dealing with a fascist if he/she chooses the
> > programming language C over MS Visual Basic.".
This is merely a distortion of my claim that the use of VB versus C
tracks social origin, and selectivity for C is often use for the
purposes of racial and class discrimination in employment, and in the
experience of my students at DeVry. I have quite a lot of C experience
and assisted John Nash, the real-life protagonist of A Beautiful Mind,
with C. But I do find that its more mathematical flavor offputs
programmers who were ill-served by the education system but who have
mastered Visual Basic.
> >
> > Etc.
> >
> > It will be a bestseller, trust me ;-)
>
> Of all the posters here, I tend to think of Nilges as the closest to being
> truly fascistic (maybe that's why he's so busy pointing the finger
> elsewhere). Fascism is based on the total disregard for individual worth -
> so one way it commonly surfaces is in the labelling of people on the very
> weakest of grounds, and then determining their worth by those labels. (Toss
> in going on a great length e.g. Hitler, Stalin, Castro, Mao, none of whom
> were particularly pithy - our Nilges is in good company...)
Actually, I speculated that T de Lempicka was a Fascist and this
attracts feeble minds who like the sheen, the gloss, the
sado-masochism and the *faux* modernism of Fascist art.
Edward G. Nilges
Upper class decadence of the 1920s PRODUCED many Hitler followers.
Read Hannah Arendt's book The Origin of Totalitarianism. She shows how
the upper clawsses, beginning with the scramble in the 1880s and 1890s
for colonies, had of necessity to make common cause with the lowest of
the low in order to have foot-soldiers in the exploitation of the
colonies.
This, according to Arendt, created in the 1890s and later the
false-Modernist exaltation of the "savage" or "primitive" insofar as,
and only insofar as, it could be enlisted in the struggle AGAINST the
"savage" and the "primitive".
Colonial administrators saw that men were brutalized in places like
the Belgian Congo and this created the demand, such as Teddy
Roosevelt's, that men be more than just *mensch*, but able to be
beasts-on-command in order to win what was then represented, without
apology, as a race war.
This is one of the sources for the regression of Modernism of the
1920s represented by Picasso's classical period and Stravinsky's
reversion towards tonality. The upper clawsses felt they needed the
vitalism of Picasso and le Sacre but needed to ensure that its basic
orientation was on their side.
The tonality of the later Stravinsky is not, as is sometimes said,
"pretty" or "beautiful". In fact, his 1920s production retains the
ugliness and oversimplification of Le Sacre but the reintroduction of
tonality performs an ideological function.
It is a recommittment to metropolitan and bourgeois ideals upon return
from the jungle, but one that has forgotten "beauty" in a way neither
Schonberg nor Berg forgot. As long as you listen to Schonberg and to
Berg on their terms, their work has "beauty" in the sense of a
committment to a continuous, internal and organic structure.
Whereas Stravinsky's classical works, in an ugly and crowd pleasing
way, re-create hackneyed tonal structures in a disconnected fashion.
This reversion, as Arendt shows, produces barbarism in the metropolis
in which the overthrow of Parliamentary procedures becomes a necessary
political atonality, justified, dimly, by the initial Modernism.
And, what is frightening about America 2003 is that this gesture is
deeply embedded in our culture. Starting with Coppola's The Godfather,
media culture has accepted without question a sort of continuous war
of all against all.
Any element that changes the fundamental equation is systematically
scorned. For example, the key fact about Jane Fonda is that any movie,
of the period of the Godfather (roughly 1967 to roughly 1974) that
stars Fonda has a basic anti-fascist and life-affirming orientation.
This is why she is so systematically scorned: she managed to remind
moviegoers that there was such a thing as the possibility of the
sweetness of life (Barefoot in the Park) or moral seriousness (Klute).
Audiences preferred, or were socialised to prefer, movies in which the
sweetness of life and moral seriousness were eradicated: cf. Easy
Rider (two drug dealers go on a toot and get killed in a meaningless
fashion) or The Godfather (shots kill men who always want).
Thur
> In history actually some of the greatest painters, like Rembrandt died
> completely broke and they learned their basic skills.
>
> Dilettante
That's a reflection upon the tastes at that time, if it were that he could
not
get for a decent reward for his efforts.
More likely he did not have a clue how to keep his finances under control.
What you are saying is that basic skills are only the foundations of art,
rather than everything?
Thur
Dilettante
entertaining and trendy coffee-house compositions
Dilettante
Chris
>
> George Orwell was right.
>
Holy moly Nilges - you ought to go back and read your anti-Orwell
rants from last year. You mean that sometime between then and now you
actually sat down and read a book by him? Keep up the good work -
there's hope for you yet.
Chris
Auctions: http://tinyurl.com/shat
Leo Papandreou
> Papandreou wrote:
> >I argue the realist function in painting has been assumed by modern forms of
> >art, photography, cinema and computer graphics and you tell me it is a rare
> >photographer that can challenge "the editing decisions that the sensitive
> >human eye can [make.]" I don't get it.
>
> Here I am talking about how human perception differs from that which a
> machine can do. The most expensive, sophisticated camera still trashes
> sensitive gradations in shadow areas and does not make editing choices with
> regards to what is in focus and what is not. It is the biology of the human
> eye and the mind behind it that works to make painting something different from
> other images.
Yeah, well, a painted shadow is not the human eye contemplating a real shadow
either, is it? If the image in the painter's retina resembles the shadow on his
canvas then he don't see too good.
The latitude of film and some digital sensors is a more than adequate match
for painted shadows. In fact, it can be superior. Even with equipment bought
at K-Mart -- and a little skill, go figure -- we can bracket, overexpose,
compensate in the digital darkroom, etc. until, yea, though we stumble across
silicon valleys lit by blinking lights, we will fear no shadow.
You can cavil about shadows as if they were the measure of art, but your
mistaken trivia will not change the fact that optics and signal processing has
expanded the useful range of what the naked eye can see, in the shadows and
clear light, far away, up close and in the middle distance, and in wavelengths
that used to be invisible. There be art in all those places too.
Apropos art, a painter can paint shadows any way he likes. I mean, he won't
disappear in a puff of art logic if his shadows disagree with your concept of
what shadows should look like. I hope you don't think shadows should resemble
those dark things in a photograph. If so, give up. Your case for realism's
ambitions unravels like a cheap sweater spun from virgin irony.
Finally, as a culture, we experience painting photographically, through
reproductions. We talk about paintings we have never seen, except dimly, like
an opera heard across the phone. The course of painting, and all the rest of
visual culture, is plotted by people that experience only a fraction of it
directly. We are jacked into the photo matrix, our life forces drained by
twitching images tripping across beams of light fantastic. Everything that is,
is not.
Groovy.
Please ponder this the next time someone cloistered in the 19th century asserts
an extravagant primacy for realism (in enigmatic sermons about the painter's
artistic duty to paint what he nee Hasselblad "sees") and a troll writes
blithely in response that painting is staring down its obsolescence. A delicate
situation in which with friends like ARC it don't need enemies. That's what I'm
saying.
>
> >I think it is very hard to extract cube roots inside your head. So what? We
> >have calculators.
>
> What I am trying to say is that you can add five plus four in your head
> and get the same answer as a calculator, but a movie camera will not get the
> same answer as someone who makes their own images with skill.
You kids and your newfangled paints and brushes -- luxuries! You don't know how
good you have it. In my day we had to mine colored clay at the bottom of
streams crawling with leeches and piranhas, burn our thumbs and pointing
fingers dragging fiery chunks of coal across cave walls, in haste for fear of
vicious saber-tooth rabbits returning to the nest or lurking behind stalactites.
A camera does not do anything. It just sits there, like a brush, waiting for
someone to pick it up. Sadly, they don't give fame and fortune away to people
who pick up cameras (or brushes.) You have to earn it.
First: you have to *imagine*. You have to *create* something out of nothing,
battle the discrepancy between wishes and fishes, "I" against I against a world
of disappointing facts outside the mind -- or possess an occult knack for being
where the picture is always waiting, as if by magic, a magnet for minor
miracles.
Then: you have to ply practiced *skills* learned reading jargon-laden books and
listening to teachers drone on and on about composition, color and design;
focal lengths, depths of field, shutter speeds, apertures, ASA and Ansel Adam's
zone; artificial and natural lighting, strobes and flashes and white points
too; and film, film, film, the alchemy of fleeting light stepping lightly over
hydrocarbons, silver, iron, dyes, plus intangible time, imprinting mind upon
electrons suspended in a gelatin. AND ALL THIS FOR WHAT? You have this fancy
notion you can cheat mortality. A plan so cunning you can hang a tail on it and
call it 'fox.'
You kids and your old fashioned paints and brushes! How dare you speak of
skill? You have it easy.
The printing phase: Fuck it. I'm getting tired of writing novels for this
group. Just imagine a run-on sentence, OK, awkward metaphors and excess clauses
spliced with semi-colons.
Finally: through the process of breathing life into the portrayal of your
subject, coming to see it as a whole during the discovery of pattern and rhythm
and so imaginatively to appreciate its nature, creating our power to love it if
it is loveable, laugh at it if it is laughable, or hate it if it is hateful, a
picture of your little nephew in a gay hat. "YOU FAILED!" sneers the world.
Take a moment to recover and collect yourself, then proceed afresh to step
first.
Jane, photography is an art. Please read this book: <http://tinyurl.com/vhhf>,
and stop trifling the Internet with worthless prejudices.
>
> >Are reclining
> >nudes "harder" than _Finding Nemo_? There are aspects of reclining nudes that
> >are more difficult than computer animation. Again, so what?
>
> That computer animation is extrapolated from reality and observation.
> Everyone at Disney spends their days off drawing at the zoo to know how animal
> anatomy works. It is the same as the illustrations that appear in my turn of
> the century copy of "A Little Princess." It is always a pleasure to interact
> with good ideas presented with good skills.
I claimed the modern visual arts have assumed the representational and story-
telling function of traditional painting. This is indisputably true. This has
marginalized traditional painting, not the skill required to draw realistically
(representation) or story telling. One way to become a famous realist is to
learn computer animation. But animation software isn't magic. It does not draw
for you. It cannot create. Computer animation is an art *form*, like painting.
The software is a *tool*, like a pen.
<snip>
I have to go somewhere. I'll respond to your remaining points later, in a
separate reply.
P.S. If it weren't "indisputably true," modernism wouldn't have dodged the
struggle against the photograph by failing to make any attempt whatsoever at
naturalism (inciting a reaction pissing in the wind and pitting Mani against
the world) and we wouldn't be living in a postmodern situation with the sense
that the whole world is an anthology of photographic images. My God, the
rec.collecting.stamps hierarchy is more popular than rec.arts.fine.
If it weren't indisputably true, Mani would have nothing to rail against,
rec.arts.fine would be a peaceful place, and Fred Ross, Chairman of the Art
Renewal Center, couldn't stand up before the American Society of Portrait
Artists and say to thunderous applause, "Ladies and Gentlemen, Artists: The art
of painting, one of the greatest traditions in all of human history has been
under a merciless and relentless assault for the last one hundred years," blah,
blah, spittle, foam.
Does that mean painting is stupid waste of time, fit for terrorists alone? NO!
It means -- and I quote myself -- "create something radically new with your
paints and brushes" -- transcend the fucking photograph -- "or languish in
obscurity, a hobbyist, irrelevant." Is it wrong to languish in obscurity, a
hobbyist, irrelevant? Six billion people beg the answer no.
However, if you want to play the "I want to be a famous artist" game, steel
yourself against the possibility you will lose. I feel qualified to comment
on that outcome, neutrally, without participating in the game itself. I don't
believe in "artists."
--
Leo Papandreou
Paul Mesken
>spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges) wrote in message >
>>
>> George Orwell was right.
>>
>Holy moly Nilges -
You know, he really reminds me of a Stalinist Commisar or something.
Everything is politics and ideology to him, from the food you eat to
the color of your car, all driven by political convictions. Of course,
sane people couldn't care less.
Hey, imagine he got real power from some maniacal leader (a Hitler,
Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, etc.). He would be the guy who decides who goes
to death camp. Getting rid of reactionaries and stuff. I guess as an
imperialist C programmer I better go into hiding ;-)
Miriam
> Here's an acrylic working sketch ready for computer enhancement. I'll
> show the finished painting when its ready. Hope it irritates you as
> much as my other work.
>
> Only bad opinions please. Artzy Fartzies here take note that I'm not
> the only one here who writes somewhat negative stuff about the
> paintings of others.
>
> http://www3.sympatico.ca/manideli/reference_pictures/sketch.jpg
>
ridiculous composition as a whole. Quite entertaining really.
It will be interesting to see the computer enhancement. I put some
sketches into Photoshop a while ago and I don't think it came out too
nicely. Maybe you will have better luck.
Edward G. Nilges
> spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges) wrote in message >
> >
> > George Orwell was right.
> >
> Holy moly Nilges - you ought to go back and read your anti-Orwell
> rants from last year. You mean that sometime between then and now you
> actually sat down and read a book by him? Keep up the good work -
> there's hope for you yet.
Can't you read?
I go on to say how he was also wrong. Last year, I posted no friggin'
rant, instead a classy analysis of St George, and the foolishness of
treating his thought as "one" thought, to be accepted or rejected.
It is a digital fascism to be either-or to the point of moronization.
And, as you missed last year, I said I read him. In fact, I've read
Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm,
1984, Coming Up for Air, and a variety of his essays. I've read these
over a period of time, from 1964 to 1999.
What have you read?
>
> Chris
>
> Auctions: http://tinyurl.com/shat
Paul Mesken
Nilges) wrote:
>It is a digital fascism to....
Say Chris, I don't know what you're going to do but I'm throwing this
guy in my kill file. Thur is right, the pattern is repeating. Seeing
how my newsreader trashed a couple of posts I suspect Nilges' sidekick
has jumped to his defense (after all they're like peas in a pod). I
have far more interesting things to do than to enter a flamewar again
with these two loonies.
There you go Edward G.Nilges *PLOINK*
Chris
He never came out of mine :) If it wasn't for a certain someone who kept
reading his posts and then responding to them, I'd neveer have known he
existed. You fascist lover you. (OK, I did dig out the one on Orwell all by
my lonesome). Anyway, Dilettante is more fun.
BTW - did I ever tell you I know how to program in FORTRAN? And Fortran-66
at that . And I learned it on paper tape and punch cards.Wonder what that
says about me? LOL...
Cheers;
Chris
Paul Mesken
>BTW - did I ever tell you I know how to program in FORTRAN? And Fortran-66
>at that . And I learned it on paper tape and punch cards.Wonder what that
>says about me? LOL...
WOW! You might be an official "old fart" (someone who has programmed
for over 25 years, it's all in the "yellow book" ;-)
Edward G. Nilges
> "Paul Mesken" <usu...@euronet.nl> wrote in message
> news:f14lrvkv1el6a75ju...@4ax.com...
> > On 18 Nov 2003 12:27:35 -0800, spino...@yahoo.com (Edward G.
> > Nilges) wrote:
> >
> > >It is a digital fascism to....
> >
> > Say Chris, I don't know what you're going to do but I'm throwing this
> > guy in my kill file. Thur is right, the pattern is repeating. Seeing
> > how my newsreader trashed a couple of posts I suspect Nilges' sidekick
> > has jumped to his defense (after all they're like peas in a pod). I
> > have far more interesting things to do than to enter a flamewar again
> > with these two loonies.
> >
> > There you go Edward G.Nilges *PLOINK*
Good bye
> >
>
> He never came out of mine :) If it wasn't for a certain someone who kept
> reading his posts and then responding to them, I'd neveer have known he
> existed. You fascist lover you. (OK, I did dig out the one on Orwell all by
> my lonesome). Anyway, Dilettante is more fun.
>
> BTW - did I ever tell you I know how to program in FORTRAN? And Fortran-66
> at that . And I learned it on paper tape and punch cards.Wonder what that
> says about me? LOL...
Did I ever tell you that in order to start programming in Fortran, in
1972, I debugged a non-working, non-supported Fortran compiler on 2000
punched cards and in object code format only?
Please see the IEEE Transactions on the History of Software for
Spring/Summer 1999 for documentation.
This compiler generated interpreted code in a small memory (8000 6-bit
characters in my configuration). It had been "patched" by a customer
engineer to insert a subroutine for multiply and divide.
Multiplication and division were of course needed for Fortran, but
lower-cost minimal configurations of the IBM 1401 did not include the
operation codes for multiplication and division (at sign and slash if
memory serves).
The problem was that the subroutine overlaid a critical portion of
memory during the execution of the compiler's approximately 99 phases,
each of which was a set of instructions, fitted to 8K, loaded from a
sequence of cards in a 2000 card deck.
It did so because as it happened, the university where I worked had
the minimal configuration for supporting Fortran, and the overlay
manager of the IBM Fortran compiler, resident throughout compilation
in high memory, assumed that all memory was available. Therefore by
the time the overlay manager loaded the interpreter to execute the
"byte code" compiled from the Fortran source, the multiplication and
division routines were gone, Flintstone.
The customer engineer, however, had made a second error. He had failed
to look at our bill and did not realize that in fact we had installed,
and were paying for, hardware multiplication and division.
Therefore I removed the "patch" and compiled and ran immediately a
simple Fortran program to calculate N factorial.
You will therefore excuse me if I am underwhelmed by your studly
experience with Fortran. Precisely because I was an anti-fascist
programmer, resistant to the psychoanalysis in reverse and the
authoritarianism which causes data systems people to believe men
merely because they are IBM customer engineers, I was able to provide
my university with a Fortran compiler on the basis of which we taught
classes and supported student work and faculty research.
Back then, IBM customer engineers were believed because they wore
white shirts and ties, and, long haired geeky kids like me were
disbelieved because we were freaks. However, when I demonstrated a
working Fortran compiler to the university computer committee, the
objections to my anti-nominian, if not anti-Fascist, style, were
silenced.
The white shirts and ties are passe, of course, but today and in a
post-structuralist sense, being overweight, having a beard, and being
personally offensive become the new uniform of system administrators
who regard systems as their private domain, and problems as someone
else's.
I had failed to reify IBM's lies and instead saw the truth of the
situation.
Today, of course, thanks to years of media psychoanalysis in reverse,
thousands of real problems are unsolved in real systems because of
authoritarianism. One example is the failure of NASA to respond to the
organizational failures (with an origin in the authoritarianism of the
comment "think like a manager and not an engineer") that killed the
Challenger astronauts in 1986, which resulted in the organizational
near-murder of the Columbia crew this year.
In Challenger, the engineers who were thinking like managers were
unable to pushback, and stop the launch because of their concerns
about the behavior of the Challenger's O ring alloys at low
temperatures. In Columbia, years later, the engineers were unable to
recommend a fix to the damage created on liftoff by tiles because the
problem was skipped over in an authoritarian PowerPoint presentation,
the authoritarian goal of which was to show that an incompetent
program manager was in control at all times.
Needless to say, I did not ask permission to fix the Fortran compiler
and I did the work at night. Had I used the IBM 1401 to prepare a
PowerPoint presentation :-) and tried to persuade the computer
committee to let me research a fix, I may not have succeeded in
demonstrating reified and hypostatized "costs and benefits".
Have a nice day...
>
> Cheers;
>
> Chris
Edward G. Nilges
That's very interesting because in fact I have no political power and
could not win an election for the school board. Nor do I have a mob of
thugs willing to do my bidding.
What's interesting, and sad, is how any positive claim, backed up by a
discursive and narrative style, is presumed to belong to the era of
the grand narrative.
People, who are unable to make sense of their lives, react negatively
to some slob like me who they imagine is "telling them what to think
and using too many words".
I respectfully submit that I have an idea or two whereas the readers
have really little original to contribute, and, as a result, they fear
I may be some sort of chap with plans to force his ideas down their
throats.
Nothing further from the truth could be imagined. I have fled several
chances to be a manager; I was made an acting manager once and quickly
interviewed for and hired a "real" manager.
The possibility is that we live in an administered world with a closed
agenda, as was seen in the war in Iraq, and as such guys like me, with
our visions for the betterment of humanity, are troublemakers not
because of the content of what we say, but merely because we don't
concern ourselves with trivia.
What I do in these threads is tell stories. If you don't want to sit
around de campfire, please, just find another. DON'T waste my time
with your pretentious analyses of my totalitarian tendencies.
"Hey, Harv, are you into TRIVIA?"
"I'm talking to ya, ain't I?" - Harvey Pekar, American Splendour
Comics
Mike Stengl
> Papandreou wrote:
>
> Jane
this guy farts words faster than you or i can emotionally respond.
he's got something against (the idea of) people who find meaning in
their creative endeavors. frankly i don't know why he hangs out at RAF
since he's 3 days ahead of the rest of the world and owns a digital
camera...
Palo Meano
says...
>BTW - did I ever tell you I know how to program in FORTRAN? And Fortran-66
>at that . And I learned it on paper tape and punch cards.Wonder what that
>says about me? LOL...
Brings back memories for me too. I programmed for
three-plus years in Fortran IV, primarily, with
subroutines in Assembler. That was at a time when
IBM actually OWNED all of the computers used in
business and only leased them out. And there was
no such thing as a "desktop computer" nor did anyone
envision ever having one for home use. IBM did
provide excellent technical support, which saved
my bacon many times. Pretty incredible to think
back on what "was" compared to what "is" isn't it!
Leo Papandreou
> this guy farts words faster than you or i can emotionally respond.
Gosh, I'll try to be less articulate.
> he's got something against (the idea of) people who find meaning in
> their creative endeavors.
I have never stated or implied that (funny that you should mention "finding
meaning.") I am a big fan of people. Ask anyone. You have a lot of time and
mental life invested in what you do. Comparing what I wrote with what you read
I can only surmise the investment takes offense to learn people derive meaning
and satisfaction from things, including art that many here insist is not, that
don't line neatly up with what you do. Perhaps I surmise incorrectly; let that
be a lesson to you in the hazards of reading too little and inferring too much.
Your thing is yours and I hope it takes you where you want to go but your thing
is not an obligation on the world to sit up and pay attention. Six billion
people are doing their thing. They find meaning in every detail of their
unembellished lives. Do you have something against those people, Mike? What is
it – is it because they don't cultivate your kind of thing, or is it something
worse?
I have noticed something about many "I'm an artist" regulars in this group.
Their training (http://tinyurl.com/vq27) is based on a very narrow,
historically blinkered view of the world -- so-called "SKILL", written here in
large block capitals to distinguish it from its pretenders -- and most of them
never manage to free themselves from the prison of their rigid word
associations. They talk past each other and among themselves, as if someone
else could talk to them, smuggle past the Chinese wall evidence of a world of
art outside rec.arts.fine.intolerant.hobbyists.
Once in a rare while a stranger reveals a glimpse of reality, however alien it
may be to their deep-rooted habits of thinking, and they begin to have some
sense their besieged worldview might be wrong, undistinguished, or not as
relevant as it used to be. This confuses them, so they accuse the stranger of
flat feet, long arms, and thinking differently: "he's got something against
(the idea of) people who find meaning in their creative endeavors." For shame,
brother. If you were Dilettante I'd flame you back so hard they'd gather your
remains and sell them back to you in little baggies labeled artist's charcoal.
> frankly i don't know why he hangs out at RAF
Because painting is my thing, Mike. You?
> since he's 3 days ahead of the rest of the world and owns a digital
> camera...
Ah, yes. There's that little flat person on the bed again.
Dilettante [edited for grammar]:
> It would behoove you to learn English before using phrases like "the little
> people."
You're that weenie who was defending pedophilia a month or so ago, right? OK so
for your information I meant something very different than what you might have
understood reading "little people." Now piss off. I have grown tired responding
to your ineffectual carping.
Nerd Girl:
<well, google seems to have lost your reply.>
I'll take your points up later in my reply to Jane. I don't disagree with
what you wrote but I want to clarify some issues. By the way, your replies
don't thread. Many people, especially those of us who read news on Google,
will not expend needless effort to situate and place your comments in their
proper order and context in discussion. Just saying, for what it's worth,
that you might want to fiddle with your newsreader so it doesn't trash
the 'References:' header.
OK so you be chilling, little artist people. I'm going drinking and snorting.
--
Leo Papandreou
Dilettante
> reproductions. We talk about paintings we have never seen, except dimly, like
> an opera heard across the phone. The course of painting, and all the rest of
> visual culture, is plotted by people that experience only a fraction of it
> directly. We are jacked into the photo matrix, our life forces drained by
> twitching images tripping across beams of light fantastic. Everything that is,
> is not.
>
Excellent example of a clever person trying to appear a genius.
Dilettante
Miriam
>
> Read Hannah Arendt's book The Origin of Totalitarianism.
Hannah Arendt's books are among those that I plan to read, but I have
never gotten that far - so I can't discuss the books as such. Your
different political arguments scattered around in these postings about
what happened in Europe before the second ww are more or less
gradually becoming historical facts, "commonly" agreed on. That
includes "wrightwingers" in Europe showing sympathy with Hitler
because they believed he was fighting communism. A little by little
many of the hidden stories about the war are surfacing.
Another thing is to conclude that an individual artist probably was a
fascist from what he or she made in the 1920s. For some reason a
television play I once have seen comes to my mind. It might have been
a biographic play. It was about a jew. He had abandoned his cultural
and religious background. One of his lines in this play went something
like: I didn't know I was a jew until Hitler came and made me one.
DNALJM
Forgive my lateness in responding, I've been very tired these past few days.
>Yeah, well, a painted shadow is not the human eye contemplating a real shadow
>either, is it?
It is, I would say, like an ATM printout of a transaction at the bank. It
is not the transaction itself, or the paper money, but a record of the event.
>The latitude of film and some digital sensors is a more than adequate match
>for painted shadows.
Ah, but they cannot. The sort of manipulation and editing you speak of
requires some of the same thought and "SKILL" as you would need to make a
masterful painting. A camera will not "see" the way the human optics system
can.
>I mean, he won't
>disappear in a puff of art logic if his shadows disagree with your concept of
>what shadows should look like.
No, but I find that people who don't master skills will often make weak,
unmoving, sucky art not because they want to but because they have to.
>I hope you don't think shadows should resemble
>those dark things in a photograph.
My point is the very opposite, that they should not. Shadows in
photographs are often featureless, colorless [even in color photography],
formless masses while the intelligently rendered or painted shadow can reveal
subtle architecture and color. All in service to the finished artwork, of
course. Do you know what happens when you draw/paint a shadow if you don't
understand anatomy and color? That's where your eye will rest and you won't
want to look at anything else.
. . .TBC. . .
Jane
http://www.geocities.com/teslathemothgod
*new drawings
Leo Papandreou
> Forgive my lateness in responding, I've been very tired these past few days.
That's OK, I wasn't around to read a prompt reply anyway.
>
>
> >Yeah, well, a painted shadow is not the human eye contemplating a real shadow
> >either, is it?
>
> It is, I would say, like an ATM printout of a transaction at the bank. It
> is not the transaction itself, or the paper money, but a record of the event.
>
> >The latitude of film and some digital sensors is a more than adequate match
> >for painted shadows.
>
> Ah, but they cannot. The sort of manipulation and editing you speak of
> requires some of the same thought and "SKILL" as you would need to make a
> masterful painting. A camera will not "see" the way the human optics system
> can.
Let's try this again.
If you want to compare painting with photography, and it seems you want to
do that, why compare the photograph with human vision? A painting is an art
object. A photograph is an art object. However, the image in the retina is
not an art object. As good as that image is -- and it is so good that we
call it "real" to distinguish it from "illusions" such as photographs and
paintings -- there is no brush or particle of pigment as tiny as a clump of
four atoms, which is the size of a unit of visual information on the surface
of photographic film.
That is the problem.
To appreciate the problem more fully, paint an image on a rectangular piece of
film 36 mm across and 24 mm high (a frame of so-called "35mm" film.) Compare
that with a slide shot on film that size. Now repeat the exercise on a standard
8x10 or 16x20 sheet of film, which is somewhat larger than Anthony Ryder's
work.
Link: You'll need a large format camera: <http://www.toyoview.com>.
Link: Ryder's site: <http://www.tonyryder.com/a-paintings.htm>.
The larger sheet of film is, in effect, a grid of 35 mm frames, each one
exposing a smaller chunk of the original scene in the same insane detail you
were unable to match before. Inch for inch, film has it all over painting (for
realism -- *inch for inch*.) Ryder's work, as realistic as it looks, compares
closer to undifferentiated blots and splatters than the image in a large format
slide, especially up close.
Although you can see very well, can *discern* differences in (e.g.) value much
better than even the slowest, most specialized film, you can't *copy* what you
see very well at all (compared to film.) Nothing you paint resembles very much
at all what you are painting unless you are painting another painting. That is
why it is much easier to copy paintings than photographs or life (because most
things aren't dusty pigment suspended in globs of oil and resin.) [1]
Give up? Don't. You were right.
Painted shadows can be "richer," "deeper," more "luxurious," and "transparent"
than the shadows in the family photo album -- if that's the way you want to
*paint* them. What I mean emphasizing "paint" is this: *make up*; and the
reason I scare-quoted the adjectives is they are poetry not a scientific
description of what shadows are or look like. It is painting language, a kind
of figurative jargon characteristic of painting books and how-to manuals.
Its purpose is to inspire the painter and instruct him in a convention and
variety of exaggerated, evocative visual impressions he must paint -- invent
from imagination and pigment -- in order to paint "painterly" shadows. In a
good figurative painting, shadows appear unified with the rest of the work:
they are as "realistic" as everything else in the picture. Hopper and
Caravaggio simulated shadows equally well; but Hopper's shadows don't resemble
Caravaggio's don't resemble shadows very much at all.
So although photographs are spectacularly more detailed, accurate, and "real"
than paintings -- you could say they are "photo-realistic" -- the problem is
that is what they are: realistic. Film cannot create. It cannot imaginatively
embellish what it "sees." It can only record. [Footnote: Unlike film, the
*photographer* can do interesting and creative things. See footnote 1.]
That does not mean the painted shadow is absolutely better than its
photographic twin. It means that they are different. I mean, photography and
painting are different media. They have different visual grammars, limitations
and conventionalities. They combine visual parts and elements into complete
images we experience and relate to differently, because they *are* different.
If painted shadows are superior to photographic shadows then I guess you could
say the Polish comma is better than the English semi-colon. That's just crazy
talk.
Are Ryder's pictures better than Aubrey Beardsley's because Beardsley's shadows
are absolutely black?
http://beardsley.artpassions.net/
Finally, I remind you that most people experience painting in reproductions.
Many aspiring realist painters have never seen a realist painting up close in
all their lives, and others paint from photographs. That indicates to me at
least that supposed deficiencies in the shadows in the photograph make a
negligible difference to either painting or photography. It simply isn't an
issue, thus no advantage or disadvantage for either form of art.
> The sort of manipulation and editing you speak of requires some of the same
> thought and "SKILL" as you would need to make a masterful painting.
Yes, that's what I wrote. I wrote that elsewhere in the message you are
quoting. The skill belongs to the photographer (artist) working in photography
(art) not to the camera or film, which are fancy brushes. You have only to
compare the family photos with a magazine to "get it."
http://www.cameraarts.com/
http://www.eyecaramba.com/mag/index.html
http://www.21stphotography.com/
http://www.lenswork.com/
http://www.onlinephotography.com/
http://www.portfoliocatalogue.com/
http://www.zoom-net.com/
>
> >I mean, he won't
> >disappear in a puff of art logic if his shadows disagree with your concept of
> >what shadows should look like.
>
> No, but I find that people who don't master skills will often make weak,
> unmoving, sucky art not because they want to but because they have to.
Yes, skill, everyone agrees, but skill at what? Skill in a media is what you
need to translate mental images onto that media without burning down the house.
If your painting doesn't look like the one in your imagination, as opposed to
some-one else's, you need to practice your skills.
>
> >I hope you don't think shadows should resemble
> >those dark things in a photograph.
>
> My point is the very opposite, that they should not.
There is no should in art. I have one word for you: happytrees.
> Shadows in
> photographs are often featureless, colorless [even in color photography],
> formless masses while the intelligently rendered or painted shadow can reveal
> subtle architecture and color. All in service to the finished artwork, of
> course. Do you know what happens when you draw/paint a shadow if you don't
> understand anatomy and color? That's where your eye will rest and you won't
> want to look at anything else.
I meant shadows as in those things that simulate 3-dimensional form in two
dimensions, exhibiting "realism," as opposed to yellow polka dots in a field of
purple stripes or whatever. I meant images so "real" courts call them evidence,
as opposed to painting, which they call "made-up."
I thought your point was painted shadows are more realistic, that light obeys
the laws of physics and geometry more exactly in painting than in photography,
which is false. They are not more or less realistic or artistic. They just are.
Moreover, it seemed you were arguing an arbitrary measure of art, shadows, that
cannot be sensibly supported. For one thing, it's a wrong-headed reductionism.
For another, technology will make your facts (which really aren't) false:
everything you know about photography is wrong in the year 2150. Then what?
[1] There are caveats. There are always caveats when we compare apples and
oranges for equality. One caveat is the scene must be well and uniformly lit.
If it is poorly lit, or the contrast is pathological, you have to expose the
lights and shadows separately ("bracket" your shots.)
In fact, there is a range of imaging technologies and techniques available to
the photographer, from darkroom chemistry to signal processing and everything
in between. Moreover, the photographer can add information -- information that
isn't on the film or was even at the scene -- by "painting" directly on the
film or print or in computer memory.
The possibilities are limited only by the imagination (not exactly, but still.)
That doesn't mean photographers can copy shadows exactly -- a photograph is
never the image in the retina -- or that they might even want to; it means the
photographer can push the photo where he wants to go, as close to "real" (the
image in the retina) or as far away as possible.
--
Leo Papandreou