Evidence » course: color theory

First, don't forget to sign your name to your posts! Continuing conversations are easier, and fairer, if you know who you're talking to.

Second, is this actually a quote from Atlas Shrugged? I've never read it.

Wherever it's from, I'm glad somebody brought up this area of discussion. People do often accuse academic art, not unfairly, of being increasingly self-contained, made by Gallery People for Gallery People. Re-assessing what makes art work, at the most basic level, is a good thing to do from time to time.

That said, you or Ayn Rand, whichever, are conflating a bunch of different points together. You say "non-objective, content free sculptures and images" as though "non-objective" and "content-free" meant pretty much the same thing. But even in the West there's a long pre-modern tradition in non-objective art with a lot of content attached, and that's still the dominant mode in a lot of non-Western cultures. Today in Letters, Signs & Symbols I talked a bit about the Tibetan monks who were on UNCG campus last week, making a sand mandala. This kind of art is non-objective representation, but is it content-free?

I also talked a bit about representational vs. symbolic art, and I quoted a writer on religious folk art in New Mexico who said, "The people of the Renaissance insisted that art ought to be realistic, but the people of New Mexico, being still very medieval in their outlook, demanded that art was real." This is the same demand made by a number of different Modernist movements: the Surrealists, who wanted art to be a non-aesthetic representation of direct thought; the Futurists, who wanted art to reflect the experience of new technology, and so forth. Some of those movements have been more convincing than others, and some are forgotten, but this is because a lot of modern art has been experimental, trying to find new ways to deal with new cultural forms. Some of those experiments turned out to be failures, but that doesn't mean that their influence won't be felt a few hundred years from now.

You, or Ayn, contrast Michelangelo's David to ancient Egyptian art. This is another conflation: going straight from David to "depictions of the human condition," which is a pretty broad term. The ancient Egyptians who drew their funny little figures on the walls of tombs thought that they were depicting the human condition, as they understood it. The difference between David and the Great Pyramid is not that one is "universal" and the other is not, but that David exists within our cultural framework, and Egyptian art does not.

But from your point of view (not Ayn's), why is David the kind of thing that will be remembered centuries from now? What does "depictions of the human condition" mean? Is it because David is naturalistic in form? Because it's showing a figure? Because of its religious symbolism? Which part of all that, or something else, is the key? Personally, I think it's too early yet to know what kind of Modern thing will last through the centuries. Humans haven't changed that much, but we live in a time that's pretty much unlike any time that's ever happened. The steam train has never existed before, let alone the Internet. How we'll see ourselves, and our surroundings, centuries from now is still up in the air.