Why are painting and sculpture so stale compared to music, literature and film...

Why would I not? Because muh emotions?

well considering that Greenberg's entire schtick is flatness and that's how we get white paintings and flat paintings, not knowing which way is up on a pollock is praise for pollock. at least, the same kind of praise that got him selling in the first place. surely, being post-Greenberg, you should have perfect hindsight on that and wouldn't consider it amateur at all but something Greenberg would admit to himself
>highly_skeptical_verging_on_venomous_wyndham_lewis.tarr
>yes, i've heard of it
>yes, i've heard of stendhal syndrome, let's talk about a book that isn't the same quality as stendhal because i've read that and not stendhal
do any of you bitches read the shit you want to seem au fait with? i'd recommend it.

>yes, i've heard of stendhal syndrome, let's talk about a book that isn't the same quality as stendhal because i've read that and not stendhal
your point?

you have shit taste and are poorly read. be better.

>well considering that Greenberg's entire schtick is flatness and that's how we get white paintings and flat paintings, not knowing which way is up on a pollock is praise for pollock. at least, the same kind of praise that got him selling in the first place. surely, being post-Greenberg, you should have perfect hindsight on that and wouldn't consider it amateur at all but something Greenberg would admit to himself

I'm not sure what your point is. Are you taking a side at all?

that pollock fans normally don't know why pollock has fans.

There is tons of music and film that I don't react to with anything other than indifference. The same goes for paintings and sculptures, whereas some works truly impress me, as deeply as music or film would, in their own respect, with equal vigor.

>do you even see a normal person get really emotionally connected to a painting?
Yes

Well you get out of art what you put in. But I think it's interesting that Rosenberg wrote against psychological manipulation in mass culture too despite having a different reaction to Pollock than formalism

>doesn't know how to draw
>art is bad hurrdurr
neck yourself.

Maybe because books, movies and music are readily disposable to you at home and the fact that you have to go to a fucking museum to see a good painting.

>Rosenberg
If you're interested in him too, Tom Wolfe has a book on how Greenberg and Rosenberg basically wrote the culture. I've only ever seen Electric Kool Aid Acid Test mentioned here, but the one on Greenberg et al is called The Painted Word.

Cool, I will check it out

>rosenberg
american action painters is such a bad written article

wait til you see greenberg. actually all you need is this
>muh flatness
>muhflatness
>MUH FLATNESS
>flatness

>The Painted World
poorly researched and inanely opinionated, as everything by Wolfe, the only reason it's popular is because it gives plebs that "DUH, SOMEBODY FINALLY STICKS IT TO THEM ART SNOBS" sentiment.

Greenberg is a good writer comparatively. His points are well-made and well-researched. You end up at muh flatness but the journey you take to reach that point is comprehensive and substantial. It gives enough to move beyond muh flatness into Minimalism and whatever.

You could get the title right if you expect me to believe you read it.
>inanely opinionated
Compared to Greenberg? Ha.

>Greenberg is a good writer comparatively
You know anyone can read him online and see you're wrong?

They can do the same and see I'm right too.

Yeah, because Action Painters is way more sophisticated than Avant Garde and Kitsch, Modernist Painting, Towards a New Laocoon and American Type of Painting etc.

They aren't you just have to look at good art/sculpture and not this mondriaan shit

a good painting/sculpture can tell a story as well as a good book
look f.e. at the "Oath of the Horatii" by David
first its beautiful compostion (3 brothers to the left, the father in the middle, 3 women on the right), it's like composed like an actual drama on a stage.
It tells the whole story of the Horatii and much more, it tells us about courage, loyality, patriotism, war (represented by the brothers) but at the same it shows us the grief, suffering and anguish that are inherint in war (represented by the women), the upcoming triumph of the Horatii but also their grief (2 brothers die in the fight) are already inherint in the painting, it manages to tell a whole story, values and ideas with just one picture
If you look closely you will be able to find a whole cosmos in almost any classical/renaissance/baroque painting

you pretty much only have to read maybe two paragraphs into his first essay to see his entire goal is to stultify the growth of painting. you're retarded and essentially artistic cancer.

Green:
>The dogmatism and intransigence of the “non-objective’ or ‘abstract` purists of painting today cannot be dismissed as symptoms merely of a cultist attitude towards art. Purists make extravagant claims for art, because usually they value it much more than an one else does. For the same reason they are much more solicitous about it. A great deal of purism is the translation of an extreme solicitude, an anxiousness as to the fate of art, a concern for its identity.

Rosen:
>Since the War every twentieth-century style in painting has been brought to profusion in the United States: thousands of "abstract" painters—crowded teaching courses in Modern Art—a scattering of new heroes—ambitions stimulated by new galleries, mass exhibitions, reproduction in popular magazines, festivals, appropriations.

>Is this the usual catching up of America with European art forms? Or is something new being created? For the question of novelty, a definition would seem indispensable.

>Some people deny that there is anything original in the recent American painting. Whatever is being done here now, they claim, was done thirty years ago in Paris. You can trace this painter's boxes of symbols to Kandinsky, that one's moony shapes to Miró or even back to Cézanne.

>they can't both be shit
they're both shit

We're comparing Greenberg to Rosenberg. Like I said, I'm post-Greenberg. I have the same reaction to formalism as any non-formalist of the 50s onwards.

Green:
>this is why paintings should only ever look like paint: it's paint and if you say otherwise i'll say you're impure
Rosen:
>everything new is good because new is good and europe is just pretending to have history. why do they call US dumb?
yeah, neither is good, greenberg's just more pretentious about it. green's r9k to rosen's pol. both are broken.

>painting in question

or go look at renaissance fresci, there a literally whole room's (f.e. in villa borghese in rome) that are dedicated to tell stories from ovid metamorphoses through fresci, paintings and sculptures, go see Benini's "Apoll and Daphne" and tell me that is an inferior work of art than the poem by Ovid

youtube.com/watch?v=E_jwv2QMtAo

ayyy

You haven't really shown why they're bad.

So you're saying paintings should be only interpreted as narrative devices and iconological passwords at best? Kill yourself, my man.

>I have the same reaction to formalism as any non-formalist of the 50s onwards.
because all their reactions were so formalized. come on man, you can do better than this. non-formalism isn't necessarily a hardline position, and those that are have a different reaction to moderate non-formalists. the entire point since the 1950s has been everyone draws a different line on how many and which elements of form are necessary.

>i need literariness in painting in order to appreciate it
you are a special kind of cancer

>purple prose and notions of purism
>my opinion of America as an American is global fact

they're stale to you because you never leave your room, go to a museum and see the fucking paintings as opposed to viewing them through a screen

What? You're not saying anything I disagree with.

holy crap an actual academicmoralfag. didn't they all die of heart attacks around the time Manet's Olympia first showed? i figured the stress of claiming Bouguereau isn't beastiality porn but a moral tale would have done them all in by now alongside old age. huh

Can't you accuse Vasari of being the same way? I mean I don't think modernist art theory is still 'true' holistically but I don't think it's wrong either.

You cannot have the same reaction as every non-formalist. I'm disagreeing that you can, like you claimed you did. jfc this board is retarded even for artfags

I said 'any' not 'every'

wtf are you talking about? Vasari writes about the deception of paint not looking like paint being amusing, while hundreds of years later both the people you want to compare him too say that is bad and wrong. Neither of my criticisms apply to Vasari, especially because his praise of America would have been limited by American having only been discovered as a continent by Mediterraneans less than twenty years before his birth. Are you just naming people from the past and hoping they have the same problems as two critcs from the 20th C?

>picks any given non-formalist
>checks your reaction against theirs
>same probably variance as if you checked every one in this fashion
do you want to keep being wrong but in a specific wording?

sorry replied to myself

I mean the parochial nature of his writing as a central Italian and offering a theoretical explanation for the development of relatively recent novel styles of painting

Again still not sure of your point. I can't read your mind dude.

Sure, he has a Florentine bias. Compared to the biases of city states at the time, leaving the worst to the Goths is pretty cosmopolitan for the time, as is not just solely focusing on Florence. Do I expect someone after the invention of aeroplanes and international newspapers to be more parochial and revisionist? No, I think that's a bigger problem than in Renaissance writers, especially when the writer proclaims it as a universal truth that Europe is just making shit up about because they're jealous. If your opinion is more parochial than 500 years ago, you got problems man.

I'm saying that what you said about your reaction shows you know sweet fuck all about your reaction or the reactions of non-formalists since the 1950s.

There's no single 'postmodern' position, sure, except for elaborating on or rejecting the 'modernist position' which is what I'm getting at. There is no universal art and the fact that postmodernism ('non-formalism' -- I admit I was being lazy with this term) is diverse and not hard-line is exactly the point.

You really have a hard time with saying "I'm wrong". You're being lazy with the term post-modern too. I'm going out for a while because I'm not getting lecture fees for this thread. Post some more retarded shit and I might get back to you later.

This is why I'm saying he's not holistically 'true' but he's not wrong. It's an interesting theory and following the argument has you arrive comfortably at his conclusions, but of course it is a limited theory and advances in linguistics, civil rights, feminism, etc. provide open fields for other aesthetic systems.

I haven't been wrong because you've been saying things about my position ('reaction') that I agree with but with the implication that they're wrong without actually demonstrating it or being convincing in any way. Are you the OP arguing about 'emotional connection'?

That has no relevance at all to my criticism of Greenberg or Rosenberg, or my exculpation of Vasari. It just tells me you don't know why it's retarded to be more retarded than a 1500s Florence resident while being a 1950s resident of New York. I'll assume you will have more retarded shit later too.

Your criticism doesn't have a lot to do with the thread honestly. It only arose because you misinterpreted the point of comparing Greenberg and Rosenberg ("Oh, well, they're both wrong!"). Are you tired or on drugs or something?

>go to a museum and see the fucking paintings as opposed to viewing them through a screen

People well overrate this. If you don't care for a given artwork it's unlikely that seeing it in person will change your mind to such a great extent.

Things like scale and texture change in an image though. Actually getting a sense of the work as an historical object is different to seeing it as a 900x900 .jpg in the context of contemporary internet design

I thought he was saying this user's post sounds like Greenberg He's not comparing them. He's putting him and the other berg kek course they're all jews together as a movement I thought. I don't even need to know shit about them to work that out. If he's arguing against user because that's the kind of thing the Jewberg group would say, telling him one of the Jews is less Jewy than the other probably isn't going to make him stop hating Jews.

ofc the aesthetic quality/beauty is important but that's just presupposed, it's art after all
but if you really want to appreciate "renaissance" (or better non-modern) art you have to take symbolism/iconograpy/iconology/compositio into account it plays a huge role, otherwise you would just look at painting like this Holbein and say "Well there's two dudes I guess".
If you don't like it go back to duchamps and look at your urinal.

>some dude in the 1500s painted a skull like it was lazily transformed in photoshop
Truly remarkable, I'd never seen this before.

Retard

>Look user, paintings can be good too!
>Cites a Neoclassical paintings

you should shoot yourself in the head desu

Just shoot your

Art sure is boring.

what's it like being a pleb?
you have any arguments? I'd love if you could enlighten me

>stale

...

>talking about art history with hentai drawers

I've never seen a painting or sculpture that has affected me emotionally, and music does it to me all the time.

Where do I look to find such paintings? Anyone have some recs?

SINCE I LEFT YOU

I feel like this thread is as good a time as any other to say that I have always been baffled by paintings.

They have almost never made me feel a deep emotion or sunk me in an abyss of contemplation and reverie. When I look at a painting, I just say, "OK, well-done" but don't feel anything if it's some Renaissance work with well-done anatomy, proportion, lighting, etc. And if it's something more modern, like a Picasso or Pollock, my inward mental and emotional reaction can be perfectly represented by:

"..."

I am almost literally "blind" to the merits of painting, they have almost never excited in me great thoughts or emotions or even awe at their aesthetic beauty.

However, one exception is Monet's water lilies. For some reason, they're the only things that strike me with awe. I can't even say why. And I am in general so uninterested in paintings from what I've seen of them (besides Monet's water lilies) that I can't be bothered to learn more about the history or fundamentals of painting. When I see or hear people talking about the awe paintings put them into, and talking about all the "technique" and the "theory" behind it, all I feel is nothing. I feel as if I'm watching robots mechanically jack themselves off in public.

In one sense, you could say that a lot of painting is "subjective", and that people see a merit in them that isn't there. My theory is that, as children or early teenagers, they became interested in drawing and painting for whatever reason, perhaps because they did good in art class. Then they learn more about art, and grow up to learn more about art, and, since children have very plastic minds, convince themselves from childhood that there is a deep value in painting. They read books on art criticism or read reviews of artists going into hysterics over the beauty of the artists, and these critics/reviewers/expositors have themselves been mechanically brought up in the same way to "appreciate" paintings. Since children are very naive and generally accept as truth what is given to them from great authorities (within certain bounds), if they read that such-and-such a painting and painter is supposed to be very beautiful, they artificially force in themselves a corresponding "emotion" of "Wow, this is beautiful!"

Over time, they mechanize themselves to create this seem hysteria over art that's claimed by the mainstream as being good; really, the reaction to the art isn't an "objective" reaction to some merit in the art, but something that comes within themselves, a certain capacity towards imagination and fantasy. This is why there are not too many agreeing interpretations of an artwork most of the time: it's entirely subjective and mixed with the viewer's own emotions. If you haven't hypnotized yourself from an early age to be interested in art, you feel nothing looking at it.

>children reading about art history and art criticism
ok then

And btw, this exact same argument can be made about pretty much every art form.
Avid readers of literature have most often been reading since they were children.

Not everything is a social construct you post-modern mongoloid.

I'm not gonna lie, it can be applied to every art form. In a way, I've lost all faith in art, even literature and music. For instance, I started listening to a lot of different music in my youth ... but many people only listen to what is on the popular radio when they are kids. Thus, their music taste gets set in stone. I'm not criticizing them for this, just saying it as I see it. Most young adults today can't listen to jazz, to classical music, experimental music, etc. Usually they either do the generic pop/rap/hip-hop, or get into one genre exclusively (punk, metal, dad-rock, whatever). This isn't necessarily their fault, they just weren't brought up to like other music, there's a certain time our brain is developing that shapes us for life.

I think this is pretty much true for everything, I've realized. I can't even read literature anymore, which I once thought so beautiful and deep, because of how sickened I am at its inanity and objective meaninglessness. I could just as well have become interested in sculpture or something.

Second, I also said early youth. Most people interested in paintings are already more intellectual than the average run of people, so it's not unlikely to imagine them reading about art history and criticism while they're still teenagers.

I hate postmodernists but you gotta admit, everything kind of is a social construct.

Who would you be if you didn't grow up with certain genes, certain upbringing, certain environment, and certain social norms around you? Most people are so contingent on the world around them and they don't want to admit it because that would mean admitting they never had any freewill, never chose what they desired, never really were anyone, just did what circumstances around them made them do.

t. pseud the post
You're no special snowflake for having nihilistic thoughts. You cling onto them, though, not because you realize the nihilism of it all but because your crippling self-pity and self-hatred prevents you from appreciating sincere beauty. Anything beautiful reminds you of your own ineptitude and flawed humanity.

>inb4 this guy thinks the world isn't nihilistic.
Existential nihilism isn't an untenable position to hold. But when you're very young and have yet to experience or think about many things you can't really say everything is inane and meaningless

Pollack was propped up by the CIA in order to help the USA win the artistic cultural war against communism, not even joking.

I'm not self-pitying nor do I hate myself. In fact, this is a problem I often find on Veeky Forums (which is why I don't sincerely post much), that people think I must be incredibly miserable just because I am cynical. All I'm saying is that art is useless jacking off. You can have your pleasure in it but my point-of-view is I see nothing behind it.

>genetics is a social construct
What?

There will always be people outside of the normal curve ie people with autism or Asperger's. What do you say of their aesthetics, their preference then? Even in animals with only the limbic system we see appreciation of beauty through the selection of mate. Perhaps aesthetics isn't what you assume it to be but to say beauty is a social construct is just absurd

Read Sakura no Uta and get over it

You like yourself too much

Denial. Obviously, I'm not God and I don't know how you think, you probably don't either. But all I'm saying is, nihilism is an untenable position to hold until you have actually experienced every single thing in the world because of the problem of induction.

In fact, not even experiencing everything grants you the privilege of claiming nihilism. A retard would not experience art at the same level as Van Gogh. You would have to have experienced everything at the highest possible level, ie be God to claim nihilism

...

Except Water Lilies

...

I think I can help you a great deal here.

denisdutton.com/bell.htm

Read this.

Here, Clive Bell goes into great detail on what exactly he believes is valuable the experience of art and, here's the crux, why he believes not everyone is capable of this kind of appreciation in the same way. He talks about what he specifically loves in painting and what he shares with other genuine lovers of visual art, and contrasts this with his lack of ability to appreciate music.

I'm the in the same boat as you, I am thrilled by music but feel little for 2D visual art by itself beyond a vague sense of "oh, that's nice".

I also have a whole blog which is dedicated to tackling this problem from the opposite perspective, as someone who has come to love other forms of art yet still can't grasp painting. I go into great detail using my own experiences as a basis for an attempted theory of the human capacity for art, but I don't want to post it here directly because fuck associating my identity with this place.

>do you even see

jesus christ mods seriously this thread is not about literature it is about art and painting delete this thread it is unrelated to the board it is on move it to /ic/ or delete it

I'm saying that such concepts as the worth we put in things, and also in our own supposed free-will in choosing how we value things, is determined by such things as genetics, upbringing, etc.

The way I view it, beauty should be objective and scientific and have the same effect on everyone, according of course to their level of self-awareness.

I'm many bad things but I'm not a weaboo, sorry

I do

Yes, but even God must be a nihilist, and even God is meaningless. Suppose that God ascribes worth to something. We ask, "Why ascribe worth to it?" God either says, "Because it is inherently worthy", or "Because I say so." We ask why in either case. God says, "Because I say so." And why should even God by meaningful? Because he simply IS. As Moses quotes him, "I am what I am."

Behind all meaning, there is an abyss of arbitrariness, because meaning must, by its nature, be subjectively ascribed, even if by God. God has to subjectively determine what is objective for us. By the way, I'm not an edgy (g)a(y)theist, I believe in God.

Yeah, p much

Thanks, interesting article.

>when he says sculptures suck

well going to good museum is a start, you wont get into art or sculpture from watching pictures on the internet, go see some Rembrandt or Benini or Caravaggio in person and if you 'feel it' or whatever go read up on art history it's a fascinating subject

Well, you're only looking at the emotional response in terms of effort put in. How paintings have always resonated with me is by giving me a sense of an atmosphere I never knew and can only know through what's directly before my eyes. It requires a fair bit of imagination to really enjoy a painting the way I enjoy it. You can suppose many things about what you are seeing without being right or wrong, and all very quickly. Which is really kind of a free sensation that I don't think you can experience with literature, although this makes literature much better at expressing ideas. Color is a big factor too, there is no better immediate emotional connection for visuals than color. I'd say it's what makes the water lilies so appealing in terms of pure aesthetic. I think it just requires being a little less jaded and a little more open minded and imaginative to feel something from art.

Do you think God is subjective? How could something omniscient possibly be subjective? We could never begin to understand how God thinks, much less assume that he'd think like us.