Art lovers, connoisseurs, kunstliefhebbers.

Daumier_art lovers

Daumier’s portrayal of amateur French art lovers (collectors? connoisseurs?) very careful peering at a small frame / picture. Is Haecht’s depictions of art lovers (kunstliefhebbers) comparable, assuming that Daumier’s isn’t exactly flattering? Note man peering closely, on bended knees before picture of hunt. Kneeling being a not very dignified, gentlemanly position.

Willem II Haecht_Kunstkammer of Cornelis van der Geest_1628, from wga.hu

Pleasure of old books.

While I am quite aware that “we have become accustomed to the irrelevance of the artist’s intentions or the inaccessibility of the artist’s experience in our aesthetic response,” (Joel Black review of Greenblatt’s Allegory and Representation) and even though historians like David Freedberg or Hans Belting question the categories of high art and low art, still, it’s hard to not be a bit in awe when one comes across the works of a ‘famous’ painter. Even knowing that that fame is built-up, constructed, and changeable.

Hence despite it all, I must say that I had the incredible pleasure of handling and reading a book printed in 1627 (English edition) with an engraved title-page that was designed by Rubens.

Rubens_title page to Obsidio Bredana by H. Hugo, from Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, 1994,0514.45

A few iPhone photos of the book (something could be said about new technology meeting new technology!):

photo from Warburg_English edition of H. Hugo's Obsidio Bredana.

Now I’ve got to write a paper about it. Not so pleasurable. More about the readings in a bit (for my own reference in the future).

Unrelatedly, just ran into this in a reading about allegory and representation, which amused me:

“Characteristically, Courbet expected to draw vast crowds and, at twenty sous a head, to make a financial killing while embarrassing the government. In these expectations he was of course disappointed…”

from Michael Fried, “Representing Representation: On the central group in Courbet’s Studio,” Allegory and Representation, ed. Stephen J. Greenblatt (Johns Hopkins UP: Baltimore) 94.

Here’s the painting:

Courbet, The Painter's Studio, 1854-55. Paris, Louvre.

How art ought to be written.

Writing about the man in the back of the picture:

Even so, there is a difference [between him and the figures reflected in the mirror]: he is there in flesh and blood; he has appeared from the outside, on the threshold of the area represented; he is indubitable–not a probable reflection but an irruption. The mirror, by making visible, beyond even the walls of the studio itself, what is happening in front of the picture, creates, in its sagittal dimension, an oscillation between the interior and the exterior. One foot only on the lower step, his body entirely in profile, the ambiguous visitor is coming in and going out at the same time, like a pendulum caught at the bottom of its swing. He repeats on the spot, but in the dark reality of his body, the instantaneous movement of those images flashing across the room, plunging into the mirror, being reflected there, and springing out from it again like visible, new, and identical species. Pale, miniscule, those silhouetted figures in the mirror are challenged by the tall, solid stature of the man appearing in the doorway.

Painting List: Hold your Horses video.

Hold your Horses video:

Paintings in the video after jump (couldn’t identify them all).

Hold your Horses.

So amusing. Identify them all?

Humanities PhD = Starving artist.

The humanities are useless and don’t actually do anything: no patents filed, no divorces settled, no meds prescribed, no bones set, no cells babied, no stocks sold, no programs written (or debugged). Goodness, what a useless thing to do.

The smarter option is to follow a pre-professional or professional route. It’s productive, it provides one with a tangible skill, it’s more secure, and no one will wonder (verbally or no) why you’re wasting your time. In fact, Ezra Klein recently linked to a disheartening study of the incomes of graduates in different fields:

Pulling up the average are computer science, engineering, business, health, math, and vocational-technical. Pulling down the average are life sciences (why is this so low?), social sciences, humanities, physical sciences (again, why so low?), education, and “other technical/professional.”

At the 25th percentile, the really bad majors are life sciences (again, what are these, and why do they do so poorly?), humanities, and social sciences. Perhaps the 25th percentile of these three groups is what defines the unskilled college graduate. Note how much better vocational-technical looks at the 25th percentile.

And then there’s the even more disheartening articles by humanities professors who either say that students shouldn’t pursue it, or defend its pursuit by comparing humanities graduates to starving artists, as Wheaton College professor James Mulholland does in “Neither a Trap Nor a Lie”:

One of those reasons is the pursuit of the life of the mind. Not because we need another generation of teachers who are abused by stressful working conditions, unequal wages, little job security, and no health benefits, but because the lifestyle of academe is meaningful and rewarding in ways that are different from many other careers. Choosing to pursue that life—as irrational as it may seem, as hopeless as the prospect of achieving it might be—can still be a sound choice.

…[W]e must think of graduate school as more like choosing to go to New York to become a painter or deciding to travel to Hollywood to become an actor. Those arts-based careers have always married hope and desperation into a tense relationship. We must admit that the humanities, now, is that way, too.

Goodness.

Goya, Hirst, Rembrandt, and Rubens.

On France2 this evening, there was a brief exposé on Damien Hirst, which reminded me of my awfully disappointing visit to Musée Maillol in March (I happened to walk past it this evening). That then reminded me that I’d read an article about Goya not long ago, in which the author, photographer John Sevigny dismissed the Saatchi-fed Damien Hirst fad. From Guernica magazine:

John Sevigny: On Francisco Goya

December 18, 2009

By John Sevigny

Even in the age of Modern art, there was never a painter as modern as Francisco Goya (1746-1828). A thinker, a painter to the Spanish Crown, a do-it-yourself/sell-it yourself printmaker almost 200 years before punk rockers took up the act, and a master draughtsman, Goya was a Renaissance man long after the Renaissance ended.

…The black paintings present a powerful argument for doing away with patronage-based art systems (which exist even today in the guise of know-nothing, influence-everything collectors such as Charles Saatchi, who has championed such dubious art-world Paparazzi targets as Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, and Stella Vine, a stripper turned painter).

…There is a great lesson here for Saatchi and the other mafiosos of the art market, from Miami to Madrid.

…Indeed, our greatest artists have frequently been outsiders initially rejected by the establishment. They include Claude Monet, Eduoard Manet, and Jackson Pollock, just to name three from the 19th and 20th Centuries. Hirst, Koons, Prince and Vine can hardly be expected to be remembered in 50 years, much less two centuries.

…That Goya was a better painter than the earlier, more popular Peter Paul Rubens, or a more intelligent artist than Diego Velazquez, Michelangelo or Rembrandt hardly seems worth mentioning. That he created the Black Paintings, and The Dog, the most thoroughly modern piece in the group, in utter solitude, is food for thought in this age of Artistic Prostitution.

Oh, and I happen to have a print of the Goya painting seen above, bought it during the Wellesley print sale! I don’t altogether agree with Sevigny’s take on Goya. Sevigny states unequivocably that Goya was a ‘more intelligent painter’ than Michelangelo and Rembrandt. What does that even mean, to be a ‘more intelligent painter’? As in he was more diplomatic? More intelligent approach to his patrons? Or that his intelligence was somehow expressed through his art. I suspect that Sevigny means intelligent as in diplomatic because he says that “Goya was a better painter than the earlier, more popular Peter Paul Rubens”. Rubens is known for being equally a great painter and an astute diplomat. If one is looking for diplomacy, intelligence, or tact, one must turn to Rubens. Take his Medici Cycle (at the Louvre!) The level of diplomacy as expressed through choice of subject and reinforced by composition is incredible. That’s obviously not very clear, but I’m too lazy to go into an art history discussion of the Medici Cycle right now. If, by intelligence, Sevigny means intelligence somehow expressed through his art, then I’m flummoxed. I don’t know what that means. I’d counter with Rembrandt’s painting of the prodigal son. Yes, I’m offended by his dismissal of the Dutch and Flemish painters 😛

But that’s not the point. My point was that I agree with Sevigny’s skeptical stance with regards to Saatchi and Hirst. Here are two Hirsts: