Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

Curt Doolittle updated his status.

LET ME HELP: UNDERSTANDING THE BASICS OF ART

DIMENSIONS OF MEASUREMENT
There are three dimensions of art criticism:
– Craftsmanship (includes materials)
– Design (the play of order(composition) and bounty(beauty) and perception)
– Content (the content and values of that content)

All art can be judged by triangulation (comparison) along these three axis. There is no possible cardinality to art but ordinality can be achieved by recursive triangulation.

ALL ART BEGINS WITH MONUMENTAL ARCHITECTURE AND DEVOLVES TO DECORATION AND HANDCRAFTS
– Monumental Architecture is self selecting due to cost.
– Monumental Sculpture is self selecting due to cost.
– Monumental Painting is self selecting due to cost.
– Life Size Representationalism (not photorealism) in painting is self selecting due to cost (hours).

HOWEVER
– Painting, Print, and Photography are not self selecting.
They are middle, working, and lower class substitutes for monuments.

– Even for the upper middle and upper class, and out-of-sight class, the few pieces of quality art that are canon (mentioned in art magazines and books, and references, or which had popular press) are inaccessible. Demand is just too high. So given the high signal value of art (yes it is an extreme expression of dominance), the market has had to experiment with novelty in order to satisfy demand.

Much of what ordinary people rail against is the same as railing against fashion: for those in the fashion industries (of which display art is a member) novelty has to function as a substitute for scarcity of craftsmanship quality (note my particular distaste for the so called ‘art glass’ industry).

AS SUCH
– Monumental works convey ideas (allegiances, heroics, beauty)
– The demand for low cost high production ‘decoration’
(a) may form an icon or ‘remembrance’.
(b) may decorate the environment.
(c) may reflect the monumental, life sized, and representational, is misplaced in non monumental size (which is what most of us intuit as great work).

IN OTHER WORDS
– Monumental work is misplaced in most homes and offices in market (business) and is generally reserved for the political and institutional and aristocratic.
– Most homes cannot support monumental work and require only design (decoration).
– Most people are actually not capable of design, or capable of acquiring the monumental.
– As such the colorful, abstract, the impressionistic, are to homes as type design and color pallet are to print and display advertising.

IN OTHER WORDS
– when people purchase relatively well made ‘design’ (abstract, gestural, impressionistic) of architectural size (to fill a wall) they are practicing good aesthetics (not acting on pretense).
– when people pay homage to the monumental in private spaces, they are practicing good aesthetics. (small engineering drawings, paintings of flowers, well constructed prints)
– when people pay homage to the monumental in architectural spaces (your living room, hallway, or dining room, or office) you are (a) alienating others, and (b)

PERSONAL: ALLORA AND I
We purchased a detailed mezzotint (print) of an elaborately painstakingly made tree that is about four or five feet tall in all, and framed in a wide matte and black frame. This was the centerpeice of the livingroom between two custom made bookcases.

And in the center of the living room we had a glass table with her art jewelry collection and work. And Allora decorated a hallway with dozens of small pieces of framed photographs, etchings, mezzotints, and collections of remembrances.

THE DESTRUCTION OF WEST VIA DESTRUCTION OF ARTS LITERATURE HISTORY LAW AND SCIENCE.

Allora and I were a rare couple because we were the last generation that could be ‘cultured’ – you actually can’t get an art education any longer. You can’t get a liberal arts education any longer (the whig history). The marxists have destroyed art on purpose just as they have destroyed literature, academics, law, and history. It is nearly impossible to ‘be cultured’ in the aristocratic sense any longer. And it was destroyed on purpose by (((the marxists, socialists and postmodernists))).

WE MUST ONCE AGIAN BE WARRIORS SO OUR CHILDREN CAN BE COMPETITIVE SO OUR GRAND CHILDREN CAN BE ARTISTS.