(April 7, 2019 at 8:52 am)Thoreauvian Wrote: I can't say I particularly relate to them.
That's something this thread has suggested to me -- the idea of relating to paintings.
And here I'm not necessarily talking about relating to the characters in the paintings, although there may be a little of that. (For example, the characters in the TV sitcom The Big Bang Show are completely unrelatable to me. But this may be less to do with their presented personalities than with the fact that the show itself is cliched and stylized in a way that I don't enjoy. It's comfortable for people who are used to that whole style, but for me its extreme stylization and distance from how real people behave comes across as more artificial than Kabuki.)
Anyway, what I mean is that when people on this thread have pointed to the pictures they like, it seems to be with more than just ranking qualities. There is some personal and felt connection. So your connection to the Mona Lisa (and I hope you'll correct me if I'm wrong) gives me the impression that you feel something for that painting -- you value it, you want others to see its value, and you might be irked if someone called it worthless.
Likewise Succubus and I have a thing for van Eyck. Maybe I'm projecting on to Succubus, but for me, that is a personal thing and something far more than a judgment concerning its level of accomplishment.
Susan Sontag said "we need an erotics of art." This seems insightful to me. What we feel for the art we love is far more than academic interest. We love it the way we love people (almost). We feel a kind of loyalty (?) or valuation -- in the same way that, ok, we know other people's kids are good, too, but our own kids will always be the best for us.
And, maybe I'm imagining, but when people say they despise Jackson Pollock or somebody else, there seems to be some emotion in there. I mean, we can all agree, probably, that the Kardashians are over-rated and don't deserve their money, but the fact that Pollock is held up as worthy offends us more, I think. (Despite the fact that he made a hell of a lot less money than Kim.)
Freud says that one reason we can love someone is because he embodies for us qualities that we would like to have in ourselves -- an image of our best selves. I have a (fuzzy, unformed) theory that this is how we see art, a lot of the time. It embodies for us qualities that call to us personally. The perfection, the wit, the depth, the accomplished feeling, that we would love to feel about ourselves, but almost never do.
(I'm intentionally avoiding the terms subjective and objective here, because I want to say more than that. It's more than a subjective preference for chocolate ice cream -- unless you really wildly identify yourself with chocolate ice cream.)
So this is one of art's values. This is one of the things which makes art important. The embodiment of principle. And it's one reason why it's better to like good art than bad or simple-minded art. Attaching yourself to comic book movies keeps you at a lower level than attaching yourself to a genuinely great object.
It also, just to make everybody hate me again, connects art with religion. God, or Jesus, is a fictional place-holder which we assume is everything we would like ourselves to be. I said "embodiment" about art, but "incarnation" would do just as well.
