Your Thoughts On Art

[Belacqua]

The success of an artwork should be judged in accordance with the artist's intentions.  

Well, maybe. That's a never-ending argument. In general, I suspect it's best to take what's there. The intentions may or may not help us in understanding the thing, but the thing is what it is. 

And an artist may lie about his intentions, or maybe he didn't record them, or maybe he succeeded at something wonderful which he didn't intend at all. 

But that doesn't mean we have to support those intentions.  

This is what's odd to me. It's not like we're going to be influencing Cézanne at this point. He's dead. Does our approval or disapproval have some sway on other painters around the world? 

Often people seem to think that they are protecting the world from terrible religion by posting on sites like this one, and that seems misguided to me. The influence we have here is about as near zero as we can get. And this goes even more for artists at work in their studios. If I sit here and stew about long-dead painters, am I going to improve something? 

In fact, this is a major problem in the art world. The artist may intend anything at all he wants, or I suspect rationalize his intentions after the fact by the results of his efforts. When an artist can sign a urinal and call it art, and some people actually believe him, there is a problem. I am no longer that someone.

It may be that in a capitalist world in which efficiency and science are the standards, art is an oasis of irrationality. I see no reason why an artist's intentions should meet anyone else's approval. Especially mine or yours, given that we are powerless to help or hurt their progress. As you noted earlier, there is a lot of bad art, but to say therefore that we should take a stand as if it's determining foreign policy is strange to me.

The urinal was a bit of Gallic wit that people took way too far. Like Magritte's non-pipe, it's a joke that the insiders enjoyed, and then got blown way out of proportion by shallow-thinking students. I put Duchamp in my list of very smart people who accidentally did harm to the world -- it's not his fault that art students and curators took it all too far. The problem is using these things as mascots or turning points, instead of looking more widely at the whole scene. 

But the main thing that puzzles me is why we should worry about it, as if we have some control over things. 

There is also a serious issue concerning what you're calling "realism." We have to be careful with that. It might imply that there is a real way that the real world looks, and an artist can be nearer or farther away from that. But I don't think it's that simple. Surely after Kant we acknowledge that awareness of perception is interpretation. And one of the things about painting (and other representative arts) is that it shows us differences in how people perceive. 

Currently we live in a mechanical age, and we have been trained to think that photographs see "realistically." But they don't; they see mechanically. A camera has one eye and its glimpse is limited to a fraction of a second. A human has two eyes, moves around, and perceives in time. To eliminate those fundamental things and call it "real" seems odd to me. 

When you're rolling around with your lover you don't perceive her still, posed, two-dimensional, and reduced in size. You see lots of different angles within a few seconds, and your mind automatically edits things so that her elbow appears less dominant in your vision than the more interesting bits. So in fact a Picasso may be more "realistic" in this way than a photo. A Picasso is humanly seen, not mechanically seen. It's about the same as the difference between a phenomenological description of the world and a scientific one. 

And Cézanne's figures can be seen the same way. You want him to perceive differently, in a way that is more traditionally portrait-like. But that would rule out this different thing which he has offered us, which I think has an equal or greater value. Greater, perhaps, because it shows these people in a way not seen by traditionalists, in a monumental or sculptural way. The light is certainly depicted in a believable and beautiful way. The form is simplified to something like Cycladic or Romanesque sculpture -- also beautiful in their non-portrait manners. 

I don't know, maybe Mrs. Cézanne had her photo taken or had a less original portrait painter do her picture so she could give it to the grandkids. Her husband was doing something different. And I still don't see why we should pass moral judgment on that.