Painting, sculpting, disappearing?

[Belacqua]

What I like about the visual arts are the aspects that resist narative...i.e. what cannot be coveyed by words.

I also want to be wary of a kind of stripping-away which happened in the post-War arts, particularly in New York but of course elsewhere, too. 

There was a movement, with Hoffmann, and Greenberg, and Rosenberg, and Rothko, and other influential thinkers in the visual arts. And Philip Glass and John Cage and others in music. The idea was that pure painting -- real painting -- is only about the paint. Everybody was supposed to recognize that a painting is just colored stuff on a flat thing, and acknowledge that and not dishonestly pretend it is something else, like a person's face or a view through a window. Purity and honesty demanded minimalism. 

I'm not criticizing any of these individuals. A lot of what they did was wonderful. But I think they indirectly had an unfortunate influence, and there are a lot of people making paintings now who are making use of only a tiny fraction of what art can do, and traditionally has done. 

Of course a painting can be viscerally, unmediatedly beautiful. But it can operate on many other levels as well, and these may enrich and support one another. If you think about one of those fantastic Titian paintings, like the Ariadne in London, we gain more (and lose nothing) by learning, little by little, what the characters are doing, and what stories and traditions they refer to, and how Titian is responding to other artists, and the full spectrum of what that painting is and refers to. It is worthwhile to look at even if we know none of that, but nothing is lost by knowing more. And I think that a painting which reveals more of itself over many viewings is something to respect and treasure.

[Angrboda]

I think in some sense that's short-selling literature. Literary analysis deals primarily with structure rather than execution. There is a reason why reading remains a popular medium for artististic expression in that aspects of narratives can have edifying and beautiful qualities all in themselves. I think of writers like Faulkner and Stephen R. Donaldson (Chronicles of Thomas Covenant), whose literary style in lesser hands would simply be numbing to read. Their sentences are long and complicated, and reading them is more of an effort than the simpler prose of a Steinbeck or Clifford Simak but the effort is rewarded by the immediacy, intimacy, and beauty of the evoked images and ideas. Yes, they also had great stories to tell and were excellent in their construction of plot and so forth, but there is a beauty in reading the written word used well which also is immediate and not mediated by the intellect. It's just not something tangible you can point at as the cause of said experiential aspect like a painting or sculpture because the effect is created by the activity of the mind and is by its nature temporally limited, whereas a painting or sculpture is not.

[Belacqua]

[...]

Literary analysis deals primarily with structure rather than execution.

[...]

Not quite sure what you mean here. When I think of literary analysis, I think of someone identifying and pointing out what's going on in the text -- beyond just restating the plot. As I understand it, this can address both structure and execution (if I understand what you mean by those things).

For example, as you read Nabokov it's useful to understand how he often foreshadows elements of the plot with puns and allusions. This is something that isn't immediately obvious, and it's a pleasure when we realize what he's up to. I guess this falls under the category of structural analysis.

You could also analyze his prose by noticing and pointing out the witty, absolutely non-cliched ways in which he says things. To me, this is about execution. 

I would say that enjoyment and awareness of the beauty of the work is increased through this kind of analysis. It allows us to notice qualities which aren't obvious to more casual reading. It's true that this happens over time, and has this in common with music. 

In a different way, I think this sort of unfolding over time happens with good painting, as well. Coming back to the same work over time will allow us to discover things we didn't see before. Partly the change is in the viewer, of course. We are more aware and open to things at different parts of our lives. Partly the unfolding happens because of the picture, which may have more going on in it than is apparent at first glance. (And we might use this as a way to think about quality, as well. I think there are popular pictures in which the whole thing is revealed in a glance, and that there will be no increase in enjoyment by living with them. The opposite in fact -- they get boring.)

[Angrboda]

[...]

Literary analysis deals primarily with structure rather than execution.

[...]

Not quite sure what you mean here. When I think of literary analysis, I think of someone identifying and pointing out what's going on in the text -- beyond just restating the plot. As I understand it, this can address both structure and execution (if I understand what you mean by those things).

For example, as you read Nabokov it's useful to understand how he often foreshadows elements of the plot with puns and allusions. This is something that isn't immediately obvious, and it's a pleasure when we realize what he's up to. I guess this falls under the category of structural analysis.

You could also analyze his prose by noticing and pointing out the witty, absolutely non-cliched ways in which he says things. To me, this is about execution. 

I would say that enjoyment and awareness of the beauty of the work is increased through this kind of analysis. It allows us to notice qualities which aren't obvious to more casual reading. It's true that this happens over time, and has this in common with music. 

In a different way, I think this sort of unfolding over time happens with good painting, as well. Coming back to the same work over time will allow us to discover things we didn't see before. Partly the change is in the viewer, of course. We are more aware and open to things at different parts of our lives. Partly the unfolding happens because of the picture, which may have more going on in it than is apparent at first glance. (And we might use this as a way to think about quality, as well. I think there are popular pictures in which the whole thing is revealed in a glance, and that there will be no increase in enjoyment by living with them. The opposite in fact -- they get boring.)

Perhaps it was a poor way of describing the distinction that I was making. Literary analysis is about the text in terms of how it creates the experience of the reader. This is distinct from the experience of reading itself. In a poem, no matter how you analyze the execution, you will never arrive at the perceptual experience of actually reading the poem. I forget who it was, but this aspect of poetry has been referred to as, "milk tongue and goose foot," as there are attendant aural and rhythmic effects which are created in the person reading the poem. Additionally, there is the dimensions of a poem which are revealed from listening to it spoken by someone else as opposed to hearing it in one's own, internal voice. And different speakers can reveal different dimensions to the same poem. It was a response to Neo's claim that literature does not evoke a direct encounter with beauty the way a physical work of art does. And my counter is that narrowing the potential encounter to that delivered by analysis was shortselling the beauty to be found in literature. An analogy to music is probably clearer. Yes, musical theory can enhance one's appreciation of a musical work, but it alone does not replace the experience of actually listening to a piece, without which, what one learns through a focus on theory is missing the actual aesthetic experience.