General Critics & Theorists Flashcards
AO1 & AO2 (18 cards)
‘great power of the sublime’
18th century ciritc Edmund Burke
‘Biophilia’
- The word “biophilia” was coined twice independently by German psychologist Erich Fromm and American biologist E.O. Wilson.
“I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.”
Marcel Duchamp
“beauty is in the eye of the beholder”
1878, Margaret Wolff
book/cite: Molly Bawn
Beauty as “Subjective”
- capturing the deeply nuanced thought: the idea that beauty is subjective and open to multiple meanings and a variety of interpretations.
Betty Friedan on the Feminie Mystique
“The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own. There is no other way.” “Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women’s denigration of themselves.
George Santayana
Was a Spanish/American philospher who viewed art as fundamentally rooted in aesthetic pleasure and beauty, not primarily as a tool for social commentary or emotional connection
Q: ‘the landscape without figures would have seemed meaningless’
‘landscape appeals to us, as music does to those who have no sense for musical form’
George Santayana
20th Century British Art Historian, Hugh Honor, on Caspar David Friedrich
‘although most of his paintings were inventions… all are entirely credible’
Sergei Bongart types of artists…
“There are two kinds of artists, the emotional painter and academician. The academician can paint into old age sitting on his stool licking his canvas until 98 years of age. The emotional artist burns himself up; he does not live long.
‘Study nature. Exaggerate light; overstate - the less inhibited you are, the better’
Sergei Bongart
‘Nature suggests the mood, the painter interprets and records it’
Don Grieger
‘Art is the way to get to the very centre of truth’
Anselm keifer
Allen Carlson thesis is
“that only
natural sciences, and not art, teach us to appreciate natural beauty.”
Carlson argues that…
“Land-
scape painting distorts the true character of natural environments”
“because it frames and flattens environments into scenery.”
- claims that aesthetic appreciation of nature is not a matter of looking at views from a distance, as we contemplate pictures in a gallery, but
it is being involved in the environment, moving through it, and not only looking, but hearing, touching, smelling.
Marta Tafalla on land art and philosophical aesthetics…
Land art was born at the same time as philosophical aesthetics of nature was renewed by Ronald Hepburn after a long time of oblivion,
Jeremy Gorovoy (friend & assistant) on Louise Bourgeois…
“She thought, for example, that the surrealists made women the object of their work, whereas she was trying to make women the subject,”
Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) was a German zoologist, embryologist who believed in..
theory of ‘monism’; which denies the existence of duality/distinction in a particular sphere
his work was anatomical, biological and as a purpose of accuracy, record and tribute to the technical beauty of nature and biological macro and micro forms.
convergent creativity or parallel invention theory implies that…
independent innovation, usually isolated, is driven by circumstantial similarity
