so I was going to put some time aside and do some proper blogging, like about a popular subject, or about style, or something that I saw in the news and wanted to comment on, something that people know about that they would like to search and read about, but instead I think I want to talk about a few lines of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. he writes:
When we speak of beauty in the second sense of the term our judgment is influenced in the first place by the art itself and by the form of the art.
and it got me thinking about my idea of beauty in art. immediately I think of Michelangelo's contrapposto David, or Egon Shiele, or to go as far as Kazimir Malevich's Supremus No. 58, and I think of them as beautiful, but even the last one does not challenge my sense of beauty. if I think of a grand sculpture, or an excellent painting, or a precise exercise in colour, then I think of a beauty that I have already in my head. this does not weigh down on the beauty the art has, but it makes it familiar.
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for an overused example, Damien Hirst's tiger shark is a piece of art that challenged my perception of art. if I thought in my head of a shark suspended in a tank, I would not have thought it was beautiful, but in reality it was, so my perception of beauty was changed by a piece of art, and that is a rare and important thing. xx
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for an overused example, Damien Hirst's tiger shark is a piece of art that challenged my perception of art. if I thought in my head of a shark suspended in a tank, I would not have thought it was beautiful, but in reality it was, so my perception of beauty was changed by a piece of art, and that is a rare and important thing. xx
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P.S. just so there's no confusion, I think that Michelangelo's David is by a v. v. long stretch the better piece of art of the two. xx
