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TheAleph

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Everything posted by TheAleph

  1. Great responses everyone. I'm glad to see at least a bit of interest. If you find me encouraging certain ideas, know that I am only playing the devil's advocate, as it were. I knew that the majority of responses would come from common minded individuals, so forgive me if I throw some different ideas in there for the sake of argument.
  2. I tend to agree with you for the most part, you make some good points. But does art necessarily depend on the re-creation of living form? If so, which is more desirable? Realists that create true to life images, flaws included, or Idealists that create that which may never exist in reality, improving upon it, as it were? Your ideas on abstraction and subsidized art recalled to me two other possible cases for this topic. I'll post them later after I write them down. Thanks for replying.
  3. In college I took a course called "The Aesthetics of Art". It was a discussion class and everyone came into it with unique perspectives on what exactly art is. Whether they were the strict classicists, dismissing anything that did not necessarily require classical training to create, or the flimsy types that thought "everything and anything could be art as long as it is beautiful". At the end of the course everyone left with a more centrist agenda. I know I began to appreciate things I had at one time dismissed as craft or decoration instead of art. I'm interested in what your limits of art are, forget any hierarchy of man's design and create your own. For instance, say, my taste for Miming over that of Caricature Portraits. I will list a few interesting cases and you all respond accordingly. Is it art? Why? Case One: In 1964, the Parisian performance artist Ben Vautier sat down in the middle of a street in Nice with a placard on his lap. The placard read, "Regardez moi cela suffit je suis art." ["Look at me. That's all it takes; I'm art."] He then had himself photographed in this position. Was he right? Is this self proclamation enough to constitute art? Or is it the result of some mis-guided narcissism? Is he critiquing the method that popularly accepted art is produced? Case Two: In Liverpool, England, late in 1983, a wine merchant named Maureen Gledhill bought an abstract painting from Ernest Cleverley, a sculptor who also runs a pet shop. When Ms. Gledhill walked into the shop, the sculptor had been discussing the picture with Brian Burgess, an artist, and she believed it was one of Burgess' works. She paid $105 for the painting, thinking it a bargain, and displayed it prominently in her home. But it turned out that the painting was the work of a duck named Pablo, who had escaped from his cage while Cleverley, the sculptor, was doing some painting, and had got his feet in the paint. "The duck," said Cleverley, "is a natural." Should Gledhill have been disappointed to find out this was the work of a frantic duck, without intent of cause or pattern? Does art necessarily require a human element at all? Would you have kept the painting, or asked for your money back? Case Three: Okay, here's a hypothetical one. Suppose a well-known artist happens to be vacationing in the small community where you are curator of the local museum. One day you see him walking along the beach, and you tell him that your museum - although it is almost without funds to purchase new works - would be greatly honored to be given a work by him. The artist pauses, smiles in an indecipherable way, and bends over to pick up a piece of driftwood that is lying on the beach. "Here," he says with a glint in his eye, "take this. Call it Driftwood." As curator, do you exhibit the driftwood or not? [Your gallery would be greatly enhanced by acquiring a genuine work by this famous artist.] --- If this topic sparks any interest, perhaps I will post more cases later. For now, tell me what you think.
  4. Thank you all for the warm welcome. Haha, nor is it something I'd ever hope to achieve. But if you found my post too modest I can most certainly elaborate on all of my sparkling qualities.
  5. Santa Sabina, it's a Medievalist!! Glad to have another art historian on the forum. Let's chat AHI sometime!

  6. Hello. Let me first thank you for taking the time to read this. I understand that none of you have any obligations to entertain me. I have recently joined the OO.net community and have thoroughly enjoyed reading the different ideas/posts thus far. You can most certainly look forward to some of my own input in the near future. Those who know me have deemed me a recluse, an anti-social, an egotist and a general hater of mankind. I respectfully disagree, not in the accusations themselves, but in what those accusations imply. I am 23, male, and a recent graduate from a University in Florida, US. There I double majored in the academic study of Art History and Religious Studies, with a minor in English. I was a celebrated scholar and have been published in both academic and creative writing journals. My focus was Medieval and Romanesque Art/Architecture, but I dabbled in the Northern Renaissance as well. I am an athiest (although I was raised Catholic), but became one of the top Biblical scholars of my university, and was even mentored by one of the few people in the country that can read both ancient hebrew and greek. I have since finished my studies but hope to continue them again in graduate school. My handle is from a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, and I have come to adopt a similar search for it's existence in my own adventures. I first came to know Objectivism (like many of you, assumingly) through the literature and philosophy of Ayn Rand. My introduction to the philosophy came from The Fountainhead, a book I found while browsing my roommates bookshelf after exhausting my own collection. Her bookmark was early into the story, and I assumed that she had given up on the somewhat intimidating prose of the novel. Reading that book was a very unique experience for me. I had studied different philosophies throughout my explorations in academia, and found them interesting, or moving, or existential, or rational. But none of them were my own. Reading The Fountainhead was like learning more about myself the more I read. All the thoughts, opinions, ideas and actions I had endured throughout my life seemed to be collected, organized and given a narrative. I have since finished reading Atlas Shrugged, The Romantic Manifesto, and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. I am not exactly sure of what I hope to gain from this community, I suppose it is human nature to migrate towards a group of common minded individuals. But even that seems counterintuitive. Best. tl;dr: Hello.
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