I Am Not Nike / Coke / Adidas / Heineken etc.

My favourite t-shirt has printed on the chest "This space is not available for corporate advertising"

Melvyn Bragg Attacks Dawkins' View Of Faith

Did The Enlightenment Fail ?

Image via Wikipedia

Jurgen Habermas

"Enlightenment thinkers still had the extravagant expectation that the arts and sciences would promote not only the control of natural forces, but would also further understanding of the world and of the self, would promote moral progress, the justice of institutions, and even the happiness of human beings. The 20th Century has shattered this optimism...Should we try to hold on to the intentions of the Enlightenment, feeble as they may be, or should we declare the entire project of modernity as a lost cause ?" - Jurgen Habermas, "Modernity versus Postmodernity" in New Left Critique, 22 (Winter 1981)

Image via Wikipedia"But equality is always the same. Liberty and fraternity are words while equality is a fact. Equality should be the great human formula—social equality, for while individuals have varying values, each must have an equal share in the social life; and that is only just, because the life of one human being is equal to the life of another. That formula is of prodigious importance. The principle of the equal rights of every living being and the sacred will of the majority is infallible and must be invincible; all progress will be brought about by it, all, with a force truly divine. It will bring first the smooth bed-rock of all progress—the settling of quarrels by that justice which is exactly the same thing as the general advantage." - The 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade.

Pic - a line engraving of the Marquid de Sade in prison.

A Man Amongst Men

Image via Wikipedia
“In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man amongst men” - Charles Baudelaire.

Speaking A Thing Makes It Real

“ ‘Expressing’ emotions is certainly not the same thing as arousing them. There is emotion before we express it. But as we express it, we confer upon it a different kind of emotional colouring; in one way, therefore, expression creates what it expresses, for exactly this emotion, colouring and all, only exists so far as it is expressed.”  - R G Collingwood, The Principles Of Art, 1938

The Fluxus Manifesto by George Maciunas

Lose Yourself In The Art

Image by kamikazecactus via Flickr

 “I paint very large pictures. I realise that historically the function of painting large pictures is something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them however – I think it applies to other painters I know – is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However, you paint the larger picture you are in it. It isn’t something you command.” – Mark Rothko, Tate Gallery catalogue, 1987.

Werner Hertzog on Watching Films

Talking about 3D on R3 Arts Show 28/03/11 “It takes away the possibility of the viewer forming their own parallel story.” 

“A film forms and shapes itself inside the collective spirit of its specific audience” – Hertzog says that his films are differently received and perceived depending on who is watching them.

Boccioni's Technical Manifesto

Image via Wikipedia“The gesture which we would reproduce on canvas shall no longer be a fixed moment in universal dynamism. It shall simply be the dynamic sensation itself (made eternal).

Indeed, all things move, all things run, all things are rapidly changing.

A profile is never motionless before our eyes, but it constantly appears and disappears. On account of the persistency of an image upon the retina, moving objects constantly multiply themselves; their form changes like rapid vibrations in their mad career. Thus a running horse has not four legs, but twenty, and thei movements are triangular.” – Umberto Boccioni, in Chipp (Ed), Theories of Modern Art.

The painting is Boccioni's Dynamism of a Soccer Player.

Cubism - Seeing The Whole Picture

Image via Wikipedia“I felt dissatisfied with traditional perspective. Merely a mechanical  process, the perspective never conveys things in full. It starts from one viewpoint and never gets away from it. But the viewpoint is quite unimportant. It is as though someone were to draw profiles all his life, leading people to think a man only had one eye.” – Georges Braque, in Friedenthal, Letters Of Great Artists

The painting is Braque’s Violin And Candlestick.

Postmodern Architecture

Image via Wikipedia[Postmodern characteristics] “elements that are hybrid rather than ‘pure’, compromising rather than ‘clear’, distorted rather than ‘straightforward’, ambiguous rather than ‘articulated’, perverse as well as ‘impersonal’, conventional rather than ‘designed’, accommodating rather than ‘excluding’, redundant rather than simple, vestigial as well as innovating, inconsistent and equivocal rather than direct and clear” – Robert Venturi.


Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.


The photograph shows "The "Art Ladder", the main staircase of the original Robert Venturi portion of the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington. The visible statues are Chinese funerary statues: two rams and a civilian guardian" - from Wikipedia.

Post-Modernism

Image by Fran Simó via Flickr“The ideas behind post-modernism are probably most clearly expressed through architectural theory” – Mary Acton

The photo shows a view of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao designed by the architect Frank Gehry.

Modernism

“Realistic, illusionist art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art. Modernism used art to call attention to art. The limitations that constitute the medium of the painting – the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of pigment – were treated by the Old Masters as negative factors that could be acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly. Modernist painting has come to regard these same limitations as positive factors that are to be acknowledged openly.” – Clement Greenberg.

Clement Greenberg, in Harrison and Wood, (eds), Art in Theory, 1960-1990, 755-6.

What a fabulous quote, it gets right to the heart of what Modernist art and painting is and explains it simply by comparing it with the art that has gone before.

The Nature of Modernist Poetry

Image via Wikipedia

“To me the whole of the ancient world, the whole of classical, biblical and mythology means very little, and I think that using them today not only fills poems full of dead spots but dodges the writers duty to be original” – Philip Larkin, ‘Four Conversations’, The London Magazine.

Thought and Sound in Language

Image via Wikipedia

“Thought is one side of the sheet (of paper) and sound the reverse side. Just as it is impossible to take a pair of scissors and cut one side of the paper without at the same time cutting the other, so it is impossible in a language to isolate thought from sound or sound from thought” - Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics.

Killing Us Softly 3 - Jean Kilbourne

Jean Kilbourne presents the third part of her ongoing lecture series 'Killing Us Softly' about the portrayal of women in advertising and its wider effects on society.

Art Objects Transmit Meaning

Some features of a civilization no longer exist. Ancient civilizations exist today in the art and architecture that they left behind, people and their learning died but the objects they crafted remained. These items transmit meaning to the next generations.

Dewey said that social customs and objects were “saturated with story” and that they “transmitted meaning.”

Pic - Decoration on Greek pottery showing long distance runners.

Art Makes Civilization

Image via Wikipedia

“Esthetic experience is a manifestation, a record and celebration of the life of a civilization, a means of promoting its development, and is also the ultimate judgement upon the quality of a civilization.” - John Dewey

The Philosopher’s Handbook, Ed. Stanley Rosen, Random House Reference, 1^st Ed, 2003, ISBN 0-375-72011-1

Bronze sculpture, thought to be either Poseidon or Zeus, National Archaeological Museum of Athens

Gardner's Multiple Intelligences

1 Linguistic – such as reading, writing, talking, listening or poetry.

2 Logical, mathematical – such as ability with numbers, or legal or scientific thinking.

3 Spatial – such as navigating a boat or a plane, driving, or architecture

4 Musical – such as singing, composing, playing an instrument, or appreciating music

5 Bodily-kinaesthetic – such as sports, drama, dance, or making things

6 Interpersonal – such as counselling and teaching skills, or understanding others

7 Intrapersonal – such as self-understanding, self-management, or reflection.

The list is quotes from; Cottrel, Stella. (1999) The Study Skills Handbook, 3rd edn. Palgrave Macmillan

Which in turn is taken from; Gardner, Howard. (1993) Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, 2nd edn. London: Fonatana.