By Matthew Guerrieri<\/p>\n
Here’s where he really<\/i> lost me:<\/p>\n In the restructured Earlier (p. 36), Hickey really lays down the law: As someone with an Ellsworth A big difference between My initial reaction was that this Page 71: “So we talk, because the By Matthew Guerrieri Here’s where he really lost me: In the restructured modernist dynamic, the role of the beholder is to be dominsated and awestruck by the work of art, which undergoes a sex change and is recast as a simulacrum of the male artist’s autonomous, impenetrable self.…Under these revised priorities, the validity of receding […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-163","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-bookclubii","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nmodernist dynamic, the role of the beholder is to be dominsated and
\nawestruck by the work of art, which undergoes a sex change and is
\nrecast as a simulacrum of the male artist’s autonomous, impenetrable
\nself.
…
Under these revised priorities, the validity of
\nreceding illusionistic space in painting was immediately called into
\nquestion. This imaginary space had been traditionally, and quite
\nrightly, perceived as “community property,” shared by the work, its
\ncreator, and its beholder. The new, modern priorities insisted that no
\nsuch community existed. The flat picture plane came to represent the
\nproperty line dividing the mundane world of the beholder from the
\nexalted territory of the artist’s incarnate philosophy. (pp.
\n41-42)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\n“Today we are content to slither through the flatland of Baudelairian
\nmodernity, trapped like cocker spaniels in the eternal, positive
\npresentness of a terrain so visually impoverished that we cannot even
\nlie<\/i> to any effect in its language of images–nor imagine with
\nany authority–nor even remember.”<\/p>\n
\nKelly print hanging above his piano, I can only say, this is not the
\nway I perceive beauty. I think the problem is this: Hickey is very
\nconcerned about modernism’s elimination of the illusion of three
\ndimensions in Renaissance painting. But he doesn’t seem to be
\nconsidering that the plane of a painting is a convenient fiction as
\nwell–all<\/i> paintings are three-dimensional objects, we experience
\nthem in three dimensions, because we experience the world in three
\ndimensions. And the “flat picture plane” is just as much<\/i> an
\nillusion as Renaissance perspective.<\/p>\n
\nthe two is how that illusion changes as the work is regarded from
\ndifferent angles in the real, three-dimensional world. For
\ntraditional, representative perspective, any viewing angle but
\nstraight on collapses<\/i> the illusion. But for abstracts, the
\ndifferent angles produce different images, different proportions–the
\n“flat plane” illusion not only holds, it enables<\/i>–the illusion
\nof a flat picture plane makes possible manifold relationships between
\nthe work and the viewer.<\/p>\n
\ndifference–between seeing abstraction as a boundary and seeing it as a
\nsource of possibility–might be roughly analogous to reacting to
\nanalysis of a piece of music and reacting to a live performance. But the
\nmore I re-read the book, I find it hard to see how any of its
\narguments about beauty and the relationship between art and audience
\ncan carry over into any music that doesn’t come pre-packaged with a
\nprogrammatic frame of reference. This might be because the book
\ndoesn’t ever explain what Hickey likes<\/i> about abstraction–he
\ngives Frank Stella a hard time but elsewhere gives an approving
\nshout-out to Morris Louis, which is a little cognitively dissonant to
\nme. (I’d be really interested to know what he thinks about painters
\nlike Seurat or Matisse.) But going on what’s there, beauty seems to be
\ndefined at the intersection of a work’s visual pleasure and its
\nrepresentative content–which I can see for representative, figurative
\nart, but falls apart when the content is not immediately recognizable
\nor easily agreed upon.<\/p>\n
\nexperience of American beauty is inextricable from its optimal social
\nconsequence: our membership in a happy coalition of citizens who agree
\non what is beautiful, valuable, and just.” I have real problems with
\nthat one–not because I don’t think it accurately describes a lot of
\nthe way people perceive art nowadays, but because Hickey seems to
\nthink it a good thing. Notice that this is now shifting the viewer’s
\npleasure from their viewing of the work to the crowd’s validation of
\ntheir opinion. I think this need for validation inevitably warps
\nartistic values to market values–but those market values aren’t a
\nreflection of artistic value, but of ease of marketability<\/i>. On
\nboth these counts–a privileging of representative art and a need for
\nlike-minded validation–an awful lot of the music I find beautiful–any
\nmusic, really, that doesn’t have an obvious textual or cultural
\nframe–is bound to come up short, because it a) such music tends to
\nrequire a less passive interpretive engagement on the part of the
\nlistener, which means everyone’s going to build up their own
\ndifferent, individual interpretive framework, and b) music is hard to
\ntalk about. The fact that I still experience such music as beautiful
\nisn’t diminished by the possible lack of a “happy coalition.” The
\nsecret ballot is a hallmark of democracy as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"