• Jamal
    9.1k
    My former professor in art failed to perceive the beauty of the Mona Lisa painting when she saw it in person. She wasn't impressed.Caldwell

    Yes, there is clearly something wrong with her.Bartricks

    tpu4zm2cnijg0m4t.jpg
  • GraveItty
    311
    Yes, there is clearly something wrong with her.Bartricks

    Clearly, there is something wrong with you. When I see Mona, the only thing I want is to run away as fast as possible and release a dump. She is ugly as hell. Imagine I would find her in my bed, giving me that same grin when she makes me... Brrrrrrr!

    Beauty lies in my dog jumping out of a moonlit blanket of mist. Dew glistening thousand colored in the morning autumn sun, trying to touch it and realizing it glistens from fungi on a pile of dogshit.
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    Yes, there is clearly something wrong with her.Bartricks

    Interesting! In what sense, may I ask, is something wrong with the Mona Lisa?
  • Tom Storm
    8.3k
    Of course. I've seen some Rodins. But I am not a great enthusiast of art. I like Turner and the odd Matisse. But mostly I like Japanese, Pre-Columbian and Ancient Egyptian art and also Greek, Roman and Etruscan pottery. I like the power of these pieces but beauty has never been the quest. A given work has to give me thrill, I need to feel a sense of vitality or serenity coming from it.
  • GraveItty
    311


    I was thinking exactly the same! :lol:
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    I was thinking exactly the same!GraveItty

    Soulmate!
  • GraveItty
    311
    Is there a difference between seeing a painting in person, or from a picture book?
  • Olivier5
    6.2k
    beauty has never been the quest. A given work has to give me thrill, I need to feel a sense of vitality or serenity coming from it.Tom Storm

    And that -- I suggest -- is precisely what people call beauty.
  • Olivier5
    6.2k
    Yes there is, obviously. The canvas is in 3d most of times, and all the colors and nuances cannot be reproduced on screen or paper.
  • Tom Storm
    8.3k
    And that -- I suggest -- is precisely what people call beauty.Olivier5

    OK
  • GraveItty
    311
    Yes there is, obviously. The canvas is in 3d most of times, and all the colors and nuances cannot be reproduced on screen.
    now
    Olivier5

    I don't mean the physical difference. I know how dear Mona looks like without ever having seen the painting myself. I can't imagine bursting into tears when seeing it for real. Maybe tears of boredom, as sprang up when seeing the de nachtwacht and de staalmeesters, for example. Though some of his paintings impressed me, like the view on the Amstel. But they did so when looking in a book.
  • GraveItty
    311
    And that -- I suggest -- is precisely what people call beauty.Olivier5

    It isn't. An ugly scene can do just the same. Even more maybe.
  • Olivier5
    6.2k
    The difference it makes to your own personal aesthetic emotions depends on many many things including how receptive you are to certain styles. But in practice, a good rule of thumb is that the reproduction of a work of art will give you less than the original.
  • Olivier5
    6.2k
    An ugly scene can do just the same. Even more maybe.GraveItty

    Can you give an example?
  • GraveItty
    311
    The difference it makes to your own personal aesthetic emotions depends on many many things including how receptive you are to certain stylesOlivier5

    Sitting in a chair, beneath a soft-toned lamp, makes me appreciate van Gogh more than looking at his paintings in the museum.

    Can you give an example?Olivier5

    I get more vitality from looking at ugly scenes like some dadaists show us. Or de Koninck. These big magic blacks give me bright shining light. Serenety even. The are not beauty, in my eyes. Beauty is superfluous.
  • Bartricks
    6k
    The professor, obviously. The mona lisa is just fine
  • Olivier5
    6.2k
    Beauty is superfluous.GraveItty

    Unless you can see the beauty of ugliness. There is a passage about that in Heinlein's Stranger in Strange Land, where an alien comes to earth and tries to understand human civilisations. One of the things puzzling him is human art, and how it can depict ugly scenes. The examples are drawn from sculpture, including Rodin:

    A great artist—a master—and that is what Auguste Rodin was—can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is . . . and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be . . . and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart . . . no matter what the merciless hours have done to her.

    1*pvQ1oiKEI-SIt8sbHDdrQQ.jpeg
    (Celle qui fut) la Belle Heaumière, by Rodin.
  • Bartricks
    6k
    You're a philistine. Or you haven't actually seen it.
  • GraveItty
    311
    Beautifull sculpture. Looks like the thinker has done a bit too much thinking.

    It's a thin line between beauty and ugliness. Maybe there is not even a line at all. It's all in the eyes and ears or nose of the beholder though. You can construct abstract schemes for explaining it, like I read in a thread here about art, but this merely relocates both beauty and ugliness. Besides the formally pleasing aspects of an artwork, there are of course many other ones.
  • GraveItty
    311
    You're a philistine. Or you haven't actually seen it.Bartricks

    You mean Mona? No, I haven't actually seen her. And luckily. Spared me money for the entrance ticket.
  • Bartricks
    6k
    Ah, well there you go. I have. And there aren't words to describe it.

    Velasquez's portrait of pope innocent X is another in the same league.

    If you see them and are unmoved, then you're just dead inside.
  • GraveItty
    311
    Ah, well there you go. I have. And there aren't words to describe it.
    now
    Bartricks

    I have them. If I see the painting (be it for real or not, I'm not a fetishist) I get the feeling of giving her a wake-up slam in the face, to make her stop giving me that double smile. Leonardo must have had a hard time with that lady, self-assured serenity. So it does provoke a feeling in me.
  • Yohan
    679
    Beauty is symmetrical relationship. A harmony of complimentary opposites.

    As an aside, I think the "big picture" "truth" of life is also a harmony of opposites. I.E Yin Yang

    This may be the source of John Keats saying “Beauty is truth–truth beauty

    And R Buckminster Fuller: "When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
  • Bartricks
    6k
    Like I say, a philistine.
  • GraveItty
    311
    Beauty is symmetrical relationship. A harmony of complimentary opposites.Yohan

    How does this explain the beauty of my dog jumping up out of a dark ultramarine moonlit blanket of low mist?
  • GraveItty
    311
    And R Buckminster Fuller: "When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.Yohan

    I have exactly the opposite attitude.
  • Yohan
    679
    I have exactly the opposite attitude.GraveItty
    And I bet its a complimentary opposite, if we examined both attitudes in the proper context.
  • Yohan
    679
    How does this explain the beauty of my dog jumping up out of a dark ultramarine moonlit blanket of low mist?GraveItty
    To me you are asking "where is the symmetry". I assume you are relating the experience to something in your memory, perhaps subconscious memory, which is creating a symmetry.

    Edit: To me the imagine evokes a balance between gravitas and levity.

    Edit: However, I do agree that the perception of symmetry, or the feeling/state it evokes aesthetically as the experience of beauty in a person, is subjective. So my definition was too simplistic.
  • GraveItty
    311
    And I bet its a complimentary opposite, if we examined both attitudes in the proper context.Yohan

    It's not a complementary opposite. It's no complement at all. It's the lacking of symmetry or its complement. If we examine symmetry and it's complement in the proper context than we end up in math, which can have beauty (symmetry is fashion in physics). But the most beautiful math is in which both are not present. Now you can call this a complement again, but then you are stuck in the symmetry-asymmetry dichotomy.
  • Yohan
    679
    But the most beautiful math is in which both are not present. Now you can call this a complement again, but then you are stuck in the symmetry-asymmetry dichotomy.GraveItty
    I'm not sure what you are saying. The most beautiful math is when there is neither symmetry no asymmetry?
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