Saturday, December 30, 2023
MATTERS OF ORNAMENT - OR FURNISHING APARTMENTS - A THOUGHT
"The value and rank of every art is in proportion to the mental labour employed in it, or the mental pleasure produced by it. As this principle is observed or neglected, our profession becomes either a liberal art or a mechanical trade. In the hands of one man it makes the highest pretensions, as it is addressed to the noblest faculties, In those of another it is reduced to a mere matter of ornament, and the painter has but the humble province of furnishing our apartments with elegance."
- Sir Joshua Reynolds, "Seven Discourses on Art" (1771)
Perhaps that's one way of looking at it, Sir Joshua, but, I like to think that even in matters of ornament, or the "humble province of furnishing our apartments with elegance", the craftsman, the mechanical tradesman (or woman), introduces us to, reminds us of, what may be an opening to those things "addressed to the noblest faculties".
Labels: art, discussion, donovan baldwin, Sir Joshua Reynolds
Wednesday, December 29, 2021
ESSAY: ART HUMANIZES THE MIND... PERHAPS
Thinking Out Loud... Revisited (From Dec 29, 2018)
In "Seven Discourses On Art" (1769), Sir Joshua Reynolds uses the phrase, "...art worthy of his notice that tends to soften and humanise the mind."
This has long been what I have understood about "art", ever since the genteel nuns of my youth tried so hard to beat the concept into my rather unmalleable brain.
I guess that's the point, at least mine.
The goal of "education" was to learn to earn. You were supposed to become someone who could contribute realistically to the common good, and make a living doing it. You also learned how everybody else thought and followed in their footsteps.
Rather a harsh reality to my mind.
Yet, concurrently, it was somehow assumed that there would be, should be, a strange group of admirable, if weird, individuals who would stray from this straight and narrow path, and produce... "art".
It was further assumed that art WOULD "soften and humanize" us humans.
Yet again, over the decades, I have come to notice that sometimes, it seemed to me, we artistes (so to speak), see and comment on the real, the painful, the difficult to deal with and/or understand.
I think maybe, in that way, we contribute to the "humanizing" of the human hordes.
Softening?
Toughening?
Perhaps both... concurrently.
Introduction of the concept of intentional malleability, at least.
Open our mind to the "other"... another way of thinking or viewing reality. Just thinking out loud... as often happens.
Come to think of it, isn't "art" sort of just "thinking out loud"?
Labels: art, article, donovan baldwin, essay, humanize, Seven Discourses on Art, Sir Joshua Reynolds
