Art Blog - Art In History

Back in my days as a student of Architecture, I read with interest the writings of Charles Jencks on Le Corbusier, one of the giants of the modern movement in the 20th century. In advocating for the greatness of Le Corbusier, Jencks did someting much more ambitious: he propounded a theory of value to be applied to all art, based on multiple levels of meaning. All works of art, he says, fall somewhere on a spectrum from "Univalence" (single-leveled) to "multivalence" (multileveled), and truly great works are always multivalent. He compares in detail Le Corbusier's apartment block in Marseilles, the "Unite d'Habitation", with a contemporary church design (of which I could find no image) in the form of a cross of thorns… Continue reading… 2 comments

I was a young man - a young artist - when Marshall McLuhan came out with his seminal statement: "The medium is the message". The idea had tremendous power, since it seemed to sum up a century of change in attitudes toward the art object (visual, auditory, written) and its purpose. The work of art was its own reason for being; it did not have to serve any outside purpose. For me this is not only an exciting idea, it is a justification for what I secretly often feel is a failing of mine: my work isn't serving a higher purpose that I can define. Which means that, deep down, I don't fully accept that my work has no need to "teach" or "advocate". There is this suspiciaon that the work that deserves the most respect is the one with a higher purpose… Continue reading… 2 comments

In my last post, I promised to put out some additional posts on the major trends which led up to the phenomenon of Modern Art. One of these was a new way of looking at paintings, one which isolated the aesthetic qualities of the work and appreciated them independent of the subject matter. In 2000 I did an article called "The Aesthetic Attitude" in which I looked at this phenomenon, and I will include a big chunk of that post here: [QUOTE]One of the most fascinating of the developments that occurred during the 18th century was the recognition of an independent aesthetic attitude toward art, and indeed toward the world. Of course, this is not the first appearance of such an attitude in mankind's artistic history; far from it… Continue reading… 2 comments

The moment at the beginning of the 20th century when artists made the lead to pure non-representational art is a fascinating one. It is the culmination of a number of trends over the previous 100-200 years, each interesting in itself, and together creating a uniquely self-aware moment in art. First, I would like to register my complaint about the term "abstract", which has come to be applied indiscriminately to non-representational art. The term describes very well the process which led up to the leap, but is misleading when applied to "pure abstraction". Abstraction implies a process of generalizing and simplifying from the specific; it presumes a reality from which essentials are being drawn… Continue reading… 4 comments