“…. Taste is the enemy of creativeness.” ?

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Phylo. I'm with you. I doubt it, too.</p>

<p>I actually do not assume that my dreams are events that have taken place. I "know" I'm awake. And I "have" dreams. There's a difference.</p>

<p>"The recall of the dream is not any different I think than the recalling of an event or remembering the things you did and the people you talked to yesterday, or the week before. "</p>

<p>I don't agree. You can't verify the content of a dream in the same way you can verify the event that took place yesterday. Your memory of yesterday can be tested. Not your memory of your dream.</p>

<p>I think "knowledge" is a key here and I figure knowledge is a point of relevance regarding creativity as well, perhaps more likely a point of departure. I wonder about the veracity of looking for knowledge of unbound creativity, just as I wonder about the veracity of looking for knowledge of dreams.</p>

[jtk]

<p>http://www.scribd.com/doc/7124613/volume3-part2 : see especially 13.7.3 - 13.8.<br>

Re Neanderthal (eg Lascaux) ... evidence re language, pro and con.</p>

<p>And this, suggesting loss of language:</p>

<p>"A brain in a vat wouldn't have the concept of ' a brain in a vat ' or the ' richness in signs ' to think about itself as possibly being fooled in not being a brain in a vat while at the same time being it, a brain in a vat that is."</p>

<p>How about humming a few bars?</p>

<p> "Given that we can be fairly certain in knowing that when we are awake we are not actually dreaming..."<br>

All the most popular fantasies are "given" and "certain."</p>

<p>"It is in dreams, where we are not bound by this physical world, that this new understanding can become fruitfull, ' unbound creativity ' even way beyond our dreams."<br>

That's pretty much what Carlos Castaneda said. Peyote? :-)</p>

<p> </p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>"peyote"</p>

<p>Mind alteration is relevant.</p>

[saskphotog]

<p>According to some, it is entirely possible to learn to dream with the same amount of lucidity and "control" over the dream content and "plot" as we have in what we call our waking state.</p>

<p>At that point, of course, whether you are awake or dreaming becomes irrelevant.</p>

[fate_faith_change_chains]

<p><a href="http://faculty.uca.edu/rnovy/Putnam--Brains%20in%20a%20vat.htm">Brains In a Vat</a> ( like Descartes dream ), and how this ' thought-experiment ', and arguments against or for it, brings up philosophical questions / answers about the mind <> world relationship, with language being stuck in there somewhere in the middle.</p>

[jtk]

<p>This exchange has drifted back to 1968, Mexico, peyote, Carlos Castaneda etc.<br>

http://books.google.com/books?id=mQdBescQULoC&dq=Carlos+Castaneda&printsec=frontcover&source=an&hl=en&ei=kVSfSZxggoSwA6DAgMcJ&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=6&ct=result#PPP1,M1<br>

There was evidently greater lucidity and respect for language back then :-)</p>

<p> </p>

[phyllis_ollari]

<p>I personally think what Picasso was saying with that quote is more about breaking new ground, going beyond the usual and mundane. If he was anchored by the good taste of his day there wouldn't have been cubism. Duchamp was the same way. Following good taste leads to a lack of vision. Lack of vision is the enemy of creativity.</p>

[don_e]

<p>Phyllis states the ideology of the unique creative individual and its nemesis "good taste" and is accurate to the meaning and intention of the quotation attributed to Picasso. I don't think it existed prior to the 19th century. Although individual artists must have felt that way, it was not a social phenomenon until the 19th. I use the exhibit of Manet's Olympia as a marker for it. Personally, I find the ideology juvenile.</p>

<p>The quest for creativeness outside the bounds of one's social matrix can take many forms, and I think we see several here including special dreaming facility, injesting hallucinogens, and sitting at the feet of magicians and gurus -- things whose major value to the individual is to mark them as special, certainly not "mundane", and probably as "creative"...and likely a nostalgia for past times, a special past time in a special place.</p>

<p> </p>

[jtk]

<p>Manet's Olympia is, more than anything else, a superbly rendered erotic painting... paint! ... sex!...It's a "marker" only to a brain that's been defensively reduced to handy-dandy analytic tool status.</p>

<p>Eros and outright sexuality has always occupied, even driven many or most artists (nor just the "artistes"): Such an artist depicted hunters with erections, whether or not that artist had a "language."</p>

<p>Many or most artists have enjoyed, or even relied upon, psychotropic substances...such as tobacco, coffee, alcohol, absinthe, the drugs of the sixties...or they've been priapic (eg Picasso, Lascaux, unknown Anazasi)...</p>

<p>The Popes and painters of the great cathedrals were evidently far from celibate, keeping boys if not wives and mistresses...and they all imbibed.</p>

<p>Even Goethe dabbled in human nature: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE7DD1439F936A15755C0A967958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all</p>

<p>I think it'd be good if we could cut mankind a little slack.</p>

 

[don_e]

<p>"It's a "marker" only to a brain that's been defensively reduced to handy-dandy analytic tool status."</p>

<p>Too many adjectives. A common flaw mean people display when calculating an insult. There's just too much venom in them for words to contain and so they pile it on. But I do like "defensively reduced". It's a lot better than your usual 'fearful of anything new' tropes.</p>

<p>Keep us informed of your rhetorical adventures.</p>

<p> </p>

[phyllis_ollari]

<p>Its funny because we are talking about a time that paitings and new styles did cause riots in the street. Photography helped in making painting move as fast as it did in the early 20th centuary. The artist was more free to create and experiment. The controversial becomes mundane to future generations, but the works still maintians greatness. Think about it, Nude Desending a Staircase by Duchamp caused an uproar now its a fine example of a cubist style painting.</p>

[don_e]

<p>"Its funny because we are talking about a time that paitings and new styles did cause riots in the street."</p>

<p>And is today the perfect postcard/calendar art.</p>

<p>"The controversial becomes mundane to future generations, but the works still maintians greatness."</p>

<p>Not all, perhaps. It might be worth looking into that. What remains controversial and why, if anything.</p>

<p>"Photography helped in making painting move as fast as it did in the early 20th centuary. The artist was more free to create and experiment."</p>

<p>Perhaps, but from my perspective and needs, I would prefer they had chosen a different path. If photography (both moving and still) had not existed we would hardly have a clue, based on the painters' work, what the world looked like in those times. Confronted with new forms, textures, surfaces, lighting, the painters decided "Gone up the country, got to get away" or became cafe and studio nerds scribbling their manifestos. It wasn't until Photorealism in the postwar period that one sees our world in paintings. Photography might be blamed. Perhaps photography freed painters -- post-impressionists of all varieties -- to create and experiment. But it also doomed them to irrelevance. Or sometmes photography gets the blame. The freedom they attained was the freedom not to paint electric lighting, the forms, textures and surfaces of the industrialized world and so on. They were freed to paint what they saw in their mind's eye. And so made the postcards and drapery patterns of the future.</p>

<p> </p>

[jtk]

<p>Calling Olympia a "marker" without explaining the rationale seems just one more reduction of a superb painting to academic phenomenon. </p>

<p>Many of us know what scholars tell each other about that painting, but I don't know how that hints that Manet painted in relationship to "creativity" vs "taste." </p>

<p>Scholars rephrase rephrasings of other rephrasings of writers, some of whom actually saw the painting, who called Manet's Olympia "untasteful." Somehow I doubt they mattered to the artist.</p>

<p>Manet directly appealed to the taste of his viewers and market...how was that different from the motivations of painters in any previous period?</p>

<p>Manet painted Olympia for the same sort of market as Ingres and Matisse..for the eternal continuum of human "taste" for sensuality. </p>

[don_e]

<p>"Calling Olympia a "marker" without explaining the rationale seems just one more reduction of a superb painting to academic phenomenon."</p>

<p>Maybe, assuming I wrote that. Go on, John, quote me. Actually read what I've written before insulting me. Give it a shot.</p>

<p>We've done this dance for years now, and you always get it screwed up. You are always wrong.</p>

<p> </p>

[jtk]

<p>" It wasn't until Photorealism in the postwar period that one sees our world in paintings."</p>

<p>Manet showed many bourgeois young Parisians their world in paintings. That's precisely what upset some of the official taste-makers in 1863.... surely irrelevant to Manet's creativity, judging by his subsequent work.</p>

<p>The "worlds" of people like Manet travel across time amazingly well. Their worlds become our worlds, if we're willing to step up to the plate and participate with the artist in the image.</p>

<p>Olympia looks partially ring-lit...very trendy in 2009.</p>

<p>If we accept for a moment that we may respond to an image, rather than passively allowing it to slip in (greased by photorealism), we may even find that "exotics" like Katsushika Hokusai show us "their world" (in his case 160 years ago), making it "our world".</p>

<p> </p>

[don_e]

<p>So. Nothing to say about what you think I wrote re "marker" and what I really wrote?</p>

<p>"That's precisely what upset some of the official taste-makers in 1863"</p>

<p>1863? You're just making it up as you go along, aren't you?</p>

[jtk]

<p>Here's some typical sixth-hand art history ( "scholarship")... this is what we're supposed to believe : Parisian mobs hated Olympia in 1863... hated erotic paintings...no whores in the City of Lights (not until Henry Miller anyway). Sounds like "urban legend" to me.</p>

<p>http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hist255-s01/courtesans/Manet-olympia.htm</p>

<p>I think art history needs "stress testing."</p>

 

[don_e]

<p>"Parisian mobs hated Olympia in 1863..."</p>

<p>Your linked source is incorrect.</p>

<p>Still nothing about "marker", eh?</p>

<p> </p>

[jtk]

<p>Don, you're right ! Olympia dates from 1863... the famous mob tale is usually dated 1865 !</p>

<p>Happily the two year error was the historian's, not mine...but I do apologize for citing something with such a grossly mistaken date.</p>

<p>More to the point...did you mean those alleged events were a "marker," rather than the painting itself? I'm not sure what the difference is, given the Olympia's exposure before 1865..</p>

<p>The mob story (the 1865 story) is passed from lazy scholar to lazy scholar to fill pages. Looking beyond Cliff's Notes they'd understand Olympia as an inherent part of Manet's body of work...the whole of which does carry life in the 19th century nicely into the 21st, WWI and WWII and photography's emergence not withstanding. </p>

<p>IMO: That Manet's Olympia is alive among us in 2009 disproves this: "It wasn't until Photorealism in the postwar period that one sees our world in paintings. "</p>

<p> </p>

[don_e]

<p>I wrote: "I use the exhibit of Manet's Olympia as a marker for it.</p>

<p>Which exhibit is the marker? The one that exhibited Manet's Olympia, ie, the Paris Salon of 1865.</p>

<p>What is "it"? The sentence prior to that one.</p>

<p>" Although individual artists must have felt that way, it was not a social phenomenon until the 19th."</p>

<p>And what is the issue with the word "marker"? I'm marking or flagging or noting a point in a chronology.</p>

<p>"I'm not sure what the difference is, given the Olympia's exposure before 1865."</p>

<p>What exposure? Manet exhibited Le déjeuner sur l'herbe at the Salon of the Refused in 1863. There was a fuss. You, or your sources, are conflating two different salons and two different paintings and two different years, to first my confusion, and then annoyance.<br>

Ok. Everything is cleared up. I'm out of the thread.</p>

<p> </p>

[don_e]

<p>Not done. I see the problem (or one of them) after browsing images. The painting is usually captioned "Olympia (1863)" "1863" refers to the year it was painted, not the year it was exhibited.</p>

 

[antoniobassiphotography]

<p>Sometimes artists of his caliber, especially those that reached fame when still alive, used phrases to justify and promote their work. There are aesthetic values that have formed and consolidated over centuries and they fit the social profile of each specific society. Picasso and others were aware that doing figurative painting was tougher because of the work already done by gentlemen like Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Raffaello etc. He has early figurative work but it is not even comparable to the work of the great masters of the Renaissance. Then he became one of the founders of the Cubist movement, a new thing, a new unexplored world...</p>

[lance_lee4]

<blockquote>

<p>Early on, I taught myself a valuable lesson at art school. Pay attention when something implants a little voice in my head. At school I was directly exposed to many different styles and tastes. Many of those differences were not to my taste but they did speak to me and eventually opened doors. When I began to tune in to those whispers I found great rewards. I find I have to often set my taste aside and be less discriminating in what I allow in</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Acquired Taste - One that is unpleasant on immediate experience or is likeable only after being experienced repeatedly.<br>

after substantial exposure to something new, you may grow to like it.<br>

In other words, taste and creativity may go hand in hand.</p>