5 ms·

Mortality and the Old Masters

16 points by benbreen 7y ago

hprotagonist 7y ago
I will always take the excuse to post Auden: About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
groby_b 7y ago
This is, even for the New Yorker, quite the pretentious piece. Starting with author writing from his retreat in his "country place", over the disdain for virtual museum tours (complete with scare quotes), to the idea that somehow, this art just carries more heft. Because - ludicrous explanation abounds - somehow Goya saw more of the "scourges of war". I'd love to see the author's take on "Guernica". Or any of the large number of pieces that were shaped by the trauma of WW1 (modernism), Spanish Flu (e.g. Munch), and so on. It is the piece of somebody who loves art not for art's sake, but who loves art because knowing it confers status. And so, of course, clings to the idea that there is some kind of "best art" - and for many of those deeply conservative art observers, that's the Old Masters. Because, of course, old things are good, mastery is good, naturalistic is good (because it doesn't require engaging too deeply with the thought process) There's no better thing to describe that stuck mindset than the author's "Everything in them will be other than what we remember." No, it won't. The art will be just the same. How we engage might have changed. But the idea that we as humans change is deeply scary to the author's kind of mindset, and so he'd rather focus on the immutability of the greatness of the old masters.
- yters 7y ago
  Math has stuck around immutably since the beginning of recorded history. Maybe other areas of human endeavour, like art, has the same access to immutable realities.
  - ArnoVW 7y ago
    Sure, many concepts identified 2000 years ago still exist. Adding, subtraction, platonic shapes. But we still add stuff, and some things are even changed. We don't call odd numbers "male" anymore, and even numbers "female", like Pythagoras did. Calculus was only invented a couple of hundred years ago, and looks nothing like the creative trig proofs of the Greek. Our handling of infinity dates from the beginning of the 20th century (Cantor), as is all the meta weirdness like the completeness theory of Gödel. And that's math, a domain, the domain where knowledge acquired stays valid for all of eternity.
    - yters 7y ago
      Who is rejecting addition and subtraction?
- _bxg1 7y ago
  > In December, I spent most of two days studying “Las Meninas” during a visit to Madrid, when I believed that my end was near. I had set myself the task of ignoring all received theories about this voluminously analyzed masterpiece and, on the spot, figuring out its maddening ambiguities...Presuming to grasp the whole is like hazarding a unified theory of relativity and quantum physics. At the risk of coming off as reductionist, I've never understood how the work of a single human being can be elevated and studied on this level. One could study the masterful techniques of craftsmanship, one could study the artist as a person, one could study the cultural context surrounding the work. One could even meditate on it and create one's own experiences that go above and beyond the artist's intentions. This last, at least, could be called "boundless" in some sense. But there is not an entire universe to be discovered in a painting (or a book, or a symphony). There is no hidden truth underlying it all, just waiting to be found through analysis, whose scope escapes the bounds of the human context in which it was made. I sometimes wonder what a classical novelist would think of being told that entire academic careers have been made out of nothing but studying his or her works. I like to think most of them would be appalled that people are doing that instead of creating works of their own.

16 points by benbreen 7y ago

I will always take the excuse to post Auden: About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

groby_b 7y ago

This is, even for the New Yorker, quite the pretentious piece. Starting with author writing from his retreat in his "country place", over the disdain for virtual museum tours (complete with scare quotes), to the idea that somehow, this art just carries more heft. Because - ludicrous explanation abounds - somehow Goya saw more of the "scourges of war". I'd love to see the author's take on "Guernica". Or any of the large number of pieces that were shaped by the trauma of WW1 (modernism), Spanish Flu (e.g. Munch), and so on. It is the piece of somebody who loves art not for art's sake, but who loves art because knowing it confers status. And so, of course, clings to the idea that there is some kind of "best art" - and for many of those deeply conservative art observers, that's the Old Masters. Because, of course, old things are good, mastery is good, naturalistic is good (because it doesn't require engaging too deeply with the thought process) There's no better thing to describe that stuck mindset than the author's "Everything in them will be other than what we remember." No, it won't. The art will be just the same. How we engage might have changed. But the idea that we as humans change is deeply scary to the author's kind of mindset, and so he'd rather focus on the immutability of the greatness of the old masters.

yters 7y ago
Math has stuck around immutably since the beginning of recorded history. Maybe other areas of human endeavour, like art, has the same access to immutable realities.
- ArnoVW 7y ago
  Sure, many concepts identified 2000 years ago still exist. Adding, subtraction, platonic shapes. But we still add stuff, and some things are even changed. We don't call odd numbers "male" anymore, and even numbers "female", like Pythagoras did. Calculus was only invented a couple of hundred years ago, and looks nothing like the creative trig proofs of the Greek. Our handling of infinity dates from the beginning of the 20th century (Cantor), as is all the meta weirdness like the completeness theory of Gödel. And that's math, a domain, the domain where knowledge acquired stays valid for all of eternity.
  - yters 7y ago
    Who is rejecting addition and subtraction?
_bxg1 7y ago
> In December, I spent most of two days studying “Las Meninas” during a visit to Madrid, when I believed that my end was near. I had set myself the task of ignoring all received theories about this voluminously analyzed masterpiece and, on the spot, figuring out its maddening ambiguities...Presuming to grasp the whole is like hazarding a unified theory of relativity and quantum physics. At the risk of coming off as reductionist, I've never understood how the work of a single human being can be elevated and studied on this level. One could study the masterful techniques of craftsmanship, one could study the artist as a person, one could study the cultural context surrounding the work. One could even meditate on it and create one's own experiences that go above and beyond the artist's intentions. This last, at least, could be called "boundless" in some sense. But there is not an entire universe to be discovered in a painting (or a book, or a symphony). There is no hidden truth underlying it all, just waiting to be found through analysis, whose scope escapes the bounds of the human context in which it was made. I sometimes wonder what a classical novelist would think of being told that entire academic careers have been made out of nothing but studying his or her works. I like to think most of them would be appalled that people are doing that instead of creating works of their own.