The observation by Hegal that is the title of the blog is all too often true, unfortunately. While no single person will ever do more than catch a glimpse of the creation, I can say that I appreciate the complexity and interconnectedness of things now more than I ever did as a youth. This provisional understanding of the interconnectedness of things is why I crusade about fundamental principles in Art. We create the Art we do because we believe the nature of things is one way or another. A very wise professor (Professor Frank Teti at the Naval Postgraduate School) once told me that all questions boil down to one: Is there a God? Although I thought this simplistic at first, as I continue to track down the threads of artistic thought, I have come to realize the wisdom of his observation.
Our culture’s silent hand guides us in certain attitudes about art. As an American I was given a general if unspoken antipathy towards intellectuals, Art and the like; we are a nation of builders, a nation of workers. As Leo Steinberg noted in his essay, “Other Criteria” (found in a book of the same name):
Americans have always felt suspicious and uneasy about art…. To Americans, the word “art” is the guilty root from which derive “artful,” “arty,” and “artificial….” American art since World War II is unthinkable without this liberating impulse towards something other than art. [Abstract Expressionism] appealed once again to the American disdain for art conceived as something too carefully plotted, to cosmetic, too French.
I am hardly French, but despite my cultural biases, I have learned that Art is not an industrial object despite the fact that I create it with machines. This blog wrestles with the idea of Art and its purposes regularly; I do not expect to reach conclusions; I only hope for progress as I enter the dusk of my life, and in that I am quintessentially American.
No. 29: “The owl of Minerva only spreads her wings only at dusk.”
The observation by Hegal that is the title of the blog is all too often true, unfortunately. While no single person will ever do more than catch a glimpse of the creation, I can say that I appreciate the complexity and interconnectedness of things now more than I ever did as a youth. This provisional understanding of the interconnectedness of things is why I crusade about fundamental principles in Art. We create the Art we do because we believe the nature of things is one way or another. A very wise professor (Professor Frank Teti at the Naval Postgraduate School) once told me that all questions boil down to one: Is there a God? Although I thought this simplistic at first, as I continue to track down the threads of artistic thought, I have come to realize the wisdom of his observation.
Our culture’s silent hand guides us in certain attitudes about art. As an American I was given a general if unspoken antipathy towards intellectuals, Art and the like; we are a nation of builders, a nation of workers. As Leo Steinberg noted in his essay, “Other Criteria” (found in a book of the same name):
Americans have always felt suspicious and uneasy about art…. To Americans, the word “art” is the guilty root from which derive “artful,” “arty,” and “artificial….” American art since World War II is unthinkable without this liberating impulse towards something other than art. [Abstract Expressionism] appealed once again to the American disdain for art conceived as something too carefully plotted, to cosmetic, too French.
I am hardly French, but despite my cultural biases, I have learned that Art is not an industrial object despite the fact that I create it with machines. This blog wrestles with the idea of Art and its purposes regularly; I do not expect to reach conclusions; I only hope for progress as I enter the dusk of my life, and in that I am quintessentially American.