Push and Pull
In short, there appears to be something paradoxical about the horror genre. It obviously attracts consumers; but it seems to do so by means of the expressly repulsive. Furthermore, the horror genre gives every evidence of being pleasurable to its audience, but it does so by means of trafficking in the very sorts of things that cause disquiet, distress, and displeasure. So different ways of clarifying the question ‘Why horror?’ are to ask: ‘Why are horror audiences attracted by what, typically (in everyday life), should (and would) repel them?,’ or ‘How can horror audiences find pleasure in what by nature is distressful and unpleasant?’
– Noël Carroll, “Why Horror?” in Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley, eds., Arguing About Art, 1995
Urban Contemporary
In 1939, Heitor Villa-Lobos composed a piano piece by superimposing the New York skyline on a piece of graph paper.
Five years later he used a similar method to compose his sixth symphony, finding a melodic line in the mountain peaks of his native Brazil.
Who’s Who?
Picasso said of his portrait of Gertrude Stein, “Everybody thinks that the portrait is not like her, but never mind, in the end she will look like the portrait.”
An old epigram runs: “It sounds like paradox — and yet ’tis true, You’re like your picture, though it’s not like you.”
Thin Thinking
Some of the figures (particularly the holy ones) in El Greco paintings seem unnaturally tall and thin. An ophthalmologist surmised that the painter had a defect of vision that caused him to see people this way.
The zoologist Sir Peter Medawar pointed out that we can reject this conjecture on purely logical grounds. What was his insight?
Shadow Governments
In 1907 an anonymous turner produced a vase that threw a shadow of Queen Victoria.
Seventy years later, for the Silver Jubilee in 1977, a vase was produced that evoked the profiles of both Prince Philip and Elizabeth II.
Is this a tradition? It might lead us to see too much.
First Impressions
In 1842, a Mrs. Simon was traveling by train through the English countryside when a torrential downpour began. The kind-looking elderly gentleman sitting opposite her suddenly arose, opened the window, put his head out, and kept it out for nearly nine minutes. Finally he withdrew it, dripping with water, closed the window, and sat with his eyes closed for a quarter of an hour.
Unable to suppress her curiosity, the young lady arose, opened the window, and put her own head out.
At the next year’s Academy, as she was viewing Rain, Steam, and Speed, someone behind her said, “Just like Turner, ain’t it. Whoever saw such a ridiculous conglomeration?”
She said quietly, “I did.”
Essential Characters
Three years after personifying the four seasons, Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593) did the same for the four elements.
“There is no unemployed force in Nature,” wrote Emerson. “All decomposition is recomposition.”
Landscape or Portrait?
An engraving by Johann Martin Will, 1780.
Andrew Wyeth said, “I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn’t show.”
The Emperor’s New Pose
In 1924, irritated with the undiscerning faddishness of modern art criticism, Los Angeles novelist Paul Jordan Smith “made up my mind that critics would praise anything unintelligible.”
So he assembled some old paint, a worn brush, and a defective canvas and “in a few minutes splashed out the crude outlines of an asymmetrical savage holding up what was intended to be a star fish, but turned out a banana.” Then he slicked back his hair, styled himself Pavel Jerdanowitch, and submitted Exaltation to a New York artist group, claiming a new school called Disumbrationism.
The critics loved it. “Jerdanowitch” showed the painting at the Waldorf Astoria gallery, and over the next two years he turned out increasingly outlandish paintings, which were written up in Paris art journals and exhibited in Chicago and Buffalo.
He finally confessed the hoax to the Los Angeles Times in 1927. Ironically, “Many of the critics in America contended that since I was already a writer and knew something about organization, I had artistic ability, but was either too ignorant or too stubborn to see it and acknowledge it.” Can an artist found a school against his will?
Misc
- 2737 = (2 × 7)3 – 7
- Move the C in CABARET and you get A BAR, ETC.
- Van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime.
- “He who hesitates is last.” — Mae West
- If a man is convinced he has hypochondria, is he a hypochondriac?
(Thanks, Ben.)
