<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Double your pleasure, double your fun
Review: I purchased this book at the end of an exhausting morning fighting crowds at the Vermeer show at the Met in New York City. How lucky for me. John Armstrong delivers on what he promises: a personal philosophy of art, not a dissertation on why a certain painting is deemed as quote-masterpiece-unquote. The author's point is the more you put into art, the more you get out of it. He then breezily discusses the many ways to extract the most pleasure from a particular artwork. Art is about pleasure - the pleasure of beauty, of learning, of insight or of truth (even if the truth isn't pretty). This author shows you how to increase your pleasure. Simple. Nothing more or less. The read is quick and very accessible, contrary to most of today's art writing/reporting which is gobbledygook. If you enjoy art or philosophy then BUY THIS BOOK.
Rating:
Summary: Double your pleasure, double your fun
Review: I purchased this book at the end of an exhausting morning fighting crowds at the Vermeer show at the Met in New York City. How lucky for me. John Armstrong delivers on what he promises: a personal philosophy of art, not a dissertation on why a certain painting is deemed as quote-masterpiece-unquote. The author's point is the more you put into art, the more you get out of it. He then breezily discusses the many ways to extract the most pleasure from a particular artwork. Art is about pleasure - the pleasure of beauty, of learning, of insight or of truth (even if the truth isn't pretty). This author shows you how to increase your pleasure. Simple. Nothing more or less. The read is quick and very accessible, contrary to most of today's art writing/reporting which is gobbledygook. If you enjoy art or philosophy then BUY THIS BOOK.
Rating:
Summary: A refreshing and intellectually stimulating piece of work
Review: John Armstrong's book is a wittily written essay about our personal enjoyment of the arts, in particular of paintings and architecture. Being generally easy to read, the book not only makes you laugh occasionally, but sometimes requires an all-round humanistic art education to grasp the points ("contextual knowledge" of the world of painting and literature). The book is a small piece of esthetical art in itself, pursuing to extend the philosophy of our unconscious mind to appreciate beautiful art. Armstrong's book carefully analyses what exactly makes art enjoyable and after you have read the book you will find that your personal enjoyment of art has been enhanced. All in all, a refreshing and intellectually stimulating piece of work. The book enables all those readers who are busily pursuing a hectic lifestyle to take a step back and start thinking about what rearly makes life enjoyable.
Rating:
Summary: A refreshing and intellectually stimulating piece of work
Review: John Armstrong's book is a wittily written essay about our personal enjoyment of the arts, in particular of paintings and architecture. Being generally easy to read, the book not only makes you laugh occasionally, but sometimes requires an all-round humanistic art education to grasp the points ("contextual knowledge" of the world of painting and literature). The book is a small piece of esthetical art in itself, pursuing to extend the philosophy of our unconscious mind to appreciate beautiful art. Armstrong's book carefully analyses what exactly makes art enjoyable and after you have read the book you will find that your personal enjoyment of art has been enhanced. All in all, a refreshing and intellectually stimulating piece of work. The book enables all those readers who are busily pursuing a hectic lifestyle to take a step back and start thinking about what rearly makes life enjoyable.
Rating: 
Summary: interesting but don't push the ideas too far
Review: The general task of this book [is] to elaborate the style of attention which works of art solicit. The cultivation of such a style is of importance because it is in the quality of our engagement that the human worth of art is apparent--art matters in virtue of the kind of experience it invites the spectator into. There is no access to art except in private--in looking, thinking, feeling as we stand before an individual work. Cultivation requires that we draw upon our own resources of sensitivity, reverie and contemplation, our capacity to invest our ideals and interests in the process of looking. Without these we can only know about art as detached observers who look on without being able to participate (like seeing people share a joke others don't quite catch). -John Armstrong, Move Closer John Armstrong, director of the Aesthetic Programme of the School for Advanced Study at the University of London, is concerned here with "our private, individual response to particular works of art." He delineates the various techniques that we use when we approach art and how we use them to appreciate what we are seeing. The book is short, eminently readable and contains sumptuous illustrations which he uses to good effect in making his points. But the points he's making all deal, as his subtitle suggests, with internal reactions and personal likes and dislikes. This is fine up to a point, but there does come a point where this kind of intensely individualistic approach really abandons the idea of art and particularly of great art. Obviously there are personal reasons why one individual likes Rembrandt best and another likes Michelangelo. Framed in this context, such preferences are not all that significant--who is to say ultimately which is the better artist ? Does the attempt to differentiate even make a whole lot of sense? But carried to it's logical extreme, and it breaks down long before the extreme, the idea that there is much significance to each individual's unique interaction with artwork undermines the concept of art itself. Given the 5 billion people on the planet, it is entirely possible that there's at least one person who will like just about anything that someone puts down on paper. The salient question is : does the fact that someone reacts favorably to it make it art? I would argue that it does not. Armstrong uses the metaphor in the quote above of "seeing people share a joke others don't quite catch." But an emphasis on individual reaction eventually leads to just such a situation, one where we are all incapable of detachment and only react to those jokes (or paintings) which appeal uniquely to us. Then art ceases to be capable of communicating ideas; it is reduced instead to appealing to viewers' emotions. At another point armstrong compares the affection that we develop for certain works of art to the way we develop love for another person, but someone loved Hitler and someone loved Ted Bundy. What do those emotions have to do with the absolute value of the objects of the affection? Great art, those works which we generally recognize as canonical, should not merely be attractive to a few, but accessible to and appreciated by the multitudes. Art should be universal, not individual, and should prompt a general reaction in most of us, not in an elite or in a handful of folks. There are two excellent books by Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word (1975) & From Bauhaus to Our House (1981)(Tom Wolfe 1931-) (Grade: A+), and one by Jamie James, The Music of the Spheres : Music, Science, and the Natural Order of the Universe (1995)(Jamie James), which together explain how art, which was once held to objective standards of beauty, became so subjective over the past century or two. Mr. Armstrong's book is an entertaining and instructive guide to some of the ways that we process what we see when we look at art and how certain works come to be our particular favorites, but for a compelling vision of how art should be judged in general and of the shortcomings of the modern individualistic approach to art, try Wolfe and James. GRADE : C
Rating:
Summary: interesting but don't push the ideas too far
Review: The general task of this book [is] to elaborate the style of attention which works of art solicit. The cultivation of such a style is of importance because it is in the quality of our engagement that the human worth of art is apparent--art matters in virtue of the kind of experience it invites the spectator into. There is no access to art except in private--in looking, thinking, feeling as we stand before an individual work. Cultivation requires that we draw upon our own resources of sensitivity, reverie and contemplation, our capacity to invest our ideals and interests in the process of looking. Without these we can only know about art as detached observers who look on without being able to participate (like seeing people share a joke others don't quite catch). -John Armstrong, Move Closer John Armstrong, director of the Aesthetic Programme of the School for Advanced Study at the University of London, is concerned here with "our private, individual response to particular works of art." He delineates the various techniques that we use when we approach art and how we use them to appreciate what we are seeing. The book is short, eminently readable and contains sumptuous illustrations which he uses to good effect in making his points. But the points he's making all deal, as his subtitle suggests, with internal reactions and personal likes and dislikes. This is fine up to a point, but there does come a point where this kind of intensely individualistic approach really abandons the idea of art and particularly of great art. Obviously there are personal reasons why one individual likes Rembrandt best and another likes Michelangelo. Framed in this context, such preferences are not all that significant--who is to say ultimately which is the better artist ? Does the attempt to differentiate even make a whole lot of sense? But carried to it's logical extreme, and it breaks down long before the extreme, the idea that there is much significance to each individual's unique interaction with artwork undermines the concept of art itself. Given the 5 billion people on the planet, it is entirely possible that there's at least one person who will like just about anything that someone puts down on paper. The salient question is : does the fact that someone reacts favorably to it make it art? I would argue that it does not. Armstrong uses the metaphor in the quote above of "seeing people share a joke others don't quite catch." But an emphasis on individual reaction eventually leads to just such a situation, one where we are all incapable of detachment and only react to those jokes (or paintings) which appeal uniquely to us. Then art ceases to be capable of communicating ideas; it is reduced instead to appealing to viewers' emotions. At another point armstrong compares the affection that we develop for certain works of art to the way we develop love for another person, but someone loved Hitler and someone loved Ted Bundy. What do those emotions have to do with the absolute value of the objects of the affection? Great art, those works which we generally recognize as canonical, should not merely be attractive to a few, but accessible to and appreciated by the multitudes. Art should be universal, not individual, and should prompt a general reaction in most of us, not in an elite or in a handful of folks. There are two excellent books by Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word (1975) & From Bauhaus to Our House (1981)(Tom Wolfe 1931-) (Grade: A+), and one by Jamie James, The Music of the Spheres : Music, Science, and the Natural Order of the Universe (1995)(Jamie James), which together explain how art, which was once held to objective standards of beauty, became so subjective over the past century or two. Mr. Armstrong's book is an entertaining and instructive guide to some of the ways that we process what we see when we look at art and how certain works come to be our particular favorites, but for a compelling vision of how art should be judged in general and of the shortcomings of the modern individualistic approach to art, try Wolfe and James. GRADE : C
<< 1 >>
| 
