Personal Journal Week 4

Botton, Ch. 6 - Painting

"... it seems logical to ask what Taylor's art might be for. To help us to notice what we have already seen... They are in a sense comparable to advertising billboards, but instead of forcing us to focus on a specific brand... they incite us to focus on the meaning of nature, the yearly cycles of growth and decay, the intricacies of the vegetal and animal realms, our lost connection with the earth and the redemptive powers of modest dappled things. We might define art as anything that pushes our thoughts in important yet neglected directions" (184).

I really loved the above paragraph. My thoughts about the reasons behind Taylor's paintings lingered throughout the chapter, so when it was finally revealed -- despite the writer urging people not to try to define the meaning behind a piece of art -- I totally got it. Trees in general symbolize so many things as well, like "the tree of life" with its roots and strong foundation that carries the smaller branches up to the sky like a great leader would do (maybe not like the world leaders we have today, but still). Or how you yourself need to have a strong foundation in order to grow as a person. I know the poet Robert Frost used trees as symbols in so many of his poems as well.

Interestingly, one sentence that struck me in the beginning of the chapter was when it was mentioned that Taylor had noticed the tree shortly after his girlfriend's death. A lot of what was written about honoring the tree after that seemed to, in actuality, be a way of honoring her spirit. But I think that's just my own interpretation because nothing else was mentioned about that throughout.

I also loved the language. Even though I sometimes find this type of writing a little too drawn out, pretentious and pompous, I didn't mind it this time. I think it's because art and artists deserve to be spoken about in this way, and it fits in with the type of artist Taylor is. He devotes so much time into exploring aspects of one single object to create something to inspire others with messages and reminders about the importance of life, and receive little to no money for it. Also, the writer is British so the pretentiousness is easily forgiven.

"Psychical Distance as a Factor in Art and as an Aesthetic Principle" By Edward Bullough

Okay, I took away a lot from this reading even though I had to reread a lot of the paragraphs to at all comprehend the meaning of them. In order to make sense of it here, I need to refer to quotes that particularly stood out to me.

The first thing that I thought was interesting was the sentence quoted below:

"Temporal distance, remoteness from us in point of time, though often a cause of misconceptions, has been declared to be a factor of considerable weight in our appreciation."

I interpreted it as the more the spectator uses Distance, the more he internalizes and relates to the work of the artist as long as he can avoid over or under distancing, as well as taking what he thinks is the artist's intentions/thoughts and making them his own.


The following paragraph was the first part of the reading that made me "get it," and I'll describe why below it.

"As a rule, experiences constantly turn the same side towards us, namely, that which has the strongest practical force of appeal. We are not ordinarily aware of those aspects of things which do not touch us immediately and practically, nor are we generally conscious of impressions apart from our own self which is impressed. The sudden view of things from their reverse, unusually unnoticed, side, comes upon us as a revelation, and such revelations are precisely those of Art."

The reason I was so taken by this was because Bullough is speaking of our internal biases and personal perspectives that are so hard to shift or affect, but explains that with Distance, this is possible through written or visual art. He argues that; "the sudden view of things from their reverse... comes upon us as a revelation..," and that sentence in itself made me understand how art can be appreciated in a more intricate way if one knows how to analyze it from the artist's point of view - if that's even possible, something he also talks about in the essay, suggesting it might be with the right Distance.

Speaking of objectivity and subjectivity, the following quote reinforced my own belief that most things are subjective since we're all experiencing our own realities fueled by our own beliefs, cultures, interests etc.

"The success and intensity of its appeal would seem, therefore, to stand in direct proportion to the completeness with which it corresponds with our intellectual and emotional peculiarities and the idiosyncracies of our experience"

He's basically saying, according to my own interpretation, that a piece of art is only as "good" or "bad" as the spectator believes it to be based on his own inner world. In the end of the essay, it even points out that "Many an artist has seen his work condemned, and himself ostracized for the sake of so-called 'immoralities' which to him were bona fide aesthetic objects." These judgments come directly from peoples religious, cultural and environmental beliefs, and he continues to say that "his power of distancing, nay, the necessity of distancing feelings, sensations, situations which for the average person are too intimately bound up with his concrete existence to be regarded in that light, have often quite unjustly earned for him accusations of cynicism, sensualism, morbidness or frivolity."

When Bullough makes the example of a man who's suspicious of his wife being unfaithful, watching Othello, the loss of Distance may be created because of the spectator's ability to relate in a way that, for example, a single woman couldn't. She, in turn, is able to keep the Distance, and reasonably so, keep the objectivity of the play. It reads: "The reversal of perspective is the consequence of the loss of Distance."

I guess what I ultimately got out of this essay is that one must be willing to lose and gain Distance to a piece of art but not stay fixed in one world or the other in order to appreciate it the most.