French Symbolist poet, essayist, and philosopher Paul Valery (1871-1945) summed up art for 20th century eyes thusly:
"Modern art tends almost exclusively to exploit sensory sensibility... it has a marvelous flair for arousing our attention, and for exploiting every means to that end - intensification, contrast, the startling, or the enigmatic. It can capture, by the subtlety of its means or the audacity of its execution, certain very valuable effects: states of extreme transience or complexity, irrational values, inarticulate sensations, resonances, correspondences, intuitions of shifting depths... "
Rightly so, a work of art that succeeds in communicating its "meaning" directly is both flawed and superficial in its certainty, hence merely a work of illustration.
No comments:
Post a Comment