2119. peach blossoms on path to studio

February 24, 2020February 24, 2020Leave a comment

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2046. Russian river from house.

July 16, 2019July 16, 2019Leave a comment

maybe thinking about climate. look from about two feet from screen.

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Post 2026. Poetry and art.

June 12, 2019June 12, 2019Leave a comment

Some recent thoughts.

The focus on the artist and the work is unbalanced. Thee should be much more attention, especially in teaching, on the expanding experience of the viewer. The work of art is purposed as an encouragement to greater depth of experience by the viewer.

For poetry, the poem should be taught as “What do you experience while reading?” more than what do you think of the writer’s experience?” Judging the writer shifts to “how does he-she evoke a new sense or awareness for the viewer”, Not how brilliant she-he is.

For poetry this means that the writer does not primarily write as a self expression, but to provide encouragement and examples for the reader to become more expressive..

Strikingly bad poetry can be in this sense “good” in that evokes new experience for the reader.

This shift makes art and poetry much more important in society, not as consumerist but as consciousness.

I think the core feeling here is democratic – make others more capable, take the focus off of self expression by the artist. Artistic self expression i just an invitation to yoyerurism.

1963. Petra.

April 10, 2018May 7, 2018Leave a comment

https://www.bbc.com/ideas/videos/welcome-to-petra-a-little-bit-of-heaven-on-earth/p05zn715

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The blend of architecture and greening. Then we have

Writing early in the first century A.D., the Greek historian Strabo reported that while foreigners in Petra are “frequently engaged in litigation,” the locals “had never any dispute among themselves, and lived together in perfect harmony.” Dubious as that may sound, we do know that the Nabateans were unusual in the ancient world for their abhorrence of slavery, for the prominent role women played in political life and for an egalitarian approach to governing. Joukowsky suggests that the large theater in the Great Temple that she partially restored may have been used for council meetings accommodating hundreds of citizens.

Strabo, however, scorns the Nabateans as poor soldiers and as “hucksters and merchants” who are “fond of accumulating property” through the trade of gold, silver, incense, brass, iron, saffron, sculpture, paintings and purple garments. And they took their prosperity seriously: he notes that those merchants whose income dropped may have been fined by the government. All that wealth eventually caught the attention of Rome, a major consumer of incense for religious rites and spices for medicinal purposes and food preparation. Rome annexed Nabatea in A.D. 106, apparently without a fight.

1962. Picasso’s Woman throwing a stone.

April 10, 2018May 7, 2018Leave a comment

Intersting puzzle. Commentary on today’s identity politics.

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we have from Zizek’s Return To Plato As Materialist?

A Woman Throwing a Stone, a lesser known painting by Picasso from his surrealist period in the 1920s, offers itself easily to a Platonist reading: the distorted fragments of a woman on a beach throwing a stone are, of course, a grotesque misrepresentation, if measured by the standard of realist reproduction; however, in their very plastic distortion, they immediately/ intuitively render the Idea of a “woman throwing a stone,” the “inner form” of such a figure. This painting makes clear the true dimension of Plato’s philosophical revolution, so radical that it was misinterpreted by Plato himself: the assertion of the gap between the spatio-temporal order of reality in its eternal movement of generation and corruption, and the “eternal” order of Ideas.

We ned to nudge our thinking into . terrains.