There are many arts in the world, but the most popular are: literature, music, theater, cinema and others. Every person has his or her own favorite art.
Music has always fascinated people. It touches their hearts and makes them laugh or cry. Music can be heard everywhere. Nowadays there are a lot of musical genres: classical music, rock music, pop music, club music and others. I can listen to any genre of music. It depends on my mood. When I am sad I listen to classical music. When I am happy I like listening to energetic, fast music and hard beat. However, some people listen to one kind of music only and they listen to it no matter what mood they are in.
There are a lot of wonderful works of literature-Famous writers and poets created a large variety of poems, stories and novels that are read over the world. Russian poets and writers like Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are famous all over the world. Their works are translated into many languages.
Theater is a popular kind of arts, too. There are a lot of theaters in Russia, but most of them are located in Moscow. The Bolshoi Theater and the Maly Theater are world famous. If you like opera you should go to the Bolshoi Theatre. The tickets are rather expensive though. The Maly Theater stages dramas and plays based on classical novels.
I am a theater-goer. I prefer going to drama theatres. I do not like opera and ballet. Not long ago I saw Uncle's Dream by Dostoevsky in the Vakhtangov Theater I liked the play a lot. The decorations were rich and the famous actors played very well. There was a storm of applause after the performance.
Nowadays theaters are becoming less and less popular, and cinema has got big popularity instead. There are a lot of cinemas in Moscow: modern and old-fashioned, cheap and expensive. Modern films are full of audio and computer special effects and people go to the cinema to enjoy them. The so-called home cinemas have appeared lately. More and more people buy modern TV-sets with large flat screens and special sound equipment and watch films at home.
My favorite art is painting. I enjoy going to art galleries to look at paintings. I think that this type of art will exist forever. Artists express their feelings and emotions in their paintings. There are a lot of art galleries in Moscow, but the most famous one is me Tretyakov Gallery. It has large collections of paintings by Russian and foreign painters. My favorite painting is landscape. I think that Russian landscapists are the best in the world. I love going to this gallery when I have free time. One of my friends draws very well she is going to enter the University of Arts to become a professional artist. But I think that amateurs are the best artists.
Unfortunately I do not have any talent for this or that art. I used to sing in childhood, but then I gave it up. I think that arts are not for me.
Art is an intellectual and aesthetic form of cognition of social reality: a work of art usually always combines truth (the author's truth) and beauty. Due to the participation of the author's intellect in artistic creativity, stimulated by his intuitive sensations, art can even outstrip the development of reality.
Let's consider the main stages of people's knowledge of the essence of art.
Aristotle, outlining the contours of the theory of mimesis - imitation, identified the main feature of art - the knowledge of life in images. Theologians of the Middle Ages assessed art as a way of introducing man to the “divine” with the help of earthly forms. The aesthetic thought of the Renaissance emphasized the cognitive essence of art as a “mirror” of life (Leonardo da Vinci). Here we see the rapprochement of science and artistic creativity. Later (Diderot, 18th century) art was seen as a form of knowledge of truth in living pictures of reality. German classical philosophy sought the sources of artistic creativity in the “realm of the spirit” (Kant – “purposive activity without a goal”, Schiller – “play”, Hegel – “manifestation of the spirit”..., “direct contemplation of truth”...). The materialist Chernyshevsky understood art as a form of knowledge of life. He argued that the subject of art is “everything that is interesting for a person in life.” Marx believed that the holistic and comprehensive nature of artistic consciousness contributes to the individual’s awareness of his “tribal essence”, thereby expanding the boundaries of the direct experience of individuals, forming an integral human personality.
So, the main social function of art is the “artistic exploration of the world,” which contributes to the creation of reality “according to the laws of beauty” (for example, the emergence in the twentieth century of design that combines aesthetics and pragmatics). The social function of art is also to promote the formation and self-formation of personality “according to the laws of beauty.”
In the Middle Ages, the seven liberal arts comprised the trivium - grammar, logic and rhetoric, and the quadrivium - arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy. Painting and sculpture dominated among the Western European forms of performing arts for many centuries.
How is art classified today? Types of artistic creativity are literature, cinema, theater, dance (choreography), music, painting, sculpture, architecture. The criterion for division is the mechanism of perception: visual, visual-auditory, auditory forms and genres of art. Language is often considered as a criterion as the main means of communication (semiotics distinguishes between verbal, written, image, gesture, machine languages...).
The artistic search, due to the fact that art expresses human life, full of contradictions, is carried out in a continuum of oppositions: truth - error, beautiful - ugly, good - evil. In general, this semantic (value) universe (Scheler) is imposed by people on the objective world and represents a field of culture. The components of this field are science, morality, art. Science is focused more on the search for truth, ethics - on the good, art - on the beautiful. Of all these types of creativity, art expresses life most holistically - it shapes inner world human lifestyles that orient human behavior and activity towards achieving goals within the framework of the values and norms of culture accepted in society. Therefore, in order to understand the essence of artistic creativity, it is necessary to analyze the concepts of truth, beauty and goodness, taken together with their shadows: error, ugliness and evil.
It is known that truth is the result of an adequate reflection of reality by the cognizing subject. Adequate reflection (expression) means the creation, in our case by the artist, of a new image in the context of reality itself, i.e. in all his connections. However, such an understanding of truth is inherent primarily in the scientific community, which requires objectivity research result, i.e. its independence from consciousness. But artistic production always carries the author’s sense of life, therefore, truth in art “... is the same as... sensuality.”41 True, in this definition there is an assumption that feelings cannot be false. Some correction is needed: for example, artists recognize that any role requires sensory content with elements of awareness. The latter is necessary for the modern interpretation of the role, as indicated, for example, in Shakespeare's plays. Interpretation takes place on tracing paper modern life how it appears to the actor and director, which requires active awareness and social reality.
Due to the fact that in artistic creativity the author is, as it were, a colorful prism that refracts the contradictions of human existence in modern world, then the determination of the truth of the result of an artistic search is best done “according to Aristotle.” He argued that truth is the correspondence of thought to an object, and error is their inconsistency. There is a legend that the cubist artist Picasso, who was attacked by hooligans, at the request of the police, painted their portraits from memory. The next morning, a donkey, two zebras and a snake were identified and arrested at the zoo. It is clear that the artist expressed his ideas about the attackers and, perhaps, the drawn images corresponded to the feelings that arose, but are they true? What then is truth in art? Apparently, we must agree that truth in art comes down to the truth of the artist’s feelings. Here we enter the shaky ground of relative and therefore illusory standards of aesthetic assessments; the natural conclusion of all our reflections is that the space of truth work of art is expanding and will expand from now on incredibly - postmodernism claims that everything more people, i.e. “aesthetic prisms” is included in the processes of artistic creativity.
The next component of artistic creativity is the opposition “beautiful - ugly.” Do the beautiful and the ugly exist in reality or does it all exist only in our imaginations? Eternal question! The history of thought says the following. Plato distinguished between what is beautiful and what is beautiful, i.e. distinguished between essence and its manifestations. He saw the essence in the divine idea, on which the existence of all beautiful phenomena depends. Otherwise, “seeing the local beauty, he (man) remembers true beauty.” Aristotle refutes the “idea of beauty” by considering beauty as an objective property of reality, as a manifestation of its laws. “The most important forms of beauty are order (in space), proportionality and certainty...”42Sometimes they say that beauty is pleasure, considered as the quality of a thing. Later, beauty is explained as a sensually contemplated image of the universal realization of human freedom. It seems that Marx’s approach is very accurate: “Our needs and pleasures are generated by society; therefore, we apply a social standard to them, and do not measure them with objects that serve to satisfy them.”43 Today there are discussions about this “social standard” on the topics “what is the hero of our time?”, “how and to what extent the beautiful and the ugly are combined in him ? etc. A little about this. Ugly is by definition the opposite of beautiful. It is something ugly, base, and evokes a feeling of protest. It is clear that ideas about ugliness depend on national, historical, class and taste differences. Cicero argued that the ugly in art belongs to the sphere of the funny, for laughter is caused mainly by what designates or reveals something ugly, not ugly. In the Middle Ages, ugly was identified with evil. Later (Lessing) defended the legitimacy of the ugly in poetry as a means of arousing feelings of “funny and terrible.” It turned out that the combination of the beautiful and the ugly gives rise to the grotesque. In the history of art there was also a period of “poeticization of evil” (Baudelaire’s expression). Sometimes the ugly is seen as one of the negative aspects of the beautiful. Belinsky et al. assessed the ugly as a reflection of deformities in social life of people. Chernyshevsky revealed the connection between the sublime and the ugly, when the latter ceases to be disgusting, turning into the terrible. It seems that the twentieth century, with its two world wars, was expressed in art precisely in this vein. Today's tossing of artists in the space between the beautiful and the ugly is largely explained by the inhuman social experience of the twentieth century, when violence, terror and war began to be recognized as a natural accompaniment of the evolution of mankind. The 21st century began with the emergence of large-scale terrorism, which led to the “glorification of terrorists” in a number of works of art.
Of course, the “ugly hero” has the right to his “presentation” in modern art. But if it is not presented “ugly”, i.e. highly artistic, then it generates in a mature viewer and reader not laughter, as Cicero believed, but anxiety for the younger generations, subject to age-related imitation of the “heroes” of the media44.
Consequently, time dictates that the artist create professionally, i.e.
Not only talented, but also responsible.
Let's return to the stages of any type of (scientific, sociocultural, technical and artistic) creativity. They are arranged, according to the general statement, as follows: preparation - incubation (maturation) - insight (revelation) - completion (transition to the semiotic system as conditions for social transmission).
Let us consider this scheme sequentially in relation to artistic creativity (art). The specificity of artistic creativity is that in it the activity of the unconscious prevails over the activity of the artist’s consciousness. In the psychology of art, this statement sometimes takes on such a sharp form that the unconscious is declared to be a factor determining the entire process of formation of an artistic image; and the intervention of the artist’s consciousness in the form of an attempt to verbalize the meaning of his work leads, they say, either to its destruction by himself during the process of creation, or to recognition of it as “pseudo-artistic” after the completion of the creation. The motto of supporters of this position is “The irrational is the constant goal of art”!45 However, the development of the theory of the unconscious led to the conclusion that it is active in the genesis of a work of art and concerns primarily the artist’s decisions regarding the choice of forms of expression of the image (visual, acoustic, verbal). But this cannot be said when it comes to the functional structure of an artistic image, because the image is a generalized expression of reality. And generalization is impossible without a certain activity of consciousness. For example, an actor’s interpretation of a role is “a sensual filling of the role with elements of consciousness” (from an interview with Chulpan Khamatova). Non-symbolic vision is also characteristic of scientific discovery, i.e. there is unity and difference between truth and beauty. It is known that “Everything crazy is born in the subconscious.” I. Kant also noted that the unconscious is the midwife of thought.
The ugly can become beautiful in art, therefore, “The truth of nature cannot be and will never be the truth of art” (O. Balzac). Life, reality is included in the structure of an artistic concept or image only as one of its many components. The selection and modification of life material occurs on the basis of the artist’s previous experiences, thoughts, feelings, tastes and aspirations. Therefore, an artistic image is not so much a cast of reality, but rather “life-like”. Penetration occurs into the innermost recesses of human existence and soul, thanks to which new individualized knowledge is achieved, even deeper than what science gives us with its reliance on what is formalized. This is the power of “non-dividing” knowledge46.
So, the stage of “incubation” of an image (painting, sculpture, melody, drama, novel or sonnet) occurs mainly in the subconscious. The activity of the latter (inspiration) is realized in the form of an intuitive feeling of aesthetically justified forms, movements, colors, sounds, words...
The stage of insight (revelation) is the most mysterious phase of creativity. Here we must distinguish between inspiration caused by the activity of the unconscious and the intention to realize an intuitive feeling. This is where conditions are needed: an atmosphere of freedom of creativity; material, including everyday factors; artistic traditions; fashion and incentives that organize possible levels of social recognition (prizes, competitions, publications...). These conditions are formed outside the artist, much here depends on the capabilities and activity of the artistic community, its “union” with the state, etc. Basically, such conditions are concentrated in the infrastructure relevant type of art (literature, cinema, theater, music, sculpture and architecture, painting...)
Here we need to make some excursion into the history of Soviet art. Russia is now experiencing a period of transformation of socialist principles of life into capitalist ones. Naturally, these changes also affected the social foundations of artistic creativity. We are talking primarily about the degree of freedom of the artist. The well-known formula “Freedom is a perceived necessity” (Spinoza) is completely inapplicable to art. Such a “conciliatory” understanding of freedom, when the main way to achieve it is declared to be only the path of knowledge, is rejected by the artist, for the emancipation of his creative powers is achieved not through knowledge, but through action. At the same time, the “social chaos” that arose during the years of perestroika, and by which freedom began to be understood, led, contrary to expectations, to the opposite results. The long-awaited freedom of spiritual creativity has so far only given rise to new problems of “cohabitation of the artistic community.” The focus on the commercialization of spiritual creativity also does not give the expected results. We have to admit that over the past ten years in fine arts, cinema, music, literature, architecture and sculpture, nothing significant appeared.
Nevertheless, we must turn to the socially determined reasons for the “rebellion” of the artistic intelligentsia during the periods of “stagnation” and “perestroika”. The first state reaction of the proletarian government to the sphere of art was expressed in the order of the Council of People's Commissars “On Ancient Monuments” (04/12/1918), based on complete trust in the artists and the collective will of the audience. However, the subsequent “apparatization of art” (M. Weber) led to the centralization of the management of culture (i.e. art). Administrative functionaries appeared who did not trust either the artists or the audience. V. Mayakovsky wrote about them:
"Between the writer
and the reader
there are intermediaries,
at the intermediary
the most average"
Subsequently, this “average taste” of an art official increasingly began to reflect the authorities’ distrust of the intelligentsia. S. Eisenstein argued that “when political power dictates what I should do, I become sterile. I cannot play the role of an illustrator."47 Nationalization led to increased censorship. During the years of Stalin's personality cult, state pressure on artists reached its apogee. Of course, the method of socialist realism, dictated by the authorities, also gave rise to artistic masterpieces, however, the general atmosphere remained depressing. This was the main factor in the transformation of most of the artistic intelligentsia into “partisans of reality”, intuitively groping for paths to the future, let us note, “to a better future,” as many of them believed. The situation was further aggravated by the fact that, due to the entry of the world and the country into the phase of the information society, artistic production increasingly began to acquire the character of a digest and show, serving the demand of mass culture. This objective tendency of the decline of art in our country was deliberately used to destroy the system - the anti-socialist offensive was ideologically, politically and even artistically coordinated and synchronized. The recent increase in reassessment by a number of artists of their positions during the perestroika years is far from an accident. Today we can quite clearly say that the sincere quest of the intelligentsia in the field of literature and art was cynically used by the post-democratic wave to loot the ruins of the Union. The oligarchic layer that emerged “out of nothing” began to vigorously defend its interests, seizing first of all the press, trying to use it to acquire and political power. IN Once again The artistic intelligentsia has to, in order to ensure the material conditions of their life and creativity, bow to “sponsors”, “patrons” and other “benefactors”, who in any case pursue their own selfish interests, which do not coincide at all with the goals of artistic creativity. The humiliating historical situation is being repeated, forcing the artist to serve the “jaded heroine of the top ten thousand.” These lessons of history should not be repeated - this is evidenced by the incessant discussions about the social state of art that are currently going on among artists. Here are the topics of a number of discussions that took place during the XXI Moscow International Film Festival in 1999: “Russia after the Empire” and “National models of cinema in the context of the world film process.” The main questions were: Soviet film heritage - real money or creative capital? Free market and cinema - disaster, test or panacea?
If a new art is not understandable to everyone, this means that its means are not universal to all mankind. Art is not intended for all people in general, but only for a very small category of people who, perhaps, are not more significant than others, but are clearly not like others.
First of all, there is one thing that is useful to clarify. What do most people call aesthetic pleasure? What happens in a person’s soul when he “likes” a work of art, such as a theatrical production? The answer is beyond doubt: people like drama if it can captivate them with its depiction of human destinies. Their hearts are moved by the love, hatred, troubles and joys of the heroes: the audience participates in the events as if they were real, happening in life. And the viewer says that the play is “good” when it manages to evoke the illusion of vitality and authenticity of the imaginary characters. In the lyrics he will look for human love and sadness, with which the poet’s lines seem to breathe. In painting, viewers will be attracted only to canvases depicting men and women with whom, in a certain sense, he would be interested in living. He will find the landscape "nice" if it is attractive enough as a place to walk.
This means that for most people, aesthetic pleasure is not different in principle from those experiences that accompany their everyday life. The difference is only in minor, minor details: this aesthetic experience is perhaps less utilitarian, more intense and does not entail any burdensome consequences. But ultimately, the subject, the object towards which art is directed, and at the same time its other features, for most people are the same as in everyday existence, people and human passions. And they will call art the totality of means by which this contact of theirs is achieved with everything that is interesting in human existence. Such viewers will be able to accept pure artistic forms, unreality, and fantasy only to the extent that these forms do not violate their habitual perception of human images and destinies. As soon as these strictly aesthetic elements begin to predominate and the public does not recognize the story of Juan and Maria that is familiar to it, it is confused and no longer knows what to do next with the play, book or painting. And this is understandable: they do not know any other attitude towards objects than a practical one, that is, one that forces us to experience and actively intervene in the world of objects. A work of art that does not encourage such intervention leaves them indifferent.
This point requires complete clarity. Let us say right away that to rejoice or sympathize with human destinies, which a work of art tells us about, is something different from truly artistic pleasure. Moreover, in a work of art this preoccupation with the strictly human is fundamentally incompatible with strictly aesthetic pleasure.
This is essentially an optical problem. To see an object, we need to adapt our visual apparatus in a certain way. If the visual adjustment is inadequate for the object, we will not see it or will see it blurry. Let the reader imagine that we are currently looking into the garden through a glass window. Our eyes must adapt in such a way that the visual ray passes through the glass without lingering on it, and stops on flowers and leaves. Since our subject is a garden and the visual ray is directed towards it, we will not see the glass if we look through it. The cleaner the glass, the less noticeable it is. But with an effort, we can turn our attention away from the garden and look at the glass. The garden will disappear from view and the only thing left of it will be blurry spots of color that appear to be painted on the glass. Therefore, seeing a garden and seeing window glass are two incompatible operations: they exclude each other and require different visual accommodation.
Accordingly, anyone who in a work of art seeks to worry about the fate of Juan and Maria or Tristan and Isolde and adapts his spiritual perception precisely to this will not see the work of art as such. Tristan's grief is only Tristan's grief and, therefore, can only excite to the extent that we accept it as reality. But the whole point is that an artistic creation is such only to the extent that it is not real. Only on one condition can we enjoy Titian's portrait of Charles V on horseback: we must not look at Charles V as a real, living person - instead we must see only a portrait, an unreal image, a fiction. The person depicted in the portrait and the portrait itself are completely different things: either we are interested in one or the other. In the first case, we “live together” with Charles V; in the second we “contemplate” the work of art as such.
However, most people cannot adjust their vision so that, with a garden before their eyes, they see glass, that is, that transparency that constitutes a work of art: instead, people pass by - or through - without pausing, preferring to grasp with all passion the human reality , which trembles in the work. If they are asked to leave their prey and pay attention to the work of art itself, they will say that they see nothing there, because in fact they do not see the human material so familiar to them - after all, before them is pure artistry, pure potency.
Throughout the 19th century, artists worked too uncleanly. They minimized strictly aesthetic elements and sought to base their works almost entirely on the depiction of human existence. It should be noted here that most of the art of the last century was, one way or another, realistic. Beethoven and Wagner were realists. Chateaubriand is as much a realist as Zola. Romanticism and naturalism, if you look at them from the heights of today, are moving closer to each other, revealing common realistic roots.
Creations of this kind are only partly works of art, artistic objects. To enjoy them, it is not at all necessary to be sensitive to the non-obvious and transparent, which implies artistic sensitivity. It is enough to have ordinary human sensitivity and allow the worries and joys of your neighbor to resonate in your soul. This makes it clear why the art of the 19th century was so popular: it was served to the masses diluted in the proportion in which it no longer became art, but a part of life. Let us remember that in all times when there have been two different types of art, one for the minority, the other for the majority, the latter has always been realistic.
Let us not argue now whether pure art is possible. It is very likely not; but the train of thought which will lead us to such a denial will be very long and complex... Even if pure art is impossible, there is no doubt that a natural tendency towards its purification is possible. This trend will lead to the progressive displacement of the elements of “human, all too human” that prevailed in romantic and naturalistic artistic production. And during this process, a moment comes when the “human” content of the work will become so meager that it will become almost invisible. Then we will have before us an object that can only be perceived by those who have a special gift of artistic sensitivity. It will be art for artists, not for the masses; it will be the art of the caste, not the demos.
That is why the new art divides the public into two classes - those who understand it and those who do not understand it, that is, into artists and those who are not artists. New art is purely artistic art.
H. Ortega y Gasset. Dehumanization of art
//X. Ortega y Gasset. Aesthetics. Philosophy of culture.
ART (artistic creativity)
ART,
1) artistic creativity in general - literature, architecture, sculpture, painting, graphics, decorative applied arts, music, dance, theater, cinema and other types of human activity, combined as artistic and figurative forms of exploring the world. In the history of aesthetics, the essence of art has been interpreted as imitation (mimesis), sensual expression of the supersensible, etc.
2) In the narrow sense - fine art.
3) High degree skills and mastery in any field of activity.
encyclopedic Dictionary. 2009 .
See what “ART (artistic creativity)” is in other dictionaries:
Artistic creativity (children)- expression individual characteristics, relationships to the surrounding world and to oneself in an artistic form feasible for a child. H.t. an integral part of the system of aesthetic education and artistic education, a means of personal development.... ... Pedagogical terminological dictionary
ARTISTIC CREATIVITY of children- expression of individual characteristics, attitude to the world around him and to himself in an artistic style feasible for the child. form X t is an integral part of the aesthetic system. and artist education, a means of personal development. Manifestation of X t can be departments of work... ... Russian Pedagogical Encyclopedia
A form of creativity, a way of spiritual self-realization of a person through sensual expressive means(sound, body plasticity, drawing, words, color, light, natural material, etc.). The peculiarity of the creative process in I. is its indivisibility... Philosophical Encyclopedia
A process of activity that creates qualitatively new material and spiritual values or the result of creating an objectively new one. The main criterion that distinguishes creativity from manufacturing (production) is the uniqueness of its result. Result... ... Wikipedia
Activities that generate new values, ideas, and the person himself as a creator. In modern scientific literature devoted to this problem, there is an obvious desire to study specific types of T. (in science, technology, art), its... ... Philosophical Encyclopedia
Among the words that, in their morphological appearance, in their semantic structure, and even in their immediate impression of decay, resemble Church Slavonicisms, there are many Russian literary new formations of the 18th and 19th centuries. This is the word creativity,... ... History of words
creation- CREATIVITY is a category of philosophy, psychology and culture, expressing the most important meaning of human activity, which consists in increasing the diversity of the human world in the process of cultural migration. Term and concept. T.… … Encyclopedia of Epistemology and Philosophy of Science
Modern encyclopedia
1) artistic creativity in general - literature, architecture, sculpture, painting, graphics, decorative and applied arts, music, dance, theater, cinema and other types of human activity, combined as artistic... ... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary
Art- ART, 1) artistic creativity in general - literature, architecture, sculpture, painting, graphics, decorative arts, music, dance, theater, cinema, etc. In the history of aesthetics, the essence of art was interpreted as imitation (mimesis), ... ... Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary
Books
- Category: Cultural studies. Art history Publisher: Progress-Tradition,
- Amateur artistic creativity in Russia of the twentieth century. Dictionary, The Dictionary is a scientific publication in which the phenomenon of amateur creativity is examined from various angles: artistic, historical and cultural, social, political,… Category: Art history Publisher:
"About photography"
Susan Sontag
Ethics and aesthetics in one bottle.
“The limitations of photographic knowledge of the world are such that it may stir the conscience, but in the end it will never be ethical or political knowledge. Knowledge gleaned from still photographs will always be a kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanistic. It will be knowledge at reduced prices - a semblance of knowledge, a semblance of wisdom, just as the act of photography is a semblance of appropriation, a semblance of rape. The very muteness of what is hypothetically understood from photographs is what makes them attractive and seductive. The ubiquity of photographs has an unpredictable effect on our aesthetic sense. By duplicating our already cluttered world with its images, photography allows us to believe that the world is more accessible than it actually is.”
"Utz" and other stories from the world of art"
Bruce Chatwin
About porcelain cups and those who devote their lives to them.
“Utz spent hours in the Dresden museums, looking at commedia dell'arte figures from the royal collections. Locked in glass sarcophagi, they seemed to be calling him to their secret Lilliputian world and begging for release. His second article was entitled "Private Collector":
“An object displayed in a museum window,” he wrote, “should feel like an animal in a zoo. Having become a museum exhibit, the thing dies - from suffocation and the impossibility of privacy. Meanwhile, the owner of a home collection can, or rather, cannot help but touch it. Just as a child touches an object to give it a name, a passionate collector, whose eye and hand are always in harmony, again and again gives an object the life-giving touch of its creator. The collector's main enemy is the museum curator. Ideally, all museums should be emptied at least once every fifty years so that their collections again end up in private hands...” “How can you explain,” Utz’s mother once asked the family doctor, “Caspar’s manic passion for porcelain?” Perversion,” he replied, “is the same as all the others.”
"Bento Notebook"
John Berger
Philosophy of art from the first person.
“The bodies of dancers devoted to their art are characterized by dualism. And this is noticeable in everything they do. They are governed by a kind of uncertainty principle; only instead of moving from the particle state to the wave state, their body alternates between being a giver and a gift.
They have comprehended their body so deeply that they can be inside it, or in front and behind it - alternately, switching every few seconds, then every few minutes.
The dualism inherent in each body is what allows them to merge together during performances. They lean against each other, lift, carry, roll, separate, join, support each other, and at the same time two or three bodies form a single shelter, similar to either a living cell - a shelter of molecules and information carriers, or a forest where animals live "
"Movie"
Gilles Deleuze
Classification of images and signs of cinema.
“Cinema does not converge with other forms of art, the purpose of which is rather to see the unreal in the world, but creates the unreal or a narrative from the world: with the invention of cinema, it is no longer the image that becomes the world, but the world - its own image. It can be noted that phenomenology is in some respects stuck at the pre-cinematographic stage, which explains its awkward position: phenomenology puts natural perception in a privileged position, which is why movement is also correlated with poses (no longer essential, but simply existential). Consequently, the cinematic movement is immediately exposed as not being faithful to the conditions of perception and, moreover, is exalted as a new type of narrative, capable of “bringing together” the perceived and the perceiver, the world and perception. At least that's the impression it gave us complex theory in the phenomenological spirit of Albert Laffe."
"Tintin and the Mystery of Literature"
Tom McCarthy
Discussions about literary fiction that are very easy to read.
“Open the first old novel you come across: the narrative itself is preceded by an extremely unreliable statement “explaining” how the author knew about the events you are about to read about. Founders modern novel worked in the 17th century, when science began to demand that only proven facts be presented, and theology still insisted that lying was a sin. Under these conditions, prose writers resorted to all sorts of tricks so that their “figments of the imagination” and “romantic fantasies” did not contradict the immutable principles of honesty and factual accuracy. Thus, Daniel Defoe assured that it is better to express the truth, “instilling it gradually, under the guise of some Symbol or Allegory”; John Bunyan claimed to be reporting information “from persons of whose involvement in these events I have every confidence,” and Aphra Behn impudently exclaimed in one of her fantastic “true stories”: “I do not intend to entertain you with fiction or any a tale concocted from Romantic Coincidence of Circumstances; all Circumstances, with Precision to the Iota, are pure Truth. I myself was an Eyewitness to almost all the major Events; and what I did not see was confirmed to me by the Heroes of this Intriguing Story, clergy from the Order of St. Francis.”
Tintin's camera, Aphra Behn's monks - all these are literary devices designed to create a veneer of authenticity around fiction. Aphra Behn, like Tintin, even becomes a character and finds herself at the center of the events that she is going to tell the world about. This unity in two persons splits reality into different levels.”
"Architecture as Re-Creation"
Sam Jacob
How urban space reflects and creates history.
“In its free, unfettered rewriting of the past, architecture uses history as a springboard into the future. She endlessly recreates herself, consciously laying her own past into her own future, re-inscribing her inherent myth into the fabric of the future. At the same time, architecture legitimizes its own new proposals by introducing them within the same boundaries as existing languages, materials and typologies. The repetition of what already exists, which accompanies re-creation, helps to soften the shock of newness, while it itself declares itself to be the inevitable product of historical circumstances. Thus, architecture mythologizes its own creation, providing itself with historical arguments and offering a world of the future, all within the confines of its essence.
Architecture's predilection for self-reproduction is more than a joke understood only by the initiated. Unlike, for example, participants in historical reconstructions, she never packs up her things and goes home, because she herself is a house (or another space where we could be). The architectural recreations are completely serious and absolutely real.”
"Action is form"
Keller Easterling
How Gutenberg became a key figure in architecture.
“To understand the meaning of the statement “architecture is information,” that is, to make water tangible, a work of thought is required, similar to the study of the principles of work, but implying overcoming the associations associated with the word “information.” Information, especially in digital culture, is text or code - something that appears on a screen and is recognized using one of many languages. The more widespread such devices become, the more difficult it is to find spatial technologies or networks that are independent of the digital world. The world is becoming an "Internet of Things" where smart buildings, smart machines interact with countless mobile phones and digital devices. Almost every branch of knowledge in the 20th century turned out to be subordinate to computer science, since it sought to rely on management information systems that made it possible, based on calculations and measurements, to give more or less reliable forecasts.
Architecture was also one of these industries, as can be seen in the works of Cedric Price and Christopher Alexander. Late 20th century gurus like Kevin Kelly, in the wake of the economic successes of the digital industry, asked us to imagine cars as “chips with wheels,” airplanes as “flying chips with wings,” buildings as chips for housing, and large chips for keeping sheep. and cows. Naturally, they will all be material, but every gram of their material essence will be simply stuffed with knowledge and information.”
“Mushrooms, mutants and others: architecture of the Luzhkov era”
Dasha Paramonova
About how the era is reflected in architecture.
“A separate and, perhaps, the most radical direction of transformation of the industrial approach in post-Soviet Russia is the use of this practical method in the construction of religious buildings. To serve the spiritual life of its citizens, Moscow must be covered with a uniform network of churches. According to calculations, it is necessary to build at least 200 new churches, but the overall shortage of religious buildings is estimated by representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church at 600 objects. Projects developed by Mosproekt-2 and Mosproekt-3 can be erected in a period of 1 to 6 months. Two types of temple are offered - one-domed and five-domed, as well as various variations of chapels and decoration. “Therefore, by changing domes, endings and color schemes, it may appear a large number of options,” says Alexander Kuzmin. This utilitarian approach to construction indicates that religion in the life of a Russian is as natural a thing as a garage or a dacha, and a church in the area is as necessary as a heating station or a children's playground. Cooperation between the state and the church began in the late 1980s with the recognition of the right to freedom of conscience, and in 2012 this union initiated a scandalous court case against artistic activists chanting “Virgin Mary, drive Putin away.” Religion and power are now not just allies, but partners. According to representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church, the construction of standard churches should not only restore historical justice, but also make society more homogeneous, convey the image of a proper citizen who needs walking distance to an Orthodox church.”
"A work of art in the era of its technical reproducibility"
Walter Benjamin
Art with and without aura.
“The uniqueness of a work of art is identical to its embeddedness in the continuity of tradition. At the same time, this tradition itself is a very living and extremely mobile phenomenon. For example, the ancient statue of Venus existed for the Greeks, for whom it was an object of worship, in a different traditional context than for the medieval clerics, who saw it as a terrible idol. What was equally significant for both was her uniqueness, in other words: her aura. The original way of placing a work of art in a traditional context found expression in cult; The most ancient works of art arose, as we know, to serve a ritual, first magical, and then religious. Of decisive importance is the fact that this aura-evoking image of the existence of a work of art is never completely freed from the ritual function of the work. In other words: the unique value of an “authentic” work of art is based on the ritual in which it found its original and first use. This basis can be mediated many times, however, even in the most profane forms of serving beauty, it is visible as a secularized ritual. The profane cult of serving the beautiful, which arose in the Renaissance and lasted for three centuries, clearly revealed, after experiencing the first serious shocks, its ritual foundations. Namely, when, with the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, photography (simultaneously with the emergence of socialism), art begins to feel the approach of a crisis, which a century later becomes completely obvious, it, as a response, puts forward the doctrine of l“art pour l”art, which is theology of art."
"Imprinted Time"
Andrei Tarkovsky
A poetic essay about time, music and art in general.
“Time is the condition for the existence of our “I”. Our nourishing atmosphere, which is destroyed as unnecessary as a result of the severance of the individual’s ties with the conditions of his existence. When death comes. And the death of individual time too - as a result of which the life of a human being becomes inaccessible to the feelings of those who remain alive. Dead to others.
Time is necessary for a person so that, having incarnated, he can be realized as a person. But I don’t mean linear time, which means the opportunity to have time to do something, to perform some action. An action is a result, and I am now talking about the reason that impregnates a person in a moral sense.
History is not Time yet. And evolution too. These are sequences. Time is a state. The flame in which the salamander of the human soul lives.”
“Notes on the margins of “The Name of the Rose””
Umberto Eco
Fascinating behind-the-scenes insight into postmodern games.
“Postmodernism is a response to modernism: since the past cannot be destroyed, because its destruction leads to muteness, it needs to be rethought, ironically, without naivety. The postmodern position reminds me of the position of a man in love with a very educated woman. He understands that he cannot say “I love you madly” to her, because he understands that she understands (and she understands that he understands) that such phrases are Lial’s prerogative. However, there is a way out. He should say: “In Lial’s words, I love you madly.” At the same time, he avoids feigned simplicity and directly shows her that he is not able to speak in a simple way; and yet he brings to her attention what he intended to bring to her attention - that is, that he loves her, but that his love lives in an era of lost simplicity. If a woman is ready to play the same game, she will understand that a declaration of love remains a declaration of love. Neither of the interlocutors is given simplicity, both withstand the onslaught of the past, the onslaught of everything that was said before them, from which there is no escape, both consciously and willingly enter into the game of irony... And yet they managed to talk about love once again.”
"Cinema between Hell and Heaven"
Alexander Mitta
A tutorial for dummies on how to make a brilliant film.
“Suspense is something like an examination that the constructive elements of the structure pass before the audience. If the dramatic situation is good, it creates suspense. If the dramatic twist is developed correctly, you will get everything you wanted, plus suspense in the development. If the event correctly reveals the conflict, suspense will grow along with the threat to the hero and unexpected turns of action.
The director who coined the term "suspense" was Alfred Hitchcock. He called suspense "the most intense representation of a dramatic situation that is possible." Hitchcock said that when he started making films as an unknown director, he thought: “How can I get all the stars to want to be in my films? We need to seduce them with a story that has something mysterious and disturbing, we need to awaken their feelings.” This is what brings the story to suspense.
Hitchcock once told French director Truffaut:
When I write stories, what worries me most is not the characters, but the stairs that creak.
What it is? - asked Truffaut.
Stairs that creak and can collapse under the hero. I call it "suspense".
"Sade, Fourier, Loyola"
Roland Barthes
Literary glass bead game.
“In the transition from Sade to Fourier, sadism falls out; in the transition from Loyola to Sade, communication with God disappears. Otherwise, the same letter: the same classificatory voluptuousness, the same uncontrollable desire to dissect (the body of Christ, the body of a victim, the human soul), the same obsession with numbers (to count sins, tortures, passions and even mistakes in account), the same practice of the image (the practice of imitation, painting, session), the same outlines of the system - social, erotic, fantasy. None of these three authors allows the reader to breathe freely; everyone makes pleasure, happiness and communication dependent on some inflexible order or, to be even more aggressive, on some combinatorics. So, here they are, all three united: the damned writer, the great utopian and the holy Jesuit.”
"The Work of Francois Rabelais and the Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance"
Mikhail Bakhtin
How folk culture becomes part of great literature.
“The entire rich folk culture of laughter in the Middle Ages lived and developed outside the official sphere of high ideology and literature. But it was precisely thanks to this unofficial existence that the culture of laughter was distinguished by exceptional radicalism, freedom and merciless sobriety. The Middle Ages, not allowing laughter into any of the official areas of life and ideology, provided it with exceptional privileges for freedom and impunity outside these areas: in the square, during holidays, in recreational holiday literature. And medieval laughter managed to make wide and deep use of these privileges.
And in the Renaissance, laughter in its most radical, universal, so to speak, world-encompassing and at the same time in its most cheerful form only once in history for some fifty to sixty years (in different countries at different times) broke through from the depths of the people, along with popular (“vulgar”) languages, into great literature and high ideology to play a significant role in the creation of such works of world literature as Boccaccio’s “Decameron”, Rabelais’s novel, Cervantes’ novel, dramas and comedies Shakespeare and others."
"Notes and extracts"
Mikhail Gasparov
Very witty discussions about literature, philology and criticism.
“Once I happened to say: “We don’t like Lermontov because he is great, but on the contrary, we call him great because we like him.” It seemed to me that this was a banality, but V.V. For some reason, Kozhinov was very outraged by this. It still seems to me that our “like or dislike” is not a sufficient basis to declare a writer great or not great. I would prefer to consider that the writer is good who I do not like, who goes beyond my taste: after all, I have no right to consider my taste good just because it is mine. It would be even better, instead of your own egocentric point of view, to reconstruct someone else’s, obviously worthy of respect: what would you say about such and such modern poet Mandelstam? Pushkin? Ovid? Such hypothetical judgments would probably be more interesting; but usually they don’t think about it, probably having a presentiment: they wouldn’t say anything good.”
"Art and Visual Perception"
Rudolf Arnheim
Psychological background of painting.
“...light seems to be an independent phenomenon or a quality inherent in the objects themselves, and not an influence transmitted from one object to another, “Day” is a bright thing, which is often thought of as a cluster of white clouds that come from outside and move along vault of heaven. In the same way, the brightness of objects on earth is perceived mainly as a property of themselves, and not as a result of reflection. Without taking into account the special conditions that will be discussed below, the illumination of a house, a tree, or a book lying on a table is not perceived by us as some kind of gift from a distant source. At best, daylight or the light of an electric lamp illuminates things the way a match sets fire to an armful of wood. These things are less bright than the sun or the sky, but in principle they are no different from them. They are simply less bright luminaries.
Accordingly, darkness is perceived either as a fading of the brightness inherent in an object, or as the effect that occurs when they try to hide light objects in the shadows of dark ones. Night is not a negative result of the removal of light, but
the positive appearance of a dark blanket that replaces or covers the day. The night, as it appears to children, consists of black clouds that move so close to each other that white cannot break through them. Some artists, such as Rembrandt or Goya, at least in some of their paintings, depicted the world as a dark space, illuminated in places by light. It turned out that they confirmed by means of art the discoveries made by physicists.”
"Selected Works of Leonardo da Vinci"
Leonardo da Vinci
As the man who became a symbol of his time thought.
“The mind of a painter should be like a mirror, which always changes into the color of the object it has as its object, and is filled with as many images as there are objects opposed to it. So, knowing that you cannot be a good painter unless you are a universal master in imitating with your art all the qualities of the forms produced by nature, and that you cannot make them unless you have seen them and sketched them in your soul, you, wandering through the fields, act in such a way that your judgment turns to various objects, and successively consider first one object, then another, making a collection of various things, selected and chosen from those less good. And do not do as some painters, who, tired of their imagination, leave work and walk on foot for exercise, keeping weariness in their souls; They not only do not want to pay attention to various objects, but often, when meeting with friends or relatives, they, although greeted by them, do not see or hear them, and they take them only as offended.”
"Folklore in the Old Testament"
James George Fraser
What and how was the most famous book in the world assembled?
“Russian Cheremis, (modern name - Mari) people of Finnish origin, tell the story of the creation of the world, reminiscent of some episodes from the legends of the Toraja tribe and Indian natives. God sculpted a man's body from clay and ascended to his heaven to bring from there a soul to revive the man, leaving a dog in place to guard the body in his absence. Meanwhile the devil came and let loose on the dog cold wind, seduced her with fur clothes to weaken her vigilance. Then the evil spirit spat on the clay body and dirtied it so much that when God returned, he fell into complete despair and, not hoping to ever remove all the dirt from the body, reluctantly decided to turn the body inside out. This is why a person has such a dirty inside. And on the same day God cursed the dog for its criminal violation of its duty.”
"Morphology of a fairy tale"
Vladimir Propp
“We are making a cross-plot comparison of these (fairy) tales. For comparison, we highlight the components fairy tales according to special techniques and then compare fairy tales according to their component parts. The result will be morphology, i.e. description of a fairy tale by its component parts and the relationship of the parts to each other and to the whole. By what methods can an accurate description of a fairy tale be achieved? Let's compare the following cases:
1. The king gives the daredevil an eagle. The eagle takes the daredevil to another kingdom.
2.Grandfather gives Suchenka a horse. The horse takes Suchenko to another kingdom.
3. The sorcerer gives Ivan a boat. The boat takes Ivan to another kingdom.
4. The princess gives Ivan a ring. The fellows from the ring take Ivan to another kingdom; etc.
In the above cases, there are constant and variable quantities. The names change (and with them the attributes) characters, their actions or functions do not change. Hence the conclusion is that fairy tales often attribute the same actions to different characters. This gives us the opportunity to study a fairy tale based on the functions of the characters.”
“Photography is like...”
Alexander Lapin
A fundamental work on composition in photography.
“Of course, the vast majority of photographers use the viewfinder frame as a scope to point the camera at what interests them. In this case, neither the background nor surrounding details are taken into account. IN English language The word shoot has two meanings: to shoot and to remove. The real work with the camera is completely different, it is the construction of the frame, its organization. The photographer strives to ensure that nothing unnecessary gets into the frame.
He deliberately selects the details of the future photograph, looks for meaning in their combination and position, composes them, achieving expressiveness, trying to fill the frame with a very specific content. The artist also finds composition and expressiveness in reality itself, but it is more difficult for the photographer; he cannot synthesize his picture from individual observations and must find it as a whole. This is how a thinking, creative, understanding photographer works; photography is a kind of statement, the meaning of which must be “read” by the viewer. Every statement and message must be formalized and organized. For example, a set of arbitrary words without rules of grammar and punctuation will contain virtually no information. The same applies to the visual statement - photography. Therefore, the main thing in it must be highlighted (stresses, exclamation marks), its parts must necessarily be connected (syntax), it, the statement, has a beginning and an end, a significant detail is similar subordinate clause and so on".