More than a century after its publication, Vertov’s writing on the revolution in cinematography and the mechanical eye is more relevant than ever in the age of machine learning and data science. Excerpts and translation – …Я – киноглаз. Я строитель. Я посадил тебя, сегодня созданного мной, в не существовавшую до сего момента удивительнейшую комнату, …
Category Archives: Art History
On 300 Poems of the T’ong Dynasty
I recently completed reading Three Hundred Poems of the T’ong Dynasty (Taipei, 1965), the traditional anthology of Tang Dynasty poetry compiled by Sun Zhu (孫洙, 1711–1778), who wrote under the name Hengtang Tuishi (蘅塘退士). The English translations in this edition are those associated with Witter Bynner and Kiang Kang-hu, originally published as The Jade Mountain: …
Kitsch, Camp, and Ugliness
Ugliness can belong to judgments we make about people, periods, and other social classes. For example, a Gothic cathedral can be barbarous in one century and protected as a masterpiece in another. A body admired in one period can look strange in another, and the object remains while judgment changes. This extends the problem I …
Avant-Garde and Ugliness
The twentieth century avant-garde presents an interesting problem in the history of beauty. What happens when artists no longer simply represent ugly things, but deliberately try to make art that earlier generations judge as ugly? This is different than painting a battle, an old body, suffering, poverty, or some other unpleasant subject beautifully. Here, ugliness …
The Eiffel Tower and Industrial Beauty
The Eiffel Tower rises above Paris with such familiarity that it is difficult to imagine the city without it. Its lattice of iron has become part of the visual order of Paris, alongside the stone facades, the river, the bridges, and the great monuments created from earlier centuries. Yet, when the tower was proposed in …
The Uncanny and the Failure of Order
Let us journey back to the time of Dr. Freud in 1919 – A lamp sits on a table in an ordinary room. The lamp rises, but there is something wrong about the lamp. This is the peculiar force of the uncanny, where it is not an ugly event. It is ugliness of situation, which …
Ugliness in Art – Redemption & Romanticism
On ugliness in art – If art seeks beauty, what is it to do with pain, deformity, terror, revulsion, and disorder? Artists should not simply exclude them, because the world does not exclude them if it can be reflected. Lessing saw this problem in Laocoon. Poetry and sculpture, he argued, do not suffer from the …
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Reclaiming Form During the Renaissance
The Renaissance did not only restart antiquity, it reordered what could be observed and valued. From the margins, the coarse, the bodily, the obscene, moved into the center of cultural life. In Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, obscenity is no longer a feature of carnival or tolerated disorder. It becomes deliberate, cultivated, and visible within educated …
Order, Error, and the Eye
Greek culture did not claim that the world was wholly beautiful. Its myths include monstrosities, mistakes, and bodies that fall outside any ideal. Plato sharpened that tension into philosophy. Sensible reality, as he saw it, was a diminished copy of a more perfect world of forms. The visible world was not the final standard. It …
Remembering Family – Photographer Paul Liebhardt
Recently my cousin and family member Paul Liebhardt passed away. He worked at NASA for a time and then became a photographer. While a photographer, he traveled internationally. His work as a photographer is well known. The remembrance celebration (link below) shows nice videos and writing of his students coming together from various paths of …
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