Writing About Visual Art (Aesthetics Today) PDF
Preview Writing About Visual Art (Aesthetics Today)
TRA LAUSIV WRITING ABOUT UOVBIASU GALN AIRTTIRW IRRAC DIV DAVID CARRIER TRA LA TUOBA G ii AUSIV GNITIRW WRITING ABOUT VISUAL ART DAVID CARRIER iii © 2003 David Carrier All rights reserved. Copyright under Berne Copyright Convention, Universal Copyright Convention, and Pan-American Copyright Convention. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher. 08 07 06 05 04 03 5 4 3 2 1 Copublished with the School of Visual Arts Published by Allworth Press An imprint of Allworth Communications, Inc. 10 East 23rd Street, New York, NY 10010 Cover and interior design by James Victore, New York, NY Page composition/typography by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd., Pondicherry, India Cover image: Royal Road Test. Original concept by Ed Ruscha and Mason Williams; photograph by Patrick Blackwell, courtesy Gagosian Gallery. ISBN: 1-58115-261-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Carrier, David, 1944- Writing about visual art / David Carrier. p. cm. ISBN 1-58115-261-2 1. Art criticism—Authorship. 2. Description (Rhetoric) I. Title. N7476 .C378 2003 808’.0667—dc21 2002152013 AESTHETICS TODAY Editorial Director: Bill Beckley The Chronicles of Now: The Ways of the World in Pictures and (Some) Words byAnthony Haden-Guest Sticky Sublime, edited by Bill Beckley Uncontrollable Beauty, edited by Bill Beckley with David Shapiro Out of the Box: The Reinvention of Art: 1965-1975, by Carter Ratcliff Redeeming Art: Critical Reveries, by Donald Kuspit The Dialectic of Decadence: Between Advance and Decline in Art, by Donald Kuspit Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime, by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe Sculpture in the Age of Doubt, by Thomas McEvilley The End of the Art Worldby Robert C. Morgan Lectures on Art, by John Ruskin Imaginary Portraits, by Walter Pater The Laws of Fésole: Principles of Drawing and Painting from the Tuscan Masters, by John Ruskin Printed in Canada David Carrier’s books include: Truth and Falsity in Visual Images (1983), with Mark Roskill Artwriting (l987) Principles of Art History Writing (l991) Poussin’s Paintings: A Study in Art-Historical Methodology ( l993) The Aesthete in the City: The Philosophy and Practice of American Abstract Painting in the 1980s (1994) Nicolas Poussin. Lettere sull’arte, (1995); editor, with an introduction High Art: Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernism (1996) England and Its Aesthetes: Biography and Taste (1997); editor, with an introduction Garner Tullis: The Life of Collaboration (1998) The Aesthetics of the Comic Strip (2000) Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism: from Formalism to beyond Postmodernism (2002) Sean Scully (2003) Hegel, with characteristic profundity, spoke of beautiful art as the Idea given sensuous embodiment. As a start, this gives us the rudiments of a philosophical concept of art, and a first stab at a theory of criticism: the critic must identify the idea embodied in the work, and assess the adequacy of its embodiment. —Arthur C. Danto Nothing is more depressing than to imagine the Text as an intellectual object (for reflection, analysis, comparison, mirroring, etc.). The text is an object of pleasure. —Roland Barthes vi This book is for Peggy and Dick Kuhns and George J. Leonard TNETNCOO viii ONTENTS Acknowledgments xi Foreword by Bill Beckley xvii Overture 3 Part One Art Writing Narratives Chapter One Beginnings in Art Writing 31 Chapter Two Endings in Narrative Art Histories 59 Chapter Three The Presentness of Visual Art 81 Interlude 105 Part Two Doing Things with Words Chapter Four Museum Narratives 119 Chapter Five Art Gallery Narratives 149 Chapter Six Defining Art: How We Do Things with Words 177 Index 197 About the Author 201
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