Pretty good summary of Kant. And I don't agree with Kant at all — Jackson
No offense, but I never read stuff just because someone posts it quoting someone. Make an argument — Jackson
There certainly must have been a dawning realization that something intervenes between our experience of the world and the world itself, such that it became increasing important to capture this something rather than a photographic copy of reality. — Joshs
I haven’t read much on Hume in relation to modern art , but so far I’m having no luck finding any writings connecting him to cubism
or any other trend toward abstraction in art. We could analyze why that might be. — Joshs
He had a digital idea of perception much like today. — Jackson
Cubist paintings took the idea of frontal, optical perception and created a geometry of the picture plane. A cube is a spatial object--a die--that when looked at does not show its back.
So, cubism is about how the picture plane is presented. — Jackson
Significant movements in art are not about merely reshuffling old technical concepts but offering a new vision. — Joshs
Vision is a function of the technical. Nothing to do with "reshuffling." — Jackson
Recognizing that thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. This is a realization you will not find in Descartes through Hume. — Joshs
The technical has to do with the applied, and the applied is a reshuffling within an extant theoretical edifice. Steve Jobs introduced brilliant technical innovations but added nothing to the existing scientific theory underlying
it. Great art isn’t just application of extant theory, it is the creation of new theory, a new vision. — Joshs
Thanks Joshs. Not sure I recognise the significance of these two ideas. Are you able to briefly describe how this Kantian stage actually plays out in art with an example? — Tom Storm
remember reading a description by an art critic of a work
of abstract art that consisted of a series of geometric shapes. The critic argued that these shapes captured some sort of deep essence , some transcendental
truth , underlying sensory appearances. Why would the artist assume there would be such an underlying order?
Because Kant showed that whatever contingent causal
concatenation of sensations we experience in visual perception, we cannot assume that visual experience presents us with a direct truth. The renaissance artists seem to have had absolute faith in such a truth. This is why it was so important for them to render precisely and faithfully the perspectival facts of a painting. One could get close to the mind of God by disclosing the rational
logic of the visually appearing world.
But Kant told us that the only direct truths in a visual scene are the inborn categories of perception that puts the world together for us in terms of causality, space and time. So one could imagine the abstract painter
‘abstracting’ from the contingent details of a scene these underlying categories in the guise of geometrical
forms. The real truth of a scene is in its deep categorical structure. — Joshs
remember reading a description by an art critic of a work
of abstract art that consisted of a series of geometric shapes. The critic argued that these shapes captured some sort of deep essence , some transcendental
truth , underlying sensory appearances. Why would the artist assume there would be such an underlying order? — Joshs
Because the geometry of a picture plane was new. Using the abstract math of architecture was a new thing — Jackson
What philosophical and scientific innovation made it new? — Joshs
Starting from impressionism the progression was basically > post-impressionism > cubism. If you're saying there's a "new theory" behind each of these stages, what are they? — praxis
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