Tuesday
Apr172012
civilized ku # 2161 ~ mysterious
Tuesday, April 17, 2012 at 10:00AM ;)
Canada War Museum ~ Ottawa, CA • click to embiggen
There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described. ~ Garry Winogrand
Tuesday, April 17, 2012 at 10:00AM
Reader Comments (3)
Or, as Oscar Wilde once said, "The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible".
I believe the Oscar Wilde quote is an excerpt from "The Picture of Dorian Gray":
"And beauty is a form of genius -- is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty . . . People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial. That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial as thought is. To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible"
When looking for the Oscar Wilde quote I stumbled across the essay "Against Interpretation" by Susan Sontag (published in 1966). An excerpt...
"Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for granted, now. Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it is in the light of the condition of our senses, our capacities (rather than those of another age), that the task of the critic must be assessed.
What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.
Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means."