I feel like I can see that your painting is by someone who likes the Mt Ste Victoire you posted! Which seems kind of cool. (Especially because, when I saw it when you posted it just having painted it, I wasn't able to see this aspect of it.)
I remember that you are a Green Lantern comic reader. I think comics, as both a collection of images and a narrative that unfolds over time (or rather, space) are really vulnerable to the difficulties with active observation you've laid out here. It is so easy to focus on the content of the story or the artistic style in isolation from each other and not as a gestalt work of art. I know it is a niche hobby marred by its association with low-class mass production, but I really crave a space for higher level discussions of comics in this sense.
Thank you for this highly enlightening post. You are clearly a wonderful teacher. In future years your students will come to realise how fortunate they have been.
Miscellaneous things I’ve seen straddle the line between highbrow and lowbrow culture:
Back before I left Twitter, I followed a bot account (called Bosch Bot) which tweeted out randomly cropped sections of The Garden of Earthly Delights. I remember people having so much fun riffing on the images, turning them into reaction images and memes etc.
I went to the Stardew Valley symphony concert last year and the energy was somewhere between a rock concert and a comic con. People dressed up in costumes from the game, they cheered at each song. The conductor took a poll on the favorite character and when the winner was announced people screamed so loudly it could be heard several blocks away from the symphony hall.
When a friend has taken me to see an opera or I’ve gone to an art museum or some classic film screening, sometimes I feel intimidated but I find I have a good experience when I go in relatively fresh and don’t feel like I have to “get” everything. I don’t know if there’s some correlation between the detachment you describe and treating art like eating your vegetables, but I wonder if part of the detachment you’re seeing comes from the expectation that what I want is to have gone to a concert or art museum, to present myself as the kind of person who does those things, rather than as something I enjoy in itself.
Not sure if it's germane to this post, but thinking about how we as audience members approach art led me to wonder if our generation had a somewhat unique experience of living through two or more major eras of self-directed "browsable" or "surfable" media: First analog cable tv (when rapid channel switching was still possible), and second the internet (before it was gated and algorithmically-directed). And is the trend to make museums less "surfable"? And to the extent that we've become somewhat less responsible for our own experience in a museum (because we're walking a path designed by a curator), maybe now the walking of the path _is_ the experience we're having (rather than the experience being an "actual" encounter with the art)? Take five steps to the right, read the placard, emit a subtle "hmmph!", visually confirm that the object on display matches the placard, photograph object, take five steps to the right, repeat until the gift shop.
Once you're past food, water, and shelter, I can't think of a greater gift than the one you're trying to give your students.
Aside from all the spiritual rewards of close, slow attention to materiality and form, I'll note how budget-friendly the impulse has been for me: not only does it throttle my initial consumption rate, but it makes rereading (or re-listening, or revisiting, or re-watching) more rewarding as well.
Interesting. You're describing the structure of attention itself. Listening and looking are architectural choices about what the mind stabilizes. People think they’re perceiving the actual work, but they’re really perceiving their mind's pattern, what it already knows how to sustain. I like your description of resetting the architecture of your audience so new meaning can be activated. I thought I was the only one who did that intentionally. Thank you for sharing this!
I feel like I can see that your painting is by someone who likes the Mt Ste Victoire you posted! Which seems kind of cool. (Especially because, when I saw it when you posted it just having painted it, I wasn't able to see this aspect of it.)
Thanks! I was flattered when one of the art profs at North Central said she could see the Cézanne tribute in my paintings.
I remember that you are a Green Lantern comic reader. I think comics, as both a collection of images and a narrative that unfolds over time (or rather, space) are really vulnerable to the difficulties with active observation you've laid out here. It is so easy to focus on the content of the story or the artistic style in isolation from each other and not as a gestalt work of art. I know it is a niche hobby marred by its association with low-class mass production, but I really crave a space for higher level discussions of comics in this sense.
I've had a TON of success with McCloud's Understanding Comics in the classroom -- you should definitely check it out if you don't know it!
McCloud is so insightful, I agree!
Thank you for this highly enlightening post. You are clearly a wonderful teacher. In future years your students will come to realise how fortunate they have been.
Thanks for the kind words -- hopefully my students feel the same!
Miscellaneous things I’ve seen straddle the line between highbrow and lowbrow culture:
Back before I left Twitter, I followed a bot account (called Bosch Bot) which tweeted out randomly cropped sections of The Garden of Earthly Delights. I remember people having so much fun riffing on the images, turning them into reaction images and memes etc.
I went to the Stardew Valley symphony concert last year and the energy was somewhere between a rock concert and a comic con. People dressed up in costumes from the game, they cheered at each song. The conductor took a poll on the favorite character and when the winner was announced people screamed so loudly it could be heard several blocks away from the symphony hall.
When a friend has taken me to see an opera or I’ve gone to an art museum or some classic film screening, sometimes I feel intimidated but I find I have a good experience when I go in relatively fresh and don’t feel like I have to “get” everything. I don’t know if there’s some correlation between the detachment you describe and treating art like eating your vegetables, but I wonder if part of the detachment you’re seeing comes from the expectation that what I want is to have gone to a concert or art museum, to present myself as the kind of person who does those things, rather than as something I enjoy in itself.
Not sure if it's germane to this post, but thinking about how we as audience members approach art led me to wonder if our generation had a somewhat unique experience of living through two or more major eras of self-directed "browsable" or "surfable" media: First analog cable tv (when rapid channel switching was still possible), and second the internet (before it was gated and algorithmically-directed). And is the trend to make museums less "surfable"? And to the extent that we've become somewhat less responsible for our own experience in a museum (because we're walking a path designed by a curator), maybe now the walking of the path _is_ the experience we're having (rather than the experience being an "actual" encounter with the art)? Take five steps to the right, read the placard, emit a subtle "hmmph!", visually confirm that the object on display matches the placard, photograph object, take five steps to the right, repeat until the gift shop.
Once you're past food, water, and shelter, I can't think of a greater gift than the one you're trying to give your students.
Aside from all the spiritual rewards of close, slow attention to materiality and form, I'll note how budget-friendly the impulse has been for me: not only does it throttle my initial consumption rate, but it makes rereading (or re-listening, or revisiting, or re-watching) more rewarding as well.
Interesting. You're describing the structure of attention itself. Listening and looking are architectural choices about what the mind stabilizes. People think they’re perceiving the actual work, but they’re really perceiving their mind's pattern, what it already knows how to sustain. I like your description of resetting the architecture of your audience so new meaning can be activated. I thought I was the only one who did that intentionally. Thank you for sharing this!