Learning To See: It's All Relative

[Applause] Thank You Kristen and thanks you thank you all for coming today learn about how some things in art or relative we're going to be seeing a lot of things that are relative in various ways things that have to do for example with a term mimesis which means making something look like the way things look like they're out in the real world out in nature it's kind of like that word mine like to pantomime or connect it's just sort of a fancy word it's a little bit like when Shakespeare has that line about holding a mirror up to nature and a lot of art in the history of art especially in the Western tradition has to do with making things more lifelike and that's one of the things that the Renaissance is about making things somehow seem more lifelike and as I was telling you last time when I was talking about space and I showed you this very famous painting by Raphael called the school of athens I mentioned that it's a really consummate example of what we call one-point perspective and remember perspective is that trick or a kind of device or construction that was invented in the 15th century relatively early in the 15th century quite a bit maybe a hundred years almost before this painting was painted by Filippo Brunelleschi and it was in Florence and then it was really publicized it was published by another Renaissance man whose name was Albert II and so that by the time you get to the School of Athens in the early 16th century and it's an example what we call high Renaissance art high in the sense that all of the currents that we saw developing in the Renaissance have really moved to a kind of crescendo and also high because there for some mysterious reason there were all these amazing artists working in competition with each other as the saint you know at the same time Raphael Leonardo da Vinci Michelangelo for a Monta they didn't necessarily like each other I mean mikkel Angelo in particular was a very difficult person but for somehow somehow they you know managed to meld their talents in many ways and make some incredible things partly because they had some very powerful patrons for example julius ii of rome of the papacy of Pope Julius ii and if you go to the home of the papacy that is the Vatican you can see this amazing mural this fresco and one of the reasons why I'm showing it to you today because as I said a consummate example of one-point perspective so remember with perspective it's this device or it's kind of a construction that told the artist how big and where to place things going back into space so that they would pull your eye and in this particular painting the thing that's especially striking are these floor tiles in the in the front they really look more shortened that is we're shortening remember that's that effect when if my aunt my arm is like this it's very foreshortened if it's like this it isn't particularly for shortening is the way that things are distorted in space when you look at them just like when you look down a railroad track the way it looks like all the sleepers are coming together and the tracks are coming together into what we call the vanishing point that's where things disappear now of course they don't really disappear it's just a kind of an illusion but this perspective of device or construction really I wasn't able to get was a means of consistently fooling your eye fooling your mind that this was really happening and I mentioned last time that the illusion because we're really talking about illusionism illusionism really means any art that tries to fool your eye into thinking generally about three-dimensional space that even this running spiral this decorative band at the top it looks like this is a 3-dimensional frame this is all actually painted you really have to go there to see it to believe it because it looks like it's really 3-dimensional but it's part of the the whole thing now the prospective construction does have its limitations and if this floor were if there were nothing else in here if you didn't have these figures and you just had this floor extending into the back then would begin to fall apart a little bit when you started to get right around where these figures are blocking it in other words perspective linear perspective works best when you're in that center sort of main line the kind of axial line that you're looking through as you start getting into the periphery it begins to distort somewhat now the other thing is that the term perspective think about is very much like you know if you think about when we say perspective like from my perspective my perspective on such-and-such it means your position and one-point perspective presumes that the viewer is at an ideal position in other words it's not just that it's trying to fool your eye but it's fooling your eye according to a particular place that you're viewing the painting from now this is such a powerful illusion I mean with these incredible coffered a barrel vault the way that the figures are distributed so evenly there's a kind of you know wonderful symmetry and a balance and that sense of balance and harmony goes along perfectly with the subject this idea of this learning walk the conversation between Plato who's pointing up because he is attached to the ideal and Aristotle who's pointing down because he you know is interested in things like classifying animals and things like that thing you know empirical things from the earth that kind of space makes sense especially when you're looking directly out of it at it now it's such a powerful illusion that you could move to the side and it would still fool your eye but it's gonna work fast when you look at it when you look at it directly now this is a a print by the the 20th century Dutch print maker MC Escher called relativity and some of you may have seen that extensive show they had on Esther just about a year ago and he was a really a master of perspective but he was also a master of playing with it he's very playful and what he does here and I put it very early in this lecture because I'm going to be talking a lot about relativity is that everything here you could say seems to work in its own way if you tilted the picture it really looked like someone going up and down the stairs things like that but relative to each other if madness it doesn't make sense at all it's a kind of crazy wild space where gravity doesn't hold true and you have people walking you know on both sides of staircases and things like that it's a really playful kind of thing but one of the things that Asher does that's really fantastic is he can work the transitions between these mutually contradictory images and so it makes them look like a complete whole now it's not the first time in the history of art that some are the only time that someone has played around with perspective if you visited the National Gallery in London you probably know this very famous and very beautiful painting by hands Holbein the younger called the ambassadors and it's an example of what we call anamorphosis and that's why I put that term partly because I can never remember it so I have to put it up there and you know if you just look at the main part of the painting it's very you know really beautiful portrait in this very northern style that I kind of ignore them Renaissance emphasis on particularity of description everything from this beautiful looks like a Persian carpet to this loot the the figures themselves very very detailed and all of that and you'll notice that when you look at that loot and also when you look at the floor the floor tiles they are in very clear perspective in other words this is an artist who completely understands perspective but then you notice what is this weird thing it looks kind of like just a strange kind of cloudy shape well it's a giant skull and if you stand in the right place you can't really I can't do it here and because you're in your seats you can't really do it but if you go to the National Gallery in London if you move to a certain place in the periphery it begins to sort of unfold and it becomes an actual skull now why would you have a skull there well it goes along with the tradition of still life this is something I'll talk about more next time we'll see a little bit of shortly when I show you a pain that we saw once before my Audrey flack told Bonnie tops the idea of vanity of the passage of life you know if you're going to have these beautiful things from the world like scientific instruments and books and music and instruments we'll then that's a reminder of death but it's being done here in a kind of bravura sort of sleight of hand showing you this as something that's really very strange like a strange kind of projection from some other dimension even the way that it casts a shadow is really it's really very strange now here's another example of something that involves strange things in relation to each other and also it involves a very high level of mimesis of illusion so this is actually a chalk drawing on the street by someone named Julian beaver and I assume it's called swimming pool in the high street so I assume that's High Street and you know in South Kensington near you know Kensington Gardens and not far from Hyde Park but anyway this is a really elaborate chalk drawing and you can see right away that there's some things that are from the real world like this bottle of coke and a glass here a real person who looks like he's getting into the swimming pool very excited about that with a thing of coke but then these flip-flops you know they don't really fool your eye they're pretty realistic that you can tell that they've been drawn with chalk but that's not the strangest thing about this I mean it looks very complete for a bathtub you've got your ball you have the person swimming you have the rubber duckie and everything but it all is a question of perspective that is where you were standing when you look at this so this way if you're looking from this point of view that's how it looks if you are standing basically where her foot is pointing if you go down the street in the direction that her foot is pointing and then you turn around this is what it looks like so in other words this view was like what you'd see from that camera in other words the that's a like a picture that you take from that camera but if you walk down the street it's completely bizarre and what happens is that because it's foreshorten when you look from that angle foreshortening makes things collapse so that you know if you're looking at my arm this way there's you're just gonna see like the tips of my fingers and a little bit of the arm but it basically it's gonna clasp and that's what happens with this drawing I mean in some ways it's it's all the more amazing because it's just an ephemeral work of art I mean when it starts raining there's probably going to wipe away some of this and certainly with people walking so it really is a kind of marvelous example of street art I mean hopefully the hopefully he's gets lots of euros rather pounds in his little you know his his little can therefore doing this well another aspect of relativity and also my my nieces has to do with the fact that realism and this looks like a pretty realistic painting it's actually a painting by Janet fish called homemade jellies she's a really fine example of what we call a photo realist and photo realism is a movement well it really has its beginnings in the 1960s but it's very big in the 70s and it's still with us today and there's a couple of other names that people use for it sometimes people call it hyper realism because it really does look pretty realistic some people call it super realism which is a little bit of a problem because surrealism also means in French super realism so that is obviously very different I like photo realism because paintings like this generally started out with photographs either a slide or a photograph that was oh this is you know my students don't know what an opaque projector is but you probably remember them or you know regular slides where you could project the slide on a say on a canvas and that photo part of it is really critical general so the kinds of paintings that these people made for one thing it's a guide in making something that really is startling ly realistic but at the same time photographs have their own imperfections and distortions I mean you know that when you take a photograph as you know and you can add not with a sort of point-and-click camera but with the old-fashioned kind where you can adjust the depth of field how some things and you can even do that with phones now I guess some things will be more InFocus than others and sometimes these artists incorporate those kinds of effects now the thing about realism and this really does look very realistic I mean they could tell like what they are right away by looking at them and she's done a really marvelous job of getting the way that the light is sort of refracted through this glass and how it goes through these nice you know jelly colors here the the shine of the lids I mean it really is pretty remarkable but what I want to the point that I want to make and I'm going to show you a couple of different examples of this is that realism is not absolute it's relative in other words if you see something that's realistic I'll show you something else that's even more realistic and the two of them will look very different and part of this has to do with the fact that when you see a painting it's basically a two-dimensional thing it can fool your I mean these things really look three-dimensional and you don't only have to use one-point perspective there's other ways to do that but certainly one-point perspective was this critical means of doing that but you can only you know you can have something that it's looks three-dimensional but it's on a two-dimensional canvas you can't really take the whole world out there and stick it on a canvas you have to come up with metaphors with short hands with tricks and things like that just like the one-point perspective was a very elaborate trick and those kinds of metaphors might be very different among two different artists so if you keep this one in mind if we look at this still life by Audrey Black and I showed you this once before we'll come back to it when I mentioned when I was talking about Bonnie toss that's actually the title this Maryland as in it's actually Norma Jeane you know the original a person who became Marilyn Monroe vaneeta still like this one that has reminders of the passage of time you know like the hourglass the clock or in the ambassadora slot I just showed you with the skull but I'm not really showing it to you for that it's really more for the the rendering of things from the real world in other words for the Miami system magnetic aspect so when you look at this little porcelain mug the hour this glass here with beads the shine of the fruit the lipstick container the candlestick they are reflective objects that look very different and here's a detail from the ones down here in other words if you saw either one of these paintings individually you might say wow that's really realistic how did she do that that's really amazing and it is I mean you can't do this kind of art unless you really are have aquatic control I certainly got into it but in any case they look very very different so that's a relative that's something and we're gonna see this also when we look at sculpture that there's a kind of relativity about realism now there's other kinds of ways of making something realistic or being my metic and we even can have that in paintings which predate one-point perspective in other words something from the very very dawn of the Renaissance like this wonderful famous painting by Giotto the lamentation over the dead Christ which is in Padua another one of my favorite towns by the way and in the area and a chapel also known as the scrouge aney chapel that was the person who paid for it and really did it you really paid for this chapel these wonderful paintings of the virgin and the life of the virgin and the life of Christ during these great bands because in his family was known for Ussery and it was it which is a sin and so there was a kind of expiation you know that well you know we we may have been greedy but we're gonna pay for some really beautiful you know Christian paintings and kind of get out of purgatory quick but anyway so what you have here is something that you know it's a painting that you know if you take a Renaissance course this is the kind of painting you may start with in the first class and it's considered either you know as I said the dawn of the Renaissance some people especially if they're medievalists consider it a late medieval painting and it sort of in between I mean this is an artist who was a contemporary of Dante and in some ways in the art world had the same kind of you know profile or you know prestige or as it were you know as that great as that great writer so when you look at these figures individually I mean first of all the scene itself is a scene from the gospel so it's not something that you know you can imagine really you know happening in real time or real space or anything like that it really is much more a sacred space happening in sacred time but when you look at some of the faces you know they have those kind of narrowed eyes that if you're familiar with late medieval art or what we call Byzantine art that's very typical it's very very stylized in other risen when we use that word stylized we're talking about things that aren't they you know what they refer to in the real world but they somehow are they're very artificial are they're they're very simplified or something like that and these are very stylized but on the other hand when it comes to emotion this is you could say very naturalistic that is that it really elicits a kind of powerful empathetic response from the viewer that's sort of signaled by the angels up at the top which looked like hysterical birds so in other words they're really responding with a kind of intensity to this very tragic scene that's going on below st. John and sort of making the sign of the Cross with this in the sort of par looking on but I'm especially thinking about the way that these bodies really look like they have bulk in other words it looks like there's a figure under the clothing and that's something that really you hadn't seen in earlier say medieval or Byzantine art which tends to be flatter and excuse me I'm also thinking for example of this figure here who is sitting there in a way with bulk that makes us think and also think about this figure out the right here that it makes us feel that we can actually be sitting there ourselves in other words it sort of makes something that even though we don't have one-point perspective that hasn't been discovered yet it still suggests that this is a space that you could actually occupy so in other words it has a kind of emotional realism or naturalism and realism and naturalism er terms that are used somewhat interchangeably when we're talking about green my medic art now this is as I said the dawn of the Renaissance but if we fast-forward to the early baroque we have a whole different level of mimesis a whole different level of things that fool your eye and that engaged the viewer in an emotional way but in a very different kind of emotional way so this is a painting by Caravaggio in the Uffizi in Florence called Bacchus and I showed you a painting by Caravaggio last time when I was talking about light and dark remember that really striking conversion of st. Paul you know the man who's fallen off his horse it was on the ground now on the one hand Caravaggio and we think of this the paintings like the Saint Paul was one of the greatest religious painters of all the top of all time he was also a murderer he killed somebody about a game of tennis and so he was you know probably not the nicest person and he also would paint for a Cardinal Cardinal Delmont a who liked to have parties where young boys would dress up like young girls and so there is a kind of homoerotic current in a some of Caravaggio art that we definitely would find in this painting of Bacchus because after all Bacchus is supposed to be a male figure he looks somewhat hermaphroditic or androgynous in this painting but the main thing that I want to you but with that in mind with the idea that there is this erotic aspect of the painting is the way that it approaches you in a very aggressive way as a viewer so that he's offering you this very decadently elaborate laughs of wines and sort of offering you the wine as a way to sort of invite you into his space it also looks like he's taking about to take off his robe so it's a kind of very aggressive sort of interplay between you as the viewer and the image there in a way that is very Baroque that's not a Renaissance kind of way of addressing the viewer and there is a high level of realism this is one of the things that Caravaggio startled people at the time so that for example the way that the wine glass is painted the fruit in the front and this is something that I'll talk about when we look at still life next time that the first thing you want to look at it is still life is what is being shown if it's fruit what kind of fruit is it is it stuff that looks like you know it's the stuff you couldn't afford at Whole Foods or is it something like this that looks over right about to maybe get a little bit rotten that kind of goes along with the decadence of this of this image and the fruit and the wine are also inviting you to partake this whole idea of inviting you and it's a very erotic thing there's a painting by Caravaggio from around the same time in the Metropolitan Museum where it's these young boys very androgynous boys who are singing and playing music and then they have a musical instrument laid out for you in other words you are supposed to partake of their their activity now when we're talking about mimesis and life likeness and sculpture we get into some different issues altogether now this is a really of blunt kind of comparison that is we have a high renaissance statue here I'm a sweets obscure I'm sure most of you know it the famous David by Michelangelo and over here this really magnificent group of what we called jam figures that is JMB is an adored am from one of the doors i think the system the main western door at the cathedral of chart in france and this is a you know a really a sort of quintessential example of medieval art in fact of gothic art that's what we're dealing with here and the gothic is a style both in sculpture or in manuscript illumination or in architecture which tends towards the elongated towards the vertical excuse me so you have a church like a shark excuse me which you know has these very pointed you know tall towers it's sort of aspiring upward to the heavens i mean that's one of the aspects and with these figures they're much more elongated than something that you would find from real life they don't look at all like the david and well the first thing i want to point out is that one of the things that's so different here and i think i may have mentioned this last time is that in the renaissance with a work like this you have what we call a free-standing sculpture that is you could walk around it and that's something that sculpture was i mentioned this last time in classical antiquity in ancient Greece in Rome and of course part of what the Renaissance was about was about imitating things from classical antiquity that's something that you have but you don't have it in the Middle Ages just like you don't really have it in Egyptian art as well the you don't really have freestanding sculpture the sculptures are attached to an architectural element and when you see an individual detached medieval sculpture and I think we have some examples upstairs in the medieval room they the backs are generally either unfinished or flattened or they have something like a some kind of a piece of hardware that you could use to attach them to a wall they don't think of sculpture that way they think they think of it something that's part of architecture something that is you know flat in that way and the other thing is that we start looking at elements of you know what is it this makes this more lifelike well for one thing the you don't really see those body under the clothing remember when I was showing you the Giotto I mentioned how that's one of the things that makes that lifelike instead you have these very patterned this very patties very patterned robes and the way that the feet just sort of point down they don't look like they're bearing anyway now with nickel Angelo it's something very very different he has and I may have mentioned this last time he has what we call contrapposto one thing of next door against another and that's really that idea that if you're putting more weight on one foot as he's doing here then the hip shifts up slightly and that's it's something which they knew about in ancient Greece and ancient Rome it had really been forgotten in the Middle Ages it comes back in the Renaissance but of course in the Middle Ages they had very different interests they had forgotten about these or they weren't interested in they really weren't interested maybe as the point I should say in this kind of thing because the idea was not to celebrate say a nude beautiful body because Michelangelo he's really going back to that classical idea of the perfect athlete you know it's david from the bible as this sort of gorgeous athletic body this is something that you could imagine existing in real time in real space although of course he's very very tall and he's very idealized he's more perfect than you can imagine a real person this is something that exists in sacred time and sacred space and I may have mentioned this last time that when you get to making things more my medic like this when you make them more lifelike you have certain things that you've gained obviously I mean it's an amazing work but there are things that you've lost and what you've lost here is you could say the spirituality which you have in the case of the of the medieval art but this is of course as I said a relative thing because then when you look at a broke David so this is the same character this is by Bernini this is one of these remarkable early sculptures that Bernini you know really carved himself to sort of show what he could do there it's a there's a whole group of these they're in the there's the Apollo and Daphne this David the Pluto and Persephone they're all just absolutely astounding and they're all in the the Borghese collection and Cardinal Borghese should be owning Borghese who was not a very nice person was one of Bernini's patrons when I said he wasn't very nice well he loved art and there was a certain baroque painter named to menechino who painted a painting of Diana and her nymphs bathing and the Cardinal wanted it and the artist didn't want to sell it so he simply put the artist in jail until he got his painting I mean as I've often said this is the history of art not the history of niceness but anyway the they function completely differently in regard to their relationship in space the David by Bernini has that kind of aggressive engagement of your space that in some ways is analogous to what I showed you with that Caravaggio Bacchus or that we saw last week with the Caravaggio st. Paul he's actually in the action of hurling the stone and you can see how he's concentrating this one looks so much more removed it doesn't really seem to have a narrative aspect it's really you could imagine David standing there and sort of looking off in the distance with his sling on his shoulder but he's not really engaged in action in the same way and so you could say that there is a level of mimesis a level of naturalism or realism here which really surpasses what you have in the mikkel Angelo and if you look at the details I mean look even as hair under his armpits and the way that he's sort of you know biting his his lips to get all of his energy to sling the stone now this is a somewhat it's very different this is somewhat unfair comparison because the nickel Angelo David is much much bigger and the way that these eyes are carved at and the width the hair is carved it really is done to accommodate the fact that you're going to be way down below so it's it's not completely a fair comparison but the very idea that this is really approximately a life-size figure you relate to it in a way that you wouldn't relate to with the Michelangelo which in some ways is something you contemplate from a distance it's a really different sort of thing altogether notice also the way that the hair is treated the way that Bernini used the drill to drill around the hair to make it really look like it's in tops that it's actually moving he was a great master at that I mean it said that he could be carved marble like butter and he was a incredible child prodigy I mean he was a young man when he did this but when he was a little boy he was already the greatest sculptor in Rome I mean it's an interesting kind of thing where you have a parent in this case his father Pietro Bernini who was a sculptor of not a great sculptor but you know it's sort of like the Picasso his father was an artist as well although Picasso is far they're really just painted pigeons that was his specialty but you know where you have a kind of jr who just completely overshadows the father in these in this case now the idea though of relativity is something that really comes across in a comparison like this one so you all know the little dancer i mean there's many cats of it I'm not sure whether this is the one from the MFA there's quite a few of them those casts were all made quite a bit later quite a bit after you know the time around 1880 when it was first made when it was first made - God created it and showed it in one of the impressionist exhibitions in a special box a like glass box that he had designed and in fact the first time it was supposed to be shown it wasn't quite ready the box was so apparently he just showed the box it's very strange it must've been very proud of it but when he showed this thing and they've tried to recreate this in these replicas because they really are replicas it's a bronze replica the original one was in colored wax and she had real hair like a real a wig of real hair she had ribbon in her hair which they have put in here on the bronze here she had a real - - a little skirt here and the real the original one also had real slippers now they've sort of approximated that in the the bronzes and so it looks it looks a little up in some ways a little otter or more sort of heterogeneous than perhaps the original one did but if you think about it in coloured wax now apparently it didn't fool your eye the way that a wax sculpture it like Madame Tussauds I mean those look like real people they're really sort of a little unmake you uncomfortable they're so realistic apparently it wasn't quite like that but it still really broke decorum it really broke tradition with being so realistic that you'd have a wig that you'd have a tutu you know slippers and all of this and not only that but she looked very very realistic and she was made a model not an actual little girl we actually know her name and everything now the way that people respond to this was very very negatively and one of the things that people said was that she's a vicious little girl and it's a strange thing to respond to a sculpture by their personality I mean think about you you don't go to the academia in Florence and look at the David and say oh my god is he stuck up you know it's just too funny kind of thing and it's sort of like you know if because they're so realistic then you begin to respond to them almost as if they were people now when you actually go upstairs and the impressionist galleries and look at the little dancer you know she's only about so high so she couldn't really be you know and let's she was some kind of little fairy princess or something she's not really you know doesn't fool you but still she's very realistic now if she's realistic what do you call this guy that's a work of sculpture called student by Duane Hanson now this one's from 1992 but he really was big in the 1970s at the same time that photo realist painting was big so in other words there's this taste for startling ly realist he's kind of a three-dimensional version now in the case of most artists like say Janet fish and Audrey flack as I mentioned you generally have some kind of photograph or a slide or something like that in his case he actually would use real people in other words you'd have a real person who looked like this who was used as the model for a cast and then from the cast he would make the figure out of polyurethane and then very very carefully and it took a lot of skill use a an aerosol brush to an airbrush the kind of brush that you would you say if you're painting a car and you don't want to you know have any brushstrokes and he would paint in the colors of the flash and then he would put clothes on them and give them accessories like this one with the book ie there's a one I often show my students which you know goes along with my poodle thing it's a woman with a poodle but I don't have that one to show you but in any case this is a good one too because it's a student you know they can kind of relate to that but I remember you know going to a retrospective of Dewayne Hansen at the Whitney Museum excuse me in the late 1970s and they just had plenty of these things laying out in the galleries and you know they were very realistic but I thought well you know I'm an art history grad student I'm not taking in by this yeah yeah but then I was taken in because there was a museum guard and I thought he was a real guard and he was I was just sort of taking a rest and leaning out the wall he was leaning against the wall he had the Whitney costume he had the badge and I went oh my gosh he's a statue and it was kind of creepy but you know the problem with this kind of art it's an example of what I call a one-liner it is pretty amazing the first time you see it would you really pay ten through the thousands of dollars to have this in your living room you know it's once you get it you get it in a way that you don't really have so much with the DES god the guy you sort of want to come back - I mean it's so interesting how he modeled the you know the the position that she's in and all of that this is sort of like a kind of reviewer you know virtuoso trick excuse me that is a little bit different now that kind of thing you know so it's really relative here but when you as I said you know with this response to sort of emotional response to the de God excuse me with the emotional response to the God that there's something about three-dimensional work that is sculpture that when it's so realistic you respond differently than you would to a realistic painting it's somehow in your face and in your space and it can be somewhat disquieting so look at this this is a doll and I'm just showing you half of the Daleks by this master doll maker Rio she Yoshida and it really it's a little frightening you know it just it's too realistic something is a little bit off here but if you think that's disquieting look at this this is called in bed by Ron whack and it looks like in so this is a gallery space this is the Brooklyn Museum and you may not you know you may think well this is a really odd thing it's so intimate I mean this woman is in bed she's so realistic but then look at the museum guard so she's giant so it's like the Gulliver's Travels you know it's just this absolutely immense a figure and there's something extremely uncomfortable about that especially because it's such an intimate kind of thing that somebody is in bed you know in a nightgown or something like that you're right in the middle of the museum there's also something in a way dehumanizing about it because she's so big that she becomes more like an object and even the way that what she is lying on I mean you could say well maybe it's a kind of thin you know a kind of IKEA mattress they don't give you a lot of mattress right or something like that but still it makes it look a little bit like it's an abstract thing you might find in a gallery you know which is really a strange kind of thing now this is of course another work that you know goes along with what I was talking about last time when I was showing you things that are very jarring and turn of scale like that dog that I showed you it looks like the dog this is biggest house and the cars you know that kind of thing now when we're talking about my nieces and naturalism and this whole thing about relativity you know it relates to photography in a kind of interesting way and this is a photograph I showed you briefly last time and I really showed it to you in the context of a point of view that somehow the point of view of the photographer W Eugene Smith very famous American photographer that somehow he was down there low down so that it made the figures bloom up but also made it looked like a kind of magical scene I mean the whole title the walk to Paradise Garden is if it's in this kind of little protected area almost like a kind of Garden of Eden now when photography and I mentioned this last time when photography was first developed in the 19th century there was really controversy about whether it was art like is this really art or is it just a kind of a device and there are artists who didn't really pursue it as an art I mean people like say a corbeil or a dellacroix who still used it as a kind of a helpful device they could have a photograph of a model for example and use that I also showed you last time that photograph of road and I mentioned you know as an example what we call pictorialism that was this movement around the turn of the 20th century where the photographers specifically wanted to make it look arty and you know with this kind of atmospheric sort of scrim or screen that it looks like you're looking at but this kind of photograph doesn't have anything like that it looks much more direct we don't know though by looking at it and I don't know enough about this photographer to really know how he worked but we don't know what went on in the darkroom in other words did he crop things did he change the lighting did he take many many of them and then pick the best one we don't know in other words they did involve choice in some ways and but we still there when you in a photograph the temptation is to say well this is the truth this is what the photographer actually saw now is we start getting into the 1970s the 1980s especially there's a lot of skepticism in the art world about the truth about how you can have what's called the innocent eye and that that's a term excuse me that sometimes used with an artist like Monet you know Monet had this famous statement that I mentioned I think perhaps last time when he was teaching an American artist whose name is Lila Cabot Perry he they were sitting down together he was teaching her how he paints and he said well you see that house over there don't think house think lozenges pig in other words don't think about what the thing is just just the way you see it now if you really paint that way and to some extent Monet did you could say that there's something innocent about it in a kind of direct transparent way but it's never really innocent the artist is going to make decisions and in Monet's case even though he wanted you to think that he had always painted just what was out there he especially when you start getting into the 1880s and beyond he would change things afterwards he would have unfinished paintings that he would complete in the studio one time he was asked by a critic you know where's your studio and he got really angry I don't have a studio I don't need one but of course that kind of thing really is a fiction and in the 1980s especially anything that claimed to be the truth began to be sort of get people's / up at least in the art world and you want to have something that sort of gave the lie to that so what you start seeing and here's an example from the early 1980s are photographs like this one it's called guarded future by Ellen Brooks and I remember seeing this photograph I seem to remember it was about so Biggums many years ago back around 82 I remember it was in one of the Whitney Biennial and being really struck by it I mean for one thing it's such a strange scene I mean this some kind of like rather sinister looking magician with his assistant and then this big ball that looks like a cue ball but it could also be a crystal ball against this bright red curtain something like this obviously is fake in other words it's clear that the photographer manipulated it that they took the little dolls and move them around and there's a name for that it's been called the directorial mode sort of like a director you know moves things around and this got to be really big around this time because it was a way of sort of saying see it's fake its fake and that what became like a big thing especially in the 1980s it but and it's a kind of you know it's a strange sort of thing because on the one hand it's saying that it sort of wants it both ways on the one hand it's saying well it's fake but it's also more real because these little dolls and the ball these are palpable things whereas this you know really looks like it's in some ways could belong in the imagination you know it's a different sort of thing altogether so it's it's an interesting kind of variation on that now there's a pair of terms that I like to contrast with my students and has to do with art that's deductive and art that's inductive and these are two examples I'm saying that the famous vitruvian man by Mick by Leonardo da Vinci which I'm sure many of you know is an example of deductive art and then this drawing by de God really drawing it's what we call an academy and academi the term comes from the Academy that is the art school the Ecole des Vosges are where this kind of drawing into God attended the school briefly that kind of drawing with the sort of meat and potatoes of what students did there they drew the male model and women weren't allowed in but that was you know which was a real handicap for women who wanted to be artists but that's what is what you're getting with de god now when you say inductive and deductive I mean I'm sure many of you know that from you know if you've studied logic and things like that and inductive that's more like what say a scientist would do you look at the facts out there I mean you do start with some kind of hypothesis but you look at the facts out there the your empirical data and then you make some kind of conclusion from that so that's inductive with deductive you're going in the opposite direction you're starting with some kind of theory or some kind of set thing and then you are getting things out there that fit into that thing now these terms are also relative because someone as I said you know even if you're doing something inductive if you're looking at the evidence out there you generally start with some kind of hypothesis which means you have some kind of idea of where you're starting I mean you want to keep an open mind so that if you come upon some phenomenon that just doesn't fit well then you're going to change that but there's also a deductive way of looking at things and the way that I imagine is is that in the case of the Digga it's a more inductive kind of approach in other words he's they're drawing the model he's looking at the model and it looks like this one really looks like a real person I mean I've never seen that person before represented anywhere else but there individuated features in other words it looks like the guy wasn't just doing a kind of a general image of the figured from he was really trying to get the way that this guy looked and really be pretty accurate a seemingly very accurate about the anatomy and everything else now with the with the Leonardo it's completely the opposite he starts with a concept he starts with this concept of the perfect perfectly proportioned body you know going back I guess to Vitruvius who was this ancient you know theorized or about architecture and proportions and what he comes up with is this first of all an idealized body but it's idealized especially in terms of its proportions so that the way that you have this circle and a square superimposed the man in his two different positions with his arms out like this in his arms out like that and with the legs you know together and then spread apart that they interact or they you know they are tangent with with these geometric forms in a way that's a very very specific very rigorous and the idea is that to have the to be able to do that with a figure then all of the the members the legs the torso the head everything they have to have certain kinds of proportions or it just won't work and it's kind of an interesting thing especially with the circle because in the Renaissance they had this kind of passion for circles they really thought some of people like Albert II for example the one who really publicized a perspective really thought that circles were divine that there was something just so amazing about this idea and he gave us proof of that that birds nests are circular see look what God is doing you know he's making circles so it's a kind of interesting sort of thing but what you have there is you're starting with this kind of rigorous idea and then you're taking a body now he had to look at lots of bodies nude bodies to know what they look like so that there is an element of induction in there but the basic sort of process is deductive now apparently you know in in Sherlock Holmes you know what I think it's you know his some it's Watson who would say brilliant deduction I think it's actually God he got it backwards it's actually brilliant induction because it's he's you know seen some clue of the crime and then he decides whodunit that really is much more of an induction than a deduction but anyway these terms are relative and it's a kind of thing that you know it's an interesting sort of thing that there are works of art that seem to be much more deductive like the one on the left or more inductive on the one on the right but it's a kind of I mean this is a pretty extreme example I want to show you another extreme example this time of you could say a deduction this is a work which is not the real work it's a replica of a very famous work by Marcel Duchamp called fountain and you can see that and I think I may have showed you this last time it was a you know work which it was just a urinal which he chose you know found somewhere he could have gone to a plumbing supply store he may have just found it somewhere and the fact that it's he didn't say that it was art he called it anti art but the idea that he chose this and then chose to show it in exhibition that in a way made it so that the choice was the thing that was really important here and so that it really had to do not at all with making something it's also an example of what we can called East skilling that is it didn't really take skill all he had to do was choose it and then write this fake name or mutt which I think I mentioned you know means a poverty of German armor and then the date it was really just a choice and he insisted that it had nothing to do with aesthetic pleasure or anything like that and you know he's the one who's his motto was reduced reduced reduced so he's really reducing the artistic process just to making a decision making a decision about something that really is absurd now in duchamp's lifetime he wasn't really that well-known he was this sort of bizarre complex Joker it wasn't until the late 1950s when there was a monograph about Marcel Duchamp that was written that his name really started to get out there I he was still alive then and he really by the time of the 1960s he had this huge reputation so now you know the urinal it you know as I said is just the replica if you could find the original one it would be almost priceless I mean it's hard to believe but he's that famous he's in all the you know the survey textbook his of art and in the 1960s there's a whole movement called conceptual art and here is an example on the left it's by an artist named Mel Bakker called meditation on a theorem of Pythagoras it's from the 1970s and this is just a shine on the page that's actually not it's really just a flat surface there and I can't actually tell whether it's done on the floor it looks like it's done on the floor or if they're actually attached on a wall I suspect it may be on the floor if and this is actually you may notice this is a different copy this is a different version of the the fountain it's it's I mean if you go back with sorry it looks different I mean look at where the holes are so someone else has come up with another one I mean just because I said the original doesn't exist but with conceptual art you have the concept being all-powerful in many ways so that what you have here if you saw a description you know when you go in the galleries and you have a especially say if you're looking at sculpture you have in the label the title and everything the you know the accession number and everything but you also have the materials so bronze marble wood whatever this one would say hazelnuts and chalk that aren't those are the materials so right away we're dealing with a rather aggressive kind of thing in terms of the fine art part of art in other words here is something that is at marble or isn't bronze or isn't you know oil on canvas or whatever it's hazelnuts and chalk and what he's done here is just as the title suggests he's made a right triangle and then he has taken hazelnuts and made little grids three grids a sort of parallel to each one of these sides and if you count the hazelnuts and I'm not very good at math but I did count them and did the math and a square plus B Square really does equal to you know C square in other words the sum of these two is equal to this total amount here so it's an interesting kind of exposition of this now when I was in college this artist Mel Bakker came to my college he was invited by my painting and design teacher whose name was Haim Steinbach who does some pretty far-out stuff but he invited Mel Bachman he was always interested my teacher in the cutting edge and so Mel Baca came and he talked about his work he didn't show us this one but he had some of his other things and one of the art history professors tried to kind of get him in a corner and get him to admit that his art only had to do with an idea in other words and he wouldn't he refused he said no the idea is important but so is the visual part the vision without the visual part the idea won't work now you could say it's a completely deductive work of art and that he's come up with this idea but the fact is that it has a certain kind of visual aspect and there are other examples of conceptual art some of you may know the work of Sala Witt who also would come up with instructions for something what you would end up with would be completely unexpected and often visually very beautiful so it's a it's an interesting kind of thing in that in that regard now you can also find a difference between say inductive and deductive women within the work of the same artist so this is a very early Picasso because it was about 15 when he painted that first communion you know if Picasso wanted to he could have you know made a good living being a kind of you know provincial genre painter and Spain know doing first communions and things like that but that clearly you know that that would have been more like what his father did in fact I believe this is his father in the scene but that's not what he wanted of course and he changed the course of art history for one thing by helping with with with his friend Georges Braque helping develop cubism and one of the stages of cubism as you can see here in this guitar from 1913 to Zenith Modern Art in New York is that he created a kind of art which doesn't seem to follow induction at all in other words this painting even though he didn't actually probably go there he probably used models and he may have gone to a church and you know really looked at the altar and the candle holders and things that candelabra and things like that this one he really started out with a bunch of scraps of paper and he may have had the the guitar in mind and he ended up making something that looks very playfully like a guitar so if you could imagine and it's also playful the way that he cut out newspaper so it has little words so if this is the sound hole that suggests to kind of whisper or chatter of sound no little words there that a little bit of texture it also looks a little bit like a woman and that's very typical of Cubism that one thing can look like another and you know maybe it's a woman in a kind of sexy outfit you know sort of tight-fitting outfit well that really comes to mind because one of the papers that he uses for you know pasting on here it's this Spanish you know newspaper here down at the bottom there is an ad for a certain factor Kasasa and if you read the ad he's a specialist in venereal disease and that's very typical of Picasso he loved raunchy jokes that he would put in things like that now if we go back a little earlier in the history of cubism just two years we see and I'm sorry it looks like my I forgot to label these but this is cold woman with a mandolin it's from 1910 it's a new museum modern art this one doesn't really you need any introduction you know who that is and the reason why I'm showing them together is that as wild as this looks you know that it's a figure whose broken down into planes of highly simplified I mean look at the eye the profile here and there also is the decision between space and figures in space that's been broken down so look what's going on with her elbow here it's beginning to merge with what looks like it's surrounding so these things there's no consistent light source it is bewildering if you try to you know it has the look of something that's illusionistic but if you you know in terms of the modeling in light and shade the Kuras grow but it's so inconsistent and the planes look like they interpenetrate that you can never really follow it so in other words it's deliberately ambiguous it's playful wild but at the same time the subject is very traditional it's like what you had with the Mona Lisa in other words it's a half-length portrait of a woman and even the fact that she's playing a musical instrument that's something that is a traditional kind of thing for example in the work of Koro who in 19th century artists who was actually quite respected around this time sometimes did women with mandolins but in any case and also just the way that the look there isn't much in the way of color here it's all in tone or value it's all light and shade now within the tones and the values these four colors the Browns and olive greens the blacks the Grays there is a great variety almost like you would have in an incredible you know rich richly tonal painting by say a Rembrandt or some of you like that but in terms of color is very restricted in terms of hue and that is a kind of you know control as it were in going into this very wild territory where all of you know the world is being remade as it were Picasso and Braque did this as well they don't want to have color as well or hue as another variable at this point they reintroduce it like when you saw the guitar later on now the interesting thing is that as strange as this looks and the way that it looks like you wouldn't really need a real model in fact he needed a model it was painted of we even know her name her name was Fannie telly a he had a model for this and she got bored she left and I'm done and it's like you know you're painting your little angles and stuff I'm out of here so he was left with an unfinished painting but the idea that he needed a model for it that's a really you could say an inductive aspect of something which otherwise seems deductive and Picasso was completely attached to the real world he didn't believe in abstract art or non objective art that is the kind of thing that an artist like a Ken did ski did you know where they have just shapes and lines and angles and triangles and things he didn't believe that was possible or valid and for all the revolutionary aspects of Picasso's work that in particular really makes him more like you know a 19th century artist now I'm gonna show you one more of these cubist paintings by Picasso this one is a portrait by Ambrose Villard who was an art dealer and here he is again shown by Renoir and I'm showing you that because of course you know there's no question that the Renoir looks more lifelike but this face it really looks like Ambrose Boulard like he really captured him as a kind of a caricaturist would and you could say that the Renoir is actually taking great liberties as well because it has the kind of sweetness I mean this guy wasn't sweet I mean Villard was the kind of guy who you know apparently was you know really you know kind of hard and character who you need to bite the court or that you get you know this sort of thing but he makes him look so sweet and Renoir like you know and so that's a kind of that's an interesting kind of you could say abstraction now another thing that I like to talk about in this course is collecting and musi ology and I couldn't resist bringing in mrs. Gardner you know this work we're neighbors here and of course the the one of the the favorite views of the Gardner Museum and the reason why I'm showing you the Gardner is that it has this aspect that it is a private collection and that's a really different sort of museum than we have at the MFA in the MFA you can see that there's plenty of works here that have family names on them or you know people who gave them to the museum or who helped or who bought them for the museum but this is very different this was her collection her house and when she died everything had to stay the same so it's as if the whole place is stuck in amber its mrs. Gardiner's memory forever I mean she obviously had a very large ego I mean apparently she was a complete control freak in terms of building this place and the reason why I picked this view the the Titian room because it really has her favorite painting the rape of Europa by Titian that Bernard Berenson who was her art advisor you know kind of got for her found but the thing that's so interesting and there's a North Australian name and he done a who's written about this very eloquently that what you see below it this pattern cloth well that's mrs. Gardiner's favorite dress that's her it's a worth gown so she wanted her favorite painting shown above her favorite drafts so this is something that you just wouldn't have at the MFA I mean it's just a completely different kind of thing altogether and of course you know when they did the the the refurbishment at the the the renovation they didn't really change this much at all I mean they change with the entrances and they made a whole new elaborate entrance with a cap of tea you know with a dionyse dining room and a you know restaurant and a place for smaller exhibitions but most of it is just an entryway everything else just stayed the same you also get the strange kind of thing in this we also have at the MFA because we have you know in the medieval gallery it looks like a chapel here's the chapel in the Gardner Museum where it's not a religious institution it's really these religious things taken from various places put together as art somebody told me that once the guards at the Gardner who are you know since the gras burry they're like very jumpy anyway but apparently somebody was praying they wouldn't move and they were just praying there at the chapel and they didn't know what to do with them because they're kind of blocking you know the traffic pattern and you know it's interesting kind of predicament now in the down on the first floor here one of my favorite galleries at the MFA is the Clint's comer it's this little gallery and the term quince comer means art chamber another term sort of a synonym is a wunderkammer that is a kind of chamber of wonders here's a 17th century painting of one of these quince commerce and as you if you've been to that wonderful gallery at the MFA you know with a little mechanical Diana on a horse and everything I mean sorry on a deer snag you know you know you'll know this but what you have and these are really the first museums it's kind of the beginning of the museum you have not only works of art like paintings and sculpture like your paintings but you also have wonders like beautiful Nautilus shells Carl or look at this cabinet from a quints camera this is a painting in the Museum in Hamburg for again from the 17th century by a German artist a art hence and it has the kinds of virtuosic objects you know beautiful carvings exquisite about rich materials that you might have in the quinces camera here and so that's really how museums started it wasn't just art that it was kind of old things that were wondrous that you brought together now that's very different from a modern museum and this is one of the first great museums of course the loo and the idea for it really as a public museum really came about in the French Revolution but it was really under Napoleon that it really ballooned and for Napoleon it became a propaganda machine like a lot of other things in his regime it was a way to show off the art that his armies had plundered from the countries that he had conquered and here's a print from that time here is Napoleon showing off the Apollo Belvedere a which is now back where it really belongs which is in the Vatican - these amazed Wow you know on to this entourage here so that was really a kind of you know you know gesture like look what I had conquered now there also is the whole issue of museums as buildings and museums as visiting gallery experiences so here's the Guggenheim and you can imagine I mean you can tell this is an old photograph you can imagine in the 1950s when this was built I mean it just must have blown people away but also you know Wright didn't really like cities and so it's kind of coming it snows at the rest of Manhattan it's an extraordinary building I mean you go inside it I mean the building itself in a way is a work of art that in some ways overwhelms the other art that you see in it to some extent I mean there's some very great things in in the in the Guggenheim but as you can see in this photo and in this one as well as you know I'm sure most of you have been there you don't get to see the art unless you go around those those gallery those walkways and I have for one find them really uncomfortable there's one place where you take a false step and I've heard that when they were building this the concrete was being poured from the top at the same time as the bottom and they were a little off when they met the other thing is that if you try to use the the bathroom at least the men's room downstairs it's about the size of a closet he apparently didn't want bathrooms like why do you need a bathroom at the Museum you know it's about art but the city had other ideas there's also the whole concept of connoisseurship which has to do for one thing with quality and art and also telling you know whether something belong really was from that artist was it by an assistant or was it a fake and here's a these are two images that come from a work called quality and art by jakob rosenberg who was a great art historian and it's a comparison between a Rubens and a comprar biblia cup Jordans we don't really know who did this but it could have been by him who is a contemporary Flemish artist so to 17th century Flemish artists and the longer you look at them you realize somehow that this one is the better drawing that it has more subtlety it brings out that the modeling this is much more plain it's you know this one certainly has a lot of information and it's not a bad drawing but there's something that really conveys the holiness of the Virgin there it really is a very different kind of thing much more articulated and at the same time when we are connoisseurs of drawings we have to look for different kinds of things in different drawings so remember I showed you the kathe Kollwitz which has that marvelous expressive passage with the drawing and you know it goes so well with a subject that she's showing herself drawing but it's also the act of drawing well what you enjoy in a drawing like this is very different from what you would enjoy in this beautiful drawing by AG we're all the teaser cross the I's are dotted and it's all idealize it's supposed to be more beautiful and more smooth and untroubled than anything that you could actually imagine your life so you can be a connoisseur of both but you're gonna look for different things just like you're gonna look for different things in different kinds of food and if you're talking about prints like with Rembrandt well then you even have different states so state number two the very famous print the three crosses state number three look how different it is and there's also state number one I think there may be a four as well and this was a great money-making approach because if you have collectors who want these they may just buy all of them because they want they want to have all the different states so that's a really great thing but connoisseurs also spot fakes and here is a fake Van Gogh on the side and a real van Gogh and if you didn't have if you hadn't immersed yourself in drawings like this real and over here this beautiful drawing of irises outside aural you might be fooled by this because it looks kind of like a van Gogh the more you look at it you realize there's a lot of empty space here and all the little dabs and marks even though they look a little bit like they're in the style of ENGO are kind of the same it's boring in other words whereas this is so rich and varied and also the irises look like real irises they really are very specific and that's very typical of what van Gogh did there's also the question of you know what is art and what is an art I mean you can have a well designed industrial thing like this Pepsi bottle that actually you know thought went into just like it went into the logo but that is nothing like this beautiful Art Nouveau Vaz by gallais which you know has this you know you can imagine you put flowers in it well it has flowers like this beautiful iris but also the way it gets darker and bluer down at the bottom is like the water that you might put in the vos so it's like a whole landscape there also is an interesting kind of situation for connoisseurship with folk art and we have you know folk art here in the muse but here is a very famous example by Edward Hicks from the 1830s called the peaceable kingdom so when you're looking at something like this I mean this painting is worth a fortune but it looks like it's by someone who wasn't really trained but that's part of the charm right and that's part of the charm also that made Grandma Moses so famous so here she is in 1949 and she did paintings like this one balloon I mean it really is charming and I you know she was very famous and had this appeal that somehow her paintings really told you something about American you know rural America that it was somehow unspoiled that it had a kind of simplicity kind of like you know quilts and things like that it really or old weather vanes it had that kind of charm but you also have artists like the Colombian artist Fernando Botero like this hysterically funny presidential family look at this cat they all look like they need to lose a little weight but but taro when you look at him he looks kind of naive like you know say you know one of these other artists that I showed you but he's very very sophisticated he knows exactly what he's doing to the point of showing himself in the position that Velazquez and Goya are in and very famous painting so it's really a kind of you know very sophisticated thing another thing to think about is why do people destroy art like for example these Protestant fanatics who are pulling down a statuary in a Dutch Church in the set here in this painting of the 17th century to make the church look more like this this is a Dutch Protestant Church you know from a 17th century painting by Emanuel Davitt very plain very simple and sometimes this is done enormous violence for example when this huge Buddha was destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 in Afghanistan and there's a long history of this this is a very a moving thing to look at it's a head of one of the kings of Judah that was on the facade of Notre Dame in Paris they were very large about nine-foot statues and during French Revolution they were ripped down and they thought by the way they thought they were French kings and that was they were you know they hated the monarchy but they also were doing violence to the church because it was a you know on the church and in the 1970s they were doing construction in Paris somewhere in the code shows they'd done time and they dug them up they were like a whole group of these heads so now they're in the clooney museum you know where the unicorn tapestries are and then there's another kind of thing this is really funny but it's a place in Gerudo Lithuania called Stalin world almost like a theme park where they basically have gathered these absolutely hideous you know Soviet statues and put them together as a kind of goofy thing almost like you know putting them in their place and you know it's a really interesting sort of phenomenon there and so when we're talking about the French Revolution when we're talking about the the Protestant Reformation you were really talking about vandalism but this is another kind of something that you could call vandalism at least that's what James Beck who is a very eminent renaissance scholar from Columbia I don't know he's still there but he was furious when they restored the Sistine Chapel so this is one of the symbols in the Sistine Chapel and you can imagine you know before the restoration he or she is afterwards most people like this much more and I mean clearly there were centuries of candles and smoke and everything but he said this is vandalism that you've made it look like Disney and that's a real decision what do you do when you clean works of art would anyone ever clean the Mona Lisa for example because we have a report from around the time that she was painted that she had rosy cheeks but you know that would really be like an act of vandalism there also are interesting examples where the destruction of a work of art becomes the work of art so this is Robert Rauschenberg erase de Kooning where he asked de Kooning who was such a superstar at the time and everyone wanted to be de Cunha so in a way Rauschenberg wanted to get out from under the weight of de Kooning by erasing one of his are his pictures and he said this was actually a very difficult work to make because it was so so hard to erase there also are artists who really make a their art has to do with criticizing the art world criticizing museum so here are the famous gorilla girls who really publicized you know they dressed like gorillas so you don't know who they are they all take the names of famous art at women artists like Frida Kahlo for example oh but they there are you know really poster art it really has to do with publicizing things that are unfair about the art world now this grande odalisque and I'm showing you this is not actually the one here this is the black and white the great the koozai one which is in the Metropolitan Museum this one's in blue but they're basically the same picture but you know this whole idea that you know you have to be naked to get into the museum and there's another artist who does this pants haka where it becomes his attack on the museum is an artwork so Metro mobility an you have something that looks like the cornice of the mat here and then down at the bottom a kind of travesty of one of their put you know flag something that's supported by mobile but here they are attacking the sponsor attacking mobile and you know that but the irony is that something like this becomes a work of art and you know actually is valued and you know has a price tag on it there also is the irony or paradox of censorship so here's a really beautiful photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe called Thomas and it really goes in with something I'll talk about next year like the difference between a nude and something that's naked I mean that's really you probably would say it's nude cuz it just says so already an aesthetic but in 1989 there was this controversial exhibition in DC that had some much more explicit photos than this and you know Jesse Helms flew off the handle and you know with you know National Endowment of the Arts money and things like that so the irony is that it made Matt for Balaam were famous and he already was famous but there were other artists who you know really have benefited in terms of their careers there's also the question of when what do you do when there's a new very big or even say obtrusive work of art that some people hate do you take it down well that's what people that's how people responded many of them many cultivated people responded to the Eiffel Tower that it was a big piece of junk like let's take it down right away and you can't imagine that so sometimes in the case of the Eiffel Tower with time things become you could say great works of art and they become sort of you know preserved now that didn't happen with tilted art that's worked by Richard Serra which was in a plaza in New York and a lot of the people there who ate their lunch by this really felt threatened by it and it was taken down and there was a big court case he the there was an offer to put it up again at storm King Art Center of sculpture garden on the Hudson and he said oh no that's ridiculous because it was designed for this place it's a very minimal a piece that interacts with the space and he was right about that and at the same time even though in the art world back then the correct and sort of politically correct thing to do was to be on the sculpture side I was actually on the other people side because I felt well they have a right to you know they don't really want to eat lunch next to this thing that they think it's gonna sort of fall down on them and in New York you don't really want big walls so you don't know what's on the other side there's also the question of things that are famous because they're famous for example the Mona Lisa you know or you know the kinds of incredible prices that you have you know so that this Picasso the boy with the pipe you know went for 104 million but that was surpassed by the Basquiat untitled the skull 110 point five million I mean it's just unbelievable what is it that makes these things command that kind of money I mean it's basically whatever people will pay and what they have paid and the irony is that an artist like Joseph boys who is really a German artist who was a cult figure in the 1960s and 70s who really made his whole work about sort of you know a kind of hostile thing towards the the commercial art world to capitalism and things like that so he didn't really make works that were supposed to be permanent work they were what he called his acciones his sort of performance pieces like this strange one how to explain pictures to a dead hare where he's talking to this hare well one of the things that resulted from one of these performances was the fat chair really very powerful if you think about it very disturbing this fat sort of human presence on the chair but the thing is there's two fat chairs there's this one which is recognized as the fat chair and then there's someone else who owns another one who claims that it was done at the same time and the difference has to do with millions of dollars so it's a it's an interesting thing how things become works of art you know almost in spite of themselves well you may wonder why is Piero Manzoni who was a 60s Italian artist why is he in a bathroom what is he holding and why is he smiling he's only one of these it's called artist and it was a project that he did where he supposedly put his own poop in cans and then labeled it signed it and you can see there's a whole edition of 90 and charged a fortune for them I think they were supposed to be their weight in gold or something like this nobody really knows what's inside them no one's ever tried to there also are cases like here's Duchamp again where somebody does a kind of aggressive work relating to a famous work of art and this is what he called an assisted ready-made he took a reproduction of the mona lisa drew a mustache and bjorn on it and then wrote the letters l h o oq which don't mean anything and he'll english but if you say them in french it's extremely obscene it's sort of like she has hot pants but it's a little worse than that so you know it's a kind of aggressive thing there are also copies that have to do with great respect for example that rape of Europa that I showed you earlier was copied by Rubens in a really knockout painting in the Prado when I saw this I thought oh my gosh I like looking at this so much more than I like the one in the gardener or you have sort of the mattock things like this where MANET you know clearly he did a study of this famous Venus of Urbino and when he did a modern prostitute or a modern woman clearly you know she's sort of a modern Love goddess here but he really was both making a kind of a joke but being respectful at the same time wanting to be thought of as a great master like like Titian or finally we have this remarkable pair of images aged a beautiful Japanese print by hero Shiva which which the van Gogh copied over here and then added all of this what looks like Japanese script but which really may just be fake but completely changed it in other words it doesn't really look like a print anymore it's got that thick impasto they changed the colors he loved Japanese art so he was being very respectful but he was bringing his own creativity into this so next time we'll see some more creative things and I hope you can enjoy me that you can join me [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Views: 6,058

Rating: 4.9120879 out of 5

Keywords: Museum, lecture, course, art, fine art

Id: bc1NEmLSD_U

Length: 86min 15sec (5175 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 03 2020