You raise a serious question about art with your Mona Lisa video.

1. You know, as your painting shows us, it's not that impossible to make your own Mona Lisa given enough effort and some artistic talent. Certainly the painting can be reproduced. Yet we regard da Vinci as one of the greatest artistic geniuses of all time. Why? Because of the stylistic innovations, and because of the psychological complexity, from what I recall. But there have been plenty of stylistic innovations in modern art, and I happen to think most of them kind of suck, and I think a lot of people on this blog agree with me, probably because of the beauty issue. But a reproduction of da Vinci isn't considered art, whereas the Mona Lisa is. But (assuming a perfect reproduction, which is at least theoretically possible) they're the same painting and hence each is as beautiful as the other. So it's not just beauty, and not just ideas. Some combination thereof?

2. BTW, has it occurred to you that if beauty grows out of the human condition, and the human condition is biologically determined, then we have a way out of the modern art trap ('my blank canvas is beautiful if you understand the ideas behind it') and the problem of some pieces of art producing a universal response? We can all relate to the tender figure of Madonna and Child because most of us, as humans, had a mother who took care of us and hence the painting resonates with us in a way that a blank canvas cannot.

What do you think?

Posted by: SFG on April 21, 2007 6:54 PM

I'm not sure that Robert Nagle is at all wrong in his regard for sitcoms. I may be getting fanciful in my old age, but it seems to me that any work of art in a repetitive format--a situation comedy or even a situation drama--is presenting a vision of utopia. The strongest characteristic of ordinary reality is its quality of "once-throughness," whereas a work of art in a repetitive format suggests reincarnation or Nietzsche's eternal recurrence--in either case a transcendant mystical state brought on by repetition with variations.

Hmm, the sitcom as a religious symbol...or gateway...like the spiral of shamanism. I wonder...

Posted by: friedrich von Blowhard on April 24, 2007 1:08 AM






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