Art and the Homeless

I have been introduced to Michel Houellebecq upon reading his book Interventions 2020 (Polity 2022). I have come to certain conclusions of a political nature as a result. Both left and right agree democracy is the best form of government. The difference is, a conservative French critic of culture is a loyal citizen with aristocratic tastes. The leftist complement is a loyal citizen with plebeian tastes. The left doesn't consider culture worth dying for. Pop culture is tolerated by the left. It is a distraction from the social agenda. Since anything aristocratic (under the Republic) is officially disdained, conservative critics must be content deriding what is tolerated. What is tolerated is bourgeois Pop culture.  The right doesn't oppose democratic culture because it is the right of every citizen. The right opposes the cheapening of culture by democracy. Price is the measure of everything. If it isn't in a museum it is, by default, for sale. Artists are as much at fault a...

What Pythagoras did for music, by giving it a mathematical basis, could be said to have been done for painting by Paolo Uccello, and other Renaissance artists, with the discovery of optical perspective. Perspective in general has to do with “point of view” -literally so, with artistic perspective. To be unambiguous, artistic perspective is linear perspective, as in "lines of a design drawing." It is a snapshot, or visual moment, as the painter sees it. To draw a perspective drawing involves the use of a straight edge or ruler but, be it noted, not for measurement -unlike Pythagorean intervals, which are all about measurement -of the lengths of the strings of a harp, for instance. When we consider lines it is straight lines that we take into consideration. A “line” is implicitly straight. The discovery by Pythagoras of the mathematical intervals was likely made upon string instruments, the strings of which are always stretched tight. The musical staff of modern musical notati...

I wish to dispel the notion that a work of art originates in the mind of the artist. The occasion for this opinion was a recent re-reading of St. Anselm's Ontological Argument. My memory of the famous debate was vague and I wanted to review the facts. Indeed, those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. There are precedents for Anselm's Ontological Argument, but one which hasn't been discussed (as far as I know), is the myth of Athena's birth from the cracked skull of Zeus. This highly improbable occurrence is taken as god-given grounds for the emergence of expressed thought. Anselm offers, as metaphor, the painter who conceives the painting in his head before making it manifest on canvas.  Thus, the Ontological Argument. To state the metaphysical dilemma once again, is reality first an idea, or is the idea impressed upon the mind from without? We know where Anselm stands. I argue this conundrum (as old as the Vedas) is, as far as artists are concerned a tired,...