h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I partly share that perception. With Freud, the perv factor is, maybe, Something To Be Got Over.

But in fairness...isn't he equally pervy about men?
http://www.uleth.ca/artgallery/images/Favorite%20things/largeimages/Freud.jpg

And what's the difference between him and Jenny Saville? There are some objective similarities, you'd agree?
http://www.csudh.edu/dearhabermas/saville01.jpg
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article3728149.ece

Are women allowed to be pervy about women?

A minefield of an area, maybe...and I certainly don't think that Freud is trying to say anything about equality or sexual objectification.

Picasso...also, of course, a bit of a perv and far from decent in his dealings with women.

Effers and I recently discussed this Spencer:

>>http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/pharos/images/collection_images/20th/PD966-1963/PD966-1963_SE.jpg

I love it. She hates it. I totally agree that it's pervy. But what I see in it is that Spencer is showing herself as pathetic. As - literally - a w@nker.

What I have against Freud - there's certainly something great about him and his 'celebration' of the human body, whether beautiful or ugly. However...tere's a bit of a nasty, unequal power relationship between him and his sitters, is there not? You can't Imagine him submitting himself in the way he requires them to do. You can't imagine him putting himself in his portrait in quite the way Spencer did.

This was influenced by Spencer:
http://www.nysun.com/blogs/auctions/pics/large/22.jpg

Who do we reckon is in charge in this relationship?

Oi! Mods! Please review your deletion. It was quite a good post, I thought.

Was it because I linked to some fairly explicit nudes? I do hope not! I mean...Lucian Freud? Jenny Saville?

Ed,

"But I do, strangely, have an amazing sense of direction. (My theory is that, like pigeons, I have magnes in my sinuses)."

It's not impossible actually, search for 'human magnetoreception' and you'll find some interesting things about it.

Ays - I did know that.

In a new place, once I orient myself (usually by finding the Pole Star) I can generally point to North thereafter. However...when it breaks down - a combination of tiredness and too many twists and turns - I get totally disoriented.

Moss only grows on the North side of a tree, I've been told.

('course Effers wouldn't like Freud. It's the kind of stuff Chelsea fans go for. )

>>Moss only grows on the North side of a tree, I've been told.

Or, at least, grows slightly more - and if it's only on one side, that will be the North. Because that's the cold, damp side. (In the Northern hemisphere)

And you can make a fire by rubbing two Boy Scouts together. It can be an in tents experience.

Well of course we Arsenal fans are all post modernists....

>> ...the pinnacle of sculpture is traditionally held to be Greek Classicism. All perfect proportions...<<

And it was recently demonstrated that these were mostly body casts of actual bodies and faces. The proof apparently is in the casting of the feet in a way a sculptor could never achieve, like on the bottoms.

~jwf~

Well, in response to the getting a buzz from a plain blue painting thing: The way I've always seen this is to do with the effects of homogenous fields on the way the brain percieves space. They kind of force it to make up ideas of space as it starts asking for it's blanky if there don't appear to be any. You can experiment with this easily at home and I, at least, find it highly interesting. Get a piece of white paper, cut a square out of it, hold it up to the sky on a clear day (dusk or dawn for the nicest colours) and you will percieve the area of sky with in the square to be the same distance away as the paper. There's a weird duality of sensory cognition here to be played with, something I've done quite a bit of to various very, very strong physical and emotional effect. Upto and including dizzyness, fear, a multitude of different optical illusions (the favourite is when I made one homogenous field within another, there was no horizon, implied or otherwise, in this space and the result was that people would start swaying due to this lack, when they blinked, unaware they were swaying the imbedded field appeared to jump around in turn making them pull a whitey) vomiting, weeping and intense "religous" experiences. Buzzing is easy.

See, a_a_e...there's lots of ways of looking at art, aren't there...including the putely psychological/mechanical. (For what is psychology but the mechanics of the brain?)

A good place to start with all that is Ernst Gombrich's classic wprks, such as 'Art and Illusion'.
http://www.gombrich.co.uk/

Squiggles:

More detail, please, on the casting of Greek statues. Personally...I'm initially sceptical about the ancients' ability to cat narble, which would have to count as a Lost Art, but I'd be delighted to be educated Plus...I somewhat doubt that any real woman could have quite as perfect an arse as Lely's Venus:
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/gr/m/marble_statue_of_aphrodite.aspx

(I'm still looking, though. The search is part of the fun. )

cat narble? cast marble! S'late.

And it's only Monday!

Carroll would be proud.

"To suggest is to create - to describe is to destroy." Robert Doisneau.

What do you think of this?

http://hantsnet.co.uk/antonygormley/domainfield.html

"...To describe is destroy"

I usually read the introduction after reading the whole book, specially if it's a novel, for 2 reasons:

1) some literary critics have a tendency to rip excesively the story.
2) some critics have a tendency to tell people what are they going to feel on reading the book


about painting... I haven't been exposed to erudites critics so much, can't tell about their "destruction". But I love to know tasty details* about the process or something alike,
I don't like too many valorative adjetives though.

My way of looking at Greco's paintings changed when I knew about his ocular condition.

Oh, everyone likes Gormley, don't they? This is near where I was brought up (and also Honest Iago) Like...a couple of hundred yards away, just over the marina and sea wall:

A32779182

>>"...To describe is destroy"

Possibly. But isn't there a difference between 'decribing' and 'talking about'? A defy you to look at my posts here and find anything that sounds even remotely like a description.

In fact...I'd go further. If people like pictures on the basis of 'That's a pretty vase of flowers'...then *that's* a descriptive way of looking at a picture. It misses the whole point.

As did you. It was a quote from a photographer about *doing* art, not appreciating it.

Oh good grief. The Mods haven't yet given me the courtesy of an explanation as to why one of my posts was Yikesed. I assume the links were considered pornographic (they weren't), so you'll have to google.

I said I somewhat shared Effer's view that Lucian Freud is Pervy about women. (I guess he takes after his grandad).

But I also said that, in fairness he is equally perny about men and I linked to a painting that comes up if you do a Google search for 'Lucian Freud' (the one in the middle of the naked guy, showing his knob, orange background)

I also compared and contrasted his 'Benefits Addvisor Sleeping' (qv) to the tryptich you see when you google 'jenny saville', pointed out the prima facie similarities and asked if women are allowed to be pervy.

(Jaysus! They'll probably Yikes it for 'prima facie' now.)

I didn't mention...but it occurs to me now:

Jack Vettriano, as well as his godawful 'Singing Butler' type shite also paints a lot of godawful soft porn. For examples, google image search him. (Although you will not find this life-enhancing). I can't see the particular ones I'm thinking of wghere he likes to show a semi dressed woman showing off one , but compare and contrast Vettriano's 'Bye Bye Baby' (qv) to Freud's 'Girl with a white dog' (qv)