Now I’ve got this real phat attitude because of all the hype
The American painter Barnett Newman once said that an artist gets from aesthetics what a bird gets from ornithology—nothing. (…)
There are things in our context that we readily recognize to be art because they are sufficiently like it in relevant respects—even though they may not “look like art” in every respect. What is this form of life in which this likeness can be seen? (…)
The notion that “vision itself has its history,” to use the words of Heinrich Wölfflin, has been one of the longest-lasting and deepest- seated principles of art history, even if it has sometimes been somewhat subterranean.
{ Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture | Continue reading | PDF }
photo { Richard Ross, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, 1986 }
