On Novelty.
Let me hear no more of that absurd maxim: "We need the new, we need to follow our century, everything is changed." Sophistry--all of that! Does nature change, do the light and air change, have the passions of the human heart changed since the time of Homer? "We must follow our century": but suppose my century is wrong. Because my neighbor does evil, am I therefore obliged to do it also? Because virtue, as also beauty, can be misunderstood by you, have I in turn got to misunderstand it? Shall I be compelled to imitate you!
-Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
-Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Labels: thoughts
posted by Nate Mecham at 4:04 PM
5 Comments:
I shall not! Damn, damn, damn that absurd maxim! Furthermore, Damn all absurd maxims!
Seriously though, he asks a string of rhetorical questions, with at least one of which I can take issue, "have the passions of the human heart changed since the time of Homer?"
Perhaps not. But the framework from which the human heart looks out on its world and relates to it -- that probably has changed. So relationships and events and feelings and ideas mean different things to us now than they may have meant then. In that sense, I believe things have changed. At least somewhat -- I can't know for sure because I live now and didn't then.
That question was rhetorical, dammit!
Beauty, like truth, is relative to the time when one lives and to the individual who can grasp it.
-Gustave Courbet
Both this quote and the main post are from my art readings text, and certainly much could be said to disagree or agree with either position. The point I think Ingres is trying to make is that new for the sake of new isn't enough. Just as we shouldn't "follow our century" in trendy interpretations of beauty and virtue, we shouldn't accept the past interpretations as correct simply because they are traditional.
Perhaps Ingres is also suggesting that there is a certain human level in which we all can experience things like art and virtue and beauty in general. A timeless standard.
Genius is always above the age
-William Blake
I will withhold a final judgment on the timelessness of art for now... but I am prepared to accept Blake's statement with some modifications (which I don't want to write out now).
Another view:
Pictures aren't made out of doctrines.
-Monet
Monet said this in response to the outrage the impressionist movement caused among traditionalists. Maybe nailing things down isn't going to help us do anything but become dogmatic.
perfect, nate. perfect.
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