Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the essential role that landscape plays in American painting, similar to how sex and psychoanalysis influence American literature.
Robert Hughes compares the significance of landscape in American painting to the themes of sex and psychoanalysis in the American novel. This analogy suggests that just as these complex and often taboo subjects shape the narrative and character development in literature, the depiction of landscape is crucial in capturing the essence of American identity and experience in visual art.
In practice
During an art lecture, this quote can be used to spark a discussion about the importance of landscape in visual storytelling.
Essentially, perspective is a form of abstraction. It simplifies the relationship between eye, brain and object. It is an ideal view, imagined as being seen by a one-eyed, motionless person who is clearly detached from what he sees. It makes a God of the spectator, who becomes the person on whom the whole world converges, the Unmoved Onlooker.
It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say 'this saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian'. Specific books, perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and the artists of the 1920's is that they they thought such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was a certain naivete that made them think so. But it is certainly our loss that we cannot.
Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius.
What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?
What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.
The greater the artist, the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.
The words come. Usually, it's a long time before they come. And then when they start to come, it doesn't take so long for it to be finished. It takes a long time to begin. And then it sort of gets finished.
It is enough for a poet to be the guilty conscience of his age.
But I really resist categories β that naming is a closing down of meaning. Women's art, political art β those categorisations perpetuate a certain kind of marginality which I'm resistant to. But I absolutely define myself as a feminist.
A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent.
I like so many different kinds of music that I've never allowed myself the limitations of one particular range.
By definition, poetry works with qualities and dynamics that mainstream society is reluctant to face head-on. It's an interesting phenomenon that by necessity, poetry is just below the radar.
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