Someone could write a book. The relation of Florence to Venice, to modernity.  Titian admitted he couldn't compete with Florentine facility; he had to do something else. But Picasso's best painting is an anti-formalist clusterfuck that works. Panofsky said he didn't use color plates in his book on Titian because they would only be an insult. The plates “were made from the best available originals and are all in black and white, not in spite but because of the fact that Titian was the greatest ‘colorist’ who ever lived.” And he doubted the attribution  of The Flaying of Marsyas.  Picasso said "when I don't have red, I use blue."

All repeats, but I'd never put the images side by side.

The ideal of Modernism was that it was a sort of return to the Renaissance, but the Renaissance was a loosening of rules, while Modernism was a closing down. Gursky’s nihilism begins in Seurat. To see Les Demoiselles d’Avignon as the high-point of 20th century painting is to imagine a century beginning with the Carracci and Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas and fading into mannerism. The idealism of Modernism is always the idealism of a church, or the equally strict, fearful, ironic mockery of the same church.

old and new "Behind the chiliasm..." etc.

It is from this ambivalent conception of humanitas that humanism was born. It is not so much a movement as an attitude which can be defined as the conviction of the dignity of man, based on both the insistence on human values (rationality and freedom) and the acceptance of human limitations (fallibility and frailty); from this two postulates result responsibility and tolerance.

Small wonder that this attitude has been attacked frorn two opposite camps whose common aversion to the ideas of responsibility and tolerance has recently aligned them in a united front. Entrenched in one of these camps are those who deny human values: the determinists, whether they believe in divine, physical or social predestination, the authoritarians, and those "insectolatrists" who profess the all-importance of the hive, whether the hive be called group, class, nation or race. In the other camp are those who deny human limitations in favor of some sort of intellectual or political libertinism, such as aestheticists, vitalists, intuitionists and hero-worshipers. From the point of view of determinism, the humanist is either a lost soul or an ideologist. From the point of view of authoritarianism, he is either a heretic or a revolutionary (or a counterrevolutionary). From the point of view of "insectolatry," he is a useless individualist. And from the point of view of libertinism he is a timid bourgeois.

Michael Fried, 2008, leading from the rear. 

I have always liked photography, and in a low-key way I was always interested in it. I bough t a Berenice Abbott print of an Atget bedroom at the Willard Gallery in New York City more than thirty years ago, and have lived for a long time with photographs by Evans, Baldus, Frith, and O'Sullivan (a particular favorite). Over the years, too, I attended numerous exhibitions of photography, though rarely with the sense of urgency that I felt with respect to exhibitions of modern painting or sculpture. But until recently I did not have any strong intuitions about photography, and without such an intuition - some sort of epiphany, real or imagined - I have never been motivated to write on anything. Then several things happened. First, I got to know James Welling and his work because friends in Baltimore walked into his first show at Metro Pictures and bought several of the "Diary" photographs; soon they became close to him. l found that I liked his photographs enormously, and we, too, became friends . And then about ten years ago, by sheer chance, I met Jeff Wall at the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam and discovered that, to put it mildly, we were interested in many of the same pictorial issues. I had been aware of Wall's work for years and had even had an inkling of our shared concerns, but meeting him and exchanging thoughts was galvanizing for me. From that moment on I started looking seriously at recent photography, a process greatly aided by major exhibitions of work by figures such as Welling, Wall, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Thomas Demand, Rineke Dijkstra, Candida Hofer, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Luc Delahaye, among others. To my surprise I fairly quickly became gripped by the though that all that work, and much else besides, hung together artistically in ways that it seemed to me no one else writing about the topic had quite recognized. At that point, I began drafting what I hoped would be a short book on recent art photography that would convey the gist of my thinking. Pretty soon, though, it became clear that no such short book was in the cards. Rather, if I wanted to do justice to my subject, I would have to deal with the work of more than fifteen photographers(and, it turned out, video and filmmakers) in sufficient detail to convey a sense of what each was up to and at the same time to allow the connections I saw among their individual projects to emerge. This is what I have tried to do in Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before.

 Sauerländer is so much more interesting. 

Rail: Were you aware of Modern Art at that time?

Sauerländer: Yes, in a moderate sense, but I would say that I developed a vivid interest in it only after coming to New York. I can’t deny it, it came with Pop Art. Not with Abstract Expressionism, not Barnett Newman, not Rothko. I’ve written on Rothko a couple of times, but I’m a little skeptical of his religious and mystical aura. It was in the 60s that I became interested in the works of Rauschenburg, [Claes] Oldenburg, and even Warhol (Warhol before 1970, Warhol after 1970 is a different thing) we had liberation, even if today I am skeptical of it. Suddenly the thick reality of a consumer’s world, of a media world, entered the art and that was liberating.

Rail: How did you feel about the German artists who became very visible in the decade of the 1980s, for example, Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer?

Sauerländer: Beuys was an enormous event and we all were fascinated because he transformed cold reality, real things of the everyday world, into symbols of misery, death, extinction. It fascinated us though I admit that I always mistrusted the man a little. There was something tricky about it. The man was not very agreeable if you met him. Kiefer, on the other hand, is a man who lives from the darkest of the German meeds, which I don’t care much for. I remember the 1988 Kiefer exhibition [opening] at the MoMA full of drunken American ladies, if possible also Jewish. They looked as if they were in a Wagner opera, staring at all these symbols of German fire, blockhaus, the Reich Chancellor. I know Kiefer personally and there I would make a great distinction. There is something intelligent and even enlightened in Beuys whereas in Kiefer it’s a sort of fundamentalism that doesn’t interest me. Due to my health, I couldn’t go to see the 2007 Kiefer exhibition in the Grand Palais in Paris, which must have been gigantic. People were very impressed, but I have a suspicion that Kiefer is exactly what the French think Germany should be—Wagner and mysticism and so on.

Rail: Now getting back to where we had left off before: What was your impression of the U.S. when you came to Princeton in 1961?

Sauerländer: We had a totally idealistic image of America, it was the perfect democracy, the Bill of Rights, we believed in all of that. It was the moment of President Kennedy who everyone saw as young, progressive, and enlightened. Whether that was true, well that’s another question.

So we arrived in September just in time for the International Congress [of Art History]. Upon arriving at the Columbia dormitory where we were housed, my wife asked: “Goodness, who is that?” There was man who looked like an Old Testament prophet! It was Meyer Schapiro and he was the first person we saw. Apart from participating in the Congress, it was a great experience to come from truncated Germany and suddenly encounter all these émigrés. It was Panofsky, his wife, and Walter Friedländer; suddenly we discovered a Germany that no longer existed in Germany. We couldn’t help but just listen to them because they had very much remained German. With that said they, especially Panofksy naturally, regarded themselves as American. Suddenly a pre-Nazi German past came back on us and it was astonishing. During this first phase in the United States, between ’61 and ’62, we became close friends with Panofsky, Friedländer and Krautheimer. Later I invited Freidländer to Freiburg where he taught before ’33 and Panofsky took an honorary position there; [seeing these scholars return to Germany, if only temporarily] was a very important part of my American experience....

I must say that I remained in unbroken admiration of the U.S., even in ’64-’65, I found it all wonderful. Then I came back to teach in 1970 during the centenary of the Metropolitan Museum and there were all these parties with rich ladies—Panofsky, Friedländer, all were dead, the emigrés, in part, had disappeared. I suddenly saw all the poor people on the streets and I discovered the dark side of America. It was actually the moment when Panofsky’s great illumination was at its end—everyone imitated him. Panofsky himself said, “Well if I am punished for what I did to art history, I will come into the seventh stage of Hell.” In ’65 he gave those Titian lectures, which with all respect for Panofsky were a disaster. I mean, reducing Titian to iconography naturally doesn’t work....

Rail: Was your enthusiasm for America and Pop Art something shared by Germans at the time? 

Sauerländer: I don’t think there were many people in Germany who were aware of it. There was Evelyn Weiss in Cologne who wrote on Pop Art and I’m not absolutely sure at what moment Peter Ludwig, a collector of art in Cologne who bought an enormous number of Pop Art pieces, began acquiring it. It was relatively early even in New York as well. [Barnett] Newman, [Mark] Rothko, [Meyer] Schapiro were shocked by Pop, they thought it was the end. It was a break that others have to write about. I couldn’t have done it in 1970, which I regret it to this day. This break coincides with all the social and mental changes of the 60s—before and after 1968.

Rail: Even in America, it has taken time for Pop to enter scholarly discourse.

Sauerländer: The disturbing question is what remains? I was very fascinated by [Edward] Kienholz, [Robert] Rauschenberg, and [Claes] Oldenburg, but where are they today? Warhol remains an icon—Warhol until 1970. Later the factory goes wrong. At this moment I find photography seems to be more interesting than other fields, especially, there are very good photographers in Germany, for example [Thomas] Struth, [Andreas] Gursky.

Rail: How about Bernd and Hilla Becher, Candida Höffer?

Sauerländer: Höffer, yes, too many libraries, a little bit sterile. I have great problems with the Bechers. There is a great human message with Walker Evans, but never were with the Bechers or Höffer. [Bernd] told me that he photographed at 5 a.m. and made scaffolding above the human level, on an abstract level. The [Robert] Bergman catalogue that you gave me is something different altogether.  [August] Sander is one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. [Thomas] Struth and [Thomas] Demand are interesting.

Panofsky's book on Titian begins with an editor's acknowledgment, quoting Panofsky, that he never intended to do an overview of Titian's career and the focus on iconography was in no way an attempt to set a limit on the work itself, and that the the images were all black and white "not in spite but because of the fact that Titian was the greatest ‘colorist’ who ever lived.” And then the passage I remember from his description of The Flaying of Marsyas, even though he was wrong in wanting to deny attribution, is key to any understanding of Titian.

When Panofsky writes that Titian, “like Henry James’ Linda Pallant, ‘knew the value of intervals’” he’s describing Titian’s focus on the space between objects and people, and implicitly between viewer and canvas.  The connecting line isn’t a formal cue, an arrow or the edge of a table or the stripes on a piece of fabric; space is crossed often only by a line of sight. As in the theater, actors’ success or failure isn’t measured in inches or millimeters to match the perfect ratio of  the sides of a triangle, but in faces and gestures directed at each other. And Titian makes sure the space isn’t so cluttered that things get in the way. The sense of time as the our eyes move observing others’ eyes, the fleeting sense of intimacy is beyond anything in Florence.  It’s an an art that doesn’t even try to give us an illusion of perfection, except perhaps as a ‘perfect’ description of its lack.

I'm not going to quibble with other criticisms of the book. I take things that strike me and ignore others. As a scholar I'm an amateur. As for the interview I'd be surprised if Germans didn't know Warhol by the early 70s. According to a timeline I found at the Met, in 1968 he had a retrospective that went from the Moderna Museet to the Stedelijk and he had work in Documenta. But his interest in Warhol, until 1970—it's be too much to wish he'd added Rauschenberg until 64—after his scepticism about Newman and Rothko as religious theater, and then Kiefer...  we all try to distinguish between observing and imposing, reading and reading in, but the 20th century was a century of enthusiasts.  "Newman, Rothko, Schapiro were shocked by Pop, they thought it was the end." I'm sure Panofsky laughed.  

Fried spends a good deal of time on Douglas Gordon, and his documentary with Philippe Parreno—in the form of "video art"— on Zidane, but says nothing about its predecessor. I din't know about it either until I found on the Wikipedia page about their film, but they knew about it of course, and never bothered to tell Fried. Gordon and Parreno's film has a theatrical intimacy, and with the music, an aestheticized, poeticized, melancholy; it's a film about the past in the sense that Hellmuth Costard's film is about its present. And the new film fits with the culture of music videos and advertising that grew out of video art.

Fried is the sort of critic who has a better idea of what good art should be than why anyone would want to make art to begin with. He's easily seduced by the impression of seriousness. Sauerländer saw seriousness in Warhol's work and knew the rest was secondary. Fried was right to see immaturity in the work of the late 60s and he's right to see maturity now, but he doesn't understand history, time, and change. 

A Man United fan account has put Costard's film on Youtube. We'll see how long it lasts.

updated a few times by now

John Ganz got into a twitter feud with a wise-ass, who turned out to be an asshole, but it started when the asshole made a point that was obvious to Panofsky 90 years ago, though the asshole overstated his case. It wasn't obvious to Ganz so I paid my 5 dollars and subscribed again, just so I could use the quotes I have for years. I riffed a bit on Richter and the art world, told stories and name-dropped. After that I cancelled my account. I don't think Ganz knows it was me. He liked the comment. Or maybe deleting it might have been difficult. Or maybe he'll still do it. If Shadi Hamid can like and delete, why not Ganz? 

Film art is the only art the development of which men now living have witnessed from the very beginnings; and this development is all the more interesting as it took place under conditions contrary to precedent. It was not an artistic urge that gave rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a new technique; it was a technical invention that gave rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a new art.

From this we understand two fundamental facts. First, that the primordial basis of the enjoyment of moving pictures was not an objective interest in a specific subject matter, much less an aesthetic interest in the formal presentation of subject matter, but the sheer delight in the fact that things seemed to move, no matter what things they were. Second, that films—first exhibited in “kinetoscopes,” namely, cinematographic peep shows, but projectable to a screen since as early as 1894—are, originally, a product of genuine folk art (whereas, as a rule, folk art derives from what is known as “higher art”). At the very beginning of things we find the simple recording of movements: galloping horses, railroad trains, fire engines, sporting events, street scenes. And when it had come to the making of narrative films these were produced by photographers who were anything but “producers” or “directors,” performed by people who were anything but actors, and enjoyed by people who would have been much offended had anyone called them “art lovers.”

The casts of these archaic films were usually collected in a “café” where unemployed supers or ordinary citizens possessed of a suitable exterior were wont to assemble at a given hour. An enterprising photographer would walk in, hire four or five convenient characters, and make the picture while carefully instructing them what to do: “Now, you pretend to hit this lady over the head”; and (to the lady): “And you pretend to fall down in a heap.” Productions like these were shown, together with those purely factual recordings of “movement for movement’s sake,” in a few small and dingy cinemas mostly frequented by the “lower classes” and a sprinkling of youngsters in quest of adventure (about 1905, I happen to remember, there was only one obscure and faintly disreputable Kino in the whole city of Berlin, bearing, for some unfathomable reason, the English name of “The Meeting Room”). Small wonder that the “better classes,” when they slowly began to venture into these early picture theaters, did so, not by way of seeking normal and possibly serious entertainment, but with that characteristic sensation of self-conscious condescension with which we may plunge, in gay company, into the folkloristic depths of Coney Island or a European kermis; even a few years ago it was the regulation attitude of the socially or intellectually prominent that one could confess to enjoying such austerely educational films as The Sex Life of the Starfish or films with “beautiful scenery,” but never to a serious liking for narratives.

Today there is no denying that narrative films are not only “art”— not often good art, to be sure, but this applies to other media as well—but also, besides architecture, cartooning, and “commercial design,” the only visual art entirely alive. The “movies” have reestablished that dynamic contact between art production and art consumption which, for reasons too complex to be considered here, is sorely attenuated, if not entirely interrupted, in many other fields of artistic endeavor. Whether we like it or not, it is the movies that mold, more than any other single force, the opinions, the taste, the language, the dress, the behavior, and even the physical appearance of a public comprising more than 60 percent of the population of the earth. If all the serious lyrical poets, composers, painters, and sculptors were forced by law to stop their activities, a rather small fraction of the general public would become aware of the fact and a still smaller fraction would seriously regret it. If the same thing were to happen with the movies the social consequences would be catastrophic.

I also added something because the asshole made a comment about Ganz' connection with Zwirner. Ganz is now writing for Artforum and has a piece on Richter. 

I don't know what this guys fucking problem with me is but this absurd. I don't have any "proximity" to David Zwirner, you can not like my writing but implying that I wrote it on behest of the gallerist or whatever is scurrilous https://t.co/BeAXHnhnDp

— John Ganz (@lionel_trolling) May 6, 2023

Fine art is a luxury commodity. Galleries are luxury boutiques, not bookstores. And of course you're connected to Zwirner. When you were an "artist" in Bushwick did you have any friends who were born there? Any social connection at all to the working class other than as idea? In 1993 Zwirner told me with a shrug to me that there was no difference between art and fashion anymore. Art is now style, and HBO has more art than Chelsea. Panofsky was right. Fine art and couture are vestiges of the old regime. Art for the rich. The connection to philosophy is tied to that and the lie that philosophy is superior to fiction, as theology concerns "truth" and fiction is lies.

All of the above is obvious in 2023, except to pretentious American liberals who call themselves leftists: Ganz and the Brooklyn Institute. I have friends born in Bushwick and I've known Zwirner for 30 years. Ganz the earnest gentrifier doesn't talk socially to art dealers, art collectors, or the working class. The only union members he knows are grad students, or maybe WGA, probably not even even IATSE.  He stays in his bubble, and that's never good. Now I'm wondering if the Richter show I mentioned is the one where I told Roberta Smith that she had her head up her ass writing about late Picasso. Saltz was there too. About Richter he asked me "Do you really think this is art for the ages?" I said, of course not, but I was sympathetic. I should have asked him if he thought Donald Judd was art for the ages, but that would have started a whole new fight, with his wife.

Everything above is a repeat, except some of the name-dropping.

---

...and this development is all the more interesting as it took place under conditions contrary to precedent.  It was not an artistic urge that gave rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a new technique; it was a technical invention that gave rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a new art.

But Panofsky is wrong.  If we want to be optimistic, the relation of art and and technology is reciprocal. Pessimism—or materialism—says art follows technology: secularization and the printing press, painting on walls or wood panels that can be bought and sold, theater and the novel, the rise of the middle classes, democracy. We're back to free will and determinism, which goes back to Richter and HBO and the Nolan brothers, Westworld, Devs, Tenet, The Dark Knight. But as a teacher of mine said about Gursky, "he used to be a nihilist, but he sold out". Another old story. The same is true for Richter. 

But that's why the asshole was wrong. It's not that the "fine" art is meaningless, only which forms give us the most compelling description of the present.

I can't make a living at any of this—art or criticism—only because I'm always best at pissing people off. Talking to a woman at Christie's a few years ago I said only billionaires could be honest talking about what they liked and why, but that I was raised to behave as if I were a billionaire. She looked back at me and smiled sweetly. "Then you're free." I guess I am. The rich and the poor can be honest. Everyone else lies to themselves first, and then everyone else.

Ganz helped to gentrify a working class neighborhood, admitting he formed no social connections to people who lived there; he writes about romanticism, the sublime, and hope, as manifest in multi-million dollar baubles on display in a luxury boutique, and with earnest moral fervor about the killing of a homeless man on the subway, all without the slightest sense of self-awareness.

Richter's work at best is a notch above kitsch, describing a desperate need for cheap sentiment to be more than it is. Modernism is full of that, and I have a sympathy for it. He's fighting his own numbness. Ganz by comparison is earnest, shallow, callow, self-absorbed, self-serving, and on down the list. From my grandfather's job as a hired killer to my father's essay on Hammett, I have him cold. It doesn't matter.

I remember walking around the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, sitting in on crits, and one student's video, or it might have been a film, which was nothing but him on a beach yelling at the sea, shouting his name at the top of his lungs at the surf, demanding to be recognized: an over-the-top, absurd, derivative but full-throated performance, an expression of humility.

If a character in a novel lights a cigarette, the cigarette is part of a work of art. In a play the cigarette is a prop. In the older definition of art objects the craft supplied a formal logic internal to the piece. The iconography supplied a formal logic external to it. For relics as opposed to artworks the logic was external only: absent its place in a narrative a thighbone is a thighbone, a cigarette is just a cigarette, a madeleine... etc.

Duchamp has a tag. click it.

Jäger deserves a tag for retweeting this.

Bogost:  "Writer & game designer. Director of Film & Media Studies and Professor of Computer Sci & Eng @WUSTL " 

A problem the humanities—and universities in general—haven’t solved: They are playgrounds of the aristocracy that paid a historically temporary visit to populism, which was mistakenly  construed as permanent residency.

2 "historian of social knowledge, modern Europe and US. would rather be outdoors." 

More accurate: the university has long been both playground of the aristocracy (or haute bourgeois) and means for the upwardly mobile to enter the civil service. In Germany the Humboldts represent the former, Fichte the latter. The late-20th Century inflation of fees is novel...

"Who believes in this? –aside from a few big children in university chairs or editorial offices." Max Weber.

The US isn't Germany.  As always: from Brooklyn College students moving to Manhattan, to Harvard grads gentrifying Brooklyn. 

There's no way in hell I should be able to do this. But history is bunk.

work your way back.

1960

Whatever Greenwich Village may once have been or may now be supposed to have been, anyone who has recently strayed down MacDougal Street on a Saturday night knows that now it is a playground. What Coney Island was once to the honest workingman, Greenwich Village is now to the unmarried or ex-married young professional. The Village streets, pads, coffee houses, and bars are jammed with people who look a million times more sensitive, artistic, and "interesting" than William Faulkner or Igor Stravinsky, but who live by teaching economics, analyzing public opinion, writing advertising copy, practicing psychoanalysis, or "doing research" for political candidates. They are not intellectuals, but occasionally dream that they will be. 

And again.

Perhaps the most exciting component of the curriculum was the series of guest lecturers the institute brought to campus. “One hundred and sixty of America’s leading intellectuals,” according to Baltzell, spoke to the Bell students that year. They included the poets W. H. Auden and Delmore Schwartz, the Princeton literary critic R. P. Blackmur, the architectural historian Lewis Mumford, the composer Virgil Thomson. It was a thrilling intellectual carnival. 

...What’s more, the graduates were no longer content to let the machinery of business determine the course of their lives. One man told Baltzell that before the program he had been “like a straw floating with the current down the stream” and added: “The stream was the Bell Telephone Company. I don’t think I will ever be that straw again.” 

...But Bell gradually withdrew its support after yet another positive assessment found that while executives came out of the program more confident and more intellectually engaged, they were also less interested in putting the company’s bottom line ahead of their commitments to their families and communities. By 1960, the Institute of Humanistic Studies for Executives was finished.

 The author of the New Yorker piece, Nathan Heller, in 2016.

---

April 2023, NYRB: 

At the English department I chair, our major has grown by more than 40 percent in the last two years. We are being driven to the edge of extinction anyway.

...In their interviews with Heller, English faculty and administrators discuss an array of real issues with an alarming lack of coherence. They try to place blame both for what is happening at their own institutions and for what they consider broader national concerns: Middlemarch is too long for the TikTok generation; K-12 education is the problem; humanists haven’t made a strong enough case for how our areas of study prepare debt-ridden students for jobs; funding has dried up; a fusty curriculum drives students away; television exists.

Much more to the point are Heller’s interviews with students, who explain the fundamental problem quite clearly: universities do not value the humanities. This disregard is demonstrated in most universities’ built environments, real estate investments, hiring practices, staffing ratios, and unwillingness to direct resources toward the humanities even in appropriate balance with the often substantial revenue they bring in. I heard in these young people’s comments a real awareness of the funding priorities of the colleges they attend.

Students are quick to associate those priorities with their job prospects: when it comes to deciding on a major, they sense that their own personal, intellectual, and creative interests don’t really matter at all. As Ben Schmidt, a data analyst and former history professor, put it in a 2018 article on the declining number of humanities majors, “In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, students seem to have shifted their view of what they should be studying—in a largely misguided effort to enhance their chances on the job market.” What faculty and administrators have mistaken for a problem (declining enrollments) with an identifiable cause (take your pick), students correctly see as a story being spun by the universities themselves: this area of study lacks value, is in some sense wrong. That story has become powerful enough to shape their world, restricting the number of paths presented to them as real options. 

And I should have added this, 

"The sociology of modern knowledge production empowers the scholar over the humanist, and the collective/communal enterprise of scholarship over the inspiration of the individual thinker."

You have that precisely backwards. The humanist is embedded in culture by calling, the mathematician only by default, while embedded by choice in a private world of universals. What would you call the communal enterprise of neoclassical formal economics? Would you call it worldly or unworldly? Formal philosophy is formal economics with no need to ignore evidence.

--- 

June 16th, he rt's a link to a statement by the UK Royal Historical Society. I suppose the monarchist trappings could be taken as confirmation of something.

None of these problems can be explained by a decline in student numbers or interest in History, which remain strong. Instead we must look to political decisions to explain this troubling situation. UK universities now operate in a market economy. Institutions are placed in direct competition, with income generation via intake the principal measure of success. The lifting of the student cap in 2015 has established an environment of ‘feast and famine’ across the sector.

Cuts and closures are the starkest manifestation of this environment. But marketisation also brings turbulence and uncertainty to historians in ‘winning’ institutions, required at short notice to deal with sharp, and unpredictable, spikes in student numbers. Across the sector, uncertainty is exhausting, all-consuming, and impedes long-term thinking, planning and the delivery of high-quality teaching.

In the coming months, the Royal Historical Society is undertaking a project to assess the full extent of the losses, risks and concerns that now characterise History in UK Higher Education. We also seek to better understand the personal, institutional and disciplinary impact of change on academic staff, researchers, students and community partners. As is clear, the aftershocks of upheaval are long-lasting and have negative effects on the life of a department well after a programme of change has officially ended.

Kristeller reviews Panofsky [JSTOR] 

He begins by describing the argument, adding that what he's done is "very far from doing justice to the great wealth of detailed information and of fruitful ideas assembled in this volume", and then —"Since I am not qualified to judge Panofsky's interpretation of the numerous works of art which he has occasion to discuss"—limits his criticism to a full column of corrections in translation and sourcing.  And then he winds it up.

The book contains many noteworthy remarks, e.g., on the importance of artistic genres (p. 56), on the effects of textual errors on artistic representations (p. 105), and on the theory and practice of perspective (pp.I22ff.). I should like to confirm the view that Italian Trecento painting partly resulted from the conflux of Byzantine and French Gothic elements (p. 137) with a parallel from the history of humanist learning, and to endorse the remark (p. 187), hardly ever encountered in the literature on Erasmus, that his Praise of Folly "ends on a very serious and essentially Neo-Platonic note." I also agree with Panofsky and Gombrich that Renaissance Platonism opened up "to secular art" (and to secular thought) "emotional spheres which had hitherto been the preserve of religious worship" (p. 188).

Panofsky rarely comes forth with aesthetic value judgments, and thus an occasional harsh remark such as the one on the Gundohinus manuscript (p. 49, note) attracts attention. Panofsky is a valiant defender of Renaissance art and of its classicism, and I tend to agree with his general attitude. Yet I am afraid that his statement that after the Renaissance "the classical element in our civilization could be opposed . . . but it could not entirely disappear again" (p. 108) sounds a bit too optimistic in view of contemporary developments. We have seen in our times many powerful forces that are more or less openly hostile to the heritage of the Renaissance, and even of classical antiquity: certain modern conceptions of "science," of "religion," and of "education" are quite incompatible with an appreciation of antiquity or of the Renaissance, and so are the antihistorical tendencies inherent in the philosophy of language, in structural linguistics, or in "new" criticism. The same is true, in an entirely different way, of existentialism and of primitivism. If an admirer of contemporary art can write that "the ancient civilisations of Greece and Rome... made a violent and lamentable break with the past" (E. Langui, Fifty Years of Modern Art, New York, 1959, p. II), the classical tradition in art, as in other fields, seems to be in a defensive, if not in a hopeless, position indeed. I am afraid its defenders are fighting a rear guard action, and the best they can hope for is to be the forerunners of a future  Renaissance, as were the mediaeval proto-humanists. 

The most impressive feature of this book is the variety of its problems which extend from the early Middle Ages to the fifteenth century, and from the  visual arts into literature, philosophy, and the sciences.  Among the historians of art, Panofsky is the most authoritative scholar who conceives of his subject as a part and facet of the broader field of intellectual and  cultural history, and who thus also instructs and inspires  through his work those who are interested in other aspects of cultural history. For he conceives of the visual arts as a part of a universe of culture that also comprises the sciences, the philosophical and religious thought, the literature and scholarship of the Western  world in the various phases of its history. This is the  kind of “true humanism” of which we are badly in  need, and in spite of our present grim outlook, there  is some hope for the future of our civilization as long as  its cause is being upheld by scholars of Panofsky’s  caliber.

The "new critics", rebelled against "history of ideas"; the "new historicists"... "You put chocolate in my peanut butter!" to 'Why not both?". Panofsky who called the new critics "harmless" at best (with discussion of Joseph Raz—everything circles around to the same issues).

This goes back the the reason the old German humanists had contempt for the hard sciences. Looking back I found this, from 2014. It has Panofsky, Grafton, behaving as I suppose he always has, and Ukraine too. On C.P. Snow and The Two Cultures, from 2013

Somewhere I've said that I had only a general idea—fully internalized—of the history of tension between humanism and the sciences, before a woman I know whose grandfather had been one of Habermas' thesis advisors referred casually "the old contempt", which explained Panofsky's reference to his sons, a physicist and an atmospheric scientist as "plumbers", and Arendt's hatred for social science, with the only religious belief required, "just that self-evident religio without which there is no desire for knowledge, not even the desire for atheism." (Hermann Broch). In the Anglosphere in the 1950s, that history was already forgotten, though perhaps there was nothing to forget. But hearing her comment everything came together, including my own parents' unresolved and unacknowledged conflicts. I've never found a discussion of the antagonism in German intellectual life in English, just as I've never read mention of the the Jewish humanists disdain for Zionism. The leftists were the Zionists: the enthusiasts. And Adorno was terrified of instrumentalism because he though somehow it was scientifically justified. And it isn't.   

Humanism, in the largest sense, means that every human activity, including language and mathematics, is an aspect of "culture", so there's no conflict between writing about Mozart or Muzak, provided you accept that there's a distinction between Plato and your moralizing high school Latin teacher. A humanist who reads Plato reads Aristophanes. The conflict between sympathy and understanding is one of the burdens and pleasures of adulthood. Panofsky shrugged of the new critics, not out of a defense of history as such, but as the shallow version of a tendency towards the institutionalization of one technique over another. 

Raymond Klibansky

Although he took a keen interest in the great British philosophers - he later discovered and edited some new letters by Hume - he shared Cassirer's dismay at the blinkered approach of the analytical philosophers who dominated the Oxford scene: ignoring the historical context of thinkers such as Leibniz, the only thing they wanted to know was whether his statements were true according to their own criteria.

Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl. They even wrote a book. Christopher Wood wrote a review of the new edition, for October/Vogue. He even refers to "Panofsky’s tragic, existential reading" of Durer's Melancholia. So much for optimism.

Emile Langui, Fifty Years of Modern Art. Modernism as anti-humanist. I should buy a copy.

Frank Stella: "I wrote my thesis on Celtic, Carolingian and Ottoman manuscript illumination."

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Back to Jäger, et al.: "causal dodge".  The responses even include a recommendation of Healy's "Fuck Nuance", from a player from the Berggruen Institute. Nils Gilman himself is in the mix. 

And someone found the source. It begins with Sam Haselby, and it's worth noting that the two people who push back against academic utilitarianism are an Israeli and as Arab . 

I sent one of the assholes a reminder of the origins and mandate of the I.A.S. : the importance of "useless knowledge".  See also Turner on Jencks and Riesman, the rise of professionalism and the "academic ethic".

Only a student of culture could describe the mix of positivism and perversity of contemporary academia.

The Middle Ages accepted and developed rather than studied and restored the heritage of the past. They copied classical works of art and used Aristotle and Ovid much as they copied and used the works of contemporaries. They made no attempt to interpret them from an archaeological, philological or "critical" in short, from an historical, point of view. For, if human existence could be thought of as a means rather than an end, how much less could the records of human activity be considered as values in themselves.

In mediaeval scholasticism there is, therefore, no basic distinction between natural science and what we call the humanities, studia humaniora, to quote again an Erasmian phrase.  

And Henry Farrell will never change. Liam Kofi Bright and Osita Nwanevu are the new gen Matthew Yglesias, pundits of neoliberal happytalk. Blacks are the new Jews in American culture.

enough for now. I'm avoiding other things. But sloppy or not, this helps me think.

Campbell

Titian has progressed from a pursuit of painting as drama—narratives of passion and violence, of the suffering and desiring body, all staged to move the beholder—to a mode of painting as the imaging of other modes of bodily engagement with the world; toward an experience of embodiment without boundaries, as an experience of continuum. The Flaying of Marsyas is thus where two preoccupations of his art come together, are imposed on each other—the interest in the parahuman, the analogy of human beings with animals on one hand, the idea of painting as a sensory continuum on the other.44 The intersection of these two preoccupations stands behind the painting’s ritual or sacrificial as opposed to tragic character: flaying, the animal-human hybrid, and openness of the body to space are all states of being that are conjoined here, albeit obtained at a price, where some- thing whole is torn apart in the process.

The Flaying of Marsyas is the culmination of this preoccupation with bodies that might overcome their boundaries; the dissolution of bodies—not just that of Marsyas—and the radical equivalence between figure and ground, object and void—produces the sense of a flow of energy or vitality within a stable or monumental pictorial structure, which—as Panofsky correctly noted, no longer depends on the “interval,” the intersubjective vector. The viewer himself vacillates between the impact of the horrific subject and the perception of a radically new kind of pictorial order: We compare rivers of blood to the blood-colored ribbons that bind the satyr’s feet: a harmony, a near identity, between fixity and flow, where one looks like the other. Painting is pushed to its limits but we respond to a stable structure, as if the painting was itself a kind of body that addressed itself to our own, that demands to be perceived with more than just the eye. The painting, as Richard Wollheim observed about late Titian, has a skin: The skin is not smooth and impermeable but an endlessly open process of unblended matter, disquieting, but perhaps no longer “abject”: “The truth is that in this work the vitality of the human frame is projected beyond all recognizable bounds.”45

At a distance, the spectacle of the abject, suffering body is appalling; close at hand, it becomes absorbing, and solicits an array of other responses, which the figures surrounding Marsyas seem to model in their postures of immersive sensory engagement, melancholy rumination, or wonder. And let’s notforget a whole other dimension of non-human engagement here, which is scarcely de-privileged—the engagement through taste and smell (the dogs), through the indeterminate but at least anthropomorphic emotion of the satirino, and finally through Marsyas. From his expression, this is not the Marsyas in Ovid who screams “why are you stripping me from myself?” This is a Marsyas who accepts an annihilation of boundaried personhood. The Marsyas serves as a dream of shattering, of the undoing/unfolding of the figure in its boundaries, of continuum of the body with matter, attained through an impossibly “non-violent violence,” as it was dreamed of in Dante’s invocation of Apollo and Marsyas.46 It is one thing for a poet to declare this, and quite another to paint it. Titian manages to do so beyond the language of allegory, by finding other ways of making such a transformation visible.

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44. Wollheim, Painting as an Art, 326, on the “shift in perspective” in late Titian: “That Titian should, in connecting the body so powerfully with suffer- ing, retain the connection between the body and vitality is what establishes the shift in perspective” characteristic of the Flaying of Marsyas. The presence of animals can be seen to stand for this transfer from a human response of shock or horror to a “posthuman” seeing in terms of vitality.

45. Wollheim, Painting As an Art, 326. 

6. Paradiso, I.20:

Entra nel petto mio, e spira tue

sì come quando Marsïa traesti

de la vagina de le membra sue.

Wollheim 324

So massive is the element of condensation in this startling work that we have to tread carefully if we are to retrieve its meaning. To a greater degree than ni any of the other three pictures metaphorical content is entwined with representational, expressive, and

textual, content, so that the precise conception under which this painting metaphorizes the body has to be sifted out from these other forms of meaning.

On this issue, iconology, left to itself, would have little difficulty in enlightening us. Classical antiquity, Christianity,and the thought of the Renaissanceconcurred in finding ni the imposition of Apollo's will upon the brutish body of Marsyas the victory of what is higher ni its nature over what is lower. Over the centuries this understanding of the event came to be articulated on a number of different levels.

Taken as a piece of narrative, the destruction of Marsyas was seen as the punishment inflicted by an angry god upon a mortal creature who had of fended him through arrogance, or at least through gross imprudence. To this description of the event other interpretations of a more allegorical sort accrued. One interpretation, which went back to antiquity, saw ni the outcome of the musical contest the victory of the superior arts, or of those touched with rationality, exemplified by the music of the stringed lyre, over the inferior or coarser arts, of which the shrill tones of the pipes or flute, which excite the senses without appealing to the intellect, would be typical. This interpretation is to be found in the ancient philosophers.17 Again, the victory of Apollo over Marsyas was taken to symbolize the ascent of man from the world of confusion into the realm of universal harmony: man enters upon the sunlit domain of reason. Finally, the victory of Apollo stood ni for the soul's escape from its earthbound condition. The Christian evaluation of this terrifying story fully bursts upon us when, listening to Dante at the beginning ofthe Paradisoas he places himself under the protection of Apollo, we hear him apostrophize hte god, hte 'buono Apolo', specifically as the tormentor of Marsyas:  

Entra nel petto mio, espira tue

sí come quando Marsia traesti

della vagina dele membra sue.

(Paradiso, Canto 1, lines 19-21) 

'Enter my breast, and breathe there as you did when you tore Marsyas from out of what sheathed his limbs.'

There are however few if any scholars who would in the context of Titian's painting follow the lead of iconology unconditionally, and would without reserve equate the meaning of the picture with the meaning, the gradually acquired meaning, of the event that it represents. If this reluctance cannot be directly ascribed to the considerations that I advanced in Lecture IV—that is, that we should not, just because a picture represents an event associated with a certain text, infer that the picture means that text, unless the picture also discloses what the text meant to the artist—nevertheless a related consideration is undoubtedly at work. Scholars have been deterred by the fact that, if we accept the interpretation that iconology urges, we shall be required to see the picture in ways that perception cannot negotiate. We shall have to see it as expressive of joy, elation, and triumphant righteousness. That we cannot manage.

It would. of course be unjustified to jump to the conclusion that Titian transvalued the ancient myth, or that from his depiction of the event Marsyas emerges as the hero, Apollo as the wrongdoer. Such an interpretation would be historically untenable. However asuggestion which has its appeal, is free of anachronism, and is also fully in keeping with what we otherwise know of Titian, ii that in The Flaying of Marsyas he brought about, not a reversal of values, but a radical shift in perspective.For if Titian still continued to understand the mythological event in terms of texts that the centuries had associated with it—and just how many of these texts he wished to incorporate into the painting is not something that I need settle in detail—he thought of them in a new  way. Their emphasis was displaced. In telling us what lies above or beyond our mortal embodied condition, they were taken by Titian to be showing us, primarily, something about this condition of ours: that it is not merely what precedes, it is a necessary preparation for, indeed it is a way of bringing about, what lies ahead of itself. These texts are not just texts about the soul, they are as much texts about the body: they are, fundamentally, texts about what the body does for the soul. This is what I mean by a shift in perspective, 1 and my claim is that this shift is crucial for grasping the conception of the body under which this great painting metaphorizes it.

The Flaying of Marsyas is given over to the suffering of the body, but in Titian's hands suffering is shown to be fully compatible with the vitality that erupted so buoyantly in the earlier works. The truth is that ni this work the vitality of the human frame is projected beyond all recognizable bounds. Marsyas's body, defeated, degraded, in its final throes, has been so placed upon the canvas that, at any rate before the support was unevenly extended,19the navel lay at the very centre of the picture, and from this vantage point the body then swells out to assume control of the picture as a whole. It does so by various means. It does so through the blood that, running out of Marsyas's wounds, is carried by Titian's brush, or by his fingertips, with which eh also applied the paint, to the farthest parts of the canvas. It does so through the other figures who, ni the savage unremitting attention they give to its destruction, acquire a kind of dependency upon it, like leeches upon the ailing frame of an invalid. And ti does so through Titian's flickering brushstrokes which, in tumult across much of the pictorial surface, attain an equilibrium as they mark the great cylindrical carcass, flaying it into incandescence. The inverted pose of Marsyas, which has the effect, unless we invert ourselves too, of obscuring from us the expression on his face, makes more mysterious, hence makes more potent, the spell that this enormous polluted body casts over the total painting.

That Titian should, in connecting the body so powerfully with suffering, retain the connection between the body and vitality is what establishes the shift in perspective of which I have spoken. For if the defeat of the flesh is not just what prefaces higher things, but is that through which they are won, then this defeat must somehow be shown as achievement. This Titian does when he presents suffering, massive suffering, as the supreme occasion on which man can, through his determination and the straining of his body, wrest activity out of passivity. If, this activity communicating itself to us, we do invert ourselves and we try to make out the expression on Marsyas's face, a shock is now in store for us. Titian has given Marsyas the features of a young loose-limbed peasant, a farmer or a gardener's boy. The features are distorted by fear and incredulity. But in the great haunted eyes there is also a totally unexpected look of acceptance - acceptance triumphant over suffering. fI it is the victory of the soul over the body that we are watching, what makes it possible is the victory of the body over itself. 

Modern man that I am, I can't help thinking about Kafka

Enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted. It begins around the eyes. From there it radiates. A moment that might tempt one to get under the Harrow oneself. Nothing more happens than that the man begins to understand the inscription, he purses his mouth as if he were listening. You have seen how difficult it is to decipher the script with one's eyes; but our man deciphers it with his wounds. To be sure, that is a hard task; he needs six hours to accomplish it. By that time the Harrow has pierced him quite through and casts him into the pit, where he pitches down upon the blood and water and the cotton wool. Then the judgment has been fulfilled, and we, the soldier and I, bury him."

"We were the essence of good, and they, nothing, human dust. And it was almost charity to fight them.” 

I worked at a fabrication shop a few years ago. It was 10-12 hours a day, seven days a week. One of the other workers was in his late 20s, a skateboarder, builder, dude. He worked on projects at Burning Man every year. He had a kind of openness about him. It took me a week to figure out where that went. He was gay and he liked real pain. We didn't talk about it but it was all there.

I'm not done.

Stephen J Campbell, "Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas: Thresholds of the Human and the Limits of Painting", in Renaissance Posthumanism 

Yet Panofsky’s humanist art history ultimately conceded little quarter to any ambivalence (not to mention outright differences) on the part of Renaissance humanists about the nature of the human, nor was Panofsky willing to countenance other humanisms discontinuous with the modern or the post-Kantian liberal ideal of the rational and the humane. The book Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic from 1969 was to be the ultimate litmus test of his self-consciously humanist iconological method (many would now regard it as an exposure of its shortcomings) as well as a bid to claim the great Venetian painter for a humanist pantheon of Dürer, Erasmus, Ficino, Botticelli, and Michelangelo. Yet the astonishing Flaying of Marsyas (see Figure 2-1), one of the most singular mythological paintings of the sixteenth century, was almost completely excluded from a lengthy chapter on “Titian and Ovid.” It appears only in the footnote quoted previously, in which the scholar expressed misgivings over Titian’s authorship of the picture, as troubling in formal terms as its subject was disturbing in its extreme cruelty. Artistic representation had in both respects been pushed beyond an acceptable limit; if this were Titian’s work, it would appear, it would make of Titian something other than a “humanist.” “Gratuitous brutality” has replaced “tolerance and responsibility."

Panofsky, Problems in Titian, p 171 fn.

85. Since I have never seen the original, which comes from the collection of Thomas Howard Earl of Arundel and  Surrey (died 1646) and is now in the Archiepiscopal Palace at Kroměříž, formerly Kremsier, in Czechoslovakia, I do not dare pronounce on the authenticity of  the now almost generally accepted Flaying of Marsyas (V., II, Pl. 143; cf. J. Neumann, Titian, The Flaying of Marsyas, London, 1962 [German translation, Prague, 1962];  P. Fehl, “Realism and Classicism in the Representation of a Painful Scene:  Titian’s ‘Flaying of Marsyas,”’ Czechoslovakia Past and Present [Czechoslovakia Society of Arts and Sciences in America],  scheduled for publication in the near future). It is admittedly difficult to attribute this painting to anyone else (although in  View of the Pietà in the Accademia one might  think of the very versatile Palma Giovane);  but it is equally difficult to accept Titian’s  responsibility for a composition which in  gratuitous brutality (the little dog lapping  up the blood) not only outdoes its model, one of Giulio Romano’s frescoes in the  Palazzo del Tè at Mantua (for its connection with the Kroměříž picture see F. Hartt, Giulio Romano, p. 111, Fig. 172, where the authenticity of the Flaying of Marsyas is doubted as it is in Hetzer’s article in Thieme-Becker), but also, and more importantly, evinces a horror vacui normally foreign to Titian who, like Henry James’  Linda Pallant, “knew the value of intervals.” In the Kroměříž picture no square inch is vacant. If the Flaying of Marsyas were  rejected it would also be hard to accept the  Boy with Dogs in the Boymans Museum at  Rotterdam (17., 11, Pl. 140) which is apparently by the same hand and from the same period. Director Ebbinge-Wubben  was kind enough to impart to me the  results of a recent examination of the  Rotterdam canvas. As conjectured by  Tietze (T., p. 392), it is not a complete  composition but a mere fragment, roughly  torn off from rather than cut out of a  larger painting; and it measures only 99.2  by 111 cm. while all available references  give its dimensions as 128 by 180 cm. For the  subject, one may think of Cupid mastering  two dogs of different temper as in a painting  by Paolo Veronese in the Alte Pinakothek  at Munich; cf. also A. P. de Mirimonde,  “La Musique dans les Allégories de  l’Amour,” Gazette des Beam-Arts, Series 6,  LXIX, 1967, pp. 319ff, Figs. 11 and 12. 

Titian, The Flaying of Marsyas, c. 1575

Giulio Romano

Was Panofsky really unable to discuss violence, or was it something more specific? 

Panofsky was wrong, but violence itself wasn't the issue. Titian and Charles V

Panofsky describes Titian’s relation with Charles V “extending to his whole family and entourage… [as] almost unique in the annals of art”.  He dismisses the story that Charles, “to the pained surprise of his courtiers” once stooped down to pick up Titian’s dropped brush, but says he treated Titian as “an equal in spirit if not in rank… their correspondence occasionally reads like that of two great and equal powers.”[vii]He also writes about Titian’s “best friend”, Pietro Aretino “the scourge of princes”, blackmailer, and pornographer.  With Aretino and Jacopo Sansovino “Titian contracted, almost immediately, a life-long friendship. A formidable alliance of the "Three Arts of Design" with literature, this "Triumvirate" wielded an enormous influence and its members were united by genuine affection as well as self-interest.”  Sansovino immortalized the three of them on the doors of the Sacristy of St. Mark's. Aretino died in 1556

…allegedly at a dinner party in his own house: when one of the guests had told a particularly funny and indecent story, it was said, Aretino roared with laughter and threw himself back in his chair with such violence that the chair tipped over and he broke his head. There is no shred of evidence for this story… but it throws light on Aretino's reputation — a reputation summarized in a famous "epitaph"… 

"Questo è Pietro Aretino, poeta Tosco, 

Che d'ogni un disse male, eccetto the di Dio;

Scusandosi con dir 'non lo conosco’ "

 ("Here Aretino lies, a Tuscan poet; Evil he spoke of all, except of God; When questioned why, he said 'Him I don't know' “)…

Aretino was perhaps the first publicist to make a living by misrepresentation and extortion; and — in return for praise or, no less often, for silence — he received honors, presents and huge sums of money from nearly all the princes of his time — including the two eternal adversaries, Charles V and Francis I of France. He led a loose life. He wrote indecent sonnets and equally indecent, often extremely amusing comedies while posing as a fervent believer and even aspiring to a Cardinal's hat….

It was indeed only in Venice, governed with an extraordinary combination of discipline and permissiveness… where life was strictly regulated in theory but very free in practice, and where political action was rigorously controlled while the liberty of thought, the liberty of speech and the liberty of the press were protected even against the Inquisition, that a man like Aretino could flourish.

Kenneth Gouwens, "What Posthumanism Isn’t: On Humanism and Human Exceptionalism in the Renaissance", on Charles V

Those with both Humanistic and Scholastic training could be the most formidable critics of scholars who possessed only the former, as the distinctly second-rate Ciceronian stylist Pietro Alcionio (ca. 1480s?–1528) found out to his chagrin.25 In April of 1521, Alcionio published with the Aldine Press in Venice a volume comprising several translations of Aristotle, including ten books from the philosopher’s writings about animals. The following year, however, he came under direct fire from the prominent Spanish scholar Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1490–1573). Best known today for a later polemic in which he asserted on Aristotelian grounds that the Indians of the New World were natural slaves, Sepúlveda was deeply learned not only in classical philosophy but also in Humanist methods. Later on, in fact, the Emperor Charles V would appoint him his official chronicler. 

This post continues, back and forth. 

Related: the second of three posts from 2017 on Dana Schutz' painting Open Casket, and other, related, things.

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On Titian and Henry James, since I forgot to add it.

When Panofsky writes that Titian, “like Henry James’ Linda Pallant, ‘knew the value of intervals’”[v] he’s describing Titian’s focus on the space between objects and people, and implicitly between viewer and canvas.  The connecting line isn’t a formal cue, an arrow or the edge of a table or the stripes on a piece of fabric; space is crossed often only by a line of sight. As in the theater, actors’ success or failure isn’t measured in inches or millimeters to match the perfect ratio of  the sides of a triangle, but in faces and gestures directed at each other. And Titian makes sure the space isn’t so cluttered that things get in the way. The sense of time as the our eyes move observing others’ eyes, the fleeting sense of intimacy is beyond anything in Florence.  It’s an an art that doesn’t even try to give us an illusion of perfection, except perhaps as a ‘perfect’ description of its lack.

I guess I'm just having fun piling on. Fun and frustration.

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Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry 

The greatest adhesion to the pure sense perception of the (seemingly objective) material individuality of objects and, therefore, the possible greatest assimilation of the material appearance of the work of art to the plane, yet not the optical plane, imagined by our eye at a distance from the objects, but the tactile plane suggested by the sense of touch, because on this level of development, to be certain about (touchable) impenetrability also means having the convinction of the material individuality. From the optical point of view, this is the plane which the eye perceives when it comes so close to the surface of an object, that all the silhouettes and, in particular all shadows which otherwise could disclose an alteration in depth, disappear.² The perception of objects, which characterizes this first level of the ancient Kunstwollen, is thus tactile, and in as much as it has to be optical to a certain degree, it is nahsichtig; ancient Egyptian art expresses it in almost its purest form.³ Foreshortenings and shadows (disclosing deep space) avoid this as painstakingly as the expression of mental states (disclosing the subjective psychic life). The main accent, however, is placed on the silhouettes which are kept as symmetrical as possible, because symmetry reveals to the exterior an uninterrupted tactile connection within the plane in the most convincing manner. Symmetry inherently belongs to the dimensions of the plane, it is limited, if not destroyed, by depth; for that reason in the visual arts of all of antiquity symmetry became the essential instrument of bestowing completeness on material entities on plane surfaces.

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2) One can test this, for example, with ancient Egyptian statues by looking first from a distance where they make a flat and absolutely lifeless impression and then gradually from greater proximity, where the planes become increasingly lively, until eventually the fine modelling can be felt entirely, when one lets the tip of the fingers glide over them.

3) As can be understood from its development over a thousand years, ancient Egyptian art also developed at various points beyond this indicated degree; on the other side the Greeks, even during an advanced period were still partly constrained by it.

"...until eventually the fine modelling can be felt entirely, when one lets the tip of the fingers glide over them."

He knows because he's done it. I've done it. Riegl's not writing from an abstracted rationalized empiricism. He's fucking great.

That's the simple way to put it. The more complex way is to say he belongs fully to an academic milieu while still describing the the richness and immediacy of his own experience. 

The primacy of perception 

Christopher Wood, Introduction to Panofsky,  Perspective as Symbolic Form

This antagonism between the historicist scruple and the structuralist  imagination is revealed most graphically in Panofsky’s awkward chronological coordinations of art history and intellectual history. Synchrony is never better than approximate. Modern projective geometry as worked  out by Desargues corresponds to the directionless space of Descartes,  but it also corresponds to Alberti’s costruzione legittima and to Kantian  epistemology. The conceptions of space of Democritus, Plato and Aristotle all correspond to Greco-Roman landscape painting. The Aristotelian revival of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries correSponds to High  Gothic sculpture. These are great blind spots in Panofsky, spectacular  moments of irresponsible synthesis, forgiven because they serve as mere  rhetorical punctuation of lengthy and substantive arguments. But what  do they reveal about those arguments? The two kinds of events, philosophical and artistic, run in parallel because they derive from a common Weltanschauung. Because their relationships to that Weltanscbauung are  different — one is logical, the other symbolic — the time scales may  diverge. But once they are out of synchrony, we lose our grip on the  Weltanschauung. We are reduced to coordinating entirely unrelated sequences of events without any sense of Why they should be coordinated. The Weltanschauung is stripped of its historical reality, exposed as the  hypothetical least common denominator between art and philosophy. ¹⁵
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15. One is not necessarily more confident when the synchrony is exact: see for instance Panofsky’s comments on Cubism and Einstein s relativity in Early Netherlandish Painting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 5, n. 1.

Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, p. 5, n. 1.

In spite of all the changes in accident to which space was subjected from ca. 1400 to the end of the nineteenth century, it remained unaltered in substance. Even Mannerism and Raroque, even Matisse, Gauguin and Cezanne do not defy the assumption that space, whatever happens within it, is three-dimensional (cf. Cezanne's famous injunction to "treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything in proper perspective so that every side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point"), continuous and, therefore, static. It was only with Picasso, and his more or less avowed followers, that an attempt was made to open up the fourth dimension of time so that the objects cease to be determinable by three co-ordinates alone and can present themselves in any number of aspects and in all states of either "becoming" or disintegrating. In the present discussion the use of the term "modern" is naturally limited to a pre-Picassian or non-Picassian interpretation of space.

Stephen G. Brush, Physics Today, 2001

The French mathematician Henri Poincaré provided inspiration for both Einstein and Picasso. Einstein read Poincaré’s Science and Hypothesis (French edition 1902, German translation 1904) and discussed it with his friends in Bern. He might also have read Poincaré’s 1898 article on the measurement of time, in which the synchronization of clocks was discussed—a topic of professional interest to Einstein as a patent examiner. Picasso learned about Science and Hypothesis indirectly through Maurice Princet, an insurance actuary who explained the new geometry to Picasso and his friends in Paris. At that time there was considerable popular fascination with the idea of a fourth spatial dimension, thought by some to be the home of spirits, conceived by others as an “astral plane” where one can see all sides of an object at once. The British novelist H. G. Wells caused a sensation with his book The Time Machine (1895, French translation in a popular magazine 1898-99), where the fourth dimension was time, not space.

 I'm ignoring the stupid title of the book and the art/science, beauty/truth crap.

Spending the day reading Wood above and his introduction to The Vienna School Reader. These people depress me. I just don't pay enough attention or I would have known sooner. 

p 47.  Interesting, but unsurprising, history and lazy thought.

Both Panofsky and Sedlmayr, for instance, aimed at a totalizing comprehension of historical phenomena. Both rejected the choice implied by the conventional dichotomies of connoisseurship and history, form and content. Both took the risk of extending Riegl’s project and trying to make the individual work of art do more historiographical work than it was capable of. Both trusted in the fundamental, deep-structural affinity between works of art and the world at large, what Charles Rosen calls the “unified stylistic field-theory.” One could argue that the links that Panofsky posited between work and world under the quasi-philosophical rubric “symbolic forms” were as irrational and unprovable as any of Sedlmayr’s. Peter Betthausen gave the example of the juxtaposition of Neoplatonic ideas and Michelangelo’s drawings in the article “The Neoplatonic Movement and Michelangelo” (1939). Many aspects of the Many aspects of the “Viennese” Panofsky survived the emigration to America and his turn to plain English and common sense. Indeed none of Panofsky’s eidetic intuitions was more creative, and more difficult to prove, than the extended analogy between the Gothic cathedral and the Scholastic encyclopedia in Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951). This is not such a different kind of book from the treatise on the cathedral written the year before by his methodological “evil twin” Sedlmayr.

Only a decade later the comparison between the two methods was explicitly drawn by George Kubler when—in order to dismiss them both as wishful thinking, basically—he described iconology and Strukturanalyse (“configurational analysis”) as two modes of inquiry into “adherent meaning," with Strukturanalyse slightly preferable for being more  “perplexed” about discontinuities in the cultures under study.  

In the end, it is impossible to normalize Sedlmayr. The totalitarian vision is intrinsic to his art history. Joseph Koerner showed this in a reading of Sedlmayr's essay “Bruegel’s Macchia.” Sedlmayr, in his formal analysis of the atomized blobs of subhumanity on Bruegel’s picture surfaces, recapitulated the pitiless vertical  pitch of Bruegel's own society and the inhumanity of his original  aristocratic patrons and admirers. In this sense Sedlmayr was truly  re-creating the work of the historical artist, just as he had promised to do in “Toward a Rigorous Study of Art “ (pp. 147-48). His Bruegel essay is a chilling, anachronistic reanimation of a lost ideological world. Interpretative violence, which we prize in Riegl, Warburg, or Piicht, here converges with ideological violence.

But it is important to realize that the objection is not to Sedlmayr’s historical interpretation of Bruegel as such, but to the role that he forces Bruegel to play within his own grandiose, bitter critique of modernity. Sedlmayr's historical reading of Bruegel’s  paintings is powerful and not so easy to overturn. And that  reading is the direct product of the insight into the meaning of the color patch in the encyclopedic paintings. Empirical research  on its own could never have arrived at the link between the color  patch and the worldview. Empiricism is supposed to provide a  methodological guarantee against subjective, “interested” interpretations and pernicious ideological mystifications. Many today doubt that empiricism can actually do this. But even if it could,  it is not clear that it would be worth sacrificing the historical  insights yielded by the anti-empiricist, allegorical method. One  might well decide to take one’s chances with allegory. 

Even more disquieting than this comparison of art historical methodologies is the comparison between the attitudes of Sedlmayr, on the one hand, and of the liberal émigré art historians, on the other, toward modern art. What is striking is Sedlmayr’s extreme sensitivity, to the point of inflammation, to modernity and to modern art. Whereas Panofsky and Gombrich, as has often  been noted, made no serious effort to understand the art of their  time or the function of art in modern life, Sedlmayr hated modern art and wrote quite a lot about it. Not only that, but in his excoriating commentary on modern painting, sculpture, and  architecture he managed to hit almost all the right targets. Sedlmayr derided the eighteenth-century French architects Ledoux, Boullée and Lequeu for detaching their utopian buildings from  their natural base on the earth.  He chose a Duchamp readymade, the Porte-Bouteilles (1914), as the first illustration in his book Die Revolution der modernen Kunst. He saw how Walt Disney’s cartoons transformed the oneiric, crossbred fantasies of Grandville—sickly, unlawful, and terrifying to Baudelaire—into  “an idiom of innocence, a fairy idiom of pure fun.” The antiheroes of Art in Crisis: The Lost Center are Bosch, Bruegel, Goya, Ledoux, Friedrich, Cézanne. Sedlmayr's vilification of modern art  was even more perspicacious than the National Socialists’ Degenerate Art exhibition eleven years earlier.

Sedlmayr lamented the tumult of postwar European society  but refused to acknowledge how it had all come about. insolently  he compared the images of the European cities reduced to rubble  by total war to the “dc-compositions” of surrealism, as if all  nations somehow shared the responsibility for the war, as they  surely did share the blame for surrealism. For modernism was,  of course, a European disease: a cosmopolitan and urban condition. Sedlmayr did not even look to German culture as a source of aesthetic salvation, except possibly in architecture. In fact  for Sedlmayr the trouble had begun in the age of the ascendant  nation-state. The solution was to be found, if anywhere, in the  feudal, Christian Middle Ages.

It is hard for us today to understand the impact Sedlmayr’s  book had in 1948.” At the time, he was the only German art historian of premodern art writing about the function and meaning of modern art and was recognized as such even by his enemies.  There was no German equivalent to Meyer Schapiro. Sedlmayr’s  theses were publicly debated at the Second Conference of German Art Historians in 1949. In 1950 he was one of two featured speakers, alongside the Bauhaus artist and teacher Johannes Itten,  on the first evening of the Darmstadter Gespra'ch, a major conference of artists, art historians, philosophers, theologians, sociologists, and scientists. The topic of the conference was “The Image  of Man in Our Time.” Sedlmayr’s lecture was interrupted by whistling, stamping, heckling, including the cry “Heil Hitler!,” but also applause. Sedlmayr’s surprising ally at the conference turned out  to be none other than Adorno, who had returned from the United  States only the year before. It has been suggested that Sedlmayr was perhaps one of the few participants who had any clear idea of who Adorno was. In his lecture Sedlmayr cited Adorno on Schoenberg. Later, in 1955 and 1976, he would again quote Adorno in his writings. At the Darmstéidter Gesprach, Adorno sided with Sedlmayr against Franz Roh and others who spoke of the reconciliatory function of art: “As much as I object to the cultural pessimism Sedlmayr brings to bear, he does on this point quite correctly  define something otherwise neglected by a too unbroken and  naive belief in progress. Speaking dialectically, I would say that  the harmony of an artwork consists in its bringing the riven, itself unreconciled, to unmisplaced expression, and that it withstand the  riven.” Adorno conceded in 1958-1959 that some of his writing on modern music ran “parallel to the work of Sedlmayr.” Werner  Hofmann has pointed out that Sedlmayr's entire polemic was a  partly understandable response to the ubiquitous postwar apologetics for autonomous art, which wanted to insulate art and exempt it from any “interrogation" whatsoever. [footnote to Kuspit attacking Fried] Many artists were sympathetic. Georg Grosz, for example, saluted Sedlmayr in a letter in 1955. Even Gerhard Richter has commented ruefully on the  “loss of the center" in modern art, with deliberately perverse reference to Sedlmayr but without irony. It has to be admitted that with his instinct for distortion, degradation, catastrophe, chaos,  deadpan evacuations of meaning, and Nietzschean mismatches  between subject and object, and his fascination with the ruin, the  fragment, and the spectacle, Sedlmayr never lost sight of “art." 

The contrast with. Panofsky is sharp. After reading Sedlmayr,  one starts to wish that Panofsky’s neat analogies between modernist painting and the early twentieth-century “worldview” had been somehow more anguished. Panofsky the cultural historian simply absorbed Picasso into the “unified stylistic field" by comparing cubism to Einstein’s theory of relativity. In 1933 Panofsky (with his co-author Fritz Saxl) expressed the naive confidence  that artistic and cultural crisis could be “overcome" by the “recourse" to classicism, as it always had been; here too he invoked Picasso. It is as if Panofsky and Sedlmayr were recognizing the  same crisis, but that one of them considered Picasso part of the solution and the other considered him part of the problem. Gombrich for his part has affected blasé or supercilious indifference to the art of his own time. His standard model of “making vs . matching" — conformity to schemata vs. direct imitation of nature  - leaves little room for a transfiguring artistic vision. Panofsky  and Gombrich’s discreet response to modern art’s promulgation  of the abject, the entropic, and the anarchic was to ignore it. Sedlmayr, by contrast, did not repress his panic but rather let it spill out into tasteless, gothic demagoguery. 

Panofsky and Saxl, “Classical Mythology in Medieval Art,” Metropolitan Museum Studies 4 (1932-1933),  JSTOR 

Thus  the classical past, while it was more and more  thought of and investigated as a concrete historical phenomenon, simultaneously developed into an enchanting Utopia that was surrounded with a halo of sweet and melancholy resignation, as in some of the paintings by Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorraine. The idea of antiquity developed into a dream of bliss and happiness; the classical past became a visionary harbor of refuge from every distress. A paradise lamented without having been possessed and longed for without being attainable, it  promised an ideal fulfillment to all unappeased desires. From this we can understand why, from the crisis of the Counter Reformation in the sixteenth century, when the classicism of the Carracci led the way out of Mannerism into the baroque style, down to the crisis of  our own days, which, among other phenomena, has given rise to the classicism of Picasso, almost every artistic and cultural crisis has been  overcome by that recourse to antiquity which we know as Classicism.

An old friend and colleague of Panofsky, now as far as I can tell a cynic—he's given up—told me Panofsky was too generous. I don't question him on that. Panofsky always wanted to accentuate the positive. His refusal to accept  The Flaying of Marsyas as Titian's surprised me, but it makes sense. He even quotes Henry James in defense of his decision to exclude it. [I need to add the context in the manuscript] Picasso's turn to classicism in fits Panofsky's model perfectly, but it was shallow.  I doubt he took Picasso's work in 1932 that seriously, but the  article was published one month before Panofsky was dismissed from his position in Hamburg. 

The rest is old news for me but not for anyone who drops by, so why not?

Panofsky, 1934

Today there is no denying that narrative films are not only “art”—not often good art, to be sure, but this applies to other media as well—but also, besides architecture, cartooning and “commercial design,” the only visual art entirely alive.

The belief that Panofsky "made no serious effort to understand the art of [his] time or the function of art in modern life" is absurd. Wood should know better. But he has a limited notion of "art"

The canonical account is that Panofsky was approached by Iris Barry in 1934, who was in the process of gathering support for a new Film Department at the Museum of Modern Art of which she would later become the founding curator....

In terms of the history of film theory, Panofsky’s film essay manifests many of the hallmarks of the first generation of theoretical writings on the cinema, which are, by and large, the product of the silent cinema era.  

Panofsky, 1938 

If the anthropocratic civilization of the Renaissance is headed, as it seems to be, for a Middle Ages in reverse—a satanocracy as opposed to the mediaeval theocracy—not only the humanities but also the natural sciences, as we know them, will disappear, and nothing will be left but what serves the dictates of the subhuman. 

Panofsky, 195? 

“They are not subversives, they are mass murderers! We are the subversives” 

Wood is a Zionist and an an admitted critic of humanism as defined by Panofsky, who was a universalist opposed to Zionism and nationalism as such. And I'm tired of defenses of Benjamin. There's of a lot of information in the passage above.

"Even Gerhard Richter" That's good for a laugh. He used to be a nihilist but he sold out. 

Looking through earlier reference to Grosz, I found this too. A good fit. Arguing with philosophers, and with Wood:

Instead of treating art as a unique creation that requires reason and refined taste to appreciate, Elizabeth Grosz argues that art-especially architecture, music, and painting-is born from the disruptive forces of sexual selection. She approaches art as a form of erotic expression connecting sensory richness with primal desire, and in doing so, finds that the meaning of art comes from the intensities and sensations it inspires, not just its intention and aesthetic.

Find and Replace

Instead of treating scholarship as a unique creation that requires reason and refined taste to appreciate, Elizabeth Grosz argues that intellectual activity-especially theory, philosophy, and the humanities as such-is born from the disruptive forces of sexual selection. She approaches the humanities as a form of erotic expression connecting sensory richness with primal desire, and in doing so, finds that the meaning of works comes from the intensities and sensations they inspire, not just their intention.

At some point in the 50s [George] Grosz have a lecture in NY earnestly defending figurative art and criticizing abstraction. The audience started to laugh, and he ended up reading his speech as a travesty. The audience loved it. He was humiliated. His estate has never allowed it to be published.

And since The Vienna School Reader is published by Zone,  I'll add the tag for Design as Crime

--

I'm going to be returning to this to add some of the footnotes I stripped from Wood's text. This is all just public notetaking.

It's obvious reading Sedlmayr that like all "philosophically" minded thinkers on "fine art" he's disgusted by the rise of fictions against eternal truths: the hieratic vs the demotic.

Art vs Theater. Thomas Crow vs Jean-Christophe Agnew. Worlds Apart. Going back to the beginnings of my manuscript in the late 80s

Panofsky isn't a snob. Adorno and Sedlmayr are equally opposed to democracy. Negative dialectics is a preference for ironic self-destruction. It gets boring. Grosz is a tragic figure.

Wood: "[Sedlmayr's] Bruegel essay is a chilling, anachronistic reanimation of a lost ideological world." 

The language of an angry schoolmaster staring out at the chaos of the playground.  

The mask—this “most profound deception” that disguises a  form and changes its meaning—is, as it were, the essence of this  process of estrangement concretized as a device, a process that  can take hold of any object or event whatsoever. Even without  the aid of the device of disguise, everyday things can be made to  appear no less fantastic and bizarre, suspicious and unfathomable than the masked actors representing “Carnival.” Such an active attitude consists in shedding all knowledge of the usual and self-evident sense of the course of everyday life, acting as if one knew  nothing of the meaning and function of persons and things —an  artificial and abstract attitude. Then the everyday world discloses  its hitherto concealed fantastic qualities.13 The first and classic  product of this estranged vision turned onto the everyday is Children’s Games. If one disregards what children’s games are, and what they mean for us and for children, then what children do  when engaged in these games is as absurd, uncanny, and suspicious as the behavior of a band of lunatics or other beings incomprehensible to us. There are monsters with ten legs and three  heads. The blindfolded boy looking for a pot with a staff is reminiscent of an executioner, the stilt walker of a cripple, the contortions produced by the games of epileptic seizures, the strange toys  of magical apparatuses -— the whole scene is one of “indescribable  mania.”

This is so easy. George Bernard Shaw: 

… Search [in Shakespeare] for statesmanship, or even citizenship, or any sense of the commonwealth, material or spiritual, and you will not find the making of a decent vestryman or curate in the whole horde. As to faith, hope, courage, conviction, or any of the true heroic qualities, you find nothing but death made sensational, despair made stage-sublime, sex made romantic, and barrenness covered up by sentimentality and the mechanical lilt of blank verse.

"Brighouse’s philosophy, like Cohen’s, like all the liberalism of ideas, is deeply anti-social, laced with the melancholy superiority of a schoolmaster of a school for wayward youth."  

"In the end, it is impossible to normalize Sedlmayr." By that logic it should be impossible to normalize Plato or the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Art in Crisis: The Lost Center

THE LANDSCAPE GARDEN  

The landscape garden had its origin in England about 1720 as a conscious protest against the architectural gardens of France. The French product's use of geometric forms in its layout was now rejected as something unnatural. From 1760 onwards the 'English Garden' swept the Continent with a rapidity and completeness which, in a matter of this kind, was wholly without precedent. Under the hands of artists of note its early and uncertain attempts to take shape gave place to creations of unparalleled grandeur. Everywhere the French parks were transformed, often at enormous expense, into English ones. Towards the end ofthe epoch- say, around 183o-whole stretches of territory began to be trans- formed into nature parks. Enthusiasm for the new art infected the widest circles. Even at the end of the epoch Prince Armin von Plickler-Muskau, who had twice attempted to transform his great Silesian properties into a single landscape and had ruined himself in doing so, could still speak of a prevailing 'Parkomania '.

Since the time of the Renaissance the rivalry of the arts for precedence had been a constant theme of discussion among artistic theorists. Now for the first time the gardener's art claimed the primacy. The artistic theory of the day bases this claim on a variety of grounds. Firstly, the art of the gardener is of all the most comprehensive since it comprises, and in a spatial sense actually contains, both sculpture and architecture, even as architecture contains sculpture, painting and decoration. It therefore brings into being the most comprehensive o f all imaginable works of art-a work of art that may well be termed 'super-comprehensive'. Yet there is a deeper sense in which the term comprehensive may be applied to this form of art, for it is indeed a rival to architecture, which it surpasses above all in the sheer size of its productions; moreover, it brings into being free creations in space of superlative magnificence. It composes with such organic masses as groups of bushes and trees, with hills and great expanses of lawn and with ponds and streams, it entwines among these tree masses the decorative element provided by flowering plants. Out of the constituent elements of nature it builds nature pictures which the painter can only hold fast within a two-dimensional framework; further-and here it is comparable to music-it creates entire successions of such pictures, an advantage to which other arts than music cannot aspire. In the different scenes that it calls into being it can ring the changes on all our feelings, can present us with grandeur, with charm, with the genial, the melancholy and the wild. Finally-and this is the weightiest ground of all-this art is most intimately connected with nature herself, and is, like nature, elusive and changing. 'None of the imitative arts is as interwoven with nature as is that of the gardener, none approximates to her more closely.' Such theoretical justification of the landscape gardener's primacy among the arts would mean but little did not the actual facts of the case clearly show landscape gardening to have aroused an enthusiasm far exceeding that felt for any other art at the time. 'Everywhere we find expressions of a veritable passion for these novel works of art, a passion comparable to the building passion of the Baroque.

All this proves that the landscape garden was something much more than a new kind of garden. It implied a revolt against the hegemony of architecture. It implied a wholly new relationship between man and nature and a new conception of art in general.

One condition was essential if the landscape garden was to come into being. The active relation of man to nature had necessarily to become a passive one!  

It's hard not to laugh. 

Wood: "At the time, he was the only German art historian of premodern art writing about the function and meaning of modern art and was recognized as such even by his enemies."

How is it the model of academia that scholars of the past are seen to have authority over the culture of the present? Isn't that what he was arguing against: a programmatic art? Panofsky didn't write about film as a man granting permission. He wrote as a hobbyist, and a lifelong member of the audience.

But that's the problem all reactionaries have: the need to burn the village to save it. It would really help if people like Wood would see themselves as aspects of their times. Riegl's sympathetic understanding of the human experience of touch belongs with Panofsky and Auerbach 

"It differs from the factual one in that it is apprehended, not by simple identification, but by "empathy". To understand it, I need a certain sensitivity, but this sensitivity is still part of my practical experience that is, of my everyday familiarity with objects and events. "

"He liked to quote Erich Auerbach’s assertion that in reading literature we need an ‘empirical confidence in our spontaneous faculty for understanding others on the basis of our own experience’."

And both were Jewish humanists who forswore Zionism, not as radicals but as liberals. That's never mentioned anywhere, because their principled liberalism is forgotten. Compared to that the debate over iconography or interpretation of form is a friendly game. I don't pick sides.

Kids these days don't know shit.  The parallel in Sedlmayr is Gombrich and The Preference for the Primitive; along with Wood, varieties of decadence in denial.  

Now I'm going to get drunk and read the Roger Kimball introduction.

In 1937, the Nazis mounted a show of modernist art and called it “Degenerate Art.” They were wrong about the art, but does that mean we are henceforth forbidden from describing any art as “degenerate”? Consider the photographs in Robert Mapplethorpe’s notorious “X Portfolio”: would “degenerate” be out of place in describing them?... 

Sedlmayr writes as an Augustinian Catholic. For him, the underlying motive for the pursuit of autonomy is pride. The “lost center” of his original title is God. Autonomy, for finite, mortal creatures, is a dangerous illusion. “Autonomous man,” he writes, “does not and cannot exist—any more than can autonomous art, architecture, painting and so on. It is of the essence of man that he should be both natural and supernatural. . . . Man is fully human only in so far as he is a repository of the divine spirit.”

Seeing ourselves as a part of nature, even a English gardener, isn't enough. Self-hatred is key. Mapplethorpe said it himself: “There's this clock in Hell that chimes every hour, You will never get out . . . you will never get out . . . you will never get out."

Why is this so easy? Shouldn't I be able to make a living at this shit by now?