Ivan Gaskell

Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts

1. Nature, fine arts, and aesthetics Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell 2. Natural beauty without metaphysics T. J. Diffey 3. Trivial and serious in aesthetic appreciation of nature Ronald W. Hepburn 4. The public prospect and the private view: the politics of taste in eighteenth-century Britain John Barrell 5. Landscape in the cinema: the rhythms of the world and the camera P. Adams Sitney 6. The touch of landscape Don Gifford 7. Desert and ice: ambivalent aesthetics Yi-Fu Tuan 8. Gardens, earthworks, and environmental art Stephanie Ross 9. Comparing natural and artistic beauty Donald W. Crawford 10. Appreciating art and appreciating nature Allen Carlson 11. The aesthetics of art and nature Arnold Berleant 12. On being moved by nature: between religion and natural history NoEl Carroll.

Landscape, natural beauty and the arts: Nature, fine arts, and aesthetics

Our starting point is Lindisfarne, or Holy Island. The island is off the coast of Northumbria and connects to the mainland by a causeway that floods at high tide. Much of its early history is known only through Bedes Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum . In 635 King Oswald granted the island to Bishop Aidan to found a monastery. A cult grew around the king following his death in battle against the heathen Mercians in 642. Bede writes that people began to collect dust from where the king had fallen with which to cure sicknesses in themselves and their stock. About this time, another man, who was of the British nation, is said to have been crossing the place where this battle had been fought; and seeing that one spot was more green and more beautiful than the rest of the field, he came to the wise conclusion that there could be no other explanation for this exceptional greenness than that some person of greater sanctity than anyone else in the army had been killed there. So he took away some of that earth wrapped up in a linen cloth… The Briton found that piece of earth valuable because the color and beauty he saw signified something more. The depth of color and quality of that patch of grass had moral magnitude because the earth, nature, and its workings were affects of divinity.

The Language of Art History

1. Art history and language: some issues 2. Presence 3. Writing and painting: the soul as hermeneut 4. Correspondence, projective properties, and expression in the arts 5. The language of art criticism 6. Baxandall and Goodman 7. Figurative language in art history 8. Cezannes physicality: the politics of touch 9. Conditions and conventions: on the disanalogy of art and language 10. A minimal syntax for the pictorial: the pictorial and the linguistic- analogies and disanalogies.

Explanation and Value in the Arts

List of contributors Editors acknowledgements 1. Interests, values and explanations Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell 2. Fiction and reality in painting Michael Podro 3. Franz Kafka: the necessity for a philosophical interpretation of his work Walter Biemel 4. On relocating ethical criticism Wayne C. Booth 5. Explanation and value: what makes the visual arts so different, so appealing? Mark Roskill 6. Is art history? Svetlana Alpers 7. Objectivity and valuation in contemporary art history Gregg Horowitz 8. Fullness and parsimony: notes on creativity in the arts Jon Elster 9. Principles of a sociology of cultural works Pierre Bourdieu 10. Althusser and ideological criticism of the arts Richard Eldridge 11. Film, rhetoric, and ideology Noel Carroll Index.

Writing (and) the History of Art

Part of a symposium on writing and the history of art. Art-historical writing is for the most part full of jargon and cliche, impenetrable in its density, analytic and contentious to a fault, and utterly predictable. Art historians are so completely absorbed in their own scholarly procedures, lost in their own habits of mind, that they do not contemplate much on the simple fact that they have cut themselves off from the imaginative tradition of writing about art that extends from Philostratus to Dante, Vasari, Bellori, Diderot, and Winckelmann. What is needed is a sensitivity to the art historians potential as a writer with the capacity to tell a good story and to describe works of art vividly and suggestively.

Sacred spain: art and belief in the spanish world exhibition at the indianapolis museum of art, 2009–2010

Ronda Kasl, senior curator at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and her team have organized an exemplary exhibition of mostly seventeenthand eighteenth-century sacred art from Spain and her former American colonies. The arrangement is in six thematic sections: “In Defense of Images,” “True Likeness,” “Moving Images,” “With the Eyes of the Soul,” “Visualizing Sanctity,” and “Living with Images.” The selection of artworks— paintings, sculpture, illustrated books, metalwork—perfectly balances the aesthetic command that each object exerts with the role each plays in thematic exemplification. Grants allowed Kasl to trace unfamiliar examples of Spanish and Spanish colonial religious art not only in the US and Spain, but in Mexico and Peru. Admirably, Kasl observes no status hierarchy either among the fine and decorative arts, or among metropolitan and colonial artworks. She freely mixes paintings and sculptures with monstrances and reliquaries, as well as juxtaposing objects from Spain and America (Figure 1). For instance, in the section “True Likeness,” large trompe l’oeil paintings depicting venerated sculpted images, one of the Virgen de los Desamparados (patroness of Valencia), another of the Virgen de la Soledad (venerated in Madrid) are shown near one another. The former, dated 1644 (Real Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales, Madrid), is by the Valencian, Tomás Yepes, whereas the latter (c.1690; San Pedro Museo de Arte, Puebla) is by Cristóbal de Villalpando, who was born, worked, and died in Mexico City. In both cases the painters have exerted themselves to the utmost to evoke the presence of a distant cult object. Close by, borrowed from a private collection, is an extraordinary accoutrement of another venerated sculpture of the Virgin, a seventeenth-century gold crown, amended in the eighteenth century, encrusted with over 200 emeralds, made to adorn the statue of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception in the cathedral of Popayán, New Granada (now Colombia). Throughout the exhibition, Kasl explores how Spanish and Spanish American artists used verisimilitude to convey abstract doctrines, and to promote devotion by evoking a heightened awareness of the senses. This could take the form of an apparently straightforward evocation of an ideal object of veneration, such as the body of the dead Christ, sculpted in wood and

Rembrandt’s Genius, Wittgenstein’s Warning

We are attracted to the things people make: artifacts? Individually and socially we may be attracted to some more than to others, yet we know that all human-made things are of interest to someone, even if not?at first? to us or to any of the groups to which we belong. If we are not content to satisfy ourselves with familiar things alone, we need to learn how to engage with those that are unfamiliar. If we want to be equitable (and to learn that our things and ways are not the only worthwhile things and ways), we need to develop cognitive and affective modes of attention to artifacts from all human

Explanation and value in the arts: Index

List of contributors Editors acknowledgements 1. Interests, values and explanations Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell 2. Fiction and reality in painting Michael Podro 3. Franz Kafka: the necessity for a philosophical interpretation of his work Walter Biemel 4. On relocating ethical criticism Wayne C. Booth 5. Explanation and value: what makes the visual arts so different, so appealing? Mark Roskill 6. Is art history? Svetlana Alpers 7. Objectivity and valuation in contemporary art history Gregg Horowitz 8. Fullness and parsimony: notes on creativity in the arts Jon Elster 9. Principles of a sociology of cultural works Pierre Bourdieu 10. Althusser and ideological criticism of the arts Richard Eldridge 11. Film, rhetoric, and ideology Noel Carroll Index.

Explanation and value in the arts: List of contributors

List of contributors Editors acknowledgements 1. Interests, values and explanations Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell 2. Fiction and reality in painting Michael Podro 3. Franz Kafka: the necessity for a philosophical interpretation of his work Walter Biemel 4. On relocating ethical criticism Wayne C. Booth 5. Explanation and value: what makes the visual arts so different, so appealing? Mark Roskill 6. Is art history? Svetlana Alpers 7. Objectivity and valuation in contemporary art history Gregg Horowitz 8. Fullness and parsimony: notes on creativity in the arts Jon Elster 9. Principles of a sociology of cultural works Pierre Bourdieu 10. Althusser and ideological criticism of the arts Richard Eldridge 11. Film, rhetoric, and ideology Noel Carroll Index.

Landscape, natural beauty and the arts: Contents

1. Nature, fine arts, and aesthetics Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell 2. Natural beauty without metaphysics T. J. Diffey 3. Trivial and serious in aesthetic appreciation of nature Ronald W. Hepburn 4. The public prospect and the private view: the politics of taste in eighteenth-century Britain John Barrell 5. Landscape in the cinema: the rhythms of the world and the camera P. Adams Sitney 6. The touch of landscape Don Gifford 7. Desert and ice: ambivalent aesthetics Yi-Fu Tuan 8. Gardens, earthworks, and environmental art Stephanie Ross 9. Comparing natural and artistic beauty Donald W. Crawford 10. Appreciating art and appreciating nature Allen Carlson 11. The aesthetics of art and nature Arnold Berleant 12. On being moved by nature: between religion and natural history NoEl Carroll.