Writing About Visual Art (Aesthetics Today)

225 Pages·2003·2.52 MB·English

by  David Carrier

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WRITING ABOUT
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DAVID CARRIER
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WRITING ABOUT
VISUAL ART
DAVID CARRIER
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© 2003 David Carrier
All rights reserved. Copyright under Berne Copyright Convention, Universal Copyright Convention, and Pan-American Copyright
Convention. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.
08 07 06 05 04 03 5 4 3 2 1
Copublished with the School of Visual Arts
Published by Allworth Press
An imprint of Allworth Communications, Inc.
10 East 23rd Street, New York, NY 10010
Cover and interior design by James Victore, New York, NY
Page composition/typography by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd., Pondicherry, India
Cover image: Royal Road Test. Original concept by Ed Ruscha and Mason Williams; photograph by Patrick Blackwell, courtesy Gagosian
Gallery.
ISBN: 1-58115-261-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Carrier, David, 1944-
Writing about visual art / David Carrier.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-58115-261-2
1. Art criticism—Authorship. 2. Description (Rhetoric) I. Title.
N7476 .C378 2003
808’.0667—dc21
2002152013
AESTHETICS TODAY
Editorial Director: Bill Beckley
The Chronicles of Now: The Ways of the World in Pictures and (Some) Words byAnthony Haden-Guest
Sticky Sublime, edited by Bill Beckley
Uncontrollable Beauty, edited by Bill Beckley with David Shapiro
Out of the Box: The Reinvention of Art: 1965-1975, by Carter Ratcliff
Redeeming Art: Critical Reveries, by Donald Kuspit
The Dialectic of Decadence: Between Advance and Decline in Art, by Donald Kuspit
Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime, by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe
Sculpture in the Age of Doubt, by Thomas McEvilley
The End of the Art Worldby Robert C. Morgan
Lectures on Art, by John Ruskin
Imaginary Portraits, by Walter Pater
The Laws of Fésole: Principles of Drawing and Painting from the Tuscan Masters, by John Ruskin
Printed in Canada
David Carrier’s books include:
Truth and Falsity in Visual Images (1983), with Mark Roskill
Artwriting (l987)
Principles of Art History Writing (l991)
Poussin’s Paintings: A Study in Art-Historical Methodology ( l993)
The Aesthete in the City: The Philosophy and Practice of American Abstract
Painting in the 1980s (1994)
Nicolas Poussin. Lettere sull’arte, (1995); editor, with an introduction
High Art: Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernism (1996)
England and Its Aesthetes: Biography and Taste (1997); editor, with an
introduction
Garner Tullis: The Life of Collaboration (1998)
The Aesthetics of the Comic Strip (2000)
Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism: from Formalism to
beyond Postmodernism (2002)
Sean Scully (2003)
Hegel, with characteristic profundity, spoke of beautiful art as
the Idea given sensuous embodiment. As a start, this gives us
the rudiments of a philosophical concept of art, and a first
stab at a theory of criticism: the critic must identify the
idea embodied in the work, and assess the adequacy of
its embodiment.
—Arthur C. Danto
Nothing is more depressing than to imagine the Text as an
intellectual object (for reflection, analysis, comparison,
mirroring, etc.). The text is an object of pleasure.
—Roland Barthes
vi
This book is for
Peggy and Dick Kuhns
and
George J. Leonard
TNETNCOO
viii
ONTENTS
Acknowledgments
xi
Foreword
by Bill Beckley
xvii
Overture 3
Part One
Art Writing Narratives
Chapter One Beginnings in Art Writing 31
Chapter Two Endings in Narrative Art Histories 59
Chapter Three The Presentness of Visual Art 81
Interlude 105
Part Two
Doing Things with Words
Chapter Four Museum Narratives 119
Chapter Five Art Gallery Narratives 149
Chapter Six Defining Art: How We Do Things with Words 177
Index 197
About the Author 201