Woke Pantywadding Meets Fine Art
Art critic Holland Cotter writes in The New York Times -- an article with this churningly "woke" headline/subhead:
Can We Ever Look at Titian's Paintings the Same Way Again?Great is what this art is, yet it raises doubts about whether any art, however "great," can be considered exempt from moral scrutiny.
An excerpt from his piece:
BOSTON -- With its small supernova of a show, "Titian: Women, Myth & Power," the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum here scores an art historical coup that institutions many times its size should envy, and audiences, hungry for old master dazzle, can count themselves lucky to see. Yet the same exhibition raises troubling questions about how, in art from the distant past viewed through the lens of the political present, aesthetics and ethics can clash.[One painting] was titled "The Rape of Europa," and its theme -- a young woman, a Phoenician princess, is abducted and forcibly impregnated by a god in disguise -- can't help but put us on red alerts today, when accusations and verified reports of sexual assault on women appear almost daily in the news. In fact, the whole cycle, with its repeated images of gender-based power plays and exposed female flesh, invites #MeToo evaluation, and raises doubts about whether any art, however "great," can be considered exempt from moral scrutiny.
And purely in terms of formal innovation and historical influence, great is what this art is. In 1550, when Titian first received the commission from Philip, then ruler-to-be, he was renowned throughout Europe as the most daringly expressive brush-man in the business. Unlike his Florentine peers, he let paint, stroke by stroke, have a material and emotional life of its own. In this, he was the un-Michelangelo, the contemporary he considered his only real rival.
...The nude, or almost nude, female form is the cycle's repeated motif, the erotic emblem, as bright as a light beam, you can spot from wherever you stand. We see it viewed from behind in "Venus and Adonis" (from the Prado's collection); stretched out frontally and bound with ropes in "Perseus and Andromeda" (from the Wallace Collection, London); and turned into a multi-figure tangle in two pendant paintings, "Diana and Actaeon" and "Diana and Callisto"(jointly owned by the National Gallery, London, and National Galleries of Scotland, in Edinburgh).
Only one female character, the virgin-goddess Diana, is depicted as assertive and commanding, but her actions are arbitrary and cruel. She lashes out at the young follower, the nymph Callisto, for becoming pregnant and concealing it. (Jupiter was, again, the seducer.) And in a fit of pique she condemns the young hunter Actaeon, who has stumbled upon her al fresco bathing spot, to a terrible fate: He will be transformed into a stag and chased down by his own dogs.
In each scene, Titian proves himself an ingenious dramatist, telescoping past, present and future events within a single incident. And he's especially adept at showing a world that's physically and psychically off-balance, with figures tilting, twisting, recoiling. This dynamic is especially pronounced in "Rape of Europa," the last, and in some ways, most violent painting of the group.
...Increasingly, a lot of older art, if it's going to be alive for new audiences, will need to be presented from these dual perspectives, as formally superlative creations, but also as container of difficult, often negative, histories.
Oh, grow the fuck up. It's a painting, not an ad for being raped by nonexistent gods!
(Pieces like this strike me more as "woke" calling cards for the author than any sort of meaningful insights.)
Speaking of Titian:
When Titian was grinding rose madder,
his model was posed on a ladder.
Her position to Titian
suggested coition
so he climbed up the ladder and had her.
Conan the Grammarian at August 13, 2021 5:53 AM
Picasso is making fun of your plain features and other defects.
An artist of whatever discipline can see colors we cannot - and some are so offended at their own lack of vision they can only throw their own feces.
Radwaste at August 13, 2021 7:48 AM
You nailed the real problem. These people can't grow up. It's apparently a physical and mental impossibility for them.
What is sad is that anyone pays to hear what they have to say or write.
ruralcounsel at August 13, 2021 9:03 AM
They made paintings of war and rapes and true love vows for the same reason people today make movies of those things. They're dramatic stories that entertain. Tragedy and gore are plot devices.
NicoleK at August 13, 2021 9:17 AM
Another critic saying, in effect, "I am more important than the artist or the art!"
Jay R at August 13, 2021 9:57 AM
It's pretty weird, regarding the directions that writers USED to take...
I'm thinking of Edith Hamilton's "Mythology," published in 1942.
That is, she attempted to make it all "family-friendly." She never mentions what happened to Atalanta's suitors or to Psyche's sisters, for starters - understandably. Nor does she make clear that Cupid seduces Psyche, in the dark. Even in the myth of Aeneas and Dido, she says that Venus -
"was quite willing to have Dido fall in love with Aeneas, so that no harm could come to him in Carthage; but she intended to see to it that his feeling for Dido should be no more than an entire willingness to take anything she wanted to give; by no means such as to interfere in the least with his sailing away to Italy whenever that seemed best."
I read that as a preteen and it went over my head. So, I was shocked, as a teen, to find out that Aeneas abandoned a woman he'd been SLEEPING with. How could anyone do such a thing? Also, I found it very hard to believe that SHE would have premarital sex, in that era, and risk getting pregnant. But, it's barely possible she was over 40, when you read the story.
Anyway, here are the weird parts. While Hamilton (I think) never used so much as a pronoun for any rape in any myth (and, when the centaur Nessus tries to rape Deianira, Hamilton used the archaic term "insulted her"), she had no qualms, apparently, about using the word "rape" in captions under illustrations to refer to KIDNAPPINGS that would presumably end in rape - one being Persephone's. As if kids reading that wouldn't ask their parents what the word means - or look it up!
But even worse (this is from the beginning of the chapter The Royal House of Athens - the bad part comes later):
"...The tale of Creüsa and Ion is the subject of a play of Euripides, one of the many plays in which he tried to show the Athenians what the gods of the myths really were when judged by the ordinary human standards of mercy, honor, self-control. Greek mythology was full of stories such as that of the rape of Europa, in which never a suggestion was allowed that the deity in question had acted somewhat less than divinely. In his version of the story of Creüsa, Euripides said to his audience, 'Look at your Apollo, the sun-bright Lord of the Lyre, the pure God of Truth. This is what he did. He brutally forced a helpless young girl and then he abandoned her.' The end of Greek mythology was at hand when such plays drew full houses in Athens."
So, after the terrifying kidnapping scene of Creüsa, who is "hardly more than a child" and who "screamed for her mother," Hamilton writes THIS:
"God though he was she hated him, especially when the time came for her child to be born and he showed her no sign, gave her no aid. She did not dare tell her parents. The fact that the lover was a god and could not be resisted was, as many stories show, not accepted as an excuse. A girl ran every risk of being killed if she confessed."
I mean....LOVER?!
What in the world was Hamilton thinking, when she could just have easily have written "man" or even "brute," which would have reflected what she wrote earlier?
After all, wasn't it one of the points of the myth that a rapist is NOT motivated by love - and even if he were, rape still wouldn't be romantic?
Lenona at August 13, 2021 10:49 AM
Meh,
This kind of hit pieces happen because no one gives a damn about "modern" art.
With classic paintings you could at least use quality and talent as a way to hide that you are laundering money.
You tell the IRS that a poorly knitted white sweater soaked in menstrual emissions is worth five million dollars and they're going to come down on you harder than an Obama drone on your wedding.
Sixclaws at August 13, 2021 12:19 PM
Not if you tell them Hunter Biden painted it.
Conan the Grammarian at August 13, 2021 12:21 PM
I've been to the museum in question in boston. It is full of great art from the 1200s to 1900 or so. The Woke cannot abide great art because doing great things requires standards and hard work. Everyone should be exactly the same, with no one standing out (see Harrison Bergeron).
The also are mental midgets and cannot understand that someone from 1500 lived in a world where a frenchman marrying an italian was interracial marriage, they had only just learned about africa, and most people lost kids to childhood illness (oh, and the plague was still a threat). That is, in an entirely different world from ours.
cc at August 13, 2021 2:20 PM
"[Tedious] is what this art [critic] is, yet it raises doubts about whether any art [critic], however ["woke"] can be considered exempt from moral scrutiny [and deserved ridicule]."
FIFY.
Gene at August 14, 2021 9:35 AM
"Well, the female body is a work of art. The male body is utilitarian. It's for gettin' around, like a Jeep." ~ Julia Louis-Dreyfuss in a Seinfeld episode
Conan the Grammarian at August 18, 2021 6:16 AM
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