Litsy

Wabi-sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers | Leonard Koren

Another book haul thanks to a gift card I got as a belated Christmas gift from some friends 😁 #enablers

AmyG Art Forms in Nature looks beautiful. 1d

TheBookHippie Oh I want the Art Forms book!!! It‘s stunning! 1d

jen_the_scribe @AmyG @TheBookHippie it‘s a gorgeous book. I‘ve been wanting one of Ernst Haeckel‘s books for a long time so I was glad to scoop this one up! 1d

TheBookHippie @jen_the_scribe all I‘ve had is stationary 🤣 1d

jen_the_scribe @TheBookHippie Stationary is good too! Lol 1d

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GerardtheBookworm

In Praise of Shadows | Jun'ichiro Tanizaki

pick

Japanese award winning writer Jun'ichiro Tanizaki pens a classic series of essays that is reprinted reflecting the culture post World War 2. Commenting on Japanese life after a natural disaster, he examines the transformation of western modernization of traditional versus cultural values, art, food, and architecture of the Baby Boom period. An interesting perspective of a hidden society of that time!

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cant_i'm_booked

On Photography | Susan Sontag

so-so

Sontag‘s book of critical essays concerning photography, whether it should be considered a fine art, its historical relationship to painting, the illusory and distancing qualities of a photo, the widespread public acceptance of the photographer chronicling the private, debates as to what should be photographed, as well as the consequences of a modern world obsessed with “capturing reality” even if a definition of “reality” will never be reached.

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Bibliophilebabe3425

Beauty: The Invisible Embrace (Perennial) | John O'Donohue

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Robotswithpersonality

Chromophobia | David Batchelor

so-so

And around and around we go! 😵‍💫 When the book started with a chapter about whitescapes, an apparent critique of minimalist architecture/interior design, I thought maybe we were going to consider individual colours, how people historically have reacted to them, how they might arouse fear, disgust, phobia, as much as praise, from an art-focused, rather than psychological basis. 1/?

Robotswithpersonality 2/? But after the first chapter, it was a bunch of chapters considering the idea of not liking colour or colours, as a unit, at all, largely from the perspective of writers from the 19th century or earlier, contrasting with what I guess the author saw as the clearest emergent vote for colour thereafter, the 1960s with psychedelia and pop art. Film also gets in there, too. 5mo

Robotswithpersonality 3/? The 19th century opinions showcase a staggering amount of anthropocentric, hierarchical thinking, attempting to make line, form, architecture, superior to colour, and proving both racist and misogynist in the way colour and its associations/attributes are described as subordinated to form. 😬 5mo

Robotswithpersonality 4/? There was also a chapter discussing how different languages have different conceptions of basic colours, pitting colour against language, the idea that people react to colour before they have language, that describing colour is often beyond words. A side tangent that felt very tangential.
I guess if you're going to look at the range of opinions in art criticism and see what the reasoning was behind chromophobia you'll sample whatever period 5mo

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Robotswithpersonality 5/? of history such views hold sway, but it does feel somewhat truncated that there were some published dudes in the 1800s (not all anti-colour but majority of those quoted) and seemingly a reaction to this mindset by dudes in the 1960s, and this author decided in 2000 to quote a bunch of each group without touching on much time outside of what was either decades or hundreds of years' old writings, interviews. 5mo

Robotswithpersonality 6/? The paragraphs, the meanderings Batchelor gets into featuring his own thoughts did often seem to be repeats, paragraphs going round in circles.
So:
Some older people have not liked colour and their reasons are kind of sus, many people, artists, have worked with and discussed colour (some are recognized as trailblazers for doing so) in ways that might not be recognized as art by the older guys, but why should we care what they thought? 5mo

Robotswithpersonality 7/? And maybe modern minimalism is the backlash to the backlash depending on whether your tastes run that way, but I don't see it in danger of taking over the world based on the life of colour and creativity I'm witness to every day in person and online. 5mo

Robotswithpersonality 8/8 There were a number of 20th century artists and some art critics from both time periods quoted that I think I'd like to follow up on, but aside from fulfilling an essay requirement (with a hefty word count stipulation) for an art history course, I'm not sure why Batchelor would choose these angles on this topic. 🤷🏼‍♂️ 5mo

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