Re: CHAT: Steg's wonderful .sig (and a question)

On Thu, 11 Nov 1999, Thomas R. Wier wrote:

> The point is not whether you can appreciate it, it's the extent to
> which you can appreciate.  The way I read Boudewijn, he was
> saying that there are multiple levels to a work of art, and while you might
> be able to appreciate the general gist of it, you might not fully understand
Well, I did pick Jan Steen for a reason - his paintings tell a story,
actually a lot of stories. When you first look at them, they often
depict a nice & chaotic scene in the local inn, but each and every
object in the painting has a meaning - hidden to us, but not to the
people for whom he painted.

> how the brushstrokes or the color interact with that gist.  It's like...
Thinking about the interaction of brushwork, colour, and so on,
is the only way I can think of that one can appreciate more recent
paintings. Surely, to the picture-viewer, there's little to like in
Klee, or even a Dali - you need to go deeper for that. Not that I
necessarily think of that as a good thing, but rather is a fact.

> say, watching an Akira Kurosawa film.  There are multiple levels of
> meaning in _Dersu Uzala_: the basic plotline set in Tsarist Russia,
> yet deeper, the interactions between the Tsarist troops and the
> Siberian natives, and then at a still deeper level allusions to
> the Sumerian epic Gilgamesh and the Enkidu-wildman motif.  In
> otherwords, you can't just reduce things to what they're "basically"
> about -- you, the audience, have to pick them apart, and digest
> them in bits and pieces.   And to do that picking apart takes practice,
> and isn't normally the kind of thing you can do just off hand like that.
Practice, knowledge and a fair bit of dedication. I know I lack the
dedication needed to appreciate certain forms of art - I don't terribly
like watching films. That's quite general, and I lack knowledge of
a lot of the idioms. Of poetry, I know that there are whole genres
I can't appreciate with my current knowledge, and the same holds for
sculpture - even though I am not a stranger to that field of art.

Yes, in sum, I think you got my meaning completely.

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://denden.conlang.org/~bsarempt