---
title: Art I've Been into
author: Colton Grainger
belief: likely
---
This is a half-baked chronology of visual art (hence *abandoned*), and a
discussion of "art as experience". It's a decently representative sample of
work that influenced me (for better or worse) throughout my undergrad and
during the following 2 years of service.
### Fall 2017
- [Inés Estrada](http://inechi.com/)!
### Winter 2017
- [Kissa Millar](https://www.visualaids.org/artists/detail/kissa-millar) (NSFW)
- [A Lesson in How to Communicate](/attached/millar-lesson-how-to-communicate.jpg)
- [Pink Elephant](/attached/millar-pink-elephant.jpg)
### Summer 2016
- [Dutch Golden Age Painting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Golden_Age_painting)
- [Phoebe Anna Traquair](https://www.nationalgalleries.org/search/artist/phoebe-anna-traquair)
- [The Progress of a Soul: Victory](https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/17411/progress-soul-victory?artists[15156]=15156&search_set_offset=12)
### Spring 2016
- [Jean Baptiste Greuze](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Greuze)
### Winter 2016
- [M.C. Escher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._C._Escher)
- [Reptiles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptiles_(M._C._Escher))
- [Circle Limit III](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._C._Escher#/media/File:Escher_Circle_Limit_III.jpg)
### Fall 2015
- [Yoshitoshi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshitoshi)
- [Bodhidharma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshitoshi#/media/File:BodhidharmaYoshitoshi1887.jpg), 1887
- [Womb Realm Mandalas]()
- e.g., [Shingon tantric buddhist school mandala](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Taizokai.jpg), Heian period
### Summer 2015
- [Lindisfarne Gospels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindisfarne_Gospels)
- [Frida Kahlo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frida_Kahlo)
- [Thinking about Death](https://www.wikiart.org/en/frida-kahlo/thinking-about-death-1943)
### Spring 2015
- [Dürer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albrecht_D%C3%BCrer)
- [Melancholia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melancholia#/media/File:D%C3%BCrer_Melancholia_I.jpg)
- self portrait
- netherlandish woman in grey dress
- [Anatoly Fomenko](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoly_Fomenko)
- [Melancholia](/attached/fomenko-melancholia.jpg)
- [The Temptation of Saint Anthony](http://virtualmathmuseum.org/mathart/ArtGalleryAnatoly/mediafiles/The_Temptation_of_St_Anthony.jpg)
- [homotopic topology illustrations](http://www.math.columbia.edu/~khovanov/gradalgtop/Fuchs1.pdf)
### Winter 2015
- [Natalia Goncharova](https://www.wikiart.org/en/natalia-goncharova)
- [Rooster](/attached/goncharova-rooster.jpg)
- [Six Winged Seraph](https://www.wikiart.org/en/natalia-goncharova/liturgy-six-winged-seraph)
- [St. Andrew](https://www.wikiart.org/en/natalia-goncharova/liturgy-st-andrew)
### Spring 2014
- [Edgar Degas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Degas)
- some [horses](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Edgar_Degas_-_Before_the_Race_-_Walters_37850.jpg)
- also [dancers](https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/search/?search-term=degas+sculpture)
- [Gustav Klimt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Klimt)
- watersnakes II
- [Egon Schiele](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egon_Schiele)
- [Gustave Moreau](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Moreau)
- salome dancing for Herod (various versions)
- [Joan Miró](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Mir%C3%B3)
- Waking up at sunrise, 1941
- Rhythmic Personages, 1934
- Man and Woman in front of a pile of excrement, 1936
### Winter 2014
- [Spivak](also://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Spivak)
- [differential geometry cover art](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91L0KVJjGlL.jpg)
### Earlier
- Holbein?
## Meta
Why keep this record?
- Different art spurns to action folks at various stages of their lives; this
is a trace of the relationships that've *spurned* me (for better or worse).
- Artists have a productive process I'm trying to mimic.
- I'm also supervising (?) my consumption.
Note! I'm not "collecting gems", in the sense developed by Schorske's
[Politics and the Psyche: Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal](https://www.jstor.org/stable/1845864).
He writes[^fin-de-siecle] (emphasis my own):
[^fin-de-siecle]: Carl Schorske, *[Fin-De-Siècle Vienna](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fin-de-si%C3%A8cle_Vienna)*, 1979.
> Only Karl Kraus, [Vienna's] most acidulous moralist, poured contempt upon
> "that gem-collector" Hofmannsthal, who "flees life and loves the things which
> beautify it."
>
> How wrong Kraus was, as wrong as Hofmannsthal's admirers! All were deceived
> by the poet's diction. From the very beginning, the aesthetic attitude was
> problemative for Hofmannsthal. The dweller in the temple of art, he knew, was
> *condemned to seek the significance of life purely within his own psyche*. He
> suffered acutely from this imprisonment within the self, which permitted no
> connection with outer reality except that of the passive reception of
> sensation. ...
>
> In *The Death of Titian* (1892) the poet presented in his own terms the
> cultists who made art the source of value, but also manifested for the first
> time his own urge to escape from the aesthetic attitude. A sort of *tableau
> vivant*, the playlet verges on a rite of the dying god of the cult of beauty.
> The disciples of Tita, in an atmosphere of stylized richness reminiscent of
> Walter Pater's *Renaissance*, converse on the aesthetic vision of life given
> to them by the artist now nearing death. The disciples glorify the master for
> having, through his soul, transfigured nature and man for them. Were it not
> for him
>
> > We would live on in twilight,
Out life devoid of meaning ...
>
> as do the vulgar in the city. Although Hofmannsthal renders this cult of
> beauty with all the warmth of an initiate, his commitment is qualified. He
> senses danger and ... gives that danger voice: *for the orthodox of the
> religion of art, the interpretation of life as beauty brings a terrible
> dependency.* The genius can always see beauty; to him every moment brings
> fulfillment. But those who know not how to create "must helplessly await the
> revelation" of the genius. Meanwhile, life is drained of vitality:
>
> > Our present is all void and dreariness
If consecration comes not from
> > without.[^hofmannsthal]
[^hofmannsthal]: *Und unsre Gegenwart is trüb und leer / Kommt uns die Weihe night von aussen her ... / So lebten wire in Dämmerung dahin, / Und unser Leben hätte keinen Sinn.* *[Der Tod des Tizians](https://archive.org/stream/dertoddestiziani00hofm#page/26/)*, pp. 26
I view [art as experience](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_as_Experience).
To give a concrete example, the notes scrawled in fear and boredom on the back
blank pages of my copy of the Brothers Karamazov *is as* my experience waiting
for an acquaintance to drive back with my f-ing car, 2:30am some weekend
early September 2014, behind the Jackson’s convenience store, right off the
I-84 freeway exit in Nampa.
I understand that *what I wrote is concomitant with being there*
(and, in this case, made waiting all the worse).
In term's of Schorske's argument (that is, his interpretation of Hofmannstahl's
*Der Tod des Tizians*),
> The root of the difficulty [in a purely passive view of art] is suspected
> only by the youngest of the disciples, the sixteen-year-old Gianino, to whose
> beautiful person, as to the young Hofmannsthal, "something maidenly" clings.
> In a "half-dream", the state in which so many of Hofmannsthal's own insights
> were born, Gianino has wandered in the night to a ledge below which sleeping
> Venice lies. He sees the city through a painter's eyes: an object of pure
> vision, "nestling whispering in the spangled cloak which the moon and tide
> had cast about her sleep". There there rises on the night wind the shattering
> secret that under this visual image *life is pulsing---intoxication,
> suffering, hate, spirit, blood.* For the first time, Gianino becomes aware of
> an *active, emotionally rich and committed existence.* "Life, alive and
> omnipotent---one can have it, yet be oblivious of it", if one separates
> oneself from the city.
>
> Titian's other apostles rush to resurrect the glacis which separates the art
> and life, and which Gianino's vision threatens to destroy. One explains that
> under the beautiful and seductive face of the city live ugliness and
> vulgarity, that distance wisely conceals from Gianino a hideous, dreary
> world, peopled with beings who do not recognize beauty, who even in their
> sleep are dreamless. To keep out this gross world, another avers, Titian has
> built the high fence, through whose luxuriously blooming vines the devotee of
> beauty shall not see the world directly, but only sense it dimly. Gianino
> speaks no more, but his attitude finds justification in the dying Titian. The
> master, in a final burst of insight, cries out, "The God Pan lives!"
> Fortified by his new dedication to the unity of all life, Titian paints on
> the eve of his death a canvas in which Pan is the central figure. The painter
> does not represent Pan the god of life directly, but only as a veiled puppet
> in the arms of a young girl, a female counterpart of Gianino with his
> androgynous characteristics, a girl who feels the mystery of the life she
> holds. *The master has pointed the way to the unification of art and life,
> but he has not passed beyond a traditional mythological representation of its
> possibility.* For Gianino, though he does not say so, even this merely
> symbolic vision of vitality is *not enough*. He wants more than symbol. While
> the other followers of Titian become
> [epigoni](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/epigone), losing the master's
> connection of traditional artistic achievement and life, Gianino intensifies
> the aesthete's vision until it *drives him through the ornamented pale of
> beauty to a yearning for life itself*, to the horror of his friends who find
> life outside the pale unthinkable.
>
> In the fragment, Gianino-Hofmannthal's problem is not resolved, but the
> question that plagued the poet is clearly posed: *How shall art transcend
> mere passive rendering of beauty to achieve a fruitful relationship to the
> life of the world?* More simply: *Where [is] the escape from the temple of
> art?*
## See Also
- my complementary [music log](/music)
- [Dewey's Aesthetics](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey-aesthetics/)