File spoon-archives/phillitcrit.archive/phillitcrit_1997/phillitcrit.9707, message 30


Date: Mon, 21 Jul 1997 09:10:41 -0400
From: Reg Lilly <rlilly-AT-scott.skidmore.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Plato and Aristotle on Art


Patsloane-AT-aol.com wrote:
> 
> > . While Plato and Aristotle are good reference points for any
> discussion
> >  of art,........................
> 
> Not necessarily.  Each of them has a kinda fallacious view, and they
> don't
> even seem to understand the art of their own day.

	Perhaps, given the spread of what 'to understand' can mean, but
Aristotle seem more of the 'reporter' of what was going on than Plato
does.

> 
> Each assumes that art  is imitation (mimesis), which it need not
> necessarily
> be.
> For Aristotle this is good.  Imitation "delights" people. But where do
> we put
> the non-imitative arts, those that don't "copy" forms found in nature.
> 
> For Plato, imitation is bad.  Art is inferior because its forms
> imitate the
> forms of nature, which imitate ideal forms. So art is an imitation of
> an
> imitation.  Plato is assuming, of course, that any imitation is
> inferior to
> the original, or isn't a good enough imitation of that original.  But
> an
> imitation can introduce new qualities that make it <better> than the
> original.  


Forgive a second reference to him but, J. Taminiaux in LE THEATRE DES
PHILOSOPHES makes a strong (I think too 'strong') a case that Plato is
the great hater of mimesis and art, and Aristotle saw the connection to
praxis in tragedy and had a much more favorable opinion of art -- the
first and last philosopher to have genuine esteem for tragedy and art
until Kant and Hoelderlin and the later Heidegger.

Rubens copied a lot of paintings by Titian.  In many cases,
> the
> Rubens' paintings are admired more than the Titians. Rubens improved
> on what
> he was "copying." This is actually a very common phenomenon. Somebody
> gives
> you a recipe for chicken soup.  In the process of "following" the
> recipe, you
> find ways to improve it..
> 
> Plato is also too easy to reduce to absurdity.  T. S. Eliot has a very
> beautiful description of a painting "designed upon a gesso ground" by
> a
> painter of the Umbrian school.  It's in  Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning
> Service.
>  Assuming that the description "imitates" the painting (which imitates
> reality), the description would presumably be even more inferior than
> the
> painting.  Imitation of an imitation of an imitation, etc.
> 
> But what if it's a beautiful description of an ugly painting?

	Ah, the eternal return of the platonic triad: True-Good-Beautiful!

> What if
> there
> was <no> painting, and he just imagined the painting?  What, then,
> would the
> description "imitate?"

	Wouldn't the description in fact be the work in this case?

>  What of the thousands of paintings in musuems
> of the
> Baptism of Christ?  Do you really think a huge army of artists set up
> their
> easels at the actual event so that they could "copy" what they saw?
> Of
> course not.  The  artists imagined the event. What, then, were they
> "copying?"
> 
> pat sloane

Reg Lilly

   

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