To Generalize is to be an Idiot
- W. Blake

Mister William Blake (1757-1827) was a British painter and poet, an interesting figure of the mature Pre-Romanticism and the young Romanticism. Left school at the age of 10, pursued certain artistic interests, but managed to quarrel with all of his ‘masters’. He developed a very interesting style, both in painting and poetry, marked by a poignant naivety (stylistically speaking, not ideologically) and his themes evolved from the countryside and the misery of the poor to representations of a peculiar mythology that he had made up as some sort of double to the Bible. People back then said he’d gone crazy, people now admire his creative freedom.

The painting today is Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing (c. 1786)

(i apologize for the small size, wordpress says it’s either this or you just see half of it. feel free to google it and find a better version)
It’s a watercolour work, and I’m sure what I said earlier about ‘naivety’ is quite obvious here. The faces especially are nothing special, but the atmosphere, the composition and the white ethereal bodies are quite beautiful. You can almost see them spinning.
And, as this is inspired by Shakespeare, I couldn’t possibly skip the opportunity to quote him a little. Forgive me for taking things out of context and butchering it a little at the end, but I couldn’t possibly quote the whole thing.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V

PUCK

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
….

The love in the book is not homosexual love. It is ‘the love we don’t speak of’. It is asexual love. It is not the painter’s love for the man he is fascinated by. It is not the painter’s love for the pinnacle of his artistic creation. It is the painter’s love for his sitter – the artist’s love.

This is the most beautiful ars poetica that I have ever read.

I was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. (…) You would have never understood it. I hardly understood it myself. I only knew that I had seen perfection face to face, and that the world had become wonderful to my eyes – too wonderful, perhaps, for in such mad worships there is peril, the peril of losing them, no less than the peril of keeping them. (…) And it had all been what art should be, unconscious, ideal, and remote. One day, a fatal day I sometimes think, I determined to paint a wonderful portrait of you as you actually are, not in the costume of dead ages, but in your own dress and your own time. Whether it was the Realism of the method, or the mere wonder of your own personality, thus directly presented to me without mist or veil, I cannot tell. But I know that as I worked at it, every flake and film of colour seemed to me to reveal my secret. There was love in every line, and in every touch there was passion.
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, chapter IX

It’s the 19th of January. This, if memory serves, is the same video I posted last year. I tried to find something better and new, but to me there’s nothing to surpass this poem and the soft, yet somehow heavy and emotional voice of Jeff. He ‘got’ Poe. Not enough people do, considering how popular he is…

There is a petition which attempts to earn some justice, but, for that, it needs to get to 100 000 in the next 5 days. Only UK citizens can sign, but if you don’t live in the UK you can still help by spreading the word. Only takes a second:

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/19149

Thanks.

I’ve chosen one of my favourite painters this week, John William Waterhouse; this painting is called A naiad:

Now, one might protest; I said I’d speak about fairies and here’s a Naiad. I beg to differ. The word fairy comes from the Middle English faie (which, in its turn, comes from French and then from Latin), originally meaning ‘faith’, but believed to have meant ‘enchantment’ at some point in this interesting etymological process. Fairies are wrongly considered to be these small creatures with fancy powers over nature; however, quoting from Tolkien’s On Fairy Stories:

The diminutive being, elf or fairy, is (I guess) in England largely a sophisticated product of literary fancy. It is perhaps not unnatural that in England, the land where the love of the delicate and fine has often reappeared in art, fancy should in this matter turn towards the dainty and diminutive, as in France it went to court and put on powder and diamonds. Yet I suspect that this flower-and-butterfly minuteness was also a product of “rationalization,” which transformed the glamour of Elfland into mere finesse, and invisibility into a fragility that could hide in a cowslip or shrink behind a blade of grass.

So yes, that beautiful creature up there is a fairy. But, back from my useless divagations into my literary crushes, a Naiad is, according to dictionary.com, a class of nymphs which presides over rivers and springs, so an aquatic being which may also symbolize youth. (see how it’s rivers and springs, not lakes and puddles.)
When the painting was exhibited at New Gallery, in 1893, this was its description in the catalogue notes:

The Naiad has just risen, nude, from the stream, and peers between the willow stems at a sleeping youth, who lies half covered with a leopard skin on the bank. Two green water-lily leaves confine the water-nymph’s red tresses. Harmony of pink and green, relieved by blue light on the water. Large oblong picture.

- Henry Blackburn

What personally attracts me to the painting is her facial expression, hesitant, but somehow wild; and this innocent eroticism which seems to build up between the two naked, young figures.

A bit of music today, too. Not a brilliant song, but simple and pretty; thematic, too.

Unconsciously he defines for me the lines of a fresh school, a school that is to have in it all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is Greek. The harmony of soul and body – how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void.

He is all my art to me now.

- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey

This is basically a post inspired by mister Kundera (whom I adore and will love eternally). Probably none of the ideas here are my own, so don’t credit me if anything sounds smart. Also, what I want to say is quite long and quite chaotic, so I apologize for the length and incoherence of this post.

I don’t even know where to start. What is kitsch? How subjective is it and why does Kundera associate it with the emotional, the irrational, as opposed to the more analytical decisions of the mind? Is it necessary for good art to involve rationality? If we allowed our emotions complete creative freedom (as the Romantics supposedly did), would kitsch be the only result? Is kitsch, in a very strange way, an aspiration to what some would consider perfection?

Kitsch, says dictionary.com, is a loanword from the German “kitschen”, meaning to throw together. Something that would suggest, perhaps, some sort of haste in the creative process, or perhaps the amount of useless ornaments that is tantamount to kitsch in the collective opinion. However, wikipedia suggests this painting below, “The Widow”, as a kitsch example of late 19th century popular lithograph of a humorous painting by Frederick Dielman.

Does this look like a careless work? Fair enough, it’s no Dali in terms of pretty details, but it’s not something one paints in one hour. And where’s the excessive ornamentation? Shouldn’t we then also take into account the idea that kitsch is also dependable on the sheer artistic quality of the oeuvre we’re analysing?

Moving on. Dictionary.com says then that kitsch is
something of tawdry design, appearance, or content created to appeal to popular or undiscriminating taste.
There we go. That’s a bit closer. This picture, for example, is the first result that comes up when you google ‘kitsch’ and is, indeed, something overly adorned, sort of tawdry and which probably appeals to undiscriminating taste:

But then. Mozart apparently wrote a large percentage of his works for the clear and honest purpose to avoid death by starvation. They were written quickly and with money and commercial success in mind, rather than art. But who can say Mozart actually is kitsch? I doubt anyone can, unless completely unfamiliar with both the term and the man’s work and immense talent. What is it that sets him apart? The sheer quality – and where does that come from? From passion for music or from a very sharp intellect? Kundera would say it’s the second. But then again, Kundera would say there’s a bit of kitsch in Mozart as well.
I’d also venture to speak about ‘commercial music’ in general, but seeing how people now use ‘commercial’ to mean ‘made for money’, as well as ‘which sells well’, as well as ‘which everyone likes’, as well as ‘which sounds like music that sells well’, as well as ‘bad’. So let’s not go there.

Moving on, to slightly more intelligent approaches of the subject.
Kant was among the first philosophers to develop a proper aesthetic system (although still quite dependent on Aristotle’s, which seems to dictate the general direction of aesthetics until Schopenhauer and that other German dude.) and he opposed the terms of Art and Artistic Indifference (Kitsch). He affirmed that art is disinterested in a fundamental, unique way, and that it is necessarily moral. (whether this morality is relative to said disinterest, I don’t know.) We can agree on the ‘disinterested’ part (if we exclude examples such as Mozart, whose art was perhaps disinterested anyway, seeing as he could’ve as well washed floors and windows to earn the same money), but moral? Is kitsch immoral? Strangely enough, Kundera argues for the exact opposite and says kitsch is an everpresent lie, a sort of pathetic attempt at one’s moral and aesthetic salvation through a continuous denial of reality, the yearning of the heart for something that isn’t really there – sort of like religion, perhaps?
Here is the quote, from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, just like the one at the beginning of this post, where he says it:
The fact that until recently the word “shit” appeared in print as s— has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can’t claim that shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. … The aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch. … Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.

I’m afraid I’ll have to continue this in another post (I added the ’1.0′ to the title ), as this is already long and probably extremely boring. But yeah, there’s more to tell.