My taste in art is pretty varied, but tends--as does my taste in most things--away from the post-modern and minimalist..
The philosophical field of aesthetics explores why we find things beautiful, and my artistic tastes tend to agree with my philosophy--or at least I tend to make them agree. I like art that has some component of rationality, e.g. the work of Escher (whom I believe to be rational because of the way most of his work incorporates mathematics), or the work of the Bauhaus artists.
I also like art that elicits a strongly visceral, emotional reaction. This can range from the renaissance beauty of Da Vinci and Raphael (to name a couple) to the disturbing images of Geiger and Mossa.
Perhaps it's not just an emotional reaction I'm after, but also a sense of progress. The above artists all contributed something to the "state of the art" of art. The same can be said of many other artists I like from other periods, e.g. Van Eyck and Giotto, Matisse and Cezanne.
So how do you define progress? This brings us back to rationality. Rationality, as I will undoubtedly write elsewhere, is the one quality that truly sets us apart from the rest of the animals. It provides the only common language we humans can use to frame discussions of value, whether we're talking about the financial value of a company or the emotional value of art. This is one part of Ayn Rand's aesthetics I can agree with.
Art, I contend, must rationally contribute to human progress to be considered good. The artists I list--and others who are similar--do this in one way or another. The renaissance painters were the first to imbue their work with realistic perspective; the impressionists kept the dimensionality of this perspective while enhancing it with color and technique; Mossa, Escher, and Giger explored spiritual, scientific, and technological beliefs and developments. All of these artists told us a little more about ourselves than we had known before.
To be continued.
Copyright © 2004 Vince Cavasin. All rights reserved.