My hazy recollection is that I first heard cubism explained as a style that showed multiple points of view in a single painting. That may be fairly typical of the popular conception of what cubism is. But since one often has difficulty even telling what the subject is, it’s pretty clear that maximizing information conveyed was not the main motivation for Picasso, Braque, and company. I’ve long felt that I didn’t really have much grasp of what cubism really was, of what the artists cared about and thought about. Following are some snippets I’ve encountered, in no particular order.
Recently artist and blogger Laurie Fendrich, on residency in France, claims to have found a source for cubism in the jumbled roof planes of hill-clinging villages. This visually appealing view is supported by the Braques of L’Estaque and Picassos of Horta:
Along these lines, there’s a cute analysis posted on YouTube on Picasso’s La Grenade, reproduced below:
Of a more analytical bent, the art critic Walter Darby Bannard, writing in a 1968 essay, says that the essence of cubism is that a painting be composed of small elements whose positions and relations reconstitute the subject. The classic elements for Picasso and Braque were the facets that broke up the surfaces they depicted. Bannard credits Cezanne with having taken the color spots of the Impressionists and “flattened out the ‘pieces’ and organized them spatially.” He goes on to apply his definition to the sculptor David Smith.
Pierre Daix, writer and friend of Picasso, brings science into the mix:
Cubism was not only a revolution in pictorial space, but a revolution in our understanding of pictorial space. This was in all probability linked to the fact that physics was simultaneously destroying our three-dimensional space-time perception.
As a scientist myself, I’m skeptical of any substantive relevance, but that’s not the point. Ideas of revolution were in the air, and took on cultural significance independent of their original meaning.
David Hockney, as reported by Lawrence Weschler in True to Life (where I also found the Daix quote in a note), considers that cubism is not so much about the structure of the object, but about the process of perception.
If there are three noses, this is not because the face has three noses, or the nose has three aspects, but rather because it has been seen three times, and that is what seeing is like.
Of course, that’s much what Hockney himself was attempting to do with his photocollages. Insofar as that was the goal, I think Hockney did it in a more convincing way.
And then there’s the aesthetic-historical Pepe Karmel, whose book Picasso and the Invention of Cubism was made known to us by Jay (I picked it up used on Amazon).
To understand Cubism, it is necessary to examine three key ideas associated with earlier avant-garde movements. One is the “empiricist” theory of perception… Another is the Symbolist idea that the work of art should not imitate reality but should offer an “equivalent” for experience… The third is the idea of “decorative” design, whose influence on modernism…
Hopefully that will make more sense as I get further into the book.
These bits of study are beginning to coalesce into what, inevitably, can only be called a cubist picture of cubism. But I’m not sure how far I can get without attempting a cubist painting a la June (results here)—rather problematic as I don’t paint.
Please add your own facet to the picture. What comes to your mind when I say, “Cubism?” Do you still believe the creation myth, the story of its origin, that you were first told? Did the cubists have a goal, and if so was the endeavor a success or a failure?
Steve,
Your referring back to June’s posts reminds me of a possibility that Karl brought up recently. “Put Google Ads on A&P and then use the proceipts to pay someone (with an artistic bent) to organize our posts. We have accumulated enough posts by now that there may be enough income to make this a realistic source of revenue for someone to spend her/his time.
Why? A&P could better serve as an educational resource. Recently, someone left a comment saying that she was writing an essay on still lifes and wanted more information from Hanneke. Presenting our posts according to particular themes may stimulate others to use our posts, perhaps in art school?
You may argue that we already have categories. But, I am thinking about organizing our posts creatively according to a particular theme and then present this organization on ‘halibut days’.
Mr Durbin:
You say you are a scientist, and what you are doing seems to be a scientific examination of the evolution of an art-making method, so my recommendation is to go strictly by the source evidence – what Picasso & Braque actually did and said from about 1907 to 1914 – and disregard both the oft-repeated and inadequate given theories and various tangential stuff (eg roof tiles, etc).
It it a dense subject, so good luck.
Mr Bannard:
First of all, I’m grateful for the opportunity to thank you for a body of exceptionally readable and insightful writing about art that I have learned much from. Thanks also to Franklin Einspruch for making it available on the web in The Walter Darby Bannard Archive.
I’m sure you’re right that so much written about Cubism is repetition of poorly understood and perhaps ill-founded claims. Though I’m just at the beginnings of my study, it was that sense that suggested my title.
Your point about original sources is well-taken, though not so easy to adhere to. I suspect it requires a great deal of care and knowledge to interpret the original statements we have. Picasso, in particular, appears to have enjoyed twitting his interlocuters with tossed-off statements, not only from a sense of play, but because of a deeply felt belief that “People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.”
I suspect, by the way, that Picasso’s playfulness is responsible for a lot of his cubist invention. I think he became fascinated with a new way of making pictures, and mined it obsessively as he did other ways in other periods of his career.
Though I am very interested in gaining an understanding of what the Cubists were thinking and doing, I’m equally interested in what other artists made of it, whether mistakenly or not, and naturally with their own purposes. The article of yours I cited, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism and David Smith, is very helpful with just this sort of thing. It’s clearly a lifelong study.
Birgit,
I appreciate Karl’s entrepreneurial (in the best sense) suggestion, but I’m doubtful we could earn enough from Google ads to pay someone–it pains me to say it–to read through and organize A&P. However, I agree there’s a lot of interesting material there, and I also agree that a great way to go about organizing it is through themes that suggest themselves. That is exactly what tags are good for. Any organizing concept that occurs to you could become a tag, and be applied to a brief introductory post, as well as to the previous posts relating to the concept. In that way, one could access all the related posts by clicking a particular tag link on any one of them. It’s much too onerous to go back systematically, but doing it one idea at a time could be fun. Similarly, when posting on a particular topic, one could go back and tag previous posts that seem connected.
One issue is that non-admin authors only have permissions to tag their own posts. To apply the new tag to other posts would require either email requests and efforts on the part of authors, or an agreement that an admin user could do the tagging. In a sense, tagging is administrative, but I haven’t indulged in that awesome power (but June, OK if I tag your cubist posts?). If nobody objects, I’d be happy to do the tagging on request, on the assumption that anyone willing to group posts under a theme has put thought into it and is doing us all a service.
Even without the tagging, though, thematic posts that simply link to the related posts would be great to have.
Another suggestion of Karl’s which I adopted, and that will help in finding related posts, is installation of a Google search of A&P, now located in the sidebar next to the regular WordPress search. The Google search ranks by a guess at best relevance, rather than reverse-chronologically. The greatest advantage of the Google search is its ability to find posts where the search term is only in the comments–important as so much material is there.
Thanks for the kind words.
Invention and play are identical twins. Art gets treated with such solemnity that we lose sight of that. Picasso said many teasing things but most of what he said was sharp and lucid and insightful.
Also there are Bill Rubin’s excellent books and Richardson’s Life to draw from, and the letters both artists wrote. And of course the art itself, beginning with Cezanne.
Yes, it is a difficult subject, but if you stick to facts and mechanics and steer clear of artsoeak, which you seem inclined to do, I am sure you will come up with something good.
Sorry, I meant “artspeak” in the last paragraph above.
Steve et al,
First, I cringe when my “cubist” primitives (in the worst sense of the word) are referred to. Nevertheless, you have my permission to do any tagging on anything I have had the temerity to publish on A&P, provided I’m allowed to let everyone know that those monstrosities have now been painted over — the delete key is useful and so is white titanium over a bit of sanding. Perhaps I need to go back and make this clear on the post –snort–
What I found interesting about this exchange is that, in addition to Steve’s research, Mr Bannard could write and further enlighten us — and then we have the opportunity to search out his work and further enlighten ourselves. Of course, Steve had already done much of the work, but there is nothing like a personal voice adding a bass tremolo or tenor line to make me want to investigate the intricacies of the composition further. So thank you, Mr. Bannard.
As I come to your question, Steve, being a fairly solipsistic, not to mention selfish, individual, I often look at other artists not as to whether they excite me or not, but whether and how I can make use of the insights which they bring to the canvas (or paper or metal or back fence). This is less true on A&P than elsewhere for me, because here I feel a responsibility to the other artists and commentors and so try to resist sucking up and distorting the art for my own purposes. But truly, much of what I do in looking at art is to try to understand so I can upgrade my own endeavors.
Thus, my answer to your questions: “Do you still believe the creation myth, the story of its origin, that you were first told? Did the cubists have a goal, and if so was the endeavor a success or a failure?” for me, is that I don’t know and, truly, scarcely care — whether about the creation myth or about the goals and successes that these artists may have had in pursuing a verbal goal (they of course were successful as visual artists.) Or at least I care only insofar as what they said has something that I can comprehend that pushes me further into my own art (even if I mis-comprehend).
I am overstating my case, of course, and perhaps denigrating my vision a bit more than necessary, but when I read your comments, Steve, I was most interested in the Daix comment because at the moment _I’m_ immersed in questions of pictorial space — (without, however, the concern of cross-discipline mindsets or metaphors.)
The artist here on A&P are in process and thus much of what they (you) say concerns process and thus are always useful for my processing mind. So my question back-atcha, Steve, is what use can you, as photographer, can make of Cubism — can you push somehow beyond where Hockney pushed? Which makes me want to read Mr. Bannard on Steve Smith, and then I immediately wonder whether Mr. Bannard on Steve Smith will enlighten June Underwood on Michael Heizer which might in some way further June Underwood’s terribly selfish desire to capture on a 2-d surface the void, or at least to muckle about with space in such a way as to allow us (oh what a nice generous and vague “us” that is) to perceive it differently.
So what say you, Steve? Is this what you hope your Yellowstone photos, rightside-up or upside-down, will do to our perceptions? (And my apologies for not linking to your photos — I’ve used up my quota of thinking ability for the day.
June,
Fair question, I suppose, as one solipsist to another. Aside from a strong general interest that tends to follow any butterfly flitting past, there are two reasons I’m pursuing cubism at the moment.
One is that I’m attempting to write a piece on a painter/sculptor whose whose sculpture, especially, reminded me much of cubist paintings (more Gris than Picasso) and the wee bit of sculpture like Picasso’s Mandolin and Clarinet, which never went very far. And “spatial ambiguity” is a very important aspect of both her painting and sculpture. So in order to write something intelligent, I feel I need to learn more about relevant thinking and accomplishments along those lines.
Then for my own work, I’m still very much exploring how abstraction works in photography, and cubism seems to be the starting point for modernist abstraction. In fact, thinking about it now, spatial ambiguity is something that already comes into some of my photographs, and a new thing I’m thinking about would completely throw in the wrenches, as bad as or worse than suddenly faceting the rounded space about a subject. Like you, I find that learning how others have thought about such ideas helps me to cast a wider net as I seek my own fish in this wide, wide sea.
Seems to be a rather large can of worms here…and provocative as indicated by the flurry of comments and questions.
The presence of Walter Darby Bannard here was a very pleasant surprise. An extremely articulate and thoughtful critic, who also has a distinguished career as a painter. There is an archive of a selection of his paintings at: http://bannard.com/ As a young artist and teacher I was extremely interested in his early minimalist color work.
I have a few observations about Cubism, which I’ll try to make briefly, and hope they help with some of the thinking and questions here. I hope they don’t seem hackneyed and obvious.
First and perhaps foremost for me is their rejection of the conventions of western pictorial space. Picasso and Braque, following a variety of leads from the Post Impressionists, and eastern Art, and certainly African Art, insisted on conceptual, rather than perceptual representation. They sought to make images which denied perspective, denied a single point of view, denied a unified play of light and shadow, and denied the solidity and opacity of their subjects. So; they made emphatically flat and or shallow ‘shadow boxes’, with the space that is suggested created by both the shadows and transparency of overlapping planes. A point to make here is that the majority of art has been conceptual, as opposed to perceptual, in the methods of representation employed. (Think Egyptian, Byzantine, or Anasazi Petroglyphs or whatever in terms of conceptual representation.)
The Cubists insistence on the flatness, and physicality, of the painting became an axiom of modernist painting and formalism. They also avoided, or obliterated, clear figure/ground relationships. The newspaper in the foreground disappears behind some wallpaper, and the bowl of a pipe becomes the shape of the mouth of a jug…which means it’s a very fluid and plastic space…as our attention wanders things pop forward or drop back.
Black is first on top, then behind. Ditto with white…and all colors.
I believe their project was to make an ersatz, cobbled together representation of consciousness. A diagrammatic rendering of bits of fleeting experience.They explored a variety of modes in the years between 1907 and 1914 or so…think of the range and variety of image from Les Damoiselles to Analytic Cubism to Synthetic Cubism. An essential element pops up in Synthetic Cubism, when objects from breakfast make their way onto the paintings. The bits of newspapers and tobacco labels seem the most emphatic denials of perceptual representation…”Here it is; the thing I was conscious of.” This resonates forward from Duchamp to Warhol to Jeff Koons to Roxy Paine….(sort of…)
The paintings, all the way through, are quite linear, with reduced or almost monochrome palettes. I believe this is a part of their anti-perceptual program, and supports a notion of their diagrammatic and conceptual qualities.
But…note the references to the multiplicity of experience..guitars, absinthe, tobacco, texts, and heavily textured surfaces…I believe they are referring to the multiplicity of consciousness.
There is so much more that has been elaborated over the years…the relation to relativity in physics…(the interweaving of time and matter and energy…) The anti- decorative response to industrialization.. Perhaps even the connections to Freud and James Joyce.
On a personal note, I mentioned in a comment on the Oakes twins drawing process, where one eye ‘sees’ the subject and the other eye ‘sees’ the pen and paper superimposed, that after trying to do some drawing this way I became very aware of input from both eyes…with the result that the edges of nearby things seemd transparent, overlaying farther objects, and that it struck me that it seemed very related to the multiplicity and transparency of cubist painting.
Steve; In thinking of photography in relation to cubism I think of Muybridge sequences, and the composite prints of Man Ray and many others, strobe photos, and a whole range of lensless work, pinholes, photograms, etc. Perhaps also by looking for the means to emphasize the physicality of the print and the process. There are also a good deal of video works that address the issues by putting images into time.
Enough! Hope it doesn’t sound too much like an Art Appreciation Lecture, circa 1965.
Bruce,
Ignorant me, I only knew of Darby Bannard as an art critic–thanks for putting us onto his painting. I especially liked the 90’s paintings, which reminded me of some of the rock surfaces I’ve photographed (click images to go to posts):
Your remarks make a lot of sense, and the perceptual/conceptual division helps to organize it all, though I’m not sure I understand it fully. It seems that as soon as one becomes aware of perception, things have a tendency to veer toward the conceptual. The Impressionists were concerned with representing the fundamentals of light perception (another oversimplification?), leading them to represent the subject with tiny color spots. An interesting and insightful idea that resulted in beautiful effects, but not more illusionistic ones. Where would the Impressionsts fit in a perceptual/conceptual scheme?
That’s very nice about the Oakes and binocular view relating to cubism’s facets. I would love to know if Picasso or Braque were explicitly aware of it in this way.
It’s not that I’m interested in attempting “cubist” photography per se, but I’m becoming increasingly aware of how playing with perception, incorporating time, and emphasizing the print as object (not just window)–things I am interested in–all go back to that period.
Steve, a very interesting discussion you’ve initiated here! Thought I’d put in my own two cents, from a very unscientific and unscholarly point of view, based on my own experience as a painter.
Having seen quite a bit of Picasso’s work, as well as the very fascinating film that was made of him painting, my main impression of his working process is that of an ongoing improvisation. One thing leads to the next, and the goal, if there can be said to be one, is the process of invention itself.
Many of the things mentioned in this discussion no doubt contributed to the conditions from which Picasso’s work evolved. Bruce’s mention of Muybridge is, I think, a good observation, and in the case of the cubists it could be said that not only the subject, but also the point of view is moving. Which is what it seems Hockney was exploring in his photomontages.
Steve;
Very sumptuous photos of rock surfaces…related to both Cubist painting and the Bannard paintings in some regards.
When I mentioned perceptual vs. conceptual images I was making a fairly simple distinction; conceptual images being more related to our knowledge of the subject…perceptual images more related to it’s appearance. The conceptual image is highly schematized and usually part of an established and codified ‘school’ of representation. Most Art, incidentally, is quite conceptual. An Egyptian artist would never go out and look at a garden pool…he knows it is a rectangle, and he pictures a rectangle. Like wise Egyptian artists never had to pay model fees…they had clear rules for eyes, hands, feet, etc…..Think of children’s art….Mom, Dad, House, Sun, Sky….they have no need of looking.
The Impressionists claimed to be painting from their direct sensory experience…which in vision is primarily blobs of color. So they did that, and certainly produced images that were strongly related to ordinary visual experience. To quote Bannard:
“This method brought abstraction to the surface, and yet it produced the most realistic paintings seen in art to that time, and, to my mind, the most beautiful and complete.”
Their method, the daubs and spots of paint, which mix in the eye to produce “optical’ color, had the paradoxical effect of producing a surface which was very abstract if viewed closely.
I think they were supremely perceptual painters. I also feel that they developed, inevitably, schemes of color mixing and schemes of rendering effects of atmosphere, and schemes of composition so that they in no way were constantly, over the years, painting with their eyes hanging out and de focused, The evidence is that they paint transitory and elusive qualities of light which occured over a brief span of a few minutes…but they spent hours on those paintings…count the brushstrokes.
They were also strongly affected by Photography….the cropping, the accidents of composition and scale, the unexpected jumps in exposure, all produced images which were very far removed from the orderly and mostly airless painted worlds of post Renaissance painting.
The question of whether Picasso and Braque were consciously aware of the visual confusion produced by binocular vision is an interesting question…I would need to look at a number of the paintings give it some thought. I was just struck by how often they used transparency in their facets..transparency made by a continuing line or by fading color in an overlap, which is so apparent to me as I look at close objects dissolving into further ones….the edge of my desk has a double and transparent contour, overlapping a more distant chair.
David; Your point about the moving viewpoint is well taken, and the Hockney montages were clear examples.
I’d take issue with your comment about Picasso and the process of invention, in regard to the Cubist work. In the early Cubist painting, ’08 or so to ’12, he seemed to adopt a definite and very limited set of rules for the work, and to be working on a methodical exploration of the problem. Real nose to the grindstone work…..limited palette, limited range of marks, very restricted size relationships…etc. The Cubist idea was an amazing invention, but they worked it out in a very disciplined way. Then….Picasso took off, raiding every nook and cranny of Art History.
A Halibut…The recent Picasso show at Gagosian looks like it was a smashing affirmation of his relevance and vigor in old age..wish I’d seen it.
conceptual images being more related to our knowledge of the subject…perceptual images more related to it’s appearance
That’s indeed how I took it, and I agree that most art is quite conceptual. This seems to me partly true of the Impressionists also, though in a different way. They seem to have painted not simply from their sensed visual experience (we don’t consciously see tiny blobs of color, do we?), but from their idea–gained from some amalgam of then-current optical physics and retinal anatomy, which only partly holds up in our current understanding–of what the “primary” sensory experience ought to be. Their concept was still important, though it was a concept about seeing itself, rather than of the subject.
“A rose is a rose is a rose”
“I can’t see you anymore”
Birgit:
What is the position of Word Press regarding content? Does it claim ownership to thoughts expressed here? Recently, Facebook, or somebody, got into a dust up over a similar ownership issue.
Steve;
Their concept, and their practice, was most certainly about ‘seeing’, rather than an attempt to describe the subject. I think they wanted to paint the visual effect of the subject, the subject being the ‘vehicle’. A note here is how mundane and ordinary their subjects were…no dying maidens….
Whether or not one see blobs of color is a very tricky question…in ordinary vision I think one sees a heavily processed version of the information striking the rods and cones of the retina. People have spoken of the eye as being a part, an extension, of the brain, and that makes sense. In ordinary vision one sees chairs and trees and spaces and people….named and known things. But to paint the appearance of those things one needs to slowly attend to the color relations of edges…to try to see the chair against the wall as color blobs.
This is made very difficult by the processing that goes on at the level of rods and cones….a complex image processing procedure, as Josef Albers (in “Interaction of Color”) demonstrated. If red light strikes an area of the retina, the red receptors not only send a ‘red signal’, they inhibit nearby red receptors from sending their usual level of signals. The result is that a swatch of gray, sitting in a red field, looks green.
There is also the problem of light and dark….an outdoor view may have light areas that are 500 times lighter than the deepest shadows…but paint only has a range of about 50 -1. So…how does the artist edit or compress that scale?
The Impressionists hit upon the idea of creating optical color…mixing light instead of pigment….a blob of red against a blob of yellow to create orange in the eye of the spectator…thus being able to avoid the dulling effects of mixing the pigments, which is a subtractive process, and which can severely reduce the saturation (purity) of color. Optical mixing creates an animated and luminous color quality, somewhat analogous to seeing sunlit landscapes.
A good example of optical color is in process printing….dots of Magenta, Cyan, Yellow and Black produce a very convincing rendering of color. (CMY are the complements of the Primary colors of light…RGB. Our retinas have color receptors, ‘Cones’, which are sensitive to RGB). Put a magnifying lens on any reproduction of a color photo.
So…a few thoughts about looking and painting…complex and intriguing stuff, particularly since our eyes seem so much like windows!
To get an immediate sense of your eyes as image processing devices you could look at some ‘afterimages’. There are positive and negative versions…1. Stare at a flag for 30 seconds and then look at a white piece of paper…voila, the flag in negative colors. 2. In a dark room, with one window open to the daylight, keep your eyes closed for a couple of minutes and than open them, very briefly (< 1/2 sec.), and close them, and you will see a positive image of the view out the window. (This is persistence of vision…it makes movies possible).
A final, and amazing, exercise is to focus on one spot in your surroundings for many minutes. It is difficult…your eyes want to lose focus, blink, tear…but if you can stay fixed on the spot you can experience your retinas becoming
‘fatigued”, and the whole space can seem as if someone is dimming the lights, until you are looking at what seems to be a neon line drawing, in very bright colors, of all the edges in the space.
I used to suggest this exercise to students, but few did it.
On playfulness and rules: “For a long time I limited myself to one colour — as a form of discipline.” -Picasso
D.: A rose, period?
Bruce: Yes, all those complications. Whether or not we call them concepts at a low level, there’s always a lot of neural process going on at many levels. As far as conscious effort, I gather the Impressionists attempted to evaluate the smallest areas of color they could, and then figure out what color combination they could use for it, at least if they didn’t have a perfectly matching pigment for that patch. It’s interesting that the results are the more compelling to the degree that the purported fusion of colors doesn’t fully take place, leaving that lovely shimmer.
Can’t remember why, but I came across Johns’ afterimage flag recently. Stare at the central dot for 10 seconds or so, then relax eyes over the white sidebar for a few seconds. How long does it take for the neon edges?
Steve et al:
Go away for a brief spell and all hell breaks loose.
Scary stuff. Granted many lines of influence going back, the Cubist phenomenon still feels like an alien encounter. Or, otherwise, it’s like a soup of molecules being stirred by the gasoline engine and electrified into new forms of life. Or it’s the picture plane dissolving from a rule-driven organizational template into a sort of fly paper catching what’s in the wind of a new century.
As usual I can’t remember where I saw something, but it was a collection of photos taken by and of Picasso and his circle in situ. Sketches lying on the floor where they had been abandoned and stuff all over the place. Would seem that this “muckle” – to use a Juneism – is paralleled in paintings, either as a sort of cause, result, or sympathetic concomitant.
Braque, I am told, was raised in a family of craft painters who specialized in creating faux effects like fake wood graining etc.
Can something be said here about dance? Analytical Cubism makes me think about Shiva Nataraja and his manner of dissolving the world through a divine dance, thus allowing it to be created anew. A dancing relationship with the subject matter.
Disguises, the relativity of identity, Cezanne paints his son as Harlequin, Picasso turns people into still lives and visa versa.
As highly speculative in their content as they may be, these paintings by Braque and Picasso are beautifully organized and painted. Note-perfect riffs.
Jay,
WordPress is the software behind this blog, but it’s not on the WordPress site. As the current domain owner, I make no claim of ownership for any thoughts expressed here–especially my own.
In this digital world, there’s perhaps a distinction between the thoughts and their representation. I basically assume that anything contributed here is deliberately made public to the world, in the sense that anyone may read it. A potential question we haven’t really faced is: Does a commenter or poster have the right to later withdraw their contribution? Or has it become irrevocably part of the public domain, a representation now “owned” by the community? By way of analogy, I don’t think a book author can demand all sold copies be destroyed. Any thoughts on this question would be welcome.
For the longest time I preferred the influence of William James as partially responsible for this evolving Cubist period. Now into the mix I will add Jay’s suggestion of Scattered Muckle. A regular experience supported by the banter of interesting ideas.
For the longest time I preferred the influence of William James as partially responsible for this evolving Cubist period. Now into the mix I will add Jay’s suggestion of Scattered Muckle. A regular experience supported by the banter of interesting ideas.
Steve; Your comment about ownership of comments and the distinction between thoughts and their representation seems to be a response to a message we are not seeing??
The scattered muckle is a very apt category for Cubism! The VegoMatic of Art…slicing and dicing everything!
It was a response to Jay’s comment #15.
Jay,
In terms of precedents, one of the three early administrators of A&P, a fiber artist from Colorado, decided to quit the blog and asked her two co-administrators to remove her posts which they did.
Steve, Birgit:
Another question: if we stopped paying the bills, would the content on this site disappear?
Jay,
Excellent question, to which the simplest answer is Yes. There are, however, extenuations. For example, you can Google “art perception” and find us at the top, but if the main link doesn’t get to our site, then you can click on Google’s “Cached” link to see a saved version of the page. So it’s still out there even if I stop paying the bills. The catch is, it may be much harder to find and to navigate. There are other archives, and a number of cheap or free programs that allow people to download whole web sites to their own computers. So though we’ve deleted or allowed deletion of content on very rare occasions, that by no means implies that it has completely ceased to exist.
The out-of-pocket cost of A&P is only about $10 per year, given that I already pay for web hosting for my personal site. I don’t consider that significant and am happy to pay it. I became owner around a year ago; before that, Karl (Zipser) was owner. If I were ever to contemplate ceasing to support A&P, I would certainly offer it to other members of our open group of contributors, and any decisions would be made by the group.
As you can see, it’s more or less being made up as we go, dependent on the good will of all.
Steve:
I hereby dub you Sugar Daddy.
man, I looked up that cubist book on amazon that you recommended and it is over one hundred dollars used, is there any other place to get it cheaper?