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Highbrow hilarity…


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Guest imported_sofarok

from the blog at hyb

 

”In contemporary western society women are judged, rightly or wrongly, primarily on their looks. The problem is how does one go about defining what is good and what is bad? In the same way that the generic term “art” can be applied to both very good and very bad work, so too can the term “woman”. Perhaps one way in which this problem can be approached is by taking the analogy with art one stage further and discussing femininity in terms of aesthetic theory (we are, after all, dealing primarily with visuality). By far the most influential aesthetic movement of the last hundred years has been modernism, so this would seem a natural place to begin. Not so much the modernism say of Picasso or Cezanne, but the high modernism as espoused by Greenberg and, more relevantly and recently, Fried. Fried argues that truly great art must be instantly accessible to the viewer and only in this way can art transcend the “theatre” of interaction; to create a sublimity solely available through the eye. When experiencing a woman, this would seem to apply perfectly. Assuming the woman is a fitty, all the information is there; there is a unique and utterly sublime beauty which can be experienced solely in terms of optical space. The problems begin when we remember that one’s experience of women is not limited to the solely visual, for there is also another space they occupy and that is the space of the mind. They have developed language, both in its written and spoken form. Some, largely discredited, theorists see this aspect as somehow more “interesting” than experiencing women in visual terms alone; however I’m sure the reader will agree that such naive and badly thought out ideas deserve no more than a passing mention. It is surely more worthwhile to think of this “mental space” as in direct competition with the optical space discussed previously - a kind of abject constantly trying to disrupt the sublime. An experience that I had recently would seem to bear this out; I met a girl at a party who really was word, I mean this honey got it going on. Anyway, I looked at her in amazed awe, my eyes taking in every detail of her olive-skinned face down to her pert breasts and perfect legs, amazed that such a vision of beauty, an Aphrodite made real, could exist with me in this mortal coil. This vision of perfection was, however, soon to be shattered as I talked to the girl and it quickly became apparent that she was a complete spastic. As the above story shows, even the most aesthetically pleasing girls, the pleasure of whose experience one would think nothing could destroy, can swiftly go from total sublimity to utter abjection when the mental space is allowed to gain the upper hand. What, however, can be done to change it? I don’t have an answer to this fundamental question, one that has tormented mankind for centuries, but maybe the answer lies with photography. Up until this point, the optical space discussed has been voluntary, ie; one can move into it but chooses not to. Through photography one can enforce a totally optical space on the viewer and also separate the image of the woman from the woman itself. The mental space stops being a problem, as the opportunity to engage with it is removed and one is left to be concerned solely with the visual. A bit like porn really.”

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