- Joined
- Jan 26, 2002
- Messages
- 2,737
Some may find this kinda tedious or irelevant.
I thought it pretty interesting, and similar in many ways to the stories and theories of older "damascus" steel swords or katanas. And the debates over "custom" and "handmade". Or a recent BFC thread where some folks thought it unbearably presumptuous that Cliff Stamp review a knife made by Ed Fowler, provided him by a third party who owns the knife, without asking "permission" from Fowler.
http://www.artandoptics.com/intro/intro_fs.html
From Intro...
This two-day conference will present a public discussion of a startling new theory being advanced by world renowned artist David Hockney, working in collaboration with University of Arizona physicist Charles Falco, to the effect that, as far back as the 1420s, Master Painters in the High Tradition were deploying optical devices to render lifelike images of people and their surroundings. The conference will bring together Hockney, Falco, and their principal supporters and skeptics among art and science historians, critics, scientists and painters for the first full public airing of their views.
Most art historians believe the majority of European painters since the Italian Renaissance deployed elaborate systems of mathematical perspective to achieve their effects. Over the past several years, however, Hockney and Falco have been arguing that, on the contrary, most artists in the High Tradition, going all the way back to Bruges in the 1420s, were deploying a variety of optical devices (ranging from concave mirrors through lenses and cameras obscura and lucida). In effect they suggest that painters (from Van Eyck through Caravaggio, Lotto, Velazquez, Vermeer, Chardin, Ingres, etc.) were using precursors of photographic cameras for centuries before the invention of chemical fixatives in 1839; and that it was only with the spread of such chemical fixatives that European painters, suddenly disenchanted with the "optical look," began to undertake the critique of photography implicit in impressionism, expressionism and cubism and the rest of the modernist tradition....
Some fascimilies of the papers on presented by either side are presented, as well as some debate that continued after the meeting. "Sixty Minutes" ran (presumably re-ran) a fairly superfluous piece on the topic last night, and I decided to look a little deeper on the 'net. The linked articles at artkrush.com don't work for me--here's working links:
http://www.artkrush.com/thearticles/011_woa_weschleronhockney/index.asp
http://www.artandoptics.com/media/smackdown.html
I thought it pretty interesting, and similar in many ways to the stories and theories of older "damascus" steel swords or katanas. And the debates over "custom" and "handmade". Or a recent BFC thread where some folks thought it unbearably presumptuous that Cliff Stamp review a knife made by Ed Fowler, provided him by a third party who owns the knife, without asking "permission" from Fowler.
http://www.artandoptics.com/intro/intro_fs.html
From Intro...
This two-day conference will present a public discussion of a startling new theory being advanced by world renowned artist David Hockney, working in collaboration with University of Arizona physicist Charles Falco, to the effect that, as far back as the 1420s, Master Painters in the High Tradition were deploying optical devices to render lifelike images of people and their surroundings. The conference will bring together Hockney, Falco, and their principal supporters and skeptics among art and science historians, critics, scientists and painters for the first full public airing of their views.
Most art historians believe the majority of European painters since the Italian Renaissance deployed elaborate systems of mathematical perspective to achieve their effects. Over the past several years, however, Hockney and Falco have been arguing that, on the contrary, most artists in the High Tradition, going all the way back to Bruges in the 1420s, were deploying a variety of optical devices (ranging from concave mirrors through lenses and cameras obscura and lucida). In effect they suggest that painters (from Van Eyck through Caravaggio, Lotto, Velazquez, Vermeer, Chardin, Ingres, etc.) were using precursors of photographic cameras for centuries before the invention of chemical fixatives in 1839; and that it was only with the spread of such chemical fixatives that European painters, suddenly disenchanted with the "optical look," began to undertake the critique of photography implicit in impressionism, expressionism and cubism and the rest of the modernist tradition....
Some fascimilies of the papers on presented by either side are presented, as well as some debate that continued after the meeting. "Sixty Minutes" ran (presumably re-ran) a fairly superfluous piece on the topic last night, and I decided to look a little deeper on the 'net. The linked articles at artkrush.com don't work for me--here's working links:
http://www.artkrush.com/thearticles/011_woa_weschleronhockney/index.asp
http://www.artandoptics.com/media/smackdown.html
