I recently discussed [the Balthus painting] Thérèse Dreaming with an older woman, an architect and former museum conservator. She told me that one thing she disliked about the painting was the brown spot on the girl’s underwear, which guided the viewer’s attention in a way that felt manipulative. I wasn’t sure if she was bothered by the brownness of the spot—with its possible menstrual or scatological connotations—or just the spot’s function as a focal point that drew one in, that narrowed one’s attention (like the punctum of a photograph, in Roland Barthes’s phrase—the point of interest, “that accident which pricks me”). Whatever the case, I was highly skeptical—in fact, in complete denial. I had looked carefully at the painting and had never noticed a brown spot. The whole thing struck me as absurd. The spot, I told myself, must be a projection of her imagination onto the painting.Here's the painting...
Feeling unsettled, however, about my own dismissiveness, I returned again to the Met and to Thérèse Dreaming. This time, I saw it, a sort of brown triangular shadow across the bottom of the girl’s panties and the slip of her skirt. I had been wrong after all about the absence of the spot. Still, it remained for me a rather incidental detail. I experienced no “prick”; it did not draw me in; it barely registered at all. Certainly I did not feel that I had been manipulated by Balthus.
... seen previously on this blog, last December, in "The Metropolitan Museum of Art declines to remove a painting that is — according to a petition — 'undeniably romanticizing the sexualization of a child.'"
ADDED: What's great about the painting is that it makes you aware of your own mind: What is it about this painting that is making me uneasy — that's making think strange things that I don't ordinarily think?
You study the painting. You try to find what the artist did to inspire these sensations. You may think: It can't be me. It must be the artist.
That's what so interesting about people like that architect lady who decided it was the brown spot.
You might wonder: Is this artist a genius for doing what he did to me with this image? Or is there something about me?!!
And perhaps you get to this sort of reasoning: He must be a great artist or there's something wrong with me. So then... he's doing it, and that's so wrong of him! Punish him! You must punish him so that I may go free and get back to my comfortable life!
But art should make you uncomfortable, and it would be wrong to help you find your way back.
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87 comments:
Althouse's 'brownness' tag is very appropriate here.
Because the entire picture is pretty much brown. Brown walls, brown floor, brown wood, brown light, brown shadows.
With this in mind, the area in question becomes a matter of which brown is THAT brown?
Is it the wrong brown in a palette of brownness?
The brownness becomes a kind of Rorshcach Test: what do YOU see in the brownness?
Of course, this question has been asked before; from the internet:
"United Parcel Service debuted this clunker in 2002, and it was widely considered the brand’s biggest and most aggressive ad campaign in their nearly 100-year history.
Initially touted as a success for bringing to mind the color of both UPS's logo and the traditional cardboard boxes used for shipping, the slogan quickly became irrelevant as UPS focused more on logistics and technology.
"What Can Brown Do For You" also had a bad landing with audiences.
The slogan was interpreted by many as a blue joke, leaving UPS ripe for ridicule by consumers and critics alike. Not exactly a win for a serious shipping and logistics company like United Parcel Service.
UPS retired the slogan entirely in 2010, and hasn’t looked back."
Besides: it is the color of the front of her shoe that conveys sexual attraction. Or symbolizes menstruation. Whichever.
-LWL
Brought to mind a comment often heard in Northwest PA: "If it's brown, it's down". (Relates to an unnamed outdoor recreational activity.)
In Fine Art, brownness can be implied, absent of the color.
For instance, some of Robert Mapplethorpe's black-and-white photographs insinuate brownness.
At least when the bullwhip is removed.
-LWL
The girl is not even important to the painting. The unholy light that somehow only shines on her and nothing else, is a reflection of her deplorable descent into heavy metal music. Satan's flashlight focus of light, and her bathing in it, is pure decadence. She hates the cat.
No, the important part of the painting is the cat. Ignore all else. Shade your eyes from this hell child. Get on your knees and pray for deliverance. Amen.
My question is what the hell is the cat doing for the painting? The painting itself is obviously a kind of child porn. I guess we have to pretend that it’s not what we see it to be because art. The artist didn’t want to bother with shoe cams, I guess.
Boy, that "older woman" would pretty much have to be sniffing the panties to be able to spot the brown. That's not cool, see, especially in a public gallery. Tell her ya gotta stand back a few feet to let the colors blend. It's a painting, not a photograph. Cripes, some people are dirty-minded philistines, I tell ya!
Sometimes a shadow is just a shadow.
The problem with Balthus, was his pornography left out transsexuals. He denied them equal time. His sole focus was on pubescent white girls, and lots of pussy in the form of cats.
Red paint was only allowed to be used on slippers.
The box fan is out of the picture on the left.
There's an evil mask starring at hercrotch in the cloth on the left, which is defying gravity.
Not to say that Balthus' fixation with pubescent girls wasn't creepy then and wouldn't still be creepy now.
Althouse writes: "...But art should make you uncomfortable ..."
So that is a crucial component of art: making the viewer uncomfortable?
A conveyance of joy is thus outside of what art should do?
Sometimes the desire to make a pronouncement paints one into a corner.
A brown corner.
-LWL
She looks like an adult woman.
I personally have zero problem with removing this piece of “art” from the museum. It’s a transgression against a positive norm that we don’t sexualize young women. Not every norm needs to be destroyed, this won’t make us more human by putting us more in touch with our “true” selves, it will make us less human, as our ability to monitor and control our baser instincts is what allows us to be social animals and what makes us uniquely human.
In related news, 'Desire Director Defends Using Children for Sex Scene on Netflix:
Diego Kaplan, who directed the film Desire, available on Netflix, is defending his choice to depict a child masturbating in the film. In a statement published at Variety, Kaplan defended the scene, comparing it to a shark attack.
What strikes me is the fresh young face above a dirty shirt. A beautiful young girl that any decent adult would feel protective towards is having, and will continue to have, a hard life.
I wouldn't have noticed the brown spot either and now, though very aware of it, still find it subtle. If it's possible for something subtle to also be an exclamation point, then that brown spot is it--reinforcing the difficult life this girl faces.
Her pose is a common one used in porn magazines. He just put clothes on her.
So that is a crucial component of art: making the viewer uncomfortable?
Good question. How about "Art should elevate." And no, not in THAT way. Rembrandt never makes me "uncomfortable." Nor does listening to Bach or Mozart.
Honestly, I never saw the sexualizing theme or aspect or whatever of this painting. I just saw and still see a young girl trying to stay cool on what I imagine to be a hot summer day. She reminds of my Midwestern childhood and visiting my female cousins in a time when no one had air conditioning.
I guess this beats talking about women's body hair and the descent [sic] of men's testicles.
Also I don't think the main purpose of art should be transgressive or to make one feel uncomfortable. I prefer that it elevate the spirit and impart feeling of transcendence. But that's just me.
The model was Therese Blanchard, born 1925, died 1950. That's a tragically short life.
Roughcoat said...Also I don't think the main purpose of art should be transgressive or to make one feel uncomfortable.
No, that's an art school definition. Art should elicit an emotional response. There is no restriction on the range of responses artists have a right to try to tap into.
But art should make you uncomfortable, and it would be wrong to help you find your way back
But that would be a property of human psychology and not the art!
Menstrual blood leaves a brown spot. That was a point in some romcom, daughter to single mom, asking about it, "not the usual." TV producer mom, actor young love interest single man. That's all I remember. It lead into a buying small size tampons and the wish I could use that size joke.
"A conveyance of joy is thus outside of what art should do?"
Joy should make you uncomfortable. After a short while, you need to come down and want to move back to normal. If your brain doesn't work like that, you have a problem. You can't go about your life in a state of ecstasy. Remember that woman who had continual orgasms and was driven to suicide?
I have a large print of Renoir Moulin de la galette on the wall in front of me and it elicits no emotional response, beyond there are people, and if I study it a little annoyance that all the faces are the same face.
So comfort, but no emotion.
Sorry to step on your dream of heaven.
But art should make you uncomfortable...
As others have pointed out, the should here isn't really a thing, unless you buy into the modernist and post-modernist ideas of what art is supposed to be/do. I've studied it enough to know that in most (but not) all cases "uncomfortable" is what is done because "great" is out of the range of skill of the artist. "Uncomfortable" is used to get attention because they afraid they're not good enough to do it on the merits of the quality of their work to elevate rather than make one uncomfortable. Great art can be both provocative and elevate at the same time.
That art is supposed to be transgressive is based on a political ideology that you must burn it all down... which, as it happens, is most often what comes from the Left.
"I have a large print of Renoir Moulin de la galette on the wall in front of me and it elicits no emotional response, beyond there are people, and if I study it a little annoyance that all the faces are the same face. So comfort, but no emotion."
Renoir famously sucks.
No, that's an art school definition.
I wouldn't know.
Art should elicit an emotional response.
Elevation of the spirit and transcendence are emotional responses.
There is no restriction on the range of responses artists have a right to try to tap into.
Including elevation of the spirit and transcendence of the spirit.
Motels make you uncomfortable.
scatological connotations
I'm going to use this more.
If someone needs to squint and pull out a magnifying glass to be outraged, it is an effort that the Outrage Mavens are willing to make.
One wishes they would devote that effort to Habitat for Humanity, a soup kitchen, or perhaps ESL classes, but nope! It is Brown Spots all the way down.
"...But art should make you uncomfortable ..."
This made me think of the saying "the job of a newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable."
So art should make you uncomfortable.
The news should make you uncomfortable.
In essence: being comfortable is a reason to be uncomfortable.
From Wiki:
A cilice /ˈsɪlɪs/, also known as a sackcloth,[1] was originally a garment or undergarment made of coarse cloth or animal hair (a hairshirt) worn close to the skin. It is used by members of various Christian traditions (including some communicants of the Anglican,[2] Catholic,[3] Lutheran,[4] Methodist,[5] and Scottish Presbyterian Churches[6]) as a self-imposed means of repentance and mortification of the flesh; it is often worn during the Christian penitential season of Lent, especially on Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, and other Fridays of the Lenten season.[7]
Cilices were originally made from sackcloth or coarse animal hair so they would irritate the skin. Other features were added to make cilices more uncomfortable, such as thin wires or twigs. In modern religious circles, cilices are simply any device worn for the same purposes.
Hairshirts for everyone.
-LWL
Maybe she had trouble gettin' the spines off her cactus.
Memoirs of the Blind (Derrida) would interest Althouse, on sight and painting. Lots of paintings.
Also "Restitutions" in The Truth in Painting, on Van Gogh's shoes.
"Joy should make you uncomfortable";"art should make you uncomfortable"--what crap! "shoulding" all over us. Equating joy with ecstasy is pathological. Art "should" help make us aware of the beauty around us, which leads us to joy. Yes, much of the urban world is banal and squalid and, thus, we are depressed by the severe diminishing of beauty. However, that does not make me uncomfortable--I become sad at the deprivations I encounter. Allusions to ecstasy betray a tendency toward the fatuous emptiness of hedonism and confuses the point of art.
"Joy should make you uncomfortable. After a short while, you need to come down and want to move back to normal. If your brain doesn't work like that, you have a problem."
So you shouldn't enjoy joy because it is temporal.
I would argue that joy provided from art is magical because joy is fleeting. It is easy to make people uneasy, in the way that farting in church is easier than making a stained-glass window.
"If your brain doesn't work like that, you have a problem.": Sure. But that is the problem of gluttony, separate from the issue of what art can achieve (or, more narrowly put, should achieve).
In your later post you have your photographs of Koon's 'Bean': is the purpose of this artwork only to make people uncomfortable? Or is it not art?
I find joy in Warhol's Campbell Soup can paintings. However, I do not find ONLY joy. But 'uncomfortable' for the sake of being uncomfortable -- see my hairshirt comment above.
So: I still think you wrote your statement without thinking through its limitations, and are now redefining joy to fit around your thesis. Or perhaps you can explain how your photographs of flowers are intended foremost to make the viewer uncomfortable.
"Sorry to step on your dream of heaven."
As the kids say, that escalated quickly. I would rather say that negating the possibility of joy through art makes much of modern art Hell.
I would call that sentence Cruel Neutrality Bullshit.
--LWL
It is my understanding that women these days mature earlier, are heavier, and have more curves than did women of the past. Without knowing a thing about the artist, just looking at the picture, I think this was painted a while ago. If women from that period were not as curvy and the painting is from a while ago, I cannot place the age of the subject.
Therefore, I'm not at all convinced - just glancing at this post - that the subject of the painting is not a young woman and well above the age at which people should be uncomfortable. She's fully clothed.
Now, if it were a man in shorts...!!!
That Flemish(?) painting with all the little houses and buildings in the harbor makes me uncomfortable. It pushes the OCD button for some reason.
"What is it about this painting that is making me uneasy — that's making think strange things that I don't ordinarily think?"
The only strange thing the painting, well, the post about the painting, that makes me think things that I don't ordinarily think is that it's a painting I'm thinking about.
Sorry, no, it doesn't make me uneasy. But as I "think" about it, I can see why others might have a soupçon of perverse titillation.
"Or is there something about me?!"
Kidding, right? (I mean, as applied to naive, PC viewers.)
"But art should make you uncomfortable, and it would be wrong to help you find your way back."
The only thing in "art" that makes me uncomfortable, apart from the absurd pretense in "modern art," is the thudding cliches people use to talk about it. Other than that, it mostly leaves me indifferent.
Of course, I am not talking about actual art, like Beethoven & Co. discussed previously.
And now I look it up and find that Balthus started painting her when she was 11.
Balthus may likely have been a creep.
One of my just teenage boys once asked, in the winter, "Dad, why do the girls wear heavy coats and shorts at the same time?" I told him it was because of the nuclear reactor they sit on. Later, I told them when you're driving you can tell if the couple in the car next to you is married/committed when you see her, if a passenger, with her foot up by the end of the dashboard. That's what the picture reminded me of, girl trying to cool off. Probably saw her mother do the same thing. (And as previously mentioned, fan off to the left out of sight.) Brown spot? Shadow that helps define depth.
My general thought process with Balthus paintings usually starts and ends with "man, that's pasty skin."
Here, here, @ joshbraid and Patrick Henry! That “art should make us uncomfortable” is a postmodern construct. The power of art is that it provides “epiphanies of beauty”, a window on the transcendant. It speaks to our destinies as children of God. We are living in a time of forgetting who we are. We could certainly use a little more “seek that which is above” and less transgression and glorification of hedonism.
Pedophilia is on the Progressive to-do list, just look up NAMBLA. Pedophilia is always the crime of choice of any Ruling Class, because it is the ultimate crime against the ultimate victim, and it is confirmation of the Ruling Class' power and freedom from all law. The grooming gangs in UK are actually supplying the demands of Britain's elite in Parliament, the Civil Service and the Military. In this country, stories of the Clintons' association with known pedophiles like Jeffrey Epstein and Tony Podesta are common place, and the Pizzagate story still has legs.
Sexual abuse of children wasn't a public problem before the 70s. It was a media ratings discovery.
Previously it was a personal moral failing, like drunk driving before the 60s.
Psychiatrist Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig attributes the hysteria to a partial archetype, the child must be perfectly innocent so the other party must be perfectly evil.
Anyway it sells eyeballs to advertisers. Perfect evil.
Ann Althouse said...Renoir famously sucks.
--
He did say "It is after you have lost your teeth that you can afford to buy steaks."
Pedophilia is on the Progressive to-do list
I suspect the perverts are attracted to progressivism since it gives them cover. Some of the gay ladies figured this one out. Author detailed stories about your sicko kiddie diddles and be celebrated for nurturing an awakening or guiding the unguided through exploration, like you're Vasco de Gama or something.
Sacagawea, I guess...
Some of the more unsettling commenters here are not mere skid marks. There is artistry to good comments.
Titus loved “the brown”, praising their hims.
Well, one of the comments made me give a shot at guessing the era of the picture. I was off by two years.
Women don't sit like that anymore unless they are under twelve or a model being paid by men.
The painting isn't sexual to me.
It's a dog whistle for the pervs who go for way underage girls wearing granny panties, it seems.
It’s the pose that sexuality’s her. A child would never pose that self-consciously.
“"Joy should make you uncomfortable";"art should make you uncomfortable"--what crap! "shoulding" all over us.”
Exactly. Like a squadron of emotional kamikaze pilots. Don’t come back until you’ve felt what I’ve told you to feel! What a bunch of dogshit. If a piece of art doesn’t move you, it either wasn’t up to the task or it wasn’t meant for you.
That 20lb bag of human shit displayed in the Tenderloin demands reinterpretation.
Sexualizes. Apparently spellcheck didn’t like that and bounced it to sexuality’s. Aaargh.
"But art should make you feel uncomfortable." Why? What theory of art or aesthetics leads to this conclusion? Politics, yes, but art?
"The model was Therese Blanchard, born 1925, died 1950. That's a tragically short life."
And so she appears in this tableau. Her eye occupies the "power spot" of the three by three grid of classic composition where the third vertical line intersects with the first horizontal line. Like GO, this is the place that draws the eye and gives force to the composition. The eye then searches the fact dominating the upper ninth square. Could be the heat, most likely, and general fatigue in the late afternoon after her thankless chores.
The opposite corner squares are empty, dark, accentuating the tension of her face (empty space in pictures regardless of media convey tension and lack of resolution). The falling skirt, obviously giving air to her groin (it's not as if men or ALL people refrain from doing such when alone), directs the eye to the floor with the cat enjoying a bowl of milk (milk of kindness that so strong eludes the girl). Her bent leg redirects the attention to the face.
Brown dominates the entire image. Brown dominates the shadows, even on the pleats of her skirt. Art is in the eye of the beholder, so short of that I do not see a "brown spot" but the folds in her obviously too large short pants.
As for Renoir sousse; n'importe quoi. Renoir était un artisan, pas un artiste; franchement, c'est clair dans tout son travail. il s'intéressait autant au pigment, au coup, à la composition et à la direction de l'œil qu'à la construction de la toile sous-jacente, comme il l'était dans le contenu de l'image.
ET
Il était dedans pour l'argent.
Voila - un artisan; pas un artiste
Back then she was a woman, not a child.
I appreciate all the amateur speculations here, but I think we should consult a prog-certified art expert on the true meaning of this painting, someone like Roman Polanski.
The obvious focus of the painting is the girl's face. It's lighter than the surroundings, and for some reason the elbows, though they point away from her face, draw attention to it. Also the items on the table, which increase in height they move from left to right, also help to draw the eye to her face, as does her left leg.
A note to the elderly female former architect and conservator. If you have to look closely to find the focus of the painting, then it isn't the focus of the painting.
> But art should make you uncomfortable
There are lots of ways to make people uncomfortable and very few of them are art. Making people uncomfortable is easy, for challenging, try uplifting. What modern artist can do uplifting?
And so she appears in this tableau. Her eye occupies the "power spot" of the three by three grid of classic composition where the third vertical line intersects with the first horizontal line. Like GO, this is the place that draws the eye and gives force to the composition. The eye then searches the fact dominating the upper ninth square. Could be the heat, most likely, and general fatigue in the late afternoon after her thankless chores.
What utter bullshit. Composition is about what works, it’s not some kind of physical law. If the painting is a statement on the futility of interpreting art through fixed rules, then on that score I would rank it a success.
Her bent leg redirects the attention to the face.
Another laughable application of a fixe “rule.”
The cat is painted better than most. The Old Masters painted some awful cats.
"It’s a transgression against a positive norm that we don’t sexualize young women."
Who says we don't? It's rampant in our culture!
That aside, I don't see any brown spot. I see strokes of paint on the panties and just under the subject's buttock where her weight rests on the chair that allread to me as shadows...indicating the wrinkles in the fabric of her panties and the sitter's weight on the chair. I think the older woman saw what she saw, not what I see.
Art "should" make me uncomfortable?
Not so much.
I can't think of any great - or even good - art that primarily makes me "uncomfortable", especially not visual art.
(Does Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon... make people uncomfortable? I didn't make me uncomfortable when I saw it at the Art Institute, and it's plainly Proper Art.
Monet's Lilies didn't, either.
I could keep listing Real Art that doesn't make me uncomfortable, but the point is made?)
The idea that art's purpose is to produce discomfort is modernist drek and should be rejected wholeheartedly.
(Plus, frankly, contra the rest of the analysis, it's not obvious in isolation that the subject is a "child" rather than, oh, a smallish-framed adult woman.
People having fits over it might be telling us more about themselves than the painting.)
"Honestly, I never saw the sexualizing theme or aspect or whatever of this painting. I just saw and still see a young girl trying to stay cool on what I imagine to be a hot summer day. She reminds of my Midwestern childhood and visiting my female cousins in a time when no one had air conditioning."
Oh, it's definitely a sexualized portrait of the girl. She has her leg up and her skirt hiked up so her panties are visible. Her arms are up, too, so her whole body language says she's vulnerable, open to one's view...or to other things. In any age or language, that is sexual.
(And I'm with Tim about the utter nonsense of composition "rules".
At best, the whole "rule of thirds" thing with grids is a rule of thumb for composition to prevent it being unbalanced; if you don't have inspiration or are stuck, go with that, sure.
It's not magical, and it's not true that "the eye is drawn to those intersections" - at least nobody has actually shown it to be so with rigor, rather than cherry-picking examples and getting people to believe it and use it, thus creating more examples.
The idea that it's universal is nonsense, like the "golden ratio" stuff that keeps popping up as a Universal Rule [it's not], or "overlay a fibonacci spiral on it" blather.
Just ... no.)
The cat knows to get in, and get out.
You see it is not relaxing, it is poised to dart. It knows nothing good can come from the old man and his paint set.
"Just a little higher with the dress darling."
"Yes, that's it, now spread your legs a bit"
meow...
"(Does Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon... make people uncomfortable? I didn't make me uncomfortable when I saw it at the Art Institute, and it's plainly Proper Art.
"Monet's Lilies didn't, either.
"I could keep listing Real Art that doesn't make me uncomfortable, but the point is made?)"
Yet, in their day, the Impressionists in general created a scandal when they first showed their works. One critic compared their style unfavorably to wallpaper. In their time, they came to be appreciated and honored, but first reactions were negative.
One cannot experience art from a previous era in the same way as it was experienced by those who saw it when it was new. So much art comes after any innovations in art (visual art, music, theater, ballet, literature, film, etc.), incorporating and elaborating on those innovations, that 10 years, 20 years, 100 years later, what was once seen as radical has become familiar, easily comprehended, even "old hat." No one today can hear how radical Louis Armstrong was in his day, and I think it's probably impossible for young people today to hear how radically different Jimi Hendrix's playing sounded in his first heyday...(or Elvis Presley, for that matter).
Gauguin was a pretty good painter. He also left his wife and kids in Denmark, went to Tahiti and started banging a 13-yo girl. Picasso was about the same. If you can produce good art, people will make a lot of excuses for what is generally considered deplorable behavior. It's a good gig.
@Cookie, in addition to everything else, your comment at 11:24 reveals you as a pedophile pervert. If you're ever in my neighborhood, you stay well away from the two little girls next door.
I don't really like the painting.
Her head is too big and her arms are too skinny. And why is her dress hiked up so far, and what's a cat doing there?
An In-joke about pussy?
I don't see the pedophilia, she's sorta of a bizarre woman-child, and completely unsexy.
In most states the age of consent is 18, in some its 16. I'm fine with 18.
However, men are programmed to be attracted to young women. And if you look like a sexy 18 y/o - men will be attracted, even if you're 16. I knew girls in my 9th class, who were "fully developed" and could easily have passed for 18.
But understanding - is not approving or excusing.
"Composition is about what works, it’s not some kind of physical law."
Dear Professor Richard Cranium,
In the words of Dennis Miller, break into your piggy bank and buy a clue. Really, your ignorance of physiology and composition in the visual arts is truly invincible. B'tz'lecha.
Truly a priceless communication.
With regards
The rat drawings that show up round here these parts have, all of a sudden, made me retrospectively anxious.
Back when we was young, me and the other guys would sometimes have a drink down by the river and wait to see if any boat would go by. One guy said once, I think M, that he was always getting What is Art and What is Philosophy mixed up. M usually said stuff that was far too grandiose for P.
J, the self-professed "witty one" due to his lack of other positive traits, suggested that Art was Aimless and Philosophy was Pointless, and that makes all the difference, ha ha ha. (Drink) M thought about that a little, and nodded, and added that perhaps Art is Artificial, and Philosophy is Politics.
P, who had no time for wordplay, told them Art is whatever comes out your Ass, and Philosophy is all a bunch of Penis wanking. I dont think P appreciated the idea of Art either uplifting you or making you uncomfortable.
You shouldn't pose with a cat, because it will always look better than you do.
Look at his paintings. Look at a photo of Balthus. Balthus is the cat. The cat licking the cream.
"@Cookie, in addition to everything else, your comment at 11:24 reveals you as a pedophile pervert."
Not at all. It's just a description of the painting as Balthus painted it. It is not necessary for one to have an attraction to underage women to recognize when an (apparently) underage woman is being depicted in a sexualized way.
If you don't or can't see it, then I must conclude you are in denial or naive to a degree startling in an adult.
In the words of Dennis Miller, break into your piggy bank and buy a clue. Really, your ignorance of physiology and composition in the visual arts is truly invincible.
So wait a minute. For anybody to correctly navigate a picture of some kind with their eyes, they have to learn these rules of composition and follow them rigorously?
Or is it that we are pre-programmed to follow these cues that artists place in photographs and are powerless to resist them? Is that what you think? That each and every human mind is identically driven around an image as if on rails?
Sorry, but the center of attention of that picture is not defined by your rules of composition that drive attention to her face. You may in fact be the person who needs to buy a clue. Why, if all of the attention is focused on her. face, for one thing, would the “brown spot” even come up as a question?
A lot of you guys seem to sharpen your minds by narrowing them. We see the same thing in a lot of lawyers.
Robert Cook, I very much appreciate the reminder that we can't appreciate the art (or whatever) of a prior era in the same spirit in which it was experienced by those of its own time. As a lifelong reader of Heinlein, whose often shockingly transgressive books (for their time) now read like Austen or something, I should never forget this. Yet I do.
And tim macguire, I'm with you (and Heinlein, to complete my circle) about the purpose of art - to elicit emotion, rather than to elicit discomfort. "Bad" art and "good" art alike can elicit emotion, though. Stephen King wrote about the stages of horror-writing (my memory of his terminology will not be accurate), referring to the lowest stage of such a work as "the gross-out," which he always tried to avoid but (he admitted) sometimes-to-often resorted to, and the highest as epitomized by, IIRC, Ghost Story by Peter Straub (I might be wrong about this - going 100% from memory except to remember Straub's name), in which almost nothing actually happens "on screen," per se, and all the horror is generated by the reader's imagining what the writer only implies.
In other words: "Art" can be a pretty much value-neutral term, which again reduces art criticism to pure subjectivity, and we have to learn about art critics as people, and their opinions through time, in order to determine whether their judgment is worth listening to.
I cry at some pretty bad movies. I totally know they're bad while I'm crying.
I'd say the point of the pic is that the girl isn't sexualized yet, the pose isn't working.
Standing for what's unattractive about teenaged girls. They all talk nonsense.
This carries over into adulthood.
"So wait a minute. For anybody to correctly navigate a picture of some kind with their eyes, they have to learn these rules of composition and follow them rigorously?"
No. The viewer does not need to know rules of composition at all. It is the artist who wishes to guide the viewer through his or her paintings who should know the rules of composition.
I saw beauty. It appears that perverts see "other things".
I saw beauty. It appears that perverts see “other things"
Good for you sir! Virtue noted.
It was a rhetorical question, Robert,
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