You’re right – “huge” was a poor choice of words. I should have said “significantly bigger than you’d expect if you’ve only seen crappy reproductions.”
And, frankly, if you’ve never heard of Vermeer, I don’t think you and I are on the same page in art.
I’ve usually found the opposite to be true lol. With the exception of a few, like “Sunday Afternoon in the Park” (?) which is huge. A lot of famous art is way smaller than you imagine. I was shocked to see the melting clocks one in person, it was practically miniature. I suspect there are no posters of it in existence that aren’t at least twice as big as the original painting.
Keats. He’s supposedly one of the bestest, most influential poets in the English language, but his poetry leaves me dry. I asked my Brit Lit II professor, who called herself a huge Keats fanatic, to explain why he’s considered so frickin great. Her exact words were, “Well, I suppose there’s a certain magic about him.” Blerg.
Jacques-Louis David. I’ve seen tons of his stuff at the Louvre, and it’s not bad, I just don’t get the appeal.
Well, anything that moves away from rococo [del]shit[/del] paintings cannot be all bad, in my book. I wouldn’t rave about him, but he’s not so bad.
Georgia O’Keefe–what is so great about huge flowers aka female sexuality?
rap “music”. <prepares for massive onslaught>
Go through this site a little bit. They have a fun way to zoom in on Vermeer paintings that are of interest to explain some of the backstory. If you see any of them with exceptional detail, the attention to those details is amazing. In possibly my favorite Vermeer painting, “Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window”, look at the window. Look at the reflection of the girl’s face off of the window. I won’t say it’s perfectly lifelike, but it is amazing what you can do with paint. The entire painting has an interesting feeling to it, a feel of slight hopelessness and hope at the same time. The woman is writing a letter to go to someone that she misses. Is it possible that she’ll never see him again? Maybe she’ll see him again very soon, but still worries about him (lots of merchants in Dutch society back in the day) but she’s still worried.
Count me as another poetry philistine. I do like the occasional piece that i come across, but for the most part it leaves me cold.
And silent film bores me to fucking tears*, even the classics. I understand, at an intellectual and historical level, the significance and the accomplishments of Birth of a Nation, but i’d rather pull out my own fingernails than sit through the whole thing again.
ETA:
So do you dislike poetry in general, or just Keats specifically? If it’s the former, don’t worry about it – I can’t get started with classical music or chess myself. If it’s the latter, however, go to any decent college or university library (or bookstore, for that matter). Find Helen Vendler’s book The Odes of John Keats. Skip to the chapter on “To Autumn”. Read it. There’s some early bits that may not make a lot of sense without you have read the rest of the book (it’s the last essay in the book, save a concluding summary chapter), but don’t sweat that. In fact, skip ahead to the top of the second page if you like, and continue skimming over anything else that seems to refer to the other Odes.
“To Autumn” is probably the closest thing anyone’s done to the Platonic ideal of the lyric poem in English. And Vendler’s explication of it is worthy of the subject. If you can read Vendler on Keats and not be convinced of his merit, well, you’re not likely to ever be convinced. You may never love his work, but you’ll likely be able to understand why it’s so highly regarded.
The Eiffel Tower and the Tower of Pisa aren’t especially exciting, but they’re national symbols of pride. One is an architectural disaster, and the other looks like a very cheap knock-off of a skyscraper.
Also, I don’t get sushi. It’s not very tasty, and there’s nothing special about the ingredients. People rave over this stuff like it’s an exotic alternative lifestyle or something.
99% of art school graduates
Most of all they ever learned was tedchnique, and most of that badly… The rest was “how to be notorius and write good arts grants”
For me, the definition of a true artist is a visionary. Stapling a seagul feather to an avocado and calling it “Mankind’s search for identity in a world of depersonalised conformity” is NOT visionary.
A real artist sees "over the horizon’ of the current culture, they introduce new ideas and visions in a way that allows us to glimpse them more fully. That is what makies innovative art valuable…
A real artist has “earned his/her chops. Graduating from art school and getting a gov’t grant to “Randomly paint sidewalk square blue and pink” as an expression of changing attitudes towards gender equality” is just a bunch of shitte.
I teach drawing at the local communit college… I will NOT allow anyone into my classes who claims “I can draw abstract, but I can not draw realistically”… Abstract drawing is like jazz… you have to know your music theory and instrument inside out before you begin to go there.
It is NOt an excuse for not being dedicated enough to drawing to not go through the work of learning how to draw.
rant rant rant
FML
That’s pretty much the only reason I still like Star Wars.
Marc
Preach it. He’s like a great dance master who can’t dance. I have two of his albums, and I’ve listened to *Trout Mask Replica *(as close as I get to a favorite) many times, but I can’t really call it an *enjoyable *experience.
Now, give me Danielle Dax, who worships at his feet, and I’m a real gone dude; she totally kills me dead. And I can definitely see the influence in her work, but the unprocessed original leaves me, at best, lukewarm.
I like poetry quite a bit, just not Keats. Actually, Coleridge and (some) Byron are pretty much the only Romantic poets whose work I actually enjoy. I’ll check out the book, though - if I can understand why something’s supposed to be good, I usually enjoy it at least a little bit more.
Thank you for being clearer and more helpful than my professor.
Re: “Romeo and Juliet.”
Try to think of the topics it covers. Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll, Gang Warfare.
Two rival families/ gangs have an entire city in such turmoil that the top law enforcement official had basically said that he will gun for the heads of the families if it keeps up. Add to this the young kids from one family crash a party with loud music and dancing at the other gangs hideout. One of them falls for a girl from the other gang. SHe falls for him. They have and illicit affair keeping it secret from the gangs. Her brother kills his best friend. He kills her brother. He has a death sentence passed on him and is on the run. She is trying to find him. He takes drugs to escape. She thinks he has ODed and takes her life. When he sees what has happened, he does the same.
Two troubled teens who thought their love could change things.
Cliche now. But rather cutting edge for the time.
ANother problem with this play is that they are so young that to have actors that look the right age, they tend to be not good enough to handle the roles. Very few young actors take the time to truly learn what it is they are saying. They know the words, but not what they mean. (See the newer R & J with Decaprio and Danes. He clearly does not understand the meaning of his lines. But she does.) few young people understand things like the aforementioned “Wherfore are thou Romeo?” means why is he Romeo rather than where is he? Changes the line reading completly if you misunderstand this. And there are hundreds of lines like this in the play. Young actors had a hard time with it. And it takes young actors to play the roles.
But, I also like Midsummer Night’s Dream better myself.
I understand why poetry is “great”, I just disagree that it’s something to be proud of. Yeah, it takes more skill to compact down a message/image/story into a poetic format, but I think that if you’re going to discourse about something you’re better to either formulate it as something entertaining or as something serious (like an essay.) Converting it into poetry strikes me as being similar to taking a 300 page book and folding each page individually into an origami crane, and then saying, “Hey, look at me! It’s prettier now as you read!”
Well yeah…but turning it into origami just makes it a pain in the ass to read since I have to unfold each one, and is irrelevant to what the actual text is trying to convey.
And ultimately, poetry was (most likely) developed as song lyrics, and then branched off to be separate from music. So whereas it did have a place in being something entertaining and beautiful, it’s ended up becoming an intellectual game with no desire to simply be beautiful and lacking it’s natural counterpart for which it was intended (i.e. musical accompaniment.)
YES! If one needs to express one’s personal pain or experience through an artistic medium–by all means, do so. Just don’t call it Great Art or state that it speaks to the “human condition”. It speaks to YOUR condition.
And I second the Bob Dylan thing. No voice whatsoever.
I re-found poetry when I went through a depression about 6 years ago. I did not have the ability to retain a narrative line. Have you tried Garrison Keiller’s book of Good Poems? There is a great variety there and much to savor.
I’ve never been all that fond of Ansel Adams. Oh, he was a technical genius and did a lot for conservation, but most of his photos strike me as cold. A few appeal to me but most seem more like exercises in technique than art.
One thing I’ve sort of realised is that novels are meant to be read but good poetry is meant to be spoken. The line breaks are not there superfluously, they guide the cadence and rhythm of the poem. Part of the art of poetry is to make word combinations that just sound right when they fit together. Thats why alliteration and assonance are emphasized so strongly. Going to readings of famous poems by good narrators completely changes the nature of them. At the very least, when you’re reading poetry, either read it out loud to yourself or imagine the voice of you reading it in your head. I’ve found people who really enjoy poetry naturally are those who have a mental narrator when reading prose as well and those who hate it or don’t get it read prose differently.
I’ll third or fourth or whatever the Mona Lisa. It could be because we’ve all seen it so many times that we can’t see what is or once was special about it, but I have seen it in real life and I couldn’t for the life of me work out what all the fuss is about.
Citizen Kane. I know it’s “the best movie ever”, but it just didn’t appeal to me. I’ll take **Casablanca **any day.
And you can add me to the list of people who don’t “get” poetry. There are a few poems that I do particularly like to head read aloud, but the vast majority just doesn’t do it for me.
The Godfather
Taxi Driver
Led Zeppelin
Nirvana
Norman Rockwell
Harry Potter (books & movies)
Mrs. Dalloway
The Sound and the Fury
Anything by Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor