The art spirit
From 1915 to 1927, Henri was a popular and influential teacher at the Art Students League of New York. He provided for each student not a style so much as an attitude, an approach to art. Henri's philosophical and practical musings were collected by former pupil Margery Ryerson and published as The Art Spirit (1923), a book that remained in print for several decades. Henri's other students include George Bellows, Arnold Franz Brasz, Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, Henry Ives Cobb, Jr., Lillian Cotton, John Sloan, Minerva Teichert and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. Filled with valuable technical advice as well as wisdom about the place of art and the artist in American society, this classic work continues to be a guide for artists concerned with the process of artistic creation.
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What Hacker News says
- > But art is mostly about surfacing the inner world, and only in part about skill. It’s unfortunate that art selects so strongly for skill. Can we decorrelate the two?
I don’t think the poor lad knows what Art is.
Put another way, we have hundreds of years of recorded philosophical texts and diatribes on what constitutes Art, and what art-making is. Often written by serious practitioners who dedicate their life to it rather than internet-dwelling dabblers and dilettantes. We have people who are deemed artists, not necessarily painters but people who are wired a certain way and are industrious with their abilities. Math geniuses attend certain schools and the other pupils may pick up a thing or two from them, but that doesn’t mean the other pupils are geniuses also. So too, do artists walk among us and may do what we do and we may imitate what they do. But that doesn’t put us on equal footing whatsoever.
Art doesn’t select for skill. This is a red herring and a misunderstanding. Art doesn’t select for anything, because if it did it wouldn’t be Art. This is an old somewhat trite topic that, historically, boiled down to no more than a pithy phrase: “Art cannot be taught.” as expounded by many teachers of incredible talent in their own right who have attempted to distill it into teachable material and realized their talent is not transferable as easily as they had hoped.
Most of what you read on this subject is nonsense sold to you by grifters who want your money. Now and today more than ever. I’m all for, say, “Art and Fear” and “The Art Spirit” and even a bit of “War of Art” to name some household items on the subject. These are all great recent texts. But let’s take these for what they are: self-help literature, and nothing more. The further back in literature you go the less of this patting-on-the-back attitude you get, and more serious the subject matter is treated (example: read the lectures on Art by the presidents of the Royal Academy, they are numerous, Archive has them all. One president basically tells students to choose a different profession, discussed as an aside topic in a book on portraiture from that time.)
Elsewhere in the comments people saying how art is simply good taste seem to be oblivious to the creations of artists that led them to make such a blundering conclusion. Your taste wouldn’t exist had an artist not created a thing to begin with.
We’ve used image generators for decades now. It gets the job done. The person using it may be an artist or just someone who wants a dynamic, changing generated image on the wall.
- I think you touch on a good example do why discernment is such a valuable skill, a skill that should forever be practiced and honed. I don't mind reading some dudes take on things for even if he's wrong he might drop an item or two that gets me thinking. For instance I've been reading (and re-reading) Robert Henri's The Art Spirit which if you judge the book by its cover is focused on painting yet I find ideas and advice that I can apply all across my life to great benefit. I've read a lot of blogs on here that may or may not be filled with good information but within many of them I have found what I find to be great ideas.
- Read Vogler’s The Writers Journey to learn basic mythological structure. Read The Art Spirit by Robert Henri to give yourself permission to be creative. Then write a novel.
- Here are few that have influenced my work:
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn - Richard Hamming
The Timeless Way of Building - Christopher Alexander
The Humane Interface - Jef Raskin
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information - Edward Tufte
The Art Spirit - Robert Henri
- The first line saying that Lynch’s Dune is a “misbegotten botch job” is based on the authors definition of success in art which is box office returns. And yet here we are discussing a film that turns 40 this year. And there the Wired author is selling ads on the back of David’s work and disabling my back button to grab mailing list signups.
To gain an understanding of David’s approach to art, which is deeply inspired by Robert Henri’s book “The Art Spirit”, it’s worth watching The Art Life (2016). David is a believer in the artist alone in the room with an infinite supply of coffee and cigarettes, creating new ideas with pure creative freedom and the removal of societal pressures. There’s no doubt that his art and all art and creativity is derived from experience and experiencing the art of others. But the point is that for original art to flourish, there comes a time for the artist to seclude themselves and create without market pressures, the influence of popular culture and daily distractions. Us devs can learn much from him.
So I think Lynch’s Dune is spectacular in its originality and bold creativity. And I think looking to box office returns as a measure of success misses the long term value of that kind of originality.
