Book 2. He still loves "aporia", but this book is significantly better edited. Some tidbits for thought:
"I find it a fascinating paradox that the more sensuous retinal aesthetic tends to be supported by advocates of logic and reason, while the more intellectual aesthetic of the signing painters tends to be supported by advocates of the irrational." vi
"For as our art has grown more linguistic, it has become more symbolic, mythic, and didactic, and these are the very qualities that stand out in the art of the Middle Ages and the Netherlands." ix
"The northern empirical nature led the Dutch to trust many different ways of knowing the world, and each of these ways involved picturing of one kind or another: the telescope, the microscope, the camera obscura, painted pictures, and maps. ..The postmodern emphasis on learning about the world by means of advanced microscopes and telescopes, as well as photographs in books, magazines, television, and movies, echoes this northern method of knowing through pictures." 19
On invention of the globe and the Mercator projection map: "Comparisons...forced map-makers to confront a fundamental dilemma about the language of representation: the unresolvable contradiction that is created when an attempt is made to represent the curved space of the earth on a flat chart." 23
"In fact, both the microscope and the map render visible things that are otherwise invisible, in the best spirit of the Middle Ages." 77
"When Newton could not find a language to fit his purpose, he invented a new one ... as his method grew more complex, it also became less stable." 80
"No major idea--with the possible exception of the zipper--has ever sprung full-blown from the head of a single person. Usually there is 'something in the air,' a unified awareness in the collective mind that permeates disciplines, including art. Ideas accumulate slowly until they saturate (or supersaturate) a society." 106
"It is the original idea as it exists in the mind of the artist that is the real work or art, and not the product of that idea, which merely represents real art." 143
"Postmodernists in general are fascinated by languages and their ability to simultaneously amplify and limit our understanding." 160
"'We are still living under the reign of logic'." --Breton 164
"When a painting is so accurate in its depiction of objects and the space in which they exist that the scene seems to actually exist in its own space on the other side of a window, that painting is said to be visually transparent. Modern artists destroyed this transparency: they created an opaque picture plane." 203
"The best painters have always had a high tolerance for chaos...Barnett Newman once wrote: 'The subject matter of creation is chaos'." 224
"The split second has been growing more and more important to us." --Steinbeck 262
"Any single text offers little more than a view through a kaleidoscope. Each view, if well presented, may seem complete and consistent, yet a slight twist of the cylinder generates still another image; and that image, too, may seem just as complete and just as consistent." 268
"Ideas, though not to be taken seriously, are not to be ignored." 270
"There is also an inverse relationship between painting's ability to communicate on a timeless universal level and its ability to communicate precise verbal ideas." 273
"One of the primary functions of a scientist or an artist is to explore and expand concepts of reality. The artists who have proved most valuable to their society have one so by posing new questions rather than by asserting answers." 275
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