give back the funk

The problem, it would seem, with being an arts editor, and a full on science major on top of that, is that there is a huge tendency to fall into an artistic funk.

I'm not complaining; I love what I'm doing this semester.  It's amazing to be part of the probably imaginary club of I-edit-therefore-I-am.  This is not meant to sound self-important in any way; it is what is is: I just happen to like this administrative stuff more than I thought I would, and as stressful it is to go about half the week wondering if people are actually going to pull through and submit their content, it is also incredibly rewarding and exciting every Friday when the issue comes out and I can say to myself, "wow, I helped organize this."  On the same note, I am now fully immersed in my major, and the psychology, cognition, and brain science classes that I'm taking are all so interesting.

However - when one is caught up in this endless circle of answering press emails, editing articles (sometimes in class...), and, yes, studying brains, it's much too easy to get caught up into the said artistic funk.

No joke, I may actually be starting to miss my art history class from last semester.  Reading fifty pages about the Orientalist movement in the 19th century?  Only a small price to pay for getting to watch slides of beautiful paintings three times a week.

I end up sifting through arts emails wistfully, wishing I could make the opening of Boston Ballet's production of the Nutcracker, or something from Boston Lyric Opera, or the new exhibit at the ICA, or at the MFA, or......

Anyway, enough of me ranting about life.

It's beautiful and sunny outside, and MIT is full of happy prefrosh visiting for CPW (campus preview weekend)!

Hopefully I'll have a semi-artistically-inspired post sometime soon.

impressionism/modernity/modernism

modernity, the social themes of modern life as painting's subject matter.
modernism, the artistic project concerned with flatness, sensation, affect.

what is the relationship in impressionist painting?

Claude Monet - Rouen Cathedral, facade 1894 (at MFA)

and a really long article -
"Impressionism, Modernism and Originality" by Charles Harrison, in Modernity and Modernism: French Painting in the Nineteenth Century

hmm...

"The bogus religiosity which now surrounds original works of art, and which is ultimately dependent upon their market value, has become the substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible.  Its function is nostalgic.  It is the final empty claim for the continuing values of an oligarchic, undemocratic culture.  If the image is no longer unique and exclusive, the art object, the thing, must be made mysteriously so."

-Ways of Seeing, John Berger

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mona-lisa_in_the_Louvre.jpg

on art.

"The uniqueness of every painting was once part of the uniqueness of the place where it resided.  Sometimes the painting was transportable.  But it could never be seen in two places at the same time.  When the camera reproduces a painting, it destroys the uniqueness of its image.  As a result its meaning changes.  Or, more exactly, its meaning multiplies and fragments into many meanings."

-Ways of Seeing, John Berger