The answer to the Death of Painting likely comes from psychology, which tell us that painting is a visual language, as likely to die as literature. People will never stop recording their visions in writing, images, music, and dance.(disclosure; I'm writing a book on this stuff.) While Duchamp and postmodernism want art to be intellectual, when art is intellectual it becomes literature, because the intellect best expresses itself in a verbal language. But there are other languages active in consciousness; there's an acoustic language whose formal expression is music, a body language whose formal expression is dance, and a visual language where a picture is worth 873 words after inflation. Painting can never die, anymore than literature.
I question whether music is a language at all. The trend in 20th century philosophy to foreground the linguistic seems like the last refuge of intellection, deriving from the real threat to the perpetuation of the human brought about by Western societal industrialization. What is language, constitutionally? I find it too easy to throw that rubric onto the artistic discipline - which probably exists to go beyond what language typically does! The assertion then is: Art doesn't require language. Language is subordinate or adjunctive to art.
The answer to the Death of Painting likely comes from psychology, which tell us that painting is a visual language, as likely to die as literature. People will never stop recording their visions in writing, images, music, and dance.(disclosure; I'm writing a book on this stuff.) While Duchamp and postmodernism want art to be intellectual, when art is intellectual it becomes literature, because the intellect best expresses itself in a verbal language. But there are other languages active in consciousness; there's an acoustic language whose formal expression is music, a body language whose formal expression is dance, and a visual language where a picture is worth 873 words after inflation. Painting can never die, anymore than literature.
I question whether music is a language at all. The trend in 20th century philosophy to foreground the linguistic seems like the last refuge of intellection, deriving from the real threat to the perpetuation of the human brought about by Western societal industrialization. What is language, constitutionally? I find it too easy to throw that rubric onto the artistic discipline - which probably exists to go beyond what language typically does! The assertion then is: Art doesn't require language. Language is subordinate or adjunctive to art.
Thank you very much for this very interesting lecture.