No. I never intended a tone of condescension. That came across wrong in the way I wrote it. Sorry, my bad.

"As if almost to imply I have no taste?"

No, not intended that way. My fault. Again Sorry about that.

I would rather look at a painting by Monet, I don't need a guide book to tell me what I am looking at or for that matter the guy who is doing crop circles in the snow just out. You only need a guide book when the "art" comes from a deranged mind, true art needs no guide, even the elephant that paints does a better job. Taking a string and nailing it to the wall is not art, its just a piece of string nailed to the wall.

River

During my "liberal arts college student" phase, I took courses in music theory, in art history, in philosophy, biology, physics, chemistry, contemporary religious thought, and many more areas of inquiry.

Pablo Picasso, according to what I was taught, was a "superbly skilled draftsman," what he drew and painted was profoundly accurate representation of what he intended to draw and paint.

Guernica is intended to be a terrible picture, terrible to see, terrible to remember seeing.

I find it utterly proper for people to be sickeningly disturbed by Picasso's Guernica.

Unlike some of the young Archive folks, I was born prior to the German invasion of Poland, in September, 1939. With respect to World War II, I am of the pre-war depression era human assemblage. I knew of the war in Europe long before December of 1941.

As I began to learn to associate some sounds with plausible meanings, the process of learning words, there were many words I heard, via radio and in family talking, which were about war. Before I began talking in sentences, I had assimilated a sense that war was somehow an aspect of the meaning of my life, and that aspect was my making the best possible effort to understand war with the goal being a notion that war, sufficiently well understood, would inform people of how to understand how to avoid war.

YouTube has a Guernica 3D video, digitally animated, created by Lena Gieseke, and credited to the University of Georgia. Would you seek to better understand Picasso's Guernica, you may find it of value to find, and watch, that video.

I have never been able to learn to be at war with myself. I have never been able to learn to "believe in" guilt as other than a culturally/socially generated addictive delusion. I have never been able to learn to believe that anyone has any responsibilities in any way. I have never been able to learn to be ashamed. I have never been able to learn that anyone or anything is truthfully blamed for anything or everything.

I have learned, or always understood, that people have response abilities which are brought forth in response to life events, and I have learned, or always understood, that the response abilities a person has are the abilities made manifest as a person responds to life events.

Were I assigned the role of Judge in a Court of Law, I would always find every defendant perfectly innocent because I would always be able to identify the situational factors which were outside the person's actual locus of control which took from the person any and every truthful form of guilt.

I am vividly sensitive to the affective state of "shame." Shame informs me that I am harboring a false belief, and, when I find and remediate the appropriate false belief, the affective state of shame vanishes.

I have come upon the conventional argument that a person who cannot be made ashamed will necessarily be sociopathic, and, as I cannot be made to be ashamed, surely must be a dangerous sociopath. That view, I find vividly, albeit perchance tragically, false.

I recognize two ways of being unashamed. One is through becoming insensitive to harm, and that is the sociopathic way. The other way, the one I find is of my life, is to become so intensely and vividly sensitive to harm as to sense the affective state of shame with such overwhelming strength as to be incapable of not resolving shame into the mistaken beliefs which generate shame. That is, in my view, the antithesis of sociopathy.

I recognize and realize that my view regarding shame as an essential aspect of human biology is not at all in accord with social consensus. That led me to search for a way to discern whether my understanding or the social convention view of shame is the more scientifically accurate.

To figure out whether my view is really delusional or not, I set out on a scientific experiment plan as an aspect of the ordinary course of my life, and took that experiment plan all the way to a doctoral dissertation which garnered unanimous thesis committee approval at a "major secular research university."

What have I found so far? The finding of my doctorate, that no mistake ever made either could or should have been avoided, and that this is true regardless of the nature of the mistake made or its consequences, is the apparent truthful fact; thousands of years of human social tradition to the contrary notwithstanding.

I find that, for people to engage in warfare, the people, as individual persons, first need to have learned to be at war with themselves, so as to be able to project their inner war onto others. That, I never learned, and, with what I have come to understand, can guarantee that I will never learn.

I do not judge what is, or is not, art. Taking a piece of string and not nailing it to a wall is also art.

Art is to the artist.

I seek to be an artist in the art of war, the art of understanding war as a human activity sufficiently well as to understand the art of non-war even better than the art of war. Clausewitz? Have an English language translation. Sun Tzu? Have an English language translation.

War is an interesting phenomenon. A war to end war is an impossibility.

well said, well said

Dave (imported) wrote: Sun Feb 26, 2012 11:42 pm No. I never intended a tone of condescension. That came across wrong in the way I wrote it. Sorry, my bad.

No, not intended that way. My fault. Again Sorry about that.

Sorry about that, like I said, I was not certain you intended it that way. I guess I was just projecting. Didn't mean to put you on the spot or question your integrity. I have never known you to be condescending.

Elizabeth

I wouldn't get angry or PO's about a piece of art. Art is subjective and personal.

I grew up with Guernica. It was a real loss to me when it went back to Spain. I suppose I was privileged to see it as often as I did.

Rothko didn't only paint in red, but he was a master of the psychology of color. His technique was to scrape scores of very thin translucent layers of paint on top of one another with a knife. The effect is to mix bits of many different colors in a sort of mist, with tiny flecks of different colors coinciding. It's impossible to capture this in a photo or reproduction, but seen up close, his paintings are clouds of moody complexity caused by the juxtaposition of so many colors. Beautiful and moving. Rothko is hard for conservators, though. Some of those ultra-thin paint layers have begun to peel and flake.

Rousseau was considered "primitive" because he didn't follow the intellectual fashions of his contemporaries. The art world is very small. In the Paris bistros where the art crowd hung out, Rousseau was laughed at for his supposed lack of sophistication, i.e., for not expounding the fashionable art doctrines of the day. The Dream is part of the Modern's permanent collection, as Guernica once was.