Status Updates From Ways of Seeing

We have shifted to a new essay - I presume one on femininity in art because there was no title in my copy - so I withhold judgment until it is completed.

“One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear … the surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”

Finally done the part where Benjamin gets ripped off wholesale - with credit though! I appreciate the discussion but I felt it was lacking in innovation.

“Adults and children have boards in their bedroom or living-rooms on which they pin pieces of paper … On each board all the images belong to the same language and all are more or less equal within it, because they have been chosen in a highly personal way to match and express the experience of the room’s inhabitant. Logically, these boards should replace museums.”

“The uniqueness of every painting was once part of the uniqueness of the place where it resided.”

“Because of the camera, the painting now travels to the spectator rather than the spectator to the painting. In its travels, its meaning is diversified.”

Still aping Benjamin, would like for the author to attempt original analysis.

“The past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act. Cultural mystification of the past entails a double loss.”

Yeah I would say I agree!

“Yet when an image is presented as a work of art, the way people look at it is affected by a whole series of learnt assumptions about art. Assumptions concerning: beauty, truth, genius, civilization, form, status, taste, etc”

Okay. Tying this to how it acts to “mystify” the past is interesting albeit not particularly new when considering how other metaphysical assumptions historically operated to do the same

“This [an image becoming a record of how x had seen y] was the result of an increasing consciousness, accompanying an increasing awareness of history. It would be rash to date this last development precisely.”

Is that so? Why is it then that Europe is granted the concession that “such consciousness [had] existed since the beginning of the Renaissance,” while the author is remiss about developments elsewhere?

“An image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced. It is an appearance, or a set of appearances, which has been detached from the place and time in which it first made its appearance and preserved - for a few moments…”

One can sniff the Frankfurtness perhaps.

“When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match: a completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate.”