
Mortality and the Old Masters - benbreen
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/13/mortality-and-the-old-masters
======
groby_b
This is, even for the New Yorker, quite the pretentious piece. Starting with
author writing from his retreat in his "country place", over the disdain for
virtual museum tours (complete with scare quotes), to the idea that somehow,
this art just carries more heft.

Because - ludicrous explanation abounds - somehow Goya saw more of the
"scourges of war". I'd love to see the author's take on "Guernica". Or any of
the large number of pieces that were shaped by the trauma of WW1 (modernism),
Spanish Flu (e.g. Munch), and so on.

It is the piece of somebody who loves art not for art's sake, but who loves
art because knowing it confers status. And so, of course, clings to the idea
that there is some kind of "best art" \- and for many of those deeply
conservative art observers, that's the Old Masters. Because, of course, old
things are good, mastery is good, naturalistic is good (because it doesn't
require engaging too deeply with the thought process)

There's no better thing to describe that stuck mindset than the author's
"Everything in them will be other than what we remember."

No, it won't. The art will be just the same. How we engage might have changed.
But the idea that we as humans change is deeply scary to the author's kind of
mindset, and so he'd rather focus on the immutability of the greatness of the
old masters.

~~~
yters
Math has stuck around immutably since the beginning of recorded history. Maybe
other areas of human endeavour, like art, has the same access to immutable
realities.

~~~
ArnoVW
Sure, many concepts identified 2000 years ago still exist. Adding,
subtraction, platonic shapes. But we still add stuff, and some things are even
changed.

We don't call odd numbers "male" anymore, and even numbers "female", like
Pythagoras did.

Calculus was only invented a couple of hundred years ago, and looks nothing
like the creative trig proofs of the Greek.

Our handling of infinity dates from the beginning of the 20th century
(Cantor), as is all the meta weirdness like the completeness theory of Gödel.

And that's math, a domain, _the_ domain where knowledge acquired stays valid
for all of eternity.

~~~
yters
Who is rejecting addition and subtraction?

------
hprotagonist
I will always take the excuse to post Auden:

 _About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position: how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on._

