“Most Egyptian wall art more closely resembles the work of elementary school children”

This statement is decidedly ill informed. First of all you make the same error artfl dgr does by assessing not only that 3-d illusionism is better than flattened abstract forms, but also by narrowing that to a particular type of illusionism.

You’re essentially saying that the Egyptians, who possessed the skill and precision to build a pyramid very precisely oriented and inches within the measurement of a perfect square base over ~700+ ft were not equally technically capable of developing a Renaissance-like 3-d illusionistic style of representation. This is non-sense.

The point I’ve been making all along is that the culture dictates the fundamental precepts of the art. If the Egyptians didn’t illustrate with the same 3-d intent as, say, the Renaissance it wasn’t because they couldn’t, rather it was because that particular artistic vocabulary wasn’t important for them so they had no need to ever learn and develop it. Not lack of skill as artfl posits, but lack of need to have that skill in the first place. To judge a culture’s art by that one peculiar 3-d western standard is like reading a German novel in German without ever having learned the language and pronouncing that said work as a terrible example of English literature. Of course it is, it’s German!

A 3-d image in space bespeaks movement and thereby a transitory here-and-now nature. Egyptian art was not about the transitory but about the eternal. Their perception of the world around them was quite keen. It is not at all a simply less skilled–more skilled artistic rendering as artfl believes and as you posit here. That latter is the real elementary point of view. It is also culturally chauvinistic; it implies that “if they could have done 3-d, they would have. That they didn’t means they couldn’t.” Again, non-sense.

“It’s possible for a modern artist to produce a Trompe-l’Å“il – no one in Egyptian times could have ever managed such a thing” (cultural chauvinism alert!). No one in Egyptian times wanted to because their culture had no use for such transitory representation, Once again you are looking at Egyptian art with a severly limited outlook; you think that because there is no trompe l’oeil illusionism implied on a flat surface that this is evidence of an elementary (or underdeveloped) understanding of the visual image. Nothing can be further from the truth. The (lack of) 3-d depth aside, Old Kingdom illustrations of flora and fauna are technically and graphically as accurate as Audubon; the lack of a supposed space receding from the viewer doesn’t change that. You can disagree with that if you wish, but you would be wrong. Botanists and zoologists have looked at Egyptian illustrations and can easily identify and type species; that’s how accurate they are. Further look especially at Middle Kingdom statuary. The portrait likenesses of the individuals are not only strikingly realistic but they also imbue the subject with a delicacy and personality that rivals any Rembrandt portrait—my favorite is a Middle Kingdom statue in the MFA in Boston. I offer that any artist at that level of skill could easily have developed a trompe-l’oeil method of rendering 3-d on a 2-d surface if the cultural need had been there in the first place.

It is not a lack of technical skill and it is not that it took until the the “sophistication” of the Renaissance to awaken and develop such a technical skill. It’s that earlier cultures were pursuing different goals which did not require the representation of an object in such an illusory three dimensional space. They were not inferior rules and precepts, they were just different than what we’ve been told is the norm (cultural chauvinism).

Remember a 3-d illusion is also a distortion. It distorts true shape in order to render relationships in “space.” It is neither more nor less valid than an art which opts to represent a purer truer form and is willing to distort spatial relationships to achieve that end.

Just as the original King Kong had women in the audience fainting at its “realism” — realism that nowadays looks almost comically inept — those classical Greeks were probably fooled by much less impressive Trompe-l’Å“il’s than are produced in modern times. Things that a modern eye catches readily were not necessarily present in the mind’s eye of the classical Greeks.

Heck, more recently, look at the original Star Wars. I recall seeing that one in the theater and not noticing ANY of the stuff that I can see NOW, because I know what’s wrong with the imagery. Matte lines that were invisible in 1977 are glaringly obvious these days.

Another example is if you go back and look at Star Trek. What used to be really state of the art looking is kind of cheesy and obvious these days…
And I’m talking about ST:NG, not ST:TOS!
Not just style but visual effects.

The art eternally advances, until eventually the brain won’t be able to tell the difference between fiction and reality.

“if audobon was born in the time of the pyramids, he would not have drawn birds with the detail he did the way he did”

This statement alone reveals precisely how limited your knowledge is on this subject. Egyptian renderings in tombs are so accurate that 5000 years later we can identify species and types. These bas-relief carvings and paintings have been favorably compared to Audubon drawings for their zoological specificity. In fact, contrary to what you believe and state, Audubon would have felt quite at home with these images.

This is a decidedly inappropriate comparison/claim, T.

He’s saying that the Audobon stuff uses a truly massive degree of enhanced drawing concepts which the Egyptians truly did not have — concept of perspective, depth effects, and so forth leave Autobon’s illustrations light years ahead of anything the Egyptians ever dreamed of in terms of photorealism.

It’s possible for a modern artist to produce a Trompe-l’Å“il — no one in Egyptian times could have ever managed such a thing. They probably would have thought one the work of a demon (or the Eqyptian equivalent), I’d argue…

I concur with you on the dfifference between “more” and “better”, for the most part, but Audobon was clearly superior by “most reasonable standards” to any Egyptian wall art. Most Egyptian wall art more closely resembles the work of elementary school children than that of ANY modern artist attempting to do photorealism. And that’s what pretty much ALL artists in all cultures were attempting before modern photography made it less appreciated as a talent.

“. . . i can also make egyptian style drawings”

So what? This makes you a copyist. How does this ability make what you produce any better art than any art that has come before you? Is Stravinsky a better musician than Bach because Stravinsky knew Bach’s work? Is Bach an inferior musician to Stravinsky because he didn’t know Stravinsky’s? You may like it better, but again, that is a quality judgement not an absolute fact-based judgement.

“better is having more choices. more tools in the toolbox.” ??? This is incoherent. More and better are two distinctly different qualities. You may equate them but that is simply your opinion. This is nonsense.

“if audobon was born in the time of the pyramids, he would not have drawn birds with the detail he did the way he did”

This statement alone reveals precisely how limited your knowledge is on this subject. Egyptian renderings in tombs are so accurate that 5000 years later we can identify species and types. These bas-relief carvings and paintings have been favorably compared to Audubon drawings for their zoological specificity. In fact, contrary to what you believe and state, Audubon would have felt quite at home with these images.

The bottom line here, Artfl dgr it that you believe the force of your argument substitutes for its veracity. You proffer your opinion as if it were fact in an attempt to demean those who criticize your theses, yet there are very few facts evident in your screed above. I have seen you do this before with Neoneocon herself.

You are certainly entitled to your opinions and I write this without any illusion that I will change your mind; I will not. You simply, in this forum, know very little whereof you speak; your three Jansons not withstanding.

Your 7{17 post evinces a tremendous lack of knowledge about art and its history; you don’t know what you don’t know.

“todays art IS better…
because we can draw like all the forms and ideas BEFORE us”

Once again, artistic knowledge is NOT a linear progression. Better is a qualitative judgement and you have just contradicted your own thesis. Today’s are is better? Then Serrano’s “Piss Christ” is better than majesterial Egyptian tomb art because we can do what they did, but they can’t envision what we would do. Yet, you yourself call 20th century abstract art the equivalent of pornography. Which is it? You can;t have it both ways.

“i can make fake cave paintings…i can also make egyptian style drawings’

That’s sturdy bread—your teeth know immediately the reality of the bread.

.. and if you’re lucky, you get to keep them all when you’re done eating the bread!

You miss the entire point. The “cave man” made the drawings that the cultural milieu demanded. If the culturwl milieu demanded other apporached, the cave man would have produced those.

“for those of us that are artists, and study art history of man, and have 3 different volumes of jansons history of art on their shelves…”

Arrogant aren’t we?

Janson is a fundamental 101 textbook. Three Janson’s are repetitive fundamental textbooks with minor revisions. I’ll see your repetitive 3 Janson’s and call your hand with my Ph.D. in art history and my twelve years’ experience teaching it in a school of art.

the cave man could not make ‘better’ drawings.
and that is my point..

there is an arrow to time and discovery and man growing and knowing, and passing it down.

so today, we take for granted all these other discoveries that were not obvious.

cutting through it all and slicing the bullsh*t away

you can give newton credit for noticing gravity and quantifying it. but not the artists who noticed reality, put it in their paintings, and led scientists to wondering why

todays art IS better…
because we can draw like all the forms and ideas BEFORE us… but not ahead of us. just like them.

i can make fake cave paintings… (and the idea of them mocing and all that is not known… your talking as if people really know what happened in proto human heads.. sorry. they dont. they have no idea other than their ideas… and they claim the one they like most is the right one… so these ideas wax and wane over time if you read the literature, while the painting remains).

i can also make egyptian style drawings, asian style, french abstractions, and i can put them all together..

and THAT is what your missing to my story

the Egyptian artists could only draw that way.
it doesn’t matter if they were like plumbers. in the past those things were the mark of craftspeople and years of apprenticeship, and have little bearing to what we have now with automation, standardization, regulation, etc.

do note that without that, they made things that stood for a 1000 years or more… unattended…

you try that with anything we build today and see what happens.

the past artists were just what they are today. hacks who wanted to make money.. and did not want to be considered hacks… the painting schools had armies of lesser artists that did all kinds of parts of things. but we forget that… completely…

these discoveries about reality and noticing were very important, as it allowed one school of art to beat another school, and have more commissions from patrons.

the truth is that modern artists go through the historical transitions, but they are getting a big tome of discoveries as pointed out. proportions, and musculature, and all kinds of stuff which allowed them to make their art better.

and better is not what you think it is. better is having more choices. more tools in the toolbox. an artists pallet is not just the colors. do they do something in action? do they contrive a scene? do they fake the light? what style? what tone? how to compose? and on and on it goes…

is it any wonder that the po mo culture was perfectly suited for the unable judgemental not to bright crowd follower?

they did not put those things in their art because they did not know those things. they saw it the way you do, but did not notice the details of it. they took it for granted.

the only way for you to ‘get’ it is to remember when something you knew was familiar, and after knowing it for a while, you discover something about it you never noticed before that was always there.

to remember that transition… the awakening to the detail in front of you that you never noticed and never saw, perceived or even thought existed until that happened.

to ask you the day before to describe such, that point would be left out… to ask you to draw the same thing the day after, you might add that thing that you newly noticed.

thats how artists discovered parts of reality. with the perspectives being learned once mathematics was invented… particularly geometry… which required WHOM? Euclid… and what euclid knew would also have to be disseminated.. so there was also the requirement of the church, and universities. of which they started teaching art.

it has been claimed that comprehensive systems of perspective were evolved in antiquity, but most scholars do not accept this. Hardly any of the many works where such a system would have been used have survived. A passage in Philostratus suggests that classical artists and theorists thought in terms of “circles” at equal distance from the viewer, like a classical semi-circular theatre seen from the stage.[4] The roof beams in rooms in the Vatican Virgil, from about 400 AD, are shown converging, more or less, on a common vanishing point, but this is not systematically related to the rest of the composition.

for those of us that are artists, and study art history of man, and have 3 different volumes of jansons history of art on their shelves…

the above makes a lot more sense than the other arguments. ie. we know about the past and what people thougth because more survived than just a few pictures. writings, and so on. and there is a whole area of study and record going over it and cross referencing it to check

they did not include what they did not notice or know

if audobon was born in the time of the pyramids, he would not have drawn birds with the detail he did the way he did…

the striving to draw reality was the discovery of the nuance and basic rules of reality around us and represent it in some way.

now its something else.

Puns aside… it WAS up until modern times and the theories of adorno, po mo, etc.

how is it NOT a linear technological development?
a BETTER question is how can it not be?

And this says most dont know what creativity really is… its not finding somethign someone else hasnt done and turning art into a linear search for what isnt been.

i doubt anyone will read this since its all gone forward into other threads. but it is important.

since man invented art, and it did not come to use in whole cloth, its travel (prior to recently) was a long line of discoveries just like any other technology.

those before the discovery didnt use it.
those after, used it more and more till we didnt notice that that was the key to its apperance changes.

prior to the modern formless bs and emotion shocking and what i call faux art

cargo cult art that resembles art on the surface and process, but isnt. with most not willing to see the differences, since most dont actually create art at a very competent level, not a modern level

so in the past, art slowly revealed reality and its principals. which is why it was always Arts and Sciences. Art gave one the ability to really see. most don’t see, they perceive and think that is seeing. its not the same, and unless one learns the difference, one never perceives their could be a difference.

but look at it this way, when a person learns English from another tongue, their accents tend to be similar and their phonetic mistakes are also similar so we can actually identify from where they came as this fingerprint is the product of the two languages being mashed.

when a person learns to draw, they seldom draw what they see very well. drawing still life is comparing what you think, and what you see.

if i could i would put a link to a drawing i did using architectural pencil.
its ALMOST photo real. I pull it back a few notches from photo real because i can use my camera if i want photo real. however, few people can see well enough to see why its not real. its so close to real in the right elements that people fill in the rest and never even notice that a lot is not defined.

so when a person learns to draw, they learn the difference between what they see and what they think they see. this is why a lot of beginners will commonly draw parts of things that are not there, or they cant see.

smarter art teachers will break the class fast of that if they can get objects that are cut in half and put them in place where no one can see they are incomplete. usually they just go around and look and show people that they are trying to include what they arent seeing but what they think they know. (the half objects make it easier to show what they think they know. otherwise, they do know the other side of a can of soda).

this is why things are warped in beginning still life drawings
as people progress, they get better and better at starting forms, orientation, and so on. but what they also do is pick up the history of art in terms of techniques and tool boxes.

people drawing prior to the discovery of certain things, did not perceive those things in a way that they could separate them. when they compared what they were drawing with what they saw, they just couldn’t figure out why it only sort of matched. and as you go through the ages, as people noted each reality, this noticing was added to the tool box.

atmospheric perspective requires one to notice

Saturation decreases with distance.
Contrast decreases with distance
Brightness increases with distance
Edges remain sharp even when far away
Is visible at night
appears in media other than air (under water, etc)
weather or conditions can change the perspective
may be weakened by strong lighting.

Aerial perspective was used in paintings from the Netherlands in the 15th Century, and explanations of its effects were with varying degrees of accuracy written by polymaths such as Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci. The latter used aerial perspective in many of his paintings such as the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. Atmospheric perspective was used in Pompeian Second Style paintings, one of the Pompeian Styles, dating as early as 30 BCE. A notable example is the Gardenscape from the Villa of Livia in Primaporta, Italy.

but before those times in those areas, you cant find it…

art dealers know this and they keep and eye out for such inclusions that put things out of date.

Systematic attempts to evolve a system of perspective are usually considered to have begun around the 5th century BC. in the art of Ancient Greece, as part of a developing interest in illusionism allied to theatrical scenery and detailed within Aristotle’s Poetics as ‘skenographia’: Using flat panels on a stage to give the illusion of depth

and the discoveries and things changed as technology did.
by Vermeers time, they were using camera obscura, which is kind of what i used to do my drawings. (so the person that says it doesnt count because its a tracing of sorts does not know what they are talking about as it was common since camera obscura, and projectors and so on)

as we moved into the age of history, where things were known, inventors recorded, time periods established. the line of everything follows the time line of discovery.

that is up until the modern changes. in which abstract expressionism and complete abstraction and formlessness, and emotional shock and all that kind of stuff took over. it has the appearance of art in form, the way a porn movie has the appearance of sex and love or other “nuances” depending on what is what.

the perversion of something is close enough to the something that its hard to define in a clear way, and becomes harder to see the more you get used to it.

so the new artists that came after this climb of discovery that put us in a place where some really incredible stuff can be turned out on demand (and styles and ideas continue)… into something that pretty much everyone can do equally or better, and was more a social gig. don’t believe me? then read Kostabe series on how to be a famous artist in the modern era, and it has more to do with who you go out with, talk with, etc. socially constructed in the modern era and has the appearance, but not the substance – an inversion.

art moves the emotions, so if art moves the emotions, something that moves the emotions must be art – ergo rotting animals presented to domesticated urbanites and considered art because their domestication makes them emotional

then there are other modifications. art shows merit, and merit makes us unequal, so real art that has merit is to be avoided, and new art that is formless and hard to judge by merits aesthetics will be celebrated and the other stuff will be shunned. ergo formless objects, and games with size, and or color, and so on. but not real art. to anyone but the urbane domesticated affectations persons its barely interesting.

the sculpture of the word love that is in ny on the street has nothing on boulevard of broken dreams by hopper. – both being modern but one still being real art.

today the modernists have tried to see what it is that describes art, and so forth, and have decided to try to accelerate its development by the very thing that your talking about. in the past the linear development was natural, now its contrived. in the past it had substance, now its lacking substance, and only has appearance.

and dont get me started on how wacky the public sounds to the artists. most dont think the way that people think about their work. i know that from personal experience, and working with other artists, and sitting in special gatherings, and so on (my photography added to that).

even edgar allen poe has a essay on how and why he wrote the raven.
its a blast to read as it has no bearing on anything common people think or say when they imagine him making his composition.