Focusing in on Art

Abstract

Attitudes toward and evaluations of aesthetics have varied over the ages, and sometimes rather quickly. As an illustration of this, consider the positions of the scientist, Hermann von Helmholtz, and the artist, Wassily Kandinsky, on the relationship between art and music. Preceding the modern schools, von Helmholtz 1 argued that art and music are fundamentally different insofar as the role of the painter was to replicate, reflect, or interpret visible nature. Music, in contrast, is not derived from an equivalent auditory nature, but emanates totally from the composer’s creative mind. In his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art , published in 1912, Kandinsky 2 shared this understanding of music but contended that a painter who finds no satisfaction in mere representation seeks to apply the methods of music to his art. He saw the modern desire for rhythm in painting, for mathematical construction, for repeated notes of color, and for setting color in motion as a result of this. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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