When art transports us, where do we actually go?

An old Chinese legend tells of the painter Wu Daozi (680-c760), who learned to paint so vividly that he was finally able to step inside his work and vanish into the landscape. Magical though it sounds, this legend iterates the common intuition that artworks are more like portals than ordinary objects: they can transport us into other worlds. When I look at Pieter Bruegel's The Hunters in the Snow (1565), I feel like I was there in the frost-bitten village, rather than the galleries of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. When reading Crime and Punishment (1866), the letters on the page conjure a whole world, and in some sense I am no longer in my living room but right there in Dostoevsky's Russia; the cinema, too, is a gateway to faraway galaxies and past centuries.

Even non-representational works can take hold of us, like the breathing colour fields of Mark Rothko's paintings or the beautiful ambience of Max Richter's music. Sometimes, artworks have such a magnetic pull that we forget the actual world around us and lose our sense of time and place, of other people - and sometimes even of ourselves. The French art critic Denis Diderot (1713-84) called such immersive experiences 'art at its most magical'. Once a painting by Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714-89) pulled Diderot inside a pastoral river scene so completely and enjoyably that he compared the experience to a divine mode of existence:

"Where am I at this moment? What is all this surrounding me? I don't know, I can't say. What's lacking? Nothing. What do I want? Nothing. If there is a God, his being must be like this, taking pleasure in himself."

No wonder, then, that there is a certain sense of wistfulness when it all ends, when the lights come up or the last page is turned, and we find ourselves back where we were, forced to carry on with our daily lives.

The idea of artworks as portals to other worlds dates back several centuries, and it has become a commonplace way of talking about our experiences with art. In Pictures and Tears (2001), the art historian James Elkins called it the 'travelling theory' of aesthetic experience. The obvious problem with this theory, however, is that it sounds terribly metaphorical. In reality, I never leave my place in physical space. I'm there in the gallery, the auditorium or on my sofa all along. Try as I might, I cannot enter Bruegel's landscape by touching the canvas, nor can I run into the world of Hamlet by running onto the stage. The artwork allows me only to peer as if from a threshold, where I can see inside but never enter. Here we face what I call the paradox of aesthetic immersion: when I'm immersed in artwork, I seem to go somewhere without going anywhere, and I seem to be in two worlds at once, and yet I'm not properly in either.

So what kind of 'travelling' are we talking about?

Full article: https://www.sott.net/article/463294-When-art-transports-us-where-do-we-actually-go

all that glitters

People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is light from within. 

~~Elizabeth Kubler Ross

This above all - to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as night follows day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

Knowledge and human power are synonymous.
- Francis Bacon

shakey illumi

Shakespeare the artist

William Sh. is best remembered as a writer. A writer at best is an artist. The artist feeds on his own mind and passions to prove to himself the something else that he creates. That thing, his art, is hard to define; it even works with this same principle in mind. A great artist gives from himself what is himself. The true artist and his work are inseparable. This is not to say an artist must share his darkest secrets in his work, but he cannot subdue himself so far as to be totally hidden behind his work. The artist also cannot work without a body of art from past to present, with which to compare and contrast his own art. An artist is usually recognisable through his style. Others copy that style, diluting its art for mass consumption, whereupon it becomes a trend. Trends die as new styles are born.

Shakespeare embodies his Age yet he is always held up for all time. At worst he is severed from his contemporaries as if he lived and worked in an unassailable tower of glory attuned only to cosmic frequencies and universal emanations. Simply I say he was a man, take him for that. What kind of man was he? Not I, nor you, nor a billion experts can ever really know, unless someone finds his diary. His sonnets are often read as a diary. Others shun this idea as ridiculous and say they were simple conventional love poems.

“…Let them say more that like of hearsay well; I will not praise that purpose not to sell…” Q21.

I Love Shakespeare