Friday, December 19, 2014

Schjeldahl on sculpture

Why I read Peter Schjedal, in the New Yorker:

"Sculpture is the hardest art. Unlike diffidently wall-mounted painting, it intrudes on an already crowded world: mediocre painting is easily ignored; mediocre sculpture is exasperating. To be tolerated, let alone welcomed, a sculpture must have immediate and persistent drama, often announced by a certain shock."

The New Yorker, December 22 & 29, 2014, p. 68

1 comment:

Curtis Faville said...

Three dimensionality exists in the space of our world in a way that two-dimensinal (flat) art doesn't.

Flat art is illusionary; sculpture occupies the same space we do, not illusionary.

I don't know about shock.

For the first viewers of the great Renaissance sculptors, like Michelangelo, for instance, seeing those huge artifacts for the first time must have been a religious experience. "Like" god or "rivaling" god's power.