Using One Work of Art to Describe Another

"Ascension Variations" was a dance performance by Meredith Monk at the Guggenheim in March of 2009. I never saw the dance.

The idea though of ascension characterizes my feeling when I am faced with a successful work of art. It’s about rising to a place we cannot ordinarily reach. The artwork, combined with a sympathetic mental state, makes this possible. “The Ascension of Christ” is a classical theme in art, and it is infinitesimal variations on themes that have characterized the development of the arts through history.

This using of one work of art to describe another was a technique developed by the late philosopher Walter Benjamin in his Arcades Project: a collection of observations, mostly quotations, on the urban phenomenon of the glass roofed Arcade shopping malls in turn of the century Paris. While not strictly speaking art work, quotations are others work employed to illuminate a phenomena, the Arcades, he, Walter Benjamin, had nothing to do with himself. In a sense he went “Window shopping” for observations that align with one’s own feelings. Montaigne's maxim reads: “I quote others only in order to better express myself.”

This blog is intended as an entirely subjective encyclopaedia of my observations and developing relationship with modern painting. An Arcades Project of my own; grasping for a definition of a phenomena so huge and nebulous one must defer to others for insight.