abvg,

Thank you for the informative post. I will also attempt something by way of self-explanation and clarification. First, I'm pleased that you liked the Kierkegaard "quote" which I paraphrased from my recollection of it (during my student time, I had it pinned to my wall). I found the exact quote only yesterday - which had long been misplaced among my loose papers: "A passionate, tumultuous age will OVERTHROW EVERYTHING, PULL EVERYTHING DOWN; but a revolutionary age, that is at the same time reflective and passionless ... leaves everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance." ("The Present Age") I was wondering ... does this quote fit your definition of distilled thought?

I agree that a virtual cafe presents obstacles to smooth communication, sometimes promoting misunderstandings. We indeed have no choice but to work with what is there. Here is some background over myself which I hope may further better mutual understanding.

Like you, I cannot call myself a minimalist painter. During my university studies in America (early 1970s) it might have been in a sense "better" for me if I'd been able to. The outspokenly authoritarian director of the painting department of my school was not only a minimalist painter, but a very successful, well-known minimalist painter. Together with his "mafia" of teaching assistants, he wasn't in the least above openly persecuting certain painting students who proved resistant to his "postmodern", rabidly anti-romantic prejudices over how one was required to march in step with the ever-advancing zeitgeist of the post-Pop art world. This situation - not exactly one of academic freedom, let alone artistic freedom - was a primary reason for my decision to take my degree in art history instead of painting - a decision I've never regretted. (I had nothing against "difficult" or demanding professors - only a complete lack of tolerance for bigoted tyrants. Some students simply left the school altogether - a choice which others like myself, owing to finances, were in no position to make. An essay confirming my experiences with minimalists and views of Minimalism in general is "Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power" by Anna C. Chave in "Art in Modern Culture" ed Francis Frascina.)

I did have, on the other hand, the compensating opportunity to study under one really outstanding - though demanding - professor of art history. It is to this professor that I owe my understanding of art history as a necessarily "method-limited" discipline, one which only begins to yield insight into its subject to the extent of its operation within a broad interdisciplinary sphere - including the cultural-critical among others - consequently raised to the level of what would then be called the "philosophy of art". This is what I meant by using the term "philosophy" in connection with art, in distinction to what various philosophers or philosophical schools have had to say over the matter (it is good to remember here that the Frankfurt School was founded as a interdisciplinary project). I'm sorry if this was unclear.

In fact, my professor's overall approach had much in common with the "empirical" theory of Max Raphael (while I became acquainted with Raphael not through my art history professor, but my German literature professor, who had translated one of Adorno's major works). And it is the very similar method of my art history professor which is reflected in Raphael's description of the artistic process:

"Artistic creation involves the totality of dispositions, functions, relations, facts, and values - all of these in harmonious interaction: body and soul, inwardness and outwardness, the individual and the community, the self and the cosmos, tradition and revolution, instinct and freedom, life and death, becoming and being, the self and fate, struggle and structure, the Dionysian and the Appolonian, law and accident, structure and surface, contemplation and action, education and achievement, sensuality and spirit, doubt and faith, love and duty, ugliness and perfection, the finite and the infinite. Neither one of any pair of these terms should exclude the other nor should any pair exclude any other - they must be brought together into a higher unity." ("The Struggle to Understand Art")

My professor was famous for running out of time at the end of a term before reaching the culminating picture of a totality such as the one outlined above. I remember one Chinese art seminar which sadly ended with the end of its beginning. When I read accounts of Raphael's "passion", I see my professor's manner as he lectured - only to be described as a mixture of totally committed professionalism and sheer inspiration.

I hope this better clarifies my position - including my conviction that an approach failing to account for nothing less than the utter complexity of what we aim to discuss here may threaten to degenerate into a simple waste of time. Might this be our real conflict? I can appreciate your personal tendency toward simplification (which was a high ideal for people like Emerson and Thoreau) - but it doesn't function very well when it becomes necessary to make complex sense out of still more complex dilemmas. At any rate, I'm skeptical of the idea that it may always be possible to distill complex and often contradictory phenomena into a sentence or two - without either risking jargon or outright falsification. (Economical thought-construction is another matter.) If this sounds a bit austere, then it probably is. I think it's no accident that the first major English edition of Raphael's writings bears the title "The Demands of Art". I'm not saying that we, as painters, are required to be forever equal to the full challenge of what Raphael attempted as an art philosopher (after all, we should be occupied with being, in the first place, painters). I am saying that I believe that it would be a grave mistake for painters not to work at - as a joint activity outside of painting itself - a philosophy of art countering those who in all seriousness proclaim the death of Autonomous Art - and painting into the bargain. Finally, the competition is far ahead of us in this endeavor.

I will continue later: In your previous post you raised two extremely important questions which I'd still like to address.

Best regards, David