This was a great reading of the gallery: exploring the artists' works in their own turns, while connecting them together as you went through their features. This is a connection in its own right, between we readers and those artists. Thank you for enacting that.
Also, the Elkins and Sands quotations recalled the (clichéd) Eliot concepts of synthesizing both the individual talent and the traditional forms that the individual artist must respond to and work with. Funny how that synthesis comes up from different corners, different ages.
Did you ever read Harold Bloom's "The Western Canon"? He goes into that also, calling it "the anxiety of influence"; for some reason it seems that this individual-talent synthesis is a source of angst in the literary world, but not in the visual arts; painters (other than Picasso) seem to be able to borrow at ease from the tradition while writers are nibbling their nails about doing so.
I haven't read it, but Bloom and that anxiety of influence has soaked into much of what I do read. Reading Ecclesiastes consistently makes me worry less about that anxiety.
Your point on literature/painting is astute, and of a piece with general existential angst over everything in literary circles: the futility of language, the futility of criticism, the futility of fiction, for instance. Though here, I'd guess that writers are more sensitive to it because: 1) critics rarely make comparisons as compliments (it's usually the "in the shadow of ___" sense, where a writer shouldn't linger in the shadow as a mere derivative); 2) text is more opaque than visual media, so that literary influences are easier to hide from more readers? These are quite off the cuff.
This was a great reading of the gallery: exploring the artists' works in their own turns, while connecting them together as you went through their features. This is a connection in its own right, between we readers and those artists. Thank you for enacting that.
Also, the Elkins and Sands quotations recalled the (clichéd) Eliot concepts of synthesizing both the individual talent and the traditional forms that the individual artist must respond to and work with. Funny how that synthesis comes up from different corners, different ages.
Did you ever read Harold Bloom's "The Western Canon"? He goes into that also, calling it "the anxiety of influence"; for some reason it seems that this individual-talent synthesis is a source of angst in the literary world, but not in the visual arts; painters (other than Picasso) seem to be able to borrow at ease from the tradition while writers are nibbling their nails about doing so.
I haven't read it, but Bloom and that anxiety of influence has soaked into much of what I do read. Reading Ecclesiastes consistently makes me worry less about that anxiety.
Your point on literature/painting is astute, and of a piece with general existential angst over everything in literary circles: the futility of language, the futility of criticism, the futility of fiction, for instance. Though here, I'd guess that writers are more sensitive to it because: 1) critics rarely make comparisons as compliments (it's usually the "in the shadow of ___" sense, where a writer shouldn't linger in the shadow as a mere derivative); 2) text is more opaque than visual media, so that literary influences are easier to hide from more readers? These are quite off the cuff.