Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the essential role that landscape plays in American painting, similar to how sex and psychoanalysis influence American literature.
Robert Hughes compares the significance of landscape in American painting to the themes of sex and psychoanalysis in the American novel. This analogy suggests that just as these complex and often taboo subjects shape the narrative and character development in literature, the depiction of landscape is crucial in capturing the essence of American identity and experience in visual art.
In practice
During an art lecture, this quote can be used to spark a discussion about the importance of landscape in visual storytelling.
Essentially, perspective is a form of abstraction. It simplifies the relationship between eye, brain and object. It is an ideal view, imagined as being seen by a one-eyed, motionless person who is clearly detached from what he sees. It makes a God of the spectator, who becomes the person on whom the whole world converges, the Unmoved Onlooker.
It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say 'this saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian'. Specific books, perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and the artists of the 1920's is that they they thought such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was a certain naivete that made them think so. But it is certainly our loss that we cannot.
Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius.
What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?
What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.
The greater the artist, the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.
Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.
From 1968 on, I was pretty much the black, gay SF writer.
A young man is afraid of his demon and puts his hand over the demon's mouth sometimes and speaks for him. And the things the young man says are very rarely poetry.
I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.
Fool," said my muse to me. "Look in thy heart and write.
What is real for me are the illusions I create with my paintings. Everything else is quicksand.
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