To See Is To Think - Looking at American Art [antikvár]

To look at a work of art is to think. Somé people might not call it that-we often limit the word thinking to a somewhat pragmatic exercise by which we rationalize various desires, feelings, and other uncalled-for promptings of the brain-but in any case, looking at a work of art is a distinctive use of the mind. Every sculpture, painting, or graphic work provides us with a new mentái activity which might very well have the power to engage all our functions from memory to muscular action, from seeing to touch. To be sure, such engagement requires a commitment on the part of the viewer; one has to be disposed to act, but it is only from such a thoughtful, personal encounter that the experience of art has meaning and sensible judgments can be made. A museum that displays works from the past as well as from the present is not a graveyard of remembered feelings but a source for new experience, a means by which each visitor can expand his own priváté environment and savor those qualities of perception and thought he might otherwise have missed. To walk through galleries or even to thumb through the illustrated pages of a book on art is to meet with a series of distinct happenings, each one of which marks the fresh unión of the eye and the mind. Unfortunately for the hasty viewer, the more one comes to realize that each work of art creates its own special world of thought and sense and makes specific demands on the consciousness, the harder it is simply to walk through a gallery of art or look idly at reproductions. Looking at a work of art takes time; only in time can the work reveal itself to the mind. But then, a personally garnered repertory of thoughtful experiences is worth many times a simple inventory of remembered artifacts. That a kind of social prestige is often associated with pronouncements on art may be hard to account for, but cannot be overlooked. Ignorance of a scientific fact can be publicly admitted without a feeling of disgrace, but the defiant cry of "I