January 6, 2006

Roger Fry, "Line as a Means of Expression in Modern Art," in A Roger Fry Reader (Univ of Chicago, 1996), 326-38.

Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art (Doubleday Anchor, 1956).

Originally published in 1918, Fry's premise that the change towards more freedom "in the general quality of rhythm in modern drawing might perhaps be compared to the change from regular verse to free verse or to poetical prose" (333) is mirrored in one of Ortega y Gasset's givens in The Dehumanization of Art: "It is amazing how compact a unity every historical epoch presents throughout its various manifestations. One and the same inspiration, one and the same biological style, are recognizable in several branches of art" (4).

The Single Art theory has been around as long as art writers have. It makes it easier to label something, beit Gothic, Romantic, post-post modern etc... That aesthetic and other artist concerns would overlap among the various artistic outlets seems natural enough, both within larger groups (literature influencing painting, music impacting dance ...) and within an individual artist (Jean Cocteau for instance).

So when Geof Huth writes in his December 8 blog, "That's, of course, the point of view of a polyartist, someone who practices many arts and extols the virtues of possibility. Maybe the polyartist is always a dilettante. I've written short stories and poems, created visual and digital poems, performed sound poems, made movies, taken and developed photographs, created sculptures, painted, carved, and scratched, all in the name of art. And maybe that reduces me as an artist and my output as art, but it also celebrates the possibility of expression and tries to open the doors to the human mind," it strikes me as odd that he would feel the need to defend himself in this way.

Are there really poets out there who aren't interested in or actively engaging in other media?

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A sidenote: Ortega y Gasset attempted a sociology of the arts of sorts, riffing off of Jean Marie Guyau's 1897 work. So even though Seth Ambramson begins from a different angle, his stab at it (problematic as it was) has a fairly long history.