"It struck me only recently that nineteenth century painters must have believed that visual truth was defined by photography, however alien to human vision what the camera reproduced often was. A good example of this would have been Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of horses in motion. Painters decided that Muybridge’s images showed what horses really look like when they run, and in effect copied Muybridge’s photographs in their paintings of horses, even though that is not at all the way we see horses when they run. We really don’t see animals move the way Muybridge shows them moving, or else there would have been no need for the photographs in the first place: Muybridge hit upon his awkward but seemingly authoritative experiments that were really designed to answer such questions as whether all four of a horse’s hooves ever touch the ground at the same time—in other words, phenomena the human eye could not perceive."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from the United StatesPhilosophers from the United StatesPainters from the United StatesArt criticsLogicians from the United States
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Chap. 4 : The End of the Contest
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_Danto
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Arthur Danto
Arthur Coleman Danto (January 1, 1924 – October 25, 2013) was an American art critic and philosopher.
11 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Arthur Danto →
Related Quotes
"My thought is that if some art is imitation and some art is not, neither term belongs to the definition of art as phi…"
"It is true that art today is pluralistic. Pluralism was noticed by certain followers of Ludwig Wittgenstein. What mak…"
"There were limits to what art—composed of such genres as portraiture, landscape, still life, and historical painting …"
"Thanks to Descartes and Plato, I will define art as “wakeful dreams.” One wants to explain the universality of art. M…"
"Any movement can be a dance movement and hence achieve the dreamlike. The same may be true of acting, as when, for ex…"
"As a philosopher, I would cherish an argument which demonstrates that the mind cannot be mapped onto the brain any be…"
"The body that feels thirst and hunger, passion, desire, and love. The body that we understand when we read the ancien…"
"The great thing about the sixties was the dawning recognition that anything could be a work of art, which was somethi…"
"What impresses me is that Kant’s highly compressed discussion of spirit is capable of addressing the logic of artwork…"
"My sense, in bringing to art the double criteria of meaning and embodiment, is to bring to art a connection with cogn…"