Move Closer : An Intimate Philosophy of Art (Hardcover)

by John Armstrong (Author) "The arts have almost always enjoyed public honour - and perhaps have never been held in higher esteem than today: fine buildings are preserved for..." (more)
Key Phrases: Autumn Sunshine, Mona Lisa, Palazzo Tolomei (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Director of the aesthetics program at the University of London's School for Advanced Study, Armstrong is also a research fellow in philosophy there, besides running his own art gallery. His brief book follows in the tradition of Sir Kenneth Clark's Looking at Pictures and Ernst Gombrich's many studies about how and why people look at art, but is less authoritative about art history, and, unlike the work of those two fine writers, often falls into truisms ( "the language of art-historical scholarship and the often grand public setting of art can encourage an impersonal attitude"). Armstrong discusses at length the feeling of a tourist being bewildered by failing to respond to famous works of art, but seems unaware that this feeling was codified nearly 200 years ago by Stendhal, and is indeed referred to as "Stendhal's Syndrome." Sometimes Armstrong's approach conflicts with his conclusions. In the chapter, "Private Uses of Art" he asserts: "We should not think that we become more sensitive to the pleasure art and beauty afford by becoming more informed or better conceptually equipped." Yet he spends the rest of the chapter explaining the views on art of writers like Kant, Schiller, Hegel et al. On less intellectual subjects, he can be a little disingenuous: "Because... we can so easily invest our passions in sexy objectsAsexual content in paintings stands as a test case of the role of interest in engaging with art." Even if the arguments do not hang together, the ultimate impression is of a highly civilized Englishman, like Jacob Bronowski (The Ascent of Man), offering a brief but refreshing interlude in a world where puzzling over art is considered an amusing pastime. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Armstrong, an art dealer who also directs the University of London's aesthetics program, offers both lay and academic readers an insightful tour of how and why certain paintings and buildings perform aesthetically for even the casual beholder. With ample illustrations matched to his narrative, he takes us on a tour of the effects and limits of information on appreciation, the role of pre-aesthetic experience on aesthetic apprehension, the importance of unguided reverie and imaginative play in the face of particular artworks, the place of art beyond the realm of social or political critique, and Western philosophy's schematization of aesthetic judgment. Armstrong's text turns often to Italian architecture and 18th- and 19th-century paintings to qualify and exemplify his main points, yet his narrative remains accessible to the nonspecialist and beginning aesthetician. Rather than a scholar's tract, this indeed reads like an "intimate" tour with an articulate guide who opens up not only the possibilities of the seen but also the capacities of the seer. Highly recommended for all collections.DFrancisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., CA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 196 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux; 1 Amer ed edition (September 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374105960
• ISBN-13: 978-0374105969
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,415,721 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A refreshing and intellectually stimulating piece of work, February 10, 2001

By	Rosengarten (London, UK) - See all my reviews

John Armstrong's book is a wittily written essay about our personal enjoyment of the arts, in particular of paintings and architecture. Being generally easy to read, the book not only makes you laugh occasionally, but sometimes requires an all-round humanistic art education to grasp the points ("contextual knowledge" of the world of painting and literature). The book is a small piece of esthetical art in itself, pursuing to extend the philosophy of our unconscious mind to appreciate beautiful art. Armstrong's book carefully analyses what exactly makes art enjoyable and after you have read the book you will find that your personal enjoyment of art has been enhanced. All in all, a refreshing and intellectually stimulating piece of work. The book enables all those readers who are busily pursuing a hectic lifestyle to take a step back and start thinking about what rearly makes life enjoyable.

13 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars interesting but don't push the ideas too far, October 18, 2000

By	Orrin C. Judd "brothersjudddotcom" (Hanover, NH USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The general task of this book [is] to elaborate the style of attention which works of art solicit. The cultivation of such a style is of importance because it is in the quality of our engagement that the human worth of art is apparent--art matters in virtue of the kind of experience it invites the spectator into. There is no access to art except in private--in looking, thinking, feeling as we stand before an individual work. Cultivation requires that we draw upon our own resources of sensitivity, reverie and contemplation, our capacity to invest our ideals and interests in the process of looking. Without these we can only know about art as detached observers who look on without being able to participate (like seeing people share a joke others don't quite catch). -John Armstrong, Move Closer

John Armstrong, director of the Aesthetic Programme of the School for Advanced Study at the University of London, is concerned here with "our private, individual response to particular works of art." He delineates the various techniques that we use when we approach art and how we use them to appreciate what we are seeing. The book is short, eminently readable and contains sumptuous illustrations which he uses to good effect in making his points. But the points he's making all deal, as his subtitle suggests, with internal reactions and personal likes and dislikes. This is fine up to a point, but there does come a point where this kind of intensely individualistic approach really abandons the idea of art and particularly of great art.

Obviously there are personal reasons why one individual likes Rembrandt best and another likes Michelangelo. Framed in this context, such preferences are not all that significant--who is to say ultimately which is the better artist ? Does the attempt to differentiate even make a whole lot of sense? But carried to it's logical extreme, and it breaks down long before the extreme, the idea that there is much significance to each individual's unique interaction with artwork undermines the concept of art itself. Given the 5 billion people on the planet, it is entirely possible that there's at least one person who will like just about anything that someone puts down on paper. The salient question is : does the fact that someone reacts favorably to it make it art? I would argue that it does not. Armstrong uses the metaphor in the quote above of "seeing people share a joke others don't quite catch." But an emphasis on individual reaction eventually leads to just such a situation, one where we are all incapable of detachment and only react to those jokes (or paintings) which appeal uniquely to us. Then art ceases to be capable of communicating ideas; it is reduced instead to appealing to viewers' emotions. At another point armstrong compares the affection that we develop for certain works of art to the way we develop love for another person, but someone loved Hitler and someone loved Ted Bundy. What do those emotions have to do with the absolute value of the objects of the affection?

Great art, those works which we generally recognize as canonical, should not merely be attractive to a few, but accessible to and appreciated by the multitudes. Art should be universal, not individual, and should prompt a general reaction in most of us, not in an elite or in a handful of folks. There are two excellent books by Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word (1975) & From Bauhaus to Our House (1981)(Tom Wolfe 1931-) (Grade: A+), and one by Jamie James, The Music of the Spheres : Music, Science, and the Natural Order of the Universe (1995)(Jamie James), which together explain how art, which was once held to objective standards of beauty, became so subjective over the past century or two. Mr. Armstrong's book is an entertaining and instructive guide to some of the ways that we process what we see when we look at art and how certain works come to be our particular favorites, but for a compelling vision of how art should be judged in general and of the shortcomings of the modern individualistic approach to art, try Wolfe and James.

GRADE : C