Suzy Hart » Blog

I get to attend the Portrait Society of America conference in DC! So happy! Max Ginsburg will be there, as well as Dominique Medici, Ricky Mujica, Theresa Oaxaca and many who were at the TRAC 2015 conference this last November in Ventura, CA. I hope to see Elana Hagler again, who, like me, presented a paper in 2014, and knows the wonderful months of study and writing that preceded that.

My paper was about Max Ginsburg and social realism in the 21st Century. 16 pages barely scratched the surface of what I would have liked to offer. My original abstract was to connect Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant's thoughts on beauty, the Sublime, and even how we understand or judge ugliness, especially as regards difficult social themes of war and torture.  Because Max Ginsburg tackles these subjects, in spite of the unmarketable nature of exposition of such themes, he is a profile in courage, and his many colleagues and students concur.

What was intriguing to me at TRAC was when the neurologist Semir Zeki, who studies how the brain perceives beauty, revealed that the brain responds to beauty, to the Sublime, and to ugliness in three separate and identifiable parts of the brain! Before there was the science to prove it, Kant arrived at these same conclusions on the basis of pure logic.

In contemporary art history, students are taught that such ideas as beauty are irrelevant if not downright trite, and yet so much of what is supposed to be beyond the criterium of beauty falls short in every way, but especially when it comes to inspiring the viewer, and actually communicating the artists' thoughts clearly. Not everyone should or must take away the same thing from what we call art, but should it not have something to say? And say it well?

So that was my paper in a nutshell. 

It will be great to see everyone!