Art’s felt experience is suppressed by learned critical discourse

Evidence

I had studied the history of art and was used to describing and analysing art. But what I never wrote about, and this is all that matters, was the experience of it. Not just because I couldn’t, but also because the feelings the pictures evoked in me went against everything I had learned about what art was and what it was for. So I kept it to myself. I wandered around the Nationalgalleri in Stockholm or the Nasjonalgalleri in Oslo or the National Gallery in London and looked. There was a kind of freedom about this. I didn’t need to justify my feelings, there was no one to whom I had to stand to account and no case to answer. Freedom, but not peace, for even though the pictures were supposed to be idylls, such as Claude’s archaic landscapes, I was always unsettled when I left them because what they possessed, the core of their being, was inexhaustibility, and what that wrought in me was a kind of desire. I can’t explain it any better than that. A desire to be inside the inexhaustibility. — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 1135

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Susan Sontag’s ‘Against Interpretation’ and to Knausgaard’s lifelong war with academic art criticism. — connects to: Scholarly discourse can itself silence and wound marginalized participants; Simultaneous immersion and critical distance form the root of critical theory — , A Year of World Stories, 18; Silence in art functions as medium for listener’s own creative imagination — George Michelsen Foy, Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute…, 242 (+10 more)
• SEED: Could seed an essay on the split between trained art analysis and raw aesthetic response.

Related

• Astute taste in others excludes what creativity requires (similarity 0.82)

Broader Connections

• Creative thought requires an initial silence that clears prior mental assumptions #corroborates (0.55) — George Michelsen Foy, Zero Decibels, 453
• Silence in art functions as medium for listener’s own creative imagination #corroborates (0.50) — George Michelsen Foy, Zero Decibels, 242
• Sharpened awareness of words sharpens perception of social phenomena. #complicates (0.45) — HLA Hart, The Concept of Law (Clarendon Law…, 23
• Modernist literature works as a perception instrument whose form survives even rejected insights #corroborates (0.40) — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 1839
• Enduring art balances a safe structure against deliberate subversion #complicates (0.40) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 1068
• Framed partial views generate unease in the viewer #complicates (0.35) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 381