The Quality Instinct by Maxwell L. Anderson

Author:Maxwell L. Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781442276826
Publisher: American Alliance Of Museums
Published: 2016-07-09T00:00:00+00:00

Artists that mine technical territory to communicate something directly and without subtlety do so at their peril, since the end result can fall flat, like an emotionless, dry rendering of a nude.

Finally, turning to works of art that go for the Hail Mary pass of over-the-top technique, we can compare two images of Christ from different epochs in art history.

The statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro towers over the city, rising 130 feet in the air at the peak of Corcovado Mountain. Made between 1922 and 1931, it is obviously impressive in scale, but fails several technical tests. The materials are reinforced concrete and soapstone, and by virtue of scale and medium admit of few details. Like so many sculptures in the era of Fascism, the image sacrifices emotional impact in its quest for balanced proportion and imposing scale.

Another statue of Christ, this one in Santiago di Compostela, might be argued to have an unfair advantage because it has stood the test of time—it is seventeenth-century, not twentieth. But it has a far more important technical advantage over its Brazilian counterpart: it is gruesome, with traces of red paint to simulate blood. The technical choice made by the artist was to “go for baroque,” and the outcome is more powerful, resonant, and memorable as a work of art, largely because of technique.

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