I was prepared to go into much more detail in that Aria of Sorrow review about that part. I didn't, because I wanted to keep the review somewhat concise, and I wanted to think that any reader would be able to fill in the gaps there if they thought about it (whether or not that's really true).

The most popular writer of our time is Stephen King, and, in a broad sense, he can be said to write fantasy. But he keeps the fantasy very "grounded", which makes it believable (and might account for his popularity). Characters speak in believable ways, using current slang. And when he describes fantastic things, he often becomes dispassionate, writing almost like he's writing for a newspaper. That gives his writing a tone of authority. (He can write with more emotion when it's called for). Heck, his first published novel, Carrie, has segments that are intended to be from newspapers or other more "objective" media.

A specific example I was thinking of was from his novel The Eyes of the Dragon. That novel is pure fantasy - dragons and wizards and stuff. It has a part that talks about invisibility, and how it's not really possible to become truly invisible, but it is possible to become dim. The novel is fantasy, but it sets out rules about things that can NOT be done! Having a world where literally anything is possible makes things less believable. Not only that, but the novel makes an analogy between being dim, and being a sort of person that's unobtrusive enough to be ignored. Think of homeless people, and how some people walk past them without looking at them. They're clearly not literally invisible, but maybe they are dim. By making connections to the real world, the fantasy is more real.

But when a story has things that happen with no regard to rules, like random characters reincarnating into other characters and other stuff, it's not fantasy, and it's certainly not believable fantasy -- it's just nonsense.


As for your other point, I'd be hard pressed to call vases that look like faces art. The observation that vases look like faces is sophomoric, and I don't think it takes a lot of technical skill to make those images.

However, there are "hidden image" works that can qualify as art:

image

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To discuss some other modern art, I once was looking through an art book to come across a picture of a big rectangular painting that was painted solid blue. That was it. I rolled my eyes, and started a rant in my head about how lame that was, and how it said nothing, and how anyone could do it, and how if master artists of the 16th (or whatever previous) century didn't make paintings like that, it wasn't because they weren't able to think outside the box, but only because they would have instantly realized how immature that was.

However, I read a bit more about it, and found that that artist had invented a new type of paint (or perhaps a shade). Well, inventing a new type of paint might indeed be a meaningful achievement, and why not commemorate that achievement with a painting -- even if the painting is of nothing *but* that new paint? So, that was a case where a piece of modern art challenged my preconceptions. And that is one thing that art is supposed to do.

There is general "nonrepresentative" art, which just means that the art isn't supposed to look like a real thing, but I think real abstract art is something more specific. It's something that *abstracts* some feature or technique that might be in representative art, but then focuses on -- abstracts -- that technique, so that the painting is about that technique, and not using the technique to, say, draw a person, or a bowl of fruit, or a landscape.

One of the most common things to abstract is color. The example I mentioned a couple of paragraphs up was an example of abstracting color. But there is a lot of op art that abstracts color:

image

There is shading there, but the shading is used to illustrate an abstract rather than real shape. It's like color being used for its own sake. Oddly, even though that art is strict and mathematical, it seems to me to suggest some emotion somehow. Maybe it's just because it's so simple that it interacts with our brains in a primal, direct way.

Another thing that can be abstracted is shape. Maybe pictures of rectangles are supposed to be abstractions of shape. I know that there is something called a golden rectangle and some people consider it to be the most beautiful rectangle, with the most aesthetically appealing proportions. So, they try to use that shape in their art. Is it really true that the golden rectangle is the most beautiful rectangle? Well, it's subjective, so there's no definitive answer. I'm not really convinced, personally. But it can be something interesting to think about.

Last Edited By: Flying Omelette 07/31/07 4:21 AM. Edited 1 times.