Reviews for Aesthetic computing

The average rating for Aesthetic computing based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-02-08 00:00:00 John Dobson I don't usually give books five stars (I feel embarrassed that I take the five star rating so seriously!), but I was blown away by this book by Michael Fried. In the strangest reverse of my normal experience with scholarship - well, at least some scholarship - I could not put this book down, and when I wasn't reading it I was thinking about it, or wanting to read it. My impression reading the book was analogous to the experience of being given a tour of a particular section of the art museum by a remarkably knowledgeable docent, and in the process of the tour your thinking about and understanding of art undergoes some changes. This happened, I believe, because Fried's scholarship - his argument, basically - struck me as so interesting (if not always 100% persuasive). For one, he did an impeccable job embedding his interpretations of the artwork (18th century French painting) within the art criticism of the time, and especially within the art criticism of Denis Diderot. I thought that his readings of Diderot were as stimulating as his readings of the paintings, and the comparison is important, because in the book Diderot's criticism and the paintings of the period reflect off one another and build a solid context for the argument. What is Fried's argument? Essentially, that the period of French painting that Fried is looking at radically changed art's understanding of the relationship between the painting and the beholder. How could this relationship be characterized? That the French painting Fried looks at created a fiction, and the fiction was that the beholder did not exist. If this sounds totally weird, read the book - after reading the second chapter especially, it makes total sense. Fried's method is formalist - he was highly influenced by Clement Greenberg, whose writings I have since been getting more into - so he does not take into account social, historical, or political factors. He looks, to put it one way, at the intrinsic logic of the paintings, and the way this logic leads to later developments in the art form. As someone without any background, really, in the painting of that period, I still was amazed that Fried's argument about absorption had never been made, because Diderot's writings, along with Fried's examples, seemed to really suggest the "primacy of absorption." At any rate, I am now officially a fan of Fried, and I am looking forward to reading more of his work in the future - I saw that my library has his books on Manet and Courbet, so I am going to try those out next.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-03-28 00:00:00 Lyndon Newman This book has changed how i view art. Powerful, well researched, interesting, Fried is one of those critics who may actually understand and appreciate the visual arts.