5 Quotes from Anne Frances Wysocki's Article

1.) When I look at the open landscape before me, my self reaches out to the horizon, which separates the lake from the sky.  Turning around I see at a shorter distance the woods and the house, and even more close by the ground beneath my feet.  All these sights are experiences as being seen from the seat of my self, and they group themselves around it in all directions.
- Rudolph Arnheim

     My thoughts on this quote is the separation of everything.  Anne uses this quote from Arnheim, because it explains the two different sides of looking at things.  Just like separating the two articles on the first page, he talks about separating different things.  The sky and lake are farther distance away, showing the huge difference.  He says the woods and the house are a closer distance, this could show closer similarities in comparing with her ideas.

2.) Since the middle position is the place of greatest importance, the viewer attributes weight to whatever he finds in that position.
-Rudolph Arnheim

     In Anne's article she explains how the women's middle section, (her butt and stomach) are the main things we focus on.  People look to that first, because it shows the curves of the human body, and we relate more to spherical shapes, than pointed shapes.  Since the women's midsection is the middle, more features are added to it.  In the article she explains how there is more of a clear light in the midsection, making this the first thing someone would focus on.  It could either be the start of someone looking or the finish, because they can't turn away from what they are seeing.

3.) We easily see that, in saying it is beautiful, and in showing that I have taste, I am concerned, not with that in which I depend on the existence of the object, but with that which I make out of the representation in myself. Everyone must admit that a judgement about beauty, in which the least interest mingles, is very partial, and is not a pure judgement taste.
-Kant

     I think what he is trying to say is that we make an image we see into the likeness of ourselves.  He makes out his own representation of what he sees.  This might mean he is relating the object to himself.  He is making a point to show that when people look at something that is articulately classified as beautiful, that we might not all see the actual beauty in the object that it is truly supposed to represent.

4.) Is this "beauty" real beauty? Of what use is it? [...T] hin, grizzled hair, toothless, wrinkles, tainted breath; even long before the end all becomes ugly and repellant; visible paint, sweat, foulness, hideousness.  Where then is the god of my idolatry? Where is beauty?
-Leo Tolstory

     He questions what real beauty is, and explain that in time everything turns ugly.  Beauty lasts for only so long, and then it disappears just like everything else.  I think he is asking where the true god of his idea of beauty is.  He wants to know where true beauty hides.

5.) ...art exists that one may recover a sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. [...] the technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar [...] art removes objects from the automatism of perception.
-Victor Shklovsky

     Art has been made to make people feel the realness of things.  I think he is trying to say when we would look at a painting for example, possibly a painting of a house he wants us to feel what it is really like to be there; the air around, the grass, trees, the house itself.  He is trying to explain that everything has meaning, the meaning of life.  When he talks about unfamiliar art, he might mean when we see things that are unfamiliar to us it could possibly give us a different understanding or even confuse us to think we are seeing something else or that we are looking at something different.


I enjoyed this reading and found it interesting, because it made me think of the reading from blackboard talking about the women's body and how women self-survey themselves.  The pictures on the first page of Anne's article are basically getting surveyed by everyone reading the article.  It shows what people really focus on when they see advertisements.  I really thought it was interesting when the naked women in the article with her thigh high shoes was compared to the mother feature, because of her midsection.