a.b.s. art lesson

Date: Thu, Feb 21, 2002 3:21 PM

From: "nu-monet v4.0" <nothing@succeeds.com>

Try ta learn somethin', ya feebs.

http://www.epub.org.br/cm/gallery/gall_leonardo/fig1-a.htm

--
"The guarding of freedom that God grants is
the noble charge of the Department of Justice."

--Attorney General John Ashcroft
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From: Fernandinande of Lemuria <lemurama@mindXspring.com>

Beware bilateral symmetry - or, in Popsychspew:

Wain has substituted the soft cat forms for simmetric[sic], obsessive,
and formal ondes[sic?], in a desperate effort to control his mental
functions in disarray.

I really doubt, as the goofy psych claims, that that series of pictures
represents or indicates any general psychotic characteristics since
They keep using that same series, one that was painted 60+ years ago,
and if it had any generalized importance there'd be plenty of other
equivalent series to choose from - yet they useg that one set and a
couple of others over and over again...almost as if they had some
special, emotional meaning to the psychologists, if nobody else.
It'd be like medical books saying "here's what a so-and-so tumor looks
like", and using the same 60-year-old picture(s) in dozens or hundreds
of books over the years; and most of the "Art by Psychotics" pictures
are fragments of one painting that's also been considered exemplary
for about 40+ years (FWIW, they all appeared in Time-Life books in
the 70s), and most of the rest is by Bosch, who wasn't psychotic, or
at least not much more so than most Europeans of that time. And
there's no reason to believe the above "desperate effort to control"
claim, which is right out of the "it sounds good, so it must be true"
system of analysis used in the psuedo-sciences.

I bet the psychs couldn't come close to distinguishing paintings by
psychotics from paintings by non-psychotics in a blind test (which they
never run because they don't want to know), and therefore everything
they say about art and psychotics is just a load of bullshit. I'm just
glad that it's Brazialian tax-payers who're supporting these charaltans.

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Subject: Re: a.b.s. art lesson
From: "nu-monet v4.0" <nothing@succeeds.com>

Fernandinande of Lemuria wrote:
>
> I really doubt, as the goofy psych claims, that that series
> of pictures represents or indicates any general psychotic
> characteristics since. They keep using that same series, one
> that was painted 60+ years ago, and if it had any generalized
> importance there'd be plenty of other equivalent series to
> choose from - yet they useg that one set and a couple of
> others over and over again...

Actually, no. Ironically, the discovery of anti-psychotic
medications resulted in the loss of much deductive information
of this sort. You just can't find institutionalized schizo-
phrenics who are allowed to degenerate from near normal to
disfunctional without some effort to slow or mitigate their
disease with drugs anymore, which screws up the "artistic"
progression.

At the time these were done, for example, artists would frequent
mental institutions to learn from the unique interpretations of
reality of mental patients--which they would adapt to make new
and interesting artworks. They don't do that anymore. Patients
are either too near normal or too whacked out on thorazine or
whatever.

(N.B. van Gogh does *not* fit into this catagory, although
people often speculate that it was his mental illness or the
drugs given to him that caused his interesting artworks. When
he was mentally ill, his creativity stopped; and only when he
was in remission, almost normal, did he produce his extraordinary
works.)
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From: Fernandinande of Lemuria <lemurama@mindXspring.com>

->Actually, no. Ironically, the discovery of anti-psychotic
->medications resulted in the loss of much deductive information
->of this sort. You just can't find institutionalized schizo-

I don't think there is any deductive information.

->phrenics who are allowed to degenerate from near normal to
->disfunctional without some effort to slow or mitigate their
->disease with drugs anymore, which screws up the "artistic"
->progression.

That's a good point, but...

->At the time these were done, for example, artists would frequent
->mental institutions to learn from the unique interpretations of
->reality of mental patients--which they would adapt to make new

The keepers also engaged the patients in "art therapy" - hence
there's plenty of art samples for them to ignore.

->and interesting artworks. They don't do that anymore. Patients
->are either too near normal or too whacked out on thorazine or
->whatever.
->
->(N.B. van Gogh does *not* fit into this catagory, although
->people often speculate that it was his mental illness or the
->drugs given to him that caused his interesting artworks. When
->he was mentally ill, his creativity stopped; and only when he
->was in remission, almost normal, did he produce his extraordinary
->works.)

That's an example that proves my point - why didn't they include
*his* psychotic pictures (i.e. none - if what you say is correct,
but IIRC from his "Collected letters" he did paint while crazy*)
as examples of psychotic's paintings? The same goes for the hundreds
or thousands of pictures from tens of thousands of other psychotics.
Because they don't fit the psychs' pre-conceived idea of what a
psychotic's painting is *supposed to* look like, while the few that
get re-used and re-used *do* happen to fit those pre-conceived ideas
It's completely non-random sampling of the images, and it makes makes
the selected samples meaningless.

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From: "nu-monet v4.0" <nothing@succeeds.com>

More goodies:

http://www.epub.org.br/cm/gallery/gall_leonardo/main.htm

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Original file name: a.b.s. art lesson.txt - converted on Friday, 20 September 2002, 16:08