Art critics think that artistic “movements” are a meaningful way of analyzing paintings, approximately at the level of usefulness that a biologist might apply to “species” or “genus.”
The pictures made within an artistic movement have something similar. We should classify them by that something, not only by the movement. Although the name of the movement can be used as a convenient label for the given cluster of picture-space.
If I give you a picture made by unknown author, you can’t classify it by author’s participation in given movements. But you can classify it by the contents of the picture itself. So even if we use the movement as a label for the cluster, it is better if we can also describe typical properties of picture within that cluster.
Just like when you find a random dog on a street, you can classify it as “dog” species, without taking a time machine and finding out whether the ancestors of this specific dogs really were domesticated wolves. You can teach “dogs are domesticated wolves” at school, but this is not how you recognize dogs in real life.
So how exactly would you recognize “impressionist” paintings, or “post-utopian” books in real life, when the author is unknown? Without teaching this, you are not truly teaching impressionism or post-utopianism.
(In case of “impressionism”, my rule of thumb is that the picture looks nice and realistic from distance, but when you stand close to it, the details become somehow ugly. My interpretation of “impressionism” is: work of authors who obviously realized that milimeter precision for a wall painting is an overkill, and you can make pictures faster and cheaper if you just optimize it for looking correct from a typical viewing distance.)
I agree with you that there are immediately obvious properties that I use to classify an object into a category, without reference to various other historical and systemic facts about the object. For example, as you say, I might classify a work of art as impressionist based on the precision with which it is rendered, or classify an animal as a dog based on various aspects of its appearance and behavior, or classify food as nutritious based on color, smell, and so forth.
It doesn’t follow that it’s somehow better to do so than to classify the object based on the less obvious historical or systemic facts.
If I categorize an object as nutritious based on those superficial properties, and later perform a lab analysis and discover that the object will kill me if I eat it, I will likely consider my initial categorization a mistake.
If I share your rule of thumb about “impressionism”, and then later realize that some works of art that share the property of being best viewed from a distance are consistently classed by art students as “pointilist” rather than “impressionist”, and I further realize that when I look at a bunch of classed-as-pointilist and classed-as-impressionist paintings it’s clear to me that paintings in each class share a family resemblance that they don’t share with paintings in the other class, I will likely consider my initial rule of thumb a mistake.
Sometimes, the categorization I perform based on properties that aren’t immediately apparent is more reliable than the one I perform “in real life.”
The pictures made within an artistic movement have something similar. We should classify them by that something, not only by the movement. Although the name of the movement can be used as a convenient label for the given cluster of picture-space.
If I give you a picture made by unknown author, you can’t classify it by author’s participation in given movements. But you can classify it by the contents of the picture itself. So even if we use the movement as a label for the cluster, it is better if we can also describe typical properties of picture within that cluster.
Just like when you find a random dog on a street, you can classify it as “dog” species, without taking a time machine and finding out whether the ancestors of this specific dogs really were domesticated wolves. You can teach “dogs are domesticated wolves” at school, but this is not how you recognize dogs in real life.
So how exactly would you recognize “impressionist” paintings, or “post-utopian” books in real life, when the author is unknown? Without teaching this, you are not truly teaching impressionism or post-utopianism.
(In case of “impressionism”, my rule of thumb is that the picture looks nice and realistic from distance, but when you stand close to it, the details become somehow ugly. My interpretation of “impressionism” is: work of authors who obviously realized that milimeter precision for a wall painting is an overkill, and you can make pictures faster and cheaper if you just optimize it for looking correct from a typical viewing distance.)
I agree with you that there are immediately obvious properties that I use to classify an object into a category, without reference to various other historical and systemic facts about the object. For example, as you say, I might classify a work of art as impressionist based on the precision with which it is rendered, or classify an animal as a dog based on various aspects of its appearance and behavior, or classify food as nutritious based on color, smell, and so forth.
It doesn’t follow that it’s somehow better to do so than to classify the object based on the less obvious historical or systemic facts.
If I categorize an object as nutritious based on those superficial properties, and later perform a lab analysis and discover that the object will kill me if I eat it, I will likely consider my initial categorization a mistake.
If I share your rule of thumb about “impressionism”, and then later realize that some works of art that share the property of being best viewed from a distance are consistently classed by art students as “pointilist” rather than “impressionist”, and I further realize that when I look at a bunch of classed-as-pointilist and classed-as-impressionist paintings it’s clear to me that paintings in each class share a family resemblance that they don’t share with paintings in the other class, I will likely consider my initial rule of thumb a mistake.
Sometimes, the categorization I perform based on properties that aren’t immediately apparent is more reliable than the one I perform “in real life.”