The Struggle for Reality: Giacometti and the Impossible Real

In Robert Hughes' article for Time magazine, written only 8 years after the artist's death, Hughes articulates Giacometti's struggle to make meaningful marks. The article sorts through common misconceptions, and also, indirectly, addresses the struggle to create.

...The painting('s)... real subject is the artist's lifelong obsession as a sculptor: the enormous difficulty of seeing anything clearly at all and the near impossibility of truthfully remaking what is seen into a lump of clay or a scribble on paper. Giacometti saw his own efforts as condemned to frustration. "There is no hope of achieving what I want, of expressing my vision of reality. I go on painting and sculpting because I am curious to know why I fail."...

       - Robert Hughes, Art: An Obsession with Seeing, Time Magazine, April 8, 1974

Link Full Text
Image: Giacometti, Head of Diego, Oil/Canvas, 1961

Arts and Citizenship - Pittsburgh Filmmakers

Arts and Citizenship via Maura Doern Danko, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and YouTube

PittsburghFilmmakers — May 26, 2009 — Shot and edited at Pittsburgh Filmmakers.

Edited by Gretchen Neidert

Cinematography by Matthew Day
Music by Charlie Humphrey

Crew:
Joseph Morrison
Will Zavala
Gretchen Neidert
Ann Toriano
Andrew Swensen
Greg Grant
Patrick Bowman
Daniel Baliban

Produced by: Pittsburgh Filmmakers / Pittsburgh Center for the Arts 2009

"The Beethoven Mystery, Why haven't we figured out his Ninth Symphony yet? By Jan Swafford"

Beethoven's inscrutable Ninth

Symphony still mesmerizes

This summer, as every summer, the end of the Boston Symphony's Tanglewood season will be marked by another round of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The world over, the Ninth has become an indispensable adornment for socio/musical hooplas. Chances are, it will be played soon by an orchestra near you. If you know Western classical music, you know this one. Probably half of humanity can hum the little ditty that serves as the theme of the choral finale—a setting of Schiller's revolutionary-era drinking song, "Ode to Joy."

Which is all to say, the Ninth has attained the kind of ubiquity that threatens to gut any artwork. Think Mona Lisa. Still, as with Lisa, when that kind of success persists through the centuries, there are reasons...   -source: Slate, "The Beethoven Mystery, Why haven't we figured out his Ninth Symphony?" Jan Swafford

Link  Full Text, Slate, "The Beethoven Mystery, Why haven't we figured out his Ninth Symphony?" Jan Swafford