Truth and Rightness

I just read this in Gerhard Richter: Overpainted Photographs. It is from an essay by Siri Hustvedt titled Truth and Rightness. I liked it.

For me, a work of art must be an enigma. It must push me into a position of unknowing or else I find myself bored by my own comprehension. I don’t write about art to explain it, but to explore what has happened between me and the image, both emotionally and intellectually. The act of looking, after all, always takes place in the first person. I see the object, but the very act of seeing it breaches the divide between me and it. At that moment aren’t subject and object bound together in a unified loop of perception? (p. 73).


1 comment
  1. Mr. Williams's avatar

    I think it is about intimacy shared. The intimacy established between the maker and the object is offered at the completion(publication) of the thing. To be redefined, reconfirmed, reinvented; offered up as a vulnerable newborn, susceptible to the full taste and digestion of the viewer/sharer/collaborator.

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