Guston and me

By comparing Philip Guston's career as a painter with mine as a composer I establish a parallelism which suggests a Zeitgeist was at work. That Zeitgeist is best characterized as a digression from traditional figurative/tonal methods of working to embracing abstract modes of modernism followed by a return to tradition viewed against the abstraction experience. I posit that this produced the tension between concreteness and abstraction which now prevails in our artistic culture and suggest further that the younger generation(s) now at work must take seriously the problem of resolving this tension which in all previous cultures may have existed successively but in ours exists simultaneously. This simultaneous tension between concreteness and abstraction poses the dilemma facing the next epoch

Abstract art · Abstraction · Aesthetics · Art · Cognitive psychology · Concreteness · Digression · Dilemma · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literal and figurative language · Literature · Melody · Metaphor · Painting · Visual arts · Zeitgeist · Art History and Market Analysis · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Philosophy · Psychology