Bonito Living

I’m very sorry that I haven’t posted much this month.  Oddly May-July is a really busy time for me and a lot of academics.  We have exams, exam marking, exam boards, external examining of other people’s exams, seeing lots of fed-up students, doing course reviews, getting stuff ready for  conferences and so on.  So not much time for anything.

But I thought I would share this quotation I found in the London Review of Books.  It’s from Charles Collingwood, who was a British philosopher, now slightly out of fashion.  It’s taken from a new biography of him in which he talks about what he learned about what constitutes a work of art as he was growing up:

I learned to think of a picture not as a finished product exposed for the attention of virtuosi, but the visible record, lying about the house, of an attempt to solve a definite…