Reading is delusion. In order to read, we have to suspend certain standards of reality and accept others; we have to offer ourselves to deceit, even if it is an act of deception of which we are acutely aware. One way of considering this paradoxical duality in the act of reading (being deceived while being aware of the deception) is more or less consciously to posit multiple levels of reading, whereby the deceived reader is watched by an aware reader, who (...) is in turn watched by a super-reader; and so it continues. The ancient art critics, obsessed as they were with deceptive realism, provide in anecdotal form a good example of such multiplicity of perception when they tell stories of birds trying to peck at painted grapes, horses trying to mate with painted horses, even humans deceived by the lifelikeness of works of art. Such stories act as easy but potent signifiers of ‘realism’ in ancient art criticism, by showing the reactions of a ‘naive reader’ (the animals) whose deception the aware reader can enter into but also see exposed. In verbal or visual art parading itself as realistic, the artistic pretence of a pose of reality is, at some level, intended to be seen as deceptive; when it is non-realistic, or anti-realistic, or even stubbornly abstract (which it rarely is), art still demands that the reader suspend ordinary perception. But deception alone is not enough: ‘deceit’ only becomes artistic when a viewer sees through it, for a work of art which is so lifelike thatno-onerealizes it is not real has not entered the realm of art. The appreciation of deception happens at the moment when the deception is undone, or by the imaginative creation of a less sophisticated reader who has not seen through the deceit. That is what happens in comedy, more overtly than in other artforms, but in the same way. (shrink)

Reading is delusion. In order to read, we have to suspend certain standards of reality and accept others; we have to offer ourselves to deceit, even if it is an act of deception of which we are acutely aware. One way of considering this paradoxical duality in the act of reading is more or less consciously to posit multiple levels of reading, whereby the deceived reader is watched by an aware reader, who is in turn watched by a super-reader; and (...) so it continues. The ancient art critics, obsessed as they were with deceptive realism, provide in anecdotal form a good example of such multiplicity of perception when they tell stories of birds trying to peck at painted grapes, horses trying to mate with painted horses, even humans deceived by the lifelikeness of works of art. Such stories act as easy but potent signifiers of ‘realism’ in ancient art criticism, by showing the reactions of a ‘naive reader’ whose deception the aware reader can enter into but also see exposed. In verbal or visual art parading itself as realistic, the artistic pretence of a pose of reality is, at some level, intended to be seen as deceptive; when it is non-realistic, or anti-realistic, or even stubbornly abstract , art still demands that the reader suspend ordinary perception. But deception alone is not enough: ‘deceit’ only becomes artistic when a viewer sees through it, for a work of art which is so lifelike that no-one realizes it is not real has not entered the realm of art. The appreciation of deception happens at the moment when the deception is undone, or by the imaginative creation of a less sophisticated reader who has not seen through the deceit. That is what happens in comedy, more overtly than in other artforms, but in the same way. (shrink)

The keywords in analyses of digital literature and cybertexts (literature that has been created by and is read on a computer) mostly derive from the vocabulary of increasing collectivism: shared authorship, readerviewer interaction, their active participation in creating text etc. However, this article focuses on the opposite phenomenon: the essence of individualism in the process of digital text creation, that is, solitude. At the same time, the paradoxes related to collectivism and solitude are also addressed. In this article, solitude is (...) regarded as a technical term, indicating the number of different agents in a creative process. This primarily means: whether the text can be associated with one author and his intention, or whether authorship is distributed between several people who have participated in the creation of the text, as well as if and how much texts presume activity on the part of the reader. We can claim that when writers write their texts they are usually on their own. A text is born in the writer’s head and he or she needs some kind of form to present it. When the form of literature was mostly what was recorded on paper, we could say that the author formalised his text in solitude – writing alone on pieces of paper. Only after the manuscript was handed in were other participants added, such as the editor, designer and printer, who took part in the completion process of the literary work. However, when the end result of production is not a printed book, but a cyber- or hypertext, we can assume that these relationships change significantly in the case of digital literature. In addition to the author of the text, cybertexts and hypertexts need active co-authors: programmers, designers etc. Creating a cybertext is, therefore, basically a collective act (although there are of course exceptions). The author of a cybertext is no longer the only and unique creator. At the same time, the solitude of a creative work in cyberspace disappears. After publishing a book in print, the text is left alone; it begins living its own life. In cyberspace, on the contrary, connections in various forms between the author, the work and the reader are retained. Alan Kirby has launched the concept of digimodernism, which marks the cultural stage connected with the spread of Web 2.0. The “digimodernist turn”, in the form of blogs, Facebook and Twitter, has also brought about a change for authors of digital literature. The technological simplicity of the new software means that authors no longer need any urgent technical assistance. This again raises the problem of the author’s solitude: he formalises his work in his blog on his own, alone. It might thus seem paradoxical that in the printed world both the author and his work are solitary, whereas in the cyberworld the solitude of creative work vanishes, because it requires interaction between authors and readers. At the same time, the author’s solitude in cyberspace is twofold – creating cybertexts mostly requires assistance, whereas digimodernist blog literature can be produced in solitude, independently. Very few cybertexts in Estonia have been produced as teamwork, with technical assistance. In this article, two showcases have been studied: the hypertextual poem “Trepp” (“Staircase”, 1996) by Hasso Krull and the grand team project Sonetimasin (Sonnet Machine, 2000) by Märt Väljataga, which consists of a book, an Internet text generator and an enormous electromechanical sonnet machine, which was displayed in an art gallery. Considering the technological experimentation of Estonian writers, these two examples are exceptional rather than normal. Estonian authors have traditionally been reluctant to try out computer-technological experiments. However, the digimodernist turn has altered this situation. Many Estonian writers are active bloggers and Facebook users. Estonian writers who were earlier afraid of technology have become very keen on it in the digimodernist world. We think that the reason for this significant change is that Estonian writers wish to be independent. We can claim that Estonian writers want to be solitary in cyberspace, to avoid participating in technological teamwork, and the new and easy technological platforms make it possible. Literature in Estonia therefore, in a way, continues the tradition of the modernist author who does not wish to give up the position of being an individual author. Digimodernist technological simplicity has indeed made possible the organic transfer from printed text to digital literature, which does not endanger the authorial position. (shrink)

First published in 1948, Frederick Antal’s Florentine Painting and Its Social Background was an important milestone in anglophone art history. Based on European examples, including Max Dvořák, it sought to understand art history’s relationship to social and intellectual history. When Antal, a Hungarian émigré, arrived in Britain in 1933, he encountered an inward-looking discipline preoccupied with formalism and connoisseurship; or, as he phrased it, art historians of ‘the older persuasion’ ignorant of ‘the fruitful achievements of modern historical research’. Despite its (...) considerable scholarship and erudition, Antal’s book was not warmly received, largely because he had used historical materialism to understand the production of art and the development of styles. Antal’s class-based account of the social position of the artist and the role of the patron in determining the emergence of early Renaissance styles was especially controversial. However, although Marxist analysis was used to challenge the assumptions of Anglo art history, it was not Antal’s intention to weaken art history’s disciplinary autonomy. With historical materialism, he sought to place art history on a firmer historical footing. Most importantly, this approach was compatible with the discipline’s Central European tradition, where art-historical scholarship was framed by questions of method and based on broad historical research. Without defending its more deterministic features, this article supports a re-evaluation of Antal’s book, as an important forerunner of interdisciplinary art scholarship. It considers why Antal’s legacy has not endured, despite the ‘social history of art’ enjoying widespread acceptance in English-speaking art history in later decades. (shrink)