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From: JJJ Category: Art Date: 29 September 2009 Time: 05:37 AM Review: One definition of intelligence is to be able to keep two opposing ideas in mind at the same time. Discursive art doesn't have to be some found object with bogus concepts tacked on. It can be a great portrait, such as Velazquez's Las Meninas, where the painter expresses many seemingly contradictory attitudes such as satire, flattery, realism, idealisation. The excitement of many great works of art lies partly in their discursive quality, they do not say I love/I hate the King, they say here is the king and here are some of things I think about him. Internally, within a picture, different subjects/elements may also be shown with differing views, to take a simple example the painter may employ a journalistic device of having the courtier, princess, dwarf, and artist all expressing different thoughts/ relationships to being painted, or to the King and Queen. I think that the idea that a painter must only say what they say feel in a painting is extremely reductive and has no basis in the history of art.