Thanks to my friend Gary Martin, I was invited to speak at the Willets Center for the Arts, on the subject of the Greek deities in art. I had a fun romp. Real art historians will likely chew me to pieces, but what I do intellectually always is, and always will be, eclectic.
And I just want to say that Exekias - one of the oldest named artists in the world - is astoundingly deep as a visual thinker. While this is not a fully articulated theory of aesthetics (yet) my intuition about artistic depth in all genres is that the artists who achieve the most create pieces that follow Augustine's dictum that "Beauty of the attractive power of truth" but not in the way old Augie meant it. The beauty is in the interface that we the observer/auditor/reader have, but the "truth" is that which keeps on revealing itself, like an "ever-opening flower" or, a complexity that is refractory to a single truth. They are prismatic in their angles of meaningfulness. Hence, Exekias - after 3,000 years, still multi-dimensional.
