.
We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.
Buddha
The Dharmapada
This old trade card and its gesture of aware cognition flashed into memory last evening when Melbourne University art historian Christopher Marshall did much the same on a program (Artscape - MONA: Feel The Weird) about David Walsh's Museum of New and Old Art in Tasmania.
During the program there were quite a number of references to thinking. The presenter Andrew Frost spoke with "a guru of art galleries", Jean-Hubert Martin :
AF: (... so what does he make of David's vision?)
J-H M: It will certainly be controversial. I guess it will attract quite a lot of people.
AF: Why do you think it will be controversial?
J-H M: If a much larger public comes here they're not just going to see beautiful paintings that will please their eye but they will be challenged and forced, actually, to think and maybe to reverse some of their ideas about art and human kind, actually.
bLOGOS/HA HA particularly enjoyed something that Walsh said almost as an aside
"There's a lot less to art than people think."
The program's final act is a simple archetype. The Actor of Regard looks across the water at MONA and its reflection, then walks away...
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA