Today’s ‘Museum as a Resources’ class talked about the decorative arts with a focus on the chairs in the museum’s collection. It got me thinking about old discussions in my college design and philosophy class. The main question of which was always the ‘thisness of this’ or, as example, the chariness of a chair. Plato had an interesting insight when he spoke of ideal forms. In this case, there is an ideal chair in the realm of ideas and forms. All human endeavors to make chairs embody this chairness to some extent, though never quite achieve the perfect, ideal chair. The ‘real thing’ we perceive as a chair is merely an echo of what the ideal chair is. The caveat of Plato’s argument is then that a drawing or painting of a chair is further removed from the ideal by its two dimensional representation of a three dimensional object. And so for no reason, I did a sketch of a chair on my iPad:
iPad sketch
This is actually also a journal entry assignment for said class.
