The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #60096   Message #963645
Posted By: GUEST,leeneia
07-Jun-03 - 07:42 AM
Thread Name: Mudcat Bad Writing Contest (Enter Often)
Subject: RE: Mudcat Bad Writing Contest (Enter Often)
It's not original, but I submit a sample of one of a very common form of bad writing, the almost-meaningless prose that pads books of art history.

"In luminist landscapes, measure confines natural elements within an ideational order. This order operates both across the surface and in depth. As in classic art, mathematical and geometric correlations predominate over natural irregularities. Luminist measure, imposing an absolute order on reality, gives specificity to the ideal. Thus the categories of the real and ideal are recipically tempered. Quantification affects every aspect of luminist art; structure, form, tone, light are all subject to the subtlest discretions of calculated control. These minute and economic discriminations release poetic rather than cerebral effects."

FYI, luminist landscapes are the grand landscape paintings of the mid-to-late 19th C., such as works by Frederick Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt. There is nothing particularly "measured" about them.