Andrew Graham-Dixon: evaluation

Transcript context

…Does this whole history make you more persuaded by objectivist or subjectivist theories of aesthetics? That is it inevitable who becomes a great painter? Mystical aesthetics is where I would go with this because it seems to me that it’s a proper miracle that a painting that has nothing—nothing on its side, no one fighting for it, no one rooting for it, no name, it’s got nothing except itself—survives 400 years. Not only that, all of the other paintings, more or less all of the others, survive. I think that’s a true miracle. It’s what Vermeer put into those paintings, and that’s really the heart of my book, what’s in the paintings that made them survive. That faith, that belief, that idealism, that dream, that beauty that’s in the paintings, that’s why they survived. That’s why no one threw them away. They didn’t not throw them away because they were valuable; they weren’t valuable. They didn’t not throw them away because they were by a famous person. They didn’t know who they were by, but they kept them because they knew they had something in them. In what sense was Vermeer a liberal?…

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