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Art Salvador Dali's Name Is Term Paper

There is a juxtaposition of the real and the unreal: the viewer recognizes a cliff in the background and the table top seems normal, but melting clocks surely do not. The composition is ironic in the sense that the subject matter seems real and concrete but the images are conveyed in wholly unnatural ways like they would be in a dream. As Gamboni as well as Chipp and Selz state, Dali developed the phrase "paranoic-critical" to describe the method and action by which he worked. The term "paranoic-critical" refers to the hyper-aware nature of time that is evident in "The Persistence of Memory." Imbuing the phrase also with the word "critical" shows that the artist was not solely relying on instinctual emotion in the construction of his paintings. Rather, some sort of critical awareness or critical thinking was used to compose paintings as seemingly random as "The Persistence of Memory." Therefore, what distinguishes "The Persistence of Memory" and other Dali paintings from...

Dali might not be painting realistic images copied exactly from daily life, but he is borrowing from those motifs and reworking and reinterpreting them.
In "The Persistence of Memory," Dali subverts the nature and meaning of time itself. Whereas the working world relies heavily on the time clock to measure value -- especially the value of labor -- the artist has no such concept of time. Using form, composition, and symbolism, the artist conveys metaphysical notions about time. Time is a ubiquitous aspect of modern life, but one that becomes distorted in alternate states of consciousness like dreams.

Works Cited

Chipp, Herschell Browning and Selz, Peter Howard. Theories of Modern Art. University of California Press, 1968.

Gamboni, Dario. Potential Images. Reaktion, 2002.

McNesse, Tim & Dali, Salvadore. Salvadore Dali. Infobase, 2006.

Sources used in this document:
Works Cited

Chipp, Herschell Browning and Selz, Peter Howard. Theories of Modern Art. University of California Press, 1968.

Gamboni, Dario. Potential Images. Reaktion, 2002.

McNesse, Tim & Dali, Salvadore. Salvadore Dali. Infobase, 2006.
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