These are but a few noteworthy citations from a most controversial oeuvre A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Color and Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpetsby by Christopher Alexander
Beauty LIES [not] in the Eye of the Beholder
“…the quality of wholeness is not merely a matter of preference or taste for different observers, but instead a definite, tangible, and objective quality, which really does exist to a greater or lesser degree in any given carpet”
” … the earlier carpets have more complex, more powerful, and more profound symmetry structures contained within them.”
‘This notion of beauty, ‘the detailed organisation of matter’ seems intangible but an analysis of structure can approach it in an objective fashion.’
‘The geometrical organisation of the carpet gives rise to colour, creates light, ‘makes the carpet have the intense “being” character that leads us to the soul’
‘Old Turkish carpets ‘represent the pinnacle of what can be done’ in terms of beauty and oneness’
‘A carpet (in the Sufi tradition) is a picture of God, or the ‘ultimate oneness of everything’ (..) ‘We may also call it the infinite domain or pearlstuff’
‘The carpet is also ‘an animal presence which tries to create an animistic being'(…) existing ‘side by side with the picture of God’ (…) ‘from an emotional and artistic point of view these two ideas are almost the same’
On What carpet may truly be About
“A carpet is a picture of God. That is the essential fact, fundamental to the people who produced the carpets, and fundamental to any proper understanding of these carpets”.
‘The Sufis, who wove most of these carpets, tried to reach union with God. And, in doing it, in contemplating this God, the carpet actually tries, itself, to be a picture of the all seeing everlasting stuff. ‘
‘… a good carpet (/) [is] resonating with some primitive, almost animistic “soul of the world.”
‘[A carpet has [or has ] no spirit in it.’
‘ … dating carpets on aesthetic grounds alone does not work.’
‘ structure, provenance, and ethnography …’ are the three common criteria while apprising a carpet
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