This is not an art essay

I want to tell a story...

I think my problem with art is that I’ve been approaching the subject from an aesthetic point of view. As any number of relativists would tell me, my approach to a work of art to a great degree determines my response. I measure the pile of dirt on the floor according to the same criteria I measure a Monet painting. By those criteria, it is not surprising the pile of dirt does not do the job for me.

It may boil down to my looking at all art as if it were painting, or at least measuring all art by the same criteria I use to measure painting. Which, when I think about it, is rather surprising, in that my exposure to Fine Arts is come-lately, compared to my exposure to literature and music. Or maybe it’s not surprising, because the come-lately aspect has been limiting my vision. I don’t know enough yet, and I don’t even know what I don’t know.

Literature may be an easier way into this analysis. As a reader, I approach a given book on the terms of that book. I know the difference between simple entertainment and an attempt by an author to do something else. And in the area of that “something else,” I know the difference between, on the one hand, writing that is mellifluous and poetic, words strung together in such a way that they celebrate the stringing together of words, of the joy of words, the joy of language, and on the other hand, writing that is attempting to explore human nature, expand my experience, touch my soul. This is not to say that some books can do both, but the wordplay that teems in Nabokov is not the same as the explorations of humanity in Dostoevsky. The two writers are doing different things, aiming at different goals. When I read Nabokov, or other wordsmiths, I am reading on that level. When I am reading Dostoevsky, I am reading at that level. Dickens may be one of the great (and few) examples of doing both. Melville is a great example of trying to do both, and ending up doing both alternately (and also providing lots of simple entertainment, in his time and place). My point here is that sometimes there is writing to appeal to me aesthetically, and sometimes there is writing to appeal to me intellectually. They may or may not overlap, intentionally or unintentionally, but I clearly and easily know the difference. After all, I’ve been trained to read practically since birth, I’ve studied reading throughout my entire academic life, and taken up reading as a profession. If I can’t do it by now, I need to change the Day Job.

So what I’ve been doing in evaluating art is evaluating it entirely on the aesthetic level. I like the way something looks, or I don’t. The philosopher would go into great detail about what that means, but I won’t, because you and I probably both have the same general idea without a lot of heigh-dee-ho. (If you care, I do follow Kant on this, but I can’t for the life of me remember exactly what he says. Do we need to define clearly what aesthetic sense is and how it works, when we all know intuitively what it is and how it works? Unlike Kant, we’re not being paid by the hour.) But the modernist movement in painting, and from there art in general, was a move away from aethestic appeal into works of an intellectual nature. Metaphorically, the artist was no longer attempting to connect with my heart; the target became the brain. Art became not a thing in and of itself, aesthetically pleasing or not aesthetically pleasing, but it was now about something. About the artist’s journey into his or her own soul or vision, about the state of art, about the state of the world in general. Andy Warhol’s painting of a can of Campbell’s soup is not about a can of soup, but about the nature of art. Interpret it as you will, and theoretically its success or failure as a work of art is measurable to some degree on how well it is interpreted in line with the artist’s purpose, which we may or may not know. (No wonder much art criticism reads like random typing.) Baudrillard tells us that this painting is about the breakdown of the difference between art and commerce. Maybe. Or it could be about a breakdown between artificial and intended aesthetics. There’s lots of ways of looking at it.

The pile of dirt is a clearer example of…something. When I say pile of dirt, I am not speaking metaphorically. Aesthetically speaking, the work is mute. Intellectually speaking? Well, it got me to write this, didn’t it?

But...

And so ends our little story.

The problem with the thesis presented above, that painting/art has migrated from aesthetic appeal to intellectual appeal, is that it completely misrepresents both the aesthetic appeal of painting and the historical place of painting in intellectual life prior to (arguably) Fountain in 1917 (or whatever other point you want to draw the line between modern and pre-modern). Painting/art wasn’t at one time entirely intended to make you feel good, to appeal to your aesthetic sense, and then evolved or switched over into something else. Art is rooted in intellectual ground. Art has historically always had something to say. The fact that some art has done so in an aesthetically pleasing way is, perhaps, merely coincidental.

As Caveman points out, the history of art is a history of narrative. Art exists because the artist has something to say. In painting, what the artist has had to say was usually pretty obvious. Since the nature of being an artist required money and training, artists had no choice but to go where that money and training was, which was to a great degree the state. That is, there was for centuries and in various locations the idea that most art was funded by the state, either in the guise of the literal government of the state, the patronage of the rich people of the state, or the religious establishment of the state. Few artists worked as private operatives. The messages made by this art were, to a great degree, the messages of the state. What do we see in surviving ancient Egyptian art? Pharaohs and tomb paintings and the tschotkes of the rich and famous. With Greeks and Romans it’s gods and goddesses and emperors. What do we see in pre-Renaissance and Renaissance art? Church decorations. Paintings of bible stories. Art that tells the story of religion. In 19th Century France, the art that the Impressionists were reacting to was art that was directed to tell a story of historical/moral significance. Art was, by social definition, instructive. And given the machinery of creating art—being trained, obtaining materials and making a living at it—the social definition ruled. There was no one to buy art who wasn’t a part of the society defining what art was, whether a part of the rich or the powerful (included in which is the capital C Church).

Then, for a variety of reasons, including the underlying intellectual strains of the Romantic age celebrating the individual, the rise of the middle class, the invention of photography—all manner of things on all manner of fronts, painting began a revolution. The evolution of art (compare the portraits of the 15th Century to the portraits of the 19th Century) was reaching its teleological conclusion, both in its own abilities and in the challenge of photography (which would ultimately replace the need for realistic representations of what could simply be photographed). Art, or at least some art, was taken back by the artists, and was for sale to the people at large. Art no longer had to tie into the cultural metanarrative. Whether it did or didn’t would be entirely up to the artists and the people who chose what art to buy. One could that that this was true for all art forms, for roughly the same reasons, and be relatively correct. The tides of romanticism and, later, modernism, affected sculpture and writing and music just as much as painting. And to a great extent, all art forms made that same perceived leap from aestheticism into intellectualism. This is not to say that all artists made the leap, but that the ones that seemed to get all the interest did. Since “all the interest” means, to a great extent, critics and curators and others in a position of power over art or whose power depended on art, we might withhold judgment on the value of this interest. In other words, just because a critic or curator says a pile of dirt is good art doesn’t objectively make it good art, which raises the question, what, then, is objectively good in art?

Objective analysis of art is where we are on firm ground aesthetically. Or at least less unfirm ground. We have rules about aesthetics. Granted that these rules are not quite immutable physical laws (although one or two come close), they at least quantify aspects of art in such a way as to allow a qualitative analysis. That is, if there is a great enough quantity of these aspects, we say that the quality is higher than a work with a smaller quantity of these aspects. We have rules purely for beauty, expressible in the so-called Golden Mean. We go so far as to look at a person and make a judgment about their beauty, so it is no trouble for us to make judgments about paintings. We have rules for composition and perspective. In music, we have rules for harmonics. (The musical rules, where Western scales are radically different from Eastern scales, lead one to ask which came first, the rules or the music, for which there is no answer. There is no answer whether the Golden Mean determines a face we think is beautiful, or whether a face we think is beautiful determines the Golden Mean. For that matter, lately there’s been interesting discussion going on in popular analysis of physics asking, even there, which comes first, the laws or the mechanics.) The thing is that, culturally, we generally agree on aesthetics. I do not think that, culturally, we generally agree on intellectual ideas. So we can, as a culture, say certain art is good aesthetically, and all go line up to see it in a museum, but we are much less likely to get a clambake going when the art is not meeting aesthetic guidelines. Or, let’s put it this way. You can’t swing a cat in the Metropolitan Museum on a Saturday, not no-how, while you could have a Patriots game up at the Dia in Beacon, with room left over for the Giants and Green Bay to boot. And that crowd at the Met is your general hoi and polloi, while that crowd at the Dia all looks like renegades from Tribeca, and you get extra point if you spot any of them wearing anything but black. Similarly, no doubt the crowds attending classical concerts are a lot bigger for Beethoven than for Cage, or at least there’s a lot more Beethoven concerts than Cage concerts. And there’s probably a comparable metaphor for the nature of the different audience to the one I drew for the art museums.

My point, if I have any, is that art, and art appreciation, exists on a continuum. Some art is rather easy to understand, and some is rather difficult, and beyond understanding, some is rather easy to claim as “good” while some is rather impossible to make any value claim for whatsoever, unless you are part of the art establishment who has no choice but to make such a claim. Baudrillard’s essay is discusses a conspiracy of art for a reason, because at the point where we have no quantifiable methods of making quality judgments, the quality judgment is sent down from on high, a conspiracy of collectors and critics and curators and those claiming to be artists, all of which may be totally unintelligible to the average schmegeggie on the street. For any of us to learn about art, we need to actually learn about it. I find that lately I’m learning about it like crazy, mostly because I want to. Which brings me to the suggestion that I hope you want to as well. The educated person is not merely someone who knows their parochial set of facts and leaves it at that. That’s technical training, regardless of the nature of the parish. If artists have something to say, if artists have had something to say, if artists will have something to say, and if we believe that artists have a special voice, or at least if we allow, as a culture, artists to have a special voice, then as participants in that culture it behooves us to attempt to listen. The narrower we are as individuals, the less individual we actually are. The more we know, the better. Given art’s special place in culture, knowing more rather than less about art has to be a good, beneficial thing.

What I’m trying to do here is look at stuff and talk about it, out of some fear that you might not be exposed to it elsewhere. My interest in this proselytizing started with the Caveman analysis of modern thought. All of modern thought is connected. All thought exists in its time and place, both in the past and in the present. The more you know about any of it, the more you know about all of it. Elvis concerts, via the film 2001, used to begin with the strains of “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” Elvis, somehow, meets Nietzsche. And Kubrick/Clarke. And Richard Strauss. Somehow all of our culture comes to its apotheosis on the stage of the Las Vegas Hilton!

Makes you really want to qualify for NatNats in Sin City this year, doesn’t it?