Posted on 06/15/2009 7:31:30 AM PDT by AreaMan
But was that their "goal?" Doubtful.
LOL! Not even close to true. Look at poetry, for example. Are you really going to suggest that poetry shouldn't be judged by the author's intent?
You are correct about the late works, but Beethoven didn't write his 'uncorrected horrors' as a way of destroying beauty or expressing blasphemy. They had a form, they adhered to an artistic ideal which we can recognize and honor.
Some useful distinctions can be made here. Not all beauty is 'elegant', not all beauty and art is what pops into our mind when we hear the word beauty (which for me is 'Summer Glau', but never mind me!).
Frogs, elephants, spiders, mushrooms, goggle-eyed fish from the deepest parts of the sea - these have a beauty, these have a form. Grotesque beings given their form by God are beautiful. And grotesque art created by an artist in sympathy with the Creator is an honorable sub-creation: it expresses something true and beautiful about creation, its energy, its power.
But (to carry on with the example) a frog mushed into roadkill either in reality or on a canvas - this is never beauty - this is a betrayal of form, this is an attack upon form. A crushed amphibian named "Concept Frog" and displayed at the Tate would be an attack upon beauty of a sort we instantly recognize.
Now, Beethoven wrote some stuff with a difficult or ugly form. A better example for our purposes might be Browning. Every poem written by Robert Browning used a difficult or grotesque form: he used many unique meters and forms to express what he wanted to say. His poems are energetic and follow weird leaping meters, they have ugly-in-the-sense-of-grotesque-forms, in the same sense that a frog or a fish or a spider can be ugly.
But his poems aren't works of hate or evil, they are not attacks upon reality, nor do they utter frantic blasphemies.
Whereas: a counter example from one of Browning's contemporaries. The pictures of Aubrey Beardsley used as the illustrations for Morte d'Arthur are examples of evilly-inspired depictions of the human form. Beardsley's pictures have no nobility, his lords and ladies are not merely weird and alien, but they depict a betrayal of the human form. They are repellent, evil dolls.
Truly hope this is helpful.
SGT. HARTMAN says: “Your so ugly you could be a modern art(expression) masterpiece!”
Excellent post from you.
I think we need a word or phrase to distinguish ‘evil’ ugliness from the true and honorable grotesqueries of the real world. Can’t think of one.
Continuing with my meandering: art can be beautiful and yet depict horrid things: Tolkien’s illustrators (all those orcs!) and Bosch’s apocalyptic scenes illustrate evil in the same way that a good horror film (Aliens) does. The monsters have a ‘good form’: even when they’re ‘evil’ they’re good!
Whereas bad horror films, bad horror comics, bad art might show horrible things in a ‘bad’ way, using bad form. For instance - despite quoting ‘Aliens’ above - I think Giger is a bad artist. His intense and disturbing concept art of “The Alien” were IMO greatly improved for film.
In the same way 90% of all the early art for Warhammer 40K, 90% of the later art for 2000 AD etc were IMO unviewable tripe. Nasty violent pr0n, some of it, and horrible to look at.
Ok, my eclectic judgments on the comics and RPG games of my youth can be put to one side. But discerning the difference between good and bad form, good and bad art is IMO something we all do instinctively: we really can be proud of “knowing what we like”. We carry a touchstone for good art inside us.
Whereas bad art revolts our internal touchstone. That’s why it can only be ‘interpreted, explained, truly understood’ by a self-appointed and well-remunerated Priesthood - that sounds like what your Wife is battling against.
There was a small sidewalk art show the other weekend in my hometown. I easily picked the winners of the show by simply locating the most vapid, ugly, intellectually vacant work there.
I was dead-bang-on, too.
Art has become a mockery of itself. And, artists have become the equivalent of a traveling carnival freak show. There’s nothing very intellectual or important about displaying conjoined twins to the masses. That’s just trying to make a buck off the unusual.
Thank you Borges. My internal touchstone is - not repelled - but I guess disinterested by the majority of the work of each of those artists. Likely it is something to do with the fragmentation of form. I like my artists to present Art, not jigsaws :0)
I don't believe any of those explorative artists - with the exception of Beardsley - are desecrators in the sense of this article. There is a middle ground here, populated by technicians who aren't doing stuff that happens to touch me.
But I will insist that it is (at best) a poor or misdirected artist who needs interpreters, who needs a Priesthood. And as for our modern rabble of excrement artists and the like: IMO they are actively seeking evil.
Both must be taken into account, unless you subscribe to some post-modernist view that the only thing that counts is the viewers' response. I've had many an experience where an otherwise appealing work has been soured by knowing what the artist originally intended with it.(a number of songs from the 60's and 70's come to mind. Likewise, I can overlook some technical deficiencies if I know the artist was seeking beauty.
I have no desire to be on the same wavelength as Jackson Pollack, for example, so I will never find his work remotely appealing.
I once astounded my wife by picking a cigarette taped to a photograph of an ashtray to win a prize, and sure enough, it did. I used the same criteria that you did. It's become predictable and sad.
Do you supposed to art world would keel over if they actually realized all their efforts at being imaginative are simply predictably ugly?
The mere recreation of reality in art is idiotic. A camera does a far better job. Anyone can paint a naturalistic scene or still life or portrait, it’s a matter of training, so what’s the challenge there, same old same old.
Artists are explorers. Look at the Florentine Renaissance- they discovered the optical laws of perspective and from that came architectural and industrial blueprints and machine tool reproduction, ie., the Industrial Revolution. Discovery.
Works of art should be experiments in finding a new technique, a new way of seeing or hearing, a new way of communicating, a new way of understanding. Otherwise what’s the point- therapy for boredom, a hobby?
I don’t understand why conservatives have a hard time with contemporary art. They’d certainly applaud the R & D work of industry, the inventiveness of human genius, a more efficient manner of getting from point A to point B or from idea A to idea B. The problem for conservatives is that they have ALLOWED art to become hijacked by political hacks and flunkies because they lost the R & D edge in that realm. They forgot how to experiment and, by default, the commies took it over lock, stock and trigger- movies, music, poetry, painting, prose, sculpture, you name it, it’s a leftist playground.
My take is that conservatives fell into the trap of assuming that culture was “high culture”, something that the wealthy patronized to grace their self-exaulted status while the proletariat had to settle for country and western laments about hard living. They allowed culture to become brahminized, remote, rare instead of understanding that culture is the glue that gives a society its cohesiveness and pride as well as its means of disseminating ideas; it’s communication apparat.
So either continue to sing a cowboy’s lament over the loss of control of the cultural matrix or learn how to strip politics and ideology from contemporary art ideas and experiment American society into a new aesthetic paradigm.
Ball’s in your court.
One big question he's trying to address is: why is art the way it is these days and have we actually lost anything, or is it simply different? Along the way one has to address some pretty basic statements about human perception.
The difficulty with naming "expression" as the fundamental value in art is that it requires an object, that is, something that is being expressed. Beauty? Well, the art I prefer approaches that, but what beauty is, probably needs to be considered. Truth? (Keats' "Beauty is truth; truth, beauty" risks the status of platitude by now but it's worth considering). It is a strange thing (to me, at least) to hear a classical musician describe the upshot of a perfect composition as "true," and yet I know what he's talking about. The expositional nature of this is perhaps easier to perceive in music than, say, in a painting or sculpture but it seems to be there as well. In literature it's so evident that it's almost cant.
This is not a truth as expressed after any rules of formal logic (necessarily) but one of direct apprehension, that moment Scruton describes here:
Not surprisingly, the idea of beauty has puzzled philosophers. The experience of beauty is so vivid, so immediate, so personal, that it seems hardly to belong to the natural order as science observes it.
Robert Pirsig likened it to a Zen moment of pure apprehension and tried to neutralize the term by rephrasing it as "quality." That seems to be where Scruton is coming from as well:
Poets have expended thousands of words on this experience, which no words seem entirely to capture.
That's Zen all right. And yes, it's hard to explain. But when I'm walking down a row of paintings and one of them - not one I'd describe as particularly "pretty" - seems to jump off the wall and grab me and start shaking, that's the direct apprehension of something: beauty or truth, internal consistency, something. It last happened with a Picasso - I know diddly about expressionism and was too ignorant to recognize it as his, but the thing was just good. If it had been signed "Schnitzelfritz" it still would have been undeniable.
"Undeniable" - that word just came out. Truth, I guess.
And yet Mozart done in a pastiche of copulating bodies may well be a reach for some sort of truth but it strikes me as a false proposition. I suppose others' mileage may vary. But I suspect it may not be that at all, it's something else, and Scruton's invocation of "transgression" leads me to suspect that it's simply an intention to evoke a strong emotional reaction of some sort. Any sort, not just the sort reserved for a direct apprehension of whatever symmetry I'm trying to describe here. (Unsuccessfully. That's Zen too.)
Other emotions such as anger and hostility, perhaps revulsion as well, seem easier to evoke because these do not require the structure, the internal consistency, that a "true" proposition does. An artist after a cheap thrill may well throw turds on a canvas, and there is, actually, an underlying proposition there that mocks both artist and audience, but one suspects that the truth thereby illuminated is one with the medium. John Cage's notorious four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence made the same sort of meta-statement, in my humble opinion, and risked insulting the audience not for failing to understand it, but for understanding it perfectly. (Cage was also an exponent of Zen and perhaps that is what he was after, but it simply isn't that easy.)
But strong emotions - anger, hostility, revulsion - require quite a bit less work than crafting that one true proposition, and so perhaps there is an element of artistic laziness at work here. Perhaps dilution as well - we live in a time when art, especially music, is, after one fashion or another, so omnipresent as to be nearly inescapable. One used to have to make one's own, but sheet music sales started to tank when that evil fellow named Edison invented that tool of the devil, the gramophone. There are occasions - elevator rides come to mind - when one prays in vain for a few moments of blissful peace.
The market used to be the control over all this, and in a sense it still is, but in fact nowadays more people have more money than any Renaissance city ever held and hence there seems less of a strict control than there used to be - artists seldom starve these days (only the good ones). Deadly to that is the call for government subsidization of the arts, for the good of society ostensibly although it seems to result mostly in the good of bad art. One could fill a very slim portfolio with "Great Art Of The Soviet Union," in a country so steeped in artistic history that the vacuum should be horrifying.
I hold onto hope, however. I saw a young feller in a music store the other day, purple hair and enough metal in his face to set off a mine detector, and when the opening statement of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto piped through the store he just smiled and whispered to his girlfriend, "that's good." Well, it is.
The recreation of reality is the beginning of art. It's a matter of understanding the basics so one can then bend them to one's own aspirations. Do not discount the talent that it takes to see and to transfer an image to canvas or stone or clay. I suspect from your statement that you've probably mastered it, but some of us will never know that joy.
Explorers, yes. Discoverers, yes. Innovators, absolutely. But the idea of exploring, discovering, and innovating ways of dragging down the human spirit and imposing a decrepit, painful, and bleak world view is the goal of many of the modern artists, and it is their work I find hideous and without any redeeming value.
I have no problem with abstract works, and I find many of them fascinating and even beautiful. But as I have stated before, I reject any efforts to undermine the value of what has come before simply by painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa (as Dada proclaims) or by spreading animal parts on a canvas just because it has not been done before.
Understand: it is a stated goal of Marxist and "revolutionary" proponents to undermine concepts of art so they can clear the way for their own ideas. It is part of their effort to "capture the culture". We see it being played out every day in all aspects of the art world.
There may, in fact, be an unreasoned, knee-jerk aspect to it for some, perhaps many, conservatives.
However, I think that it would be accurate to say that conservatives aren't opposed to contemporary are per se; indeed, many of us appreciate a good deal of it.
Speaking for myself, however, I part ways with contemporary art when it primarily evokes an awareness of the artist's narcissism, or the main point is destruction (in fact, the two seem often to appear together).
Art should to a large degree be meant for other people. It needn't be beautiful, but it should have some aspect of on person communicating with others.
When it devolves to the point of an artist doing little more than stridently demanding that I pay attention to him.... At that point, IMO, it ceases to be "art."
Pollack humbled me. I figured his stuff was dribblings - I was sure of it - until I saw one that really was undeniable. Ended up eating a lot of crow, too, and deserved it. You never know.
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