Emancipated Art

According to the Wall Street Journal this morning, the Art Institute of Chicago has received art valued at $500 million. The donors are Stefan Edlis and his wife whom the WSJ calls Gael Neeson. The art is of the Pop genre and includes some nine works by Andy Warhol (1928-1987).

During my Army years (1956-1960) I’d spent some of my free time seriously studying art as a phenomenon—aided by being in Europe during that time. Just after I’d returned to the United States, Warhol’s star began to rise, in the 1960s. By then I’d seen the terrain leading up to the Pop Art movement and, having formed some conclusions of my own through actual study and thought, I more or less shrugged. It was bound to happen.

You might say that art reflects the general culture of its time. And even as early as the 1960s, culture had come a vast distance from the days of Christendom. Indeed art had separated itself into a self-conscious social phenomenon long before I’d actually been born; it had become emancipated from the collective. Somewhat arbitrarily, let me say that this emancipation began with Impressionism in the nineteenth century. Thereafter new schools began to flourish, among them, just to name a few, were Fauvism, Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Op Art, and so on. A strong element of this was self-consciousness: viewing the collective from above and as its critics. By contrast, what I came to view as real art during my studies (and it’s always present, if also largely in the minority of works since the Renaissance) is art that aims at something transcending. And in that sense Pop Art, with its focus on ordinary objects, celebrity, and techno-wizardry is amusing, perhaps, but not in any sense motivating the viewer to respond. Self-conscious art, curiously, comes ever more to focus on itself, rather than on its subject; the subject is a means, not an end. Beauty, which is perhaps the most general word expressing art’s subject, is lost in self-promotion.

The art world, in consequence, has lost its general relevance to culture—except as yet another path to fame and fortune—whether as a creater, owner/collector, or institutional temple for it. When art is seen as art, it no longer works. And much the same may be said of countless other semi-institutional efforts that have become similarly “emancipated”  rather than remaining organically rooted in the collective social effort.

A $46 Million Minus Sign

In the Wall Street Journal this morning comes an article titled “New Masters of the Art Universe.” Hedge fund managers are evidently spending their small change on buying expensive art and then—they can’t really help it, it’s a reflex with them—trading these art works again. I was just scanning the story sort of when I saw one purchase that made me laugh spontaneously. One no doubt famous trader had spent $46 million on a painting simply known as Rothko’s “No. 11 (Untitled).” I am bringing a copy of it here—not, mind you, a photograph. I dare not reproduce the actual image lest I be sued for copyright infringement. I made it myself using the Paint program Microsoft conveniently supplies with my Vista operating system.

Moments later Brigitte was laughing with me. Now, of course, ours is but a view from one perspective. We view art as imagery. And yes. Rothko’s total oeuvre, to give it the appropriate description, is mostly minus signs in different colors, but his pronounced preference is for shades of red and orange. The few blue-tinted minus signs don’t look at home at all. Green is absent, except in the pocket of Rothko buyers. The more comprehensive view point, in which “art as image” is only a slice, includes vast ranges of human perception based on trading value, money, shorting and longing any kind of saleable object. And that’s where our Masters of the Art Universe are busy vying with one another for reflected glory. 

Writing to the Demographic, Teaching to the Test

My contention is that measurement, the very core of the scientific approach, becomes problematical when applied too rigidly to those areas of life where measurement fails to capture the most essential elements. Two such regions among others include the arts and education. How can we capture, in a quantitative net, exactly what a genuinely educated person is? How do we know that this painting here—or that television show—is art? The judgement, in either case, has everything to do with the individuals doing the judging. At best there is a kind of public consensus, more felt than measurable (e.g. as in counting critics or teachers pro and con). Far from all individuals will share the elite consensus, no matter what the individual's status is. In effect, as one ages, one finds oneself disagreeing with some elites while agreeing with others heretofore disdained.

Measurement physicalizes because it averages. It fails to capture individual uniqueness. Testing has its uses—in areas, perhaps, like guiding curriculum reform. As a measurement of a teacher’s performance, it sucks. The ability of a teacher should be judged by another individual—not by a group, and least of all a group of students. That’s a hard requirement. We want to mechanize,  routinize everything, template everything, impose a math-based cookie cutter applied to what we view as a uniform dough. Life is much more demanding than that.

In the entertainment “industry,” measuring by ratings, correlating content to viewership, the content itself classified into categories (sex, violence, relationships, urban culture, paranormal, etc.), each category appropriately weighted, produces the chaos of pop culture, where nothing of a higher sort emerges and the half-life of a series is often one quarter of a season—before it is jerked.

Underneath all this, of course, is Moloch Measuring: the measurement of money—be it investments in a show and calculating its return … or investment of public dollars in education by calculating expenditure per pupil. One could easily produce a neat TV series from this. Call it The Invasion of the Soul Snatchers. Combine art and education by defining the show’s locale as a grade school, a high school, and a University. Projected ratings should be good if sex, violence, relationships, urban culture, and paranormal are properly weighted in the resulting mix.

The Eye of the Beholder

One section of the New York Times we rarely even open. It’s the Arts&Leisure section, with Arts in bold and & Leisure in faded-grey. When people have unusual experiences, they say, instead of describing them, “It was, well, it was—I can’t put it in words.” Another equally apt phrase that here pretains are the words of Supreme Court Justice Potter Steward, relating to obscenity. He said that defining it is hopeless, “But I know it when I see it.”

Today’s lead story is about money, really. It shows four images. One is of Elvis Presley as a guman, by Andy Warhol ($30-$50 million—the estimate of what it will bring at auction); one is Mark Rothko’s “Orange” (although it might also be called “Pink”), reddish rectangles ($35-$45 million). The third is Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” ($80 million). The last is Roy Lichtenstein’s “Sleeping Girl.” It looks like something I might have snipped out of any comic book—and that, presumably is the point of this oeuvre ($30-$40 million); the elevation of the extremely ordinary to the high status of “art” somehow speaks to something in the modern soul. Whatever.

What that lead page produces, with those pictures, is a sensation of dissonnance. All these things are “art”? Perhaps in a very elevated sense they are. They are if we buy into the concept that the artist’s role is not to aim at transcendental heights but, rather, to act as a mirror for society so that it can behold itself. Then these images are right on target. That’s what we are. And the limits of our transcendence are shown effectively by dollar signs clinging to large numbers—and those, of course, will bring the reverential sighs. Justice Steward is right on. I know it when I see it. 

The 2011 Welcome Sign

While celebrating the achievements of the Paret branch of the family, I thought I’d bring here the Welcome sign marking our reserved parking spot at Wolverine Lake ahead of the July 3rd fireworks. Most of these signs over the years have been drawn by Stella, Michelle’s second child, whose many gifts include a penchant for design. Indeed the only image on this blog of me is one that she drew and I presented here. The signs are different every year, always hiding behind what looks like ink-work, from a distance, images that arise from Stella thoughts from the paper at the movement of inspiration. In this family, so far as I know, several people write their dreams down—but only one paints hers…

True Art in Written Form

True art in written form is never just
A tale of life recounted blow by blow,
The tensions caused by violence or lust;
It is instead a distillate of flow,
The boiled-down essence of experience,
Life’s repetitious rounds, its ennui,
Its boredom, mud, its sand, its transience
Transmuted into points of density—
Achieved by shaping time’s own rigid frame,
Annihilating it when it holds naught,
Expanding it when spirit’s brilliant flame
Grows hot and something real is sometimes wrought.
True, high art will rise above illusion;
It portrays the spirit in its fusion.

Balsamic Vinegar

Great works of art are distillates of memory
In which the essences of past experience,
Boiled down, fermented, pressed, enriched, and crisscross-linked
By hard-forged values will persist in simple
Narrative or smooth-formed stone or marching meter,
Resisting time’s relentless rub and scrape and as
On air, magically suspended, are carried
By a Persian carpet despite their ponderous weight.

Originality

Well, just so—because I find them so beautiful. And the pictures came out so well, even if they’re kind of pop [kitschig], worn, and not very original. I don’t care. I like it. Smileyface symbol.

The citation is the full text of a blog post, translated from the German; it accompanies pictures of a white lily from two angles. To see the post, apply here. The site, by the way, produced by a busy young mother with a little boy, is aesthetically attractive and interesting in its choice of subject matter too; its creatrice need not apologize. But her commentary reminded me of the subject. I wonder, actually, how old this issue is and when it began to plague the artistic community. It’s certainly been around throughout my life. Originality.

Originality is paradoxical in that it escapes personal control and manipulation, and when it is present, it may be mistaken for the banal. The more we try to be original, the more our project is likely to fail—because originality is a state or background from which something arises; it’s not an objective. What we can achieve is novelty, but while originality may strike people as novel, novelty is not part of its essence at all.

Now that I’ve dipped my toes in the water—thought meanders thus, feeling its way—it occurs to me that concern with originality probably arises with decadence. It comes about when the artist begins to outrank his or her creation, and the creative effort becomes a public enterprise pursued to glorify the artist. I lack the knowledge and diligence at the moment, but signing works of art began relatively late, it seems, perhaps in the nineteenth, maybe even the twentieth century. The artist began as an anonymous skilled craftsman, became a figure of renown not unlike some architect of fame, turned into a figure almost of religious veneration—real saints having been banned— and finally achieved, with Salvador Dali, let us say, the status, in addition of pop celebrity. And it is in this evolution of the artist from plumber to culture hero that originality developed. Mere skill was not enough to distinguish the craftsman, who remained—see his or her labor in advertising, wall-paper and fabric patterns, “design,” so-called, and elsewhere commercial—from the figure who carried, as it were, the effulgence of secular divinity, the radiance of genius.

Originality, therefore, in its usual application, means illumination from on high, but expressed in a manner divorced from the traditional religious sense. Here I’m reminded of Charles de Gaulle’s pronouncement, in Algeria, trying to impress his then Muslim constituents there, saying, “I have baraka.” Baraka points to the same ineffable something which in this context we call grace, in that one originality—but which, in either case, means a mysterious inflow of something transcendent. Original. Ah, yes. Original.

Originality and authenticity both have the same rooting. They point to something irreducibly given. The authentic individual is a “self-doer,” acting from within. The original artist acts from the source. In both cases the action arises from a depth, not from the surface. Inside out, not outside in. But this correct description of originality produces further paradox. The real, the original, and the authentic cannot be grasped, categorized, measured using external, thus superficial, means. It takes originality to recognize it. And the courage to assert this recognition even if, on the surface, the work appears to be ordinary or banal. The lady in question—with whose blog post I began—saw the beauty in the flower, something of its authentic nature—which is there even if often seen before. She captured it skillfully. Then she bravely asserted that she liked it—even if others were looking for something more tricky and more “original.” Interesting case, even though I may have failed to communicate it sharply enough. So much original stuff—and strikingly so—merely says decadent to me. The kitschy lily speaks the truth no matter how often photographed before.