I have no idea what Mary means by any of this, and I don't think anyone is supposed to. This is Allen's way of poking fun at the haughty intellectual persona. But doesn't there have to be more to art than sheer visual appeal? How do we evaluate a painting or a sculpture or a building or a novel or a film or a poem? What is "good" art? Isn't there a set of aesthetic criteria inherent in the simple question: "do you like this, or not?" I think that there is. Otherwise, we would fall into a kind of artistic relativism where Michelangelo is no different from graffiti, and Beethoven on par with the latest winner of American Idol.
Though I spend much less time these days strolling around art museums than I did during my six months in Europe last year, I have caught a few exhibits at the Met and MOMA, and continue to think about the nature of art and how we evaluate it. This essay by Richard Eyre from the UK magazine Standpoint makes an effort to begin to define what we mean by "art" as opposed to "culture." It suggests some of the key characteristics of the former:
Art – good or bad, high or low – must have form, it must have shape. It’s a way of knowing the world, of giving form and meaning to things that seem formless. A work of art has to have ambition beyond wanting to please the audience or appease fashion, a desire to examine the world – people or nature or society – and make it look or sound or seem new. A work of art should introduce something to the world that didn’t exist before...Art is everything that politics isn’t: politics generalises about people, art particularises. Art is about the “I” in life, not about the “we”, about private life rather than public life. There has to be a complexity about art but that’s not the same as obscurity...There must be mystery, a sense of unknowability in a work of art – as there is in every human being. In art reality must be given the chance to be mysterious and fantasy the chance to be commonplace. The DNA of art is metaphor: that’s the genetic cell without which nothing can be mutated by craft into art.
Art strives towards the mythic – towards seeing heaven in a grain of sand. Art is unquestionably a form of magic, conjuring something from nothing – sounds from the air on a musical instrument, a human being in paint on a stretch of canvas, a world with a pen on a page of paper. Art must be serious about itself. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be funny, but it means it can’t be trivial. But seriousness alone – any more than sincerity alone – isn’t enough in itself. There has to be an element of pleasure in art, of sensual enjoyment – be it of a combination of sounds, of words, or textures, or of images. Art has to ravish the senses, but not only do that. There has to be a moral sense. You have to be able to feel that the artist has a view that human beings possess a moral sensibility. That’s not the same as the artist being a moralist – or being a “good” person. The artist may be saying “this is how you should live your life” but it must be inferred, not preached. Art is not polemic.
There must be passion in art. Passion gives us a sense of life lived more intensely, with more meaning – more joy, more sorrow. “We are all under sentence of death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve,” said Victor Hugo. We can spend our period of reprieve in a state of listlessness, or we can fill the period of our death sentence with experience – lived experience or the experience we gain from art. Art reflects, expresses, invokes and describes the ambiguity of humanity. Whatever the form of art, however realistic or however fantastical, it offers up a commentary on being alive, on the infinite messiness of humanity. Art doesn’t improve our behaviour or civilise us. Art is useless. It doesn’t clothe the poor or feed the hungry. It’s as useless as, well . . . life, but it’s precisely our awareness of the uselessness of life that makes us want to struggle to give it purpose, and to give that purpose meaning through art.
The philosopher Simone Weil wrote this: “The love of our neighbour means being able to say to him: What are you going through? It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not as a specimen from a social category labelled ‘unfortunate’ but as a man exactly as we are. To forget oneself briefly, to identify with a stranger to the point of fully recognising him or her, is to defy necessity.” Art is a way of “defying necessity”, drawing us into a heightened awareness of other people’s feelings and other people’s lives. It enables us to put ourselves in the minds, eyes, ears and hearts of other human beings.
This is a lot to digest, and there are some points I disagree with that will be addressed in a future post. For now, I will share some thoughts from a trip to the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam last summer, when it occurred to me that, perhaps, there are three primary planes across which you can assess a work of art: aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual.
An emotional assessment is about what a work of art says to the viewer, what memories it prompts him to recall, what feelings it induces. This, I suppose, is a purely subjective category. It is all about the individual, the private as opposed to the public, as Eyre indicated in his essay. I would also include in this category works that induce empathy with other human beings, another important characteristic of art that Eyre identified. Of course, empathy was a fundamental part of Isaiah Berlin's philosophy, as he thought it critical to the survival of tolerance (defined as acceptance of difference rather than as acceptance of all things as equally valid) in a liberal society. In this context, to the extent that art encourages empathy, it is essential to the Western conception of freedom, and anathema to the totalitarian regime. Perhaps this is where we can begin to answer the question: what is the purpose of art and why do we need it?
The intellectual assessment of art is a very broad category. It is, in general terms, about the ideas that constitute the work, and, more specifically, these ideas may be about style, history, philosophy, or theology. The Biblical scenes depicted in Renaissance painting come immediately to mind here, as they can be evaluated across all four of these sub-categories. I would also place much of modern art here because it seems to me to be much more about the technique and how it differs from most aesthetic movements of the past, which were about representations of reality rather than abstractions from it.
But this is just a rough outline of how I have begun to classify and analyze things. Of course no single work of art is to be bound to any particular category, and in fact most works could probably be evaluated by any of these criteria. For me, purely subjective aesthetic judgments have never been enough. I want to understand the ideas behind art so that I can defend properly the things I like and the things that I don't. There are some obvious parallels between this discussion and the broader one about moral relativism. I suppose that the debate about subjectivity and objectivity in art is a component of the larger debate between timeless, universal principles and historicist, culturally-specific values. Yes, that sounds right to me. More to come after further reflection.
