Why Art is Scary
Well, who am I to argue? What does art mean in a
democracy? It's actually more of a central question to American life (and, by
extension, global modern life) than would seem obvious at first glance. I've
written here before--and felt for a very long time--that one of the great
stories of the 20th century was the transformation of American culture into a
truly democratic culture--and its subsequent (and consequent) overwhelming of
the rest of the world.
Of course, that
culture is considered grounds for the wailing and gnashing of teeth, if not the
neutron bomb, Ask any adherent of the fine arts community, and chances are
you'll be presented with America as a vast dark plain littered with refuse, with
a few lighted cabins perched precariously thereon. (all right, I'm being unfair.
But it is a frequent attitude.) And if you ask Samuel Huntington about American
culture, and he'll talk about this fragile vase in deadly peril of being
smashed.
In a country where musicians
fill stadiums, where drama and comedy are part of nearly everyone's life every
day, where artists are our aristocracy of choice--dim? fragile? Whiskey Tango
Foxtrot?
Of course now I'm being coy.
They think the stuff we spray-paint on the sky--the Britney Spears songs, Adam
Sandler movies and G.I.Joe comic books--are embarrassingly bad, humiliating on
the world stage, and indicative of our moral laxity, all-consuming greed, and
general lack of breeding. Can I blame them? No. Do I want to defend these works
of so-called art? Not really.
But here's the
difference: these works are treated as pollutants of our culture rather than our
culture itself. These are not bad art--they're anti-art. This always seemed a
stupid semantic shift to me--and I always thought that, chastened by things like
the 1903 Armory show of modern art and the riots over the performance of
Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, of ever using officially the word 'bad' in talking
about art. What, pray tell, is wrong with standing up and say Gershwin good,
Yanni bad--Godard good, Bruckheimer bad--de Kooning good, Kinkade bad? Why go
through horrible conceptual confusion by saying that Norman Rockwell is not art
at all, or better yet, condemn whole genres like musical comedies or comic books
are not art at all--only to agonizingly retract by inches over the succeeding
generations? The 'art/nonart' distinction kept on forcing people to come up
with more tortured and involved definitions of 'art' that involved things--like
artist's intent, or social/economic context--that a moment's serious reflection
(he said) would make it obvious should never enter into it. So
why?
I realized a while back that it
all had to do with a concept worked into definitions of culture and art that I
not only never agreed with, but never really even comprehended: that of the
Best.
Here's where my University of
Chicago training comes in: I was taught there that the only way to approach a
work of art was on its own terms. This seemed both self-evident and exquisitely
satisfying--so much so that, from our Olympian Hyde Park heights, we could look
on other systems of criticism (New Criticism? Structuralism?
Deconstruction?Freudian or Marxist criticism? faugh!) as the muddled and
wrong-headed attempts they were. Of course, it wasn't simple: one had to figure
out what the work's own terms were, and then figure out how the elements worked
within that structure--but no one said life was
easy.
What this did, though, is create
a multi-valued way of evaluating a work of art. What was at work in
The Golden
Bowl was something different from what was at
work in War and
Peace-- or
Tristram
Shandy. To say that one was greater than the
other seemed pointless. And so i comfortably felt for the longest
time.
The point, though is that
multivalent answers can be extraordinary unsatisfying--and non-reassuring, when
one is seeking self-definition and self-reinforcement. Here's the rub: While
America was demolishing aristocracy and enshrining egalitarianism with
considerable pride and arrogance, the hunger for the the things an aristocracy
provided still remained. In an aristocratic culture, things were easy: beauty,
elegance, style, taste, dignity, politeness were all what the nobility said they
were, how they dressed, spoke and behaved, and what art they patronized. Throw
that all away, and how are you to know if what you're wearing is good or bad? If
you are elegant or in-? How will you know if you are better than your neighbor?
Or, more charitably, how will you know if you are better than you were
before?
It's this impulse that creates
the hunger for the Best. Call it elitist or bourgeois or neurotic all you want:
the hunger is real. What good is all this art stuff without a set of values? How
will we define ourselves without touchstones, criteria,
metrics?
Those who feel dependent on the idea
of the Best feel--and make the argument that a multivalent set of criteria is no
different from having none at all. They feel (and bellow) that multi-culturalism
is non-culturalism. And insofar as it does not give them a Best, they're right:
multiculturalism makes aristocracy pretty much impossible. And it does no good
to say that the multivalent Chicago School approach does set forth an ideal, if
a very abstract one, of appropriateness, of self-faithfulness: it still does not
tell us whether we're better for preferring Theodore Dreiser to Sinclair Lewis,
or the other way around.
And this
unfulfilled hunger for the Best is what has largely made the shift from good vs.
bad art to art vs. non-art, I think. In a culture which is a mess of upper and
lower class confusion, of popular art and elite art flopping around and
switching places (Mark Twain is a vulgar humorist! No! SHAZAM! He's a Great
Novelist! Jazz is unbelievably low-class--or is it sophisticated?) The hunger
for the best seeks to redefine Culture prescriptively, to make it automatically
and be definition Good, Better, and Best. Let's exclude all that confusing
popular stuff altogether--and then American Culture will look like the Great
(Aristocratic) Cultures of old--so we can be Just As Good as they were--if not
Better.
There are those, though, for
whom the Best is just not all that important. Whether they are those who are
completely at home in the truly popular democratic American culture--or those
for whom Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité is seared into the
muscles of the heart--or those who have taken the teachings of the world's
spiritual masters seriously--they don't feel the need for the Best. Does a dog
have the Buddha nature?
The joys of a
multivalent culture are, in fact great: if you don't worry about the Best
Guitarist, you can enjoy Jimi Hendrix and Leo Kottke and Andrès Segovia all
on their own terms; you can read Thomas Mann and Raymond Chandler and James
Joyce and P.G. Wodehouse with scarcely a twinge of concern; You can look at the
graphic styles of Jack Kirby, Gene Colan, Joe Kubert and Al Williamson and just
soak in their own particular essences, without saying who's Best. Trying to
cramp down all the different dreams and disciplines at work in the millions of
humanity's artists seems to these people (ooh! ooh ! me me me!) to make about as
much sense as declaring green to be better than purple or N to be better than H.
It does make adolescence harder. And
it does make participation in that culture less therapeutic. And it does make
things like Beauty harder to
define.
But nobody said life was easy.
Nope: it's not easy--but it is wonderful.
Posted: Saturday - December 16, 2006 at 12:37 AM