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Is It True that “the Whole Point of Art Is to Be Provocative”
[The above quoted phrase came from Fred Cole’s post on “The Interview,” which is otherwise excellent.]
Isn’t that the stupid excuse that leftists use in producing bad (or good) art that is strictly political in nature?
The whole point of art is to express — to express one’s heart, an insight, an epiphany (especially) — and to create. The best use of art is to ennoble and to add to mankind’s collection of many and varied interpretations of what life on this earthly plane is.
If in the process of artistic expression the final result happens to provoke, then the modern thinking (sometimes rightly) advises that one proceed even against furious opposition. If there is a societal value around art I think that the ennobling impulse should be given precedence over simple provocation.
Can we drop all the left-wing perversions of our culture and our values. Art shouldn’t be used in a decent society to destroy, to wreck. If it is then it shouldn’t be supported simply because it’s art. This is nihilism.
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P, I love Roger Scruton. Such a clear thinker, isn’t he?
Good art expresses eloquently an idea worth expressing. Eloquence and beauty are not the same thing, but they often walk hand in hand.
It is sad that contemporary society has so few ideas worth expressing beautifully.
Concerning art that is shocking, Michelangelo’s “The Last Supper” was found to be too raw in its nudity, and the figures which were all nude were draped soon after Michelangelo’s death. http://www.archweb.it/arte/artisti_M/Michelangelo_G/images/Michelangelo%20-%20The%20Last%20Judgment.JPG. In “Escape From Reason” Schaeffer notes that Fouquet about 1450 painted a Madonna using the king’s mistress, Agnes Sorel, as Mary, and everyone in the court knew that the king’s mistress was the model. Fouquet painted Mary with a plainly bare breast, not a nursing Madonna. http://expositions.bnf.fr/fouquet/images/3/f145.jpg Manet’s “Olympia” http://cdn2.all-art.org/impressionism/manet/40.jpg was a scandal at the time as was Sargent’s “Madame X”. http://gengrayoncanvas.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/sargent_madame_x_big.jpg
Many of the symphonies we currently consider great were harshly criticized at the time.
Not just the Impressionists react and resist earlier art forms. Camille Paglia has suggested that art has cycled from sacred to sensual repeatedly.
What puzzles me is why art forms which once had life and prompted conversations are now so dead; painting, sculpture, poetry, music, drama, and novels have ceased to spark our imagination. That all of these verbal and non-verbal forms of communications have faded at the same time is also a curiosity.
Aaron
If a work is open to reasonable interpretations which the author did not intend, then that author has failed in communication. He may not claim credit for interpretations he did not anticipate and encourage through the work.
Agree with other points in your post, but split with you here. Moby Dick has been the subject of a boatload of interpretations that I’m pretty sure the author didn’t anticipate but I don’t think Melville failed.
Having known many artists, and visited many modern art museums, I just don’t think what most of them do is “art”. Crafts, maybe. But not “art”.
By craft I don’t mean goldsmith and masonry type of crafts. More like, kindergarten type of crafts. The sort of stuff you do when you’re bored in your office and are playing around with a couple of paperclips. Voila! ART!
Or maybe it seems that way to me because so many of them are just so…talent-less.
At some point, you have to ask yourself the question: if anyone can do what you just did there, then is it really “art”? Talent has to be in there somewhere.
Go to a modern art museum and try to figure out if the garbage can standing in the corner is actually a garbage can, or an art piece. I dare you!
I know it when I see it. I neither see nor hear much art these days.
Which is why I referred to “reasonable” interpretations. ;)
Even then, I grant some leeway. Generally, though, a skilled author limits the range of reasonable interpretations with precise words and imagery, just as a skilled musician knows what emotions he is invoking.
Most interpretations heard in a typical Liberal Arts class are wishful thinking.
I think real art requires two elements: 1) an idea worth expressing — i.e., it speaks to something universal and transcendent or otherwise meaningful about the human condition and 2) it is skillfully executed. So much of modern art misses on both accounts that it does not speak well of moderns.
In the world of music, I agree with Prager that movie scores are among the best music produced. In the visual and written arts, I know many uncompensated amateurs who do credit to the form. My sister, Trink, is quite a poet, for example.
Art can be whatever it wants to be. If some untalented charlatan wants to peddle something as execrable as “Piss Christ” and he can find a similar moron to part with cold hard cash for such a thing, they have my blessing. (Pun intended) As long as my tax dollars and those of my other unwilling fellow citizens is not involved, Willing Seller and Willing Buyer can wallow in all the “artistic” filth they want.
If the point of art is to provoke, then Al Sharpton is Rembrandt.
I don’t know anything about art but, in Fouquet’s picture of a Madonna and child , the bloodless pallor of the woman, and the way she seems to be looking down more at her own exposed breast than with any tenderness at the baby she is holding , makes me wonder if the artist didn’t mean to suggest an imposter in Mary’s place. Then there’s the dark blue and lurid red angels in the background. They look like demons. Baby Jesus looks coldly indifferent to everyone’s fate. And at what is he pointing? I’m thinking the Piss Christ artist doesn’t have the talent to be compellingly disturbing.
The point of postmodern art is to be “provocative”. That’s not the point of actual art.
My teachers, back when I was in art school, asked us why we didn’t see any great painters or sculptors around making great works any more. We all sat looking confused for a minute then he put it simply:
They’re working for Pixar, Tippet and Winston Studios. They’re painting epic backgrounds for movies and creating monstrosities that boggle the mind. Who do you think comes up with “The Incredibles” and “Interstellar” or the crazy things you see in “Alien” or “Star Wars”? They’re participating in the latest form of artistic communication
The real point of Art is to create. To take something that is inside your soul and transfer it to paper or clay, music or words. If your hope is to cause controversy to make money then by all means, do so. You will be forgotten. It may take time, but you will.
I see people drudge up that old piece (I won’t dignify it with a name) and think, “Oh great. Somebody is dragging that old sorry thing out of that trash heap and suddenly we’re talking about it again.”
The best thing I think we can do for that garbage is ignore it. Somebody will waste money on it and the paper will fade as light and time take there eventual toll and nobody will care any more.
Good art is good and always will be. When you see trash like that, Google Carvaggio or Bernini. Look at them and marvel. Sit a while and think: These were done hundreds of years ago. Where will that sickly yellow photo be in 300 years?
It will be dust.
Morning The Lopez,
You have a good point that there are just as many creative minds as ever, but that they now work in animation or gaming, or 3 D printing. Also Alien and Harry Potter are as wild as Bosch’s “The Garden of Early Delights”. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9796727/the-garden-of-earthly-delights.jpg “Breaking Bad” maybe our “Lear” or “Antigone”, but isn’t “Breaking Bad” the exception? Doesn’t most of modern art leave us numb or indifferent?
From “How modern art became trapped by its urge to shock”http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30343083: Modernist art was a reaction against fake emotion, and the comforting cliches of popular culture. The intention was to sweep away the pseudo-art that cushions us with sentimental lies and to put reality…in the place of it. …there can be no authentic creation…which is not in some way a ‘challenge’ to the complacencies of our public culture. Art must give offense…against the bourgeois taste for the conforming and the comfortable, which are simply other names for kitsch and cliche. If the public has become so immune to shock that only a dead shark in formaldehyde will awaken a brief spasm of outrage then the artist must produce a dead shark in formaldehyde-this, at least is an authentic gesture.
Perhaps my concerns about the sterile dead nature of modern culture are just the mutterings of an old man, but it wasn’t 50 years ago that middle class folks met to learn about the “Great Books”. Perhaps, as the above article inadvertently suggests, modern art has become just shallow gestures designed to awaken me from the sleep of my bourgeois life. The modern artist thinks I need to confront the emptiness of my shopkeepers existence, and the artist will reawaken authentic feelings in me. Rubbish. So the artist wants to school us?
Citing shock-schlock artists as representative of current art is akin to citing Howard Stern as representative of current philosophical and political discourse. They are the exception, and the only way they seek to be exceptional is by being the exception. You don’t have to be Jackson Pollock to become famous. You just have to be the first guy who ever thought to make “art” by throwing paint at a canvas. The second guy who did it – well, you’ve never heard of him. And it really isn’t “art” at all.
“Art” is a process of communicating ideas and emotions, just like speech. A bad speech is not a condemnation of speech itself. Bad art is not a condemnation of art itself. And if someone wants to give a speech that consists of nothing but incoherent grunts and screams, it isn’t “speech” at all.
The best thing one can do when confronted with incoherent grunts and screams is to walk the other way. If some people want to crowd around it and congratulate each other for understand how “original” and “creative” it is, well, it’s good to know who those people are so that you can avoid them whenever possible.
I never saw The Garden of Earthly Delights before, and just paused, for a minute, on another computer on which I was listening to someone named Spenser talk about it on UTube . If I knew how, I’d provide a link to Gustave Dior’s illustrations of Dante’s Inferno. They moved me to read Anthony Esolen’s translation of that work. {The translation that came with the illustrations was dull, but Esolen’s is very vivid.}
Please keep this discussion going with more links to unsettling paintings. It’s not getting my post Christmas house clean but I suddenly don’t care.
Back to Spenser.
A brilliant suggestion. Using the modern approach there is simply no way to know.
This is what we have come to. Much of the art world is based on fraud. Not fraud from the “artist” so much as fraud from the art “elites” who praise various artists and their creations as great art and worthy of support. So much support that we have childish pieces all over the country in prominent public spaces, paid for by government money.
Across the board most of the elites of our society are retrograde in their effect and contributions.
Nothing I write is artful, Frank.
Okay, so I have to respond to this. First, a definition:
pro·voc·a·tive
prəˈväkədiv/ adjective
causing annoyance, anger, or another strong reaction, especially deliberately.
Okay, so yeah, I stand by what I said 100%. And when I said it, I didn’t have all your anti-examples in mind. The reason that installing a urinal as an art display is stupid is because it isn’t provocative. It’s just a stunt.
The sentiment I expressed isn’t some kind of modern leftist conceit. It’s a very old tradition. Someone above mentioned Socrates. How did Socrates die? Forced suicide, heath by hemlock. Why? Because what he said was so provocative.
My mind goes to masterpieces of literature. Tell me 1984 or Animal Farm aren’t art. Tell me they’re not provocative. There is not non-provocative form of Animal Farm. That’s the whole point. If art doesn’t provoke something, why the hell bother? You’re just making episodes of Webster.
There are no rules about what art is and what is art — it seems. Not rules that can be written down, anyway. But, we have a responsibility to build and support a good society. Artists should take part in this endeavor or otherwise keep their work to themselves.
Do you want to change your sentence to remove the word “whole” — “often art is provocative” — perhaps. Have you no refined sensibilities that art can uplift — or do you only acknowledge art that pokes you? Have you never looked at a piece of art or listened to music that soothes or edifies?
Says you.
Exactly! Very nice.
I’m sure some people out there found Webster soothing.
Of course, it’s provocative — it’s the “definition” of provocative. And it’s a stunt.
Nothing anyone has said here implies that art can’t be provocative. The question is if it’s the “whole point.”
I’ve come to the conclusion that a major downfall of moderns is conflating personal with private. One’s sexual relationship, for example, is a personal matter. One’s marriage is public, not private, and, as such, either serves to support a good society — or not.
Similarly, if the artist, out of some personal affinity for the image, feels compelled to sculpt a policewoman squatting to urinate, that’s his or her business. However, the artist and the museum curator might wish to think twice before offering that particular vulgarity for public consumption, no matter how skillfully rendered. It does nothing to elevate or improve society, but rather only serves as a public display of artistic incontinence.
Art is beautiful, if it is not beautiful then it is bad art or failed art or maybe not art. Unfortunately there is a lot of stuff that is not art that people would like to consider art, they are wrong.
Art can be provocative, like Goya’s “Saturn devouring his children”http://www.usc.edu/schools/annenberg/asc/projects/comm544/library/images/165.jpg, which hung in Goya’s dining room. Goya may have wanted to shock his guests, or he may have wanted to laugh at his own mortality and not provoke guests. If provocation becomes the main reason to create, that reason always leads to the waste land we are in. From “Human Accomplishment” by Charles Murray, quoting composer, Arnold Schoinberg, “those who compose because they want to please others, and have audiences in mind, are not real artists. They are not the kind of men who are driven to say something whether or not there exists one person who likes it, even if they themselves dislike it…They are more or less skillful entertainers who would renounce composing if they did not find listeners.” Murray comments that Schoenberg’s “contempt for the audience could not be plainer.
Larry3435 is much closer to the core of what makes art profound. Art is communication. The artist is illuminating the ideas, sounds, or images that are burning in his imagination. The intensity of the images are so great that the artist will spend hours polishing, reworking, refining the image. By exposing what fires the artist’s heart, profound and moving art reveals the nature of man, or man’s attempt to deal with his fate. The artist hopes his audience will share his enthusiasm, he is not wanting to preach to them.
When artists become aesthetic Al Sharptons, tut tuting our collective artistic stupidity, the audience will tell them to sod off. Or when the artist noting the lowness of our brow wants to provoke us out of our patheic state, we, paraphrasing Dick Cheney, can suggest that the artist go provoke himself, and we can hope that artists will stop wanting to improve us.
1) Howard Stern is pretty representative of the current “philosophical and political discourse”.
2) You don’t have to cite shock-artists at all. All you have to do is go to a modern art museum to make the same arguments.