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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.
Published in General
Jim,
I’ve commented outside Ricochet as an amateur musician on this aspect of music. I found the late Romantic period of music was a crossroads between the future as ugly and the future that respects the beauty of the past. Brahms tried unsuccessfully to stem the tide of music that became increasingly self-indulgent and ugly. New for the sake of new, not new for the sake of beauty. I find the parallels with Progressivism compelling. There is so much music that has been around for centuries that so few people are able to appreciate. Modern music does not have a claim on my state of consciousness.
I know exactly what you’re talking about. We even have a museum in the city of Bellevue in Washington state, that doesn’t call itself an ‘art museum,’ they call themselves “Bellevue Arts Museum.” I like to think of it as the “Bellevue Arts and Crafts Museum.” In it, I found a lifesize nude paper mache figure swinging on a swing in perpetual motion. Eye catching, but it looked like the person who made it ought to be institutionalized. (Perhaps, not being from the NYC area, they aren’t familiar with the famous Bellevue asylum in NYC.)
The soul has ears too. You’re welcome, Mr. Dime.
This Calvin and Hobbes cartoon I think captures my thoughts on art:
We’ve missed you Mrs. Toad. Hope you and Mr. Toad and all the tadpoles are having a healthy and blessed Christmas.
Morning Ray Kujawa,
The content of our current art work is barren. Artists are not pushing to create something of beauty, and there is doubt that beauty exists other than as a personal preference, a fashion. The ability to deliniate what has depth from what is novel has been either lost, or it is claimed that there is no meaningful difference. Artists mock their audience, they say their work is not appreciated because the public is too primative. Not surprisingly, the audience has become indifferent to “artists” and their work.
In a Bleat, Lileks noted that there was a time when Bugs Bunny could play Leopold Stokowski https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt1V61SPI_w, and the reference would not be lost. Similarly, in the lyrics of “Zip”http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/paljoey/zip.htm, from the 1940 Pal Joey, references to Dali, Toscanni, Schopenhaurer, and Whistler’s mother were not lost on a good part of the audience. There are no living composers or painters which could be used in the “Simpsons” in a similar way. There are no commonly known living artists in painting, sculpture, drama, etc.
This is not to say that there are not many talented artists, as Midget Faded Rattlesnake noted, or that there are not other forms, movies, graphic novels, but what has been lost is that there is a language of beauty which exists in the hearts of most humans and that artists would seek to create that art, and would share their work with an audience for the pleasure or appreciation of the audience. It is also true that there are delightlfully talented living artists one can find on youtube, and that more than any other time in history, a person can have the work or all the past great artists in their home and on the screen in front of them, but this only highlights how dead our current art world is. A recent PBS bio of Bing Crosby noted that there were 50 million listeners for the Crosby radio show each week! One could say that that was a quirk of the time, WWII, a new technology, but jump back to the1770’s Mozart and his sister,as children, could pack the house with tickets at exhorbitant prices, in the major cities of Europe. Because we are so atomized and confused, not only will there not be another Bing Crosby but even if there were another Mozart, he would not reach more than a sliver of an audience.
People do this now– it’s just that way more people are able to afford to go to an expensive show, rather than there being a relatively small list of places that charge a lot to see a show. Would some random guy in the country have a clue who Kid Mozart was, any more than I can name this years hot pop band?
It’s like comparing “stuff that has lasted from the past” to “everything available now”– there’s a lot of stuff that didn’t last.
Your point is probably valid, but Stokowski is the wrong example to illustrate it. With his psuedo-religous light shows and Disney collaboration, Stokowski was a bit of a panderer and a pop culture figure.
Jame’s abiding point is that Stowkowski, Fantasia, and the like, are middlebrow icons, not highbrow. Or maybe, that is your point: there used to be an aspirational subculture, the middlebrow, that aped the highbrow and provided a ladder from low to high for those with the desire and aptitude for it.
So Trans-Siberian Orchestra?
Morning Foxfier and Fredosphere,
I wasn’t exactly clear about the current differences. In including Stokowski, Tocanini, Dali, Bing and Mozart, I was not suggesting that these examples were of similar artistic character, but that they were popular enough to be widely known and that there are no living artists whose work or fame is similar. It is true that there are artists and celebrities who have devoted followers, but none so broad as either Bing or Mozart. Time will sort out what is lasting. If we were to ask ourselves what are the five most important public sculptures, musical compositions, dramas created by contemporary artists in the last 50 years, I don’t think we can give an answer. I have been exhibiting sculpture for 48 years and I cannot tell you who are the top five living sculptors. There are many people who can sculpt as brilliantly as Rodin but either they don’t know what to say, or because we are so confused about the idea of beauty the artist is left grasping at any new attempt, and as a result the content of modern art is empty.
Jim-
the point of my objection is that you didn’t show that Mozart actually was all that widely known, you showed that someone who is still famous sold a lot of tickets when he was young. Since you’d need to show he was widely known to show how Bing’s very wide popularity wasn’t a result of a technological burp, it’s really important to making your point of being widely known as being a major part of great art.
Even then, the argument is weakened because both radio in the 30s and concert halls of major European cities in the middle of the 1700s are major bottlenecks– it’s like saying there’s nobody who’s an amazing painter now, because they’re not repainting entire sections of the Vatican.
There may be overlap between “was famous when people had been alive in their lifetime” and “made great art,” but they’re not the same. Just because someone can’t name a great (X type of artist) doesn’t mean that there isn’t one– for all we know in a hundred years they’ll have realized that digital sculpting is “really” the same as sculpting with marble, clay or bronze, and they’ll be bemoaning how we didn’t realize (video game artist) as the living legend he was.
Uh, no, not that bad.
It’s self-evident that art is a form of communication. What raises the communication to the level of art is the subject matter and how it involves the person at multiple levels of human understanding, and especially whether it uplifts the human consciousness rather than degrades it. Art becomes the visual working out of philosophy using visual or audible means.
The artist may have great intensity for the images and sound that burns in their head, but they may never know whether their state of consciousness will resonate with anyone else. But great artists, as well as great orators, have the ability to move back and forth in their state of consciousness and persevere through difficulty in the attempt to make their efforts understandable by others.
Question for anyone who cares to answer it : What 2 to 30 paintings, sculptures or pieces of music do you love most ?
Movie music starts to sound all the same after awhile. But composers are taking the bait. My criticism of a couple of recently composed symphonies is that they sound like movie music.
I have a perspective on this that might be interesting. This smacks of Richard Wagner, the composer from the 19th century, taken to the nth degree. Mere music wasn’t enough for Wagner. He was on a mission to remake opera into a huge extravaganza encompassing everything. In the process, music was denigrated into having to serve other forms of art, instead of being sufficient in itself. Though Brahms collected music scores of Wagner, he felt that Wagner’s music would ultimately contribute to making music worse over time.
Evening Ray Kujawa,
Concerning our times, Daniel Dennet from “Intuition Pumps”, “When an artistic tradition reaches the point where literally “anything goes”, those who want to be creative have a problem: there are no fixed rules to rebel against, no complacent expectations to shatter, nothing to subvert, no background against which to create something that is both surprising and yet meaningful.” (also) “It helps to know the tradition if you want to subert it.” So the problem of our times is meaning, our art lacks meaning. We don’t know what our meaning is as humans, that is if we have any meaning, how can an artist know what to say that has meaning. To get attention some artist present transgressive images and to push this envelope the artist must venture into the area of disgust.
Evening Foxfier,
It is possible that we are unaware of the great artists and their work. I think that this might have been more likely in the past. In this media world singers like Paul Potts do not remain hidden https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k08yxu57NA. Given the self-publishing media, few artists are without public platforms. Michelangelo and Rodin and Mozart were thought by their contemporaties to be great, their skills were widely known, if some of our game writers are in their league we would know their names. Similarly, in earlier times the public knew which were the most outstanding work of their times, and I claim that our times are so dead that we can not even name landmark work of our times
Jim-
now you’re making yet another argument, that if folks are great then these days of course we’ll know their names– which is only slightly related to the idea that if someone is great, they’re going to be very popular.
We have tons of artists whose work is widely known, from Kinkade galleries in random malls all over the place to non-movie fanatics that can recognize a composer from a short clip of his work; we have folks who will go to a movie for no other reason than who the director is, in genres ranging from animated to whatever you call the stuff Tim Burton does. We have music concerts that sell more tickets in a year than historically famous folks sold in their entire lifetime, and all of this happens in a time when the Historic Greats are still around as competition.
You’re making the unstated, unsupported assumption that we’d recognize “what people in 200 years will think is great art.” Heck, good luck defining who gets to count as “we.” About the only thing you’d probably get agreement on is that the stuff that gets supported and sold as “great art” is trying to break Sturgeon’s law by lowering the percentage of not-crud below .001%. Even then, good luck getting agreement on what portion is the not-crud.
I know that there are lists floating around of folks who, when they lived at the time of currently-recognized greats, were calling them hacks and worse. Why on earth would our time be any different, other than that we get to see what happens?
It’s been observed by others before that Richard Wagner, had he lived in the 20th century, would have been a movie director. Wagner was basically the Oliver Stone of 19th century Germany.
The problem with art today is that it has no standards. Anything created now qualifies as art. Any person now qualifies as an artist.
I found this to be true after noticing in my home town, a place supposedly with a burgeoning arts community, how bad most of the art is there.
What really drove it home was when I began asking local artists, “When did you become an artist?” I tell the truth when I say none could answer with any specificity.
What I found was, to be an artist, one need not even create a piece of art, rather only declare oneself to be an artist. It’s that cheap these days.
Then I tried to determine if there is something one must do to be an artist – something one must accomplish to be in this fraternity with Rembrandt and Van Gogh. There is nothing. Not a test. Not an application. Not even the requirement to finish a piece of art. Today I can sit in the company of the masters, tomorrow I’ll decide to be a barista at Starbucks. Same effort.
“Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.”
TOM STOPPARD, “Artist Descending a Staircase”
Marilyn Vos Savant hit Picasso and the modern art world right between the eyes in a column dated October 15th, 2000. She compared the whole phenomenon to the “Emperor’s New Clothes.” It surprised me because she tends to steer clear of controversy.
However, I can’t find the column. (I know the date because I found a mention of it on the web.)
If you can find it, it’s worth reading.
Re comment # 111
How psychic !
After going back and clicking again on the second link The Lopez provides (comment 43) I just happened to be thinking that Walldorf’s sculpture of the police woman urinating isn’t carved out of wood, or chiseled out of stone, probably because the artist doesn’t have the skills he would need to do that. I can’t get over stone made to look like folds of cloth, or like flesh pressed by fingers, or like a head of windblown hair.
This is beautiful. I don’t think it reflects all that art is but it is an excellent description.
I have a problem with the subject matter of “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp”. The painting upsets me. I’m not aware of any uplift in my consciousness after looking at it. I don’t consider it art. Does anyone agree?
Also, I wish I could find what Marilyn Vos Savant wrote. (I looked around.) But I’ll certainly now be reading Wolfe’s The Painted Word.
Morning Ansonia,
The wikipedia link suggests that this was commissioned by the Guild of Surgeons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anatomy_Lesson_of_Dr._Nicolaes_Tulp It is a more creative version of the usual guild painting. http://www.wga.hu/art/b/bol/guild.jpg
I would say this is art. I don’t expect the artist to be visual equivalent to an inspirational speaker. It is the nature of visual art to tend toward darker more dramatic images. Joy, inspiration, contentment are human emotions difficult to represent in an image. Dante’s Inferno was easier to illustrate than Paradiso.
Good morning Jim Beck,
Thank you so much for the links. Who did the much less interesting painting at the second link ?
Afternoon Ansonia,
The title of the work is “Governors of Wine Merchant Guild” painted by Ferdinand Bol. I had not heard of him and found the image amid ‘Dutch Guild paintings’ images. Even these dull guild paintings are better than the current photographs of surgical teams.
Here are a couple of my favorite pieces by Umberto Boccioni:http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7upq6vNw81rc1cdoo1_1280.jpg, named Unique Forms of Continuity in Space 1913 and http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/fnart/art/20th/sculpture/boccioni01.jpg, named Development of a bottle in Space 1912.
Re comment 118
Thank you. I like both Boccioni pieces, but especially the second one.
I run hot and cold on Whitacre – some of his stuff I can’t stand, other pieces I can’t get enough of. The clip you linked to was from “Lux Aurumque”. “Lux Aurumque” is one of his pieces I can’t get enough of. I could listen to it several times over with new delight each time – and I have.
Really, what would be the point of all that pretense? It honestly doesn’t cross your mind that some people just get off on the way classical music sounds? That they don’t have to pretend?
Some of us find within classical music some of the most intense pleasures life has to offer, approaching or even surpassing the pleasures of sex. That not every person in the world is wired or habituated to be like this makes sense to me, but that we who say we love it are all “faking it” all the time makes no sense.