Why You Hate Art (You know you do.)
Americans, the vast majority, are not merely indifferent to art; they have an antipathy to it for various reasons. This essay will attempt to chronicle some of those reasons:
1.
In the interest of fairness, I will immediately concede that a good deal of the problem has been caused by artists, critics, and curators intentionally alienating the public. The Romantics fostered the idea of the artist as misunderstood genius, and ever since then, art has had its role in the avant-garde as being subversive of the status quo. This led to a great deal of originality and creativity in early modernism from Impressionism to Expressionism to Cubism and Abstraction, but in the 1960's a combination of causes changed the status quo. A vast number of people, if not the majority, began identifying with the avant-garde, seeing themselves as liberated from their bourgeois upbringing. This brought about a substantial increase in the number of artists and a competition to capture the attention of the public. The "fifteen minutes of fame" phenomenon, coined by one of the early masters of the mixed media of art and public relations (his art was about the culture of fame, publicity and commercialism), has proliferated so that recent shows with eviscerated animals or the performance piece of a recorded sex act between artist and collector is intended to shock the public. One doesn’t need to see it in person; the publicity has subsumed the art.
To continue, in fairness, to mention the role of the art establishment (for, as always the anti-establishment has become the establishment) in alienating the public from art, I must concede that the role of the public in defining and validating art is something that has been noted, predicted, and cause for concern. Later, we will treat the former role of religion, royalty, and aristocracy in establishing culture and how this form of patronage has been disappearing, particularly in America. The pre-existing long term trend has been moving away from the unique and original in art, the integrity of which generated its own aura, according to Walter Benjamin in his seminal essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.(1936), to the dependence on the audience, the public, for validation, giving rise to the growing importance of the reproduction or copy. The question of whether technology drives history is unsettled, like the chicken and the egg: does the means of production and reproduction precede the need for it? We will also touch on the role of Consumerism in generating the hatred of art which I claim is endemic in our society.
In effect, the knife cuts both ways. The public is pandered to through the mass media, the desire for and understanding of the unique and original, which is an educated taste, even connoisseurship, declines and all this is embraced by artists, particularly Post-Modern artists, who practice, quite often parody. The inherent risk in parody is that it so often doesn’t transcend, but is instead mistaken for its target.
Marcel Duchamp is considered by some as the precursor, even the father of Post-Modernism. He is perhaps best remembered for placing a urinal in an art exhibit – even signing it. This was what he called a “readymade,” a mass produced, utilitarian item placed within the context of art. He himself, and those who follow in his footsteps, define this as “anti-art.” This was the genesis of the trend which dominates the art world today. Post-Modernism is the triumph of anti-art. (see The Triumph of Anti-Art,Thomas McEvilley, McPherson & Co.2005). As McEvilley points out in his book, the prefix “anti” can mean either “counter” or opposed to” or both. Yet, when throwing out a term like “anti-art,” it is conceivable that even the artists, those at the top of the art pyramid as represented by museum and galleries and auction prices for contemporary work, also hate art.
It has been noted by certain philosophers, such as Hegel in his dialectical theory (synthesis, antithesis, synthesis) that opposites exist in relation to each other and therefore are close. Revolutions take on the characters of the societies that gave rise to them. The Russian Revolution re-created a feudal society under the party system. The French Revolution created as much spectacle in the public square as the Royal Court had at the palace. The American Revolution was a product of the English Enlightenment; it was an experiment in rationalism. It is no coincidence that the movement of art away from its emotional, sensuous, pleasure giving, non-verbal character and towards the polemical, intellectual, and political has been led by American artists. In his book, The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe makes a correlation between this rationalist, verbal trend in art and its becoming a subject of study at the university, where only words are ultimately trusted. This, in his opinion is the subversion of the artistic in favor of the critical or curatorial function.
This too can be traced back to Duchamp whose readymades shifted the art process from production to designation or assignment. This is the curatorial role. No wonder curators are flattered. Duchamp, incidentally, became an American citizen and found recognition in this country where the soil was prepared for high art to go anti-art due to the indifference, or even innate antagonism, of the public and the well-spring of rationality in a polyglot society which relies on mutual assent for any cohesion.
There is a difference, however, between the considered, informed skepticism, even cynicism, of the artist or “anti-artist” who, by challenging certain conventions, is putting “art” in quotation marks, and the unifnformed, visceral, and highly unconscious repulsion that the general public experiences around it. The artist is engaged in expanding the limits of knowledge or experience, just like the scientist. Sometimes this experimentation can appear stupid, or rash, or sloppy. In fact most experiments fail. Even though I make this concession, it was not the art establishment that first alienated the American public. The American antipathy towards art precedes the modern era.
Let us look at some, if not all, of the philosophies, which have prevailed on this continent in the past 350 years.
2.
The Puritan fathers distrusted not only art, but also all adornment. “Beauty is vain,” as Proverbs 31:30 has it. Even the singing of hymns was
banned and only Psalms and versified Scripture could be sung in a very plain manner. The organ and the singing of hymns did not enter the Protestant churches in America until the 19th century.
This fear of idolatry can be found in other pietistic religious sects, even to this day. Paradoxically, even as some worldly attractions were
shunned, and pleasure itself mistrusted, the idea of material prosperity as a sign of God's favor is part of our same Puritan heritage. As Jonathan Edwards, the evangelist whose preaching helped inaugurate the ongoing revival known as the Great Awakening, wrote in his book Charity and Its Fruits (1738), “But if you place your happiness in God, in glorifying Him and in serving Him by doing good, in this way above all others you will promote your wealth and honor and pleasure here below, and obtain hereafter a crown of…glory and pleasure forevermore at God’s right hand.” Prosperity could be both a sign of Divine favor and predestination and a channel of blessing, but not a conduit for the ostentatious display of wealth and power through art such as characterized the estates, the castles and the churches of Europe. The purchase or commissioning of art would have seemed immodest if not idolatrous to the Puritan mind.
3.
The succession of governing philosophies in America is like layers in geology or archaeology. The old may be superseded by the new but there is a residual effect. From the middle of the nineteenth century, a new philosophy conquered America, again from England. This was called “Utilitarianism.” It was first promulgated by Jeremy Bentham. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a Utilitarian as “one who considers utility the standard of whatever is good for man.” Utility then, according to Bentham, is that property in a thing “whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness (all this in the present case comes to the same thing).” He later added the words “profit, convenience, and emolument” (remuneration).
The problem is that words, such as “pleasure, “ may mean something completely different to different people or different times. Bentham was a Materialist who regarded anything which could not be measured as illusory. Thus he repudiated any kind of spiritual pleasure such as that afforded by art or music. Nothing was inherently a source of pleasure, and therefore good; it was only so in that it provided some profit or convenience or opportunity for such. As his successor, William Stanley Jevons, so succinctly put it, “Value depends entirely on utility.” It was the perfect philosophy for the Industrial Revolution.
“Yankee practicality" is still admired, which is why so many who have been materially prospered would think nothing of purchasing a boat or a
snowmobile, or a second snowmobile, or spending lavishly on their home. It is perceived as practical, ingenious, utilitarian, whereas a work of art is not. Of course, if art is tied in to the idea of virtue, as happens with increasing frequency through art auctions for the benefit of worthy causes, it is then redeemed, its associated guilt neutralized.
There is hope on the horizon. The 2002 Nobel Prize for economics was shared by an Israeli psychologist, Daniel Kahneman. His startling
breakthrough: Money can’t buy happiness. Finally, a scientific negation of Utilitarianism. In other words, with all the quantification of goods and
services, the question remains, What is the amount of happiness that it brings? The conclusion: being poor is depressing, but if the basic
necessities are covered, no amount of money will make you happier. Some of their experiments also reveal some anomalies in human nature. For example, the vast majority of people do not make decisions based on a clear assessment of risk versus reward (pleasure vs. pain). They are far more risk averse, much more afraid of losing what they have than desirous of gaining more. And why shouldn’t they be, when we now know that once a certain threshold is passed, that no amount more will increase happiness. Yet many of the most successful have taken more risk and have courted failure. The Constitution does not vouchsafe happiness for us, only the right to pursue it.
4.
It is my theory that a nation’s capacity for art appreciation is closely tied to its capacity for meditation. It is not even necessary that the majority practice a form of meditation, just that there is an element of society which does, and that this meditative group is seen as part of the fabric of society. This is certainly the case in Asian cultures, such as Japan with its practitioners of Zen Buddhism. The tea ceremony is the cultivated practice of appreciating the tea, the teacup, the teahouse in all of their aspects. China had its tradition of court officials retiring or going into exile in seclusion to practice painting, poetry, and calligraphy.
In France the Gross Domestic Product of Meditation is spread more evenly among the public. Each region, for example, produces its own distinctive wine or cheese based on its own particular climate and soil. The subtle character of such a wine or such a cheese requires sufficient time not only to produce it, but also to enjoy it. As this time is allocated for a long, leisurely meal, people’s taste becomes refined, and this refinement is transmitted through the culture. Taste itself becomes a meditation. Throughout Europe, playwrites such as Vaslav Havel and writers such as Andre Malraux have shuttled from the arts and letters to government and back – and not merely to write their memoirs. Plato’s idea of the philosopher king is still alive.
I believe that this connection between the gross nation output of meditation and the net appreciation of art has to do with the perception and
definition of time, which is culturally based. The culture which values time more than possessions will take the time to fall in love with a work of art, and not a mere infatuation.
When I mentioned in my theory that not all need to practice some form of meditation, or art for that matter, I referred to an accepted segmentation of society that we sometimes forget when we believe everybody to be “created equal” in terms of abilities. “Everybody is an artist,” is a catch-phrase that I hear bandied about all the time, especially by the purveyors of workshops. Yes, everybody might benefit from learning some of the language and techniques of art, if only to become a better or happier person, even patron. The liberal arts, which were already disappearing from our educational system before my time,
We have made a virtue out of busyness. A whole new genre of television drama, taking place in the hospital, or law office, or the White
House, ennobles characters who only have time to carry on a dialogue on the run, in the corridor, and who have no time for any meaningful personal relationship outside of their work. Then the commercial shows a soccer mom in the driver’s seat, hastily accepting a microwaved, pre-packaged cup of soup handed to her like a baton in a relay race through the window of her car. No wonder so much of the art which is seen strives to make it on the first impression, either through shock value or production values. You’re probably asking, what’s wrong with high production values, and we will treat that later.
4.
It is not these philosophies and movements themselves that I wish to examine or to criticize, it is their historical and residual effects on the
American attitude toward art. Mercantilism, for example, was the belief that wealth consisted ultimately in gold and silver, and that since these metals were finite in supply, one nation was bound to prosper only at the expense of another. This idea may have caused a lot of wars, but, after all, something had to be done with all that gold. Spanish palaces competed with cathedrals to gild the lilly; and Spain in turn competed with France and England, and a lot of a art was produced.
It happens that the particular philosophical movements which “trickled down” to become the common, accepted modus operendi, were almost all iconoclastic, or materialistic, or in some other way antithetical to the enjoyment of art. There was one exception and, as with the others, its effect is still felt today.
Transcendentalism arose as a reaction against Utilitarianism. Emerson, one of the leading lights of the Transcendental Movement, wrote that
Utilitarianism was a “stinking philosophy.” He, along with Thoreau and Emily Dickinson constituted a small group of meditative people who, though “marching to a different drummer,” as Thoreau put it, and not always united themselves, either created or represented a backlash in the country which gave rise to most of our great poetry, the Hudson River School of painting which started the whole idea of American landscape painting, and a net percentage increase in the national level of graciousness and in the treasury of tangibles and intangibles.
6.
The valuation of possessions over time both destroys the environment and devalues art. Materialist ideas such as Utilitarianism do it one way, and any form of religious asceticism which relegates this world to a position of inferiority does it another way. The twentieth century gave rise to new forms of both.
On the materialist side, the mass-media, first in print, then in its multi-media forms, gave rise to commercialism, advertising and its twin,
consumerism. Mass-production began with Henry Ford’s pithy statement that “they can have any color they want, as long as it’s black,” and has taken off toward more and more customization. In a “public service” announcement, the Advertising Council equates greater freedom with greater choice, that is more choices or more products made possible through more information presented to us by, guess what, advertising.
Here’s where those production values come in. Flashy, glossy, or slick techniques in speech or imagery that is used to persuade the masses to political or commercial ends is a form of demagoguery. Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s propagandist film-maker, used columns of light projected into the night sky to dramatize the Nuremburg rally when she filmed it. This awe inspiring effect was used seventy years later at Ground Zero to accentuate our national loss of the Twin Towers and the many lives that were destroyed with it. Propaganda is not inherently evil. When the Roman Catholic Church coined the word during their Counter-Reformation, it did not carry a pejorative meaning.
But public art and its relation to propaganda is a matter fit for another essay or an entire book at least. I am more concerned here with
phenomena of specifically American origin and their effect on the American attitude toward art, which is, as I am attempting to show, negative.
American democracy was originally conceived as a system to bring order and contentment to a society of independent farmers and yeomen (craftsmen-proprietors). Production was decentralized and distribution was localized at the market or the trade fair. Little by little the situation reversed as production became centralized and consolidated and distribution beat a path to every door first through the Sears Roebuck Catalog, now through the internet and the proliferation of big box stores. Today, the artist-craftsperson is one of the last vestiges of the independent yeoman, flying in the face of the modern market-driven economy.
Consumerism has penetrated every aspect of our lives. Even love and marriage is analyzed as an economic transaction. Politics, religion, and entertainment are largely driven by market analysis. And because what we value most, we guard, money has become the last taboo – sex is wholly open to personal discussion. Consumerism panders and flatters the public into a suspension of disbelief, so that a mass-marketed product, whether it be a cruise, a food or beverage, a piece of furniture, or an image is perceived as “just as good” as an original, fresh creation.
On a walk, the other day, my wife and I passed a new condominium development with a sign that read "Stanwood Estates." Estates signifies exactly what they are not. We have become inured to lies, or consensual fictions. In the extreme, many Americans even prefer the facsimile to the authentic. The Alamo Theme Park erected for the John Wayne movie attracts as many visitors as the somewhat smaller,
certainly drabber Alamo a hundred miles away. Mass-production smoothes out the rough spots and introduces a comforting predictability.
“In a way, I find it as easy to forgive kitsch as I do a baby for drooling. Given our convictions, how better might the popular arts behave?
Our deepest beliefs in the twentieth century command us to dismiss the arts, popular or otherwise: they have not had value, they do not have value, they will not have value.” The quote is from The Decline of Pleasure by Walter Kerr, who was a renowned theater critic. It was first published in 1962 by Simon and Schuster (quoted here from the Time Reading Program edition, 1966, p. 125)
In the forty odd years since this was written, Consumerism has succeeded, as the Advertising Council promised, in making more and better
educated consumers out of us. Not only have production values continued to improve, but originality, honesty, and depth in the popular arts, first in music, then film, and finally television, have waxed, though sometimes also waned. On the whole I would say, the quality of the popular arts has improved from the early 1960’s. Looking at a broadcast of Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments,” a lot of it seems like a high school play by comparison.
The fine arts have been in decline for a hundred years: classical music, painting, sculpture, and poetry have been withering on the vine to to neglect verging on contempt. Some critics claim there is no difference between the popular and the fine arts, between low brow and high brow.
Igor Stravinsky delivered a series of lectures at Harvard between 1939 and 1940. In one of them he made a brief parenthetical statement which I have not forgotten: “All art is based on aristocratic culture.” Admittedly, when he made this statement, he had long since left behind his Nationalist period when his music was inspired by Russian folk songs. But I don’t think he meant that all art was inspired by aristocratic sources, or that all artists are aristocrats. I think he was talking about the type of cultural transaction that takes place between artist and society. Despite the shrinking of the Middle Class, which has been taking place over the last half a century, Americans do not like the idea of an aristocracy. We are inculcated from a young age to associate connoisseurship with an indolent leisure class. In reality, European and Asian appreciation of their own cultural artifacts is widespread in their societies. I have heard that the most popular television program in Iran is a quiz show in which contestants compete to identify passages of classical Persian poetry.
On the subject of class and art, I recently heard of the work of Ruby K. Payne, author of Bridges out of Poverty. She observes that there is a code for each social class: upper, middle, and lower. In order to enter another class one must learn the code. For example, in eating, the lower class values quantity, the middle class, quality, and the upper class, presentation. In collecting, an area which directly impacts art, the lower class collects people. That is one of the reasons why it is sometimes seen as an act of disloyalty to break out. The middle class collects things. To make my own connection, I refer back to the philosophy of Utilitarianism, according to which happiness must be defined through the attainment of material things to which value can be ascribed. Finally, the upper class collects unique objects and experiences. The middle class does not have the code, that is, the training, the experience, or the inclination to deal with one-of-a-kind. There would be no way to compare its value or worth as there would be for any mass-produced and mass-marketed item. That is why it is not that the middle class is priced out of collecting art, because it is not. But because there is not way that the purchase of an art object can be justified to others – one’s spouse, one’s friends and neighbors. The middle class, that is, the bourgeoisie, require not only quality, but its authentication.
Among its other functions, art is a conversation, not only with the broad public or its own time, but also with history, including art history. In literature this is called “allusion.” The writer is conversing not only with the reader, but with other writers past or present. The more we lose our sense and knowledge of history, the shallower our art becomes. When the Russians launched Sputnik, we asked ourselves, how far behind are we in the space race? The result was an improvement in the science curriculum. Now, how far behind are we in our knowledge and appreciation of art? Well, how old are the cave paintings of Lascaux? But better late than never.