Beckett wrote “unenjoyable” books, says Martin Amis. Paulo Coelho believes Joyce’s Ulysses caused “great harm,” while Roddy Doyle doubts any readers are “really moved by it.” “Shabby chic” is the Financial Times’ verdict on modernist architecture. You hear it often these days, this grousing about difficult, pretentious modernism: Woolf, Kafka, Stein, and Picasso come in for it too. The emperor has no clothes. The flight from modernism—we know the names but skirt the works—may be a sign of the cultural times, a symptom of our special mix of fatigue, cynicism, and complacency. And then, of course, the art can indeed try your patience and stamina. Its demands are relentless; these are creations that decline to traffic in reassurance or open themselves to clicks and scans.It's the opening of a book review on works produced in 1922, when modernism was still a rising force. But I wonder if the real problem isn't the one the critics append. Maybe it wasn't that the art was so challenging, but that it wasn't beautiful. The True and the Beautiful share a link that somehow know at basic levels of our being. We work hard for the beautiful because we can see its value, we know there is something of worth that deserves the work. Even when it is beyond us, as Kant said of the sublime, we try to grasp its truth though we are doomed to fail.
With modernism the challenge is purely intellectual, and relatively few are interested in that kind of challenge. That's not hidden praise for the art, as it is often taken to be -- "Only a select few can understand." It's a kind of hidden criticism, a democratic one.
UPDATE: Link missing before, fixed.
10 comments:
Bingo.
Actually, I have seen some "modernist" (pre-WWII) art that was wonderful. Then, there's the junk. The word "challenging" in this context is code for junk.
I've been around artists, and noticed that there are some who are not talented and not willing to learn their craft. They like being artists, though, because they think it doesn't involve much work, much like the actors that want to be in Theatre because of the parties. They produce poorly-co-ordinated output that could kindly be called obscure, mainly because there is not much intellectual content.
If someone is so unkind as to remark on the lack of content, that person is subject to the put-down that the artist is the one who decides what is art.
It's really ok for an ordinary person to look at a painting and say "That's ugly" or an upside-down toilet bowl bolted to the ceiling and say "That is a publicity stunt, not art." An ordinary person is also allowed to say that a piece of music is "boring" and a book is both pretentious and uninteresting. If that person is actually acquainted the work, he's probably right.
Meanwhile, I've been amazed at the quality and volume of art produced in this country since about the '20s. Architecture, music, magazines, clothing, restaurant design, casinos, comic books, greeting cards, books by the truckload -- so much art, every day, everywhere we go.
The industrial revolution in the United States has brought a long-running golden age of art.
Valerie
John Keats had some ideas about art 200 years ago that remain valid:
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
What is beauty, what is truth, is in the eye and mind of the artist and the viewer. And even though it's all representational art, the question becomes one of what is the artist trying to represent, and what is the viewer trying to see?
And it's complicated by an artist's disturbed mind (vis., Dali or van Gogh (who's not really modern modern) or an artist's disturbed eye (vis., that guy van Gogh, again, or Monet). Or an artist who's simply playing an enormous joke on his viewers (vis., Jackson Pollock).
All of that just adds to the fun of it. And the final choice: that'll go well with my 60" LCD TV on which I watch ... .
Eric Hines
I judge mathematics to be a kind of art as well, including both truth and beauty. Its practice demands skill (isn't that the origin of the word "art?"). Appreciation demands a great deal from the viewer, but there's something real at the core, and an elegant theorem is beautiful and as simple as possible.
I'm not persuaded that the intellectual foundations of modernism have either truth or beauty as the center--so much of the result is bound up with a rejection of both.
That's an interesting claim, James, when read with the next post up (Pythagoras Lives!). Is math an art, or is it nature?
Let's not forget goodness, another of the triumvirate.
Beauty is goodness and truth is beauty and goodness is truth.
It is often said that the Good is divided into the True and the Beautiful. But I think maybe the beautiful is just a kind of truth that we can't quite state definitely, so we approximate it.
We do that in math, too: pi is a number we can't state, but we can give more-or-less accurate approximations of it. Pi should always look like 3.14159, or something very close to it. You can't give it exactly, but you can know right away if someone is giving it in a way that is way off.
The beautiful is like that too. When we make art, sometimes it is more beautiful and sometimes less. But you can tell right away if someone has produced something that isn't beautiful at all. As Valerie says, any ordinary person can see that.
Twelve tone music is an intellectual creation. But Bach's creations in counterpoints are also intellectual creations. One can better appreciate his musical architecture from a score than from listening to the music, but the structure is there.
A difference is that there is joy in Bach, but no joy in twelve tone music- at least I haven't detected any.
Which is why more people today play or listen to Bach instead of twelve tone music.
James Lileks beat that article to death, here: http://lileks.com/bleats/archive/13/0913/092013.html
I cannot add anything of substance to what he said, other than he articulated it much better than I could have.
I don't think he's right to say, "There's no morality in art," but otherwise he's on much the same page.
"the art can indeed try your patience and stamina"
I don't mind art that tries my patience and my stamina, but I'd like there, pretty please, to be some kind of payoff. Art shouldn't be like trying to decode a long, intricate cipher just to find someone's shopping list.
Sturgeon's Law states that 90% of anything is crap, so I try not to judge an entire movement on the fact that most of it is the failed efforts of hacks. Still, cultures do go through dry spells, and even fail, to be replaced by cultures that do better.
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