Do You Call That Art? a Conversation

Do You C of all timey(prenominal) That Art? a ConversationT Do you c every(prenominal) that blind? I just dont turn oer how well-nigh social occasion same(p) could be c each(prenominal)ed cunning, I just dont face it. W present is the form, where is the dishful? Is that non what craft is for to hint at general accuracys, to uncover answers to fundamental questions ab off our hu adult male physique? To def break off us stick a kind of immortal truth, peach is truth, truth spectator that is all/Ye subsist on e finesseh, and all ye need to bash. (Keats, 1908 14) Is that non what Keats state? To be h unmatchablest I fail to slang how an undo bed surrounded by the detritus of a unafraid night come out of the c lagt thunder mug be classed as either. It is just sensationalism, pure sensationalism and should non be allowed into an guile gallery.S I suppose it has some merits doesnt it?T No, n wholeness at all as far as I am concerned. What does it say? What does it mean? Where is the skill in its construction? Why, allone could give birth that, look, it is unless made out of incessantlyy day items, theres no paint, no clay, no stone, none of the traditional tools of the creative person. My six year get wordd child could call for made that, in occurrence he does eery morning after a restless(prenominal) night. S I read some interesting reviews on it.T What do proofreaders complete? Listen to this La Giaconda is, in the truest sense, Leonardos masterpiece, the revealing instance of his mode of thought and work up. In suggestiveness, only the Melancholia of Durer is equal to it and no crude symbolism disturbs the effect of its subdued and graceful mystery (Pater, 1948 264) That is both a reviewer and subterfugeificer coming together in a perfect symbiosis of prowessistic appreciation, Walter Pater was a man of gigantic intellect and understood the genius of Da Vinci in an intimate way. What is spoken of here lifts the day-b y-day into the world of esthetics and art, it transforms the daily life, it consoles and palliates, it makes the hardships await worthwhile and the little pains of life worth bearing. S Yes, I see that, save does that non apply to artists want Tracey Emin and Damian Hurst too?T Do you olfactory sensation palliated by this unmade bed? Do you feel as though your pain is soothed by a bisected sheep? These images serve only to make us feel worse, to highlight our pain, to capitalise on our misfortunes. These are the things that sophisticated art work on, these are the emotions that they stir up depression, sadness and alienation. Is that art? Is that worth b differenting close, buying or funding? S I dont know, perhaps if we were to look at them to a greater extent motorcarefully. Isnt art just a matter of taste anyway?T Ah but taste is a complex thing and has been heatedly debated in art history and philosophy. In some ways it goes duty to the heart of our experience of art and literature as a whole. Two of the well-nigh interesting and most important theories concerning taste come, of course, from the incline thinker David Hume and Immanuel Kant, both of these philosophers, in their own way, asserted the existence and importance of the notion of taste and aesthetic judgment. Hume saw that education and experience would enable men (and women) to acquire taste the more art we see, the more books we read, the more films we see and the more music we listen to the more we learn about what is nigh(a) and what is gravely in art. For instance, if I had only seen one picture in my entire life, say of a cottage in a mountain glade surrounded by pink and blue flowers, then it goes without precept that this must be the best photo I know and, ipso facto that I must be of the position that this is the best flick in the world. The same, I suppose, goes for a situation where the only sculpture I had seen was this unmade bed, then I would naturally think it wa s masterpiece and hail it as the finest work of art ever made. Well, according toDavid Hume, the more I see the more improve I make, the more my taste develops. and so if I were to view, say, Eugene Delacroixs Massacre at Chios, that depicts a scene from the Greco-Turkish war of 1824 and is painted with both subtlety and strength, I would automatically think this was better than an unmade bed. If I then chanced to view a Renoir or a Rossetti then I might think that these were better. You see how this works? You see how, through education and experience my taste broadens and becomes more refined. S tho I still do not see who defines what is high-priced and what is bad for the rest of us? perceptivity is relative isnt it? T To an extent, says Hume, but taste as a benchmark and as a standard is set by those who are educated most. It stands to source, does it not, that those who are educated and experienced most will know the most about a particular given subject. When your car n eeds a service what sort of mechanic do you choose? S A unassailable one? T Yes, a good one, but what is a good mechanic? Is it a good mechanic someone who has had no or very little experience with cars, is it someone who has only ever seen or worked on one car the whole of their lives? No, you would choose the mechanic with the most experience, the mechanic who has worked on hundreds, perhaps thousands of cars. S Yes, I suppose I would.T So, could we not say that that mechanic is an expert, at least over the other mechanic who has seen very few cars?S Yes.T Well, it would that mechanic who sets the standard. What if he told you your engine needed replacing?S I would remember him.T Exactly, and if the inexperience mechanic told you it didnt, who would you call back? Who would you think was telling you the right thing?S Probably the experienced mechanic, he after all is more educated and more experienced so he must know what he is public lecture about.T So why is it so different with taste? Why is it so difficult to believe that those with most experience set the taste for the rest of us? Taste is intersubjective, it is founded on agreement and consensus. This was Humes great notion. It does not exist as an objective notion nor purly subjective but somewhere in between. Joshua Reynolds encapsulates it wholesome when he says The arts would lie open for ever to caprice and casualty, if those who are to judge of their excellencies had no settled principles by which they are to regulate their decisions, and the merit or defect of performances were to be determined by unguided fancy (Reynolds, 1992 182). Although, of course, Reynolds himself saw taste as organism intrinsically fixed and established in the temperament of things.S So, what about Kant? How did he see taste and aesthetic judgement? T For Kant, taste came secondary to the notion of viewer. There was, he thought such a notion as intrinsic beauty a beauty that existed outside of taste, outside of the capriciousness of fashion, a beauty that is, to quote Keats again A Joy forever. Kants philosophy extended far and wide, his works like The reexamine of Pure Reason and The Critique of Practical Reason sought to classify and quantify scarcely what it was to be tender, not just in an ontological sense but in the sense of how we experience the world how we perceive things and, most importantly, how we intellect about these things. In fact Bertrand Russell says in his A History of Western Philosophy that According to Kant, the out world ca employments only the matter of sensation, but our mental apparatus orders this matter in space and time, and supplies concepts by means of which we understand experience. (Russell, 1979 680) In order to experience the world, thought Kant, we label many of the things we sense, often in ways that are unconscious or arbitrary. Take this bench, for instance, we both know this is a bench and that it is for academic term on but we only know this because it has certain characteristics as distinct from, say, that fire extinguisher over there. It is made of wood, it is flat, it has four legs etc. etc. The bench is out in the world (Cummiskey, 1996 78) and thus our experience of it informs our idea of what it is. For Kant there was no such thing as an a priori knowledge nothing, he said could be divorced from our experience of it. S But how, then, if we know this is a bench through our learning of it out in the world heap we ever know beauty. Beauty, after all is not out in the world, it is surely a priori? We must kick in an idea of beauty before something kitty be classed as beautiful. I understand that, for Hume this is based on consensus, but this does not fit in with Kants ideas. T For Kant, beauty does exist in the world but not, perhaps in the way that we might assume. He noticed that we classify and label things according to the purpose they accommodate for us as human beings. We adopt a notion of the bench becaus e it is good for us to sit down on and take a rest every now and then. Beauty on the other hand can not be eaten or smelt or even touched, however it is in every cultivation every refining known to man so, in some ways at least, it must be intrinsic to our needs. Beauty and art have a lazy purpose. S How can a purpose be purposeless?T let me explain when I see a picture by Monet for instance, it inspires feelings in me of reflexion and of emotion. I am touched by the delicate brushwork, I am moved by the images. If I see a beautiful flower I feel the same thing. I do not ascertain the flower beautiful because I want to eat it or because it gives me an actual benefit in the real world but because it promotes a kind of internal pleasure, a mental harmony. This is what Kant thought of the beautiful. If we fix to attach meaning to art by deliberately making it ugly or adapting it for our own psychological or socio-political ends we ruin its initial purity and lose a valuable par t of its nature. Kant said Taste is the faculty of estimating an object or mode of representation by means of a delight or aversion apart from any interest. The object of such a delight is called beautiful(Kant, 1972 479). This is why Kant regarded record as representing a higher plain than man made art, simply because it does not have the other aspects, the poetic, conventionalized meaning. This unmade bed is neither of these situations, it is neither a depiction of the change in Nature not does it evoke a general response. It simply is, like the unmade bed that it mirrors, because of this is can not be art. However, if we take a picture from the Romantic movement of Nineteenth century, for mannequin, such as Turners The Fighting Temeraire (1838) or Landscape with a Distant River and Bay (1840) we can see that what the artist is striving for is a universal achievement of beauty a beauty that is invested in the very paint he uses, a beauty that arises from the purity of the ima ge the colours, the brushwork, the setting. S So, for Kant, the artist is the transcriber of that sense of beauty?T Yes, for Kant, only the artist or the man of genius can truly be said to be a translator of these universal truths. His theories gave way to the march of the Romantic movement in Europe and artists like Turner, William Etty and Landseer and writers like Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley. Let us think, for example, of the paintingThe Leaping Horse by John Constable (1825). What do we see in this painting? We see the majesty of Nature, not only in hurt of the visual images of the sky, the clouds and the trees but in the way that this is translated through the human experience. The figure in the foreground is pictured not merely against Nature but in it, existing within it and being a part of it. There is a candour of vision here that reflects Kants assertions on the place of the artist within hostel. The artists role, he said, was to translate the experience of the s ublime, of the beauty of Nature, into the synthetic medium of art. This unmade bed, or the bisected sheep of Hurst or even the daubings of Jackson Pollock do not attempt to do this and so, in my opinion at least, are not art in the slightest. A I beg to differ with you. They turn to see A standing behind them.A What do you see there?S I see an unmade bed, I see rubbish, I see magazines, tissues, cigarette butts. A I see an idea, a concept, a representation of truth. As you said, truth is beauty, right?T No, actually what I said was Beauty is truth and truth beauty there is a world of difference between those two ideas. A Yes perhaps, and I would agree with you, maybe this work is not about beauty in the Kantian sense, it is not about a universal notion of what is beautiful, what is sublime but it has everything to do with what the world means to us and how we interpret our own experiences of life. In his first manifesto on Surrealism, Breton says The marvellous is not the same in every occlusive of history it partakes in some obscure way of a sort of general revelation only the fragments of which come down to us they are the romantic ruins, the modern mannequin or any other symbol capable of impact the human sensibility(Breton, 1990 16). All we have now are shards of aesthetic philosophy that have made their way down to us. S So you are saw Kant and Hume were wrong?A No, I am saying they were right in their time. We have been let down by their structures the notions of truth and beauty no semipermanent mean anything to us in this postmodern age.T Postmodern? Does that word even mean anything?A Well, yes, Modernism as a philosophical construct can be seen to stem from the Enlightenment of the middle Eighteenth century.S I thought Modernism happen just after the First innovation War?A Yes in a way, the artistic and literary movement hails from then but, in terms of philosophy and, of course, aesthetics, Modernism can be seen to be founded much earlier w ith thinkers such as Rousseau, Locke, Hobbes, Bishop Berkely and others. Later, of course, this manifested itself in philosophies of Kant, Hegel and Marx. S So, what do these thinkers tell us about what art is and why this work should be called art? A Well it was not so much what they said about art that is of importance as how they say it. Modernism, as Jean Francois Lyotard says in his study The PostmodernCondition A Report on Knowledge, relied on metanarratives, all encompassing notions like truth, beauty, the body and even the self to provide a radical for its philosophies. The Enlightenment is considered the birth of the modern because it asserted the primacy of the individual consciousness and the reason upon which it was based it signalled a set forth from the religious dogma and the superstition of the Renaissance and Middle Ages. The art, the music and the literature all reflected the birth of this smart idea. Postmodernism is not so much the rejection of this as a mela ncholic outcome of its demise and failures. I am sure there is not one thinker in the whole postmodern canon who would not find it agreeable to rely on concrete notions like beauty and truth, but what are they? That is what postmodernism asks us, they have failed us. Foucaults poetic evocation at the end of his history of human sciences is as good as any at expression this idea As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of novel date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea.(Foucault, 1997 387) The postmodern condition recognises no hierarchy of tast e it does not see taste as being universal or being classifiable in any pregnant way. With technological advances like the internet and reprographics what now is beautiful? What can even be considered original? This is the billet that Walter Benjamin makes in his seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. S So, the Modernist artists were the get down of this, after all they experimented with style and content didnt they? As Ezra Pound said, they sought always to behave it new.A Could we not see artistic Modernism as not so much the beginning of something new as the end of something old? Its theoretical foundations are clearly based in a number of thinkers all of which assert the importance of teleological thinking Freud, Marx, Hegel etc. If we examine, for instance Guillaume Apollinaires series of essays and articles on the Cubists, we can see that we characterises both Cubism and Apollinaire is the sense of revolution in both art and in conceptions of beauty. He says Greek art has a purely human conception of beauty. It took man as the tone of perfection. The art of the new painters takes the infinite universe as its ideal, and it is to the fourth dimension alone that we owe this new measure of perfection.(Harrison and Wood, 1997 178) We can see here how, even though the nature of the artists vision has changed, his or her place hasnt. The Cubists and, indeed the Moderns as a whole (especially in terms of its literature) asserted the validity of the artist in exactly the same way as our friend here has tokened out that Kant did.T Which I see as being a testament to the correctness of Kants vision. A It was this that the Moderns desperately strove to cling on to, all of their experimentation, all of their theorising, all of their invention can be seen as merely an attempt to cover up the fact that what was dying, what was losing its validity was them their special place as artists, writers and thinkers. In the postmodern age a ll things are as valid as art, all things are equally worthy even an unmade bed. How does a painting like David Bombergs The Mud Bath (1914) or even Picassos Guernica (1937) reflect the ideals of Kant? They are obviously beautiful pictures and to that degree they have the power to terrify and to inspire awe, they do not palliate or console so much as prompt us of our own death and mortality. How do they fit in with your stratagem?T You have answered your own question, they are sublime paintings. They remind us of our own place as human beings. I agree with you, times change and so does art but the notion of the artist as a translator of human emotion is an important one. Picasso was a visionary, his art was beautiful, it made one think, to cogitate, to realise ones own humanity. OK, not in the same representative way as, say Constable or Rossetti but, then again, neither did Turner, Monet or any of the Impressionists. The subtle play of colour and light, for instance in La Prome nade (1875) or even the famous Waterlilies (1905) is nothing but the distillation of experience both in terms of the artists heightened sensibility and training. The same can be said of Picasso or Braque or any of the so called Moderns that you speak of.The form is of no importance, forms and fashions change, what matters is the importance of the artist. There are recent artists who manage to combine both an artistic brilliance with a clear understanding of exactly what art means. Take someone like Lucien Freud, for instance, his paintings do not inspire one in the traditional sense of the word. They do not remind one of beauty in the same way Botticelli does or Poussin, however he asks questions about the human condition whilst displaying an artistic talent, or skill if you will. Freuds pictures are about what is like to be human, about what it is like to have a body that is constantly dying, that is betraying the young person that you still are on the inside. His unsanded self po rtraits are concerned with my point exactly with the place of the artist in nightspot. It is their role to chuck out the ghosts.A Art should not be a religious experience.T You are wrong, thats exactly what it should be.A Art is about reflecting whats here and now not what is eternal. The work of Tracey Emin is as valid as Lucien Freud, as valid as Picasso as valid as Turner and as valid as Rembrandt because it is a product of a time that recognises no universal truths, no absolute hierarchies and no metanarratives. T But how, then do you judge? How do you decide what should be in an art gallery and what isnt? Do you simply open the doors and let everyone in? A Yes. T But thats absurd, where would that led us?A What are you afraid of? What have you got to lose?S What is there to lose by the destruction of the discourses of truth and beauty?A Well, this is at the heart of the question of whether this work is a work of art. What is there to lose by saying it isnt? We have seen the f ailure of realism in describing the truth about the human condition and we have seen the failure of abstraction in describing the truth about human emotions and mind. The only thing left over(p) for us to do is to suggest that it is the truth itself that is non-existent. S So there is no truth left.A There is no universal truth, the same as there is no universal sense of beauty. What is beauty after all? The Japanese have a notion they call Wabisabi, it makes up almost all of their aesthetic appreciation. Roughly translated it means imperfect or incomplete, modest or humble. It is as far from our traditional notions of Western aesthetics as we could get. There is none of the reveredeur of the sublime, none of the intricacies of Vermeer or Zoffany just the relaxation of line and the imperfection of creativity. S You mean Wabisabi actively encourages imperfection?A Yes, it is an intrinsic ingredient of the Japanese aesthetic, but the important point is that aesthetic notions change from country to country from time to time, therefore it is an impossible action for them to be a universal ideal as our friend here seems to think.S But is it art, this unmade bed?A Is it in an art gallery?S Yes.A It must be art then.T So you are saying anything that is in an art gallery is art, how ridiculous. That means anything I let into this gallery could be called art. My dog? The shoes on my feet? The flask I have in my bag? At least we know where we are with the universal notion of beauty. It may not be perfect, in fact it may far from perfect but it is solid, it is not ever-changing or open to this mumbo big that you are talking of. You speak as though everyone were an artist, as though everyone could lay claim to being aPicasso or a Matisse. A Well, in a way, yes, I am. For postmodernism to work we must be a number of responsibilities and positions as well as reject old ones. We must be alert of our actions, Of course that means realising that, perhaps, the whole fo rmation of aesthetics needs re-evaluating. Media such as the meshwork and increase access to cheap means of publishing means that it is becoming easier and easier to publish ones work and get it to a wide audience. Many musicians have found this out and have started making their work available for Internet downloads and many artists are using technology to challenge the boundaries of the traditional routes into the art world. This has got to be a good thing hasnt it? S So, what you are saying is that because of changes in society, because of this postmodernism thing the old ideas about what is beautiful, what is true, what is art become irrelevant. In their place is a series of individual judgements based on context. If I put a light switch into a gallery as a light switch it is not art, if I put it in as art then it is?A Exactly.S So it has a linguistic base your argument? If I say something is art, it is?T This all sounds like rubbish to me. Art has a function in the real world, to be beautiful or at least to make us realise our own humanity or humanness. If we do not draw boundaries, if we dont make distinctions between art and the rest of the world we cheapen art.A Or we elevate lifeT Take for example Hegels aesthetics theory. For Kant, existence, and along with it art and culture, could only be witnessed in a subjective sense, in other words only bits of the larger picture could be seen by anyone at any one time. It would be impossible to see the whole. Hegel disagreed with this and stated that, if we used reason, we could look at the entire universe at once. S But thats clearly impossible isnt it? How can we look at anything other than through subjectivity?T Think about the philosophy of science, physics, chemistry, do they not claim to be able to look at the entire world at once? There is no suggestion in medicine, for instance that we find a cure for TB in a subjective way. An integral part of the truth of the denudation is that it is reproducible, o bjective and quantifiable, in other words that it is being viewed in some kind of universal way. Israel Knox has a fine quote about Hegels method Hegel exalted reason to an eminence from which it could have an adequate and cordinated knowledge of the whole of reality of reality as the incessant temporal forward march of the Absolute, of Spirit, of God.(Knox,1958 81). It is reason that is at the basis of scientific discovery so why can not reason be at the heart of Aesthetic theory?A Because reason is an outmoded construct.T Let me ending For Hegel, art is a reflection of Geist, which can be translated as either spirit or mind. In Hegel the two are much the same thing the mind and the spirit could be thought of as the defining entity in man it is the thing that distinguishes him from anything else. His humanness, if you will. Geist is a manifestation of the order of the universe, the phenomenology of Geist is existence and its highest expression is art and philosophy. In this Hegel disagrees with Kant who, as we saw, thought that Nature was the most beautiful of all things. If art is an expression of Geist and Geist itself is a manifestation of the orderliness or reason of the universe, then it follows that the greatest art must be that which mirrors most succinctly this universal sense. For Hegel, art transcends nature precisely because it is a manifestation of mans spirit. You see, Hegel believed in a system he called dialectics. In the Preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit (1977) (or mind, of course) he outlined his grand scheme of things and one that he was to go on to relate to art in his Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (1993) of the 1820s. The dialectic is the grand working of history, it describes how progression can be achieved by thesis, antithesis and synthesis rather than relying on the idea of a continual advancement. In art, as in everything, first an antithesis establishes an idea, say the classical period of art here we have a number of p hilosophies, ways of seeing and ideas that go up to making what we know about the world.However this is very rarely enough, this is never would we call exhaustive. Our culture, in order to progress, needs an antithesis. The classical period of art then, gave way to a period of Romanticism whereby artists and writers developed startling new ideas and notions that would transform art into something completely new. This second notion is the antithesis, it describes not a backward movement but a negation that can propel things forward that can ensure a synthesis is formed that unites the two and causes forward momentum. For Hegel, this happens in all walks of life, from ideas and science to art and literature. He takes the great periods of art and shows how they interacted with each, succeeding schools challenging preceding schools and so on until eventually there will be an end to art where we have reached a closing stage of enlightenment and there is no longer any need for dialectics . Hegel sees that reflected in his own age, with its use of reason and beauty and its synthesis of ideas and notions.Look at this bed, I see no spirit in this, I see no manifestation of Geist here, I see a manifestation of damp and shape but very little else. This is not art because it does not conform to any of the notions I have been talking about, there is nothing here of the majesty of the universe nothing that lifts us above our free-and-easy experience, in fact it is our everyday experience. S I can see how Hegels philosophy makes art seem reasonable and structured, I can see that there is a progression from one idea to another. afterward all, if you look at a painting of the classical period it looks nothing like a painting of today, does it? Hegel must be right art must be a reflection of some universal spirit that finds its expression in an ever progressing artistic movement. A But, of course, if that is the case where is the end point?S The end point?A Yes, according to Hegel and the other philosophers of Modernism like Marx, the dialectical process needfully advances, it has to lead to some end point. In Marx it was the glories of revolution and a Marxist state, in Hegel it was the enlightened mind. For their philosophies to have any form of truth in them this end point needs to taken into account but, where is this end point? Where has it gone? We have had almost 150 eld of Marxism and over 200 hundred years of Hegelianism but still there is no sign of reaching the end point that they speak of. debate this, for Hegel the crowning glory of civilization was his own, and therefore our, age. This was the time at which art and literature, music and culture reached its highest point, the point at which Geist was reflected most in societys artifacts.T Yes, that is what I said.A According to that philosophy there can only be progression, there can only be forward motion through dialectics art, literature, culture can only get better. T Yes, surly. A But where is this enlightened society? If anything, society is getting more dangerous, more violent. The canonical image is that of Auschwitz, how can Auschwitz be a symbol of a society getting more enlightened and reflecting the reason of the universal unity? If anything it is a sign that it is getting less enlightened. What about the Russian Gulags, they challenge both Hegel and Marx and the same time On the one hand they make us question the idealist dialectic of Hegel by suggesting that, far from getting more and more enlightened, society is getting more and more barbaric and, on the other, it questions Marxs dialectical materialism by asking where is this historied revolution that was promised? What we have is not a series of structured progressions based around thesis and antithesis at all but an ad hoc collection of ideas that are organised retrospectively by history.S So what does this mean for art?A Well it means that, not only are the ideas in Hegels aesthetics challenge d but also that his very methodology is as well. It was this failure that Adorno and Horkheimer traced in their ground breaking work The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1997). It is not so much that postmodernism negates modernism or reason but that it shows up its failings. In an interesting reworking of Odysseus and the Sirens in their book, Adorno and Horkheimer suggest that there is forever a socio-political aspect to art that precludes it from ever being a universal given. Odysseus plugs the ears of his sailors with wax so that they can not hear the song of the Sirens but he ties himself to the mast, fully able to hear. S What does this mean for art though?A Well, it means, for one thing that the experience of the Sirens song (a clear symbol for art) depends upon who you are in the ship. If you are a sailor you only know the dangers of the song, you are blissfully unaware of its terrible beauty and alluring qualities and if you are Odysseus you are know the beauty and the terror bu t you have the pain and responsibility of denial. The song remains the same, only the listeners change. S So the value of art,