Nooma 2, mixed media on wood panel
Some people are gifted with an ability to sit with a political or ideological opponent and have a meaningful conversation. I’m not one of those, which is probably true of most of us. We choose to spend most of our time with my like-minded tribespeople. It’s an easier path.
I don’t think this proclivity is always just about comfort and/or close-mindedness. I know for me there is a practical aspect to consider. Ask yourself: Have your views on abortion or the obligation we all have to care for each other ever been altered by a conversation with someone who approaches those issues from the other end? Rarely, right? So that human tendency to ghettoize around key issues is often pragmatic rather than just programmatic.
That said, here is an exception to that proclivity. Roger Kimball is a conservative cultural critic and stands far afield from my political and social beliefs. He has written a few jeremiads about the art world that are full of vitriol and contempt for contemporary art memes and trends. But in his book, The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art, there are a few moments where our sensibilities actually overlap in spite of his self-professed intention to “equip the reader with a nose for balderdash and absurdity.” A few passages are worth sharing here:
In one of his essays on painting, Henry James observes that “There is a limit to what it is worthwhile to attempt to say about the greatest artists”…The great occupational hazard for an art critic or art historian is to let words come between the viewer and the experience of art—to substitute a verbal encounter for an aesthetic one. As Clement Greenberg observed somewhere, art is “a matter of self-evidence and feeling, and of the inferences of feeling, rather than of intellection and information, and the reality of art is disclosed only in experience, not in reflection upon experience”…Often, the best thing a critic can do is to effect an introduction and get out of the way.
There are several reasons for this. One reason has to do with what we might call the deep superficiality of aesthetic experience. The experience of art, like the experience of many human things, is essentially an experience of surfaces, of what meets the eye. When it comes to such realities, the effort to look behind the surface often results not in greater depth but in distortion. The philosopher Roger Scruton touched on this truth when he observed that “There is no greater error in the study of human things than to believe that the search for what is essential must lead us to what is hidden.”
I have no argument with that point of view and particularly like the concept of missing depth and going to distortion. And don’t worry—I’m not smugly touting my open-mindedness. I revel in my subjectivity and have decided to eschew the pejorative connotations of that term. I don’t have a capacity for objectivity on those issues that matter the most. Embrace your subjectivity, that’s my motto. Or one of them.
I’ve begun to wonder to what extent we can look at and discuss most things with anything but subjectivity. One, of course, can describe straightforwardly skill at doing something, but the expression of the effect of that something is, like the effect itself, necessarily personal.
Sometimes what’s on the surface is all there is.
Maureen, and sometimes that “that’s all there is” is quite enough. There are so many ways to be with, enter into, connect with a work of art.
As you may have gathered from my blog, I’m not one to engage in reasoned discussion on points where I think there is only one conclusion. I’m with you, Deborah, on art as well.
I don’t know about this….I feel that discussing, knowing the background of art objects, understanding more of what is behind them, enlarges the pure visual experience. For me, thinking and writing about what I’ve seen helps me to appreciate it more, of course with subjectivity. And reading a good writer on painting, such as Zbigniew Herbert, definitely does more than simply effecting an introduction. The essential is not necessarily hidden, but to find it requiries more than an experience of surfaces.
Altoon, I am not so extreme that words are never appropriate when it comes to enhancing and enriching the experience of art. But there is a point where language steps over a mysterious line for me, and it ends up detracting from, not adding to, an experience that is deeper and wider than words can go.
I write this blog about what I feel can be written about art and creativity, so it is probably obvious that I love words. But maybe words are like sex: A fabulous thing that is easily abused.