Here is a section of a book called Art Objects. Read it. learn something.
Art takes time. To spend an hour looking at a painting is difficult. We
are an odd people: we make it as difficult as possible for our artists to
work honestly while they are alive; either we refuse them money or we ruin
them with money; either we flatter them with unhelpful praise or wound them
with unhelpful blame, and when they are too old or dead, or too beyond
dispute to hinder anymore, we canonize them, so that what was wild is tamed,
and what was objected, becomes authority. Canonizing pictures is one way of
killing them. When the sense of familiarity becomes too great, history,
popularity, association, all crowd in between the viewer and the picture and
block it out. Not only pictures suffer like this, all the arts suffer like
this.
If the obvious direct emotional response is to have any meaning, the
question "do I like this?" will have to be the opening question and not the
final judgment. An examination of our own feelings will have to give way to
an examination of the piece of work. This is fair to the work and it will
help to clarify the nature of our own feelings; to reveal prejudice,
opinion, anxiety, even the mood of the day. It is right to trust our
feelings but right to test them too. If they are what we say they are, then
they will stand the test, if not, we will at least be less insecure. But
here we come back to the first hurdle of art, and it is a high one; it shows
up.
When you say "This work has nothing to do with me". when you say "this work
is boring/pointless/silly/obscure/elitist etc.", you might be right, because
you are looking at a fad, or you might be wrong, because the work falls so
outside of the safety of you?re own experience that in order to keep you?re
own world intact, you must deny the other world of the painting. This denial
of imaginative experience happens at a deeper level than our affirmation of
our daily world. Every day, in countless ways, you and I convince ourselves
about ourselves. True art, when it happens to us, challenges the "I" that we
are.
A love-parallel would be just; falling in love challenges the reality to
which we lay claim, part of the pleasure of love and part of its terror, is
the world turned upside down. We want and we don?t want, the cutting edge,
the upset, the new views. Mostly we work hard at taming our emotional
environment just as we work hard at taming our aesthetic environment. We
already have tamed our physical environment. And are we happy with all this
tameness? Are you?
Art cannot be tamed, although our responses to it can be, and in relation
to the Canon, our responses are conditioned from the moment we start school.
The freshness which the everyday regular man or woman pride themselves upon;
the untaught ?I know what I like? approach, now encouraged by the media, is
neither fresh nor untaught. It is the half-baked sterility of the classroom
washed down with liberal doses of popular culture.
The media ransacks the arts, in its images, in its adverts, in its copy,
in its jingles, in its little tunes and journalist?s jargon, it continually
offers up faint shadows of the form and invention of real music, real
paintings, real words. All of us are subjected to this bombardment, which
both deadens our sensibilities and makes us fear what is not instant,
approachable, consumable. The solid presence of art demands from us
significant effort, an effort anathema to popular culture. Effort of time,
effort of money, effort of study, effort of humility, effort of imagination
have each been packed by the artist into the art. Is it so unreasonable to
expect a percentage of that from us in return? I worry that to ask for
effort is to imply elitism, and the charge against art, that it is elitist,
is to often the accuser?s defense against his or her own bafflement. It is
quite close to the remark ?Why can?t they all speak English?? , which may be
why "elitist" is the favorite insult of the American and the British.
But you may say, how can I know what is good and what is not good? I may
wince at the cheap seascape over the mantelpiece but does that necessarily
mean I should go to the Tate gallery and worship a floor full of dyed rice?
Years ago, when I was living very briefly with a stockbroker who had a
good cellar, I asked him how I could learn about wine.
?Drink it? he said.
piece,
mike
p.s. if you want to read the whole thing (which was way too long for me to
type) look up the book.
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