Never trust a quiet deacon.
We have a saying where I come from:
“I tried to pull a guy’s leg and it came off in my hand”
The intent of the OP was to have a little fun. I understand that one cannot dismiss modern art, music and literature simply because they do not conform to older models. I understand also that there is work of real value done in all these fields.
One begins to get the feeling, however, that a significant motivation in modern (excuse me, post-modern) expression is nothing more than to distinguish itself from what came before.
What is more disturbing to me is the how much of modern expression era seems to be, not the result of discipline, hard work, and an attempt to interact with the audience but simply adolescent eruption, stream of consciousness, intellectual masturbation, if you will. Or, on the other hand, and to continue the sexual metaphor, an incestuous activity on the part of specialists, creating what only they and their limited circle understand.
It is interesting to note how much time is spent explaining modern expression.
Nobody has to tell me why I am moved by Beethoven’s 6th Symphony, I simply am swept up in it. The arrogance and futility expressed in Ozymandias need no explanation. When D’Artangnan and the Comte de Rocheforte cross swords, I can hear the clash of steel and feel the blade thrust home.
When I look at “White Painting” however, all I see is a blank canvas (but then docent explains the artists’ intent). When I listen to an arrhythmic, atonal musical “composition,” I just get a headache (but I am rescued by the liner notes which explain to me why I should be enthralled!).
Old is not good just because it is old, but neither is new good just because it’s new.
Where do you stand on Stravinsky? Are you moved by The Rite of Spring?
Because comtemporary audiences felt about that the way you do about atonal music. Worse, in fact–they rioted in the theatre.
How about the impressionists? Is Monet great art? How about Cezanne? Do you want to guess what contemporary audiences thought about them?
Yeah, they thought their kids could paint like that.
I suppose you’re right. But the odd thing is that this doesn’t impact much on me at all, which is why I asked the question. I suppose a lot of students are deconstructing like crazy in their English, Cultural studies and Sociology classes. But when they come to hear me talk about bioethics and environmental ethics and I discuss overpopulation and the new biotechnologies in unapologetically commonsense language, nobody has ever told me that I ought to take more notice of Derrida. Not once, ever. Some have troubles writing critical essays, but we have some stock advice that sees most of them through to a decent standard.
I can only imagine that when they leave the English lecture theatre, they must check the attitudes they just learned at the door and just get on with their lives as though postmodernism were something you just have to learn to pass English. To be sure, a lot of my students are science students, but a lot aren’t.
I still wonder what these people will do when the fashion changes. They won’t be trained for anything else, and if they are bitter now, how much worse will it be when they are waiting around for retirement playing the role of exhibit A to the next generation of young scholars who’ve gone back to talking sense. Perhaps the bitterness is a result of their seeing in advance what might well be in store for them.
If you’ve acquired subtle critical skills, you might never be fashionable, but you can adapt to whatever the winds of change throw at you. Academic life would be pointless and unbearable for me without them.
As I believe I mentioned in a previous post, I did not say that valuable work hasn’t been done in the modern era. What I will say now is that too much dross is being accepted uncritically because the definition of art has been extended to include almost any spasm of the imagination.
Somehow we have traveled from Monet to Andres Serrano dashing a crucifix in a jar of urine (or the artist portrayed above presenting a blank canvas).
From the Firebird Suite we have descended to the cacophonous clashing of instruments overlaid by apparently random shrieks and groans I heard recently but, unfortunately, failed to note the “artist’s” name (pity, too, as I’ll be humming that tune all day).
We have broadened the spectrum so wide that smearing one’s body with chocolate syrup can be accepted as “performance art” without blinking.
Jerome Witkin, a professor of art at Syracuse University, said (of the piece above and another very similar) “very, very beautiful. They are so positive and affirmative and tense, the energy is so compact and controlled, it’s just incredible. This piece is so graceful, so delicate, I can’t get most of my students to fill a page like this.”
Witkin compared the work with that of Willem de Kooning. When they were shown to Kooning, his wife, Elaine, who was an excellent artist in her own right, had this to say, “We felt they had a kind of flair and decisiveness and originality. . . The drawings do not have a random quality. They are not accidental. They have the same kind of rhythm and verve one sometimes observes in the little dance steps [of] elephants . . .”(13)
After learning that the art that he had praised had been done by an elephant, Jerome Witkin wasn’t disappointed or embarrassed. He said, “I’m even more impressed. Our egos as human beings have prevented us for too long from watching for the possibility of artistic expression in other beings.”
“Art for art’s sake, Money for God’s sake” - 10CC
I have my own criteria for art that I’ve arrived at without reference to any source. I really ought to read more. Anyhow, they are as follows, and I apologise for the word “recipient:”
(1) Great art can only be produced by a few people.
(2) The ability to produce great art requires the acquisition of skills to an exceptionally high level.
(3) Production of great art not only requires inspiration but also blood, sweat and tears, but:
(4) the signs of that hard labour will not be apparent to the recipient, though the sense of struggle may be apparent if that is what the artist intended to convey.
(5) The work must readily engender interaction between the art and the recipient - therefore it must be able to communicate and not set out to confuse or bamboozle or mystify. For me, silent music and white walls fall down for this reason. But the work must not tell all - the interaction between the work and the recipient is the only thing that gives life to art.
(6) Great art works on many levels. A small child can look at a Turner and love the colours. A professor of music may be able to point to layers in a late Beethoven sonata that I have never uncovered even though I’ve heard it countless times. Or vice versa…
(7) Great art is free of ego. I can’t bear the naked ego of Wagner’s music-dramas, and Tracey Emin’s bed is Tracey Emin’s ego.
There - a load of old bilge but I’m standing by to be developed!
Steve
Steve,
An elegant summation.
Thanks for sharing it.
If you don’t like or get Rauschenberg (or Pollock, or…), there’s Edward Hopper or Fairfield Porter or any number of contemporary figurative painters whose work might please your eye. If experimental fiction is too convoluted, well, there’s a line of terse, realistic writers running from Hemingway through Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff. (Not to mention John Updike standing off to the side, chuckling.) If John Ashbery’s poems seem like an in-group sort of thing, then there’s always …
On the one hand, life’s short, work’s long–if we go, in our limited open time, to art that speaks to us immediately, that deals in what we already recognize and value, no blame there. On the other, spending some time with work that requires some re-thinking, a different way of seeing or of organizing language can have a liberating effect, after the initial frustration. I don’t know that I’d want to exclude that possiblility for fear that I might be fooled.
Imagine being all booted and suited, dolled up to the nines, sitting alongside your equally well garbed lady in a concert hall and 4’ 33" begins..ha!
The first thirty seconds will pass before you begin to wonder “Am I being conned here?”..you begin to feel uncomfortable, start to itch, want to move.You dare not turn around for fear of looking foolish and god forbid that you should make eye contact with somebody else who is feeling the same sense of strangeness.You really want to steal a peek at your watch but any such movement will be noticed by the people on either side of you and you will look impatient or even worse, unappreciative.
Two mins have passed and you are feeling very hot under the collar and that loud noise you can hear is your heart beating faster and faster.Two minutes ..and it feels like a week.
Somebody behind you coughs, it sounds like a shotgun blast beside your ear and now you feeel like somebody is pouring a sack of sand down your throat.In a reflex action you move your leg, it brushes off the knee of the guy beside you. Now you are really getting jumpy…Don’t look at him..let it pass.
You are trying not to look up at the stage because everybody knows that there is nothing to see up there.
Finally, just as you are about to collapse from the stress of it all it’s over..a thunderous round of applause breaks out, people cheer and shout. Noise never sounded so welcome before. Beautiful meaningless noise, you are alive again and bursting with happiness now that your ordeal is over. Rejoice.
The great Art in 4’ 33" is in how Cage forces us to face up to and try to deal with our fear of silence in a crowded room. The majority of people cannot deal with sitting still and remaining silent in the close proximity of others.
Cages genius is that he captures us and forces us to be silent and still. In our attempt to deal with this we must face up to our fear and discomfort.
This is Art that lives, breathes and shakes us by the throat until we are weak and begging for release.
Absolute genius.
Slan,
D.
I think all art should speak to us immediately on at least some level, even if it’s only to say “open the door and come in - but what you find inside might be hard…” Don’t get me wrong when I say this, as I don’t want to propose for one minute staying coccooned in our own art comfort-zones, but I find infinite prompts to rethink every time I revisit a work that I thought I knew well…could be that I’m in a different emotional state to the last time I approached it, or it’s being interpreted in a different way by a different performer (thinking of music here obviously).
Joseph Kerman, writing about the late quartets of Beethoven, said “…the common listener (to adapt a term from Virginia Woolf) has found a special place for [them] in his essential musical experience.” Wow, music of that calibre, for the common listener. Who’d have thought it! The products of the highest flights of the human mind, yet not at all “unapproachable.”
Steve
I don’t want art to force me to do anything. I don’t know John Cage and he doesn’t know me and I instinctively resist such didacticism (I mean what right has he…?). I want art to help me to articulate things that I struggle with, to open me up, to edify. The only thing that would happen to me during enforced stillness and silence would be that I’d be reminded that my haemorrhoids were itching again and my tinnitus was kicking in. I think he’s taking the piss, so there. 
Steve
I wonder if Cage has a copyright on 4’33"? If so, does that mean the RIAA will kick the doors in if they don’t hear any music being played at a concert??
Someone asked Cage that but so far he’s remained silent. 
Steve
Is this true: “Modernity is to Post-modernity as Graduate is to Post-graduate”?
Because once you eliminate both, all contests come down to a matter of who’s louder.
Reminds me of the discussion in another thread about argument from faith…
nancy
Give me the elephant any day.
For me, good art is like pornography (only in the following sense!) “I can’t define it, but I know it whe I see it.”
D., your description is so very lyrical that it makes me want to agree…but. Well. While I’m not sure either you or Steve S. is entirely on point with the notion that the audience are being "forced” toward some reaction or another (that gives the artist’s intent too much weight, I think), I do think the way Steve describes his reactions makes an important point: Discussions of the artist’s intent are quite intellectually fascinating, but only part of the story, and perhaps the least important part. I feel’s all about “where the rubber meets the road,” the interaction between the two minds, artist and audience. You contend that Cage wanted to force us to face/deal with a fear… I question this on two levels:
First, is it not perhaps more likely that he didn’t mean to explore any kind of fear, but rather, to explore the nature of sound and/or the absence of sound? (I think this might be borne out by Cage’s own comments)…the paradox of the silent musician on stage being meant to suggest that the audience ignore him and instead listen to any sounds, or the silence around them in the hall, and focus on that as the “composition” unfolded?
Second, assuming your view of his intent is correct, I question the value of it: the level, the depth, if you will, of any meaning there might be. I have many deep and primal fears that I’d no doubt be the better for confronting, but can’t say that squeamishness about remaining silent and still in a crowded room is one of them. I can’t say it’s an issue I will ever feel driven to seek therapy for (through either professional services or Art). So…whether confronting audiences with such a, well, less-than-compelling fear rises to the level of “genius,” I have to doubt.
That said, your definition: “ Art…lives, breathes and shakes us by the throat until we are weak and begging for release…” I can wholeheartedly agree with.
I think the underlying dynamic is this:
the main art forms of the past have tended to become
exhausted. After a hundred years or so of the Baroque,
classical music needed to move on. The vein had been
mined by genuises; not much point in writing more fugues.
The same thing happened with romantic music. And what
do you do for an encoure after Mozart, Beethoven, et al?
Similarly with representational painting–one couldn’t go
on doing the same thing, too many great masters.
So then
one got modern art, modern music, which rebelled against
the old forms and was initially extraordinarily vital. But
after that initial vitality there was nowhere to go where
a wide audience could follow. Painting and music became cerebral and introspective,
the painting became it’s own subject, not anything in
the world; these forms became an experiment in composition for
its own sake. And they lost their audience.
This isn’t anybody’s fault–the old successful forms consumed themselves
and there was no way to continue that folks
could readily relate to without having a lot of
sophistication in art and music. There still is good work done,
sometimes the public is still moved. But painting and poetry,
which, when I was young were immensely exciting (we all
were arguing about Pound, Eliot and so on) have fallen
off the map of even highly educated people. I cannot think
of a major poet writing today (except for JS and Dale Wisely).
Nor can i think of a major painter or a major composer–
maybe Philip Glass, whom I’ve heard maybe twice.
The solution isn’t to return to what was before ZZZZZZZZZZ.
It’s to create new art forms. Note that the cinema is the
one art form that is vital, that grips us all, that we talk
about and discuss and disagree over and read reviews
about. Surely there will be newer art forms arising in
the coming century.
In short, I don’t think the old forms have gone phoney;
it’s that they are largely over. Probably they will continue
to exist as vestiges or maybe something more, but with
a much smaller place in people’s lives (except for the old
great stuff, which will endure and delight indefinitely).
As Yeats wrote:
Everything that man esteems
Endures a moment or a day.
Love’s pleasure drives his love away.
The painter’s brush consumes his dreams.
The herald’s cry,
The soldier’s tread,
Exhausts his glory with his might.
Whatever flames upon the night
Man’s own resinous heart has fed.
Delightful post there scottielvr,
I was in a fierce hurry when I banged my post out and had not got the time I needed to develop it any further.
In mitigation I will say that maybe you have been listening to a different version of 4’ 33" than I have.There is a huge difference between the studio version and the live version from Carnegie Hall which of course features a full orchestra.
That kind of silence is really scary
Slan,
D.