Your Thoughts On Art

[Belacqua]

Do you think you have some objective basis for the arts?

All the discussions about "objective morality" on web sites have made me wary of the word "objective." Let's say that I can name some qualities, and then people can think about whether they are the qualities they want to encourage. 

For example, I would say that the kind of art I respect opens up the world for people -- it adds to the richness and variety of life. While the kind of art I don't want to encourage -- which I will call "bad" in conversation -- does the opposite. It reinforces clichés and received ideas. In a way, it makes us stupider, by repeating to us what we think we know and shutting out alternatives.

Now, can I prove that the former type is "objectively" better for the world than the latter? I don't think so. But I think that given a work of art, I can make the case that it does one thing or the other. Then it's up to other people whether they want the cliché or not. 

So we could name some things we respect about art, like maybe originality, a challenging nature, intelligence, etc. And without any final proof that these things are better than their opposites, we can argue that a given work deserves attention more than another. Nor is there absolute proof that one work is more original, challenging, and intelligent than another. But we can ponder this and think about quality in that way. 

What art does best is capture beauty and emotion, not intellectual ideas (except perhaps about art itself).

Well, I think that one of the wonderful things about art (and literature, music, etc.) is that it's woven into the web of civilization. We can look at it any way we want, but it's inextricable from the culture that made it, including that culture's intellectual ideas. 

This goes all the way down, so to speak. Adorno says that sitting by a window doing nothing is a political act, because it is removed from the web of buying and selling which runs our own culture. And I think Thoreau says something similar. Likewise, just the choice to spend your time making a work of art is a choice that has all kinds of meaning, conscious or not. If I choose to devote large parts of my life to personal, beautiful, intricate, time-consuming, painstaking, not especially attention-getting, objects, then I am working in direct opposition to many values in the modern world. The return on investment, quantitatively, is less than working at a cash register. Is that an intellectual idea? I think it kind of is. 

You can enjoy a Brueghel for its color, and you can enjoy it for what it says about the value of people and the ambitions of early Protestantism. 

One of the reasons I don't like the big-money artists today is that they reinforce the capitalist status quo. These are the ones ridiculed (I think rightly) in the videos posted earlier on this thread. Those people make things, but their real medium is not paint or plaster -- their real medium is exchange value. And they are masters of manipulating exchange value. One little thingy becomes wildly expensive, through skillfully operating business institutions. This praises and reinforces capitalism, since the ideal capitalist item is one that costs nothing to produce but sells for astronomical prices. So even those dumb little nothings have intellectual ideas behind them, which we can identify and criticize.