(f)Art

Last night, after some wine, dinner and dessert, a conversation about art bubbled up into the room. One of the guests, a man with a boyish face, a mustache, and slicked-back hair only on the top part of his head, proclaimed that art had nothing to do with objectivity. He argued, I believe, that art is subjective and depends completely on the intent of the author. It is an interesting stance, but one that I did not agree with. Art, when it is good, expresses something objective, subjectively. But to illustrate his point, he made use of a hypothetical scenario in which Bob Dylan stood mindlessly strumming chords during a sound check. Surely, he said, this is not art. But isn't it? Perhaps bad art, but still art. Isn't it at least some reflection of Dylan's artistry given he chose to strum those chords in that way for that duration? Is art what the artist does? What if the artist goes as far saying that what he did is not art? Does that invalidate the work? I'd say no, it doesn't, in the same way that an author might be ashamed of his early works and not consider them canon. This doesn't change the fact that they were still artistic attempts, only the passing of time has made them seem more inconsequential and perhaps lacking in artistic merit.

Let's, for argument's sake, use the definition of art provided by the Merriam-Webster dictionary: the expression or application of human creative skill or imagination that is beautiful or expresses important ideas or feelings. This definition is already problematic because it presupposes beauty and importance. I should pause here and note that there may not be an easy solution to this question. This might serve only as an exploratory exercise.

For now, put aside beauty. We can come back to that. But importance is one that's nearly a given, because, if your art was unimportant to you, why would you do it? I think it's safe to suppose that any thing someone does must pass some litmus test of importance or, given the choice, one would simply do something else. Even if the art was deemed unimportant later on, still, during the moment of its creation, it had sustained importance long enough to arrive at completion. It would be interesting to consider works of art that had been started and never finished due to lost interest. For the purpose of this writing let's stick with completed works, because it's simpler.

If we've defined art as the expression or application of human creative skill or imagination that expresses an important feeling or idea, then I think we have something substantial enough to play with. What is an important feeling or idea? There is a great deal of subjectivity here, but most would say there are some ideas we can agree upon collectively; the preciousness of human life, for instance; the ugliness of war; the value of kindness, empathy, love; how we as a culture treat death. In that last example I overtly appeal to consensus. I think this is an important distinction when ascribing worth or value to a particular idea. Why do we as a people decide certain ideas are more worth defending than others? Perhaps it is because ideas tend to amass power when more people hold them. But what makes an idea provocative or compelling enough to imbed itself into a person's belief structure? We tend to assimilate those ideas into our worldview that most closely convey unassailable truths. When a comedian says something satirical and contentious, we laugh because we see the truth in the idea and may even say something like, "it's so true," or "it's funny because he's right." We like ideas that fit into our existing belief hierarchies, and we resist those that challenge them. Because we've grown up enjoying the benefits of a world that seeks to protect and preserve life - because it allows us to live longer, and often but not always, peacefully - most people believe in the sanctity of human life. Most deeply held ideas follow a similar trajectory. They carry with them an odd kind of utilitarian irresistibility. And though we come to understand them subjectively, the truths that these ideas express have become so ubiquitous that they border on objectivity.

If the above is true, then some ideas seem to become important out of necessity, the proliferation of certain ideas following an almost Darwinian organizing principle. These ideas, the more important ones, move in the direction of objectivity as they ingratiate themselves with more and more people. This is what gives birth to a collective consciousness amongst us, even across different cultures and in different parts of the globe. Using the same sensory apparatuses to make sense of our physical and intellectual worlds, we are able to have a shared experience. Tenets of that experience, things like fear, pain, love, sadness, joy, hunger, suffering, loss and loneliness color the lens through which we view the world. This is what enables us to participate in art. It is experiential. We each bring our unique histories to the table when we experience art and this is what generates the feeling of subjectivity. But if we were to look deeper and really consider what's happening when we experience art, the subjective becomes a bridge toward the objective.

Works of art, like people, symbols, and ideas, do not exist statically. They are dynamic. Consider classic works of literature. They are contextualized by time and place and are then further contextualized in time and place. The world changes around the work and imposes itself upon it as the work imposes itself outward on the world. But the works aren't remembered for what is changeable about them, they are remembered for what is immutable and enduring. Most literary scholars are able to agree upon the artistic merit of a work and comment about themes and style and innovativeness in an objective way; there are things that make Steinbeck Steinbeck and Proust Proust. One can say, objectively, that there are differences in their art, that they explore different ideas and in different ways. But even that is not the point. The interesting thing to try and define is what happens when someone reads Steinbeck or Proust. How do they participate in the world the author conjured? What's the reader's role? Isn't the reader also writer, intuitor, the vehicle through which the author paints his vision? The reason that we as readers feel sadness as we come upon the ending of A Farwell to Arms is because the author is conjuring a very deliberate feeling, particularly of sadness, desolation, limp devastation. We as people have experienced sadness so we are able to relate with the character and feel the feeling the author intended us to feel. If art had nothing to do with objectivity, how would this be possible?

It echoes Plato's allegory of the cave. The artist's idea is the objective form, and our experience of it is the shadow on the cave wall. Our experience will never be the form, because it cannot be - we can only participate in the artist's expression of it - but there must be something objective of which we are to participate in. Otherwise, it would be inexpressible and we would be left to decipher the shadow of a shadow. Now it should also be noted that the artist, too, is grasping at a shadow that is a only a reflection of the truly objective form, but this does not damage the relationship between artist, art, and its apprehension. During the act of creation, the artist reimagines the form and projects a very deliberate, carefully distorted shadow onto the wall. That shadow becomes the ideal representation of that form to that artist. For an analogy, imagine a master shadow-puppeteer with the ability to beguilingly mimic any shape. Because the puppeteer has complete control and discretion of the shape you will apprehend, you are seeing the most finely polished version of the shadow possible. It is the expression of something objective, subjectively.

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”
― Ernest Hemingway