JOLLY DAYS

Middlebrow (updated)

Terry Teachout writes about disdain for the fine arts amongst intellectuals:

...To them, the very idea of "high art" is anathema, a murderous act of cultural imperialism. They don't think Leonardo da Vinci should be "privileged" (to use one of their favorite pieces of jargon) over the local neighborhood graffiti artist. And as preposterous as this notion may seem to you, it is all but taken for granted among a frighteningly large swath of the postmodern American intelligentsia.

Which brings us right back to the problem of cultural illiteracy. How can we do anything about it if we can't even agree on the fact that it is a problem - or about what basic cultural facts ordinary people should be expected to know? The answer is simple: we can't.

This thought triggers a long held feeling about intellectuals and their ability to discuss the many layered qualities of paintings.

I remember years ago reading a V.S. Pritchett piece in the NYRB in which he wrote about a novelist who became a painter, saying: "he took the easier road". Only someone without a basic understanding of the difficulties of painting could say something like this.

Painting is poorly understood by those you would most expect to have the equipment for discourse - the educated. Even in the less sophisticated arena of the media, Terry Gross. on the NPR show Fresh Air, scarcely knew how to approach interviewing a painter who was a guest, although her interviews with John Updike, as an example, were models of nuance.

Political leanings have a part - often people who call themselves "conservative" will like work that is little more than illustration. The ambiguities of style and tone, of the handling of the paint and the subtleties of color, the historical insights that have enriched and layered the visual image over the centuries, the references and associations of the work, are discarded so as to affirm the singular worth of conventionally representational art above all else. It is as though the expressive power of a painting didn't exist. As though an idea stated is the same thing as an idea expressed.

An analogous error is found on the left where postmodern idea-illustrations are less liked, than approved. Post-modernism has drained art of the expressive and meaningful; detached itself from emotional, intellectual or spiritual depth. The founding agenda of post-modernism, the realization that sincerity often masks a lack of understanding as to context, has come to be a pose of detached irony by works that haven't earned the ironical distance. Both types of work, those advocated by the left or right, as these advocates present themselves in the art world, are laden with presuppositions that mask the impoverished nature of the work being presented. We have a lot of images floating around, but we aren't, in the cliche of our times, a truly visual culture. We barely can see or think about, or feel, or discuss, the images that flit by.

Terry Teachout:

The problem is that I've never been able to reject the evidence of my senses, which tell me that Stravinsky was a great composer (usually) and Picasso a great painter (sometimes). For me, pretending otherwise would be a pose, and I don't like poseurs.

Terry is affirming the essential of a civilized audience: open mindedness in experiencing a work of art; an ability to be in touch with your feelings; a willingness to consider honorably what is before you - rather than wrapping oneself in fashionable received notions.

Middlebrow culture does persist in the visual arts, without ideological association, in two venues however.

First, the hunger for truly felt images is somewhat sated by "outsider art". The artist being untrained, it is acceptable for their art to be "about" something; it is OK to think of the artist and the meanings the work has to the artist; it is OK to draw associations from the subject matter. This is a form of condescension - and no less so on the right - which often touts dreary academism with the enthusiasm of a member of a 19th Century Salon jury, cluelessly missing the reduction of art to pedestrian craft.

Second, photo realistic 3D computer simulation "art" has achieved status - with accessibility as its chief claim and video game adolescents (or the adolescent inhabiting the adult) its chief audience. Viewed as art, these 3D images are finicky and anal retentive, unsatisfying. Without human spirit or the agent of feeling, they are shallow in a way even the most decorative craft work could never be. They are amazing technical feats of course - a mathematical algorithm generating something that looks "so real". But finally, they don't look real at all - they are soulless simulacrums. Simulacrums not of experienced, felt reality, but of photographs.

As an aside, what is amazing, is the astonishing ability of a completely abstract system, mathematics, constructed without reference to the outside world, to correlate with and describe so precisely the real world. Mathematics is predictive of real world occurrence - this is miraculous. Computer art is a graphic representation of this astonishing correspondence of the smoothly abstract human made mathematical model and the bumpy Brownian soup of reality.

To say it again, in these times, ideological simple-mindedness trumps our ability to think, or to see, or to access our built in sense of the complexity of things. Ideology and its enabler, polemical academic advocacy utilizing guild-like slogans to obscure a lack of ideas or insight, thickens the tongue, clouds the mind, deadens the spirit.