I’ve thought a lot about Art.
Yes, I’m going to pretentiously capitalize it. I’m not just talking about “artfully” doing any activity, the art of the deal, or even cræft. I’m talking about the enduring works of Art throughout human history and the practice of making them. So I’m going to capitalize it.
I think it is a modern sickness that we have to define everything, systematize it and measure it just to understand it. We should be able to just be people and understand people things. The beautiful sculpture before us does not need language. It speaks directly to our souls, and we should understand it unconsciously. We should create beautiful things because we’re human, not because we’re trying to achieve some goal.
But as in so many areas, we’ve been propagandized out of our instincts so thoroughly that only a glimmer of our humane light remains within. We are barely human. We don’t know what to make of anything without some ideology or theorist lobbing lingo at us.
Or else we think everything is relative. Nothing, not even Art, has value, and esteeming Moby-Dick more than a short story I wrote for English class in grade seven is just personal preference. Back when I was young(er) and stupid(er), I argued with people on reddit’s r/books who believed this very thing. (Don’t worry: I no longer have a reddit account).
It’s all bullshit. We know there is Beauty. Deep down we do. And once you acknowledge Moby-Dick is better than your five-year old’s kindergarten project, you’ve objectified the realm of judgement. Better than means hierarchy. A real, existing one that you can see.
However, because most of us are thoroughly Modern and deracinated not only from our heritage, but from our own nature, I think we have to learn things that should really just be a part of us. Or maybe they are there, but they need to be re-awoken.
All that being said, I’m going to take a stab at explaining what Art is since we have these sick, modern minds that need all the help they can get. If I am going to talk about Art in this newsletter/blog/thing, I need everyone on the same page. I will also touch on what art criticism should be given everything I’ve just said above.
My theory of art
Beauty is all around us. It is inherent in Being. But Beauty can be found in both the very broad and the very small. It can span a whole lifetime, and it can grace a fleeting drop of dew catching the sun on a blade of grass. It can even be found in suffering, terror, and violence.
Our vision is very limited. We often don’t see the Beauty in a second, a day, a life (though sometimes, of course, we do). Many small things escape our attention unless we’re purposefully being mindful. Some massive things escape our attention because they are bigger than the scope of our vision.
More abstractly, there are patterns, roles and—that dreaded high school English word—themes throughout Nature, History and human life and civilization. These patterns are normally unconsciously recognized and integrated into our heuristics and therefore our thought and behaviour, but there is Beauty to be found in them too, when one begins to notice.
Wherefore Art? Here’s my theory—and no, I have no papers to cite, and no pretensions to practicing Evolutionary Psychology.
Cave paintings and ancient little carvings were the result of an artistic impulse. Ancient humans instinctually sensed the Beauty around them and within their own existence, and felt compelled to embody these things in the best forms they could manage. They may not have even known why they were doing so. Or maybe they knew better than we do today.
What could be more sensible than surrounding yourself with Beauty? Creating beautiful monuments to beings you respect (gods)? Making totems that you see every day or grand works in gathering places for special occasions to remind yourself and the tribe that life is beautiful and worth living and perpetuating.
Along the way, the process of encapsulating Beauty become more and more self-conscious and deliberate. Not only did people instinctually feel and respond to the Beauty around them in the way that we have from, I suspect, Homo erectus on down, but they truly studied it in a mindful way and at different scales. They found that they could go beyond that which is obvious to our narrow vision and find Beauty everywhere in both space and time.
This wasn’t theory. This was merely perceiving reality more carefully and acting on this new information.
Their greatest achievement was recognizing that they could make this more abstract or difficult-to-perceive Beauty concrete with representative objects. They could create Beauty of their own that was a small encapsulation of the Beauty of all Being.
This act was already being done with the cave paintings and so on, but bringing self-consciousness and a wider vision to Art allowed men to be more purposeful, skillful and encompassing with their creations.
And so, a long-germinating seed sprouted into a sapling. And as time passed, into a mighty oak. Later works of Art are not always so much better as further along in the growth process of Art as a whole. They have a taller, thicker trunk from which to spring. And different media, styles and genres are like branches all shooting from the same trunk, twigs from branches, etcetera. Some branches are higher up the tree, I would argue, but all are Art and therefore beautiful.
To summarize, I think Art crystallizes, embodies and compresses Beauty into intricate, skillfully made objects that we can apprehend.
I think we have always created Art, and that it is part of being human. But I think Art evolved from an unconscious process into something more deliberate, although the best has always maintained the power of its deep, unconscious roots.
This is valuable for us because we naturally love Beauty, are enriched by it, inspired by it and so on. But it is easy for us to miss it, or to forget it, or to have our vision clouded by suffering and worry. We see that the universe is beautiful, but it is also bewildering and overwhelming.
A small, comprehensible, beautiful object in our hands or on the wall or on the street or ringing in our ears connects us with Beauty in a very human way.
Of course, as is the case in all human activities, some Art is better than others, and some artists are more successful than others. In almost any field, 80% of what is generated by people is crap. And 15% is merely good. That last 5% ranges from the excellent to the truly great.
But that does not invalidate Art as a whole. That just means we need critics to help prune the tree so that we don’t have to wade through so much crap to see the truly Beautiful.
The Place of Criticism
Critics have a bad rap, and for good reason.
If 80% of Art is crap, 99% of criticism is the foulest pig manure. Critics are largely responsible for the pre-eminence of the worthless contemporary Art that now fills galleries. The gatekeepers lowered the bridge and raised the portcullis as they ushered the invaders inside.
Every reactionary who looks on contemporary art with disdain cites DuChamp’s Fountain as an early example, or even a marker of the beginning of the end of great Art as it has existed in the Western tradition for millenia.
Trying to pinpoint a discrete moment, act or idea that began the decline is a common and—in my opinion—somewhat wasteful reactionary exercise. It is good to know what went wrong so that we can fix the problem and avoid it in the future, but the origin of a civilizational problem is rarely discrete and easily “fixable,” and one can usually get the gist of the problem without knowing its specific origin.
Besides, as Roger Scruton said, the urinal was just a joke. A joke on critics, actually. They didn’t get that they were the punchline, and now there are no depths to which Art can sink that they won’t praise or excuse or contextualize.
The commercialization of everything also has played a role, as has been pointed out many times before. When nothing is sacred, Art (and fakes) becomes big business. If the standards are erased, then curators, dealers and select critics can arbitrarily decide what is valuable, and then make a killing off of being the ones to have “discovered” the next great artist. Insider trading is illegal. I assume fabricating a company along with all its financial statements and then selling it off to some rich asshole is also illegal. But in the art world…
To paraphrase Satre paraphrasing Dostoyevsky: Without Beauty, everything is permitted.
This degeneracy mandates that a critic use annoying jargon and read way too much in Art that contains very little in order to justify his own existence. Without his obfuscation, it would be all too clear that the emperor has no clothes. Actually, it is clear to normal people. Almost no one likes the canvases with two colours on them or the concrete bunkers on university campuses. One has to be deluded—I mean, educated—in some ideology to see the true meaning behind the ugly and the puerile.
Thanks to this dehumanizing, de-Beautifying process, total apathy about Art is now the default position among much of the public. Why would you appreciate something so ugly and that has such hateful gatekeepers?
These bad critical habits have filtered all the way down to our high school English classes, where educated teachers—so much wrong with the world today springs from universities—impose bad critical takes on literature and encourage their students to come up with more variations of the same.
I’m enraged by this state of affairs because literature is my favourite Art, and the one I know best. But is is one of the most abstracted arts because, unless one is participating in an oral literary tradition, it doesn’t tap into as primal an evolutionary system as say painted images or music. It takes a bit more of the mindfulness that I mentioned earlier.
And so for teachers with no discernment for Beauty and no understanding of Art to foist literature upon children is a recipe for baking a hatred of it into their impressionable minds. Hence, several generations now despise the classics and only want to ingest boring slop written (poorly) by people with agendas to sell rather than insight into the beautiful.
A related phenomenon is the insistence that Art is meant to change the world or create empathy with other people or help you experience other cultures. These base and utilitarian ends are irrelevant to the vast majority of Art as it has evolved throughout human history. They are the lame excuses of a society to keep holding its breath because it doesn’t know that human beings need oxygen.
The contemporary high school teacher says:
Artists have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.
Telling a poorly written story about a non-binary black teen who is unhappy about some things is great art for the new generation that should displace irrelevant classics because it is about a non-binary black teen with problems. Not because of any Beauty captured in the Art object itself.
Without Beauty, everything is permitted.
Why is Art criticism worse than Art, historically? For it was ever thus, even before the great decline.
The obvious thing to say is that those who can’t do art, critique. That may be so, but often even great artists make terrible critics.
I think it has more to do with two things: the explicitness of criticism, and the deep well of Beauty from which Art can draw.
Art is ambiguous, manifold, fractal, often felt more than it is thought, although intellect unlocks new passages of Beauty’s great structure. There is a massive reservoir of Beauty. A great artist need only craft a fine spigot to tap into this great store, and Beauty will flow through his piece in greater volumes than he could ever have anticipated.
Criticism, by contrast, must try to judge and explicate, and so it must be explicit. There is a lot more room for error precisely because one must walk the tightrope of the explicit. Error is the wide, deep space all around you. The explicit is obvious and narrow, and so it is easier to disprove, reject and discredit.
In other words, the artist can accidentally do much better than he expected. The critic cannot.
Another major hurdle for the critic is bias. We cannot help but see reality from our own perspectives, coloured and sometimes twisted by experience. Bias can keep us from seeing a work of Art from a reality-based perspective. Instead, we see it through some particular pathology of ours. Since the 20th Century, ideology has been the overriding bias infecting critics. The Rape of Polyxena, the statue seen above, can only be seen through a feminist “lens” nowadays. Critical lens swapping is a modern disease.
Is there a place for the very difficult and severely degenerated craft of criticism? In my opinion, yes.
There is so much Art to wade through, and there is so much about Art to understand given its long history of development, that I think critics are necessary. Someone has to prune the ever-sprouting twigs so that we can see the beautiful more clearly. Someone has to gently place Art in its proper context because, while Art makes Beauty comprehensible, that does not mean every element of it is obvious. A statue and a painting should be beautiful upon first glance, but there should also be layers of Beauty, some unconsciously present as the voice of a thousand generations speak through the artist, some consciously and intricately crafted. Those of us looking to get everything out of an artwork that we can appreciate the work of a talented critic who understands Art, Beauty, Man and History.
But as with all activities, there is a balance. The critic cannot replace the experience of Art for you, and he should not try to. He judges. He provides context based on what is reality, not on ideology.
Finding a balance of approaching the world as a human being with a subjective perspective and seeing Art for what it is is very difficult. Becoming a courageous, noble people who are embedded in a heritage and in a community of forthrightness is the best thing we can do to limit bias at a societal level. Until such a time, however, the individual critic needs to bravely rise up and try to stare reality in the face, and proclaim it for all to hear regardless of the consequences. His efforts will be mostly fruitless in his own time, but this is how a canon begins to be re-established.
The Formalist literary critics thought everything you needed to know about a text was right there in the text. This is a safe approach to start with because you are engaging with something that you know is real: the work of Art sitting before you.
But this approach is far too limited. A great work of Art sprouts from a glorious tree that places it in context, and it sprouts from the hand of man with his own heritage that imbues the work with meaning.
We can do better. We don’t have to live like this. Art doesn’t have to be bad. Criticism doesn’t have to be bad.
I think there have always been and will always be good artists. The difference is the quantity of them, the degree of their quality, and the extent to which the best artists rise to the top of our cultural hierarchies.
Many of the best artists can now be found on platforms like Twitter and Substack because the traditional publishing industry and literary magazine clique are so incestuous and so detached from the continent of reality that the whole little artificial island they’ve made for themselves should be glassed.
We need good artists. We also need good critics to recognize them and promote them. Most importantly, we need everyone to reconnect with their understanding of Beauty so that they can recognize beautiful Art when it comes before them, even if they don’t know all the details that a critic might be able to provide.
A few generations of this process, and maybe our children will have finely cultivated instincts for Beauty, and the best Art will once again inspire us to collectively look up.