Art’s a Fucking Mess
My friend Tadd over at Big Other has a post up about why Plato wanted to kick all the poets out of his ideal republic. And I’m no philosopher. But my understanding has long been that Plato’s problem with poets/art (besides the whole mimesis “copy of a copy” thing) is that art is messy, uncontrollable.
Like, consider this:
Someone—some artist somewhere—decided to make this. Is it good? Bad? Funny? Sick? Evil? Juvenile? Calculated? Hip? Clever? Stupid? Immoral? Amoral? Sure—it’s all those things, and more! It supports a variety of readings. In fact, the better an artwork is (I think this is a pretty OK one), the more irreducible it tends to be (at least, according to certain lines of aesthetic reasoning that I think Tadd would agree with).
Good art disrupts the social order. It wakes you up, shocks you, makes you feel alive—it makes you see the world again, differently. Bad art is boring, predictable, prescribed, a weak illustration of what you’ve already been thinking. (That’s my problem with so many depictions of September 11th, Roxanne—they reduce that day into something so digestible, so mundane, it’s as though it never happened.)
This doesn’t mean that all good art is shock art, or that all shock art is good. As Curtis White likes to put it: in June 1967 he walked into a record shop expecting to see all the records he’d grown accustomed to seeing, but saw instead the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—
—which blew his mind. So he bought and listened to that record, which made him realize that music didn’t have to be the way he thought it was—and what’s more, that life didn’t have to be the way it was.
We all have art experiences like this. I remember seeing Federico Fellini’s 8½ for the first time, in 1996 in a film class. It was like no other movie I’d ever seen. Before that class, I had no idea that anyone would even think of making a movie like 8½. And as I watched it, I could make very little sense of it; the thing just seemed totally alien to my life up till that point.
And yet I liked it. Indeed, I loved it, and knew immediately that I would have to keep watching it over and over again—which I did—until, if it didn’t make sense to me, I made sense to it, and 8½ had become my new understanding of what a great film could be. Which is to say, of course, that Fellini totally changed me.
Which is why poets have to go, if you’re trying to organize an ideal republic—because the very nature of their work (if it’s any good) will pervert, subvert, challenge, and reimagine the social order. And what’s worse, they may not know or understand a single thing about what it is that they are doing! Did the Beatles know anything about politics, or how an economy should be organized? Probably not. Did they know that, for reasons they couldn’t explain, they simply utterly had to make crazy, exciting music that didn’t sound anything at all like the boring music they heard everyday all around them? We know that they did. Did their strange exciting new music convince millions of youngsters to stop listening to their parents and run around screaming and have sex and experiment with drugs and stop taking baths and grow their hair long?
They sure didn’t discourage them!
Tags: 8½, 9/11, animated gifs, big other, Curtis White, federico fellini, James Tadd Adcox, Plato, poets, Roxanne Gay, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Republic
I should add that it was the comments on my last snippet post—the one about 9/11 art—that got me thinking along these lines this morning. In particular, I watched this video, and found myself wondering what I made of it:
http://youtu.be/gV9-xCoPIf0
This is good.
Interesting. The Fresh Prince thing is certainly detestable, but… it’s shocking in that it’s not some conspiracy shit more than anything else (which says a fucking lot in and of itself). I certainly have no qualms about the whole “copy of a copy” thing–it’s more about how you do it than anything else, not to debase all art as just that. I’ve gotten flamed on here before (probably out of simple misunderstanding) about it, but… fuck it, I was being a bit of an asshole beforehand anyways. Good post.
Art is supposed to tell the truth, and the best truths are the most detested ones, so it only makes sense that the best art brings the most detested truths center-stage, which in turn forces people to think about things they’d rather let lie, which in turn results in change, be it social, personal, emotional, whatever, and without art these detested truths lay dormant and eat at people and make them worse and worse.
Thanks for bringing this up!
is it art or a coincidence that your Fresh Prince GIF also accurately ekphrasizes how excited i feel about the fact you’re writing now for us here at the humble G?
Hey Adam,
Great post. I’d agree that one of the effects of art can be opening up new political & social possibilities. However, I’m not sure if that’s necessarily the yardstick I’d use to measure the value of art, or of a given work. Certainly I’m still working through a lot of this myself. But maybe where you say that a work of art is irreducible to any one meaning, I’d claim that meaning isn’t the point of art at all. Which I was kind of getting at in my post–IF Plato is correct in asserting Truth (with its connection to meaning) as the one value towards which everything must subscribe, then his critique of poets is entirely right. But perhaps there are other values? Art seems to open up the possibility that we can value something for reasons other than truth or use-value, which is part of what I find interesting about this line of inquiry.
Good post, Adam even though my name is spelled with one “n”. Indeed much of the coverage of 9/11 did try to reduce a tragedy into something digestible but I also think rational, intelligent people know that such reduction is not possible and as such, they consume the media images for what they are. When something immense and deeply emotional like 9/11 happens, people try to make the incomprehensible comprehensible. Sometimes they fail with good intentions. Sometimes they exploit. Sometimes they create art. I simply don’t think there’s some sort of magic solution to coverage, both artistic and journalistic, of such a tragedy, that will make everyone happy. Everyone needs something different.
America will always blame Indians for the death of cowboys
http://youtu.be/vnY7bUFA5f0
art’s a messy fuck
Art’s supposed to tell the truth…unless it’s supposed to lie.
Does that mean you’re trampling some skyscraper down into the dust?
Sorry about the misspelling, Roxxane.
(I’m actually a terrible speller…)
People should of course do whatever it is they want to do.
But people should also be totally free to criticize the fuck out of what other people do.
a dust of joy!
Absolutely. I’ve just seen a lot of “criticism’ about the media coverage of 9/11 that feels very state the obvious.
I don’t think I say that, not in those terms…? Those possibilities are sometimes consequences of art, but they may also not result, and that doesn’t mean the work of art is bad. In other words, I wouldn’t judge a work based entirely on its social response; that seems a sloppy metric.
There are many different ways to measure whether a work of art is good or bad. I myself don’t like anything that doesn’t have dogs in it. (By this I mean literal dogs. I like paintings and sculptures made from dead dogs. Clothing, too.)
I also didn’t say “meaning” anywhere in my post. I took great care not to, in fact. (C’mon! I’m taking a class right now with Professor Michaels! I just got home from it!)
There are always other values. There are more values than you or I could ever name.
Jonathan Rosenbaum once said that when It Happened One Night came out, men stopped wearing white cotton T-shirts underneath their dress shirts, because Clark Gable doesn’t wear one in that film. And so men and women realized that was a sexy look. The undershirt market tanked virtually overnight.
That’s a social effect, perhaps the greatest social effect It Happened One Night has had. Does it make It Happened One Night a great film? The greatest film? The worst film?
Obviously that’s a bizarre line of questioning. But I think we can see how this example illustrates my point. Who could have predicted beforehand that that film would have that (aesthetic social) effect?
Is mine like that?
Is mine like that?
No, not at all. I’m thinking mostly of Twitter level responses where people are frothing their outrage in convenient, ineffectual soundbytes.
No, not at all. I’m thinking mostly of Twitter level responses where people are frothing their outrage in convenient, ineffectual soundbytes.
Well, there’s a lot of stupidity out there, and yesterday seems to have brought out more than usual. But I suppose complaining about 9/11 coverage is also pretty dumb.
People are going to do what they’re going to do. Ultimately, for me, the more interesting conversation is, “What are the better ways we can cover 9/11?”
The “good-art-is-subversive-and-blows-shit-up” argument is sort of weary and dated by now and Captain Obvious, thanks to post-modernism. A lot of lazy artists who like to fashion themselves as progressives who are really just lazy and looking for a crutch and an excuse to wallow in endless, self-serving irony still cling to it, without any original or unique vision. DFW wrote an essay about all this–I’m sure folks have read it.
Time to try something else, folks, and move the conversation forward from the 1970’s.
P.S. Your name is awesome!
Yes, that’s a much better question.
Roxane, I think we just talked more just now than in the past two years. I’m happy for that.
No! No! No, I must disagree, it’s not weary and dated and obvious. Honestly, I don’t see how postmodernism has anything to do with it.
Postmodernism is about foregrounding the artificiality of the art object. Among other things—such as (I just learned this from Walter Benn Michaels, tonight, and I think it’s an interesting thought) recognizing that one can make art that means nothing, and is completely unavailable for aesthetic judgment (or, at least, one can imagine such art).
Meanwhile, the view of art that I’m invoking above—art as consciousness expansion (NOT subversion/blow-things-up) is a much, much, much older idea. It dates back to at least the Russian Formalists (Viktor Shklovsky very coherently espoused it c. 1917), and probably earlier still, to Blake (William, not Butler; sorry, BB) and the Impressionists and the French Symbolists (who were of course trying to find an artistic way to deal with the fact that the world was suddenly going Insanely Modern all around them—just think for a second how fucked up that must have been! To suddenly have trains and steamships invented, when before that there had never been anything like that, ever!) (That’s why they spent so much time painting train stations. It would be like me making endless prints of iPads. It’s hard for us to remember that now, really.)
So this conversation dates back to much, much, much before the 1970s. Try 1870s.
That said, there’s some truth in what you write, MFBomb (and thanks for chiming in; it’s always good to see you!). As I’ve been saying for a while now (mainly to friends in bars, after I’ve had a few gin and tonics), very little that I see in the art world today strikes me as being new in the slightest, at least when viewed through the context of the Impressionists/French Symbolists (and Decadents). They really invented a concept of the artist (and art) that we’ve been living with ever since. And I don’t see how anyone (or hardly anyone) has been able to find a way out of it. (In other words: fuck postmodernism!—despite what I wrote earlier in this comment—from this POV, it’s just one very long modernism.)
Just think about it. What is an artist? Someone who sits in cafes and smokes and drinks and says “aw fuck it” and then writes about cheap sex and how shitty life is, right? And then dies (or aspires to die) by the age of 30? But who also wants to be really famous—wants everyone else in the city to know who he is? Or something roughly equivalent to that?
Congratulations! That dream of the artist is 150 years old! Find a way outside of that, and you’ll be the greatest artist/critic/person of our time…
(OK, that’s enough half-assed theory for one comment. Now, to finish my third gin and tonic…)
Sounds nice! Where can I find some of this “art”?
why do you have a star after your name, and what do I have to do to get one of my own? do I have to post a lot of comments?
Comment moderation privileges. No, you don’t have to post a lot.
Comment moderation privileges. No, you don’t have to post a lot.
Comment moderation privileges. No, you don’t have to post a lot.
Comment moderation privileges. No, you don’t have to post a lot.
haha thanks! deadgod actually gave it to me. It’s a nice thing, to be called a raptor.
People are going to do what they’re going to do.
I want those privileges! But none of the attendant responsibilities.
That’s why it’s more important to control want than action.
I wasn’t attempting to give a comprehensive definition of Postmodernism when I said that it took the idea/notion the furthest it could go, nor did I mean to suggest that it didn’t have any historical precedent(s). Postmodernism obviously didn’t arrive out-of-nowhere.
I just think too many of today’s writers don’t have anything to actually say and are content to appropriate principles without updating them at all.
I just recently read “Not-Knowing,” the essay by Barthelme. And, thinking of art as more than representation (which, for D.B., is the realm of sociology or journalism), as something existing on its own, independent–in a way–makes the whole issue of art about or in light of 9/11 make way more sense.
Maybe it’s too easy of an answer, but it seems like the problem is that 9/11 is massive, it’s a blackhole. When we talk or write or think about anything associated with it, we can’t help seeing the towers falling, seeing the coverage, seeing all the shit that’s happened since then.
When Kurt Vonnegut writes slaughterhouse 5 and deals with the bombing of dresden and tries to reach the level of art, he succeeds (maybe?) because dresden for most americans is a fairly empty word. I think Dresden, and I imagine, well, everything that Vonnegut tells me, and nothing more (until I read more about it).
On the other hand, someone attempts to write about 9/11, to make art with 9/11 in mind, and what they’re doing, or what it feels like, is going up to an already existing massive object and scribbling their name in some tiny corner of it.
And so, then, the freshprince thing, which is only funny because it’s shocking, if it’s funny at all, seems actually tragic, sad (are these the same words?).
Because it’s an act of desperation. It’s the equivalent of getting a call on the phone telling you someone you love has died, and then you proceeding to just scream your head off, or to run in any direction that seems appropriate, as if you could get away, or scream it away. But you can’t. It has happened. So, then what? I don’t know.
p.s. Desperate because it recognizes the maybe impossibility of turning the massive reality of 9/11 into anything more, the extreme burden of shifting this massive object sitting in our heads, or something.
“(if it’s any good) will
pervert, subvert, challenge, and reimagine the social order. ”
Just tired of it. Does this have to be said in every post? Yeah, okay, any artwork that had any idea of strengthening society rather than taking the piss out of it is automatically not good, blehlelhkajgjdkb fart.
Word. I’m tired of hearing it too and have begun to question the motives of people who beat me over the head with it all the time.
I realize this is being framed in a particular context in looking at art/literature through theory in academic context or whatever, but I’m so so sick of the “no one has done anything new since x” complaint. Who
fucking cares. Go find something to get excited about and talk about
how you’re excited about it. The last person I want to hear from is
someone who wants to talk about how they’ve amassed so much knowledge
that everything is boring to them now. Why is that a good thing?
No worries. Just wanted to expand a little bit on what I said in my post, & wanted to make sure that it was clear that I wasn’t arguing, for example, that art *isn’t* a fucking mess. I’m partial to the fucking-mess side of art, myself. I guess I’m not totally sure what the point of disagreement is here, if there is one (your “And I’m no philosopher. But…” made me read this as partially taking issue with my post, though I could be misreading this).
In any case, I haven’t been able to get that .gif out of my head for the past 2 days.
I think this is kind of a trap, that has to do less with our experience of art and more with our experience of art histories. Histories of art tend to put so much emphasis on the novel that novelty, or the lack of it, becomes a sort of artistic veto: “you’re wrong to like that/think it’s interesting, because I can show examples of when it’s been done before.”
John Barth offers a way out of this, I think, with the idea of “passionate virtuosity”: instead of valuing the newness of a work (which in any case can always be called into question), we might choose to value the mastery of the work, recognizing that tradition (and how it’s used) are part of artistic mastery.
And I already said this to Tadd, but I’ll say it again here: Everything is new! You have to narrow the concept of what “new” is down pretty effing far to be able to make the statement “nothing is new”.
I AM BORED AND IT IS THE WORLD’S FAULT
Hmmm, I’m glad that you admitted to taking my post out-of-context before you took it out-of-context. Appreciate your honesty.
So if I’m reading you correctly, you’re advocating some sort of primitive and ahistorical approach to art?
Eh, really? Don’t use up your daily quota of strawmen. Geeze, dude.
so you know i have birthed a child every time you have used “strawman” in a htmlgiant comment. i have 17 children! ahh! strawchilds in my wazoos! got outcher strawminds mend your paws for them!
“Cool” post.
Also, I’ve birthed a million children every time a poster used caps lock to mock another poster. 1M>17.
Sometimes that’s exactly how you need to approach it. Or need to think you’re approaching it. Everyone consumes each piece of art as an individual and what they bring to it is based on their own knowledge and experience. THAT’S the history that is important. Your own. There is no universal experience or history. We’re all going to die and none of this is going to matter!
ALSO, I’VE BIRTHED A MILLION CHILDREN EVERY TIME A POSTER USED CAPS LOCK TO MOCK ANOTHER POSTER. 1M>17.
Also, my daily quota of strawmen is much, much bigger than you realize. I have an army of strawmen.
Letting myself be wrong about shit makes me feel alive.
And I will probably change my mind about that by tomorrow.
No, that’s how you need to approach it, apparently. I’m doing just fine with the approach outlined in T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and The Individual Talent.”
Also note that I advocated the “new” with language like, “updating,” and “unique vision.” I’m not sure, either, what you mean when you suggest that I suggested there was some sort of “universal human experience or history” simply because I don’t advocate ahistorical and primitive approaches to art. It would seem to me that your approach is the one that advocates such thinking, not mine.
(cont). Something else I see all over your posts (and the posts of some other folks here) is an inflexible mind and uber-defensiveness over your own, personal process. As a big boy writer who wears big boy pants, you should be able to navigate between what you need to do to create a healthy psychic space for creating your own work and more abstract discussions in a comment thread about the relationship between art/culture/history. Big boy writers can do both.
at first glance, I thought you were referring to my friend Art
“Time to try something else, folks, and move the conversation forward from the 1970’s.”
“I’m doing just fine with the approach outlined in T.S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and The Individual Talent.'”
lulz
re: image. We’re talking about “truth” no? Or are we talking about the consequence of unbroken chain of belligerent ideology? The image …. “still more believable than the official story”. Or “First as tragedy, then as farce”. Or more directly, “From Plato to NATO”. What causes wars? “… Well, Shitty ideologies for one thing..” -w.s.b.
[…] A high-school-aged girl saying “no problem, my man” to a disheveled man in his forties who has suddenly come across her smoking and drinking alcohol in a graveyard? Fingernails on a chalkboard. Admittedly, one imagines that the awkwardness of the dialogue might be attempting to enact the awkwardness of the situation, but the novel doesn’t display any self-knowledge of its own awkwardness—and, what’s more, there are many, many more examples of poorly imagined dialogue in this novel. But having to trek through these particularly hackneyed moments—and there are, unfortunately, several of them—is a small price to pay for the lyrical gems Harding gives us. Perhaps we should not begrudge art its mess. […]