September 5, 2003
Art Reflections Part III
More Art Reflections.
In my brief outline of my own basic views on art, as well as discussions with Matthew of the Shrine of the Holy Whapping, I realize that an important issue must be dealt with: the relationship of objective beauty to individual taste. Certainly de gustibus non disputandem est. There is no point in arguing over whether or not it is correct to like the color orange, or the smell of skunks, or even to prefer Wagner to Scarlatti (God forbid!).
The problem comes in modern society, when the proper understanding of beauty is neglected and confounded with taste. The problem probably started when taste became a badge of class, and I will not be so foolish as to suggest a single time for that. I do know from studying the history of food, that there have been class-based food fads going way back. For awhile the nobility (and emerging bourgeoisie) shunned aromatic herbs, because that was how the peasants flavored their food. Then, the craze for spice was seen as incredibly nouveau, so spices were almost completely abandoned in savory dishes in favor of thyme, savory, marjoram, etc.
Once taste was linked to social standing, it became an imposed thing. Don’t like cardamom in your meatballs? Tough, cause that’s what the proper people are doing. Sage is vulgar. Naturally one cannot back up such an imposition of taste simply by resorting to whim, so a theoretical justification was sought after, and the ancients had already done some great work in aesthetics, so why not just borrow that? The result was a rigid and often erroneous use of the language of beauty to describe taste.
With all of the other errors of philosophical Liberalism and naturalistic philosophies came the outlandish notion of self-reliance in all matters. It was no longer acceptable to ignore one’s own taste if society called it ugly. But degeneracy takes awhile, so it was about 100 or so years before it really hit the fan, and some people noticed that official taste was often rather ugly. Now the obvious and correct way to attack official ugly taste is to resort to appeals to eternal beauty, but Liberalism was too prevalent, so the battle was fought in the arena of the dialectic of power. False tastes were imposed, but the basic human urge towards the Good recognized the hypocrisy. This reaction of our better natures was exploited by the Liberal cult of the individual, and the results were tragic.
No longer could you say that my taste was bad, nor that anything was objectively ugly. From “To each his own” to “Hey man, it’s all good.”
In the middle of this turmoil (which was necessary to break the iron fist of official taste, particularly when official taste reached the various ever-sinking nadirs it has hit) were a lot of artists, poets, musicians, sculptors, and architects who clung or grasped or blindly whacked around for the eternal. Some were better than others, some were even quite amazing, some failed, and some managed to achieve extreme beauty and extreme ugliness in practically the same breath. And that is the story of art in our culture for the past 200 years!
Now that the notion of the avant-garde has played itself out except in the minds of the dim-bulbs who curate most museums and probably some high school artist in Sacramento who has the idea that Van Gogh and Matisse are somehow controversial in the greater art world (I really did see the battles of 100 years before me as still being fought), we must make an important distinction between the appreciation of the Good and the True and the Beautiful and taste.
I am going to discuss an artist who I admire as a painter, yet loathe: Francis Bacon. I have not only studied many reproductions, but have spent considerable time face to face with his work. It is an experience.
The folksinger Leo Kottke, who is known for telling funny yarns in between his fantastic guitar work, tells a story on one of his live albums about looking through his father’s (who was in the Army Medical Corps) books on jungle diseases. “A book of jungle diseases is like pornography. The more you look the sicker you get, but you can’t help yourself,” says Kottke.
At the last retrospective of Bacon, I sort of understood. I was captivated by his paint handling, his control of color, his tightly constructed compositions. Basically, I had to give him credit: Francis Bacon could paint well. His figures betrayed a good hand with the pen as well. Yet there is something that really repulsed me from his work. I don’t think that it is the content, because I have no problem with looking at decay and the grotesque and macabre. I have to just chalk it up to taste, although there is something to talk about in our discussion of content when a piece of art repulses at the same time that it draws us in (we will deal with that in the next installment).
This is where it gets tricky: to recognize that I do not like an artist, although logically I realize that he was a good artist. As much as it boggles my mind, it is possible that there are people out there who can recognize that Richard Diebenkorn was a great painter and not like his work. I feel sorry for these poor souls, but we have to make allowances for that in our discussions of art.
I do believe that we are on the verge of a great era of Western art (or the complete collapse of civilization, although I tend to be an optimist), and I believe that part of this new springtime will be a flowering of figurative art (although non-figurative art is not necessarily modern, and will always be with us). However, many of the folks who are promoting “returns to sanity” and the such really seem to be arguing for a return to the imposition of taste. They argue, as I mentioned in the previous post, against the theories that were fashionable, rather than against the work itself, which they have not taken the time to really see. Their groupings of disparate painters, following the groupings of the various theorists of New York betrays them.
I admit that I do not always keep taste and aesthetics apart. I also admit that I share the weakness that many do in liking the occasional bad piece (no names, but there are a few pop artists that I like in spite of their general lack of anything really beautiful – liking garbage is a consequence of original sin, by the way, but we must leave that for later discussion). However, we must always struggle to make this distinction and should probably work to conform our taste to what we know is good from the intellect. But we must be honest with ourselves, otherwise we will end up with the old taste imposition, which is how we got to the problem to begin with.