Art pour l'art

Last night we dug into canti 10,11, and 12 of the Purgatorio. The topic of the artists and the arts came up, as it inevitably will when you encounter the Trajan's column of Humility. The notion of Art for the sake of Art (capital Art, to make is sound more Important) came up.

There was a day when I firmly upheld the notion of Art for the sake of Art, but the more I think about it, the less sure I am of even what it means. It sounds more and more like a slogan, and less and less like a tenable position.

Do we have cooking for the sake of cooking? Sorry, Cooking for the sake of Cooking? What would it be? We cook inedible food simply as homage to our techniques?

"Chef, this sauteed tire certainly shows off your skills on the line, and the knife work on the piece of oak is truly stunning, but what is for dinner?"

Art, if it is at all worth anything, must be towards some ends other than itself. Art for the purpose of resonating deep aesthetic realities is for the sake of that resonance within the human soul. It is not for the sake of the art itself.

Ulitmately I am more and more inclined to see visual arts as part of the realm of music than in the realm of rhetoric. One cannot persuade by art, and we should worry if one could.

At its most utilitarian political art is preaching to the choir or inflaming the enemy. It simply does not bring people around to the other side. I have never heard of someone seeing a painting, slapping his head and saying, "oh, I had it all wrong. David is right! Down with the King!"

At best, political art stands as art in spite of the political content. That way the Good, the True, and the Beautiful can be found in David or Mayakovski, in spite of their reprehensible positions on revolution.

It is perhaps the greatest slap in the face an artist has ever received from his own art that Bert Brecht's plays have become part of the canon of establishment theater, to be viewed by the wealthy without inciting them to revolution.