Sunday, March 20, 2011

Art Snobs


I'm reading John Brockman's Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? and blew up when I hit the section by Eric Fischl and April Gornik where they said:
Art objects contain a dynamism based on scale and physicality that produces a somatic response in the viewer. The powerful visual experience of art locates the viewer precisely as an integrated self within the artist's vision. With the flattening of visual information and the randomness of size inherent in reproduction, the significance of scale is eroded. Visual information becomes based on image alone. Experience is replaced with facsimile.
What a pile of horse puckey. This is the typical involuted and obscurantist "commentary" which passes for art criticism or analysis. Let me translate. They are saying: Reproductions are 2D images of the "real" object without the same size as the original. Therefore they are inferior and just "facsimiles". If you have the requisite experience with antiquated technology of the facsimile machine you know that the result is a fairly degraded copy of the original. So they are implying that by nature all copies must be immensely worse than "an original".

This reminds me of a gourmand complaining that the poor have no appreciation for the finer tastes of truffles and caviar because they are so busy spending 80% of their income on coarse bread and beans rather than the "finer stuff" of life. My response? The overstuffed gourmand will never savour simple bread and beans because he has never tasted the greatest "seasoning" life allows to enhance culinary enjoyment: hunger.

Any artist worth their mettle would be tickled pink to make their art available to 6.5 billion people via reproductions. Only a dilletante insists that the public view their art in the tiny gallery of the artist's choosing during the one week "exposition" that even significant "art" barely manages. Can you imagine squeezing 6.5 billion into that gallery? Talk about an "inferior experience"! You would be lucky to not be trampled to death.

This pair goes on:
As admittedly useful as the Internet is, easy access to images of everything and anything creates a false illusion of knowledge and experience. The world pictured as pictures does not deliver the experience of art seen and experienced physically. It is possible for an art-experienced person to "translate" what is seen online, but the experience is necessarily remote.
Again, nutty elitism! Let me translate: Only original "art" is worthy. Anything that makes art accessible to the masses demeans it and drains it of any "reality". Only if you have the original artist at hand to commune with you while you survey his work do you have any hope of understanding it. Any other experience is simply wandering in the dark or pretending that you can understand "true art" unaided by genius. Real art cannot be "translated". It must be worshiped. Anything else is derivative and meaningless.

This is the equivalent of saying that "one cannot truly learn the heart of physics unless one sits at the feet of Einstein, of Dirac, of Richard Feynman, of Steven Weinberg, of Leonard Susskind. Sure, it would be nice to crowd around these greats, but 99.9% of physics graduate students have to put up with a "facsimile" of a mere mortal physics academic as their teacher.

Complaining about the "useful access" of the Internet is similar to Plato scoffing as reading as an inferior experience to sitting at the feet of a master and learning through the Socratic method. Guess what. The number of philosophers who learned their craft at the feet of a true master in Socratic dialog can be numbered on two hands... a completely insignificant number. The great philosphers since the Middle Ages learned their craft mainly from reading texts and none of them spent time memorizing texts. The presumed value of memory got demoted. The last two centuries have moved from aristocracy and elitism to mass society and education via "reproductions".

And finally from this pair of elitists states:
As John Berger pointed out in his 1978 essay "The Uses of Photography," the nature of photography is a memory device that allows us to forget. Perhaps something similar can be said about the Internet. In terms of art, the Internet expands the network of reproduction that replaces the way we "know" something. It replaces experience with facsimile.
Again, idiocy! Let me translate: Looking at a reproduction simply distracts and stupifies you. The only valid experience of "art" is with the original. Worse, any art that mechanically reproduces itself like photography or movie-making cannot be true art because they replace "experience" with a mechanical device whose goal is to created an undifferentiated "mass" experience rather than a personal encounter with "art".

This is like saying that the film industry and the great films produced over the last century are mere "facsimiles" of true arts. The true "arts" being live dance on a stage, original paintings hung in a gallery, and live plays in an intimate theatre. Sure, those types of art are wonderful, but none of them have the scope and power and the timeless reach that a great film has or that great photography has. Only a few thousand people can ever see a "great" theatre production. Only a few thousand will ever get to a gallery to see a painting. Only a few thousand will attend a dance performance. But billions can experience a great film or see exact replicas of fine photography. To deny that film and photography are not "great art" because they are accessible to the rabble by mechanical reproduction is the worst kind of elitism.

Berger's idiotic statement that photography is "forgetting" ranks up there with Plato's rant that literacy through writing has destroyed the education of the young which once required them to memorize and recite the classics of Homer. Sure, memorizing a text makes it more intimate and "memorable" (Plato claims it etches it on the soul). But there is a tradeoff. In an oral culture you have tens and at most a few hundred "classics". But in a print society, there are tens of thousands, if not millions of classics.

Sure, viewing an original can be exciting. But if the choice is between allowing only a few thousand elite to experience "art" or to give access to the billions. I go with the billions. I'm a democrat deep at heart. I admire skill and I understand the beauty of elite concepts. But I love the idea of lifting up the billions more than I love closing off education or art to only the ultra-rich and powerful few.

Fischl and Gornik are repugnant elitists who probably aren't smart enough to understand how vicious and demeaning their concept of "art" and the Internet truly are. They are blighted fools. It is a disgrace that they got reprinted in this volume.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

RY;

I would add that listening to music on a scratchy vinyl record is better than not hearing it at all.. How many can ever go to a concert and even those who do want to remember it with a copy of the music.. Yes, experiencing something first hand in person is incredible but seeing or hearing a copy is better than not at all and sometimes we want the copy to remind us of the experience or just to get a taste of the experience that some of us will never get. Reliving moments with photos or tapes is art in itself..

RYviewpoint said...

Thomas:

Yes... even a poor reproduction can have great value in helping to re-trigger the experience. Art is about the experience not the material object. That's why the Western world since the Renaissance has gone a bit crazy about "classic sculpture". They are beautiful, but the material objects in the museums are not what the Greeks and Romans admired. They dressed them up, they painted them, they were gaudy by contemporary standards. What is the "real" art object?

You can see this funny effect of "relationship" and not material object in the fact that "great art" goes in and out of fashion. The art stays the same, it is the appreciation that changes. J. S. Bach wasn't that highly regarded after his death. He became a "great" composer over a century after he died. His music didn't change. It was the appreciation of it that changed.

The glorification of "the experience" is wrong-headed because it removes it from the cultural setting and the reaction of the community of art appreciators. Art doesn't stand by itself. It is a shared experience. If you like something and propagandize me, I pay more attention and am more likely to appreciate it too. To pretend that "art" is some absolute, some pristine thing, that is only experienced in the original presentation unmediated by reproduction (or word of mouth reputation) is just plain wrong-headed.

What bugs me about Fischl and Gornik is that they fall for the elitist "you have to be there to 'experience' it" nonsense. I can tell you that almost any chamber music played by a modern professional group is head-and-shoulders over what you would have experienced at some rich aristocrat's salon in the 17th century. And I would say that a modern recording of an excellent modern professional group is superior to listening to fairly mediocre court musicians of the 17th century.