Gioia’s Nightmare
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Dana Gioia reveals his nocturnal panic attack:
I have a recurring nightmare. I am in Rome visiting the Sistine Chapel. I look up at Michelangelo’s incomparable fresco of the “Creation of Man.” I see God stretching out his arm to touch the reclining Adam’s finger. And then I notice in the other hand Adam is holding a Diet Pepsi.
He worries about a culture that increasing wants to be entertained, rather than challenged in a way that only art can challenge. (The late Neil Postman warned about “amusing ourselves to death.”)Yet Gioia suggests that culpability is not a one-sided affair:
In a time of social progress and economic prosperity, why have we experienced this colossal cultural decline? There are several reasons, but I must risk offending many friends and colleagues by saying that surely artists and intellectuals are partly to blame. Most American artists, intellectuals and academics have lost their ability to converse with the rest of society. We have become wonderfully expert in talking to one another, but we have become almost invisible and inaudible in the general culture.
This mutual estrangement has had enormous cultural, social and political consequences. America needs its artists and intellectuals, and they need to re-establish their rightful place in the general culture. If we could reopen the conversation between our best minds and the broader public, the results would not only transform society but also artistic and intellectual life.
And he concludes with an eloquent statement about the cultural importance of art and of education in the arts:
Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world–equal to but distinct from scientific and conceptual methods. Art addresses us in the fullness of our being–simultaneously speaking to our intellect, emotions, intuition, imagination, memory and physical senses. There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories or songs or images.
Art delights, instructs, consoles. It educates our emotions. And it remembers. As Robert Frost once said about poetry, “It is a way of remembering that which it would impoverish us to forget.” Art awakens, enlarges, refines and restores our humanity.
The entire piece is here.
My two cents:
Western society is Greek, and Plato is its father. His most emminent son, Aristotle, true to his father, saw scientific knowledge as the highest goal of man, and scientific knowledge is about *necessary* relationships among things. For them, contingency is essentially inferior to necessity, and art at its best mimics the necessity of science and math. Even history tries to generalize, tries to find necessary connections among people.
ISTM that the Greeks were wrong. The highest good for man involves not what is necessary, but what is gratuitous, contingent, what does not *have to be*, It is gracious. And the epitome of the gratuitous is found in Christ’s choosing to do what was unrequired — to suffer die, and then — miracle of miracles — rise from the dead. And all for the sake of us contingent, non-necessary featherless bipeds.
Art, unlike science, is essentially contingent (an oxymoron for the Greeks, no doubt). It is about mere possibilities which nevertheless are valuable. A great artwork work links beings (sometimes just soft little sounds or small, irregular shapes) whose very interconnections makes each of those things within the artwork more valuable than it can possibly be in isolation from the others.
Art is almost miraculous. It is beyond what has to be. The poet John Crowe Ransome said, “Poetry is indefinable. That is, it *exceeds* definition.” Like nature, it is profligate, unending, varied, It strives to say the whole of possibility, of the gratuitous, of the fulness of being. It tries to say God, but only the Word says God fully. We need it, a little bit like we need God. What did Voltaire say? — ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary for man to invent him’.
Maybe our art is failing because we have become destructive, and we have become greedy, not gratuitious in our relatiionships with others. We don’t even understand the necessity of gratuitousness, of graciousness any more.
(If anyone should want me to respond to a comment, I can’t get back to the blog. Sigh.)
While I agree with some of Gioia’s observations, and with his position that the ‘fault’ in the breakdown lies on both sides, I would point out that his comment that we must ‘reopen the conversation between our best minds and the broader public’ is hardly helpful, and indeed indicative of part of the problem. The implication that the ‘best minds’ are found exclusively in the ‘arts and intellectual’ crowd, and that the ‘general public’ must somehow be reconnected with, seems to me to imply an unfortunate elitism and condescension which I think in fact is part of the problem.
I agree as he says that the ‘artists and intellectuals’ have become too adept at talking to themselves, but I think he should consider also the fact that it may simply be that the ‘broader society’ simply doesn’t care for what they have to say. And, I hasten to add, he should consider this not from a default consideration that this means the society ‘just doesn’t understand it’ or needs to be educated, but perhaps that the ‘artists’ need to rethink what exactly they are trying to do, and why. The artist or intellectual’s demand for relevence is not the responsibility of the society they want to inform. Some ‘art’ is just bad (speaking broadly, of course, I understand the subjectivity of such judgements) and some ‘intellectuals/academics’ are simply wrong. Society or the ‘general public’ certainly has a legitimate right to call them on it.
RM
Ann–
I for one hope you can get back to the blog, especially if you have several more “cents” to share like this one:
“Art is almost miraculous. It is beyond what has to be. The poet John Crowe Ransome said, ‘Poetry is indefinable. That is, it *exceeds* definition.’ Like nature, it is profligate, unending, varied, It strives to say the whole of possibility, of the gratuitous, of the fulness of being. It tries to say God, but only the Word says God fully. We need it, a little bit like we need God.”
That’s very nicely said, IMHO.
An artist acquaintance of mine had his first major showing of his paintings as a gallery. I went with a friend of mine, a hard drinking news reporter who had already been drinking rather hard before hitting the artist’s reception wine. He then staggered over to the artist who was standing in front of one of the massive canvases explaining something to someone, and said “This thing is pretty enough, but it seems to me that you never actually learned how to paint.” The artist glared at him a moment, and replied “I believe that skill is an impediment to creativity!”
This comment was very well received.
Art will always be with us just as God will always be with us. But art in the general mind has become the expression of strong emotion conveyed through irony and attached to the holy grail of individualism, the status of mystic seer. The thrust in our society is to commoditize art, and if I can get Platonic for a moment, most people seem to want to use art rather than having it use them. Maybe intellectuals and the cultural elite used to have a proprietary interest in art. But I think that that is our degenerate age, we are all quite on our own.
Unagidon’s remarks are worthy of attention, especially those about individualism and art as a commodity.
I have no expertise in matters of art, but maybe it is useful to recall that there are paintings, sculptures poems, novels etc., some of which are great blessings while others of which are trivial or worse. Critics help us separate the wheat from the chaff. But inevitably there is some chaff.
How could anyone be against “art” in the abstract? But one can often rightly reject some particular works and do so precisely in the name of art.
There is apparently an “art industry” that is not interested in serious artistic criticism, but rather trades in “novelty,” “originality,” etc.
Just as a preface, I’m all for art in the schools–it’s really good for kids all around.
But I wonder if it’s such a good thing that Robert Frost became the spokesman for American poetry. Or Kinsey (!!) for science. Jonas Salk and Duke Ellington I can live with, but was Steinbeck really a great artist? Maybe. But O’Keefe?
And while all these fine artists were being famous, why was Flannery O’Connor languishing in poverty and obscurity with her peacocks on the farm, instead of giving interviews on TV?
One effect of excessive public influence on art could be a flattening of its potential, and a shift of all the available patronage to talents who might not be our most strikingly original.
I’m sure the caravan has moved on by now, but I wanted to leave this note anyway as a more hopeful response to the cultural despair on this thread.
In this excerpt, taken from the introduction to “The Public Arts” by the critic of mass culture, Gilbert Seldes, he dedicates the book to two of the cultural icons of his time, Jimmy Durante and Edward R. Murrow. It sets the tone for the book, which expresses his love for mass culture, his concern for its welfare and his guarded optimism about its future. Would that we had a critic of his like today.
“You have seen many changes and you have not only seen but have yourselves been been conspicuous examples of another phenomenon: the persistence of the first-rate. Against the superstition that the public always prefers the mediocre stands the eminent fact that that in the fiercely competitive race for public favor the consistent winners have almost all been the best in their class. The consistent ones, the ones that “stay up there.” The great public is as apt to fall for a phony as the critics are (and the philosophers and artists), but give people adequate time to become acquainted with the special quality of one man’s work as compared to another and in the long run they will make the better man the winner, with place and show for the rest. There are a few neglected geniuses, to be sure but the real danger is that the public arts will succumb to their own routine, that experiments will become fewer and fewer that new things will only be superficially different from the old and good things will not be allowed time enough to take hold, to root themselves, to live. These arts are dreadfully at the mercy of time. In the older ones, the chance of a revival remains: a Melville can be brought back from near oblivion and a change in taste can restore to favor a Delscroix or Berlioz. But in the expensive mass arts we are all out for instantaneous success; we have no time for that kind of slow excellence which we will eventually admire but which now has something harsh and rebarbative about it, so we cannot give it our instant applause. Productions that are instantly successful may be the very best, but they do not always have the gem of new life in them; they are only the perfection of what has gone before. To continue growing, we need some special strength, and it is found often enough in unexpected and even unexplored places.”
I am not depressed or oppressed by some worry that art will disappear, and I don’t think that mass culture is bad for art as such or incapable of producing it. What does depress me sometimes in our market driven society is all the effort that I see being expended by people who want to create the appearance that they are something they could become in fact with the same amount of effort.
“The highest good for man involves not what is necessary, but what is gratuitous, contingent, what does not *have to be*,”
In that regard an art critic, whose name I don’t remember, once referred to art as a form of “deep play”.
Works of art. yes. But keep in mind the reflections of Robert Hughes, who, if I remember correctly, was the Australian critic of the visual arts for Time magazine.
Btw, just a quibble with Ann in her absence. Aristotle held contemplation to be the highest human activity. (N. Ethics, Book 10)
Yes Kathy, but for Aristotle the best object of contemplation is changeless truths. Philosophical contemplation is to be as close to the contemplation of God as possible, and Aristotle’s God had no relation to changing reality. Thus, to note that Aristotle held contemplation to be the highest human activity would in no way challenge Ann’s claim that the Greeks prioritized the changeless over the changing.
Joe, I agree that Ann held Aristotle to value the unchanging over the changing. But Ann’s claim (at the beginning of her post) was that the object of contemplation was scientific truth. I agree that Aristotle thought that scientific truth could be used as a means to contemplation, but I don’t think that scientific truth was his ultimate object of contemplation.
***
In theological discussions I have often heard Aristotle brought in as the champion of the particular and the contingent, in contrast with Plato. I have never understood this invocation of Aristotle. Obviously he disagreed with Plato over whether forms have existence apart from the things of which they are the form. And in his view of the world, the species of things are enduring. Although the mind doesn’t consider them as non-existents (unlike, e.g., a mind that climbs Diotema’s ladder), it doesn’t directly concern itself with them anymore.
I guess my second quibble would be: isn’t creation in itself gratuitous? And doesn’t creation have an order that is in itself marvelous and joyful?