I was asked to post a comment on Tim's blog entry "Artist Ideals and Reflective Judgements." Instead, I started my own blog.
This will be less of a coherent critique or support of any one specific part of the above entry, and more of a rambling reflection, as some of the ideas in the Tim's entry happen to relate to some independent thoughts I've had lately.
My first thought is a general challenge to the need to come up with "practical aesthetics" for the review and critique of art. I understand Tim's argument, and believe in the limited utility of having practical aesthetics for understanding why and how we value art, but something about the whole idea bothers me. I haven't thought enough about this yet to say much about why, so maybe it's better to just move on, and hopefully the why will emerge as I reflect.
I've been thinking about why I like certain kinds of music— what it is about that handful of artists, that handful of songs, that makes me go "YES! AWESOME!" I identify with the suggestion that we are drawn to art because of its "newness," but I think I look at the issue from a bit of a different angle. I find the whole notion of "classification," be it in creative writing, visual art, or music, worth considering. Classification is telling of our need to compartmentalize and standardize in an effort to understand. But in the realm of art, I find this need extremely unfortunate. I'm beginning to think that I like art that can't be classified...art that we just really can't quite rap our minds, or really, language, around. I think classification– saying that this painting is impressionist, this song is rap– is counter to the whole idea of what art should be. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate (as I do "practical aesthetics"), the need to classify, but I still find it unfortunate and inherently unartistic. Whenever people ask me what types, what categories, of music I like, I never really know quite what to say, because the music I like most always seems to be that which can't be easily categorized– that music of which I must say, "Well, it's sort of this, but it's also sort of that...really, you just need to listen to it." Just listen to it and let it affect you however it might without limiting your understanding with labels. An example: I recently ran across and subsequently became obsessed with a song called "Lynguistics" by CunninLynguists, of which the lastfm.com description reads, "Sampling genres from psych-rock to blues, New Romantic to polka, they have been musically compared to UGK and Atmosphere in the same breath." They are unclassifiable.
Broadly, I think I see art as a quest for understanding ourselves and the world around us, and how can something so ambitious be classified? I understand that we can in some sense classify the techniques and the tools involved in creating art, but can we really classify the art, the product, itself?
It seems like classification is a short-cut to "understanding," maybe a faux understanding. As a musician, I gave up trying to "understand" music long ago, but I think this is something I've failed to apply to poetry, which is why I'm still so intimidated by it. I've yet to reach the point where I can just let go and say that I don't need to "understand," but I can just appreciate it's beauty.
Of course, this is all rather idealized and unpractical, and for all intents and purposes I "support" the idea of classification through language as a means of ordering the world around us. But ultimately, I see our human effort to comprehend art (and how/why it speaks to us) almost as futile as our effort to comprehend God. The two are closely connected in my mind as I see art, from music to creation around us, as one of the most profound means given to us of connecting to God. We can discuss and critique all day long, but we never can reach a perfect understanding of either, and that's OK, because to have mystery is part of what it means to be art, and it is even more a part of what it means to be God.
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4 years ago
Eva,
ReplyDeleteExcellent first post, and a challenge for me to delineate a justification for my project. As a short, and likely unfulfilling, answer, I would suggest that a practical aesthetics is important because of art's "mixed status" level.
I agree wholeheartedly that art is an avenue (the avenue?) through which God is approached, but unlike God, art is not a wholly divine thing. Or, I could say, like God, Art is both human and divine... In fact, I see no better way to hold Christ in our minds other than aesthetically.
My main thrust of this thought comes from a positive notion of ambiguity, which I hope to write on soon, and the much more common notion of comprehensibility. Specifically, art is the tension between the two. As much as I agree that art in itself avoids classification (this is a cool description I recently remembered from my Maimonides reading: Aristotle said we could only classify commonalities and this helps us understand to a degree, but in the end everything, including the specific, breathing-in-front-of-you human, has an unknowable essence), our response to art still has a comprehensibility-driven, analytic component. Not something that fits it entirely, or even perhaps mostly, but it is there.
Ok, so I a quick analogy. Christ's parables, and his teachings, are very rarely pin-downable. I imagine there are a billion theses written on what Christ means by saying that he is the Way the Truth and the Life - but this isn't a bad thing. In fact, this is a gloriously beautiful thing! We don't follow a Dogma or a Code or a Law but an individualized God who bleed for us and is personally relevant to us.
So a billion interpretations, but one stem. This is the highest, greatest possibility of art. I could go on with this in the religious sense, but my comment is already becoming a bit hefty. Art, like Christ, definitely does bring us to a non-temporal non-earthly kind of thought/world, but not at the expense or denial of practical understanding. In fact, one of the most important parts of art and Christ is the Meaningfulness in both (whether an artistic piece has meaningfulness is one of my criteria). But meaningfulness, though it certainly can, does not always come unidentifiable, through the spiritual part of us alone. For me, and I am going to venture that is similar for you, the truly meaningful comes from a study and a justification that then points us into the unknowable, the ambiguous, the Divine.
I am inordinately excited about this blog.
excellent work! you have a great thought which you shared with us. your first post is really nice and thoughtful. keep it up.
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