Why do artists go to such much trouble to make art? Art is useless by definition, and it’s not just philistines who think so. Kant thought so too, and he meant it as praise. In the Critique of Judgment he argued that genuine aesthetic pleasure has to be free of any practical interest. The instant you want something from a beautiful thing, like to eat it, sell it, or learn from it, you’ve left the aesthetic behind for the merely agreeable or the useful. He called beauty “purposiveness without purpose,” the form of functioning without any actual function. So when someone says art is useless, they’re in the company of a great philosopher, for, if beauty is useless, then the production of beauty in art would be useless, too. It’s hard to explain why artists sacrifice so much to make art. If art always brought money or status, the hard work would make practical sense. People give up things for good reasons all the time. But if art has no practical use, wouldn’t the starving artist be better off making something useful and eating a good meal? I just read two books by genuine starving artists. Both asked what they were starving for. Bleaker HouseThe first book was Bleaker House: Chasing My Novel to the End of the World by Nell Stevens. Honestly, I was put off as soon as I saw it was a book about a writer writing a book. An overpopulated genre, if there ever was one. However, it was highly recommended by someone who knows I like quirky, semi-experimental, character-driven fiction, with sentences full of unexpected twists and turns. Bleaker House is filled with that, although it could have made a lot more out of its parallel to Dickens’ Bleak House. Twenty-seven, fresh out of a Masters in Fine Arts program (MFA), Stevens won a fellowship that would pay her way to anywhere in the world to write her first novel. Did she go to Paris, a Tuscan villa, or a tropical island? No, she picked Bleaker Island: a windswept slab of mud, rock, and bird shit in the Falklands, eight square miles she shared only with sheep, penguins, and sea lions, rationing herself to a thousand calories a day. She stripped away every distraction so that nothing stood between her and the novel, but the novel never showed up on Bleaker Island. What we got instead is the memoir of the attempt, with snippets of the failed novel folded in. Perhaps the author included samples of the failed novel as exhibits to show what wasn’t working. Despite my attitude towards a privileged, navel-gazing class of people that includes me, the thing that made Bleaker House interesting was the memoir. Will an over-educated young woman survive, alone in such an inhospitable place, outside her safe bubble? That part was fascinating. The “real” art she went to make, the novel, sputtered out while the memoir she didn’t plan on finished strong. The Ritual Madness of Rock & RollThe second book was by Keegan Kjeldsen. When he’s not philosophizing on his Nietzsche Podcast, Kjeldsen is a doom-metal musician. Sometimes, he’s doing both; head-banging by night with his band, Destroyer of Light, and, by day, reading dense philosophy texts on endless treks between gigs in a crowded van. The result of this multi-tasking during a 2019 European tour was The Ritual Madness of Rock & Roll: An Inquiry into Aesthetics. Like Bleaker House, it’s partly a memoir. In his case, a frantic, sweaty account of his American band’s first, ill-fated swing through Europe; a money-losing trip wrecked by jetlag, a demanding route, cancelled shows, injuries, and a negligent record label. He alternates this with a philosophical argument about the origin and function of art. Why do human beings endure the misery of the road to make art when there’s no money in it? I wanted to know the answer, too; because I’ve been asking why I write when I have no money or fame to show for it. In this case, I rushed through the memoir to get to the philosophy. Most artists say they do it for themselves. They make the thing they want to see, play the song they want to hear, and write the book they wish someone else had written. The audience is an afterthought, and courting it is the first step toward selling out. To please a crowd is to pander, and pandering is the death of anything real. I’ve said so myself. The trouble is, it isn’t true. I secretly want people to read my stuff, and like it. Art to please only yourself may have been what Stevens had in mind when she chose to go on a writer’s retreat on a frozen desert island; but for Kjeldsen, art is a collective concern, a communal project, a product of the human social life, even when the artist is working alone and shows his work to no one but himself. Stevens’ failure on the island may be evidence that Kjeldsen is right. But I’m getting ahead of myself. What is Art?Kjeldsen takes his definition of art from Tolstoy. In What Is Art? Tolstoy says art is the activity of transmitting a feeling you’ve had, so that others catch it and feel it too. The first part is to give oneself over to a feeling, and represent it in a way that captures its unique essence. The second part is to infect everyone else with it. Tolstoy’s definition presents art, not as a self-agrandizing activity, but as a self-effacing one. The artist is a carrier of emotional infection, like a human mosquito. This definition gives you a simple test. If you catch the feeling, it’s art; if you don’t, it’s something else. Tolstoy puts beauty not in the eye of the beholder or in the beautiful object, but in the relationship between them. What is it that artists want so badly to transmit? We used to call them gods before gods got a bad name. Now we call them feelings. Reaching past psychology, Kjeldsen says the thing that inspires artists is what historian Ernst Cassirer called “momentary gods”, fleeting flashes of feeling that words or images cannot contain. You sense a momentary god when you catch an intimation of something sublimely numinous, a spiritual, animating presence. To Cassirer, both art and religion began in animism. Picture a prehistoric cave man caught in a thunderstorm, feeling raw and shapeless terror and awe. In an attempt to tell others what he felt, he comes up with words, images, and stories of an angry giant roaring and hurling fire from the sky. Subsequent artists also feel that terror and awe when they get caught in a thunderstorm, but find that it is still too big and complex to be fully expressed in the image the original man told, so they add to it. When a culture tells that story long enough, everyone adding a detail, you get Zeus and a whole religion devoted to him. You can think of all art as a kind of fan fiction in which every artist has his own thing to say about a feeling. For example, the first metal band, Black Sabbath, was feeling plenty of rage in the industrial grime of late-sixties Birmingham, after the economy fell apart. They made their anger audible by inventing heavy metal music. Others, feeling the same rage, recorded their own versions of heavy metal. However, the sound failed to capture the despair people were also feeling, so Kjeldsen’s doom-metal was born when some musicians played sad cords instead of angry ones. Art is useless only in the same way that those who defund art in favor of STEM fields say it’s useless. It’s useless if feelings are useless because they don’t put food on the table or pump water. Feelings don’t always tell the truth, so we’re suspicious of them and of the people who traffic in them. Here’s where Kjeldsen brings in the hyper-rational philosopher, Wittgenstein, who argued there’s no such thing as a private language. Suppose you tried to create one. You get a feeling that has no name, so you invent a sign for it, call it X, and resolve to use X every time the feeling returns. When it comes back days later, how do you know it’s the same feeling, and not a near neighbor you’re filing under the same letter? To check, you’d need some standard for X outside your own impression; but there isn’t one. There’s only the impression, vouching for itself. With no outside check, you can’t tell remembering from misremembering, and X stops meaning anything at all. The part of us that feels most intimately our own, our subjective feelings, turns out to be the part we have the least ability to hold onto alone, which is why we need to share them. That is exactly the predicament of our caveman, shaking in the storm with a terror too big and shapeless to hold. Left to himself, he can’t sort out the feeling in his own mind, let alone contain it. But if he creates an image of an angry giant and makes it public, he gives a private feeling a shareable form, so that it becomes something a community can hold together. This is the reason beauty lives in the relationship and not in the beholder or object alone. A feeling only becomes manageable once it’s been given a form others can understand. Therefore, art is not a frivolous alternative to serious business; it’s the one tool that does a job logic can’t do. Far from being useless, it’s how the most private thing about us is put into the public world where it can finally mean something. Kant was wrong. Art does have a use. It interprets our feelings to ourselves and to each other. Art captures feelings so precious that we build massive institutions to cage them: temples, libraries, museums, and schools. But these places only preserve the skeletons, the old forms feelings once took and the techniques used to trap them. Living gods do not stay in the temples we build. They go where they want. The structures they leave behind are just empty shells. Anyone can teach, repeat, and grade a technique long after the spirit has fled. When a poor Delta musician plays the blues, he wrestles a wild sorrow and forces it to sing. When a privileged teenager strums those exact same notes in his parents’ basement without his own anquish, the music is hollow. It has no soul. Back to BleakerWhen Stevens attended her masters in fine arts program, they taught her the techniques. She learned to produce literary novels, serious stories, and sentences engineered to win a workshop’s approval. Getting an MFA gave Stevens the credibility to win the fellowship and publish her book, but it didn’t give her anything to say. I think she went to Bleaker Island to find something to say. She went for the same reason monks seek solitude, to encounter a momentary god who would inspire her. She had a novel in mind before she ever left, a young man traveling to the Falklands to find a father he believed was dead, a premise built to MFA specs. When the god came, she didn’t recognize it, because her training told her it was supposed to look different. So she waited for an experience shaped like the book she meant to write, and when no momentary god looking like that came, she fell into despair. Instead, a momentary god arrived in a different form, as a slow, dawning horror of having nothing to say. But that didn’t fit the slot she’d been certified to fill, so she filed it under memoir. The memoir was alive because she took the one real thing that happened to her on Bleaker and shared it with us. Let’s Rock and RollSo, what is the point of making art? As much as I agree with everything he said, Kjeldsen does not reach the conclusion I’d reach. For me, art is all about connection, one isolated person sharing a feeling with another. Kjeldsen wants more than that. Connection, for him, is only the doorway to what the artist is really after, to live forever. He calls it the will to eternity, a war against death. Of course he would go there. He plays doom metal, after all. He adds that great artists, like Dickens and Black Sabbath, don’t just infect their neighbors with their feelings; they colonize the centuries, planting themselves so deep in the culture that everyone who comes after is working with their leftovers. Which means, Kjeldsen admits, that the dirty little engine of art is vanity: the artist wants to resonate not just across the room but across the ages, to sneak past his own death. Vanity is real, and I won’t pretend I’ve never wanted my name to outlive me. But I think Kjeldsen has mistaken something that happens to art for the reason we make it. The wish to be remembered for all time is just a long-distance version of wanting a friend to understand you right now. Reaching for immortality and reaching to connect feel identical when you’re doing the reaching. The will to eternity is just what the will to connect looks like when you stretch it across time instead of across a room. Wittgenstein wouldn’t agree with him either. He argues that private language is impossible; our most personal feelings only get meaning through shared, public habits, not private thoughts. Push this idea to its limit, and the boundary of the self dissolves. If I cannot even experience a feeling without borrowing your vocabulary, then who am I without you? You can’t eat art or pump water with it, but art takes the loneliest fact about being a person, that no one can feel your feeling from the inside, and, for a moment, overcomes it. That’s why I keep writing. I’m not trying to outlast death. I’m trying to reach you. Invite your friends and earn rewards
If you enjoy The Reflective Eclectic, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment