Art

2. Perl, Authority and Freedom (7 January 2024)

by kurto

Art comprises the authority of craftsmanship and the freedom of interpretation, or the reworking of the craft’s tradition. Consequently, art must be subject to its own standards, and ought not subordinate to contemporary sociopolitics. The products of imagination possess an internal logic. The well-made work acknowledges tradition; the artist explores freedom within boundaries. Vocation is sacral: if you’re going to make something, you’d better know how to proceed. Then, truth is expressed in the context of form. Perl thus explains the failure of so-called performance art, which lacks craftsmanship. As the scientist’s work is to be independent, so too the artist’s, Perl writes. But what of ethics? 20th-century art can be characterized by the search for new sources of authority. But modern ‘playfulness’ ought to be more than a bid for attention, and any political opposition which artists engender or encounter tells us nothing of the caliber of their work. Conversely, the distinction between doing and making – roughly, general activity and work within the tradition – allows one to embrace good artists with questionable personal or sociopolitical traits. Perl derives understanding of authority from Hannah Arendt; he might have addressed the contemporary obsession with Foucaldian power. Still, aesthetic theory which restores the distinction between craft and all-embracing politics is welcome.

Isaiah Berlin: ‘Man is a rational being, and to say this is to say that he is able to detect this general pattern and purpose and identify himself with them; his wishes are rational if they aspire such self-identification, and irrational if they oppose it. To be free is to fulfil one’s wishes; one can fulfill one’s wishes only if one knows how to do so effectively, that is, if one understands the nature of the world in which one lives; if this world has a pattern and a purpose, to ignore this central fact is to court disaster. … To be free is to understand the universe. … The well-known Stoic argument that to understand and adapt oneself to nature is the truest freedom, rests on the premise that nature of the cosmos possess a pattern and a purpose; that human beings possess an inner light or reason which is that in them which seeks perfection by integrating itself as completely as possible with this cosmic pattern and purpose (p. 80).

TS Eliot: ‘the existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new’ (p. 108).

9. Burckhardt, Greeks and Greek Civilization (14 Sep 2014)

by kurto

A social history of Ancient Greece which sternly judges the Hellenic character as well as its democratic excesses, but ultimately holds up Hellenistic society as the pinnacle of pre-Roman development. Most reliant on literary artifacts – legend as well as artistic works – the 19th-century German identifies four primary phases (heroic, agonal/polis, declining, and Hellenistic) through which state power gives way to tyranny of the masses as well as incipient individualism. Much in the latter that resembles 21st-century America.

Longing for antagonism

by kurto

In the 1980s, an art critic notes the establishment’s sharp turn to the left evidenced longing for the polarization of the 1930s:

For what we are now witnessing in this movement toward the politicization of art in this country is an attempt to turn back the cultural and political clock. And it is not to the radical counterculture of the Sixties that this movement looks back for its model and inspiration, despite the many resemblances it may bear to the outlook of the Sixties, but to the radicalism of the Thirties when so much of American cultural life was dominated by the hypocritical “social consciousness” of the Stalinist ethos. It is to a contemporary version of this old “social consciousness” that the protagnists [sic] of this political movement in the art world wish to confine the life of the artistic imagination. Hence the attacks on modernism and on such champions of the modernist aesthetic as Alfred Barr. For this new generation of radicals, it is the cultural life of the Forties and Fifties — when American art and literature finally vanquished the last respectable traces of the Stalinist ethos — that can never be forgiven. The Forties marked a great turning point not only in the history of American art but in the life of the American imagination, and any attempt to return American culture to the ideological straightjackets of the Thirties must inevitably attempt to discredit both the achievements and the values that belong to the post-World War ii period. Hence, too, the increasingly raucous attempts to dismiss the accomplishments of the Forties and Fifties as nothing more than the political products of the Cold War.

Kramer quotes Lionel Trilling: ‘…there was in the prevailing quality of the intellectual-political life a kind of self-deception: an impulse toward moral aggrandizement through the taking of extreme and apocalyptic positions which, while they seemed political, actually expressed a desire to transcend the political condition—which, as I saw things, and still do, meant an eventual acquiescence in tyranny.’

Hilton Kramer, ‘Turning back the clock: art and politics in 1984’, New Criterion
https://newcriterion.com/issues/1984/4/turning-back-the-clock-art-and-politics-in-1984

6. Hughes, Rome (3 May 2019)

by kurto

A breezy sketch of Roman history intertwined with trenchant art and architectural criticism, culminating in the sad observation that the Eternal City lost its leadership of the visual arts after World War II. Rome could not have ruled without concrete for its buildings, roads, and aqueducts, the projection of power. Greek culture captivated the Latins, which adopted its gods for purposes legitimacy and succession. Yet piety (i.e., ancestor worship) was the highest praise of a Roman; only Victorian England’s certainty of divine assent for White Man’s Burden is comparable. Augustus (r. 27BC-14AD) refurbished the Roman state’s governance; Constantine (r. 306-337AD) revamped citizenship by allowing Christians to be tried in church courts. Losing to the Goths at Adrianople (378AD) shook Roman confidence like nothing since Cannae six centuries earlier. Skipping ahead to the Renaissance (which started in Florence), the new forms of architecture recalled classic Rome, then hidden by ruin and overgrowth in a town reduced to 25,000 inhabitants. The style was ‘truth of representation’ as well as a faithfulness. After the Council of Trent (1543-68) kicked off the Counterreformation – don’t argue with Luther, show superior emotion and intensity – Sixtus V (from 1585) created the basis of modern Rome with rebuilding, shaping the Baroque age of religious art. Thence to neoclassicism, a noble simplicity, calm grandeur. To again jump ahead: the Futurists despised the authority of Roman tradition, seemingly an underappreciated milestone in the postwar loss of primacy (in an aside, Hughes suggests no city has been so compromised by the auto). Hughes opines Rome’s energies were spent, its classicism no longer inspiring to emerging artists. Coda the ‘freedom’ of abstract art leads to monotony, because over time there’s no anchorage to the real world. What really underpins variety is a connection to things as they appear; the world is sufficiently full of wonder.