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Angelus Novus is a beautiful painting in every (authentic) sense of the word, and only philistines think otherwise
Scott just published Contra Everyone On Taste:
This post is a followup to the earlier Friendly And Hostile Analogies For Taste. It seems that the track of the discussion went roughly as follows: Scott was reflecting on how the tastes of art connoisseurs (either self-proclaimed or credentialed) tend to a) differ sharply from the tastes of the much larger mass of non-experts, and b) show a preference for art that the majority of people consider to be ugly or incomprehensible. He essentially argued that the opinions of the "experts" are grounded in bullshit status games, political power struggles, arbitrary fashion trends, etc, while normal people are free to enter into a more natural relationship with artworks that are actually beautiful and pleasant:
When people responded to the post and argued that people with more "elitist" tastes actually are responding to features of artworks that are both objectively real and deserving of attention, like the artwork's historical and social context, philosophical content, etc, it eventually prompted Scott to respond with his latest post.
He argues that many of the proposed features of artworks that are allegedly worth appreciating, like the art's historical context or its position in an ongoing artistic dialogue, are essentially extraneous, and will only serve to hinder one's natural and immediate appreciation of the art's "sensory pleasures" (or lack thereof). He really seems to be pushing this idea of a pure and natural response above all else, abstracted away from any possible considerations of context. I think this dialectical maneuver of his is ultimately grounded in his incredulity that anyone could actually, really enjoy the types of "weird" artworks that art elitists claim to enjoy. I think he thinks that if he can just cut off all of the "escape avenues" for the mustached hipster -- "no, you're not allowed to talk about the history of this or that movement, or the artist's biography, or the dumb pseudo-philosophical artist's statement, you have to just look at the thing itself and tell me what it actually looks like" -- then the snob would be forced to admit defeat and admit that, yes, when you remove all possible external variables and immerse yourself in the pure visual experience (or aural experience or whatever), it actually is just a dumb ugly looking thing. At which point Scott could claim victory and his assertion that the snobs were never worth listening to in the first place would be vindicated.
His incredulity is on display, for example, when he discusses Benjamin's essay on Angelus Novus:
I've actually brought up this painting once or twice before on TheMotte in the context of other art discussions, always to the same perplexed reactions. I'm quite fond of this painting, and I couldn't just let Scott dis it like that, which is part of what compelled me to respond to this post in the first place.
Scott raises a number of interesting points and arguments throughout the post; I'd be happy to discuss any of them individually, but, I don't think that a point-by-point breakdown of the post would actually be persuasive in getting anyone on either side of the fence in this debate to change their minds. So for now I'll settle for the more modest goal of trying to dispel some of the incredulity. Yes, I am a real living breathing human who thinks that Angelus Novus is authentically beautiful. Not for any particularly "intellectual" or "contextual" reasons either. This is, as far as I can tell, simply my "natural" response to the painting (as "natural" as one can get anyway, seeing as one's "natural" response is always already impacted by one's life history, cultural upbringing, background philosophical assumptions, etc). Similarly, my "natural" response to the Chesterton poems that Scott loves so much is that they're, well, I have to break out the word he dreads here: kitschy. I'm not even saying that to be mean! Either to Scott or to Chesterton. I have no agenda here (or at least, whatever agenda I have, there's a pretty large chasm between it and the agenda of the modal blue-haired MFA student). I'm just calling it like I see it. (Full disclosure, I only sampled a small selection of Chesterton's poems, and I'm not much of a poetry fan in general to begin with.)
An honest dialogue should begin with the recognition that people can have idiosyncratic or even "elitist" tastes that aren't just based on bullshit political signalling. Scott would of course be the first to acknowledge that "taste is subjective", but I'm not sure if he really feels it in his bones. He's still looking for the angle, looking for something that would explain why all these ivory tower types have seemingly conspired to convince everyone that these obviously-ugly artworks are actually good, because surely no one could just simply believe that. Of course it would be utterly naive to suggest that politics and fashion play no role in "high art" trends. Of course they play a prominent role. But at the same time, they're not the only factor. It shouldn't be surprising that the types of people who dedicate their lives to becoming artists or art critics would also tend to converge on certain idiosyncratic aesthetic tastes, naturally and of their own accord, due to whatever shared underlying psychological factors drove them into art in the first place.
One of these "underlying psychological factors" might simply be the desire to grapple with the complexities of aesthetic experience as such, and a willingness to allow oneself to be transformed by that experience in radical ways. Scott treats "sensory pleasure" as essentially an unexamined, irreducible primitive, the bedrock of certainty that would be left over once one has abstracted away everything "extraneous": as though it were simply obvious to oneself when one finds an artwork to be "pleasant" or "beautiful" in the first place, as though it would be impossible or undesirable to call these modes of experience into question, to become unsure of and estranged from one's own perceptual experience. Tellingly, he does include "Ability To Profoundly Affect Or Transform You" as one of his markers of artistic quality, but suggests that it may be "emergent from some combination of sensory delight, novelty and point-making." But, the authentic work of art opens up the possibility of transforming what you experience as delightful in the first place, what you experience as a "valid point" in the first place. Conceptual groundwork of this nature calls for phenomenological experiences that are multilayered and complex rather than merely "pleasant"; it calls for engagement with the world and other people.
For understandable reasons, non-leftists get anxious whenever anyone brings up words like "historical" or "transformative" in relation to art and culture; any call to be mindful of "context", especially "political context", is seen as somewhat threatening. For decades in the West, these concepts have all been associated with the forceful imposition of leftist political strictures and leftist assaults on traditional (especially religious) culture. "You're asking me to 'be open to' being 'transformed' by art; so you're asking me to allow myself to be transformed by these people? The ones who run our universities and art galleries today? Really?" I'm not saying that your concerns are entirely unfounded. All I'm saying is that it doesn't have to be this way. Recognizing that art is ineluctably embedded in its social and political context is intrinsically neither left nor right; a more holistic way of appreciating art that goes beyond simplistic notions of "art for art's sake" can and should be reclaimed.
It's a good summary and he gets it much better than his previous self but not completely. He writes on early Scott:
This is probably how many on the autism spectrum see things, without intuiting the interpersonal aspects. You have atomized, mostly fungible human individuals, and to decide whether a thing is good or bad, you administer the thing to the human and see if he or she gains utilions. And utilions are a kind of irreducible thing like qualia, a kind of pleasure, the opposite of pain. If utilions go up, thing is good, otherwise bad. It's a clean, legible, well understandable rule, and can serve as a basis for an engineering mindset to work on. As a kid, this is also how I would have wanted the world to work.
Mature Scott comes around to see social context etc. as being also relevant but still sees it as a bit of a sham.
But in listening to a bunch of Jonathan Pageau recently, I've come around to seeing art as serving community orientation. Scott should recognize this too, it's a kind of rallying point, defining Schelling points and common knowledge, a coordination mechanism. What is our community going through currently? What happened with recent generations and what are our aspirations for the next generation, and for the next next and then for beyond? What kind of picture do we want to paint of ourselves and how we relate to each other, the past, our neighbors, our future etc? What is good and what do people around me look up to with reverence? What do they doubt and look down upon as stupid or evil or nonsensical or pointless? Art is functional, it tells concrete stories, delivers concrete messages. Beauty that is stripped of all this is quite pedestrian. Symmetry, nice color combinations, intricate patterns here and there, balanced proportions etc and you're good to go. Just like a delicious taste is in fact not super hard to achieve, you need fat, salt and sugar in reasonable proportions and it will taste good from a tastebud perspective. Food that tastes good indicates caloric density and that we are in good times, the hunt was good, we are doing well in life.
Beauty in art, architecture etc has a similar role, it says that things are well-kept, in order, people have extra time to spare for beautifying things beyond just keeping things afloat. Its opposite, decay and trash shows that people around you don't give a fuck or there are hostilities going on where people deface the common living space etc. Or a clean but gray, flat, unbeautified space also communicates something, that there is no extra effort spent on this, there are tasks to be done, no time to wander, to look beyond the immediate task you were given, it's all about efficiency etc.
Art has both a message and some weight backing it. It can't be cheap, because for me to take your message seriously, a proof of cost helps to see you're truly standing behind it and are willing to expend time, effort and money to express it. The costly signal is not sufficient, but certainly a component. This is in part why ornaments or fancy clothes or colorful dresses are not as impressive today, it's just too cheap to produce that appearance. It's like, in my grandmother's time, having a table full of meals that included meat was a big deal and a central point around holidays, like Christmas or Easter, because it couldn't be taken for granted. It's excess and waste in a sense, just like ornaments, but they orient people to a shared vision and goal.
Back to beauty: When things are beautiful, you'll feel things are on a good track. But what if the zeitgeist is all about how things are not on a good track? The 20th century artists wanted to explicitly wake people up from their slumber, so they don't think that everything is fine. To upset and shake people by the shoulders. The second industrial revolution, then the industrial-scale meat grinder of WWI, then the Holocaust. They wanted to express that things are very much not normal, and the man on the street should not be seeing some idyllic space, where he can just go about his day. Everything about the old order was tainted in their minds. You may say that it's not true, a lot of things from the old times is valuable and worth preserving, but this becomes a more substantial discussion about history, the good, how people should live, what the events of the 20th century mean for humankind etc.
That's the steelman. Of course, like anytime, there will be posers and imitators and indeed making something ugly and repellent needs much less effort and skill than making something beautiful, so you end up with a race to the bottom and a bunch or ridiculous bullshit.
My point is that it's a much better discussion if you address the actual reasons that those ugly artworks got made. Unpack your view on the trajectory of Western civilization, what is to be preserved and what is to be tossed aside, what was a dead end and what was an eternally valid compass? Or at least say that you don't care about history or what people did generations ago, and you just want to be entertained and pleased, but then don't be surprised when the world becomes an algorithmic tiktok feed of VR brainrot that tickles people's brains just the right way to make it feel mildly engaging and in a kind of homeostasis.
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I don't personally enjoy most paintings from the Impressionists onwards, including famous works by Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, etc. and concur with Scott on the aesthetic qualities of Angelus Novus and his opinions on architecture, expressed elsewhere. I think the latter field has more of an obligation to cater to the lowest common denominator taste-wise, as your average philistine can choose not to visit a modern art exhibition, but can't choose not to see the buildings they walk by every day. One area where I do have more "refined" tastes (literally) is food, but I only proffer my opinions on the subject when asked, cook for myself whenever possible, and make no great effort to change people's mind about [insert weird foreign dish that your average American would find disgusting].
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I clicked through and read the article and the perspective therein was so foreign I feel like I'm being trolled. I don't even know where to begin.
Yes restaurant critics review the entire experience of going to a restaurant. They do not obsessively focus on establishing which one has the better tasting food. Am I the crazy one? Is the taste of the food the only thing normal people care about at a restaurant? I am pretty confident people who are into, like, fine dining care a lot about atmosphere and presentation and ambiance and so on. Going to a restaurant can be an Experience!
The analogy with taking medicine feels so insane. The vast majority of people taking medicine are not doing so for pleasure, they are doing so for purely functional reasons. That is not, to my mind, how people engage with entertainment or art. People can be, and often are, induced into engaging in pleasurable activities by a good story about a thing or a sense of novelty. I cannot tell you how many books I've been induced to read because they had a cool design on the cover rather than by my expectation they would be good (often wrong!)
And, like, the context outside an artistic work can obviously inform one's enjoyment of that work. Has Scott really never had the experience of enjoying something more due to knowledge not contained in the work itself? Has he ever had an in-joke?
Not the only thing. But it is 90% of what people care about.
I suspect you're 90% wrong. If it were this taste-centered, you'd see all the tables at fancy restaurants filled with people on their own and you'd see very fast service geared to deliver as many delicious tastes as quickly as possible (i.e. you'd get McDonald's). The vast majority of people going to a good restaurant go for a social experience shared with the people at their table, the others in their restaurant, the city they're in, the culinary tradition they're participating in etc. The taste is really important but you can't even decompose it as an individual factor as delicious food in a shitty, antisocial environment doesn't bring that much pleasure, and shitty food in a beautiful environment ruins everything.
I think the rise of takeout and online orders from regular restaurants via Wolt and Foodora indicates that many people are fine with just the food part. As people are getting increasingly atomized, at least the food part stays constant and you don't have to sit together with a bunch of people who happened not to cancel last minute this time, but are staring at their phones anyway. Instead, you can eat the food at home and not pretend, and watch something more engaging than the boring stories your acquaintances would relay.
Of course this is exaggerated, but I think the reason that many see the food as the main thing of a restaurant visit is related to the erosion of communities. And for sure, for many people it's really just about practicality. American dining is anyway about rushing the customer out the door once the food is off the plate. So it's not hard to see that they would understand the purpose being the food.
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I don't find this picture beautiful or appealing, but I have found other works of art that "the masses" don't appreciate beautiful. Not in the sense of "it was an unusual experience that in the hindsight has a major influence on me", but "wow, this is pure pleasure to experience". I am 100% fine with appreciating art for art's sake.
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Then philistine am I. To Scott's point, the background of the work cannot modify the experience of a blind sampler, and so it cannot reliably impact the experience of consumers in the future when the background or context may be lost or warped. Or even now when the seller can just lie about the background. The work is as good or bad as it is with zero context. Sure, you can use the context (assuming you trust it is accurate) to predict salient facts about it, but that is not the same as those facts being modified by or dependent upon the context. The structure of a book is perceivable "blind" so it can easily be considered - it is part of the work. The vintage of some wine? No. The author is dead. Embrace that and don't fool yourself into disbelieving your own senses because of the prestige of the thing. Does it have desirable quality A, or not? If you don't like a passage of Shakespeare given to you unlabeled (and you didn't recognize it), then you ought not like it in the alternate setting where you're told the author. All else is pretentious hogwash.
Scott is right - there is a bare, brute fact of sensory pleasure, and training yourself to override it, while possible, doesn't make it go away. Angelus Novus evokes no sensory pleasure. Any pleasure I could imagine derivable must come from appreciating context and hence, is not attributable to the work itself. There is separately, a 'work' of situating a work in a context, of creating a work within a context, and the quality of the two may differ drastically. "Fountain" is a terribly low quality work. While the 'work' of getting it displayed amongst fine art is perhaps an enjoyable thing, it does not make the actual object any more appealing. Decouple. Always decouple.
You'd have to do an analysis of what counts as 'the background of the work' to determine if this is true. If I am recruited as a blind sampler in a trial but not mind-wiped first, my experience of other art or the subject of the novel is still going to have massive impact on whether I like it or not. I may not enjoy certain historical novels if I start from zero knowledge of the relevant bit of history, but is that really an indictment of the novels? If I were a caveman I expect I'd be totally bowled over by the most rudimentary drawings, but so what?
Ultimately the question is who is a blind sampler? I feel like Scott is imagining a child with uncultivated tastes, and supposing that such a child lives inside all of us. I guess this is what you are talking about above when you mention 'a bare, brute fact of sensory pleasure'. To me that seems obviously falsified by facts such as e.g. I liked very sweet desserts once and now I find them sickly. It seems to imply an 'accumulative' model of how people grow (each layer of the self stays the same but we add on layers as we gain experience) that is very contrary to my intuitive sense of myself or others.
Then again it's the strength of intuitions here that makes it such a debated topic.
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To some extent art and entertainment are something you’re taught to interpret. For instance, having a moustache and a cape isn’t inherently nefarious, but common tropes in our culture teach us to associate the qualities together. Essentially artists use the symbolically coded languages of their mediums to impart ideas and stir emotions. Highly refined sensibilities come in part from understanding these languages at a high level.
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How did you come to a place where you look at Angelus Novus as an "authentically beautiful" work? You imply that it's the result of transforming your sense of delight, possibly repeatedly. What did that look like?
This seems to prove too much given how wildly the aesthetic tastes of those people have shifted over the past one thousand years.
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If you want a picture of the future, imagine all human output being bad on purpose for the sake of making some supposed statement - forever.
Others before me have noted that an art form's practical utility being supplanted by some newer medium - painting by photography, for example - precipitates the art form's remaining devotees falling into navel-gazing spirals and acclaiming work that outright repels hoi polloi.
What happens if generative AI makes this happen to everything? What if making machines trained to do any given thing well creates the cultural association between "anything done well" with "soulless slop?" I shudder to think of the depths of degeneracy that people would descend to in order to reactively establish their human authenticity.
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Angelus Novus doesn't do much for me, but I can appreciate that there is more than surface level artistry in it.. I can see why many would call it ugly, but Scott's insistence that it's just objectively bad and everyone saying it's good are trying to put one over on the plebes is incredibly parochial.
I am put in mind of the little controversy spun up by Shad Brooks here.
Now, Shad is a tool. He's known for using Stable Diffusion to generate images, doing a little post-work on them, and claiming this makes him just as much of an artist as someone who actually draws or paints the same image. He's also a right-wing Mormon, so you've got your Culture War content too. But his Miyazaki diss is sort of the reverse of Scott's disdain for Klee. Shad thinks "More saturated, photorealistic style" is "better" and Miyazaki is just cartoons. As if Ghibli studios couldn't paint in a more "Stable Diffusion" style if they wanted to.. It's a deliberate choice of styles, and you can prefer one or the other, but just dunking on the style you like less doesn't mean you have taste. It means you're incapable of evaluating what goes into the choices artists make and are rating things according to whether you'd like it on your desktop wallpaper.
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I enjoyed the essay, as well as "The Colors of Her Coat,"but lacking in his usual clarity -- I don't know what he likes, or whether he's really secure enough in those preferences to defy the snobs. He seems to like Studio Ghibli style custom images, Art Deco doors, and stained glass windows. He sort of wanted a stained glass window with a famous scientist in it a while back, but I think not enough to actually commission one. Of course, custom art windows aren't cheap, but that was also true in the past, people who weren't nobility would have to get by with art they made themselves. Sometimes he seems to hope that AI art will solve his problem, but I don't think it will, because things that can be printed already exist to suite all tastes, and things like doors and windows are not getting there any time soon.
I feel basically neutral about Angelus Novus. I think I like the art better than the flowery description that Scott quoted, despite not liking it all that much. The description of the new mono print process he used to make it was interesting. The mouth is quite interesting. Visiting David did not fill me with awe at the human figure, though I was impressed with the scale.
The Aesthetic Experience aspect of great art may have been overhyped. Sometimes people have great spiritual experiences when praying or meditating or whatever, but traditional Christianity is right to discourage people from chasing after it. It's neat to go to the Chicago Art Institute and look atet impressionist paintings. They're quite large! It's fine to just admire them, they have good colors, the painters used a lot of paint! Someone probably could gain art fans by doing actually Impressionist things, like hauling a giant canvas off to the haystack every week to get the different lights. But hardly anyone wants to, they are not enamored with the idea, it is not the right moment, there have only ever been a few people who were truly passionate about it, and there aren't any I've heard of now.
Writing about art critics seems unlikely to lead much of anywhere.
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I find it telling that I took one look at that goddamn painting and immediately labeled it as Bauhaus.
So I checked the painter.
Well.
My words to describe anything derived or inspired by Bauhaus are not fit for this forum. Considering it a good painting is quite the take, I will agree.
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