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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.
My problem with this is that historical context and position in a dialogue are worth considering, but they aren't art.
I've felt the weight of history behind some objects, and I've been profoundly moved by it. Those objects weren't paintings, sculptures, or any other form of traditional "art" in most cases. They were simple tools and practical artifacts that may have been through extraordinary circumstances, or not.
If you can get that feeling from something untouched by any artistic intent, then why is it considered a core (rather than incidental) feature of art?
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Angelus Novus looks super ugly like a deformed chicken with the face of a monster, then the artist sneezed violently over the paper, coating it in phlegm.
https://www.1000museums.com/shop/art/paul-klee-angelus-novus/
While art and taste is indeed idiosyncratic, museums have the role of curating and selecting art for preservation and developing culture. Only a tiny fraction of art ever gets praise or is shown in museums. Whatever museums do, they're making political, cultural choices, they're distributing status and prestige in a way that alienates the majority of people and caters to a certain highly left-wing clique. They should pick art that actually looks good, that most people generally enjoy or get uplift from. That's what they're there for. The weird, deranged stuff should get its own booru and that's about it.
With sufficient verbal IQ and chutzpah I could construct an argument for why anything, including Stable Diffusion 1 512x512 outputs I made in bulk and looked at for about 5 seconds before forgetting about, is a desperately profound and deeply meaningful exploration of meaning, time and space, intensely political too.
But that wouldn't make them worthy to sit in an art gallery. It's not supposed to be a test of verbal IQ but of artistic skill and ability. Anyone can make an ugly deformed chicken with a monster face.
Exactly. Angelus Novus isn't art, it's a balderdash prompt.
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I don't possess the inclination to write a full in-depth response, but it would be helpful if people would spend more effort trying to define the words they use. Let's take "kitsch", which is how you describe Chesterton's poems. I don't necessarily disagree, I agree a lot of Chesterton's writing comes off as "kitsch". However, saying so does not really carry the discussion anywhere. It is a word different kinds of elitists all use for things they dislike, but if you scratch the surface, you find they are different kinds of elitists and often have slightly different complaints. Members of realist schools, modernist and "post-modern" schools can complain and have complained about "kitsch" tastes of the petite bourgeois, but modernist and post-modernist would call many realists "kitsch".
So what is "kitsch"? Is it synonymous with overtly cute? Overtly common? Biedermeier? Overtly nostalgic? Overtly sugary? Overtly earnest? Overtly Disneyland? Cheap and ornamental? Revival styles that are badly executed by the original standards? Unsophisticated according to All definitions I have seen. One common thread to those all that the social context of the art is part of the definition is that "it's too much of something", so you cannot define "kitsch" in vacuum. You need a reference point. So wouldn't it be better to talk about the reference point and what you are measuring? Just stating that art is embedded in social context is a true sentence, but so general statement that it does not really say that much until you start making more specific claims.
I think Angelus Novus is "kitsch". I suppose it could be unremarkable but acceptable illustration of how kabbalaistic symbolism can manifest as artists finding deep meaning in naivistic scribble * if presented as part of a work about kabbalaistic symbolism*. If presented as an artwork, a stand-alone piece, it is far too cute in a naivistic way. Perhaps the artist was earnest, but it feels like a work that has appreciators who come off as faux-earnest.
As an artist, I would disagree. I could spend a week studying the painting, by which I mean attempting to redraw it accurately, drawing variations on it, etc, and I am confident I would be a better artist at the end of that week, and art I made drawing on the lessons I learned from it would be better drawings than what I would have produced before.
The linework is very definitely not naivestic scribble. You can do really neat things with the techniques he's using there, whether you agree that he's done neat things with them or not.
Could you perhaps explain some of the technically impressive or interesting elements used? I'm curious, because people keep saying it's technically interesting, but in the many thousands of words I've seen written about this painting, I've never seen anyone actually describe anything specific about Klee's technique. 90% of the commentary is just people randomly ascribing some facial expression or body language to the bird monster, then engaging in a psychoanalysis of the bird monster.
@gattsuru
@muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
@Primaprimaprima
Sure. It's the strong linework, and specifically what I guess might be called Economy/Confluence of line.
Strong Linework
Are you familiar with Blind Contour drawing? Take a piece of paper and a pencil, pick something you want to draw, look directly at it, and while keeping your eyes fixed on it, start drawing the outlines ("contours") of your subject without looking at your paper or pencil. This will result in a really bad drawing but surprisingly good linework, because it focuses all your attention on the exact nature of the contours, going from eye > line without the usual perceptual filters that kick in when you go eye > memory > line. With no spatial points of reference, the lines get all scrambled on top of each other, but with a bit of practice the individual lines themselves get smooth, strong, confident, and the skill gained carries over to non-blind contour drawing.
I want to stress that "smooth, strong confident" aren't just arbitrary labels being deployed for glazing purposes. Compare this drawing to this drawing; to my eye the former drawing is much, much more interesting than the latter, despite the latter being far more detailed/rendered. Look at that former drawing, and try to figure out how many actual lines there are. Is that just one line?
This, incidentally, is why a lot of "fine art" linework, including angelus novus, look "childlike". When kids first grab a pencil, they have very strong linework, but no form at all. As they learn, usually they chase form, and lose the linework strength in the struggle to get control of where the lines go, and you end up with something like the daredevil drawing above, where the lines are all sorta-kinda in the right place but overall they just feel blah. To get good, they need strong lines and good control. Fine artists who focus on very simple, very strong lines with less emphasis on being in the right place feel very childlike. think of it as a game to get the most impression out of the least amount of lines. It's a game you can play yourself, and it's both a lot of fun and does a good job teaching art technique.
Here's another example, and another; you don't need a lot of lines/rendering, you need the right lines in the right places, and less can be much, much more. Any snapshot of reality includes infinite detail; one of the basic things art can be is to boil that infinity down to the minimum number of details needed to capture as much of the original image as possible, ideally triggering the viewer's own imagination to fill in the rest better than any artist ever could.
Economy/Confluence of Line
Okay, so less can be more. How much less, and how much more? Consider this stained glass piece. See how the characters' contours break them up into a relatively small number of simple shapes? Note especially how countours flow into each other; the contour lines framing the right edge of the priest's beard continue to frame the edges of his hand. there's a line running up Mary's back, up and over her head along the back of her shawl, and then down to her arm. There's another line that starts with her jaw, down her neck, and then down the whole front of her body, demarcating her cloak. Real contour lines can line up like this, but usually don't... but simplifying a bit, nudge them a bit, and you get this really pleasing confluence where one shape flows into the next. Our eyes naturally follow contour lines, and so when the contours flow into each other, the eye naturally flows around and around with them, and picks up much more of a cohesive impression of the whole of the image, rather than only focusing on one part.
Take this idea and push it a bit, and you get the art style of the animated film The Secret of Kells, where the whole point is to imitate stained glass in the character designs.
As mentioned, Mike Mignola is one of my favorite artists. If you look at his sketches, you'll see his characters often have this weird, lumpy nature, but they still feel weirdly evocative, expressive, alive. His style leans hard on economy/confluence of line. The shapes are simple, but still organic, details are strongly subordinate to the basic forms: on the Inger von Klempt sketch, note how none of the detail on her shoulder breaks the shoulder's contour, how the contour of her far arm bridges breast to hip and thigh. Note the minimal linework used to render the faces and hands. The lines aren't cleanly straight, and they're not cleanly curved; there's lots of little kinks and wiggles in them, and yet the total effect is significantly more pleasing to me than other artists dedicating themselves to the style but with more precision and detail. I think it's because the cruder linework gives an impression of detail without compromising the actual simplicity, giving the best of both worlds.
My favorite example is the cover illustration from Mignola's Art of Hellboy book. Zoom in on hellboy's face, and study the shading. Note the sort of checkerboard pattern between the shadowed blacks and the lit reds? See how that checkerboard is built out of confluence of line, and how few lines there are to build up a strong, contrasting expressive face? See how the contours flow into each other? It's amazing to me how he does so much with so little.
Now back to Angelus Novus. The painting looks like a terrible mess on first impression, but dig in and you'll see that that the whole thing is built out of strong linework and economy/confluence of line. Actually trace the lines and try to figure out how and in what order they were drawn, and you'll get a sense that the whole mess is actually built out of very simple components and rules compounding on each other. He's trading more strength for less precision than Mignola, and he's using a lot more abstraction. Some of his other pieces are more restrained and precise, some more abstract, but this idea seems like a major part of his style.
And it IS a style, and quite an effective technique. Mignola shows what one can do with it if they latch on to it and never let go; The difference between Klee and Mignola being, it seems to me, that Klee was obsessed with developing and exploring new techniques, and Mignola is obsessed with using the best of those techniques to express his ideas. Think of it like the symbiosis between science and engineering.
I don't actually like Angelus Novus much as a painting; like I said, it's a mess. I definitely don't think it's beautiful, quite the opposite in fact. The expression reminds me of the Dungeon Soup barbarian. The fingers and toes look like dicks. The overall effect is not great, IMO. But the technique it's built out of can do some absolutely amazing things, and the people who've done amazing those amazing things got it either from this painting or from similarly-goofy paintings. Even if I don't appreciate it much, it's undeniable that others did appreciate it greatly, and used it to make things that I do appreciate greatly, so I'm pretty confident there's something of actual substance there, even if I can't really grok it.
Finally, I think a lot of this discussion works a lot better if you shear away all the connotations of "Fine Art" as this grand pinnacle capstone of civilization that typifies "True Culture". This dude figured out a neat way to go about constructing a drawing. Other people built on it and made lots of neat drawings. That's how I tend to look at it; I understand that Academics would generally foam at the mouth at the idea of thinking Klee is okay but Mignola is the real shit. I'm even a bit leery of that conclusion myself, given that Mignola seems to depend on Klee. But at the end of the day, I only care about Klee at all because I love Mignola, and the Academy has too little influence on me to make me ashamed of that fact.
Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk.
You are speaking directly to me about a curious subject in a language and form that is deliciously accessible and insightful. Thanks for the talk, TED
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Firstly, thank you, I feel this is an useful discussion.
Secondly, I am not still convinced Paul Klee made innovations in linework worth of studying or is a necessary predecessor for Mike Mignola. I am going cite Rembrandt again. Here are some sketches of his, pen and ink on paper, 17h century. I am not going to say Mignola is indebted to Rembrandt or anything, rather suggest that "economy of the line" is very natural result of doing croquis-like sketching and blocking with pen and ink.
Thirdly, I don't think it is a very important characteristic in definition of "kitsch", which was my complaint. Sufficiently existentially inspired artist can learn something from nearly any experience.
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Your reply illustrates my first point, about definitions of words. You seem to use "kitsch" as if, "studying the work will elevate my skill as artist". I think of "kitsch" as a word that describes social or emotional context, ie, vibes. According to Wikipedia, it is a some sort of lithograph, so I have little technical skill to judge. (It is also quite telling that Wiki has lots of text about the history of the painting and nearly nothing to say about the printmaking technique. [1]). So I concentrate on what I see. Big, vulnerable eyes. Large mouth. Small wings, tiny legs. It looks like the artist tries to be naive, and present something that is simultaneously weird and cute. Child-like, but I agree the artist had more skill than a child. It is not a scribble that child would make. Evocative, true, but quintessential kitchy reproduction paintings of kittens and dogs are also evocative.
[1] But if I would study printmaking, I hazard a guess I would benefit more from studying Durer and Rembrandt.
P.S. I feel I should add an exemplar of work that has naivist vibes.
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I've got a piece I keep meaning to polish for Clockwork Thought, about the Five Qualities. It's meaningful to note where a work excels at one quality and not others, or where it intentionally sacrifices one or more quality to augment others.
... but the flip side is that these don't really apply, here, even if I think they're more interesting questions.
I mean, prove me wrong, but to my eyes, Angelus Novus's defense is what it says, but what it says isn't in the actual artwork. There's more Theme or World in the smoke on the paper than in the ink. The technical, arcs, and the world on paper just don't have anything going on.
Because stripped from the tonal whiplash, this seems like it's less hypothetical, and more like it's just how many people see the world. I've spoken about Johnny Cash's Hurt and Air Traffic Controller's Blame, and I'll spell out that the latter has literally moved me to tears... when I first saw it tied to a bunch of badly animated scenes from a glurgy kid's book. The Sacred Chord is now as closely tied to Shrek as Smashmouth's All-Star. FLCL had burnt into the way I see the world, and the show-runners spent over a decade working their way up to a cockblocking joke, and compared to what some specialized therianthropy writings have done that's not even the worst option.
I woke up the next morning, and I was still the man who cared about those things. There's other options available, but all of them are worse.
But once you bite that bullet, the treatment of artwork as transformative or transformation as artwork doesn't actually save you from the underlying problem and disagreement about recognizing the value of it and individual pieces within that framework.
This website has some really annoying JavaScript.
Fair, and advised. That skeleton had seemed like a good idea at the time, but it's gone well past its best-buy date.
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One of my earliest memories is of walking through an airport, and seeing the cover art of a book: one of the volumes of Mike Mignola's Ffafhard and the Grey Mouser. Cliches for the experience abound; I would say Amagari-Fault-style "this hole was made for me" comes close. It was the first time I experienced art as art, and the impression was indelible. It was several years later when I found a couple volumes of Hellboy in a book store, and devoured them, and couldn't get over the artwork. Mignola's my favorite artist, always has been and always will be.
Angelus Novus (and Klee's other work) is a huge part of where Mignola's art came from. The influence is obvious and unmistakable in how the lines work. The dick-fingers and dick-toes and Dungeon-Soup-Barbarian facial expression are obstacles, but there is significant power in the lines themselves, power that I could personally describe in objective terms at some length. Klee is not my favorite artist and never will be, but I will argue that he's not an example of an artist who only exists in the artist's statement.
Huh. That's a little frustrating because I can spell out, if not necessarily in complex or deep or particularly informed, how Mignola's art works at fundamental Technical and Arc points, in ways I can't gather from Klee's; I can show how several other artists, especially in the comic world, either descended from Mignola or evolved in parallel, in ways that I can't from Klee's work, or even (what seems to me like) Klee's better work.
But that may be, and may probably be, a limitation in myself. I don't have the abilities even basic artists develop breaking the composition into its underlying shapes and motions of lines.
I guess I'd have to ask whether that power is relevant because Klee achieved it in his works, or because he influenced it such that others could fulfill it later?
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Oh man, you drop this when I'm too busy for in-depth digging?
Some previous discussion here, for those interested.
(Primaprimaprima, you are not the "you" in the following.)
Lots of good comments in the thread too, but one of the impressions I'm getting is that the term "art" is fatally overloaded, to the point that people are turning obvious truths into mutual contradictions due simply to focus on different aspects of the process.
"There is good art and bad art."
"Art is inherently subjective, anything can be good art."
If you tell me there are art experts, you are telling me there is a standard. If there is a standard, I am entitled both to judge works by that standard and to judge the standard itself, and you don't get to retreat to abstraction if my judgement is other than you prefer. It seems obvious to me that a huge part of the conflict this conversation generates is due to influential people playing both sides of this divide to their immediate personal advantage.
"Art is important and powerful."
"Degenerate art does not exist."
...I don't think these two claims can be reconciled. "With great power comes great responsibility."
"Art is universal, appealing to core features of the human brain and raw neuro-kinematics."
"Art is all about social context."
If the former, than art that doesn't spark me is bad art from my perspective, and art that doesn't spark a lot of people is bad art from a lot of people's perspective, disagreements start looking like social conflict. If the latter, not all communication is good communication, not all social contexts should be encouraged or preserved, and again we converge on social conflict. And again, you don't get to create hierarchy and then argue that contrary opinions about hierarchy are invalid; "Angelus Novus is good" is conflict just as much as "Angelus Novus is bad".
...It seems to me that our current consensus understanding of "Art" is fatally poisoned. Judging by your summary of Scott's articles, it seems to me that Scott recognizes this and is trying to describe the problem.
Why should it start there? Bullshit political signaling seems obviously endemic. I believe I have personally observed it second-hand in an academic context, and it was one of the most embittering experiences I've ever had, generating an immediate "these people are my enemies for life, and I will never forgive them" response. Why would taste outweigh the social game in our estimation of the field, given that it seems obvious that the field has been deliberately engineered to ensure that social games outweigh taste in every possible context? Something doesn't need to be the only factor to be the overwhelmingly dominant factor.
Art shapes people, but some shapes are good and some are bad, and some ways of shaping are good and some are bad. Summitting Everest appears to be a shaping experience. Alpha Centauri's "Nerve Stapling" is also a shaping experience. I prefer one to the other, and I do not recognize diversity on this point as healthy or something to be encouraged. Neither does it seem to me that the art world actually believes in diversity being valuable in and of itself. They have, do and will police shapes and shaping methods ruthlessly to achieve their conception of the Good. It's just that their conception of the Good is obviously incompatible with mine, and their strategy for achieving it appears to involve a lot of lying and non-consensual blood-sucking.
In short, I think there's a lot of value in attempting to cleave "Art" at its many joints. A conversation of Art-as-human-universal is obviously going to go very differently than one of The-art-world-as-we-know-it. I can personally defend Angelus Novus in the former context; I'm pretty sure I won't in the latter.
Amusingly, I spent some time studying Angelus Novus in our last discussion, and so had a mental picture of the piece when arriving in this one. I checked the piece again, and the immediate impression was significantly worse that I remembered.
Because the alternative is to simply think, as you already said, that your opponents are your "enemies for life" and there's nothing to be done about it. Then the discussion is truly just reduced to nothing but political power struggles. Sounds a bit... postmodern, doesn't it?
I take Scott at his word that his immediate, honest experience of the Chesterton poems is that he experiences them as surpassingly beautiful. That doesn't mean that I think that someone's "immediate perceptual experience" should be taken as an unanalyzable, unquestionable primitive. We could then go further and ask why he has that experience, how he came to be the type of person who has that experience, how it stands in relation to his other beliefs and his other psychological traits, etc. And someone could of course perform a similar analysis on me to determine how I came to hold the views that I hold. But the important thing is that, on a certain level, I really do take Scott's word for it that he just likes the poems because he likes them. I'm not coming into it thinking that he's just saying that he likes those poems because he has a political angle. I think everyone should extend that same level of charity to everyone.
I think it's pretty clearly a good thing to have non-zero "enemies for life". I don't think you can have a functioning morality or conception of justice without this component of moral reasoning, and I think life without functioning morality or a conception of justice is not a good life.
I watched an employee of the state at a prestigious educational institution provide affirmation and encourage mutual validation to a series of young artists that their shit art was deep and meaningful because their output flattered their collective biases, and then watched her lead that same group collectively tearing down the one artist whose shit art did not flatter their collective biases. What conclusions would you draw from that experience?
To solve post-modernism, you have to take it seriously. Once you solve it, you have nothing more to fear from it.
I disagree specifically with the term everyone. I think it is possible to conclude from available evidence that some people are in fact just grifting, and that when you find enough grifters in sufficient concentration within a larger sociopolitical cluster, that cluster is reasonably described as a grift. For the art world, I think this recognition is immediately necessary; I perceive the art world has been deeply fucked up for a very long time. What I value about art can, I think, survive without it, and I think we would all be significantly better off if it did.
On the other hand, I also recognize that some and even many reactions to stimuli are genuine. I've experienced them myself. I can attempt to bridge the gap for people who don't perceive the resonance.
Either way, I find the discussion absolutely fascinating.
Conveniently, I was just thumbing through Nietzsche again due to my discussion with coffee_enjoyer:
Regarding the broader art world:
I don't deny that there's a great deal of grift, corruption, and political bickering in the "high art" world; but, I don't think anything in my post committed me to denying that either.
I have no particular attachment to the particular art institutions that we're stuck with now, and I agree with you that art could survive and flourish without them.
I would say that Game recognizes Game. Or does Neitzche "forget" the Last Men or the Tarantulas, in your view? Certainly he doesn't seem to mind making his own appeals to Justice, does he? Or am I reading him wrong?
I wouldn't think you'd deny it. I guess I'm trying to communicate why I think the problem is systemic, rather than anecdotal. It's one thing for there to be "a great deal of grift, corruption, and political bickering". Humans will inevitably human. But what the art world has done, what they are going to keep doing, is anti-human, and I will happily spend the rest of my life working to dismay them.
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I've been to many art museums in my life. I've always detested the modern art museums. None of what's in it makes sense to me. Slap dash of colors on a canvas, physical pieces made of trash, mundane things with fancy lighting and put on a pedestal, films that are just moving shapes. Everyone else is always walking around all respectfully while I'm over here not feeling reverential at all. Then one time I went to the San Francisco Modern Art Museum and saw the Polar Stampede by Lee Krasner. It was on the 5th or 6th floor. It was a big, huge, piece. there was conveniently a good viewing chair in front of it. Objectively, it was just like any of the other pieces of art that I held no feelings towards. I didn't even know who the artist was, I assumed it was some thing Pollock-y. But the emotional impact of that painting struck me like hammer on glass. I sat on that chair for no less than half an hour just staring at the piece, trying to take it all in, like a man jumping into a river after days of desert. I had just recently came out of a period of depression, and that piece of art was like a mirror to my own feelings at the time. I've never wished more that I was incredibly wealthy and can grab the nearest personnel of the museum, then just go up the chain, then make an offer they can't refuse, then hang it somewhere that I can view every day, and presumably have fancy cocktail parties in front of it. I still don't like modern art, but since that da, I know that each piece of art has an audience, and I am lucky to have found mine.
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This whole art debate actually had me thinking of a totally different Scott article:
What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?
I'm coming around to thinking that the universal human experience I am missing is "art". Or at least getting any feelings about art. Stories get to me. I've cried at a majority percentage of the pixar movies. I can feel anger reading about a betrayal, or frustration reading about a stupid decision in a book. But visual stuff? Nothing. Audio stuff? Maybe if I am very drunk or tired I'll feel some emotions. But usually those emotions are just a tie in to a story. Food can taste really good, smells can be pleasant and unpleasant, but I wouldn't consider those experiences emotional either. My thoughts about architecture are mostly on its function. Particularly impressive or beautiful buildings kinda break through to making me think 'oh cool'.
For a long time I've just believed there are "art weirdos" who strangely feel emotions when they see things. Reading all these responses ... I guess I'm the weirdo.
Maybe you just haven't found art that resonates with you (easy to do if you go by what's considered "modern"). Here's an example which really hit me right in the feels back in the day.
https://files.catbox.moe/b5lv41.jpg
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This is interesting. How short does the media have to be to evoke a response? A two hour movie can do it, from what you say above. Conversely, a single frame obviously wouldn't because that's what a painting is. What about a ten minute scene? A ten second clip?
Short cartoons under ten minutes rarely get to me. I can't think of any.
It just doesn't feel like the visuals really matter. I recently read and then watched Project Hail Mary. I read the book first and felt far more emotional during it. Which is maybe just because it was first. But I think the same applies to most movies, I could read a story of the movie and if the conversion is good I'll get as much or more from the book.
Short written stories don't tend to grab me very much. I need about 50-100 pages with the character before I start caring about them.
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I don't think it is weird – we've all been massively oversaturated by visual imagery and it's phenomenally hard for an image alone to have an emotional impact outside of a great deal of surrounding narrative. For example, I was just now pushed to a heightened level of emotion by a shot in the show DTF St Louis (this is probably weird of me) of just David Harbour dancing, but the shot isn't inherently that special, it's just lent its power by the story (and yet the story without that image would not have half the impact). Images in stories are powerful because we allow ourselves to view them as component parts of something bigger. Life isn't a story, it's too fragmented, but every experience e.g. of food, is either good or bad, but only really gets value by being part of a whole moment. I agree food isn't that emotional, but I can't say I don't value a certain piece of fatty tuna sushi I had emotionally, because of the moment of my life it recalls.
A lot of this conversation is just people trying to experience atomic sensations and rate them. You can't do this, they're rarely that special. You have to give in to the right brain and experience wholes all at once.
I use to think the ratio of visual art works : no it doesn't was something like 10:90 in the population. Now I think it's more like 80:20. Where do you think the line is?
I've never been particularly emotionally moved by a singular painting. But I have been moved by a collection of related paintings placed within a certain context, and I have been moved by singular pieces of architecture and monumental sculpture. I think it's something to do with scale. The Great Pyramid of Giza is literally just a simple geometric shape, shorn of all its former ornamentation and refinement, but looking up at it from the base moved me to tears. Meanwhile the Louvre was a fascinating place to visit from a historical perspective, and I could appreciate the beauty in much if the work on display, but nothing in that building had what I would describe as a truly meaningful effect on me. I would rather look at a beautiful building or a big tree than practically any piece of visual art.
I think I'm similar in this regard, and the Louvre fell flat for me as well. It was difficult to connect with many of the paintings there; in spite of the clear dedication of the artists, many of them were relatively small in size and unintimidating, and I came away thinking that the overwhelming focus of these artists when painting these was primarily on the formal qualities of the work. I could appreciate it and the paintings were certainly beautiful, but they largely did not affect me. It sometimes feels as if artists can get interested enough with the microscale qualities of the art that they fail to make use of many simple and "primitive" tricks that can elicit emotion. When travelling Europe I much preferred many of the murals and stained-glass works in churches, since they were far larger and often made to dwarf the viewer with visions of religious awe. My favourite piece of art in Paris was not the refined Renaissance art in the Louvre, it was the gigantic medieval stained glass panels in Sainte-Chapelle.
Scale is something that really does affect your emotional perceptions of a piece of art. Hell, the Great Wall is just a fortification built for entirely functional purposes, and yet seeing it snake over the ridgeline for as far as the eye could see had a significant emotional effect. And as far as art goes, there isn't much of anything I've seen that can compare to something like, say, Cave 6 of the Yungang Grottoes. Standing deep inside the bowels of a remote, dusty mountain in rural China and gazing up at this gargantuan 1,500 year-old cavern adorned with resplendent, colourful images of celestial figures spilling unbidden into every nook and cranny was incredibly stirring. It was like heaven carved into the side of a mountain.
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Hmmm. Very difficult. Most people seem to approach artworks as they do flowers. They know which ones are pretty, how they're supposed to look, and they like having them in the room. Maybe that's 90% of people. But off the dome I'd go with 5% of people more than very occasionally having big emotional responses as they look at individual paintings. Good question though, on reflection I don't feel I have a good handle on this.
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Yes Chad. It is indeed simply obvious when you find a piece of art to be pleasant or beautiful. When I visit an art museum, I look at the art, and I am immediately struck by beauty. Some pieces literally take my breath away when I see them: I gasp and stare at it slack-jawed. It would be undesirable and unnatural to try to change yourself so that you find beautiful things ugly, and ugly things beautiful. Some things deserve a reaction of awe and delight, and some things deserve a reaction of disgust and repellence, and if you don’t have that reaction something is wrong with you, the same way something is wrong with a man who is tone death or color blind.
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Call me a philistine, I guess? It looks like a beach caricature of a dog skull with floppy tits shoved in the eye sockets.
When I look at a Rembrandt painting, I love how he used the oils in multiple ways to create a sense of light - the pigments, the brush strokes, all of it.
When I look at a Zdzisław Beksiński I'm floored by the scale of his scenes, and how they can still appear sharp when everything is under a cloud.
When I look at a Norman Rockwell painting, I appreciate the way that he's able to capture human movement in a still medium.
I'm not sure if I can pick something about your linked work where I can say the same? Can you elaborate on that a bit?
I like the color scheme. I like how strangely ambiguous the image is: the figure floating in a strange artificial space (or maybe a "space" that's not-actually-a-space), he looks like he's looking at something, expectant about something, but we don't know what. The image feels "compact" in a way that's oddly comforting.
I've long said, "the nature of art is ambiguity." I don't know how true it is, but it's close enough for a quip. I've also said, everything you say is art, is art, but I get to say which art is good art, and which is bad art.
When I saw this, I was struck by it. It's striking, yes, in a grotesque way. Here are the things I find notable. First, the eyes merging with forehead, the nose and mouth and teeth, and the neck/jaw outline are all unsettling and, I think, intentionally so. The body is some sort of bird, especially the lower half, which gives it the appearance of a chicken-man. I almost thought it was a play on a hairless biped, "behold, a man!" Three toes plus a talon, and the tail-skirt shape, enhance this appearance.
I like the hair, and it's here that I see the titular subject: angels. It looks like angel hair might look. It looks like rolled scrolls and the curlicues of roman statuary. I also quite like the hands, and the lines that reach from index finger downward, but then the question. What am I looking at? Arm? Wing? Stole? Shawl? The detail about the neck also draws my attention. What is that nexus of lines from which a necklace hangs? Is that a fishing hook at its end?
I see what you mean about the compactness, and I can appreciate it. It can certainly be part of the striking first impression, and to cross mediums, I liken it to reading Roger Zelanzy's Amber, whose prose is sparse and direct, when compared to, say, Tolkein.
Overall, way better than some, not as good as most. Certainly not my favorite grotesque painting.
There's something different, I will say, about seeing a work of art in the flesh. Have you ever seen the original, or are you enamored with the pictures of it you've seen? Here is another place where the compactness of a work benefits it, as not everything compares well on screens.
Nice comment, it certainly has driven discussion.
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I appreciate you taking the time to go over that. When people say they like a piece of art, I usually don't care why they like it, so much as they can say why they like it, if that makes sense
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Essentially some point in the last 500 years, but probably 200-350 years ago (being deliberately broad) classical art was “solved”. Developments in perspective, the teaching of art, color, etc etc meant that certainly by the early 19th century you couldn’t really, as an artist, make a more beautiful painting of a subject in a naturalistic (ie beautiful, realistic, aesthetically congruent style) in an innovative way. There are still many classically trained artists and for a couple of hundred dollars you can buy a beautiful painting from a really good Chinese artist in a naturalistic style of whatever you want.
At that point, what does the artist do? The field has been solved, so once you spend a few years developing the fine motor skills, technique and so on in a classroom you just spend another 50 years doing the artistic version of churning out the same table 10,000 times. Many, probably most working artists did this and still do this. There are still portrait artists and video game concept artists and classical landscape artists and so on who follow these rules to the letter and just paint ‘thing, following rules’ with some technical skill.
But for the artist who wants to be innovative in terms of technique, what is there to paint or draw? You can draw something new, be the guy who does portraits of SpaceX rockets or NVIDIA GPUs or something and maybe solves some minor challenge of framing or perspective involved. Kind of a niche, and limited demand. Or you can experiment with technique in a way that violates the classical laws of beauty, perspective, framing, etc that are ‘solved’. That largely describes the last 150 years of modern and then contemporary art. It isn’t a grand conspiracy but it’s not necessarily the most flattering way of viewing the profession either.
You're kind of just doing what I warned against in my post though. "No one could really be into this stuff. We all know what 'beauty' is, after all; so artists must just be screwing around because they don't have anything better to do". I explicitly disagreed with all these points. You're still incredulous that people could be pursuing "modern art" because of their own intrinsic interest in its own intrinsic aesthetic value.
Obviously something historically unique did happen in the late 19th/early 20th century that changed the trajectory of high art. But that was due to many competing factors and isn't just reducible to "linear perspective was solved". Nor were modern artists the first artists to do anything weird/experimental: see for example Hieronymus Bosch.
Not at all. I enjoy a lot of modern and contemporary art. But I recognize that it emerged in part because technical issues were solved. Movie CGI is approaching this level now (even without AI), where it’s no longer impressive by itself so there needs to be a stylized or sometimes even incongruent element to be visually interesting.
To be fair to contemporary artists and even moreso to art critics (much maligned), traditional landscapes really are beautiful, and if you (like most even well educated people) visit an art gallery once a year at most then they’re attractive and stimulating. But if you visit a gallery or see new art every day? They’re obviously going to start boring you. The clashing, sometimes (often) overtly ugly nature of a lot of visual art produced over the last century is often more interesting. And contemporary art especially isn’t made for the general public (with the sole exception of architecture and sometimes a particularly ugly logo for a public event or something), it’s made for a relatively small community of people who consume it all the time.
Weird, ugly art has also been the norm in elite art circles for the better part of a century now, though. You'd think if a contemporary young artist would be sick to death of anything, it would be the ugly, sterile technical exercises dressed up in extreme left wing politics that old professors have been shoveling for generations. Art critics aren't spending 12 hours a day marinating in normie-approved traditionalist landscapes; they're spending their days reading paragraph-long plaques misusing the word "phenomenology" to describe why childlike stickfigure drawings are an important critique of capitalism.
Does anyone actually still find anything novel or exciting about contemporary art? We ran out of taboos to transgress and forms to deconstruct in interesting ways decades ago.
The problem is say you’re a young artist looking to make your mark. If you’re classically trained (which many are) you can churn out classical landscapes and portraits but there is literally nothing to distinguish them from what countless very technically skilled Chinese, Viet and other artists are putting out for $250 online. In addition, say you’re a critic. What is there to say about that? You can say things about ugly art, or wacky art that supposedly means some bullshit, for better or worse.
What can you say about another very nice alpine landscape that captures the Matterhorn at dawn, or a view of the Empire State Building for example? “Very technically proficient, captures the scene well.” Yes, the very very best classical art has enough mystery for books of analysis. But you’re probably not going to paint the Mona Lisa.
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I find myself getting bored of contemporary art much faster, when I visit museums, than I get bored of classical art. It's not like you can't be bored by ugliness.
True, but I think in general the experience of really big galleries / museums is bad here. Your eyes will glaze over at a hundred paintings at the Vatican galleries or the Met that you could stare at for hours and get much out of if you saw them independently for twenty minutes on a random day, something like the Uffizi is best experienced as a search for a few pieces of particular personal interest rather than a general browse, at least in my opinion. The jarring nature of a lot of contemporary art only exacerbates it.
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Right, but at the moment it's largely funded with public money for the edification (theoretically) of the public. Especially if you go beyond visual art to the other inbred arts (theatre, poetry, literature as opposed to bestsellers, much architecture).
I broadly agree with your diagnosis - I've watched e.g. Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation go from having relatable, good recommendations to really much more of 'does this reanimate some spark of life in my breast' and he even disavowed many of his original recommendations that were too normie because he thought they were dull in retrospect. But the weirdos need to be given their own private space to work and we need to acknowledge that they're weird and shouldn't be doing things for the general public.
Which is both the blessing and curse of individualism.
The duty of individuals in such a system is that they need to acknowledge that they're weird, and that the general public shouldn't be emulating them if they don't already know they're compatible with weirdness (in contrast to how human nature/instinct normally work). But knowing that in the first place usually requires enough disagreeability that they can't follow that rule.
And after you've cleared that hurdle, "knowing what advice to ignore and what to integrate" is itself very difficult. It might not be worth your time/energy to be special even if you're above-average.
The problem is that, when these people are successful, people start trying to copy their methods without being able to copy what made them able to succeed with those methods, especially when that copying is because they want an excuse to be lazy and get credit for indulging their base instincts. (This is the "Visionary X was an asshole to his workers, so that means it's OK for me to do it to mine" thing- but you are not X, and don't offer the value he does. This is kind of an emergent property of societies where the class structure is perceived/taken as morally good to be flat.)
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Right, I think we’re mostly in agreement. In terms of public funding I think it’s now widely acknowledged that these are jobs programs for the children of the upper middle class, which as far as welfare goes doesn’t seem obviously worse than the far larger numbers spent on the underclass, migrants, asylum seekers, prisoners, pensioners who spent a lifetime on minimum wage and so contributed nothing and so on.
Re Yahtzee video game critics are a great example. I don’t even think a video game critic can fairly evaluate a yearly shooter or a Ubisoft open world or something like that because these games are so inherently boring to people who play video games all day that they really can’t see them the way the intended audience does. The only exceptions are things like Grand Theft Auto that have a built-in exemption due to the hype and developer’s legacy.
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But already this narrative assumes that artists have to be these geniuses who invent something new all the time, or that there is a specific task to be solved (e.g. to make the most realistic perspective- and color-accurate depiction of the thing as if looking through a rectangular window). In many cultures art was not so artist-as-superstar-genius-centered, but more about repeating the motifs of the culture, establishing a connection with their tribal ancients etc. Ancient Egypt managed to keep a more-or-less constant art style (I'm sure this makes the egyptologist cringe, but change was certainly much slower). In fact, it's a cultural value question whether individual-based innovation is placed above integrating into and expressing one's community tradition. It's similar with writings and stories, which were in older times not so connected to specific authors and would rather float around and have different versions and variations, quite unlike today's intellectual property ideas or ideas around plagiarism.
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How about coming up with new techniques to do the classical beauty more efficiently, more quickly? Perhaps by learning linear algebra and doing it a lot really really fast. I wonder if there's an alternate universe where generative AI isn't called AI and was developed by artists trying to come up with new and innovative ways to make themselves stand out.
I think there are still visual combos of technique and modern subject matter/point of view to explore, even in traditional figurative painting. See for example Dana Schutz, someone who is making exceptional, critically acclaimed paintings that are stylised but not abstract.
I like the idea of artists coming up with generative AI btw. I wonder what they'd have done with it? Probably they would have tried to monetised the output instead of the mechanism.
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If you show a random group of teenage students that “Novus Angelus”, how could it possibly be good for them? I don’t see any rational path toward an argument that this would better their life or make them happy. The figure has an instinctively ugly face and form, and it’s evidently intended to humiliate the angels by depicting them as such. So it is the depiction of something normally glorious as pathetic. Okay. We can rationally see how it would make them worse: they are seeing an ugly and pathetic humanoid-like figure; they are being told it is “art”, which will confuse them; they are desacralizing something culturally important. If you wanted to increase unhappiness among humanity, you would show them this nonsense and say it is art, and they will infer, “hey, this is very important to look at”, so you’re biasing them to internalize filth, inhumanity, even evilness. Why?
Compare that antisocial filth to Tiepolo’s Annunciation. Even having almost no cultural understanding, you can see the good of the work. A student would see: a young woman reading is visited by an angel who points her to something mysterious and glorious above. If you show this to 100 students, all 100 of them would be benefitted. They would internalize a sense of something better, a sense of wonder and mystery, maybe a sense of the importance of reading. Or show a boy Salvatore Nobili’s Sant'Antonio in Campo Marzio and his life could change forever — he would be more courageous, more moral, more humble.
The purpose of art is not to make people very opinionated about art or to try to trick them like an intellectual gypsy. The point is to greaten us. We evolved the ability to make art to display our health and signal our competence. We evolved the ability to appreciate that art because we appreciate health. We evolved the ability to think with complexity because it sustained our common health and civic health over generations. The art instinct would have never developed in humanity if we had the degeneracy of the art snob. The art snob does not understand the point of anything, they are sick and their soul is cut off from the Realm of the Living.
If you are not capable of evaluating anything outside your totalizing culture war impulses, your art criticism will look like this, verbose and childish. Naive but not in an unpretentious and innocent way. The opposite.
You hate Angelus Novus because of what you assume about the painter and his intent, not because of any intrinsic ugliness or "degeneracy" in the work.
If you had been told that Klee was a devout Christian who spent his life trying to understand God and His angels and show them to others in a particular symbolic way, resulting in a very idiosyncratic, arguably "ugly" art style? Your opinion would flip like a bit. Maybe you still wouldn't particularly enjoy his work, but you'd appreciate his intent and wouldn't be railing about degenerate filth corrupting the youth.
Which ironically makes the point of a lot of art appreciators (a point Scott tries to negate, not very successfully) that art has context, and no matter how much you try to "appreciate it on its own merits" you and it are not in a vacuum and your priors and the context of the piece influence your perception of it.
I do not like modern Catholic art or music. It has been aesthetically barren since halfway through the 20th century, at least, and terminal before. (This is hardly due to bias, because some of my favorite composers are Orthodox John Tavener and Arvo Part, recently dead and living, and I’m not an Estonian or British Eastern Orthodox). Even the new “traditional”ish style is mediocre-to-okay, and my God, I have no words for the new stuff. Neither is this just me liking old stuff, because I do not like Eastern Orthodox iconography, generally speaking. Traditional European art moves you with powerful social emotions, with everything working together to heighten to effect, and pieces were selected according to the taste of patrons who didn’t need to flex pretention, having nothing whatsoever to prove, being the highest status and occasionally sovereign. Also, it focused on perfecting a handful of scenes for a maximum social-emotional response, ie the crucifixion must have been painted 200 times a year in every city, and gradually the visual language of the scene evolved to become perfect through a centuries-long selection process, involving artists selecting the best micro-motif over hundreds of years, the wisdom transferred in studios with an imitative learning structure. But we want to discard all that today, because we are very foolish.
It moves you.
Do you think it possible that people who are not you are moved by things that do not move you, and are not moved by things that move you?
I'm not saying "Everything is subjective" so no one can say anything is good or bad. But when you make absolute statements about not just the artistic, but the social and moral value of art, as if your judgment is clearly true and everyone else is either pretending or being deceived by the devil, well, it's beyond the arrogance of someone saying "I don't like modern art" or "Twilight is a crappy book." It's presuming that you can define good art (according to your particular fixations) and see through the pretense of anyone who likes things you don't like.
As I said, Angelus Novus doesn't move me. But clearly it moves some people. They aren't just degenerate angel-haters. Even I can see that while at first glance, sure, it looks like something I might put on the fridge because my kid drew it, ("Oh, it's an angel? Of course it is!") but further examination shows a level of intentionality, composition, color, and drafting that required artistry. Maybe not to my taste but there is meaning there. Even you evidently sense that since you so strongly react to its "degeneracy," which certainly could not be the case for some unskilled scribble.
People are moved by the placebo effect, authority bias, the desire to fit in, and ambient cues in the environment. Just as they were in 1924, four years after Novus Angelus, where this was proven:
…
https://time.com/archive/6656527/hoax/
I do not consider it art. I do think this is just rusing the tasteless and easily-influenced.
Perhaps some people really were moved by Yes, We Have No Bananas or "Jerdanowitsches's" other works. More likely it took in some critics who weren't really moved by it but were signaling, which is what Scott (and you) claim is all that people who say they like Klee's work are doing.
Certainly people can be hoaxed (Jordan-Smith isn't the first guy to put one over on a community of pretentious snobs). But people have in this thread have expressed why they find Angelus Novus worthwhile. You can disagree with their analysis, but all you've offered are personal expressions of disgust. There is a difference between "I don't like this" and "This is objectively bad and if you think it's good you're either lying or stupid." And as I said, bluntly, I don't believe your analysis is based on the art but on the artist.
One day I hope we find a TQ measurement similar to IQ. The low IQ do not realize why what they like to do is destructive. Similarly, I don’t think the low TQ realize why the art they like is destructive (to their own wellness and civilization). Until we have twin studies measuring the longterm impact of beholding works by different artists on wellbeing and prosocial behavior, we will just have to disagree.
If you just want to lob Dunning-Kruger Syndrome accusations at people who disagree with you, I could make up some Qs of my own, but again, it's not in any way a convincing argument.
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If I was told this, I would say "tried to and succeeded at are not the same thing". If I was also told that he had succeeded, I would say "that claim is unfalsifiable, compared to having failed".
Why would your reaction be meaningful to anyone who is not you? You're just saying "Yuck!" with more words.
Why should anyone else's reaction be more meaningful than mine? They're just saying "Yum!" with more words.
...And to be clear, I'm at least provisionally willing to give a "Yum!" for this specific work, and my reasons for doing so appear to align with yours: technical details of the process. On the other hand, it seems you share my skepticism of the work in the broader context outside the technical.
"That claim is unfalsifiable, compared to having failed" seems like a reasonable statement, and one that I'm not sure you're even disagreeing with.
When someone tells me "This is bad" or "This is good," I'd rather hear why they think that. Not just "I liked it" or "I didn't like it" or "It disgusts me."
I do think to some degree there is such a thing as "objectively" good and bad art, but that is mostly in the realm of technical skill, and perhaps to a lesser degree, does it accomplish what it intended? So for example, I think Twilight largely fails in the first category (it's badly written, though not the worst written book I've ever read) but obviously succeeds in eliciting feelings in its (mostly teenage girl) audience that the author intended. Angelus Novus actually shows technical proficiency which is perhaps not obvious at first glance, and it elicits feelings and analysis that some random minimalist angel sketch wouldn't. I wouldn't claim it's great or even the best in its class, but when people just sneer at it because it's "ugly" or "degenerate," or claiming "it fails because I didn't like it," I don't see that as meaningful critique. And it's telling that most of the critique seems to come not from a genuine analysis of the work, or even a particular dislike of the style, but because of culture war reads.
I disagree that "having failed" is more falsifiable than "it didn't fail." It implies you can objectively say it "fails" as art (because I didn't like it).
How do you feel about popularity? As a very simple toy model, say that society's tastes as judged by 'this is bad', 'this is good' boil down to a predictable 95%/5% split of obligate normie vs. obligate edgy. Lots of room for individual preferences within that, but basically two clusters of markedly disproportionate sizes.
Would you accede to the proposition that a work of art which is loved by much or most of the 95% is 'objectively good' and one which disgusts and repels them is 'objectively bad'? To my mind, whether a given work will delight the vast majority of people seems like a far better indication of its quality than technical skill or whether it accomplished what the artist wanted.
Personally, I've enjoyed lots of things that were technically bad - everyone dunks on Rowling's prose, the art for Higurashi is genuinely terrible, etc. And I have relatively little interest in whether the artist succeeded in his wish to discomfort and repel me (tragedy is a bit more complicated) vs. failing to please me if the result is repellent.
I think you have this exactly backwards. This is the Culture War. It's the beating core of the culture war, far deeper in many ways than immigration or politics. For complex reasons, in the West a group of extremely unrepresentative people rose to control of the beating organs of our society including but not limited to the arts and the universities. They enjoy disharmony, extreme novelty, and 'modernism' for lack of a better word, and their tastes are broadly genuine but anti-correlated with the tastes of the vast majority of the population. To please and delight themselves, they acted in a semi-coordinated way to move society towards what pleased them, aided by the cultural and literal razing of the two world wars. The built environment (bauhaus and brutalism), the social environment (immigration, the more culturally dissimilar the better), etc. This wasn't necessarily malevolent in intent, though it was sometimes selfish. Often they thought of themselves as uplifting the normies, albeit by force. However, they completely overlooked or even applauded the long term psychic damage it did to the normies who were forced to live in their world and to bow to their tastes thanks to their control of the institutions.
Contrast with Japan, which has certainly changed over the last 150 years but in which normies remain firmly in charge, and with even the very early Marxists. (Marx himself once said that the point of Marxism was to give every man the privilege of being a hunting, shooting, fat, happy aristocrat.)
TL;DR: The binary of objective vs. subjective obscures that you can have a 'subjective' question where 99.9% of people agree. It's not objective in the way that 'the sky is blue' is objective, one can perfectly well hold the opposing opinion without being mad or evil. Nevertheless, it doesn't seem to me to be particularly subjective in the, 'what's better? no way to say, really...' way where we have to abandon audience reaction and go for something explicitly relativistic like 'is the author skilled at doing this thing that almost everyone hates?'.
I think popularity has a loose, but certainly not precise, correlation to "good."
Can you give me an example of a work that is loved by 95% of the population but which you think might be arguably "bad" on a technical level? I wouldn't agree that popularity defines "goodness" but I'd be hard-pressed to think of something so universally beloved that just somehow snookered everyone and is bad, actually.
I am not familiar with Higurashi, but I've written about Rowling before. Her prose is not great (though she's improved quite a bit since Harry Potter), but it's also not the strong point of her work. I would not agree that she is "technically bad," though I would agree that there are other authors whose prose is objectively better.
When you conflate bauhaus and brutalism with immigration, you kind of lose me. Bauhaus and brutalism are not to my tastes but I've seen works of both that I thought were pretty good and I am unconvinced they are some deliberate construct imposed on the masses by the same elites who do all the other social things you disapprove of.
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I read this post with something close to physical revulsion. (It is the culture wars thread so perhaps that's par for the course.) Not because I dislike those older pictures, I love them. I don't even like Novus Angelus that much. But Klee is a for-real artist who devoted his life to his work and if you look across his oeuvre, you can't deny he was pursuing his interests and exploring interesting themes with craft and intensity and a deep aesthetic sense. To think that an example of his work would be corrupting to teenagers, 'evil' or 'filth' is offensive in its own right. He was great artist even if you don't like the work. And you certainly don't have to find it beautiful. But "filth"? "Evilness"? Absolutely, disqualifyingly, ridiculous.
How will a teenager be benefited from Novus Angelus? Klee may have been a great artist, but did he use his talents to create something helpful or harmful to his fellow man in this case? Fritz Haber was a brilliant and accomplished scientist, but that doesn’t mean his work creating chemical weapons wasn’t evil.
I saw it as a teenager in reproduction. I was very interested in how someone who was really into making drawings, philosophy and music and ceaselessly inventing new styles was villified by the Nazis as creating 'degenerate art' despite the inquisitiveness and sometimes humour of his overall project.
Did I gain from viewing that individual image by itself? Not really. It's not my favourite or anything. I'm arguing against the position it is harmful.
I'm sure that when the Nazis made lists of degenerate art they lumped in actual trash with good but ideologically inconvenient art. The art could easily both be bad and be on the list.
Lots of it may not have been good but probably none of it was degenerate, and probably degenerate art isn't really a thing.
Child porn. Snuff films, like "funky town". The cartoons of A Wyatt Mann. If these media had broad and growing audiences and were publicly celebrated by influential people, would you take that as a sign of broad social improvement?
Suppose the following statement is true: A major driver of the BLM movement was "art" that caused Blues to vastly overestimate the number of unarmed black men killed by police, thus spurring a social movement that attacked policing as a concept, leading to acute changes in how policing was conducted. The immediate result was a massive crime wave that killed many thousands of additional black people. If this be the case, would you agree that such art was bad for society?
Are you familiar with the youtube channels where people stream themselves scratching off lotto tickets and winning big? If you discovered that a young family member was a huge fan of such videos, and was also making a habit of dumping their free cash into lotto tickets, would you suppose there was a cause-and-effect relationship there? Would you consider this development good, bad, or neutral?
Do you recognize that art can be bad for society, that art can have a bad or immoral message or effect on the viewer? If not, why not? If so, what is your term for such art, and how is it fundamentally different from "degenerate"?
Art is powerful; this seems undeniable. If art is powerful, why would you presume that it is only powerful in good ways, and not in bad ones? Is that how you observe power working in any other context, ever?
I grant you that your examples are degenerate and at least some of them are kinds of art. But they aren't what the Nazis called "degnerate art", which was, broadly, all modern and abstract art, as well as art done by Jews, people with mental illnesses, Communists etc. This art was deemed evil largely independently of its content or intention, but because of who did it and the fact it was in styles other than the approved realist style. I don't think this was a coherent concept, and the elision of aesthetically displeasing with morally bad was all kinds of fucked up.
I realise I should have used my words more here instead of saying degenerate art wasn't a thing, as I have caused you to write quite a lot of stuff I fully agree with. Art is vitally important and has moral valence. It can be powerful in bad ways as well as good. That just doesn't apply (at all) to Klee, and a new term needs to be found for art with a clearly pernicious effects as with some of your examples. The Nazis have claimed "degenerate art".
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It's an old tradition in Christianity to make people face the off-putting and shocking. Initially it was scandalous to depict Christ on the cross and his passion, but over time it became integrated and accepted and in a way sanitized and defanged. One could also say, and indeed Nietzsche's critique is something like this, that the crucifix is ugly and the solemn hymns about blood and so one are also unworthy, and a good strong civilization with an inner vitality should only show strong glorious victories and victors and sing self-celebratory songs that uplift people to move forward to even more winning.
I'm not sure that Angelus Novus is intended to "demoralize", but even those things that are intended so are understood by their creators to actually point at some deeper morality. (I'm sure there are also some that are simply perverted and enjoy the destruction of all that is good and want everything to rot and decay and die and suffer and squirm and so on - but I don't think the entire art world was like this). Instead they saw their role as warning society and awakening in them a desire for change and to realize that what they were sold previously, packaged in superficial beauty, was in fact rotten and corrupt in the core, that ornament and beauty was used to hide crimes and oppression. These kinds of impulses are not unprecedented and they are similar to iconoclasm (whether the Protestant Christian or the Muslim kind) and other cases of new movements destroying the icons and totems of the old one, which they deem broken and false prophecy packaged in deceptively appealing packaging.
For one or another reason, around the turn of the century artists got saturated with all the straightforward beauty, and they longed for something fresh and not stale. The old aesthetic values felt disconnected from the modern world, dishonest even, just an anachronistic show. Instead they looked for motifs from other cultures, from the east in Art Nouveau, or from other untainted sources, such as several then-rediscovered ancient cultures, or from natural childish innocent instinct. This is also connected to accurate representation being devalued due to photography. In Angelus Novus I mainly see this celebration of childish innocence and clumsiness and honesty, as well as an echo of cave paintings or other primitive art from non-Western cultures, along the lines of Le Taureau by Picasso.
You can't get around the fact that to defend the moral authority of the pictures you linked as positive examples, you have to defend the actions of the Catholic Church. This is not an impossible task. But you have to actually do it. You can't shortcut to it by saying that the paintings look better aesthetically, hence they should be the moral examples. What exactly is this part: "his life could change forever — he would be more courageous, more moral, more humble"? This is where the crux of the thing lies. Go on with social reality and values as it was in the late 1800s? You can defend that. But you have to actually do it.
Beauty is hard to fake. Ugliness is easy to fake. (Well, it's easy to do for real, but you know what I mean.) Because of this, I'm going to have some heightened level of skepticism about claims of "this art is ugly for a reason".
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Everything in traditional Western art served a Point, a Good, which promoted individual and collective health (or wellbeing). They portrayed the horrors of the crucifixion because this is necessary for your ultimate felicity and beatitude. Art featuring the aversive stimuli of the Cross was made and consumed exclusively by people who understood the image within a cohesive and strict narrative involving a combination of dogmas:
that the pains and horrors shown are the consequence of your own bad behavior (sin), which led to this event;
that Jesus, innocent and blameless, suffered and died in order to redeem you from these evils and their consequence, out of an interest in your wellbeing and desire to see you in paradise
that Jesus, as an example for the whole human race, endured all injury and injustice with righteousness, obedience, faith, virtue, compassion, and obtained the ultimate reward in doing so
that you are in a lifelong and eternal bond with Jesus, and thus have a perfect moral influence exerted upon you continually
The off-putting and shocking nature of it is instrumental according to a complicated list of givens. There would be no point in expressing it otherwise. And importantly, an angel would never be depicted as so weak, miserable, and ugly. Either they are awe-inspiring and powerful, or they are innocent and beautiful. That’s also part of the cultural package of traditional western art.
Nietzsche never grasped Christianity. I agree with his critique of a hypothetical strawman Christianity believed by a hypothetical race of strawpeople.
Actually, I have to defend the lifestyle of a community of young devout Catholics over the lifestyle of a commune of young art students, because both are in communion with their respective traditions. Do you have any doubt which one would have behaviors more conducive to wellbeing? I don’t think I would be able to find a clearer divide between people who are halfways to inner hell and people who are at least a little bit close to human felicity.
Not sure if this should be the criterion though. If the art students are correctly disillusioned about seeing reality as it is, and the Catholics are just placated and blindfolded to the injustices and whatnot.. Just trying to be devil's advocate. Monks self-flagellating and extreme ascetism also doesn't seem to be the most wholesome and conducive to well-being, but it's also derived from the same source.
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How so?
He failed to grasp that the Cross is a superior path to Selbst-Überwindung (self-overcoming) than what he describes, in that it more accurately models the phenomenological experience of struggle and suffering in pursuit of a superhuman aim. Nietzsche hazardly circumambulates around an idol of someone who overcomes his social values to achieve a greater value, while missing that this has been painted better within the Christian story. Christ withstands His culture’s priests and academics (scribes), empire, false accusations, and so on to obtain Glory. This is modeled by the believer who “carries his cross”, denies himself, loses his life to find it. What is the Zarathustra model? To yap in self-pity about how pity is bad. His whole heroic description is woefully cloudy and nonsensical.
The thing is that the Cross Model already proved itself successful for the things Nietzsche claims to love: glory, creativity, greatness, nobility, experimentation, science. The Cross model can produce a JS Bach, who explored the limits of mathematical-music science while keeping beauty in mind, while his culture already moved on to different musical fashions (the fugue was not in vogue). He sired 20 children. He wasn’t afraid of getting into a knife fight or harshly rebuking his students. He synthesized a new style. This is the musical ubermensch! His music expresses glory better than anyone before or after him.
Yet Bach, the ubermensch of note, did this while writing “Jesus, help” at the start of every work, and ending with “To God alone the Glory”. This is because He internalized a better social model. The suffering of Bach’s mind at work was a crown of thorns, not a Zarathustrian self-obsession. His doubts were the leers of the crowd. His obstacles were the heavy beam of the Cross. His work, a taste of the heavenly banquet. It’s all there, Nietzsche missed it and ruined a generation of men. To this day, not a single good thing has ever come from Nietzsche or Nietzscheans. And even the demise and humiliation of Germany in world history was influenced by the social model of Nietzsche! (While, ironically, the “slave morality” Mennonites will continue hymning in Low German until they become half of North America). It is not Zarathustra who successfully “sweetens the dregs and the bitter shame of suffering”.
Part of Nietzsche's critique of Christianity (and Buddhism, and stoicism, and etc) is that a lot of things that appear to be or are alleged to be examples of "self-denial" or "self-overcoming", actually aren't. In the majority of cases on Nietzsche's view, followers of various religious and philosophical traditions are just doing what they were naturally going to do anyway, just with some elaborate post-hoc rationalizations to make it sound more impressive. You need to look at each individual action in each individual case to determine whether it's actually coming from a place of strength or weakness.
For example, a guy who's already having no luck with women, and who then proudly declares himself to be MGTOW because he wants to "focus on himself", inspires no confidence. It's not an accomplishment, he's not "denying" himself anything, because he already had no ability to procure the thing he's allegedly denying himself in the first place. Similarly, showing mercy and love to your enemies is only impressive if you actually had any other options available to you. Refraining from crushing your enemies is only a display of strength if it's actually difficult for you; that is, if it's more difficult for you than simply crushing your enemies would be.
He never said that it was impossible for Christian civilization to produce great individuals, or that there were no great individuals who were Christian. Otherwise, he would have had to fully discount ~2,000 years of European history, which he plainly didn't. He did think though that by the time he arrived on the scene, Christianity had already completed its own self-overcoming, and it was time for it to be transcended (at least as far as higher individuals were concerned).
Nietzsche produced the most beautiful prose writing in history (and it's barely even a contest). That's already a pretty staggering accomplishment, even before you get to the actual content of his thought.
But Nietzsche is the one who provides the subjectively-created value schema here. His advice is to create your own values and be autonomously self-governed, and to feel the most “power” which he defines circularly as successfully overcoming a subjectively-defined “resistance”. At no point does one actually have to measure against some objective standard. If someone is simply placing an arbitrary resistance in their week, so that they can feel the pleasure of dominance or “power” over their own devised lifestyle, then there is no self-overcoming. At least in Christianity, there are objective standards to measure against, and actual fears and fixations which require a man overcome himself, plus the external role model to enable this activity.
If Christianity were already the most adaptive system for a man to overcome himself, then why would we depart from the system that works and trust Frederich Nietzsche to guide us on our journey? Where is the proof in the form of successful Nietzschean households and organizations? I can at least drive to a monastery and witness a boomer living in a cell owning nothing, and without complaint (a miracle unto itself).
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Ironically, you've done what the critic from Scott's article has done, only in the opposite direction. From your commentary, I expected something monumentally blasphemous, a new Piss Christ. Instead, what I saw was some unremarkable picassoesque scribble.
I can immediately see how this picture could benefit a group of random teenage students. First, you tell them they're about to see an example of evil, horrible anti-human degeneracy. Then, you show them this. They'll be walking out of the gallery with a much better calibrated sense of what evil is, as opposed to what people say it is. And also that if that is what degeneracy is, it is in the end unremarkable and boring, not worth engaging in even for rebellion.
The most dangerous evil is the one that can successfully trick you! In real life it looks like someone politely asking you to construct value and goodness with yourself as sole authority, gently nudging your intuitions in the wrong direction and coaxing you with enticing status gains.
In real life, you say, as you quote fiction.
If it is fiction, fiction can still make true statements about the nature of reality:
"Professor Zalzabraz the Neptunian said: 'water is made of one hydrogen and two oxygen atoms.'"
"Then, professor Qartherage the Uranusian responded, 'You fool. You absolute buffoon. You got that backwards. Water is two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.'"
in case you're wondering, this is what it looks like to roll a nat-1 on your knowledge check.
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I find myself in two minds about this. I'm somebody who likes a lot of weird aleatoric experimental electronic music, enjoys foreign arthouse and slow cinema from Russia and China (Tarkovsky's Stalker and Hu Bo's An Elephant Sitting Still were two that recently really caught my eye, the latter being almost four hours long), and has a particular affinity towards extremely weird and sometimes punishing aesthetic experiences. I also, however, detest Angelus Novus, think the vast majority of modern architectural "gems" are irredeemably ugly, grew up in Southeast Asia eating the tastiest cheapest food sitting on a plastic chair on the side of the street, think that food critics are absolute wankers, and believe that appealing to context is a terrible retort when people say a piece of art didn't click with them. Art is ultimately an experience, and should be evaluated on the emotional reaction that it provides you, not necessarily the importance level of the art in some abstract sense.
Of course, even if you limit your appreciation only to your instant kneejerk reaction to a piece of art, the Historical and Cultural Context™ people are still very obviously correct. Even when you're trying to go off your first reactions, ultimately no one is capable of appreciating art in a vacuum, everyone approaches it with a set of assumptions and learned cultural background that informs how they interpret the art. The art and entertainment of a certain culture inevitably carries with it cultural baggage that an outsider isn't likely to understand, and trying to understand something like Beijing Opera from a western perspective is basically like trying to decode alien entertainment; it would probably seem deeply unpleasant on a first viewing absent any of the cultural pillars it was built upon. As an example of the very reverse, Giuseppe Castiglione had to adapt his painting style while in the Qing court because the Qianlong Emperor thought the strong shadows of chiaroscuro painting, popular in Europe at the time, looked like dirt. You can see Japanese like Shiba Kokan stating "Western pictures operate on a highly theoretical level, and no-one should view them off-handedly" and penning instructions on how to correctly view and interpret European paintings, which were clearly not intuitive to them. A lot of people here sometimes seem overly convinced of the transcendent nature of Renaissance painting traditions, but these are not universally beautiful or perfectly realistic - they operate on conventions that are indeed culturally learned (though this is not to overstate the argument: there are also many common threads in many artistic traditions that are likely biologically founded).
But even if you grant that art connoisseurs' tastes are not summed up by bullshit political signalling and grant that their evaluations are founded on their contextual interpretation of art, taste-makers still do not sit in an unassailable ivory tower, with their One True interpretation of art backed by their deep understanding of artistic and historical context that everyone else necessarily has to agree with or share. To make it crystal clear what I mean by this, I do not think most professional food critics as they stand today could accurately evaluate what counts as good in, say, the Southeast Asian context; I don't believe they could even correctly pin down what Southeast Asians consider as "good dining atmosphere" when so many people in that culture have very fond memories of street food, and the social spaces they enable within the community. Should "food critics" be provided the cultural clout to grant accolades based on their inappropriate understanding of the local context in which it is enjoyed, steeped as they are in the French haute tradition? There's a reason why no Asian gives a shit about Michelin stars, and I would argue the same tension exists between the public and the critics even within the same culture, who largely exist in different social worlds and have different conceptions of what art should be. And while this is relatively harmless in many cases - they're not forcing the public to engage with their milieu, though their high social standing does influence things a bit - it gets particularly bad when these people are contracted to design public art and public architecture that is ostensibly supposed to serve the people but ends up serving only the specific milieu that the artist runs in. Your average person actually does possess an understanding of context that helps them interpret works, it's just not necessarily the context that art critics use.
Unfortunately many artists and critics are capable of falling into the trap of viewing their ideas and aesthetic preferences as representing some cosmic universal and metaphysical Truth, even when they parrot the canard that Art Is Subjective. Klee himself was extremely guilty of this, with his notebooks including incredible bangers like "The nowhere-existent something or the somewhere-existent nothing is a non-conceptual concept of freedom from opposition. If we express it in terms of the perceptible (as though drawing up a balance sheet of chaos), we arrive at the concept grey, at the fateful point between coming-into-being and passing-away: the grey point. The point is grey because it is neither white nor black or because it is white and black at the same time. It is grey because it is neither up nor down or because it is both up and down. It is grey because it is a non-dimensional point, a point between the dimensions." Much of the Cultural and Social Context people in practice level that assertion to imply that in order to understand art, you need to internalise the correct meta. But the idea that there is some privileged method of interpreting art, some framework through which some "art criticism" can be more valid than others, is ridiculous and antithetical to the way art functions. Invoking cultural context doesn’t make you right about the art. It’s just elevating the shared context and value system of the social circle in which you belong over that of another.
In short, art critics do not represent some class of individuals endowed with superior taste or knowledge who have the ability to determine what is good art for the unwashed masses, they are simply their own idiosyncratic cultural milieu that operates on their own set of values and shared context that in fact differ greatly from what most people consider important, and it skews their aesthetic evaluations away from the evaluations of the majority of people. Their ideas of beauty and artistic profundity are built off previous works and ideas that were lauded and developed primarily within that sphere, and they ignore the artistic context and discursive circles which the majority of people use when they interpret art. You mention art people having a unique openness to being transformed by art, but the ever-popular assertion in these circles that something is "kitsch" is itself a resistance to allowing oneself to be Transformed by a piece of art based on one's own mental conceptions of what art should (not) look like.
It is ultimately the elitism of the whole affair that I think turns people against it, after all they are lauding things that are so alienating to the majority of people that they find it outright ugly, and yet these artists and critics are esteemed to such a degree as if their opinion somehow holds more weight than that of your average person - to the point that they will sometimes be allowed to force their aesthetic preferences through at the expense of everyone else. And if we must evaluate art on some scale, I actually find myself most sympathetic to the idea of pure majoritarianism when it comes to taste; the only meaningful way to measure beauty is to evaluate it through what the eyes of the majority consider beautiful, and that would change the ranking of esteemed art in a way that would very hugely deprioritise the opinions of art critics.
I disagree with that point of view. The issue is the that majority has no deep interest in music, or art, or movies. And in turn the deep interest is what drives the genre and the art medium forward. Nothing about Angelus Novus moves me, but there's so many albums that move me, while I doubt most people would even be willing to stand to listen to it for more than a few moments.
While I don't like art critics, and it can certainly create insular communities where they make art for their own clique and nobody else, it's important for communities to exist where people can push their medium forward in novel ways.
My music taste is strange enough that nobody passes me the aux cord anymore and they haven't for a decade now. And I'm not saying that people shouldn't be able to create their own art free from the preferences of the majority! Far from it. I enjoy a lot of these weird communities where people can innovate.
It's more that if we must evaluate beauty in some way (that doesn't involve appointing one group of elites as the arbiter of taste), I can't think of any other coherent way to do so outside of a simple appeal-to-majority; it at least intuitively makes sense and seems most likely to separate apart the components of aesthetic sentiments that are universally held vs. those that are culturally acquired within a certain context. But nobody ever seems to be happy with that either and every conversation about art eventually devolves into incoherence anyway because majoritarianism is an exceptionally restrictive framework for art, so perhaps discussing the quality of art is ultimately always a fruitless endeavour.
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I don't think the elitism was so different in earlier centuries. It was still elites trying to impress elites. They didn't ask for the opinions of the serfs and peasants whether they like the Baroque style better than the Renaissance style, or whether Gothic is an improvement over Romanesque. It just so happens that the metagame was at a place where making stuff beautiful was the right costly signal to use. But it was still about whatever is hot right now in Italy and other fancy trendsetting places, so commissioning similar stuff in your town meant being worldly and connected and a proper insider. Now, with machines and easy manufacturing, the meta has moved to a sophisticated understanding of nuance and implications and appreciating non-obvious context, which can mark you as being in the conversation.
Regular people did their own folk art in parallel to this, which got brought into the mainstream with Romanticism but the taste of the average nobody was never seen as all that important.
I don't think the elitism was extremely different in earlier centuries either. Elitism is pretty much a constant and the difference is just that status has shifted from "signalling wealth" to "signalling taste" (and the time and wealth necessary to develop said taste). The difference here is, as you mention, that the metagame was at a different place back then which would have brought it more in line with your average person's aesthetic preferences, and it is understandable that the things elites venerate end up being far more controversial when what they do starts significantly diverging from the preferences of the masses.
The more the public disagrees with the elites, the less justifiable the elitism is going to seem. And currently the elites are becoming increasingly incomprehensible to the average member of the public. I don't believe that your average member of the laity would have considered the murals in their local cathedral or temple to be ugly, but I certainly do believe that most people think the mural in Toronto's Union Station is ugly.
Okay, but beauty was never the goal of it, it's not failing at being beautiful, it's just playing a different game entirely. And the posted picture is the most ugly part, the rest are somewhat more colorful. You can read about it here: https://stuartreid.ca/zones-of-immersion
Making a space pretty, like putting up some nice flowers, is kind of pedestrian and kitschy for the in-crowd. They want to make a statement about the grim reality of having to take the subway day after day in this daily grind. A social statement, a critique of society. The purpose was never to brighten people's day. It's to draw their attention to the grim reality and I guess to spark the activist fire in their hearts or something?
I was in Toronto two years ago and actually gazed upon at the whole mural in person, it covers the length of the visible tube and I thought it was all terrible (the posted picture actually isn't the most ugly part in my opinion); in addition I also had a look at the artist's page right after since I wanted to see what was up with the mural after being confronted with it on the subway.
And yes, I agree it's playing a different game entirely. A non-trivial amount of contemporary art isn't playing at being beautiful and this one certainly isn't; it is indeed very successful at inducing misery and in that sense the goal was achieved. But as evidenced by the comments, it completely conflicts with what the public wants for themselves on their morning commute, thus the radical feeling of disconnection from the public I mentioned in my prior post.
Right, the question is, what's the role of the elite towards the masses? Should they simply satisfy all their desires, or should they try to shape them and educate them and "raise them" like a parent raises a child? The classic liberal/libertarian democratic view would be that the "masses" consist of knowledgeable units of citizens who have well-thought out positions and beliefs and attitudes and they should be able to exert this authentic will and the "elites" should just be administrative managers who make this will manifest. The more classical, traditional way is that the elite should help civilize the masses, moderate their excesses, keep them in check, set them good examples and bring out the better side of them. Even if your kid just wants to eat candy and not go to bed, you know better and don't entertain all their wishes.
Of course they don't want to express it this way, but performatively it's the best explanation.
The idea that the elites need to make the masses miserable "to spark the activist fire in their hearts" (presumably against the elites) borders on parody.
I'm not in favor of this and it's my outsider perspective trying to make sense of what their honest self-conception may be. As I understand, a lot of postmodern public-space art and architecture was designed to be ugly for this purpose. To deny normalness, to make people face the very non-normal guilty nature of western civilization. To awaken them to the crimes of the previous way of things, and to signify a discontinuity etc. And I'm likening this to a more general pattern where the elite tries to guide and educate the people.
It's one type of elite against another. The revolutionary leftist elite who have risen to the top of the prestige in academia and art and institutions etc. against the elite that embodies the patriarchy, oppression of minorities and capitalist exploitation.
My point was that what the revolutionary elite is doing is not all that different from classical elites at least in this high level analysis. Neither is about some kind of authentic majoritarian voice of the average people (they call catering to the base nature of the masses populism). Critical theorists have the concept of "false consciousness" that is a jolly joker to explain away any "wrong" opinion of the masses. "If only they were more educated, they would not wish it."
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The authoritarian/libertarian debate is one that has raged on forever and seems unlikely to be resolved soon, and note I'm actually not fully unconvinced of the more classical auth position as a general rule of governance. But an argument for denying the public their preferences with regards to art would actually need to include some convincing case that something like Zones of Immersion carries overall positive utility (I suppose Stuart Reid would say it raises awareness of the current social state of atomisation and isolation), whereas I would say that message is not being picked up by the public, or if it is, it's being received with annoyance and dismissal, and as such its existence is mildly negative utility-wise. I'd say many modern art installations are similarly net negative utility.
In order to "benefit the public through art" and "civilise the masses", you don't need to always fully cater to the public, but you need it to connect with them in a somewhat productive manner or the message will be lost. For a far more successful example of this, Mexican muralism is right there; these pieces of public art were meant to promote national identity and revolutionary ideals. Whether I agree with all of those ideals is another matter, I would say they largely succeeded at getting the message through to a receptive public, and there is a certain populist quality to that entire movement that makes it easy to engage with on the intended level. The aspects of modern art that allow it to be a vehicle for signalling taste is the very thing that disqualifies it as being an effective tool for social improvement. It just has too many hoe scaring qualities.
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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.
Eh. The fear of nuclear annihilation during cold war was by any sane definition about things not being on a good track but it resulted in a whole bunch of beautiful art (ie. music). See exhibits 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and so on.
Art can be intentionally made to wake up people while being both beautiful and popular.
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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?
It's just about all I care about, assuming the low bars of "won't get food poisoning" and "don't have to wait 2 hours for a meal" are cleared. When reading Yelp or Google reviews for restaurants I find it incredibly frustrating to wade through paragraphs of descriptions of the service, atmosphere, or other things I couldn't give less of a shit about, and prefer those written by Asian immigrants, who typically get right to the point and focus exclusively on the quality of the food. Of course, I'm far from normal, and the fact that I have this problem is evidence that your typical restaurant-goer does in fact care more about ambiance than me.
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Thing is, the pleasure someone gets from a dining experience is also a functional reason, one that could theoretically be isolated and measured, like the effectiveness of medicine. The problem with something like the atmosphere or vibe of a restaurant is that you really can't double or even single blind yourself against that, much like how a movie critic can't watch a film without knowing what it is. So, like film reviews, we'd have to just kinda accept the critic's word for the quality of the atmosphere of the restaurant being reflective of the actual quality, rather than the biases of the critic that could have been shaped by the restaurant bootstrapping its reputation via good marketing or whatnot.
But a restaurant critic certainly could do a double blinded taste test to judge how good the food is, and include it as a component of his review. Which would actually provide meaningful information to a reader who might not share that critic's biases than the critic's report about the taste based on his experience of eating at the restaurant.
Could they though? I am imagining a blindfolded critic being spooned with two mouthfuls, not knowing what they are going to be. With classic dishes I suppose it might work. They could say 'This tastes like lasagna. I preferred forkful A over forkful B as it tasted cheesier'. With unique dishes I don't even know what the test is supposed to look like as there will not be an obvious control dish to serve alongside it.
It certainly would be a fun scientific project to come up with ways to do this in a way that allows us to draw actually meaningful conclusions! With unique dishes, the control could just be some dish put together by an amateur based on the same ingredients (or at least the inferred ingredients). Or perhaps an amateur putting together a dish with the goal of making it taste and feel similarly to the actual dish. We'd have to actually run a study on the studies, running these studies multiple times in multiple ways, to determine which control is actually more effective as a control for the purposes of judging the unique dish.
I would consider watching an episode or two of a Youtube of this, or Hell's Kitchen tier reality show. But ultimately it would come across as trashy, and get stale fast. I would never use it to actually choose a restaurant to eat at.
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That part is describing his young self's thoughts and a naive somewhat autistic nerd would indeed find that a much more understandable and good world, where things worked that way. A human has certain sense inputs, like vision, which is like pixels in some arrangement, and hearing, and taste, and these combine in the brain and they give pleasure or sometimes pain if it's like a sharp object poking at your skin. You want the inputs that create the pleasure type of sensation, and the goal of humanity is to bring about such sensations. So we have to experimentally ascertain which kinds of inputs give which kinds of sensations and then do more of the good type. For this, we have to isolate the effect of the thing itself, so we don't have noise from other aspects, so we can purely classify and score each individual type of input and then we know what is good and what is bad. It's an impulse to catalog things, like understanding all the herbs and mushrooms and fruits of the forest to know which one is good and which ones is bad. Experiences and tastes and visual qualities are similarly somehow out there, for us to pluck and test, and to use to bring about more pleasure.
If your brain doesn't tick this way, this may sound totally alien, but the more extreme thing-oriented engineer type nerd would find this more comfortable and clean for answering the question "what do people want? what makes them tick?", than the mess that humanity actually works like, the mess and mystery and contradictions that are appreciated and enjoyed by people-oriented people. But obviously the above is exaggerated for effect, I'm not saying that such people are incapable of understanding social realities, and indeed Scott also has grown out that view. Grappling with these things has brought about the concept of "type 2 fun" in this community, but it's still grappling with these ideas of "do you truly like X, or do you just pretend for status reasons", when these are much more inseparably blended in the socially attuned, normal person's mind. Because the type of "input" that humans really crave is the one that validates their status/identity/value within the community/society, a combination of being liked/loved/respected/feared or even just stably attached to such people.
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Not the only thing. But it is 90% of what people care about.
People are willing (though less willing than they used to be) to pay a premium for mediocre chain-restaurant food served in a full-service setting compared to mediocre chain-restaurant food served in a fast-casual setting. At the high end there are a number of elite power-dining restaurants where the food, while good, is not worth the money and the name on the door is a status symbol. I think this is inconsistent with taste being as much as 90% of what normal people care about.
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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.
If I were a prisoner in solitary confinement and you served me a Michelin star meal, I think I'd disagree.
This is true and probably could make a successful novelty restaurant concept as well. Context really is all.
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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.
Outside traumatic self-shattering experiences, why should there be (much) change other than accumulation? Typical mind fallacy, I suppose, but of course I'm roughly the same person over time - how could I not be? I wouldn't be me if I was someone else! Some people undergo harrowing Big Deal Events and come out the other side changed, but without such a forcing function shouldn't people stay roughly stable? If you change dramatically all the time, then you don't have a stable stream of experiences and should have trouble thinking of yourself as a single conscious being - you should have trouble planning for the future since past you was so different and future you will be yet more different.
The child is obviously still there, and ~all his base-level tastes remain intact. Some of them are moderated by knowledge (this has a side effect I don't like) and there are plenty of new enjoyments I've found, but for the most part anything that was good then is good now. Is this like that thing where adolescents throw out their old 'taste' because it doesn't fit socially, like my younger sister completely 180'ing on music several times in several years? I never did that. Some of it I like a bit less, there are new things I like much more, and there are a handful of things that might still drive sensory pleasure but I no longer engage with for other reasons, but my younger self wasn't wrong - thing X produces positive sensation Y.
I think the traits that are stable throughout life are often at a higher level than what we think of as taste. You discover when young that you like it when a movie surprises you, and you like the twist in movie x. A year later you've seen a lot of movies, and movies like x no longer surprise you at all. You've learned the structures and tropes. You're still you. You like being surprised. But your knowledge of film and your expectations have grown and your responses are different. It takes more subversion to surprise you. Your taste has changed.
Now if you have no taste for novelty, learning new perspectives or gaining new insights from the art you consume, then you may go ahead and like the same thing throughout your life. That's not wrong, you can like what you like. But I think most people do change their tastes as a result of their understanding and expectations changing. And even if they have very fixed tastes, on some level they do require novelty. They need more slightly different romance novels for example. Why would they crave that, if their response to the stimuli of the story is unchanged each time they read it?
You can like surprise and novelty, and you can at one point enjoy a movie that surprises you and later lose that enjoyment when it stops surprising you (because it can't, since you already know it so well or whatever), but those are definitely way above the level of basic sensory pleasure - are they the only things you enjoyed about the movie? The movie can still look good. The movie can still sound good. You could move very slightly up the ladder and enjoy something like wordplay (needs a little context). If a person can only appreciate things at the highest level, they've genuinely lost something - quite a lot of somethings.
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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.
Objection! Bauhaus influencing goth music was by no means a bad thing.
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I’m not particularly into fine art but I love Bauhaus architecture and industrial design, especially when you consider how different it was to everything else at the time. It only looks plain because everyone else copied it.
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