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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.
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 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. And I'm certain they view themselves as educating the public. But an argument for denying the public their preferences with regards to art would actually need to include some convincing case that what is currently being provided 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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