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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 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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