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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.
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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