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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'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.
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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