A Child's Garden of Cons

One of my grad-school classmates sat on a hiring committee and noted that the faculty members seemed particularly impressed when an applicant had received an academic award. Most of them were unfamiliar to the committee members; some were only departmental awards. But still, they were awards! When we heard about it, we were astonished by the seemingly disproportionate value accorded them by the committee. Now, we didn't have any awards in our department. So we established one to bestow upon our fellow grad students, mainly for c.v.-padding. We made it up in a bar one evening, and named it after our department's most prominent faculty member (whom we actually respected). It's been awarded annually for the past seven or eight years, I think. While there are (or were) actual eligibility criteria, the awardees really seemed to be elected by popularity, which seems perfectly appropriate, as it was created to take cynical advantage of a fatuous hiring consideration in the first place.

I was reminded of that affair because of this article in the last New Yorker of 2005, entitled "All That Glitters: Literature's Global Economy." But that article also bears on my own fine/visual/graphic arts bugaboo, namely: what makes some objets d'art important (operationally defined as 'showing up in musea, books, and Art History 101') but not others?

The question doesn't sit so near the top of my consciousness in regard to pre-Modern art as it does for Modern and subsequent art. (This is not to say that I don't wonder about any pre-Modern art. There's a Giotto at the National Gallery of Art in D.C. whose gallery notes hail it as an example of Giotto's ability to make painted figures look natural, or suggest mass, or something like that. In that particular Giotto, I don't see it. In fact, I see it better in a Byzantine [I think] work across the room, whose notes emphasize the conventionality of Byzantine [or whatever it is] religious art. Just sayin'.) But with post–pre-Modern art, the question is often at the forefront of my mind, particularly with such folks as Jackson Pollock.

One of my suspicions, which has been partly justified by things said or written (e.g., this) by various artistas, is that novelty is a critical element to current critical appreciation. This bothers me because novelty is not a quality, it's a condition, and thus transient; but if novelty is sought for its own sake, then there are two unfortunate (to my mind) consequences:

• new ideas are not explored very extensively, and
  
• the first artist to do something has a better chance of being judged the "best" simply because they were first and, therefore, received the most attention.
  

To me, this implies that, in the symbolic economy of art, creativity is defined at least in part as novelty, at the potential expense of artists' best potential work. This suggests some empirical questions that I'm not competent to address, so I won't say more. But the point is that pure creativity may be rewarded only insofar as it conforms to art-world trends. This is probably not all that radical a notion, but it certainly does not conform to the vernacular notion of how art should be appreciated.

(And, yes, I am aware of the ironies and contradictions in what I'm saying.)

Here's the salient quotation:

...when people make these objections to the nature of prizes they are helping to sustain a collective belief that true art has nothing to do with things like politics, money, in-group tastes, and beating out the other guy. As long as we want to believe that creative achievement is special, that a work of art is not just one more commodity seeking to aggrandize itself in the marketplace at the expense of other works of art, we need prizes so that we can complain about how stupid they are. [¶ 2]

In a sense, the prizes are there to skim from the products and gather to themselves the crassness of the symbolic economy, thereby helping to preserve the imagined purity of the product. They are 'sin-eaters'. But their very existence is testimony to the presence of the sin, the crassness, the commodification.

In the artistic symbolic economy of today, the trade in works of art is thus a proxy for trade in the creative process, which cannot itself be commodified; so its products, the works, are viewed as instantiations of the aggregated process. Sacredness and profanity have been inverted; the act is worshipped and the product tolerated because how else could the act be validated? The end is no longer the end, the means are; the end is merely a byproduct of the exercise of those means. Artistic rhetoric has usurped artistic argument.

For much post–pre-modern art, then, it seems that the presence in galleries and musea and histories is more a recognition of distinctive creativity than of æsthetic accomplishment. In this connexion it seems that context has a great deal to contribute to the appreciation of a work; and yet, minimalist labels are defended as themselves defences of the purity of the work's appreciation. But I ask you: for which work would you find a minimalist label most intrusive (in the sense of a deafening silence): a work by a Great Master, or one by Pollock? The appeal to decontextualized appreciation is an appeal to the formal value of the work, which is inappropriate for those primarily deemed worthwhile for their stylistic value.

But there is a difference between art and artistry, between the product and its creation. Their appeal is not the same. I wonder whether the shift to style as the principal æsthetic concern was coincidental with the rise of an æsthetical punditry. It strikes me that there are parallels between the spread of post—pre-modern styles and the professionalization of the sciences. In science, though, one is faced with largely substitutional choices (somewhat like opportunity costs), whereas in art, the various options are complementary. Substantial training is necessary to comprehend many scientific achievements, while in art the primacy of taste means that education merely effects refinement. Professionalization is necessary to the furtherance of scientific research, but not to the furtherance of formal appreciation. There is, in fact, an element of the plebeian to the formal appreciation of art, in that all who have access to artworks may form legitimate opinions about their æsthetic merit in terms of their formal appeal. How, then, to maintain the élitism driving the symbolic economy of art? By replacing form with style as the proper viewpoint from which to evaluate æsthetic merit. Stylistic appreciation requires more than admiration; it requires critical thought and a significant committment (at least) to become conversant with the contexts of the various styles; it requires, in short, greater effort. Appreciation of a work only for its visual appeal becomes a mark of the philistine.

It happens that that same number of The New Yorker had an article about the author Philip Pullman, in which he is quoted as saying,

"In adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness... . The present-day would-be George Eliots take up their stories as if with a pair of tongs. They're embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would. Sometimes they do."

With style rather than form as the principal expressive element in visual art, with form existing only to document the stylistic performance, the form need not be intelligible in its own right. In fact, to be so restricts the stylistic freedom of the artist.

I have no general problem with artists doing whatever they want. Although the arrogance of the artistic élite raises my emotional ire, I find it intellectually ridiculous. My principal source of justifiable annoyance is the institutionalization of these attitudes in publicly-funded venues. If the artistic avant-garde wish to require the masses to come to the art, so be it. But the point of publicly-funded institutions is to reveal the art to the masses. Instead, they are operated as part of the symbolic economies not just of the art world, but of the academic one.