Tag: art

A Defence of Difficult Art

Introduction

Wow! To address the elephant in the room, it’s been over half a year since my last post. Calling this slacking off is the understatement of the century!

It’s been a particularly busy half a year; I’ve recently moved and I was suffering from a severe back pain which was preventing me from spending too much additional time in front of the computer (aside from regular work).

And Christ, how the times have changed! We find ourselves in the midst of a pandemic. A recession is looming on the horizon. But I’m generally lucky and have had ample opportunity to keep myself busy, despite everything.

But let’s start with today’s topic – a defence of difficult art!

Why this topic?

This post is a take on an issue which seems to be fairly present in today’s society – a general dislike of all things considered difficult art. That’s not to say that ‘difficult’ art doesn’t have its followers. It certainly does. Nevertheless, there’s a growing number of people who dismiss it out of hand without giving it a chance at all.

Why might that be?

A big portion of it has to do with the general perception that difficult art is elitist. That it is only meant to be for a particular group of people, and that it, as such, goes out of its way to be exclusive, rather than inclusive. Whether or not this adheres to reality doesn’t matter – they dismiss the art.

Consequently, many consider by default those people who enjoy ‘difficult’ art (or even old art, which many consider difficult just by merit of their age, and thus strangeness to a contemporary audience) are pompous or elitist as well (i.e. – ‘you only enjoy it because you feel like you should’).

Furthermore, some artists who create difficult works are often considered elitist as well – as though the difficulty were an inserted aspect with the intention of frightening off a wider, popular audience and hoping for an ‘elite’ audience.

The problems with this perception of difficult art

The issues with this way of thinking are many. First, it obviously bars the individual who is drilled into thinking this way from actually attempting to enjoy such art – it is a great pity since a lot of great art can be difficult when approached the wrong way, but some of these artworks have survived the centuries based on their merits – so dismissing them out of hand is close-minded at best, and arrogant at its worst – if considered under the pretence that it’s not worth engaging with it because it just reinforces a social elite. Difficult contemporary artworks may be lost to the centuries because they are being dismissed without being given a chance.

Worse still, if the insistence on art being easy spreads, then it will necessarily dumb the world of arts down. That’s not to say that only difficult art is great, but that deliberately making it easier will of course strip an artwork of some of its merits since its inherent difficulty is often a by-product of a composition which is dealing with a lot of complex matters at once – dumbing it down will soften the effect and create a worse work of art.

Third, forcefully insisting on easy artworks is extremely condescending to everyone – it creates the claim that the masses aren’t capable of understanding difficult art and that, therefore, they should only be confronted with works which they can comprehend and enjoy in a heartbeat. It’s purely undemocratic and in itself comes from a genuinely elitist position.

The solution to the perception of difficult art?

Discussing an issue in wider society won’t be fixed by merit of a single blog post. However, perhaps reading this will lead to some self-reflection, or if you find yourself engaging with difficult art yourself on a regular basis you may take your time to nudge friends and family gently into the direction of approaching some themselves – some of them may genuinely become interested.

I believe it’s important to acknowledge that in many cases an artwork’s difficulty is merely a result of whatever the artwork requires by its very nature. As such, it should be accepted for what it is – there are countless examples of great artwork which are easy and countless examples of those which are difficult.

In other words, an artwork should be as difficult as it needs to be. The reader/viewer/listener needn’t engage with it (lack of time or interest in the subject matter etc.). However, they should not dismiss it because they seem to be capable of reading the artist’s intentions and judging them to be elitist prats.

Trusting the general readership to be capable of understanding the artwork, and trusting the artist to create something which is as difficult or easy as it needs to be, is democratic. It can be rewarding to the participant who engages in the art. Indeed, with the right approach, I believe anyone can understand any work of art, even if some may take more time.

Closing thoughts

The one thing I didn’t include is examples of artists many people consider elitist. There are quite a few.

In poetry, T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound spring to mind (although many dismiss the latter due to his politics, which I find more justifiable). Closer to contemporary times is Geoffrey Hill, who also made a statement about the democratic nature of difficult poetry. In art, many consider anything born in the wake of modernism difficult. In music, people again see the modernists, or even Wagner before them as difficult. A writer-friend of mine rolled his eyes when someone mentioned Kafka recently!

No, examples abound, and it would be a great pity if their art were lost to the world in a dystopian future in which everyone thinks that difficult works of art – both new and old – hold no value whatsoever and that they think they can dismiss them as elitist nonsense which the world no longer needs.

Do you disagree? Anything interesting to add which I hadn’t thought about? Then why not leave a comment in the comment section below? If you enjoyed this post, why not share it on the social media of your choice? Then click on one of the tender buttons below.

The Artist and the Importance of Tradition

With the still strong notion of being new and surprising at all costs, many a contemporary artist may find it uncomfortable tackling the problem of how to handle tradition. Throw it out of the window? Embrace it? In this post we’ll consider several aspects.

Turner Prize 2018

In 2018, I had the pleasure of being asked to visit the Tate Britain on the opening day for that year’s Turner Prize to write a review. While not new to thinking and writing about art at that point, I was still in my early days as a critic, and thereby unsure what sort of approach I should take. Should I be generous because the contestants were young artists? Be brutally honest? Evaluate their applicability to current events?

What I ended up doing didn’t really matter in the long run, for what I got to see there wasn’t art in the traditional sense. Of course, you may wonder what art in the traditional sense means, but in this case it refers simply to the fact that there wasn’t a single sculpture, painting, not even some form of craft. Instead, all four entries were films. Long, slow, drawn-out films, essentially in the same style, just reflecting on different events.

Aside from the fact that this style of film is so old that it was parodied by Monty Python many years ago, it clearly shows that there is a strong disregard for tradition in contemporary art. That’s not to say that people don’t read old novels, read old poetry and enjoy old art. But it does mean that there are many artists who simply don’t seem to use the knowledge of tradition to improve their own artwork.

The World of Poetry

The problem is especially apparent in contemporary poetry. It’s not so much that good modern poets aren’t inspired by poets of the older generations – some of them certainly are – but rather that a culture is festered which encourages potentially great poets who have high ambitions to take an anything-goes approach (provided it speaks about the correct subject matter).

The result of this is the type of ‘raw and honest poetry’ which sounds like the sort of thing you might read on the back of a napkin in a dark corner of your local Wetherspoons, or else on Tinder or Instagram posts; little more than inspirational quotes which all sound the same and make you feel warm and fuzzy inside because they pose as having a deeper meaning or feeling to them than they genuinely do.

It makes it practically impossible for young poets to get decent feedback. In any given writer’s group or online forum, poets presenting their work for critique will be confronted with hoards of people offering one-line responses saying something along the lines of poetry being too sacred to touch; being afraid of offending the poet because poetry is apparently autobiographical, or because apparently a poem is only good when it comes out as a finished product in a 5-minute sitting.

Juvenile artists and the lack of technique

It all goes back to the lack of knowledge of traditional art. Nobody expects everyone to have extensive knowledge of poetry, but spending just an hour or two looking at various poems throughout history should be eye-opening and do a good job of at least improving criticism (and thus starting an upward spiral).

If the current attitude towards tradition doesn’t change it will result in more of the same. Inspirational quotes, not poetry. A complete disregard of any poetic techniques. ‘So what?’, one may ask? Well, it will result in things being passed off as poetry which don’t provide joy through sound (resemblances of vocals, and consonants, a good use of rhythm, alliterations…), any joy through meaning (because thoughts aren’t developed skilfully), any joy through anything which is the realm of technique, in short. Instead, all evaluation of poetry will be based on feeling ‘inspired’ or through pop-cultural references. Both of which are types of joy which one should let go of if one seeks genuine sentiments.

The good news is, of course, that there are still a lot of poets around who do pay attention to technique, and who don’t promote this toxic culture. But, alas, it is very prevalent in non-professional circles, and it will be a danger to the world of arts in the long run…

Tradition and the Individual Talent 1919

In 1919, TS Eliot wrote a beautiful little essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. Here, Eliot proposes more or less the opposite idea to the ‘anything goes’ approach. He advocates for the artist to know absolutely everything about literary history and using that knowledge plus the poet’s understanding of current society to formulate new poetry. Needless to say, this may be too extreme; his approach towards removing the individual entirely from poetry would turn the poet into something inhuman.

Nevertheless, the one thing to be learnt from the essay is that tradition is indeed important. Perhaps not to the extant that Eliot demands, but certainly along the lines of Ezra Pound (who in ABC of Reading actually provides a concise list of writers to be inspired by), in that one can be selective and seek out particular artists to learn particular aspects of technique, conceit or emotion from.

With tradition, you have the entire history and development of art at your fingertips. Why re-invent the wheel? If something worked in the past, why not use it and develop it to create something which you know will work, rather than do something seemingly random which doesn’t work and call it ‘experimental art’?

Without tradition, you are isolated in your own little world. The only input you have is from the people surrounding you, current events and personal feelings. An artist without some understanding of tradition is essentially stumbling in the dark and may or may not occasionally find a rose petal lying around.

Political problems with tradition: hiding the past, shunning the past

Part of the reason for shunning the history of art may be that the morals of the past are equally shunned. Back then everyone was racist, sexist, xenophobic, you name it – therefore using anything from back in the day would be to embrace part of a toxic culture.

Aside from the fact that this is an arrogant approach, assuming that we are in all ways better than our ancestors, it is also extremely narrow-minded. The reason we are supposedly morally better and more enlightened than the people of the past is precisely because our ancestors came up with these ideas in the first place.

Moreover, closing one’s eyes to the past doesn’t bar one from making the same mistakes our ancestors did. Stupid ideas can crop up anywhere but knowing how it played out in history – and that in detail – means one can prepare for the worst. And it also means that we can filter and use the good ideas from the past for our own benefit in our daily lives.

Missing merits of the past and accomplishments of the ancestors

But back to the arts. It is a common misconception nowadays that art was developed through a series of revolutionary breakthroughs. In reality, many revolutionary movements in Art can be considered as developments of what came before – responses, rejections, extensions. Woolf, for instance, was heavily inspired by Walter Pater and the Aestheticists, while Emily Dickinson was a great admirer of the metaphysical poets.

It’s just a grave error to do away with everything and to assume that self-expression is all you need. Art may stem from the individual sensibility, but not using craft and knowledge to improve it in a way so that it works as art (and not as the diary of a teenager) will mean that it is and will remain a piece of juvenile art, and not an accomplished work.

Where would we be had the Elizabethans not introduced the individual to art? What would we be like had the Enlightenment not deified reason? Would we be anything like we are had the Romantics not emphasised emotion above all? All these things shaped our lives; learning about them and understanding what made their art so beautiful will always be of benefit to any aspiring artist today.

But how to use it

This is not an invitation to paint, compose or write in an archaic form, of course. One could, but it would be laughable and certainly not well received by anyone. It’s basically a system of looking at traditional material, studying it, understanding it, disregarding what doesn’t work, ignoring what is just a thing of the past (e.g. archaic language), and using what does work.

To bring one crude example: Paradise Lost is brilliant for its use of metre and narrative flow. But the sentences are full of inversions (Milton was often criticised for essentially using Latin syntax in an English poem) and archaisms – so it goes without saying what one would learn from him.

In short, it’s about using tradition to further one’s own art, not about creating art in the style of another artist. This involves studying many artists, rather than one – otherwise one runs risk of just becoming a carbon copy. It is a way of embracing the past to look forward to another summer.

Closing thoughts

Creating art without tradition is driving in a car at night without the headlights on. It’s wilfully ignorant and won’t lead to any good results. Depending on the amount of tradition one uses, creating art with it can be like driving a car with a variety of gadgets, not just the headlights.

But what do you think – do you agree? Any points I hadn’t considered? Is this all a lot of nonsense? Then correct my post by posting in the comment section below. Otherwise, why not share it on social media? Then please click on one of the tender buttons below.

How Useful Are Classifications?

Renaissance, Romanticism, Modernism: we often label any given movement, artist or work according to an overreaching label for the sake of classification. But how useful are these terms, if at all? How much authority should be given to them?

It’s 2nd August 1492. Two farmers meet, somewhere in Spain, after a hard day’s labour. The crops don’t look promising; a famine is threatening their lives. Everything looks dark and gloomy. Together they pray for the love of God to give them some form of consolation.

The following day, Columbus discovers America. The farmers, as usual, go about their daily lives, but things are changing. They feel a bit wiser than the previous day, and more awake to novelties. When they meet in the evening, one of them says to the other, ‘Thank heavens we live in the Renaissance! Wasn’t it dreadful in the Medieval period?’

Needless to say, the farmers from our little story never existed, but it demonstrates that using common classifications for a work of art, artist, or Zeitgeist, are not always particularly useful. It’s not as though the rise of a new philosophical or artistic movement made any immediate difference to the way people felt. No – to them, things would probably feel much the same.

This problem isn’t even limited to ‘ideological’ awakenings, but stark historical changes as well. What difference would the fall of the Western Roman Empire have made to a Roman peasant living in the southern tip of the Italian peninsula? Probably not much.

However, while using such classifications doesn’t come without its severe issues, they still have remarkable benefits. So, to help you make up your own mind about whether you think they make any sense, here are a few ideas for and against using classifications.

Lack of historical consensus

Most historians place the beginning of the Renaissance at the beginning of the 14th century. Others name the discovery of America. Others, again, place it at the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453. The problem, obviously, is that experts never seem to reach a consensus.

But they also disagree about ‘sub-periods’ included in a particular period. When was the Medieval period? Do we include the Anglo-Saxons in it? How far into the Renaissance do we extend it? If a poet like Yeats uses tropes from the Romantics, does that mean the Romantic period can last until the early-mid 20th century?

Also, how do we treat artists, philosophers and such who don’t adhere to the general tropes of a classified movement although they fit into the correct time period? Do they belong to another? Doesn’t that mean that the definition of the classification should change, since it obviously also includes others?

The problem lies in the fact that in any given time period or movement, there are too many individuals, many of whom have their own idiosyncratic ideals and ideas as to what their movement should include. Therefore, theorists can take their arguments in any number of directions in order to make a case for their own personal interpretation of how we should classify X and Y. There is no true or false answer; just perspectives from extremely different backgrounds.

Lack of fundamental impact on lived experiences

For the most part, the overarching labels for certain philosophical or artistic movements wouldn’t affect the general population. Michaelangelo wouldn’t have thought of himself as a Renaissance man as much as an Italian living in the late 15th / early 16th century; Dickens wouldn’t have considered himself as a Victorian, but as a Brit living in the 19th century.

That’s not to say that these movements had no impact whatsoever on the general population, but that they didn’t to the extent that one might think. For most people the transition to a new period would have seemed seamless – with the exception being large-scale events, of course, such as the French revolution.

As such, we need to acknowledge that classifying certain people as members of a certain group isn’t particularly useful, since to them the transition wouldn’t have been of immediate consequence. Yes, they would feel progress and change, but not from one day to another, and not in the sense that they’d see it as the result of a particular philosophical or artistic movement.

Lack of philosophical consensus

This goes back to my first point. There are probably no two philosophers or artists who shared the same ideas within the same movement. This is even more evident in rather broad labels, such as the ‘Modernists’. What would the Harlem Renaissance have in common with Dada or the Surrealists? Probably not much.

Finding common ground, therefore, can prove to be neigh impossible. With a movement as large as Modernism, we soon reach a point where we can locate different schools, all Modernist, which have virtually nothing in common. In other cases, some movements were even created as a rejection of a former school with the same overall label (such as Vorticism versus Futurism).

And yes, the differences among smaller movements also make classifications difficult. Whistler was only a part-time Impressionist; Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s later Pre-Raphaelite paintings were much more idealistic than the movement’s earlier focus on hyper-realism would demand.

Need for taxonomy

One strong reason for using such classifications is our innate need for taxonomy. This is certainly the case with the Sciences, where we need to define certain objects as precisely as possible in order to understand and contextualise them. While artistic and philosophical movements are highly complex – as we have seen – it’s not entirely impossible.

The ideal thing to do would be just to identify the period and the name, e.g. T.S. Eliot – American-born poet in the first half of the twentieth century. But that’s quite a mouthful – so we can say he was a Modernist poet, although we haven’t defined Modernism yet (and good luck with that!).

On the other hand, it would probably be possible to cite overarching labels, subcategories etc. – e.g. Modernity (the modernisation of the Western World) – Modernism (all philosophical movements stemming from Modernity) – Vorticism (a particular movement within Modernism) – Wyndham Lewis (an artist who was part of the Vorticists). Setting this up for each artist and philosopher would, of course, take a long time to do and be of questionable use, but for people obsessed with taxonomy – why not? But yes, it still doesn’t solve the problem of artists changing throughout their lives and occasionally switching movements (if they even see themselves as part of a school).

Need for simplification

Related to the above point, having categories, classifications or labels makes it easier to understand what any given person is talking about. If I declare that Langston Hughes was a Modernist, others probably know that I’m talking about the time period and very rough classification, not that I am saying he has a lot in common with Pound or Williams.

In that sense, it saves time. When talking to people casually about art you’re (usually) not approximating a precise definition for everything, so using simple and wide-reaching labels for things serves one simple purpose – simplification. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this. Although it’s not ideal using classifications, it makes our lives easier, enables quicker and simpler communication, and therefore does very well serve a decent purpose.

Closing thoughts

As we have seen, classifications are of limited use, but not completely useless. It’s always important to remember that they serve the purpose of assisting you in identifying ‘things’, not shoehorning those ‘things’ into a box. As such, all these movements and periods are in a state of flow, not blocks which follow each other directly.

Do you agree or disagree? Can you think of other arguments for or against using classifications? Then why not leave a comment? Otherwise, if you liked this post, why not share it on social media? Then please click on one of the tender buttons below.