On 60 minutes, Andy Rooney weighed in on the subject of “public art,” specifically, modern/abstract sculptures that populate so many public places these days:
If you don’t want to watch it, he basically says that an awful lot of this abstract sculpture is junk.
I take my hat off to him for having the guts to stand up and admit that he is one of those “buffoons” who don’t understand it.
I agree with everything he says, but, having been a professional artist my whole life, I thought I would shed a little more light on it from a different angle.
I have developed a little set of rules by which I judge something to be or not to be a work of art. They are:
1) it must be true
2) it must have form
3) it must achieve connection with another person, and doing that requires taking the risk of both exposing one’s vulnerable self in order to connect with the audience’s vulnerable self. (If the audience is fully into the experience and the artist is not, that is schlock and exploitation.) And really good art takes an even bigger risk in that it dares to express some aspect of the collective human condition that has never been openly acknowledged before.
Let’s take these one at a time:
Truth:
The most common form of “non-art” that we encounter day today is in the highly Photoshopped ideals of the human form that we see at the supermarket checkout counter. The classic is showing a human torso that, in real life, would immediately be perceived as severely underweight, but when shown in the two-dimensional photograph with just the right kind of lighting, it looks like the perfect ideal, as it exposes so much of the muscular structure of the human form.
Another even better example is this a little youtube video, where you see a perfectly attractive woman being Photoshopped. Towards the end, you will see that her eyes were enlarged and her neck was lengthened and narrowed. It has a certain cartoonish aesthetic that is very pleasing, but it is not true, therefore it is not art. It is artifice.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U&feature=related
This kind of “artificial art” serves its purpose well; instead of offering you empathy for your condition in life, and acknowledging the beauty of the human form, it exaggerates and perverts it. The end result is, when looking at, you feel inferior. This is not art, this is manipulation.
Form:
Part of the vocabulary of the world of the artist is the word “form.” In the music world, there are any number of musical forms. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_musical_forms
Modern pop music generally follows standard forms. The vernacular changes . . . some people call it “a melody,” and then “the chorus,” or “the bridge.” These are all elements of form.
You may also be familiar with poetic forms. There are limericks, haiku, sonnets, and so forth.
Form is an extremely important part of communication. This sentence is a form. Grammar is a form. If I were to instead say, “form a this sentence is,” or “a is form grammar,” suddenly I have departed from our common references, and now it’s a lot harder for you to understand what the heck it is I’m trying to say. If (and this is a very big if) it’s necessary for me to break down standard grammatical forms in order to get closer to the core of an idea, then it’s okay to do that. If, on the other hand, I’m doing it just to obfuscate, or make you feel stupid, that’s not art. Well, it might be “con” art.
A lot of what gets called “art” lately is really just experiments in perception and mass psychology. There’s a famous piece by John Cage called 4′ 33″ which is, essentially, a performer sitting down at a piano or some such and doing absolutely nothing for four minutes and 33 seconds. It’s actually kind of interesting to see what a crowd of a thousand people will do when confronted with a confusing situation. If you do it in Carnegie Hall, it generates press, and press leads to getting grants. This is an interesting experiment in sociology maybe, but it’s not art. The”form,” such as it is, exists solely in the expectations and past experience of the audience. This is too inconsistent to be anything other than making trouble, by purposefully making people feel vulnerable and/or confused.
(There’s a famous story of some experimental/abstract piece being played in Carnegie Hall which consisted of a guy playing an F sharp over and over and over again for 20 minutes. Really loud. Somewhere around the 10 minute mark, someone in the second balcony yelled out, “Stop! I confess!”)
Risk
There seems to be a fair amount of confusion out there as to the difference between art and craft. A lot of people talk about arts education, but what they’re really talking about is craft education. I know of what I speak. When I practiced the double bass eight hours a day, I was not studying art. I was learning a craft. It may have improved my math skills, but that is neither here nor there. Art is really about studying the human condition and connecting to other people. Training one’s fingers is just one element of it. When you discover something unusual about yourself and you have the guts to openly communicate it to strangers, this has the ultimate effect of creating a greater sense of connection. Having the guts to openly display your own fallibility and vulnerability is a big part of being an artist. It’s not for the faint of heart.
When people create an overly abstract “work of art,” I question whether or not they are meeting requirement number three. I once knew a piano player who often played contemporary music. I asked him once, “why do you play that stuff so much?” He replied: “because nobody knows if I’m playing a wrong note or not.” He liked the protection of the vague.
A friend of mine who runs a university art gallery once told me a story of installing some artist’s abstract creations. One of them was a rumpled garbage bag being thumbtacked to a wall. He asked this artist how she wanted him to set it up, and she replied, “oh, just stick it up there any old way. It doesn’t matter.” When he told me this story, we both rolled our eyes. It was the usual con. All too often, when you’re on the inside, you see people pulling this nonsense, and then you see patrons walk in and they project some profoundly deep meaning into it, and more grants get given. Again, con artistry is artistry, I guess. There is a lot of truth in the fact that people can be easily fooled.
Anyway, to sum it up:
Along with the abstract paintings and sculpture that no one can make head nor tail of, when I was a musician I often had to play this kind of “contemporary music.” I did a little short chapter on it in my book, “Real Men Don’t Rehearse.” I refer to this music as “Boop Smeep Music,” because it always starts the same way. There’s a low note (Boop), followed by a very high relatively dissonant note (Smeep), then it meanders around through a lot of purposefully dissonant pitches and random rhythms. Great care must be taken not to inadvertently create something that sounds like a melody, or repeat any grouping of notes in such a way that one might mistake them for the presence of form.
When I look at the ubiquitousness of so much of this nonsensical abstract art, and how so much of it is subsidized by government money and it is placed in public squares, I decided I should look for some historical reference for this kind of activity, and I think I have found it.
In past empires, public art has always been used as a form of propaganda. When the pope ruled Western civilization, most public art reinforced the primacy of the stories of the Bible. In Stalinist Russia (and even in Italy under Mussolini), we see how public statues reinforced the grand ideals of self-sacrificing devotion to the state.
So how does that all fit into the formless and generally incomprehensible public art that we see in America today? Pardon my quasi Oliver Stone take on this:
For one thing, it’s difficult to censor artists who might make trouble for those in power. It’s a lot easier (and far more legal) to suppress dissident art by saturating the display space with nonsense, crowding out anything that might make trouble. And it is far more easy to oppress ignorant people than educated ones. If ignorant people think they are educated there is little chance of any improvement.
Further, I’m starting to think this stuff is collectively designed to make us accustomed to, and willing to accept, nonsense. If we are willing to accept what ever law is passed without question, if we are willing to accept 3rd rate performance by people in positions of power, if we are willing to passively follow instructions even though they make absolutely no sense to us, this serves the powers that be.
And the powers that be, surprise surprise, are the ones who are paying (well, at least approving the taxpayer funding) for the creation and the display of this “art.”
Suddenly, it has truth, form, and a kind of connection, in the realm of shared collective misery.
© Justin Locke
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