The Fallacy of Allowing Public Access to Art to Define It
The only downside of public access to art is when the individual reaction to what is being presented as a work of art is lost in a sea of viewers. This cumulative summation is then used to define art. The peanut gallery doesn't get to tell the surgeon how to cut, but damned if we don't let them define art by wind and whim.
This is especially sad when the museumgoer is a child who is accompanied by a self-labeled art "critic" or "historian." Watch people who view art in museums or even in a small gathering of dinner guests as a work of art is presented. With the rare exception, everyone looks around. Their eyes jut left and right away from the painting, sculpture, or photograph. Why?
Peer pressure. It's that simple. They know whether or not they like it or would call it art, but they don't believe they know. If more people around the individual viewer like a painting, the individual who doesn't will often alter his/her opinion, though not his/her perception. Perception is not going to change.
A creative work either lights up a particular part of the brain or it doesn't. Not even art education (drawing/painting classes, art history, and/or art appreciation) can alter how the brain responds to a work. Particular parts of the brain also light up in response to social pressure, compliance, and the need to belong or the need to stand out. This, of course, has nothing to do with whether a particular work is art or not. If even one other viewer is willing to say they don't like it, so might our individual viewer, even if s/he was initially enthralled. But if everyone says they don't like it, the individual will question his/her own opinion to the point of changing it. The museum experience is therefore, for many viewers, chameleon-esque.
The Fallacy of Assessed Calm versus Artistic Passion
Dear Young People: Don't listen to someone who speaks so tamely about a passionate subject as does President Botstein about art. Calm, cool, and collected is what you want from your neurosurgeon, your bus driver, and your childcare worker. These attributes have no place in the world of art and in fact are highly suspect when coupled with art. Speaking calmly about the definition of art not only indicates a lack of talent and/or appreciation; it also speaks of a seething underbelly of resentment toward those who have both. When an "artist" or "art expert" speaks to you about art in a reserved manner, you are hearing a charlatan.
Article comments
1 - Jon Sobel
Well and passionately argued, but I would take issue with at least one point, when you say "Not even art education (drawing/painting classes, art history, and/or art appreciation) can alter how the brain responds to a work." Maybe that's true at the lizard-brain level, but I found my responses to various strains of modern art developing quite dramatically after I studied art appreciation in college. I grew to love the work of some artists about whom I had been completely indifferent (Kandinsky leaps to mind).
2 - diana
The lizard brain can't perceive the nuances of emotion brought out by brush stroke, lightness/heaviness of pencil or this or that color. And neither can the unfocused viewer, whether s/he is educated or not. Are you sure this isn't part of what you think was your first impression of Kandinsky's work? The educated viewer knows what motivated the painter. This is appreciation. The educated viewer knows the artist's life story. This is education. And neither has anything to do with the finished piece of work. If what the artist intended with the painting can only be accessed in a textbook or artist's notes, then the artist failed. But there is failure on the part of the viewer, too, whose impression is based on anything other than the work itself (which is going to be the case in, say, a crowded, warm and noisy museum or in proximity to a very pretty/handsome individual one noticed and was noticed by before actually setting eyes on a work of art).
Too, the perception of and appreciation for a work of art are not synonymous. I very much appreciate the intensity (both negative and positive) and misery behind Van Gogh's work. I still don't like his work. I still, even after everything I know about him, don't care about Michelangelo. My perception of his work, however, hasn't changed. I love it. I grew up with an artist. My mother painted, sketched and sculpted until she lost the use of her right arm. Then she sketched with her left. But by then I'd already been away from home for several years. She had an impeccable eye and was very talented. And yet the only sketches that jumped off the paper were the ones (I'd learn later) that were drawn with her less-able left hand. One could speculate she couldn't keep her left hand from hiding her true intention (in the neurological sense), while her right hand was trained to do just that. And one might be right, but that doesn't change the fact that just about everyone who viewed her work without knowing anything about her reacted to her left-hand sketches the same way I did because those sketches were that full of intention, reason and motivation. Her left hand didn't fail. Her right hand had.
Look at Kandinsky's work again. Whatever you've learned about the work, the artist, the motivation and the history has obviously added to your appreciation of it. I would guess your initial indifference to Kandinsky's work was less (or not at all) about his work and more about the context in which you first viewed it. Something else was more important to you at the time (maybe even more colorful, if only metaphorically or figuratively). My guess, then, is that you didn't really see it. Your indifference, then, probably wasn't your first impression of it even as you might insist it is. This is, of course, why art education and appreciation is so important. It allows, accommodates and, where need be, forces a student to focus, be still, look up and down and sideways and look again. Even if a class provided no information about art and artists at all and only allowed one student to view one painting (sculpture, etc) at a time, students would still come away from it with a learned and particular perception for no other reason than because there was nothing else to do. This is why the museum experience is so lacking. Unless you're the only one there, other stuff is going on that's falsifying the data, as it were.
3 - Baronius
Very interesting article.
To the discussion so far, I'd say that education and exposure can increase our capacity to understand complex art. To a child, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and handprints in paint are cutting-edge. Pollock and Mahler are meaningless. As we learn more about art, we grow in our ability to understand art. We also lose our capacity to appreciate simple art. Likewise, over time, arts become more complex - blues becomes jazz, which becomes progressive jazz, which becomes unlistenable to the novice but interesting to the person who has gone through a blues and a jazz phase.
I don't think we've resolved the issues of the objective and subjective in art. I'm reluctant to buy in 100% to the approach I've stated, because it implies that there is quality in Mahler, and frankly I don't look forward to the day that I'd be able to listen to him. But I have to be honest that I can't extract much more personal appreciation from Hang On Sloopy than I already have.
4 - TEEDY NABISENKE
l think Art is also something with aesthetic value.
5 - diamond holley
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