Professor Botstein, who is clearly a calm, cool, and collected person by nature, is not without talent. He just doesn't have any talent for art. He talks about it as one would any subject one has little interest in but has been tasked to speak about – with reserve and without affect, as illustrated by the almost annoying lack of "ers" and "ums." He is rehearsed.
If you want to hear the passionate Professor Botstein, watch what happens when he talks about something he really does know and love: music. His facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language come to life when he talks about his true passion. His demeanor is similar to that of an excited child. He even refers to music as the easier of the arts to talk about. Why? Because it is his true passion. Art is not.
So what is art? If you've stripped away everything that I've said isn't art, you will find yourself surrounded by art and artists. To know art, you must study it, see it, look for it, and feel it. It isn't everywhere; it isn't in everything and everyone is not an artist. Art is a joyous, adventurous and/or dark struggle, an embrace and a channel between artist and paint, canvas, wall, ink, pen, pencil, charcoal, paper, chisel, stone, chalk, sidewalk, camera, and light. All else is something else. But it isn't art.
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
Great article Dana please check out my Website www.diamonddystrict.com would u come on ship as a writer?