Spring cleaning 0.1

How should we treat art?

This is a bit of a vent and aesthetics spring-cleaning before I start writing about the continuity in avant-garde cinema, or anything too specific like "Dial M for Murder", as was briefly mentioned in a previous blog post. About the vent: my targets are not so much individuals as the attitudes I have seen over and over again, attitudes which make for an interesting spectrum and which I will have to take the time in the near future to respond properly to, in a more structured manner. I mostly address one side of the spectrum in this post. I have been thinking about some very basic things lately that I might as well broadcast here before I have taken to formalizing them. I have been thinking about the nature of aesthetic taste and discussion. I am often disappointed by what people do with both. I am always attempting to broaden and deepen my own taste on aesthetic matters, and it is important to do this with both the mind and a visceral sense of passion, as thoroughly as possible, until the art becomes something that one interacts with very personally, yet not too possessively, for those who would know what is meant by such a cautionary comment. What happens when this personalization process occurs, however, is that one is often less willing to discuss this work of art with other people because it is no longer viewed from the outside: the outside being a place of competition, ego, relief from boredom, a plea to keep a conversation running along with someone, straight-shooting and potentially narrow logic, or any other motivation that you can think of when you have been asked 'So, what films have you seen recently?' (Though to be fair this question can be asked innocuously and, among aesthetic peers, it is a pleasure to kick off a conversation with this.) How about those people who want to be perceived as refined and "cultured", in touch with the finer things, clever enough to keep tabs on some of the more obscure things within the realm of the finer things, too (though they go about their research in all the generic, if not precisely commercialized, ways)? How do you like them, as though art had something to do with your breeding. What the fuck are these people doing? They are probably worse than the people who have no relationship with art. They are as bad as the artists who think they are too special for commonalities  and want to possess the art they love, as though no one apart from them could develop a valid relationship with it or express a humble curiosity in it; who condescend, or apologize for condescending without actually reforming their need to be dismissive.

The "outside" is uninteresting. The art has become part of you, and what other people have to say about it is rendered useless, as it is not a conversation topic, or at the very least, you find yourself failing to engage in the types of reasons that these conversations tend to seek out. They are reasons that more often than not fragment the work of art, as well as the mind that has taken this work of art into its inner realms. This may sound strange and quasi-spiritual coming from a PhD student in philosophy, who would never resist a chance to reason and joust, as well it should, and while I think it is extremely important to eventually articulate this space of "reasons" (this being a most unfortunate word for the phenomenon at hand) to oneself and to others, it is virtually impossible to do the articulation any justice or personal satisfaction in a conversational context. Arguing about art with people who are not especially invested in it can become a cerebral exercise that does not allow one to get any closer to understanding what I have recently taken to calling the frameworks through which individuals filter their experience of an artwork, which are good to know about even if the person to whom you are speaking is not an aesthetic peer (and the discovery of which, it could be argued, constitutes the most sexily cerebral layer of all, so that means most of the discussion along these lines is a cerebral exercise that is missing the point of what said cerebral exercise can do, or the best of what it can offer). Well: An artwork should not be treated merely as a theoretically-oriented interest. Many of the arguments that are applied successfully to such subjects fall flat when discussing art; they sound tawdry and ill-conceived, hasty, pathetic. When I say that an artwork should not be treated merely as a theoretically-oriented interest, I suppose I am saying that I have seen this done in both a naively clumsy and a sophisticated way. The naively clumsy way could be a dull reporting of how great a film or a director is without knowing, for example, that there were many superior precedents to film/director X. The sophisticated way could be an overly sharp cutting down of a director's work, delivered by someone who has absorbed and excessively intellectualized a great volume of art to a point of no return, having lost contact with what it's like to be very simply blown away by something. Or it could be an overly sharp cutting down of a director's work by someone who is normally quite sophisticated of aesthetic judgment and knowledgeable about everything that goes into an artwork (and therefore all the angles that an artwork must be considered from) who has decided to see a director's work through a lens that does not take enough factors into account. Yet what I am calling for the moment a theoretically-oriented treatment of an artwork, whether naively clumsy or sophisticated, reduces to a foundation of nonsense either way. I wish to say that emotional responses to art are key, but what is so often ignored is that an emotional response should run deep without necessarily confusing depth with an instantaneous quality. What is first felt must be developed, tested, and the end result of this projectile curve is the arrival at a multi-faceted, sustained emotion, or more precisely, a phenomenon for which I have no name but would rather call a multi-faceted, sustained emotion than a reason. And naturally I want to know why I am doing this, why I am choosing to go for this kind of statement at all, and if there is any value in it, since I have trouble neglecting the "meta" - initial forays into a serious inquiry, however, cannot take place on the meta-level, therefore that further analysis must take place later in the chronology of things. I am not necessarily trying to apply some variation of reflective equilibrium to the aesthetic arena; rather, if there is any bullet point to be found in this ramble, I am stating that art and emotion have a vital relationship to each other without emotion entailing obvious, quick reactions.*

My personal desire is to integrate thinking about art with making art. It keeps me honest when I make art (although in the past it has blocked me from making art, a silly thing to do to oneself), and conversely, when I think about art, I am speaking from a place of connection with, rather than latent callousness towards, the artist (e.g., having a knowledge of what is difficult to achieve versus what is an easy way out from the artist's vantage point is useful when sizing up the work of art, which somewhat defuses the switch-over to the overtly intellectual, not-actively-draughtsmanship-immersed perspective). I have not looked into aesthetics as a branch of philosophy until this past year. A lot has been said there about emotion. It is a "problem", of course, this being a branch of philosophy. It is more of a problem for the theoretician than the artist, but as I have just hinted at, some of the theoretician's concerns have to be addressed: something like burying and digging up the same corpse** until a decision is made. I believe the solution is to be both theoretician and draughtsman at once. I will tackle this "problem" in due course, so keep an eye out for my digressions if you are inclined towards pondering these sorts of difficulties. I may even try to spell out my notion of an aesthetic peer, and answer the question, "Is art necessary?", in my own little way.

DS.
 

*Should this be a cause for worry? How does aesthetic judgment really work? What are its cognitive underpinnings (a question I should have been bothered to ask a long time ago) and will my argument be supported or undermined according to the empirical evidence? In other domains, such as moral judgment, it is disconcerting (and I am putting together a dissertation on just how disconcerting that is) if reasoning is employed post hoc to support the emotion.
**"The Trouble With Harry", Alfred Hitchcock (1955).