“Everyone wants to know, ‘well, what does it mean?’ It doesn’t mean anything.” George Balanchine, Complete Stories of the Great Ballets (1977)
“I never saw a good ballet that made me think.” Arlene Croce, Afterimages (1979)
Whenever one speaks of the so-called “high-brow” arts, one can sense the dread in companions: “oh no, we will have to figure out vague meanings! My instinctive tastes will be wrong!” I won’t understand it, I won’t get it is the underlying tone. I propose that this response is NOT actually attributable to art itself, but to the fact that we’ve been trained, in some ways, to think that art will make us feel stupid.
No one likes to be told that there are shades of meaning or pleasures that would be derived from reading a certain book, or looking at a work of art, or attending a performance if one only concentrated hard enough. In fact, such an approach to the teaching of art is bound to leave someone anxious about the experience. And yet, that is how “arts appreciation” tends to be taught in this country. It’s always amusing and troubling to go to a fine arts museum and see schoolchildren running around with paper and (eek!) pencil, reading to see what pieces they HAVE TO look at, and what questions they HAVE TO answer.
If it is really real art and fine great art, it must be studied before it is enjoyed; that is what they remember from school. In school the art of poetry is approached by a strictly rational method, which teaches you what to enjoy and how to discriminate. You are taught to analyze the technique and relation of form to content; you are taught to identify and “evaluate” stylistic, biographical, economic, and anthropological influences, and told what is great and what is minor so you can prepare yourself for a great reaction or for a minor one. The effect of these conscientious labors on the pupils is distressing. For the rest of their lives they can’t face a page of verse without experiencing a complete mental blackout. They don’t enjoy, they don’t discriminate, they don’t even take the printed words at face value. For the rest of their lives they go prying for hidden motives back in literature, for psychological, economic, or stylistic explanations, and it never occurs to them to read the words and respond to them as they do to the nonsense of current songs or the nonsense of billboards by the roadside. Poetry is the same thing – it’s words, only more interesting, more directly and richly sensual. Edwin Denby, “Against Meaning in Ballet” (1949)
Some people have a natural knack for sensing, ESP-like, what one is supposed to derive from a particular poem or book, performance or painting, according to the scholars and schoolteachers. I feel no shame in admitting that I am NOT one of those people. Yet I derive a certain sensual pleasure in a wide variety of arts, and my tastes (my natural responses) have been educated by viewing or reading what is considered “good” or “great” over and over (and over) again. What Balanchine and Croce mean in the above quotes, I think, is not that there IS no meaning in ballet, or that one SHOULD NOT think, but that one’s enjoyment of art is first and foremost a sensual response, not an intellectual one.
Why we are taught to dampen our natural response to art through what Denby called the “strictly rational method” is unclear. I don’t know how arts appreciation is taught in other countries, if our method is tied to reinforcement for the single correct answer, or a sense of insecurity that we might be considered unsophisticated bumpkins by our cultural kin in
Why should we care? The arts communicate our shared cultural values; they are our spiritual and communal heritage. They are reflections of what we have held dear and the ways we have seen the world; they affirm our uniqueness and our contribution. When we lose sight of those, we lose our grip on our own civilization. We lose our place and time in the world - we allow postmodernism in its nihilistic bent to flourish.
2 comments:
A very insightful and interesting thought-piece. A third the way through, the real point starts jumping out at you clearly is that we are trained with a certain *expectation* or "something to look for" regarding the higher arts, and the novel part is the post's reminder that there is not necessarily a `point' or `something to look for' in the first place. We actually do experience this phenomena in a more familiar way with some of the popular movies, rather than the `film critic's choice'. One can indeed feel stupid if say, they went to see a movie and did not have the same reaction as most of the others who saw it.
While a more common-place example, this makes the post all the more interesting in making one *notice/realize* this response to art.
Moving on, the post speaks of "If it is really real art and fine great art, it must be studied before it is enjoyed; that is what they remember from school. In school the art of poetry is approached by a strictly rational method, which teaches you what to enjoy and how to discriminate."
Sigh, all too true, and seems yet another example where our whole education approach is so faulty, as to be more harmful to the promulgation of Western culture than it is useful.
The quote from Denby goes on to note: " The effect of these conscientious labors on the pupils is distressing. For the rest of their lives they can’t face a page of verse without experiencing a complete mental blackout. They don’t enjoy, they don’t discriminate, they don’t even take the printed words at face value. For the rest of their lives they go prying for hidden motives back in literature "
Reading this one is tempted to suggest that part of the popularity and enthusiam still found in less mainstream hobbies and art, and more avid fans found, say in science-fiction, is due to the fact that it is as yet an area that the education system has not `deconstructed' or forced meaning into.
The poster asks: "Why we are taught to dampen our natural response to art through what Denby called the “strictly rational method” is unclear. I don’t know how arts appreciation is taught in other countries, if our method is tied to reinforcement for the single correct answer, or a sense of insecurity that we might be considered unsophisticated bumpkins by our cultural kin in Western Europe."
That last part seems unlikely, for we tend to be somewhat casual in *embracing the cultural illeteracy* and even mistakenly sometimes seeing it as yes, just something for `high brows'.
"Why should we care? The arts communicate our shared cultural values; they are our spiritual and communal heritage....When we lose sight of those, we lose our grip on our own civilization. We lose our place and time in the world - we allow postmodernism in its nihilistic bent to flourish."
While this commentator tends to see Postmodernism as right up there with Jihadist Islam as a menace to Western culture, I would opine that a principle reason to "care" is the fact that by being able to enjoy art in the sensual and aesthetic sense, rather than deconstructing and "reading into" (especially in works that have no such message), we restore a bit of our ability to enjoy life overall all, and possibly find less emphasis in need to chase the most immediate fad or `trend setter'. The appeal of the latter often derives simply from a hot pursuit of a sense of pleasure or reward, and the deconstruction paradigm has operated to destroy that sense of reward from all but the most immediate and unambiguously gratifying things.
- Aurelian
We actually do experience this phenomena in a more familiar way with some of the popular movies, rather than the `film critic's choice'. One can indeed feel stupid if say, they went to see a movie and did not have the same reaction as most of the others who saw it.
An excellent point: film reviews are a wonderful and common example of this phenomenon. It's made worse by the attitude some film critics (and other art critics) have: that they are the elite preserving the last bastion of high art from the wasteland of mediocrity. While in some cases they may be, it fails to take into account that artists in some media have made their art LESS accessible to even a small section of the population, and are trying to cater to only a small group of people like them (besides the artist's obligation to first and foremost satisfy himself or herself).
I would opine that a principle reason to "care" is the fact that by being able to enjoy art in the sensual and aesthetic sense, rather than deconstructing and "reading into" (especially in works that have no such message), we restore a bit of our ability to enjoy life overall all, and possibly find less emphasis in need to chase the most immediate fad or `trend setter'.
Wonderful comments, and I would agree fully, except that I hope to post about the asceticism of the Desert Fathers in the coming days! But I fully agree that our trained inability to enjoy the arts may very well be related to our pursuit of less noble 'trends.'
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