For the Love of God
I believe, it is important for the artists to get out of their self enclosed ghetto of doing Art for Art’s sake.
This is the closing sentence of my previous post and I was asked by a friend, Oliver Koerner, a very good artist to expand a little on this statement as it seems to be more to this statement that meets the eye.
Of course Oliver is right and this statement I believe was a leading slogan of the Modernism right from its start and in many ways was its raison d’être.
In his excellent essay on Modernism, Professor Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe places the concept of” Art for Arts sake” in its right context by explaining:
“Art for Art’s Sake was a rallying cry, a call for art’s freedom from the demands of tyranny of meaning and purpose. From a progressive modernist’s point of view, it was a further exercise of freedom. It was also a ploy, another deliberate affront to bourgeois sensibility. In his book, The Gentle Art Of Making Enemies, published in 1890, the progressive modernist painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler, proposed that ‘Art should be independent of all claptrap – should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye and ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it.’
In his essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism,’ published in 1891 in the Pall Mall Gazette, Oscar Wilde wrote:
A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist.
However, Art for Art’s Sake was a stratagem that backfired. The same middle class whose tastes and ideas Whistler was confronting through his art quickly turned the call of ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ into a tool to further neutralize the content and noxious effects of progressive modernist art. From now on, art was to be discussed in formal terms — color, line, shape, space, composition — which effectively removed the question of meaning and purpose from consideration and permitted whatever social, political, or progressive statements the artist had hoped to make in his or her work to be conveniently ignored or played down.
This approach became pervasive to the extent that artists, too, certainly the weaker ones and even some of the strong ones as they got older or more comfortable, lost sight of their modernist purpose and became willy–nilly absorbed into this formalist way of thinking about art. In defense of this attitude, it was argued that, because the function of art is to preserve and enhance the values and sensibilities of civilized human beings, art should attempt to remain aloof from the malignant influences of contemporary culture which was becoming increasingly coarse and dehumanized.”
I remember in this context when I entered the Art Institute in my formative years as a student, looking for the big questions of the relationships that were supposed to exist in my naïve mind at the time, between the artist’s vocation as a Master of Meaningful Form, only to realize that I was born in the times when meaning and form got divorced. I know a lot of artists, colleagues and friends who remember with horror, same as me, those days of the Formalistic tyranny in which any reference to meaning or search of Universal relevancy was either ignored or worse, sneered at with contempt. Of course, there was never any rational explanation for this other than some vague references to what could be sensed as a dictate by the ruling elite establishment, expressed in the numerous shows in the prestigious galleries and the museums of the World. As young students we dared not argue with such authoritative display of power. Nor did we possess the necessary tools for a fair debate as it is only in recent years with the full exposure of the devastation that was left by the Postmodernism, that the serious philosophical minds entered the arena to reveal the full scope of the relativistic gibberish that was deconstructing the very fabric of the man search for meaning and order.
Professor Witecombe goes on to explain:
“Eventually there emerged the notion that modernist art is to be practiced entirely within a closed formalist sphere that was necessarily separated from, so as not to become contaminated by, the real world. The formalist critic Clement Greenberg, in an article first published in 1965 entitled ‘Modernist Painting,’ saw modernism as having achieved a self–referential autonomy. The work of art came to be seen as an isolated phenomenon governed by the internal laws of stylistic development. Art stood separate from the materialistic world and the mundane affairs of ordinary people.
The underlying assumptions at work here first of all posit that the visual artist, by virtue of special gifts, is able to express the finer things of humanity through a ‘purely visual’ understanding and mode of expression. This ‘purely visual’ characteristic of art made it an autonomous sphere of activity, completely separate from the everyday world of social and political life.
The self–determining nature of visual art meant that questions asked of it could be properly put, and answered, only in its own terms. Modernism’s ‘history’ was constructed through reference only to itself. Impressionism, for example, gains much of its art historical significance through its place within a scheme of stylistic development that has its roots in the preceding Realism of Courbet and Manet, and by its providing also the main impetus for the successive styles of Post-Impressionism.
In the hands of the conservative establishment, formalism became a very effective instrument of control over unruly and disruptive art. Many of the art movements spawned in the first half of the 20th century can be seen as various attempts to break the formalist grip on progressive modernism. The system, though, articulated by the more academic art historians and critics, operating hand–in–hand with the art market which was only interested in money and not meaning, effectively absorbed all attempts at subversion and revolt into a neutral, palatable, only occasionally mildly offensive history of art of the kind encountered today in art history textbooks.
Unfortunately for the history of art, in the process of neutralizing progressive modernism, art historians had to neutralize also all other art from earlier periods and from elsewhere in the world. The same reductionist approach was employed across the board creating a history of art largely devoid of any real meaning original to the artwork. It was generally agreed that aesthetic quality would have priority in deciding the function of art instead of its social or political relevance”
One has just to look at the standard textbooks of an Art program curriculum in any of the Art colleges or universities to see the truth of the above. I still regret the fact of disposing of my textbooks from my attempt to take a course in “Problems in Aesthetics” in Mass. College of Art, long time ago. It would make a great joke book full of long meaningless sentences, trying to explain within the formalistic framework the meanings of the works of Art. No wonder there were Problems in Aesthetics.
What I am trying to convey here with the aid of professor Witecombe is that one of the central pillars of Modernism (and later its aftermath Postmodernism) notions of Art for Art’s sake has mutated disastrously into some of the most bizarre, uninspiring, talentless, narcissistic and socially irresponsible form making , all in the name of Art.
I would like at this point strongly to emphasize that I am not against Modernism or what is called the Modern movement in Art and totally adore and respect many masters of the last 200 years who have dared to break away from the stifling traditional concepts that confined artists for ages to a closed systems of dogmas, be it the Church the King or the State.
The ghetto I was referring to is the self imposed ghetto of many artists who dare not break away from the dogma of the ruling elite of the day in the pursuit of empty form making dragging the empty corps of the “Art for Art’s sake”, glorifying anything that is devoid of real emotion, passion, artistic pathos, Eros, competing with each other who will outsmart the system by emptying even more the already empty shell of Art. In closed circles of those who pledged allegiance to the cult of Nothing there is no permission to be optimistic in your artistic outlook, no room for simple beauty without some kind of perverted twist that makes it into a fetish, no mercy for any attempt to healing the many ills of the society or try to envision Art that would balance personal talent, passion and striving for authentic expression within the context of search for Universal meaning that would result in real re-enchantment of the Arts.
Here is what an art critic Robert Hughes has to say about one of the heroes of this weird cult of nothing.
