Art and politics, part 3932939564320943287

Via About Last Night, an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education dealing with the competition between aesthetics and ideology in art. Here’s the gist:

The death of Susan Sontag, in 2004, served to point out just how much things had changed in the critical world since the annus mirabilis of 1964, when the Beatles played the Hollywood Bowl and Sontag's essay "Against Interpretation" appeared. She spray-painted on the walls of the academy the incendiary line, "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." Railing against imposing theories of interpretation on the "sensuous surface" of art, she rejected the New Criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, Marxist criticism, and other attempts to inflict meaning on art. Pleasure was her principle. Forty years on, what we have 24/7 in most English departments is the complete and total ascendancy of hermeneutics. Instead of the erotics of art, we've got the neurotics of art: the meaning-mongering of interpretation for its own sake.

As an arts writer for various politically and ideologically oriented publications, this is something that weighs heavily on my mind. How does one approach politically? Should politics even be a factor, and does all art have some socio-political or cultural statement which can be ground down to bare bone of meaning?

There is, of course, no certain answer. Politics an art are in a marriage of both necessity and convenience, and the two have their share of regal gala dances and domestic disputes alike—no marriage is without its pleasures or its difficulties. The thing is, I think, to remain open to the myriad ways in which art, even shallow pop art, works to both dazzle the senses and deliver—or at least reinforce—political and cultural meanings and values. Not to be too postmodern about it, but there is no one right way.

Most Americans experience art (or at least pop art) as an escape, a frivolous bit of throwaway time designed to provoke a mild tingling in their senses and little else. And as an occasional critic of pop art, I feel it’s my duty to respond to that desire to be thrilled, wowed, entertained and generally diverted from electric bills, cramped apartments, annoying clients and paper work. A friend once asked me about a movie, and I began to explain its various interleaved motifs and he stopped and said, “Yeah, OK, but is it any good?” Critics and elitists may quibble over the simplicity of such a question, but it’s what readers want to know, and just as it’s rude to refuse to answer a question from a friend, it’s snobbery to avoid giving readers a straight answer to that question, as best as is possible.

But there is another component to the job of critic as well, and that’s the way in which, in the processing of answering “is it good?” a critic can gently, constructively guide the reader into a fuller appreciation or understanding of the way a piece of art works. Critics, I think, often like to think of themselves as guardians of taste, upholding all that is worthy and cruelly degrading all that deserves their vitriol. And certainly, this is tempting, especially when dealing with film, much of which is basically superficial trash (there I go doing it myself). But writing about the arts and entertainments of the world, we serve a more important purpose, and that’s to give the average viewer, or listener, or whatever, a boost in their ability to see the larger implications of a work. In many ways, it’s what science reporters and political analysts do: they are experts in their areas, toiling daily in the minutiae of their fields so that their readers can benefit from their expertise. It is not that we critics are necessarily blessed with Good Taste and Important Ideas, it is that we have decided to train ourselves, through schooling and through far too much reading, watching and discussion, in how to quickly grasp the breadth of a work. We have seen all the director’s films, read the interviews and followed the set reports so that the reader doesn’t have to. It is then our responsibility to deliver a verdict based on all this in an entertaining and elucidating manner. Critics may be the groundskeepers of taste, but they are far from its owners.

But back to the question of meaning-mongering vs. aesthetic appreciation: as groundskeepers of the art world, it’s not our job to impose meaning on our patrons and visitors, but to suggest possibilities. So art may seem political, or may have some exuberant, sensuous component; it’s the critic’s job, then, to parse out what’s most prominent in a work and then help that become apparent to the viewer, reader, listener, etc…

Understandably, this is somewhat ancillary to the more academic debate in the article (you’ll find little more than fragments of "theory" in most mainstream film criticism), but within the sphere of popular commentary (popular being a term that does not describe this blog), there are clear parallels, and, I think, the issue at hand is that the battle lines between aesthetics and ideas do not have to be so firmly marked. For once, diversity, or at least an openness to a variety of ideas, may be the key.