Book/Introduction

Dead Ends in How We Talk and Think About Art, and How We Eventually Produce It

Any alarmist paper about dead ends in Art will probably try to sell itself as objective, but it will necessarily fall short. The writer’s conclusions must be based on a personal distaste for the current state of things, but since taste is subjective, the reader can choose to believe the writer or not, no side will be wrong, and that will be the end of it.

There is, however, a particular judgment criterion that tries hard to be objective: whether or not a given work of art proposes something “new” (or, more accurately, something sufficiently new”) to a given individual. (Is a remix of an old song something “new” ? Let the individual decide). Of course, this criterion is not free from value judgments, namely that “new is better.” This in itself is a paradox—after all, isn’t it possible for something to be both new and worse? In this day and age, it is unnatural to think of the paradox, not when corporate boards experfully plan for innovation, and innovation becomes the predictable invariant behind a strict schedule of novelties. You wouldn’t plan for something if it isn’t better, would you?

What the glorification of the new suggests is that “genuine” or “great” works are always “new” and “unique,” while lesser works are always the same, to the point that some critics simply avoid writing negative reviews, because they become so repetitive. What’s the point of writing the same critiques again and again? All bad works share the same typical traits: bad music fails to move the listener; bad films are poorly acted, too unrealistic or don’t have enough character development; and bad novels are weighed down by weak plots or conclusions, uninteresting subject matter, unsympathetic characters, an unengaging writing style, etc. The point is that clichéd works lend themselves to clichéd reviews.

But the real issue is not the clichéd nature of bad works, or even the clichéd nature of their reviews (and yes, it can happen that the critic be accused of not writing an especially ground-breaking review, either). The point is that positive reviews sound as clichéd as the negative reviews. For example, great music moves the listener; great films are well-acted, realistic and have a good deal of character development; and great novels have great plots and conclusions, interesting subject matter, sympathetic characters, an engaging writing style, etc. However unique, great works seem to invariably result in clichéd reviews.

Positive reviews are clichéd in such a way that you could adapt it for another work by changing a few details (e.g., names of characters, actors and locations in a movie review), and nobody would know. So much for the uniqueness argument; in a positive review, the uniqueness of the work is typically captured by saying that the work is unique. Of course, the same has been said of other works. In general, the most objective terms of a positive review could actually apply to works considered inferior. The only difference would be whether or not the critic likes it. For example, some films praised for being “very realistic” can simultaneously be thrashed elsewhere because the story moves too slowly—you know, like in real life. A novel praised for its sympathetic characters can be panned because those sympathetic characters are too one-dimensional. And a work praised for being “unique” can be lambasted because it “tries too hard to be smart for its own sake.”

This fundamental weakness in value judgments—namely, the lack of causality between content and opinion—is why so many critics try so painstakingly to be fair to multiple audiences. In that regard, there is no difference between art reviews—“If you like action in your movie, then… But if you prefer feel-good endings, then…”—and consumer product reviews with their lists of pros and cons. Take a look, for example, at this book review (emphasis mine):

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Character likeability has always been one of literature’s sources of division. If online discussions are anything to go by, book groups seem to care about little else, which puts them at odds with most serious writers, who feel that a book’s merits have nothing to do with whether or not you would take the protagonist to the pub. That said, when writers present to the world someone as unsympathetic as John Self or Humbert Humbert, they tend to sweeten the pill by offsetting the character’s despicability with likeable qualities: irony, japery, or a fancy prose style.

It is brave, then, of the much-decorated Chinese-American novelist Yiyun Li to have written a book with largely unsympathetic characters in unadorned prose. […]

I imagine most people’s reaction to the book will be dictated by their tolerance for her semi-aphoristic authorial proclamations and the mannered faux-philosophical dialogue, both of which confused and confounded this reader. Reading it, I felt Moran, Ruyu and Boyang were hedged by the past, but also, in the end, by the author.

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David Annan, for The Telegraph’s website

Kinder Than Solitude by Yiyun Li, review

There are ways to address this fundamental weakness, but it depends on your goals. If you are in search of end-consumer enjoyment as advertised by the consumerist system, you’re mostly out of luck. You’re essentially condemned to sorting out for yourself the random data of a popularity poll where the discriminating data is clichéd, including the various claims to uniqueness. You know, going in, that the most popular works may be exactly those you’re trying to avoid, especially and most ironically if you’re after something truly new. A Batman movie will always be more popular than a Gaspar Noé movie.

If, on the other hand, you are seeking a forum to talk about a work that you already know, your approach to those random opinions depends on the level of objective clarity you achieved from consuming the art. Maybe you don’t have anything else to say that hasn’t already been said—besides matters of taste and opinion. Or maybe you have something else to say that is actually objective, instead of yet another ambivalent statement that only adds meat to a value judgment, such as “the multiple character arcs keep the story interesting” or “the humor provides a welcome relief to the serious theme,” to which another critic will simply echo back with “the multiple arcs made the story confusing” and “the humor didn’t fit the serious theme at all.” For an awful lot of these statements, people can see for themselves without the help of “experts.” The “expert” in art is a highly educated person offering you an array of descriptions that are almost always a picturesque exercise in style that bounces off the subject and states the obvious in unobvious ways. If such a person, say Umberto Eco, were to describe the sense of insecurity in our society as the “new Middle Ages,” we’d get something like this:

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[…] the seminomad medieval society was a society of unsafe journeys; setting out meant making your will (think of the departure of old Anne Vercos in Claud’s L’annonce faite à Marie), and traveling meant encountering bandits, vagabond hordes, and wild animals. But the concept of the modern journey as a masterpiece of comfort and safety has long since come to grief, and boarding a jet through the various electronic checkpoints and searches to avoid hijacking restores perfectly the ancient sense of adventurous insecurity, presumably destined to increase.

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Umberto Eco

Travels in Hyper Reality

The comparison is smart, but it has the strengths and weaknesses of harmless analysis. I don’t need the comparison between “bandits, vagabond hordes and wild animals” and terrorists to understand the dangers of air travel, thank you. Likewise, I don’t need to be told about the quality of the acting in a movie. I can decide for myself if it was good enough for me. Did you ever have this moment where, while enjoying someone singing, someone complains that the singer’s “not pitch perfect?” It may be true, but really, this is besides the point. When someone opines out of the blue to tell you about “pitch perfect” in a moment when it didn’t matter at all, it puts the arbitrary nature of their judgment criterion on the spot and makes its necessity questionable. Even more questionable is the degree of arbitrariness of the array of judgments constituting a review. Each judgment criterion makes sense on its own. But when put in the larger context of the complete review, it sounds like a non sequitur, and the more the review develops, the more it forces you to think of a bottom line. All the talk about some work of art—from casual chats to philosophical commentary—is fundamentally crippled by the fact that it only makes sense in the overall picture as part of a bottom-line value judgment. What is the point of saying that “the woodwind is particularly song-like and soulful in the second movement, where the intensity of the tempestuous outbursts is all the greater for the classical restraint” (random quote from the BBC website), if not with the tacit understanding that this is a good thing? As an exercise, where is the overall coherence in the following:

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Their forms–scrolling, zig-zagging, rippling, geometric, curvaceous–are endlessly various. Sometimes the surface is incised, embossed or coated like verdigris on copper, as if the image wanted to break into three dimensions. Sometimes the canvas splits in two and a deep internal shadow appears, like the box of a violin, or the shadow is a painted illusion. There are impossible perspectives and visual interplays that you can’t exactly fathom, but above all there are gorgeous metaphorical associations: the riffle of a fan, the shimmer of art deco moiré, children’s tumbling blocks in constant cascade.

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Laura Cumming, The Observer

Painting Now: Five Contemporary Artists – review

The key word is in the last line: “gorgeous.” Only a value judgment can really tie everything up in a neat, sellable package.

When an art debate—the crowd favorite “What is art?” or its innumerable variants, such as: “Are video games art?” “Is a Renaud Lavillenie jump art?”—reaches its end, a sense of powerlessness comes from acknowledging that “it’s just a matter of taste.” You like it or you don't, and you can’t do anything about it. You were born with this taste, or this taste was programmed into you, with nothing to ever discover, and no amount of dissertation will change that. It's like a joke that leaves you unamused, so the joke is explained to you, which all but ensures that the joke is never going to work. Taste in art and jokes is too personal to rely on or to be communicated as part of a social experience. All that remains at the social level is building communities of taste. With experience, one finds out that the consensus on which communities of all kinds are founded is first and foremost superficial and coincidental, and that agreement based on taste looks like deaf people talking to each other.

If we excise value judgments from any given review, then this leaves us with the objective statements about content. You may feel that the reviews and critics did miss some of them. From there, you could pride yourself in spreading the holy word about your discoveries, which are perfectly legitimate if derived from the work’s content, rather than an analytical prowess divorced from the original work and which is more flattering to the critic than to the reviewed work. If you didn’t make the discoveries yourself, you may be grateful that someone pointed them out to you. This especially happens under the following conditions: (1) contrary to taste and feeling, it is objective and thus communicable (not counting the contagious crowd feelings that arise from social gatherings such as concerts, which have as much or more to do with the setting than with the artistic content) and (2) part of the objective content is easy to miss for a variety of reasons.

This essay is about preparing the reader for being introduced to a few select works in which I feel that a lot is missed even and especially when they are praised. Therefore, it is far from being yet another general theory about what Art is or should be, which works are good or bad, or a recipe for producing successful art. The particular content that I discuss will demand self-discipline in interpretation and communication. The difficulty is not so much in the way we talk about it, but rather in the fact that the language of value judgment dominates the way we think and consume art. Bad works are boring, and so are their reviews. But the reviews of the great works are boring as well; in fact, depending on how you approach them, the great works can also be boring, and it actually happens that if I were to approach the great works like most people do, or even like I was doing a few years ago, then the works I find great now would become exactly as boring as their reviews, since these reviews are structured according to our way of thinking.

It is all about abandoning general theories of what is good/bad, binary value judgments and their cousin, categorizations, in favor of tackling works in all their individuality, with an expanded critical awareness of the cliché. Saying more or less covertly that a work is “absolutely genius” does not exactly honor individuality. And if this is going to be what it takes to address works of art, then it should also be how we address so-called “universal” theories about art: by first looking at them in their individuality, and seeing in them the ubiquitous, unconscious clichés that pervade our thinking and needlessly prevent us from precisely identifying uniqueness as a possible gateway to enjoyment.

Why Would This Interest You? An Issue Not of Value, But of the Interpretation That Precedes the Value

Did I just write: “This essay is about preparing the reader for being introduced to a few select works in which I feel that a lot is missed”?

The reader may just stop at this point and legitimately say: “But I don’t care about you. Who are you, anyway?”

Those “few select works” are less a selection of approved works and more a selection of “new-style” interpretations—interpretations without the value judgments of a review. If it were a mere selection of works, the criterion for its success would be the degree to which people agree, and it would be weighed down by the communication issues already discussed at length. The dead end is not art (although it can ultimately be), but the interpretation.

If a work is at least somewhat unique, so is its new-style interpretation; as a result, the new-style interpretation of a unique work won't essentially amount to a value judgment. A new-style interpretation doesn’t demand that you accept it or agree with it. Instead, its purpose is to bring to light or explain some uniqueness in the work. You are free to judge the value of the revealed uniqueness on a per-case basis, but even if you don’t, you can still come away having learned something new, although new-style interpretations are not designed to be new to you. They first and foremost cover ideas that seemed new to the critic, not the critic’s audience. In a lot of ways, an interpretation is successful before it's even read: it achieves its purpose at the exact moment the uniqueness of a work is understood by an individual in a clear, objective light. Whether or not it communicates that uniqueness to someone else is secondary.

This essay has the following demographics in mind:

1. Those who are curious about what a “reconstruction” is
2. Those who feel that boredom or routine are progressively taking over their enthusiasm for art
3. Those who have given some art an honest try, listened to what enthusiasts had to say, but came away unimpressed despite understanding said enthusiasts perfectly

In particular, it doesn’t try to make believers out of non-believers, or to convince people happy with art that there is a dead end in art, like some kind of missionary trying to sell paradise to perfectly happy aborigines. The fact that it only prepares people for interpretations that are only as unique as the work that underlie them, makes it fundamentally down-to-earth and anti-“big theory.” It doesn’t need to be linked, as a subculture, to the philosophy of art or some grand purpose in the history of art or human knowledge, although I do try not to repeat what others have already said. I find it better to quote them, even pages of them if necessary. When you hear Gilles Deleuze complaining how “tired” he is of the ways of thinking he found in books written centuries ago, you're almost led to believe that Deleuze must have lived for centuries. I, for one, am only bored by stuff that I read or listen to; and sometimes, I feel the need to do something about it. I may escape my boredom thanks to a few works, and maybe even try to promote them. In that case, I leave to fate the chance that it will pay off, with more people able to express and build upon new objective ideas, instead of pushing opaque values onto other people, as if pushing again and again would somehow end up leading to loss-less reception.