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 off a personal distaste for the current state of things, but taste is subjective. So the reader can choose to believe the writer or not, no side will be wrong, and that will be 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 pervasive 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? Let this be sarcasm directed toward the capitalistic need for growth by promoting innovation over and over, to the point that corporate boards plan for innovation, and innovation becomes the predictable invariant behind a strict schedule of novelties.

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 badly 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, unengaging writing style, etc. The point is that clichéd works lend to clichéd reviews.

But the issue is not the clichéd nature of bad works, or even the clichéd nature of their reviews (and yes, it can happen that authors of poorly-received works strike back at the critic by retorting that critic didn’t write 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, engaging writing style, etc. However unique, great works invariably result in clichéd reviews.

Positive reviews are clichéd in such a way that they apply to other works with only a few cosmetic changes. So much for the uniqueness argument: the uniqueness is typically captured by saying that the work is unique. In fact, the most objective terms of a positive review—i.e., those not too tarnished by value judgments, such as “interesting subject matter”—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 “so 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-sided. 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 is why so many critics—not only in art, but everywhere else: in the tech world, in tourism, etc.—try so painstakingly to be fair to multiple audiences. “If you like action in your movie, then… But if you prefer feel-good endings, then…” 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 different ways to address this fundamental weakness, some of which resulted in this essay. If you are in search of end-consumer enjoyment as advertised, 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 discuss 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 others have already 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 thrown out there to add substance 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 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 pushes open doors. 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 some singing, someone complains that it’s “not pitch perfect?” It may be true, but really, this is besides the point. When someone pops 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 our judgment criteria on the spot and makes you question their necessity. If you begin to question the degree of arbitrariness in the judgments of what you hear and read daily, you might be surprised at the suggested overall picture. Each judgment criterion makes sense on its own. But when put in the larger context of a 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 that must guide the ultimate meaning. 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 coherence in writing 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 cold, 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. It cannot 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, like deafs talking to each other.

This leaves us with the objective statements about content, which you may or may not already know. In the first case, you may feel that the reviews and critics did miss something. From there, you could pride yourself in spreading the holy word about your discoveries, which are perfectly legitimate. These discoveries are 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 situation is plausible because (1) someone can figure it out and share the discovery with others because it is objective and communicable, contrary to taste and feeling (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) you might very well have missed the discovery precisely because it is so 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 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, binary judgments and their cousin, categorizations, in favor of tackling individual 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 honor works of art, then it should also be how we honor general theories: by first looking at them in their individuality, and, through them, understanding the widespread, unconscious clichés that pervade our thinking and unnecessarily prevent us from seeing uniqueness, before using them as a possible gateway to enjoyment.

Why you could care some. An issue not of value but of the interpretation that predates the value

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

The reader may just stop reading 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 than a selection of “new-style” interpretations. 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 has some uniqueness, so does its new-style interpretation, in such a way that the interpretation doesn’t essentially amount to a value judgment. This interpretation doesn’t demand of you to accept it or agree with it. Instead, its point is the worded communication of some uniqueness. You are free to judge its value on a per-case basis, but if you don’t, you can still come away with learning something unique, although the new-style interpretation address ideas that were new to me. In a lot of ways, the success of the interpretation was achieved before it was read: right at the time the uniqueness was figured out in a clear objective light.

This essay has the following demographics in mind:

1. The curious ones who want to know what they stumbled upon comes from
2. Those who feel the boredom or routine progressively taking over their enthusiasm for art
3. Those who have given some art a honest try, listened to what enthusiasts had to say, but came away unimpressed despite understanding perfectly what they said
4. Those who could have written this essay, and can now just focus on writing new-style interpretations instead of explaining the theories behind them

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 to unique interpretations that are only as unique as the work that underly 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 whatever grand purpose in the history of art or human knowledge, although I do try not to repeat what others have already said—I find better to quote them, even pages of them if necessary. When one hears Gilles Deleuze complaining how “tired” he is of ways of thinking he found in books written centuries ago, one is almost led to believe that the author must have lived for centuries. I, for one, only need to heed the call of feeling bored. I may escape my boredom through a few works, maybe try to promote them, and leave to fate the chance that it pays off with more people able to convey and build upon new objective ideas, instead of pushing opaque values as if pushing again and again would somehow end up leading to loss-less reception.