Book/Interpretation of the Average Value
The way we think and talk about art: the interpretation of the average value
The work interpreted as a mosaic of independent features unified by the average value
The almost ubiquitous style of interpretation consists in compartmentalizing a work into independent features. The concept of a “whole work” or self-contained unit is implied in the collection of these features. Let’s illustrate this with a modern art review from an authoritative, Wikipedia-grade source. I outlined the features in bold type:
The color is beautifully mellow and rich within its narrow range. In the long passage from light to shade, different in every object, each color unfolds its scale of values in visible steps. How solid the forms emerging in atmosphere, deep shadow, and light through subtle shifts of color from transparent tones to luminous pigment of a wonderful density and force!
Indifferent to the textures of objects, Cézanne recreates in the more palpable texture of paint the degrees of materiality: the opaque, the transparent, the atmospheric, and the surface existence of the pictorial itself in the ornament on the papered wall — the shadow of a shadow, an echo of his own art.
To define the forms in this unstable medium of air and light in which the colors at the contours merge with the surrounding tones applied in similar slanting strokes, Cézanne has drawn dark lines around the objects. More definite than in his other pictures, these outlines are not as uniform and thick as the enclosing lines that later artists derived from them. Gauguin, who owned and passionately admired this still life, reproduced it in the background of a portrait in which he took one of his first steps towards a style of abstracted decorative lines.
Most original in the drawing are the ellipses of the compotier and glass. Just as Cézanne varies the positions, colors, and contours of the fruit, he plays more daringly with the outlines of the vessels. The ellipse of the compotier becomes a unique composite form, flatter below, more arched above, contrary to perspective vision and unlike the symmetrical forms of the glass. In its proportion, it approaches the rectangular divisions of the canvas and in its curves is adapted to the contrasted forms of the apples and grapes, the straight lines of the chest, the curves of the fruit below, and the foliage on the wall. A line drawn around the six apples on the cloth would describe the same curve as the opening of the compotier. If we replace it by the correct perspective form, the compotier would look banal; it would lose the happy effect of stability and masculine strength.
This magnificent painting, at once subtle and strong, has the grave air of a masterpiece of the museums. Like other masterpieces by young artists who aspire to a grand order, it is a little meticulous and stiff. The idea of the work, its method and devices, are more tangible than in Cézanne’s later art; but this absorbing seriousness and frankness are part of the charm of the work.
❞Any feature makes sense in itself. Now let’s ask: what sense do the transitions between any two features make? Do these make any sense to you:
- “the series of great still lifes of Cézanne’s middle and late periods” → “one of the most obviously formal”
- “one of the most obviously formal” → “secret life” of “objects belonging to different groups”
- “secret life” of “objects belonging to different groups” → “color is beautifully mellow and rich within its narrow range”
- etc.
That the work is “one of the most obviously formal” has absolutely no relation whatsoever to its being a still life or its belonging to some period of Cézanne’s production. Other still lifes in the same period are less “obviously formal.” The quality of being “obviously formal” is really, as far as we and Schapiro are concerned, as contingent as any speculation about what made Cézanne choose this particular work to be one of his “most obviously formal.”
Similarly, the “secret life” of “objects belonging to different groups” has hardly any logical relationship with the “richness of the color within its narrow range.” Nonetheless, the transition doesn’t sound unacceptable. If I ask you to spontaneously review some song, you’ll likely enumerate all the things that go through your head. You will go over the genre, the instruments, the vocals, the themes, the emotions and images, etc. Everything makes sense in isolation: each thing did have an effect on you. But when you focus on the sequence of the ideas, you can only acknowledge that it has an independent quality that can apply to any song. The sequence is of the pick-and-choose variety. What was picked could have been a lot of different things, but the reader of the review would hardly notice anything incongruous if you swapped things in and out. We’re so used to this type of sequences that they just pass through our brain without us noticing their arbitrariness. It doesn’t matter that the context is a formal review or a casual talk.
So the work as painted by the review is an implicit mosaic of independent features. The mosaic is implicit because it is never talked about. It is also more a product of the review than a quality of the work. When you look at the painting, nothing tangible tells you to pay attention first to the spatial groups to which the objects belong, and then to the richness of the color. There is just a silent agreement between the critic and their readers that it is okay for the review to be a stack of features that form a mosaic. Equating the features to “arbitrary abstractions from an individual case,” we could very well quote Nietzsche on this:
What happens when one proceeds differently? For example, if, in the manner of the Parisian novelists, one goes in for backstairs psychology and deals in gossip, wholesale and retail? Then one lies in wait for reality, as it were, and every evening one brings home a handful of curiosities. But note what finally comes of all this: a things added together, a mosaic at best, but in any case something added together, something restless, a mess of screaming colors.
❞This mosaic does make sense in at least one regard, though. A lot of features tend to contain a value judgment: “beautifully mellow,” “how solid the forms,” “would look banal.” And the fact is that they are nicely compounded into an average value of the work as a whole: “This magnificent painting,” “charm of the work,” etc. It is fairly typical of global judgments to appear toward the end of the review, where they best accomplish the review’s goal of selling or underselling the work. Everything that the mere juxtaposition of independent features can’t unify, the value judgment can. It is so imperious that we have since long learned to subconsciously second-guess each feature to be a disguised value judgment. If we read in an album review that the songs are varied, we’re already conditioned to read it as a pro rather than just an objective statement.
Thanks to overall value judgments, the mosaic bears a striking resemblance to the concept of mathematical average. The mathematical sum implied in the average treats its operands interchangeably and fungibly. The summands, whether a 3 or an 8, can be replaced by a sum of 1’s, and each 1 is interchangeable with one another. One can add the price of an apple to the price of a dishwasher: the total sum completely abstracts the respective properties of apples and dishwasher and their relationships (if there is such a thing as a relationship between apples and dishwasher). Any fraction of the price is indifferent to whether it comes from the apple or the dishwasher. From now on, I will choose to use the expression “average value” instead of “overall value” to bring to mind the mathematical concept.
Amnesia with respect to the work’s composition
The relation of necessity between amnesia and value judgment. The PowerPoint cognitive style
The non sequitur relation between the features of an interpretation, or rather their interchangeability, is not a bad turn of fortune. To value the work as a whole, you have to be able to value each feature separately, and ignore the more structured relations present in the work—I call this “amnesia.” The more structured the relations, the more impossible it is to construct a value scale. Think of it from the point of view of a school teacher who has to come up with a grading system. He needs to make up a list of objective, unambiguous criteria. Each criterion awards N points (N can be negative). For the language teacher, this can quickly become tricky as soon as criteria like “style,” “culture,” “ability to reason,” are involved. To be able to measure student performance objectively and accurately, the teacher has to come up with a schematic of independent criteria, like “there must be quotations from at least 3 different authors,” or “there must be at least 3 syllogisms,” and so on. The student’s work is rigorously interpreted according to a list of preconceived criteria. The evaluator turns a blind eye to any substance beyond it. This corresponds to what Edward Tufte calls the “cognitive style of PowerPoint:”
planning and corporate strategy:
“In every company we know, planning follows the standard format of the bullet outline… [But] bullet lists encourage us to be lazy…
Bullet lists are typically too generic. They offer a series of things to do that could apply to any business…
Bullets leave critical relationships unspecified. Lists can communicate only three logical relationships: sequence (first to last in time); priority (least to most important or vice versa); or simple membership in a set (these items relate to one another in some way, but the nature of that relationship remains unstated). And a list can show only one of those relationships at a time.”
❞PowerPoint fares well when the thought process dispenses with these “logical relationships.” When such relationships need to be involved, PowerPoint doesn’t bring anything to the table, and actually confuses any attempts at reasoning, story-telling, or description that is not just enumerative. One the one hand, the expressivity of bulleted lists means that anything can fit into a slide. On the other hand, it also means that, outside its legitimate uses, Powerpoint is easily (and commonly) abused. For example, any phrase can be—and has routinely been—
- laid out in a list
- so that the idea can spelled out more clearly
- or rather, so that the reader can skim more easily between lines without reading everything
At first glance, it seems to fit mosaic-like interpretations perfectly. A feature of the mosaic corresponds to a PowerPoint slide or a bullet point. For example:
- Slide 1: “secret life of objects belonging to different groups”
- Slide 2: “color is beautifully mellow and rich within its narrow range”
The non sequitur corresponds to a slide transition (or the interline space between bullet points). If we had to make it explicit, we would insert a new “transition slide” between slide 1 and slide 2:
- Transition slide 1 → 2: “this is a painting, so obviously, after the geometric considerations, it would be nice to talk about the color”
The non sequitur thus expressed is a symptom of amnesia inherent to value judgments. It is not specific to the highly educated modern art review we just picked up. Value judgments and PowerPoint thinking are just as prevalent in this type of highbrow review as in any kind of review:
Every song presents an intriguing angle or point of view that makes one drawn deeper into its musical arrangement. Haunting melodies are sung with surprising twists that stay with a listener for days after hearing them.
The true testament to a well written song is when other artists cover it. We just might see that happen in the future with some of Lana’s music, where better vocalists can interpret her superbly written melodies for a more thrilling experience. In the meantime, Del Rey’s “Born to Die” album is about to change the present day notion of what pop music should sound like.
❞In typical fashion, the reviewer separates Lana’s music into lyrics, songwriting, singing, atmosphere, arrangement, staying power and genre considerations (he forgot to mention production and packaging, by the way). The mosaic of these features freely coalesces into the average value of “fascinating art pop heights.” These features only relate to each other from their successive evocation. They add themselves to each other, just like apples add themselves to dishwashers. The final value judgment, the “wrap-up,” actually sounds like the convenient expedient that it has always been. Consequently, we can easily derive a PowerPoint presentation:
- Slide 1: Lyrical expressiveness
- Slide 2: Originality
- Slide 3: Atmosphere
- 40’s
- 50’s
- 60’s
- Present day sounds
- Slide 4: Melodies
- Haunting
- Surprising twists
- Slide 5: Wrap-up
- Package of modern hip beats
- Fascinating art pop heights
Verbs seem totally optional. Expanding on this, one could easily contend, against the adversaries of PowerPoint, that the PowerPoint way of thinking predates PowerPoint itself; what seems like a byproduct of PowerPoint is actually a symptom of amnesic reasoning for which PowerPoint is a perfectly adequate technology. Similarly, speed reading technology doesn’t so much favor fast over clear thinking as support a way of thinking both fast and clear because today we have no need for clear thinking that demands time. That’s why competing studies about the relationship between speed reading and comprehension “rate” don’t address the whole story:
In contrast, other findings suggest that speed reading courses which teach techniques that largely constitute skimming of written text result in a lower comprehension rate (below 50% comprehension on standardized comprehension tests) (Carver 1992).
❞If I read the Cézanne or the Lana Del Rey review with a speed reading app, I’m pretty sure that the reviewer would still get their points across pretty clearly because the nature of the information does not depend on linking sentences in logical ways.
- Increase market share by 25%.
- Increase profits by 30%.
- Increase new-product introductions to ten a year.
Implicit in this plan is a complex but unexplained vision of the organization, the market, and the customer. However, we cannot extrapolate that vision from the bullet list. The plan does not tell us how these objectives tie together and, in fact, many radically different strategies could be represented by these three simple points. Does improved marketing increase market share, which results in increased profits (perhaps from economies of scale), thus providing funds for increased new-product development? Or maybe new-product development will result in both increased profits and market share at once. Alternatively, perhaps windfall profits will let us just buy market share by stepping up advertising and new-product development.
❞The writers point out that “to write is to think.” This is likely a moral issue for them: to write is to not stop thinking, it is not being brain-dead. But there is also the possibility that what is written is what was really thought before the writing. At the end of the nineteenth century, Marx already had a PowerPoint slide in mind when he wrote down the major objectives of capitalism:
- Increase capital
- Increase productivity
- Increase surplus value
The “many radically different strategies that could be represented by” the “vision of the organization, the market, the customer”—and the laborer’s exploitation, Marx might add—don’t matter as long as the objectives are reached. Yes, capitalist economy is cold, and its language barren. And PowerPoint does make sense in this regard. This goes on to show that underlying PowerPoint is a very general way of thinking. Even what looks like another PowerPoint parody in the same vein as Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Powerpoint may actually be a faithful representation of the underlying thinking. Eventually, both PowerPoint and amnesic thinking could be said to be mutually responsible for each other. Or, to quote George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language: “The English language becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
