Garbage that they teach you in AP classes

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

I am starting to get sick of my AP class. My teacher is referring to everything as a symbol. The character can be opening a door and the door becomes a symbol of this or a symbol of that. Not everything is meant to represent an idea.

Consider the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It's a work of children's literature. But my AP teacher tried to portray it as some deep allegory where the river represents freedom. Come on, that's like saying the police station in a detective novel represents security.

Absolutely ridiculous.

It sounds like you just want to read emmersively, which is fine, but that's not really what a literature class is for. Maybe your professor is going a little overboard, but at least you guys are talking about the literature, and just not having the professor give you a summary the whole class.

And, are you really asserting that Huck Finn is nothing but a simple children's story? I don't know if the river really represents freedom, but it sure as hell represents something. To think it doesn't is extremely short sighted.

And Huck Finn is more of a satire than allegory. One thing is for sure; it isn't a simplistic work of children's literature.

[Petrarch's Love]

Well... perhaps it is a variation of an idea that is not all that popular at present. The 19th century critics such as Ruskin were certainly enamored of the notion that art had a moral worth. The argument in support of the public funding of many of the great art museums... especially in the US... was commonly made on such grounds, with supporters all but avoiding to suggest that the art museum and the contemplation of art had replaced the role of the church in the spiritual life of the nation.

As something of a sworn follower of Wilde, Pater, Baudelaire, Gautier, Mallarme, and the other adherents of art pour l'art I have long been suspicious of the notion of attaching any moral/ethical/pragmatic use to art. The sophisticated tastes of the rapacious Renaissance lords such as the de Medici, Barberini, Orsini, Borgias, etc... seemingly put such links between art and morality/ethics in the realm of fantasy, and surely the mania for Wagner, Beethoven, Richard Strauss, and old master paintings among the Nazi "elite" drove a stake through the heart of such beliefs. The destruction of the arts under Stalin and his thugs surely undermined a great deal of the artist's willingness to put his or her efforts to work in support of the pragmatic goals of the state.

Neither am I overly fond of the Romantic notion that the artist inherently has a vision which surpasses that of the average mortal... that he or she is a sort of "visionary" who has some greater insight into humanity, morals, politics, etc... The biography of any number of artists surely debunks this myth. The artist is simply one who has the ability to give an aesthetic form to his or her perceptions/ideas/beliefs/thoughts.

Interesting. I didn't really have an especially moral claim in mind when making my little statement, though I can see how such a statement could easily lead to the sorts of moral arguments you allude and object to. I do agree that the claim that there is some inherent moral good associated with art is a highly questionable one. I think that the problem with many social or political aims for art is that they are reducing art, and defenses of art, to what art can offer to very particular social or political ends. Certainly, as you point out, art has been both used and abused many times because the praise of its abilities to elevate or enlighten are taken to mean that art and anything that associates itself with it are, by definition elevating and enlightening. I believe the thinking behind my remark was actually very much opposed to the sort of simplified claim that would imply that art is always connected to moral superiority any more than it is connected to social superiority.

I agree that it is difficult to speak in terms of a single, very clearly defined pragmatic application for art (this is one reason that defending the arts can be an uphill battle at times). Certainly this is true if we take my example of the claim that art can help us understand other people. If a person's goal is to understand the workings of the human mind for the pragmatic purpose of trying to deal with mental health issues or to help identify patterns in human behavior, then a more scientifically oriented field of study such as psychology, or perhaps anthropology, may be of greater direct benefit to these pragmatic aims in that the approach of these fields offers a very useful detachment that helps avoid the messiness of human bias, personal emotional response, etc. At the same time, this very detachment can sometimes be a weakness when it comes to dealing with people in the real world because people are not very detached. One of the many things--certainly not the only thing--that the study of art offers that something that a field like psychology cannot offer, is a recognition and engagement with all that human "messiness" because art--for better or for worse--is a very human product. It's a field of study that explicitly allows for a recognition of the "human factor." This doesn't mean that I would necessarily encourage my students to approach the interpretation of literature in a messy or illogical fashion, but that in attempting to analyze and make sense of a challenging work of art a person is going to acquire a different sort of understanding of others than he or she would performing a psychological case study because the study of art allows you to attend to things that your interest in scientific detachment wouldn't allow in a psychological study. One part of the challenge that both attracts people to and repels them from studying the arts is the fact that the artistic creations of human beings, like human beings themselves, do not fall neatly and predictably into moral or practical categories or applications, that you have to have a certain amount of patience and openness of mind and be willing to invest a certain amount of thought in order to come to any sort of understanding of them.

Of course there is something quite jaded with regard to Wilde's assertion that "All art is quite useless" and I am always moved by Faulkner's Nobel acceptance speech that suggests that art does indeed have a moral worth. Yet this may not be limited to the obvious. Ruskin argued that beauty itself had a moral worth in that it gave a sense of purpose and raised the spirits. Other critics have argued, for example, that the paintings of Matisse and Bonnard created during the Second World War had a moral worth, in spite of their unbridled beauty, sensuality, and almost hedonistic embrace of sensuality, for they offered hope... a belief that the horror of the dark times would end... and in this they may have had as much if not more "worth" than that art which offered up blatant social commentary.

While I do think that one of the great benefits of art is something like the claim of "art pour l'art" and have absolutely enjoyed and appreciated many different sorts of art according to nothing more than that simple criterion, I don't think that it necessarily works very well as a single defense of the arts. One problem is, as you point out, that you can get something like Wilde's "all art is quite useless statement" which, though obviously intended to be humorous, does also reflect a rather sad way a person can start thinking if they get too wrapped up in aesthetic without any other purpose. A different, and probably more common, problem with the argument is the way it may be perceived by non art lovers. I do wonder if the "art for art's sake" argument will work as well to explain the value of the arts to those who do not have an instinctive love of art already, or who don't see the purpose in taking up the challenge of reading difficult texts or listening to complex music. In order to understand "art pour l'art" as a defense it seems to me that you may need to have experienced in some way what art has to offer in order to see that this can be an end in and of itself. I know, for example, that I'll do much better as a teacher--even when starting off with a group of willing learners who were interested enough to sign up for a college literature course--if I start off a lesson by suggesting some of the human issues and feelings a poem can give them insight into than if I begin by talking about the joys offered by an aesthetic experience of the poem. Starting off with the latter will pretty much guarantee me a one on one discussion with the eager student in the front row (possibly a few more if preceded by a spirited dramatic reading of the poem), whereas I have a decent chance of engaging the majority of the class if I lead off by introducing the idea that they are connecting with some portion of the mind of another person in reading this poem, or that it has the potential to give them some insight into, or at the very least a chance to think closely about, the feelings, thoughts and behaviors of people in general. Once I've got that attention and they are open and motivated to get into the poem and make an effort to understand it, then it's much easier to move to a discussion of the aesthetic dimension of the poem with some chance of seeing more than one person in the room really getting it.

Your brief statement offers some insight into a person belief of why we read... why we waste our time with this thing called ART. Some have argued that we read to learn to talk to ourselves. Tarkovsky argued that the purpose of art was a preparation for death. I've always loved Walter Pater's Conclusion to The Renaissance which I have quoted numerous times before and won't quote again (although here is a link for anyone interested: http://www.subir.com/pater/renaissance/conclusion.html ). Anna Quindlen offers something of a similar expression in a much more condensed form: Books are the means to immortality: Plato lives forever, as do Dickens, and Dr. Seuss, Soames Forsyte, Jo March, Scrooge, Anna Karenina, and Vronsky. Over and over again Heathcliffe wanders the moor searching for his Cathy. Over and over again Ahab fights the whale.Through them we experience other times, other places, other lives. We manage to become much more than our own selves. The only dead are those who grow sere and shriveled within, unable to step outside their own lives and into those of others. Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque. Books... music... art are a form of dialog with others... often with those long dead... "An intercourse with spirits," said Kafka. Certainly, I can imagine that learning to understand the beliefs, ideas, feelings, thoughts, perceptions, and even prejudices of others through art may indeed serve as something of a preparation for dealing with such with real human beings.

Yes, I think that the Quindlin quote and Kafka's "intercourse with spirits" probably get much closer to what I had in mind in making my statement. Incidentally, I don't know if we've ever talked about Pater, but I agree that the end to Renaissance is something of a work of art in itself. "Simply for each moment's sake" right? Not a bad way to think of it sometimes.

Perhaps not... but as my Jewish studio-mate points out he is certainly one of the masters of a somewhat unique dark Jewish humor which grew out of the need to laugh at the absurdities and even horrors of life if only to keep from crying. Certainly there is much of that to be found in the experience of teaching in the public schools in an urban setting in America....Again, Kafka offers perhaps the best... or at least the most relevant comment upon the bureaucratic nightmare in any number of his tales, but certainly in The Trial and The Castle. Of course he is merely building upon the tradition of Job: "One day J (Job/Joseph K.) awoke to discover that all that his entire life had been turned upside-down... that all he loved had been taken from him... that he had been placed under arrest for no reason... all at the whim of some nameless superiors whom he could not understand... all for a game...

Well, yes, of course you're right about both the style of/purpose for humor and the Job-like themes. Perhaps Kafka is more comforting than I previously gave him credit for. Clearly there's been a missed marketing possibility here for a title like Chicken Soup for the Kafkaesque Soul maybe?

[Emil Miller]

[QUOTE=Petrarch's Love;807285]Brian--I had no idea you were an author yourself. I'll have to look up the title in the library catalogue and see if it's available for perusal.

Your too true character sketch fits in with a few of my points in an extended response to St. Luke's that I posted the other day but which seems to have dissappeared!

I don't think that your perusal will readily square with your own political viewpoint although I hope you find it interesting nevertheless.

[ScottyOhara]

I feel that most images that an author puts in a work of theirs represents a symbol, look at the era that "Hucklberry Finn" was written and what was going on it the world. Twain put his ideals into his works. However, how a person interprets that image/symbol, is completely different. If you would like a better example of how the image is related to a certain symbol, read "Dulce Et Decoeum Est," ("It is Sweet and Fitting"). It is a WWI poem about dying for ones country.

[stlukesguild]

Interesting. I didn't really have an especially moral claim in mind when making my little statement, though I can see how such a statement could easily lead to the sorts of moral arguments you allude and object to.

Petrarch... don't take me wrong. I merely allude to "morality" as one of the pragmatic uses that many have felt was the purpose of art... and have used as a defense of a criticism of the same.

I agree that it is difficult to speak in terms of a single, very clearly defined pragmatic application for art (this is one reason that defending the arts can be an uphill battle at times).

Definitely! Music and art teachers are continuously challenged with questions as to how we are assisting with the larger, "more important" curriculum of literacy and mathematics as well as with the "all important" state proficiency tests that are the end all-be all measure of academic success. Of course everyone known art and music and literature have no inherent worth in and of themselves.

If a person's goal is to understand the workings of the human mind for the pragmatic purpose of trying to deal with mental health issues or to help identify patterns in human behavior, then a more scientifically oriented field of study such as psychology, or perhaps anthropology, may be of greater direct benefit to these pragmatic aims...

As a brief digression, what are your feelings on the legitimacy of psychology (nor psychiatry)? Harold Bloom has repeatedly suggested that it nothing more than a pseudo-science founded upon the literary inventions of one man (Freud) and in its way not far removed from Islam or Mormonism which are religions founded upon the spiritual writings of one man. Psychological and Freudian theory has so pervade our culture that in many ways it is something of a religion... certainly a belief system. The obsession with the biography of the artist and the notion that the biography is virtually the key to understanding the "meanings" of the art... or vis-versa... that the art can be used to tell us about the artist (ie. the art therapy approach to criticism) at once fascinate yet repulse me as an artist.

At the same time, this very detachment can sometimes be a weakness when it comes to dealing with people in the real world because people are not very detached. One of the many things--certainly not the only thing--that the study of art offers that something that a field like psychology cannot offer, is a recognition and engagement with all that human "messiness" because art--for better or for worse--is a very human product. It's a field of study that explicitly allows for a recognition of the "human factor..."

One part of the challenge that both attracts people to and repels them from studying the arts is the fact that the artistic creations of human beings, like human beings themselves, do not fall neatly and predictably into moral or practical categories or applications, that you have to have a certain amount of patience and openness of mind and be willing to invest a certain amount of thought in order to come to any sort of understanding of them.

Yes... questions of "meaning" and "morality" in art are not always simple to define, categorize, and put in neat little boxes.

While I do think that one of the great benefits of art is something like the claim of "art pour l'art" and have absolutely enjoyed and appreciated many different sorts of art according to nothing more than that simple criterion, I don't think that it necessarily works very well as a single defense of the arts.

Pleasure is always hard to defend... and there will always be those moralists ready to attack anything they suspect of giving pleasure to others.

One problem is, as you point out, that you can get something like Wilde's "all art is quite useless statement" which, though obviously intended to be humorous, does also reflect a rather sad way a person can start thinking if they get too wrapped up in aesthetic without any other purpose. A different, and probably more common, problem with the argument is the way it may be perceived by non art lovers. I do wonder if the "art for art's sake" argument will work as well to explain the value of the arts to those who do not have an instinctive love of art already, or who don't see the purpose in taking up the challenge of reading difficult texts or listening to complex music.

Of course, art pour l'art is not a theory that is so simple as many imagine. Neither Wilde nor Pater nor Mallarme suggested that art should only be about art, or that a pragmatic, moral, social, etc... purpose inherently undermined the worth of art. William Morris proclaimed "Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful". Wilde would build upon this by stating "We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely." Again, Wilde is been wryly humorous... but we should note he does not make clear what his position might be upon making something that is at once useful AND beautiful. Yet just a few lines earlier (in the Introduction to The Picture of Dorian Gray) Wilde states: "The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art." Art pour l'art does not limit art to being about art... but rather it challenges the notion that art should be criticized upon anything but aesthetic grounds as opposed to the older notions that art need to conform to an accepted social/political/religious orthodoxy. For this reason I am less than enthralled by demands for the pragmatic uses of art from the left or the right.

In order to understand "art pour l'art" as a defense it seems to me that you may need to have experienced in some way what art has to offer in order to see that this can be an end in and of itself. I know, for example, that I'll do much better as a teacher--even when starting off with a group of willing learners who were interested enough to sign up for a college literature course--if I start off a lesson by suggesting some of the human issues and feelings a poem can give them insight into than if I begin by talking about the joys offered by an aesthetic experience of the poem.

Of course I might quote Mark Twain (a quote I'll steal from another debate being waged here on Lit Net): "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."

I largely concur with your position as an educator... still I pull back at any suggestions (not that you have made such) that art be used to illustrate a single orthodox position upon these issues or that a work of art should be judged as succeeding or failing dependent upon how well it mirrors the orthodoxy of the time... those of the teacher... or the student. I repeatedly make clear that I don't look to art to reinforce my own beliefs, values, or even prejudices.

Books are the means to immortality: Plato lives forever, as do Dickens, and Dr. Seuss, Soames Forsyte, Jo March, Scrooge, Anna Karenina, and Vronsky. Over and over again Heathcliffe wanders the moor searching for his Cathy. Over and over again Ahab fights the whale.Through them we experience other times, other places, other lives. We manage to become much more than our own selves. The only dead are those who grow sere and shriveled within, unable to step outside their own lives and into those of others. Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.- Anna Quindlen

Books... music... art are a form of dialog with others... often with those long dead... "An intercourse with spirits," said Kafka.

Yes, I think that the Quindlin quote and Kafka's "intercourse with spirits" probably get much closer to what I had in mind in making my statement.

And that is what I understood you to mean. Again... Quindlen's quote equally suggests that she does not look to art as a mans to reinforce her own beliefs, values, or even prejudices. She argues that it offers a means of experiencing... appreciating... understanding... but not necessarily agreeing with the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of others.

Incidentally, I don't know if we've ever talked about Pater, but I agree that the end to Renaissance is something of a work of art in itself. "Simply for each moment's sake" right? Not a bad way to think of it sometimes.

I love Pater's writings which certainly are works of art... almost poetic creations... especially The Renaissance... and I have repeatedly posted the conclusion to this book in offering my thoughts upon why I read... why I value art. I am also especially fond of the section on Giorgione in which Pater argues that all art aspires to the state of music in which form and content are inseparable.

Well, yes, of course you're right about both the style of/purpose for humor and the Job-like themes. Perhaps Kafka is more comforting than I previously gave him credit for. Clearly there's been a missed marketing possibility here for a title like Chicken Soup for the Kafkaesque Soul maybe?

I don't know that he is comforting... any more than is Mel Brooks' laughter at the Inquisition of the Nazis... but perhaps the laughter makes it bearable and does more to undermine those in power who have abused their position than any serious declaration of outrage. Chicken Soup for the Kafkaesque Soul? The man himself would probably have loved it. Quite Kafkaesque.:lol

[Petrarch's Love]

Petrarch... don't take me wrong. I merely allude to "morality" as one of the pragmatic uses that many have felt was the purpose of art... and have used as a defense of a criticism of the same.

I agree that it is difficult to speak in terms of a single, very clearly defined pragmatic application for art (this is one reason that defending the arts can be an uphill battle at times).

Definitely! Music and art teachers are continuously challenged with questions as to how we are assisting with the larger, "more important" curriculum of literacy and mathematics as well as with the "all important" state proficiency tests that are the end all-be all measure of academic success. Of course everyone known art and music and literature have no inherent worth in and of themselves.

Yes, the humanities division is periodically called upon to account for its existence at the university level as well, which often means coming up with the practical job skills a course on Shakespeare is going to give our eager young business majors. Nothing like the soul numbing assessment of the state proficiency test however. Certainly one of the reasons I decided early on not to go the high school teaching route.

As a brief digression, what are your feelings on the legitimacy of psychology (nor psychiatry)? Harold Bloom has repeatedly suggested that it nothing more than a pseudo-science founded upon the literary inventions of one man (Freud) and in its way not far removed from Islam or Mormonism which are religions founded upon the spiritual writings of one man. Psychological and Freudian theory has so pervade our culture that in many ways it is something of a religion... certainly a belief system. The obsession with the biography of the artist and the notion that the biography is virtually the key to understanding the "meanings" of the art... or vis-versa... that the art can be used to tell us about the artist (ie. the art therapy approach to criticism) at once fascinate yet repulse me as an artist.

Is the entire field of psychology/psychiatry legitimate? That could become more than a brief digression. Ah, good old HB. Not surprising that he's so adept at identifying "schools of resentment" when, so far as I can tell, he resents absolutely everything under the sun these days. I don't know that I would call psychology a religion exactly, though I do think that the appeal of it to our times is partly that it is connected with a premise of scientific method or empiricism that, on a very broad level, does seem to inspire a certain degree of faith among many because it seems to offer the comfort of a sure answer.

First of all, while Freud is obviously a founder and key figure in the history of psychology, it would be a mistake to either defend or attach the whole field as though it were still nothing but a monolith of Freudian psychoanalysis when many other approaches and modes of thinking, notably the behaviorist and humanist schools of psychology, have changed, enhanced or in some cases dismissed all together much of the Freudian foundation. I think the several branches of psychology together do offer some very useful tools for both helping and understanding people in a way that other fields do not and, among other things, psychological study has led to things like the classification of mental illness as an illness, which has allowed us as a society to break away from the old bedlam model, or the understanding of something like the stages of developmental ability in young children, which can be useful for helping to form the expectations of both parents and educators. Naturally, like any form of study, there are both pros and cons to the field and its practice, benifits and harm, and it's only going to be useful so long as people regard these theories and ways of thinking as tools rather than inherent truths. It is true that there are some adherents of psychology who do seem to need to be told that the "id" is no more real than the line of the equator around the earth (and as regards that group, Bloom may have a point), but most intelligent and nuanced practitioners in the field are more aware than that.

I find the field of psychology absolutely fascinating, partly because of its necessary blending of scientific and humanistic approaches in studying the human mind. However, in terms of the use of psychology in literary criticism, I am generally not a big fan of psychological lit. studies (and I do see where Bloom is coming from). Partly I think this is because they are written by literary scholars who are, not all, but for the most part, either not very expert or very bad psychologists. Simply reading some Freud does not make one an authority in the field of psychology, but some literary readings seem to treat it as such. The biggest pitfalls seem to be either the treatment of psychological theories or hypotheses as cold hard fact which serve to prove the critic's rather strained reading of his or her text, or the use of Freud in deciphering symbolism like some sort of code book. One begins to wonder, part way through some of the worst kind of Freudian crit, whether everything on the planet is really shaped like a phallus. You get deconstructionism piled on top of reductive readings of Freud and the greatest atrocities ever committed on a poem or novel begin to emerge as words that were once patently innocuous and of little note in a sentence suddenly take on strange and perverted (in many senses of the word) meanings. Perhaps such criticism is more profitable than one would imagine--surely The Freudian Code could outsell Dan Brown's little Art Historical venture?

This said, I don't think it's impossible that the study of psychology can sometimes have things to offer the study of literature and I have seen psychological theories intelligently brought in to bolster or enhance a literary interpretation, or even used as the impetus for opening up some thoughtful questions or insights into a literary text.

As for your excellent question regarding the ability to understand art through biography or biography through art, that naturally opens up onto a range of questions about the importance of the author's life to his or her artistic creation (which branches off into questions of intentionality, ethics, etc. as well as psychology). It is a good question, because I think most people probably would agree on at least some basic level that the artist's life and personality are evident in some way or another in his or her art and that there are things that a person's art can tell its reader/viewer about him or her. Certainly one can tell quite a lot about a person's experience and possibly his or her mind from both the content and the style of his or her writing. The question becomes, what sort of things can we tell about a person from his or her creative written work? To what degree can we make assumptions about an author's life, interior or exterior, from the evidence of a fictional and/or poetic work. For example, I recently wrote a chapter of my dissertation on Chaucer's poem, The House of Fame in which a narrator named "Geffrey" makes an allegorical dream journey. This is a clear instance in which the author is directly inviting a certain parallel between himself and a narrator who not only shares his first name, but happens to also be an aspiring poet. There are certain things in the poem that one can say with some assurance are allusions to Chaucer's biography. For example, the reference to Geffrey the narrator's labor at his "rekenynges" is most likely an allusion to Chaucer's job as comptroller of the wool custom at the time the poem was written. This is a fairly safe sort of connection between biography and work, and one that in this case is also backed by historical evidence. Yet attempts to make more nuanced claims about biography, even in a poem that so clearly invites a certain degree of connection between author and fictional narrator, become quickly complicated and unclear. Partly, of course, this is because fictional claims are often intentionally humorous, ironic, fanciful etc. It would, for example, be a misreading of the poem to say that because "Geffrey" protests he has no interests in fame, that means Chaucer has none. Other claims about an author's personal or interior life are difficult to prove. Can I say that because the narrator is whisked away by a giant eagle and makes a reference to Ganymede that this obviously means that Chaucer was in the closet? Can I say that the fact that the last house he visits is constructed out of humble materials and contains the conversation of those in the lower to middling classes means that Chaucer had a deep interest in the common man? The latter might not be such an outrageous claim given that people of all sorts are the heart and soul of his most famous work, The Canterbury Tales , but is it a more stretched claim if one takes it to mean that Chaucer held what we would now term proto-Marxist views? My attitude toward an attempt to forge a connection between author and work with the use of psychology is much like my attitude toward such attempts by other methods, which is that it must be treated with both a healthy degree of scepticism and a fair amount of other kinds of support along with an informed and sensitive literary reading of the text in question. Social science based interpretation cannot fully take the place of literary based interpretation when it comes to analyzing a poem or other literary text. I think a psychoanalytic/psychological reading of a text is a very difficult thing to do well. It is challenging enough to use a psychological approach to analyze living people we can talk to and get feedback from, and it can be quite hit and miss at that. How much more difficult to attempt to analyze the mind of a person who may be long dead via an artistic creation that was consciously created to have extended elements of fiction and play in meaning?

And that is what I understood you to mean. Again... Quindlen's quote equally suggests that she does not look to art as a mans to reinforce her own beliefs, values, or even prejudices. She argues that it offers a means of experiencing... appreciating... understanding... but not necessarily agreeing with the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of others.

Precisely.

I love Pater's writings which certainly are works of art... almost poetic creations... especially The Renaissance... and I have repeatedly posted the conclusion to this book in offering my thoughts upon why I read... why I value art. I am also especially fond of the section on Giorgione in which Pater argues that all art aspires to the state of music in which form and content are inseparable.

Yes. I came, quite independently, to the conclusion that music was the highest state of art when I was about 15 or 16 (though obviously not with the sophistication or knowledge of Pater) and so it is one of those ideas that has always stayed with me, partly with the sense that it is something almost organically true, as those ideas we first discover for ourselves when very young tend to seem. With what joy a few years later did I encounter a critic like Pater, who expressed so beautifully and with such nuance an idea I had attempted to express so clumsily myself. Sometimes I think that I have amended my ideas in that regard some, that I reject the hierarchy in the arts implied by the claim that they all aspire to the state of music, but then I sit down to play Bach or listen to Beethoven's 9th...and there seems very little question about it.

I don't know that he is comforting... any more than is Mel Brooks' laughter at the Inquisition of the Nazis... but perhaps the laughter makes it bearable and does more to undermine those in power who have abused their position than any serious declaration of outrage. Chicken Soup for the Kafkaesque Soul? The man himself would probably have loved it. Quite Kafkaesque.:lol

Hadn't thought of it, but I think he might approve at that.

[stlukesguild]

I think a psychoanalytic/psychological reading of a text is a very difficult thing to do well. It is challenging enough to use a psychological approach to analyze living people we can talk to and get feedback from, and it can be quite hit and miss at that. How much more difficult to attempt to analyze the mind of a person who may be long dead via an artistic creation that was consciously created to have extended elements of fiction and play in meaning?

This largely touches on the misgivings I have with regard to the notion that we can analyze the artist from his or her biography... or vis-versa. It ignores the fact that no work of art... however complex... conveys more than a small part of the individual who created it. We continually hear of the notion of "self-expression"... but do we actually imagine that The Canterbury Tales or the Sistine Ceiling or The Well-Tempered Clavier express anything more than the mere sliver of who Chaucer, Michelangelo, or Bach were? Again, Whitman's "I contain multitudes" seems prescient. In our discussions on music you expressed some surprise at the portrait of young Bach which I posted... undoubtedly because the image of Bach that we are often presented with is quite different. Many music lovers were outraged at the manner in which Mozart was present in the film Amadeus. While the film certainly played fast and loose with the facts, there is much to support the image of Mozart as rather immature... especially with regard to social relationships. There are any number of letters written by him laden with lewd sexual comments and vulgarities of an almost juvenile manner... and yet he was also able to compose Le Nozze di Figaro Of course I might justify this dichotomy by buying into our resident "musicologist's" claims that someone else wrote it all. Or it may be that the link between the art and the artist is not so easily defined.

There is a contemporary painter named Eric Fischl who came upon the scene in the mid-1980s. He rapidly became known as something of the "bad boy of painting". He earned this reputation for the creation of paintings dealing with psycho-sexual dramas played out in the suburbs... paintings such as:

(edited for content)

... painted on a grand scale, were... and continue to be... quite unsettling. Endless essays were written in which attempts were made to analyze the artist's "deviant" sexual obsessions. Suggestions were made that he had a "mommy complex" (Oedipal) or something equally unnatural. When the artist came to speak at my art school the students were shocked to discover that Fischl was well-spoken, eloquent, intelligent, knowledgeable about art history,
and quite conscious of the "mechanics" that he employed in his paintings... and how they would likely be perceived by others. In other words... the students were surprised to discover that the paintings did not come near to defining the whole of the artist.

Yes. I came, quite independently, to the conclusion that music was the highest state of art when I was about 15 or 16 (though obviously not with the sophistication or knowledge of Pater) and so it is one of those ideas that has always stayed with me, partly with the sense that it is something almost organically true, as those ideas we first discover for ourselves when very young tend to seem. With what joy a few years later did I encounter a critic like Pater, who expressed so beautifully and with such nuance an idea I had attempted to express so clumsily myself. Sometimes I think that I have amended my ideas in that regard some, that I reject the hierarchy in the arts implied by the claim that they all aspire to the state of music, but then I sit down to play Bach or listen to Beethoven's 9th...and there seems very little question about it.

I don't think of it in terms of a heirarchy... but rather with the sense that music, of all the arts, is an art form in which form and content are fully interwoven to the point that they are inseparable. The author deals with a subject and there is the notion that the subject carries a certain weight or frivolity. The same is true of painting... at least until recently. It is impossible to ignore that this painting presents an image of a nude woman, a beautiful landscape, or an apple. The "meaning" comes from both the subject matter an the art... or the manner in which it was presented. But there is no "subject" matter in Mozart's Clarinet Quintet or Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Interestingly enough, music... or at least what we know of what we define as "serious" or "classical music" has the least history. About the earliest music that has come down to us (was given written form in notations) dates from the 10th or 11th centuries AD. Visual art and literature of the greatest merit far predates this... and yet an artist as sophisticated as Paul Klee willingly admitted that painting was immature in comparison to music in that it still depended upon external subject matter or narratives. He imagined that someday one might be able to construct paintings of a collection of "colors" and "textures" and "lines" in much the same manner in which the musician constructs a work of music solely from the abstract elements of sound. Abstract painting... of which Klee was a major innovator... made major steps in this direction... but the results left many (myself included) pondering whether such was the appropriate language for visual art.

[Petrarch's Love]

This largely touches on the misgivings I have with regard to the notion that we can analyze the artist from his or her biography... or vis-versa. It ignores the fact that no work of art... however complex... conveys more than a small part of the individual who created it. We continually hear of the notion of "self-expression"... but do we actually imagine that The Canterbury Tales or the Sistine Ceiling or The Well-Tempered Clavier express anything more than the mere sliver of who Chaucer, Michelangelo, or Bach were?

Absolutely. I think this is another part of the problem with some psychological readings. While a person's art may give us some insight into one facet of that person, it may not be a key facet, and it may be leaving out a lot of other very important characteristics that make up the whole person.

There is a contemporary painter named Eric Fischl who came upon the scene in the mid-1980s. He rapidly became known as something of the "bad boy of painting". He earned this reputation for the creation of paintings dealing with psycho-sexual dramas played out in the suburbs... paintings such as:

... painted on a grand scale, were... and continue to be... quite unsettling. Endless essays were written in which attempts were made to analyze the artist's "deviant" sexual obsessions. Suggestions were made that he had a "mommy complex" (Oedipal) or something equally unnatural. When the artist came to speak at my art school the students were shocked to discover that Fischl was well-spoken, eloquent, intelligent, knowledgeable about art history,
and quite conscious of the "mechanics" that he employed in his paintings... and how they would likely be perceived by others. In other words... the students were surprised to discover that the paintings did not come near to defining the whole of the artist.

I have to confess that I'm a bit surprised that the students were surprised. Though they are obviously weird, unsettling paintings, I've always assumed that the artist who painted those subjects in that way was controlled, perhaps slightly intellectual in his, at least partial, detachment and not terribly amazed that he was a fairly eloquent and knowledgeable speaker. There's a lot of conceptualization going on in those scenes, though there's also a lot of strangeness and it's the detached thoughtfulness, the premeditated character of those paintings, that gives them that especially unsettling sense. Perhaps the surprise was in the assumption that people who exhibit strange or disturbing thoughts will automatically act or look strange and distrubing when the majority of people, regardless of what's going on in their heads, look rather normal? I'll agree that is one drawback about psychological labels like an "oedipal complex": they tend sometimes to create caricatures of the people they describe, or to lead to the assumption that a person is defined wholly by the label of having a "complex."

I don't think of it in terms of a heirarchy... but rather with the sense that music, of all the arts, is an art form in which form and content are fully interwoven to the point that they are inseparable.

Oh yes, I think that is the main point and merit of the argument, but it does tend to rather elevate the position of music n'est pas?

About the earliest music that has come down to us (was given written form in notations) dates from the 10th or 11th centuries AD. Visual art and literature of the greatest merit far predates this... and yet an artist as sophisticated as Paul Klee willingly admitted that painting was immature in comparison to music in that it still depended upon external subject matter or narratives. He imagined that someday one might be able to construct paintings of a collection of "colors" and "textures" and "lines" in much the same manner in which the musician constructs a work of music solely from the abstract elements of sound. Abstract painting... of which Klee was a major innovator... made major steps in this direction... but the results left many (myself included) pondering whether such was the appropriate language for visual art.

Yes, I'll agree that each of the arts may be able to do something in a way that the others cannot. Klee is not, of course, alone in imagining that dependence on external subject matter is somehow hampering for an art form. In the paragone debates of the Renaissance (the period, not the book) this was given explicitly moral valence in debates in which the visual arts were associated with the mortal body and literature or music with the soul (I seem to recall some of the Renaissance Neo-Platonists associating the art, literature and music with the appetitive, rational and spirited souls, respectively, though I can't think where that is.). In emblem literature, the image was commonly referred to as "the body" and the words "the soul," with much attendant moralistic play on the terms. One does tend to wonder if "the body" is being given a bad rap, since clearly there is much that can only be expressed with some reliance on an external subject. Is this objection to external subject matter partly rooted in an older moral attitude toward the mortal matter of this world? Or is it simply that a more abstract form like music allows for an escape from the corporeality of the world that people sometimes long for?

Naturally, if we're going to be really serious, the reason that literature is clearly the greatest of the art forms is that it has the capacity to describe both the external and the internal, the concrete and the abstract. In poetry we have the soul of music and the body of imagery: what more could one ask for?

Anyway, thanks for helping me make this "garbage" thread a little more interesting.

[stlukesguild]

I have to confess that I'm a bit surprised that the students were surprised. Though they are obviously weird, unsettling paintings, I've always assumed that the artist who painted those subjects in that way was controlled, perhaps slightly intellectual in his, at least partial, detachment and not terribly amazed that he was a fairly eloquent and knowledgeable speaker.

I think there was... and continues to be something of an assumption that an artist who deals with emotions or physical sensations is somehow less intellectual than the artist who deals more with ideas. Certainly, in literature, there are many who imagine that Romanticism was less rigorous or intellectually demanding of the artist than some 18th century poetry. By the same token... there is often the prejudice against the "lack of feeling" of classicism... as if Ingres or Mozart were inherently less expressive than Van Gogh or Richard Strauss. If we take a painter like Van Gogh, his entire biography revolves around emotionally charged issues: his "madness", his emotional outbursts, his struggles with Gauguin, his suicide. The image many walk away with is that of a painter just in the throws of inspiration born of his emotional turmoil... not that of a painter who carefully studied the work of the French Impressionists, Japanese Ukiyo-e prints, Rembrandt, and other sources... not that of an artist whose calligraphic brush work owed much to Japanese and Chinese art... not that of a painter whose mastery of color reveals an artist quite conscious of color harmonies.

There's a lot of conceptualization going on in those scenes, though there's also a lot of strangeness and it's the detached thoughtfulness, the premeditated character of those paintings, that gives them that especially unsettling sense. Perhaps the surprise was in the assumption that people who exhibit strange or disturbing thoughts will automatically act or look strange and distrubing...

Yes... isn't the the usual response to the latest mass murderer something along the lines of "He was quiet... kept to himself... we never suspected this..." Of course certain critics are driven to explain why an artist focused upon this or that subject matter. Degas has been repeatedly analyzed as a misogynist (fueled by his having never married) in spite of the fact that his paintings clearly suggest a love of his subjects... his dancers or his women at the millinery shop or his bathers... for who they were... and not for some unrealistic ideal... and in spite of the fact that he repeatedly took on female students including Mary Cassatt. And then there was the highly regarded feminist critic who imagined penises everywhere in Matisse (his goldfish were imagined to be penises)... a clear proof of his misogyny and immature sexual obsessions. Just as with the fundamentalist fanatics who rail about the gay agenda being put forth in Sponge Bob and Teletubbies, I suspect such criticism tells more about the viewer than it does about the artist.

Quote:SLG- About the earliest music that has come down to us (was given written form in notations) dates from the 10th or 11th centuries AD. Visual art and literature of the greatest merit far predates this... and yet an artist as sophisticated as Paul Klee willingly admitted that painting was immature in comparison to music in that it still depended upon external subject matter or narratives. He imagined that someday one might be able to construct paintings of a collection of "colors" and "textures" and "lines" in much the same manner in which the musician constructs a work of music solely from the abstract elements of sound. Abstract painting... of which Klee was a major innovator... made major steps in this direction... but the results left many (myself included) pondering whether such was the appropriate language for visual art.

Yes, I'll agree that each of the arts may be able to do something in a way that the others cannot. Klee is not, of course, alone in imagining that dependence on external subject matter is somehow hampering for an art form. In the paragone debates of the Renaissance (the period, not the book) this was given explicitly moral valence in debates in which the visual arts were associated with the mortal body and literature or music with the soul

Leonardo took part in the debate of art vs poetry and certainly he... along with Cellini, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, and Alberti... all artists who were also excellent writers and quite knowledgeable of the the history of art... and not merely the technical "craft" issues... were influential in the eventual acceptance of the visual arts as one of the "fine arts" and not merely a manual craft.

(I seem to recall some of the Renaissance Neo-Platonists associating the art, literature and music with the appetitive, rational and spirited souls, respectively, though I can't think where that is.).

Actually... I believe that there were those for whom music was even more linked with the physical and sensual. I believe there were various Catholic figures who denounced music as sensuously seductive... and Martin Luther concurred as to its power. Intriguingly, the Lutheran church was commonly quite sparse and lacking visual art... but they had the best music (Bach!)

In emblem literature, the image was commonly referred to as "the body" and the words "the soul," with much attendant moralistic play on the terms. One does tend to wonder if "the body" is being given a bad rap, since clearly there is much that can only be expressed with some reliance on an external subject. Is this objection to external subject matter partly rooted in an older moral attitude toward the mortal matter of this world? Or is it simply that a more abstract form like music allows for an escape from the corporeality of the world that people sometimes long for?

Intriguingly, this prejudice has carried over to the present where we find the development of Conceptual art (following Duchamp) in which the artists sought to negate the physical art object (which they felt connected art to craft... and to the sensual and corporal... as opposed to the intellectual. There are several intriguing books and essays which explore the Modernist obsession with the intellectual and the apparent rejection of traditional, sensual beauty with a notion that the intellectual and masculine was to be seen as inherently more rigorous than the sensual and feminine (Male Culture vs Female Nature?). There were no end of critics who felt that Matisse was at his best where he was closest to Picasso and avoided sensuality (as if Picasso himself were not the greatest sensualist!). One even suspects a similar prejudice at play among those who championed the music of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, Ligetti, Cage, Boulez, etc... while deriding Rachmaninoff or Pucinni or Richard Strauss or Aaron Copland as lacking the rigor and taking the easy route of embracing traditional concepts of beauty and playing upon the emotions.

Naturally, if we're going to be really serious, the reason that literature is clearly the greatest of the art forms is that it has the capacity to describe both the external and the internal, the concrete and the abstract. In poetry we have the soul of music and the body of imagery: what more could one ask for?

Music and pictures.

[mortalterror]

About the earliest music that has come down to us (was given written form in notations) dates from the 10th or 11th centuries AD. Visual art and literature of the greatest merit far predates this... and yet an artist as sophisticated as Paul Klee willingly admitted that painting was immature in comparison to music in that it still depended upon external subject matter or narratives. He imagined that someday one might be able to construct paintings of a collection of "colors" and "textures" and "lines" in much the same manner in which the musician constructs a work of music solely from the abstract elements of sound. Abstract painting... of which Klee was a major innovator... made major steps in this direction... but the results left many (myself included) pondering whether such was the appropriate language for visual art.

You're right, those paintings are better perceived through the ears than with the eyes. Personally, I think all art aspires to the state of perfume. Maybe we can make the Mona Lisa scratch and sniff?

[stlukesguild]

I don't know, mortal... from what I know about art history your idea brings some rather... unsavory... images to mind.

[Petrarch's Love]

I think there was... and continues to be something of an assumption that an artist who deals with emotions or physical sensations is somehow less intellectual than the artist who deals more with ideas. Certainly, in literature, there are many who imagine that Romanticism was less rigorous or intellectually demanding of the artist than some 18th century poetry. By the same token... there is often the prejudice against the "lack of feeling" of classicism... as if Ingres or Mozart were inherently less expressive than Van Gogh or Richard Strauss. If we take a painter like Van Gogh, his entire biography revolves around emotionally charged issues: his "madness", his emotional outbursts, his struggles with Gauguin, his suicide. The image many walk away with is that of a painter just in the throws of inspiration born of his emotional turmoil... not that of a painter who carefully studied the work of the French Impressionists, Japanese Ukiyo-e prints, Rembrandt, and other sources... not that of an artist whose calligraphic brush work owed much to Japanese and Chinese art... not that of a painter whose mastery of color reveals an artist quite conscious of color harmonies.

Perhaps some such assumptions are, in a way, compliments to the artist who has performed his art with such sprezzatura that the hard work looks effortless.

Yes... isn't the the usual response to the latest mass murderer something along the lines of "He was quiet... kept to himself... we never suspected this..." Of course certain critics are driven to explain why an artist focused upon this or that subject matter. Degas has been repeatedly analyzed as a misogynist (fueled by his having never married) in spite of the fact that his paintings clearly suggest a love of his subjects... his dancers or his women at the millinery shop or his bathers... for who they were... and not for some unrealistic ideal... and in spite of the fact that he repeatedly took on female students including Mary Cassatt. And then there was the highly regarded feminist critic who imagined penises everywhere in Matisse (his goldfish were imagined to be penises)... a clear proof of his misogyny and immature sexual obsessions.

Wow, I had missed that one. There are some critics that almost make me ashamed of academia. A goldfish is a goldfish is a goldfish!

Just as with the fundamentalist fanatics who rail about the gay agenda being put forth in Sponge Bob and Teletubbies, I suspect such criticism tells more about the viewer than it does about the artist.

Possibly true. (Just don't suggest any such thing around the wrong academics or we'll be getting reader response psychoanalysis before long!)

Leonardo took part in the debate of art vs poetry and certainly he... along with Cellini, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, and Alberti... all artists who were also excellent writers and quite knowledgeable of the the history of art... and not merely the technical "craft" issues... were influential in the eventual acceptance of the visual arts as one of the "fine arts" and not merely a manual craft.

Ah, Leonardo's Trattato della Pittura. That defense is so great. He even plays with the art as body trope:

"Poetry arises in the mind and imagination of the poet, who desires to depict the same thing as the painter. He wishes to parallel the painter, but in truth he is far removed...Therefore, with respect to representation, we may justly claim that the difference between the science of painting and poetry is equivalent to that between a body and its cast shadow..."

And, of course, music is a merely a "sorella minore", a younger sister to the pittura because music is ephemeral. That's among my favorite statments in his defense:

"The painter makes his work permanent for very many years, and of such excellence that it keeps alive the harmony of those proportional parts which nature, for all her powers, cannot manageto preserve. How many paintings have preserved the image of a divine beauty which in its natural manifestation has been rapidly overtaken by time or death. Thus the work of the painter is nobler than that of nature, its mistress!"

Along with Raphael's epitaph, such a statement certainly suggests we could add "humility" to the Renaissance painter's list of virtues.

Actually... I believe that there were those for whom music was even more linked with the physical and sensual. I believe there were various Catholic figures who denounced music as sensuously seductive... and Martin Luther concurred as to its power. Intriguingly, the Lutheran church was commonly quite sparse and lacking visual art... but they had the best music (Bach!)

That is true. Assessments of music as an art form do tend to run the gamut from claiming it as something divine to shunning it as the path to temptation. Of course it was complex polyphonic music in particular that caused a lot of controversy in the late middle ages: partly because the parts of the music were so complicated that church officials were afraid the words of the service were being obscured, putting an emphasis on the enjoyment of the music (art for art's sake?). They were also very nervous about secular music blending into the sacred, something that a polyphonic arrangement could disguise slightly more cleverly (is that the theme of the latest popular tavern song creeping into the mass?!) rather than understanding the liturgy. Later, some of the protestants weren't too keen on music in general, but I suppose having been raised a good Lutheran has given me a healthy association with music and the divine.

Naturally, if we're going to be really serious, the reason that literature is clearly the greatest of the art forms is that it has the capacity to describe both the external and the internal, the concrete and the abstract. In poetry we have the soul of music and the body of imagery: what more could one ask for?

Music and pictures.

Don't buy Sidney's "speaking picture" argument as a substitute for the real thing, eh?

[Petrarch's Love]

You're right, those paintings are better perceived through the ears than with the eyes. Personally, I think all art aspires to the state of perfume. Maybe we can make the Mona Lisa scratch and sniff?

I don't know, mortal... from what I know about art history your idea brings some rather... unsavory... images to mind.

Our Mortal does bring up a cogent point. What is the place of smell in thorough-going aesthetic theory?

[ennison]

". I really don't thimk that there is meaning in every single thing."

Ah but there is.

[myrna22]

Twain was a highly skilled writer. He wrote Huckleberry Finn as an satirical statement on racism and society. The book is indeed full of symbolism and imagery which is suggestive of these ideas. I think it may be more your teacher's methods and approach to helping you see the subtext in the novel which is the problem, not that her/his interpretation is off the mark or over the top.

Literature is an art form, and like other other art froms, has different levels of meaning. You can read Huck Finn simply for the advernture, or you can find the complexity of meaning woven into the simple childhood adventure story. Your teacher should not be teaching you what is there but how to see and appreciate what is there. When you learn to read literature in a way wherein you, on your own, are finding various levels of meaning, it's like a light goes on and you go 'wow,' this is fascinating. It's like figuring out a puzzle.

The obvious analogy for me is a painting. A beautiful painting can be appreciated purely on the surface level. However, if you learn about how artists work, study other works by the same or similar artists, learn about the tools and techniques artists use to express various ideas, you learn to find greater meaning and depth in any work of art. When you see more in them than is on the surface, it is a great joy, at least to me it is.

Very skilled, highly talented writers never put anything in their work that is not there for a reason and is not somehow supporting, suggesting or illustrating an idea. I believe that is much of the fun, pleasure and joy they find in the the process of writing. I imagine Twain taking great joy and pleasure in the writing of Huckleberry Finn.

If we look, for example, at Heart of Darkness: the river is not just a river. The same goes for Huckleberry Finn: the river is definitely not just a river.