Can Art make you a “better person”? Yes, it can. Artists, through their Art, enable us to ‘see’ what had not been obvious before we engaged with the work. I’ve deliberately phrased the response to this (rhetorical) question like this in order to discuss a statement by Adorno, who wrote, “After Auschwitz, no more poetry”. This is striking and, coming from a philosopher of his standing, has been taken very seriously…but it’s nonsense. Adorno’s argument seems to be that, because those running the death camps listened to Schubert and read Goethe then went out to commit atrocities, Art is useless. It has no power, no effect or affect. However, this discounts the sociopolitical construction of the time; it seems to suggest that Art can be ‘good’ regardless of other factors that contribute to the sociopolitical ‘climate’ of the time. This postulates that Art can be read outwith its, and subsequent, time(s) of engagement. A kind of general version of New Criticism (the idea that a poem refers to nothing outside itself). So what we seem to have here is the notion that Art has no influence whatsoever, it appears for a brief moment, is pretty, then vanishes. Art which lasts over time is simply ‘there’, has been ‘picked’ by a certain group, on purely aesthetic grounds.
There are two ideas to unravel here: firstly, that notion of the disconnection between Art and Society then, secondly, that we interpret Art as category in a conceptual framework that has been designed by others.
To deal with the first: How can Art (of any kind) be in some kind of seperate realm, one that exists independently of society? The artist, the makar, is involved in a dynamic, sociopolitical relation with their society, which is the aim of criticism – to decipher dynamic regardless of whether the artist knows it i contained within their work. From this perspective, the life of the artist is an irrelevance, simply a name which we use as the common denominator to discuss the work. What we are not doing is trying to reconstruct the life of the artist using the work.
For Art to exist in this “seperate realm”, the artist would have to sever themselves from society. Quite literally live as a hermit. Another factor which makes this logically impossible is that the artist uses a language: of film/painting/the novel, which pre-exsists them. They might well introduce innovations to this language, but their first ‘steps’ are taken using it (Joyce, Picasso, Manley Hopkins, Godard). As a footnote, one might also mention here the impossibility of a private language (even Burgess relied on the conventions of the novel, as Godard relied on the conventions of film); language necessarily facilitates communication – even a departure from this language relies on the original to give it meaning. The idea of a private language is meaningless. (In much the same way as the old question, “Do you think in pictures or in words?”, when to identify something as a ‘picture’ or in a picture requires a knowledge of language inorder for its to be a something. Can we define a picture without language? I would argue not.)
The second question is the more interesting one (even though I’ve seperated them, they are intertwined): Art as a category in a conceptual framework designed by others. There are two parts to this: (a) Who decides what ‘counts’ as Art? This is a question that has, in one sense, already been answered, by Duchamp, Joyce, Pollock and Cage to name but a few. It is still a question that fascinates philsophers, take George Dickie or Noel Carroll for example – the former argues that setting is crucial (apocryphal stories abound of gallery cleaners disposing of items they took for rubbish), the latter tries to identify ‘qualities’ that a work must possess (always a dangerous game).
The second part of this question, (b), concerns who decides what Art should do, its place in society, the importance it has. In these senses, it is far more connected to the current attitude dominating TUs. What I mean by this is that we are seeing a repeat performance of the marginalisation of Art/artists that occurred in the nineteenth century. By prioritising business, Art is once again pushed to the periphary in an attempt to form the dispositions of generations, suggesting to them that the critiques of society that Art offers are irrelvant, created by those who don’t inhabt “the real world” (defined as the world of economic profit and loss). Art is mere entertainment, a distraction from ‘reality’, the only realm in which values such as justice, fairness and equality can have purchase. Film? Simply an exercise in special effects and stunts. Music? Just background noise unless a controversy can be used to sell more albums or newspapers. Games? The latest convenient scapegoat for violence (look at the progression here, starting with Plato in The Republic. First of all, it’s theatre, then poetry, then theatre again, then film, then TV…now games). Look at Macron: rather than contemplate the idea that the police are violent racists, he has claimed the ‘rioters’ play too many violent games. Perhaps we might better argue that games give us the distillation of life in a capitalist society? His claim is a good example of the “moral panic” that grips people when faced with a new form of Art. However, it also acts to illustrate how afraid the ruling class is of the power of Art, and illustrates why they feel the need to both control and marginalise it.
Murmurs from the Forest 