Musings Report #39 9-22-12 What Is Art and Why It Matters
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What Is Art and Why It Matters
Ours is such a crass and unsentimental culture that it takes a certain daring to publicly pose the question "what is art?" and then go on to discuss why it matters.
Charles Murray's latest social critique, "Coming Apart" (kindly sent to me by longtime correspondent Kevin K.) addresses the widening divide between our cultural and financial Elites and the lower-income mainstream. Art falls directly into that deepening abyss as "art" (whatever is defined as art by the mainstream media and convention) is increasingly limited to moneyed Elites as public schools slash art programs and aim whatever is left at making money, i.e. graphic arts, computer design skills, etc.
The mere mention of art in America instantly cleaves a Elite/everyone-else divide, as the mainstream interest in art is limited to the excessive sums paid for famous pieces. Beyond that slice of common cultural interest (wealth and prestige), any serious mention of art is dismissed as pretentious and/or aggressively Elitist.
To avoid this ignominy, Elites engage in "slumming," i.e. loudly proclaim their attendence of mainstream-America events such as NASCAR races, football games, etc. and exclaim how much they enjoyed it (but for different reasons than those given by the non-Elite audience).
It is with these no-win misgivings (discuss art and be cast into the Elite camp, avoid it and enter a gray artless crassness) that I mention a recent discussion with my longtime friend G.F.B., who proposed that by its very nature art stimulates a wide variety of individual responses. In other words, the spectrum of response tells us what is art and what is plain-vanilla marketed for mass consumption: when the audience responses fall within a narrow range, then it is a product designed and marketed for mass consumption. If the film/painting/music/sculpture/building etc. creates a huge diversity of strong opinions, then it is art.
G.F.B. has long held that art is brought to life by people who have no choice but to create it. It is an individual expression that cannot be suppressed or diverted.
I thought this commentary on the response spectrum was extremely insightful, and it seemed to me that this tied into two features of art that I have long pondered: profound novelty, and the magnetism of transcendence.
Take Andy Warhol's famous "tomato soup can" paintings. They certainly sparked a variety of strong opinions, and perhaps some of this emotional power flowed from their profound novelty: nobody had ever seen an "artwork" that stripped away all sorts of pretensions and expectations of technique and erased the sharp hard line between commerce/marketing and "fine art".
If you see a Warhol original, it still retains the power of novelty and freshness--at least to me.
If we ask "why does art matter?", we could stop right here and say that art matters because commerce and culture both demand a constant flow of novelty and "opinion generators." People get bored with the same old products (including politicians), so novelty sells, and nothing sells novelty quite like a media hubbub of strong views, controversy and conflict.
This helps explain why some forms of art lose their immediacy; for example, the stage plays of the 1950s and early 1960s were culturally powerful in their day, but now they seem dated, melodramatic and over-acted. A similar fade occurred in jazz, which has retreated to specialized clubs and audiences. The novelty has been lost, and these art forms no longer generate a variety of opinions outside of narrow critical circles.
I think the desire for transcendence is absolutely core to the human experience. I think that art triggers a sense of wonder or keen interest that then opens the door to that rare sensation of transcendence.
We can also say that art has the capability to permanently transform our understanding and emotional response to an entire creative form. For me, seeing my first Yasujiro Ozu (one of Japan's most revered directors) film in 1994 permanently transformed my understanding of film and its power of transcendence. Each of us probably has a handful of films we place in that category, and the beauty of art is that the range of films with this power is as broad as the individuals who were transported by them.
It's becoming increasingly difficult to find Japanese films by masters that I haven't already seen, but I did find two recently: "Revenge of a Kabuki Actor" by Kon Inchikawa (1963) and "The End of Summer" (1961) by Ozu. Those familiar with Ichikawa's lush "Makioka Sisters" or his wrenching anti-war films ("Burmese Harp" and "Fires on the Plain") will be pleasantly surprised by this film, as it effortlessly combines comic touches with tragedy and revenge.
All of Ozu's familiar concerns with family relationships are present in "the End of Summer," but it also develops a sub-theme on the nature of happiness (indulgence or sacrifice). To me, these films are still fresh, relevant and undated despite being fifty years old. Each ends touching the transcendent.
Market Musings
The conventional view is the Fed's QE-to-infinity money-printing will send gobs of money into equities (stocks) that will keep the stock market levitating higher. Two factors that are generally ignored are:
1. Half the Fed's money-printing goes to buying mortgage-backed securities ($40 billion a month). The Fed bought $1.1 trillion of MBS in 2009 and 2010, and these holdings have already fallen by $300 billion to $800 billion. This results from MBS being paid off or written sown. So The Fed will need to buy over $300 billion of MBS simply to return to its previous level of ownership, and since roughtly $10-$30 billion is paid off every month, the $40 billion a month is not all that much.
2. Money is constantly being destroyed as bad loans are written down and losses are booked. With some $62 trillion in assets in the U.S. and hundreds of billions of dollars in impaired loans outstanding, a very modest writedown of bad debt of $60 billion a month would actually exceed the net "money printing" of the Fed's QE.
Those assuming there is $85 billion a month in "new money" to flow into the stock market are mistaken. The net amount of "new money" added to the base money supply is either negative (thanks to writedowns) or modest--$10 to $20 billion a month. In a $15 trillion stock market and a $15 trillion economy, those are very modest sums. This is certainly not enough to prop up a market that decides to sell off.
From Left Field
A Co-op Model for News? The Hawaii Independent Makes It Profitable -- Could the co-op model offer a robust alternative to the corporate/State model?
"Everyone wants to live at the expense of the State. They forget that the State lives at the expense of everyone." Frederic Bastiat
Thanks for reading--
charles
