This article appeared in the July/August 2007 issue of
The American Spectator. To subscribe to our monthly print
edition, click here.
A CENTURY AGO MARCEL DUCHAMP signed a urinal with the name “R.
Mutt,” entitled it “La Fontaine,” and exhibited it as a work of
art. One immediate result of Duchamp’s joke was to precipitate an
intellectual industry devoted to answering the question “What is
art?” The literature of this industry is as empty as the
neverending imitations of Duchamp’s gesture. Nevertheless, it has
left a residue of skepticism. If anything can count as art, then
art ceases to have a point. All that is left is the curious but
unfounded fact that some people like looking at some things, others
like looking at others. As for the suggestion that there is an
enterprise of criticism, which searches for objective values and
lasting monuments to the human spirit, this is dismissed out of
hand, as depending on a conception of the artwork that was washed
down the drain of Duchamp’s “fountain.”
The argument is eagerly embraced, because it seems to emancipate
people from the burden of culture, telling them that all those
venerable masterpieces can be ignored with impunity, that reality
TV is “as good as” Shakespeare and techno-rock the equal of Brahms,
since nothing is better than anything and all claims to aesthetic
value are void. The argument therefore chimes with the fashionable
forms of cultural relativism, and defines the point from which
university courses in aesthetics tend to begin-and as often as not
the point at which they end.
There is a useful comparison to be made here with jokes. It is
as hard to circumscribe the class of jokes as it is the class of
artworks. Anything is a joke if somebody says so. A joke is an
artifact made to be laughed at. It may fail to perform its
function, in which case it is a joke that “falls flat.” Or it may
perform its function, but offensively, in which case it is a joke
“in bad taste.” But none of this implies that the category of jokes
is arbitrary, or that there is no such thing as a distinction
between good jokes and bad. Nor does it in any way suggest that
there is no place for the criticism of jokes, or for the kind of
moral education that has a decorous sense of humor as its goal.
Indeed, the first thing you might learn, in considering jokes, is
that Marcel Duchamp’s urinal was one — quite a good one first time
round, corny by mid-20th century, and downright stupid today.
Works of art, like jokes, have a function. They are objects of
aesthetic interest. They may fulfill this function in a rewarding
way, offering food for thought and spiritual uplift, winning for
themselves a loyal public that returns to them to be consoled or
inspired. They may fulfill their function in ways that are judged
to be offensive or downright demeaning. Or they may fail altogether
to prompt the aesthetic interest that they are petitioning for.
THE WORKS OF ART that we remember fall into the first two
categories: the uplifting and the demeaning. The total failures
disappear from public memory. And it really matters which kind of
art you adhere to, which you include in your treasury of symbols
and allusions, which you carry around in your heart. Good taste is
as important in aesthetics as it is in humor, and indeed taste is
what it is all about. If university courses do not start from that
premise, students will finish their studies of art and culture just
as ignorant as when they began.
It is true, however, that people no longer see works of art as
objects of judgment or as expressions of the moral life.
Increasingly, many teachers of the humanities agree with the
untutored opinion of their incoming students, that there is no such
thing as a distinction between good and bad taste. But imagine
someone saying the same thing about humor. Jung Chang and Jon
Halliday recount one of the few recorded occasions when the young
Mao Tse-tung burst into laughter: it was at the circus, when a
tight-rope walker fell from the high wire to her death. Imagine a
world in which people laughed only at others’ misfortunes. What
would that world have in common with the world of Moliere’s
Tartuffe, of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, of
Cervantes’ Don Quixote, or Laurence Sterne’s Tristram
Shandy? Nothing, save the fact of laughter. It would be a
degenerate world, a world in which human kindness no longer found
its endorsement in humor, in which one whole aspect of the human
spirit would have become stunted and grotesque.
Imagine now a world in which people showed an interest only in
Brillo boxes, in signed urinals, in crucifixes pickled in urine, or
in objects similarly lifted from the debris of ordinary life and
put on display with some kind of satirical intention — in other
words, the increasingly standard fare of official modern art shows
in Europe and America. What would such a world have in common with
that of Duccio, Giotto, Velazquez, or even
C�zanne? Of course, there would be the fact of
putting objects on display, and the fact of our looking at them
through aesthetic spectacles. But it would be a degenerate world, a
world in which human aspirations no longer find their artistic
expression, in which we no longer make for ourselves images of the
ideal and the transcendent, but in which we study human debris in
place of the human soul. It would be a world in which one whole
aspect of the human spirit — the aesthetic — would have become
stunted and grotesque. For we aspire through art, and when
aspiration ceases, so too does art.
Now it seems to me that the public space of our society has in
fact begun to surrender to the kind of degradation that I have just
described. It has been taken over by a culture that wishes not to
educate our perception but to capture it, not to ennoble human life
but to trivialize it. Why this is so is an interesting question to
which I can offer only an imperfect answer. But that it is so is
surely undeniable. Look at the official art of modern societies —
the art that ends up in museums or on public pedestals, the
architecture that is commissioned by public bodies, even the music
that enjoys the favors of the public subsidy machine — and you
will all too often encounter either facetious kitsch, or
deliberately antagonizing gestures of defiance towards the
traditions that make art lovable. Much of our public art is a
loveless art, and one that is also entirely without the humility
that comes from love.
IT DOESN’T FOLLOW that taste and judgment are things of the past.
It doesn’t follow that art has vanished from our lives or has lost
its meaning. All that follows is that art is being driven from the
public arena. It is no longer out there that you find it,
but in here, in foro intero. Art is being privatized, with
each of us striving to remain faithful to visions of beauty that we
are no longer confident of sharing outside the circle of our
friends. One cause of this is the democratic culture, which is
hostile to judgment in any form, and in particular to the judgment
of taste. The prevailing attitude is that you are entitled to your
tastes, but not entitled to inflict them on me.
Most American students come to college with this attitude, and
are appalled to discover that there are people who do not merely
disagree with their tastes in music, art, and literature (not to
speak of clothes, language use, and social relations) but actually
look down on their tastes, as inferior to some putative
standard. This is very hard to take, and is one cause of the
widespread endorsement of cultural relativism in its many forms —
since cultural relativism simply lifts aesthetic experience out of
the world of judgment altogether, and therefore neutralizes good
taste as a value. And the preference for art that desecrates the
human image or the public space is connected with this fear of
aesthetic judgment. By espousing what is deliberately unlovely and
unlovable, you make judgment ridiculous, my judgment as much as
yours.
It seems to me, however, that the democratic attitude is in
conflict with itself. It is impossible to live as though there are
no aesthetic values, while living a real life among real human
beings. Manners, clothes, speech, and gestures — all require
careful attention to the way things look. In every sphere of human
life, from laying a table to giving a funeral speech, aesthetic
choices are both necessary and noticed. Without them we cannot
solve the vast problem of coordination that arises when a myriad
private individuals crowd into a single public space. Hence, in the
democratic culture, aesthetic judgment begins to be experienced as
an affliction. It imposes an unsustainable burden,
something that we must live up to, a world of ideals and
aspirations that is in sharp conflict with the tawdriness and
imperfection of our own improvised lives. It is perched like an owl
on our shoulders, while we try to hide our pet rodents in our
clothes. The temptation is to turn on it and shoo it away.
Here we see another motive for the desire to desecrate. It is a
desire to turn aesthetic judgment against itself, so that it no
longer seems like a judgment of us. This you see all the
time in children — the delight in disgusting noises, words,
allusions, which helps them to distance themselves from that adult
world that judges them, and whose authority they wish to deny. That
ordinary refuge of children from the burden of adult judgment has
become the refuge of adults from their culture. By using art as an
instrument of desecration they neutralize its claims: it loses its
authority, and becomes a fellow conspirator in the plot against
ideals.
