Teaching kids drama, music, and literature, I'm often asserting that there is quality in the arts that one can appreciate whether or not the art is to one's taste. Pushed to explain, I would say that good art will show human invention or ingenuity, that it will display some kind of abstract pattern or design, and in some way these elements will touch our view of our world outside of the art. Work that adds no value of imagination, design, or insight to a found sound - image - object - story is of little or no artistic merit.
For our musical show and tell, we found much to appreciate in all the recordings that students brought in, with one exception. One dismal rap recording was a poor excuse for art, the words being formulaic, the music being merely repetitive -- no design, no development, no buildup, the insight nil, and the emotion a generalized attitude. It was like listening to bathroom graffiti. But John Cage's infamous "piano" piece called "Four Minutes" (and some seconds) is a work of art, because the performer's not touching the keyboard for four minutes makes the audience aware of the sounds of their world as a kind of music in a way that they had not done before. I'd be willing to argue that it's not exactly musical art, but it's good theatre.
A professor of philosophy at Princeton, Alexander Nehamas, has recently published a book to reopen discussion of beauty, a concept that's been dismissed as an old-fashioned relic of social elites who made their ideals of aesthetic beauty something that had to be studied in prep schools and universities to appreciate. "What is art?" became a rhetorical statement instead of a question, and John Cage knock-offs in all genres chipped away at the idea that any human creation of any sort could be judged better in any way than something else.
The reviewer of that book emphasizes a relationship between beauty and love that I didn't find when I went to an essay by Nehamas. The reviewer, Joseph Phelan, begins with an anecdote: Rainer Maria Rilke was so taken by a fragment of Greek sculpture -- torso of Apollo -- that he thought to himself, "You must change your life." Phelan goes on to write about his own experiences "loving" works of art in such a way that he wants to live with them, spend time with them, think about them, explore side avenues.
This is what Nehamas also talks about, that art is beautiful when it attracts us by pleasure. This isn't the kind of pleasure that pornography promises, something that swells then loses its attraction the way chewing gum does. Instead, it's the pleasure of anticipation. This is where earlier writers on art, such as Immanuel Kant, Matthew Arnold, and Harold Bloom get it wrong, along with many many teachers I know: interpretation will not get you to appreciate the beauty. The beauty attracts first, promising depth, and then you want to dive in. Interpretation is part of the diving.
Thus, those of us who find the works of Shakespeare, Sondheim, Updike, or John Adams beautiful will read every word we can find about them, and will chat about them endlessly in web sites.
Here's how Nehamas says it, several ways:
To find something beautiful is to believe that making it a larger part of our life is worthwhile, that our life will be better if we spend part of it with that work. But a guess is just that: unlike a conclusion, it obeys no principles; it is not governed by concepts. It goes beyond all the evidence, which cannot therefore justify it, and points to the future. Beauty, just as Stendhal said, is a promise of happiness. We love, as Plato saw, what we do not possess. Aesthetic pleasure is the pleasure of anticipation, and therefore of imagination, not of accomplishment. The judgment of taste is prospective, not retrospective; the beginning, the middle, but never the end of criticism.
Nehemas imagines that art can become something shared, enjoyed, and the basis of a community. "Harold Bloom describes a solitary encounter, but like everyone who is in love with a book or a picture, he can’t wait to tell us about it. In telling us about it, he participates in a community he is in the very process of creating." Nehamas adds, "It is a dangerous game, pursuing the beautiful. You may never be able to stop." -- because exploring some good work of art makes you want more, and to appreciate what's different in other works, widening your understanding and community. This is what Sondheim did for me, pointing me to composers that influenced him (Ravel, Gershwin, Reich), to artists who included him in their repertoire (jazz singer Cleo Laine - who took me to a whole new stable of composers), and to poetry as a branch of lyric writing.
This brings me again to the radio interview I heard a couple of weeks ago, and wrote about here in this blog. It was a discussion with Christopher Hitchens, who's touring with his book GOD IS NOT GREAT. He showed himself to be a wise guy, not wise. He did point me to Philip Larkin, whose work I've been enjoying ever since. But his critique of religion begins from reading Scriptures as a fundamentalist would. When the interviewer pointed this out, Hitchens snapped back, "It's either God's word, or what use is it?" He thinks that ends the discussion, but of course, it's only a start.
Hitchens thinks religion is lies, and art is good. I'd simply retort, "Religion is art." That's not to say that Christianity and the Bible are fiction. The Bible isn't a book, but a library, and it contains legends, poetry, law documents, official histories, informal histories, letters, sermons, and song lyrics. All of these, taken together, are also the testimony of a people whose primitive concept of themselves as a tribe with an exclusive tribal god gradually enlarged to see themselves as agents of one, only, all-inclusive God. It's fact, not fiction, that they saw themselves that way, and continue to do so since the canon was established. Millennia of art, including the participatory drama that is liturgy, have developed from the growth of that community. Can Hitchens see that a leap of faith is an act of imagination? Add Nehamas to the picture, and see also, faith is a pleasure that changes lives and builds community.
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