How
Do You Know It's Good?
Marya Mannes
Do
you love art? Can you tell which art pieces are good and which
are not? Are there any standards for judging arts? Read the
following article and see how Marya Mannes answers such questions.
Suppose there were no
critics to tell us how to react to a picture, a play, or a
new composition of music. Suppose we wandered innocent as
the dawn into an art exhibition of unsigned paintings. By
what standards, by what values would we decide whether they
were good or bad, talented or untalented, successes or failures?
How can we ever know that what we think is right? For the last fifteen or twenty years the fashion
in criticism or appreciation of the arts has been to deny
the existence of any valid criteria and to make the words "good" or
"bad" irrelevant, immaterial, and inapplicable.
There is no such thing, we are told, as a set of standards,
first acquired through experience and knowledge and later
imposed on the subject under discussion. This has been a popular
approach, for it relieves the critic of the responsibility
of judgment and the public of the necessity of knowledge.
It pleases those resentful of disciplines, it flatters the
empty-minded by calling them open-minded, it comforts the
confused. Under the banner of democracy and the kind of equality
which our forefathers did not mean, it says, in effect, "Who
are you to tell us what is good or bad?" This is the same
cry used so long and so effectively by the producers of mass
media who insist that it is the public, not they, who decides
what it wants to hear and see, and that for a critic to say
that this program is bad and this program is good is purely
a reflection of personal taste. Nobody
recently has expressed this philosophy more succinctly than
Dr. Frank Stanton, the highly intelligent president of CBS
television. At a hearing before the Federal Communications
Commission, this phrase escaped him under questioning: "One
man's mediocrity is another man's good program."
There is no better way of saying
"No values
are absolute." There is another important aspect to this philosophy
of : It is the fear, in all observers
of all forms of art, of guessing wrong. This fear is well
come by, for who has not heard of the contemporary outcries
against artists who later were called great? Every age has
its arbiters who do not grow with their times, who cannot
tell evolution from revolution or the difference between frivolous
faddism, amateurish experimentation, and profound and necessary
change. Who
wants to be caught
with an error of judgment
as serious as this ? It is far safer, and certainly
easier, to look at a picture or a play or a poem and to say "
This is hard to understand, but it may be good," or simply
to welcome it as a new form. The word "new"—in our country
especially—has magical connotations. What is new must be
good; what is old is probably bad. And if a critic can describe
the new in language that nobody can understand, he's safer
still. If he has mastered the art of saying nothing with exquisite
complexity, nobody can quote him later as saying anything.
But all these, I maintain, are forms of abdication
from the responsibility of judgment. In creating, the artist
commits himself; in appreciating, you have a commitment of
your own. For after all, it is the audience which makes the
arts. A climate of appreciation is essential to its flowering,
and the higher the expectations of the public, the better
the performance of the artist. Conversely, only a public ill-served
by its critics could have accepted as art and as literature
so much in these last years that has been neither. If
anything goes, everything goes; and at the bottom
of the junkpile lie the discarded standards too.
But what are these standards?
How do you get them? How do you know they're the right ones?
How can you make a clear pattern out of so many intangibles,
including that greatest one, the very private I?
Well for one thing, it's fairly obvious that
the more you read and see and hear, the more equipped you'll
be to practice that art of association which is at the basis
of all understanding and judgment. The more you live and the
more you look, the more aware you are of a consistent pattern—as universal as the stars, as the tides, as breathing, as
night and day—underlying everything. I would call this pattern
and this rhythm an order. Not order—an order. Within it
exists an incredible diversity of forms. Without it lies chaos—the wild cells of destruction—sickness. It is in the end
up to you to distinguish between the diversity that is health
and the chaos that is sickness, and you can't do this without
a process of association that can link a bar of Mozart with
the corner of a Vermeer painting, or a Stravinsky score with
a Picasso abstraction; or that can relate an aggressive act
with a Franz Kline painting and a fit of coughing with a John
Cage composition.
There is no accident in the fact that certain
expressions of art live for all time and that others die with
the moment, and although you may not always define the reasons,
you can ask the questions. What does an artist say that is
timeless; how does he say it? How much is fashion, how much
is merely reflection? Why is Sir Walter Scott so hard to read
now, and Jane Austen not? Why is baroque right for one age
and too effulgent for another?
Can
a standard of craftsmanship apply to art of all ages, or does
each have its own, and different, definitions?
You may have been aware, inadvertently, that craftsmanship
has become a dirty word these years because, again, it implies
standards—something done well or done badly. The result
of this convenient avoidance is a plentitude of actors who
can't project their voices, singers who can't phrase their
songs, poets who can't communicate emotion, and writers who
have no vocabulary—not to speak of painters who can't draw.
The dogma now is that craftsmanship gets in the way of expression.
You can do better if you don't know how you do it, let alone
what you're doing.
I think it is time you helped reverse this
trend by trying to rediscover craft: the command of the chosen
instrument, whether it is a brush, a word, or a voice. When
you begin to detect the difference between freedom and sloppiness,
between serious experimentation and egotherapy,
between skill and slickness, between strength and violence,
you are on your way to separating the sheep from the goats,
a form of segregation denied us for quite a while. All you
need to restore it is a small bundle of standards and a Geiger
counter that detects fraud, and we might begin our tour of
the arts in an area where both are urgently needed: contemporary
painting.
I don't know what's worse: to have to look
at acres of bad art to find the little good, or to read what
the critics say about it all. In no other field of expression
has so much double-talk flourished, so much confusion prevailed,
and so much nonsense been circulated: further evidence of
the close interdependence between the arts and the critical
climate they inhabit. It will be my pleasure to share with
you some of this double-talk so typical of our times.
Item one: preface for a catalogue of an abstract
painter:
"Time-bound meditation experiencing a life;
sincere with plastic piety at the threshold of hallowed arcana;
a striving for pure ideation giving shape to inner drive;
formalized patterns where neural balances reach a fiction."
End of quote. Know what this artist paints like now?
Item two:
"...a weird and disparate assortment of material, but the
monstrosity which bloomed into his most recent cancer of aggregations
is present in some form everywhere..." Then, later. "A gluttony
of things and processes terminated by a glorious
constipation."
Item three: same magazine, review of an artist
who welds automobile fragments into abstract shapes:
Each fragment...is made an extreme of human
exasperation, torn at and fought all the way, and has its
rightness of form as if by accident. Any technique that requires
order or discipline would just be the human ego. No, these
must be egoless, uncontrolled, undesigned and different enough
to give you a bang—fifty miles an hour around a telephone
pole...
"Any technique that requires order of discipline
would just be the human ego." What does he mean—"just
be?"
What are they really talking about? Is this journalism? Is
it criticism? Or is it that other convenient abdication from
standards of performance and judgment practiced by so may
artists and critics that they, like certain writers who deal
only in sickness and depravity, "reflect the chaos about
them"?
Again, whose chaos? Whose depravity?
I had always thought that the prime function
of art was to create order out of chaos—again, not the order
of neatness or rigidity or convention or artifice, but the
order of clarity by which one will and one vision could draw
the essential truth out of apparent confusion. I still do.
It is not enough to use parts of a car to convey the brutality
of the machine. This is as slavishly representative, and just
as easy, as arranging dried flowers under glass to convey
nature.
Speaking of which, i.e., the use of real materials
(burlap, old gloves, bottletops) in lieu of pigment, this
is what one critic had to say about an exhibition of Assemblage
at the Museum of Modern Art last year:
Spotted throughout the show are indisputable
works of art, accounting for a quarter or even a half of the
total display. But the remainder are works of non-art, anti-art,
and art substitutes that are the aesthetic counterparts of
the social deficiencies that land people in the clink on charges
of vagrancy. These aesthetic bankrupts ...have no legitimate
ideological roof over their heads and not the price of a square
intellectual meal, much less a spiritual sandwich, in their
pockets.
I quote these words of John Canady of The
New York Times as an example of the kind of criticism which
puts responsibility to an intelligent public above popularity
with an intellectual coterie. Canaday has the courage to say
what he thinks and the capacity to say it clearly: two qualities
notably absent from his profession.
Next
to art, I would say that appreciation and evaluation in the
field of music is the most difficult. For it is
rarely possible to judge a new composition at one hearing
only. What seems confusing or fragmented at first might well
become clear and organic a third time. Or it might not. The
only salvation here for the listener is, again, an instinct
born of experience and association which allows him to separate
intent from accident, design from experimentation, and pretense
from conviction. Much of contemporary music is, like its sister
art, merely a reflection of the composer's own fragmentation:
an absorption in self and symbols at the expense of communication
with others. The artist, in short, says to the public: If
you don't understand this, it's because you're dumb. I maintain
that you are not. You may have to go part way oreven halfway
to meet the artist, but if you must go the whole way, it's his
fault, not yours. Hold fast to that. And remember it too when
you read new poetry, that estranged sister of music.
When
you come to theater, in this extremely hasty tour of the arts,
you can approach it on two different levels. You
can bring to it anticipation and innocence, giving yourself
up, as it were, to the life on the stage and reacting to it
emotionally, if the play is good, or listlessly, if the play
is boring; a part of the audience organism that expresses
its favor by silence or laughter and its disfavor by coughing
and rustling. Or you can bring to it certain critical faculties
that may heighten, rather than diminish, your enjoyment.
You can ask yourselves whether the actors
are truly in their parts or merely projecting themselves;
whether the scenery helps or hurts the mood; whether the playwright
is honest with himself, his characters, and you. Somewhere
along the line you can learn to distinguish between the true
creative act and the false arbitrary gesture; between fresh
observation and stale cliché; between the
play that is pretentious drivel and the avant-garde play that
finds new ways to say old truths.
Purpose and craftsmanship—end and means—these are the keys to your judgment in all the arts. What
is this painter trying to say when he slashes a broad band
of black across a white canvas and lets the edges dribble
down? Is it a statement of violence? Is it a self-portrait?
If it is one of these, has he made you believe it? Or is this
a gesture of the ego or a form of therapy? If it shocks you,
what does it shock you into?
And what of this tight little painting of
bright flowers in a vase? Is the painter saying anything new
about flowers? Is it different from a million other canvases
of flowers? Has it any life, any meaning, beyond its statement?
Is there any pleasure in its forms or texture? The question
is not whether a thing is abstract or representational, whether
it is "modern" or conventional. The question, inexorably,
is whether it is good. And this is a decision which only you,
on the basis of instinct, experience, and association, can
make for yourself. It takes independence and courage. It involves,
moreover, the risk of wrong decision and the humility, after
the passage of time, of recognizing it as such. As we grow
and change and learn, our attitudes can change too, and what
we once thought obscure or "difficult" can later emerge as
coherent and illuminating. Entrenched prejudices, obdurate
opinions are as sterile as no opinions at all.
Yet standards there are, timeless as the universe
itself. And when you have committed yourself to them, you
have acquired a passport to that elusive but immutable realm
of truth. Keep it with you in the forests of bewilderment.
And never be afraid to speak up.
(2 395 words)
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