To the Rescue of Art

To the Rescue of Art Editorial I One thing that seems to occur, and perhaps ought to occur as one gets older, is that one’s thinking changes location. In the building that houses our interests one begins to move toward the atticand the basement, away from those central floors where the practical life and the issues of the day are being tackled. The attic-that is the lofty place where philosophy dwells. To my mind, the move to the attic is not a change of occupation. Philosophy is not really a discipline of its own. Rather it isthe superstructureof each discipline-in our case that of the practice and the history of art and the study of the functions of art in society and in the life of the individual. The pursuit of each discipline implies questions that have a way of remaining unexamined or of being taken care of in a slipshod, irresponsible way. Take as an example the question: What is art? People are reluctant to deal with it. They find it embarrassing, unnecessary, unanswerable. Yet, inevitably, the question is being answered by implication in every artist’s or art historian’s or critic’s practical conduct; and if the answer is not good enough, neither will be the conduct it inspires. Problems likethese shed their particular embodiment as one’s thinking moves to the attic. They stare you in the face, naked like a model without its clothes. They are what it all comes down to in the last analysis. And the time for that last analysis gets to be now or never. Then there is the basement of the building that houses our interests. The basement isthe foundation on which it all rests. Unless that foundation is sound,the whole busy production on the central floors is shaky, questionable, exposed to catastrophic crises. And here again fundamental questions, philosophical principles, constitute the building blocks. When they are of cheap material and sloppily put together, they make for danger upstairs. Thus after you have labored on those central floors for many years without drawing explicit conclusions from the danger signs, the time comes when like a thoughtful home owner you take a flashlight and descend to the basement to knock at the walls and the supports. Most of us will agree that in our particular area of work and at this particular time those supports sound hollow. In practice as well as in theory the very existence of art, its basic nature and values, is being disputed. It is a disease, easily diagnosed but not so easily understood in its causes. I cannot do more here than point to someof the symptoms. In the practiceof the art world the most significant sign is that anything goes. Some very good art is being made in our time, but, as always, much is mediocre. This, it seems to me, is no longer acknowledged. Not that the average criticlikes everythinghe sees,but the fact that something is too simple, too shallow, too easy, or too vulgar is no longer a cause for disapproval. This decay of the standards of value pervades our civilization. How much can be done about this illness I do not know, but one of its consequences is a more manageable evil, one we may be able to combat. The decay of standards has led to the theoretical assertion that aesthetic value is a mere illusion. The notion that art can be good or bad is supposed to have no basis in fact or,at best, to rely on purely subjectivejudgment. This view has devastated theoretical reasoning likethe Black Death,to the extent of being practically unopposed. It is easy to find examples of this fashionable attitude. I will refer to a recent article I came across in Leonardo,written by David Carrier and entitled “On the Possibility of AestheticAtheism: Philosophy and the Market in Art” (Leonardo 18;35-38, 1985).Carrier describes usefully what he calls the cynical approach to aesthetics, without, he says, either adopting or rejecting it himself. He fails, however, to present the opposite position and thereby stacks the cards in a manner that prevents him from truly clarifying the issue. Aesthetic...