Mastering Mastery

In Love's Shadow, Paul Bové puts significant pressure on a perennial question of aesthetic theory: does aesthetics need the notion of artistic mastery? Or is this a vestige of 19^th century aestheticism, connoisseurship, the mythos of genius? This is implicitly to ask: is the proper object of aesthetic theorizing, the artwork or the artist? Is aesthetic theory, especially after Adorno, capable of defending "imaginative achievement" as Bové puts it (302), or are we resigned to thinking of the art work as a crass product (a symptom of cultural productivism, technicity, instrumental thinking) of the culture industry?

Bové raises these questions in the context of appreciating the criticism of John Berger with regard to the artist Rembrandt: "Importantly, 'mastery' is different when we speak of the master and the mastered. As Berger has it, the master 'needed to recognize his vision for what it was, and then to separate it from the usage for which it has been developed'" (302). Rembrandt, an indisputable master in Bové's judgment, is master insofar as the norms of painting are eluded in the artist's compositional schemes. Mastery has not to do with fitting oneself to the rules of practice but practicing outside the boundaries of expertise, which as we will see, is the threshold of experiencing the work as an experience in its own right. It is not the adequate representation of an experience. The skills of the master are not slavish with respect to the protocols of mastery.

Kant's chapter on the genius in the third critique comes to mind. Kant stipulates that "genius is a talent for art not for science, where we must start from distinctly known rules that determine the procedure we must use in it." That is to say, "…it manifests itself not so much in the fact that the proposed purpose is achieved in exhibiting a determinate concept, as, rather in the way aesthetic ideas, which contain a wealth of material [suitable] for that intention, are offered or expressed: and hence it presents the imagination in its freedom from any instruction by rules…"(186).

Bové's account of Rembrandt's mastery taps into the rich vein of Kantian thinking about art, without unduly involving himself in or falling prey to Kant's complicated epistemic systematizing. Bové's idea that "the critic must understand the antagonism in the relation between the master and the mastered materials"(301-2), aptly reminds us that aesthetic judgment risks obscuring the human capacities for "poiesis," without which we are obliged to face the kind of human tragedy that is epitomized in the Benjaminian nemesis of allegory, the impossibly utopian harbinger of apocalypse and ruination. Bové's choice of Rembrandt as the exemplar of his defense of poiesis leans heavily on the category of the Baroque. The Baroque is a theoretical/judgmental category within which Rembrandt's oeuvre is unjustly confined according to Bové. That said, Bové, I think, misses a chance to distinguish the Benjaminian baroque from 16^th and 17^th century painting practices themselves which the viewer standing before the picture plane, I would argue, must see differently. I will try to make clear why the difference matters.

What is at stake for Bové in rescuing Rembrandt from the Benjaminian Baroque is "Imaginative intelligence" itself (302). A critical blind spot of Benjamin's Origin of the German Trauerspiel, according to Bové, is the author's tragic and tragedy-perpetuating, faith that failure of the powers of representation (epitomized by high Renaissance perspectivism) with respect to human experience, relegates us to "messianism or utopian melancholy" (305). Bové wants us to appreciate how the Benjaminian Baroque, understood as a spiteful distortion of the no longer achievable, ephemeral Renaissance ideal, stands for incapacity rather than acknowledging the more durable truth of poiesis. Poiesis, after all, happens in time infinitum. I might say that the profoundly human time of poiesis is form giving without succumbing to formula and its attendant morbid nostalgia.

However, much I agree with Bové's critique of the category of the Baroque, as Benjamin retails it, I think that taking Benjamin's view so narrowly, obscures a fuller understanding...