What value is there is Art and its history?

Philosophy Forums Psychology and Mind
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Part 1.

I have just been reading Treasures of World Art by Nicholas Fry, published by Hamlyn — worthy credentials, if not quite on a par with other tomes on the subject where arrays of experts with impressive academic credentials have been gotten together to produce a VERY WORTHY TOME. I picked it up from a charity stall for a pound, so it will be no surprise that the publication date is 1975 — a bit of a dusty tome, and it has that dusty smell of books that have sat on a shelf for many years.

The first thing I notice is something I have come to expect when comparing non-fiction texts from the contemporary world with those of half a century or more ago: the modern world has become far more wordy and long winded and full of jargon and fuzzy and difficult to pin down — you might be forgiven for thinking that they do not WANT to be pinned down ie rather than pinning their true colours to the mast and facing their critics they prefer to play ‘hide and seek’; actually, it is not even that. They ‘shape-shift’ rather than holding their ground and defending their position — and the other thing that one finds in the modern texts is that they have picked up a lot of science and so talk as if they know something about human beings and the mind and what, therefore, might motivate people — which they do not. You will find no insight into human nature in science.

The admirable brevity of these older texts makes it easier to see what is going on — and it is going on still, but the jargon and long windedness and psychobabble create an obscuring mist that makes it harder to see — which is kind of the point: obscuring mists allow them to get away with all sorts of nonsense — and NONSENSE IT IS!!!

The boys have gone around collecting all the rubbish they can find from the past and have collected as much data on each piece of rubbish that they can, and have organised the whole into a logical structure and called it the History of Art.

It reminds me of the way Americans talk with such confidence and, in their case, brevity on a subject and yet say nothing of interest or importance. For example: take a trip with some experts to do some whale watching, and when a whale is sighted, the expert will give a spiel such as, ‘these are xxxxxx whales, which spend x months on average in these waters every year. They weigh an average of y tonnes and eat and average of z tonnes of krill each day, taking in an average of xxxx krill in every mouthful ……………’. This is science, a load of useless data that sounds impressive — always they go for impressive, so they will make a BIG THING of the numbers, the BIG numbers, like how many krill a whale swallows in a single mouthful, and how far it is to the other side of the universe……………

So this is Art History: a load of useless data that is dressed up to sound impressive.

They’re away in cloud cuckoo land.

They remind me of a nephew of mine who at the age of about 8 or 9 took an interest in submarines. In a fairly short time he could reel off all the data on every submarine ever built, down to the numbers of rivets used in its construction!!! Why should people be so impressed that a boy should stuff his head so full of such useless information ……… of course, one thing is that they have no idea about the human mind, and do not realise that you cannot abuse it with impunity, and that filling it with such useless data is to overload it with rubbish at the expense of the more important stuff that it needs. Also, a mind full of rubbish becomes as difficult to manage as a house full of rubbish — it can get so as you cannot get anything done at all.

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(What value is there is Art and its history?)

Part 2.

And the art that is paraded before us is admired primarily for its skill and perfection ie for its sterility. Skill is easy and is a dead end. Perfection is actually anti-creative. Perfection, often expressed as ‘attention to detail’ creates a critical mind-set that works against creativity, and against having fun; it makes art work instead of play.

In fact, the qualities that are so admired are those that lead to the mind that is revealed by Shelley in his poem Ozymandias of Egypt: the poem describes a the remains of a huge statue of a king that has been found in the desert. It is ‘impressive’, the kind of thing that museums would give their eye-teeth to possess, great art from the ancient world:

“On the pedestal these words appear:

`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

You worship at the alter of High Art, like Shelley did, and you end up with a mind like a desert: a mind that is carpeted with sand (bits of data) but empty of anything solid and visual except for a few scattered remains of works of the past, and a mind that is as hard to live in as the desert. If you live well you will have a mind that is as full, and varied and fertile as a rain-forest, and a mind that is as effortlessly creative.

Humans like colour, variety, imperfection, chaos, fun; humans do not thrive on ‘impressive’, attention to detail, order, or having to memorise quantities of data. Yet Art History promotes the latter at the expense of the former.

Then there is the adulation of the human body, not so evident in modern art where abstraction has become the norm, but replaced by concern for the ‘human condition’, or emotions etc; I heard a serialisation on the radio recently of a novel (Jack Aubrey novels by Patrick O’Brian) about a royal navy sailing ship getting into severe trouble in the southern oceans and having, in desperation, to try and find a tiny, uncharted island in that vastness of sea. It was some feat of seamanship, and incredibly interesting to read about how it was done, and about the details of life aboard such a ship. However, in line with modern preoccupations, the serialisation omitted all the interesting stuff and concentrated solely on the fact that there had been a woman aboard who was getting ‘friendly’ with one of the crew. They missed so much of the book that one could hardly even tell that it was other than a modern sea trip with two people having an affair.

That is typical. Western society has come to focus so exclusively on people that it has all but lost sight of the fact that there is a world out there and that people are not really that interesting without any context for their existence. Western society, and academics writing the History of Art well exemplify the sickness, is turning the world into a suffocating, emotionally over-heated, colourless, barren wasteland of sensory deprivation.

Is there any value in studying the history of art? Is there any value in collecting it into museums and art galleries?

Here are my answers to these questions:

All the History of Art tells ME is stuff about our culture, past and present: that it is ruled by posturing, self-important lads who are little short of idiot-hood, understand nothing, and who, above all, desire power.

As to visiting museums and art galleries: they are part of the environment, like churches and caves and woods and oasis and villages etc, and I like to see and experience the world and all its variety of environments.

PS: readers often complain that my posts lack coherence, that they are rambling and ‘all over the place’. I agree, but there is a point: when one gets to recognise the symptoms of some disease (in this case the ‘laddish’ mind-set) in one ‘animal’, then one is equipped to look for it elsewhere. What’s more, if one finds the ‘laddish’ mind-set has come to dominate one area of our society then it makes sense to suspect that the disease lies deeper, and if the disease does lie deeper, then one will expect to see it manifest all over the place. So, what I am doing is looking behind things, seeing society as a whole and seeing the driving forces and rulers of our society, not just the individual bits. If you are going to have a hope of UNDERSTANDING our society then you must do this.