I just received an email from Megha Lillywhite, who runs a Substack titled Classical Ideals. In it she invites attention to this piece. A brief appetite-whetter:
To deny one’s moral disease is the primary symptom of it, so those who have the worst judgements of beauty, are the most morally diseased, and the most vociferous in their claims to the idea that judgements of beauty are “subjective”. They claim that what is ugly to one person may be beautiful to another so there is really no meaning to beauty and ugliness anymore. One of the most morally diseased people in the world, Frida Kahlo, expressed her malaise best when she said “La belleza y la fealdad son un espejismo” meaning, “beauty and ugliness are a mirage.” It is because of this disease that Kahlo never made a single work of beautiful art in her life and is another charlatan pushed on the population to demoralise us with the ugliness of her work.
If you have any interest in art and what’s happened to it in recent decades, I exhort you to read the whole piece.
I wasn’t conversant with Frida Kahlo, other than as a Mexican Communist activist. Miss Lillywhite’s evaluation of her as “One of the most morally diseased people in the world” made me sit up and take notice. So I surfed through a few online reproductions of Kahlo paintings, and I came to agree with Miss Lillywhite: Kahlo was an enemy of beauty, in intent and effect.
My thoughts veered from there to a passage from That Hideous Strength:
He had a look at the pictures.
Some of them belonged to a school of art with which he was already familiar. There was a portrait of a young woman who held her mouth wide open to reveal the fact that the inside of it was thickly overgrown with hair. It was very skilfully painted in the photographic manner so that you could almost feel that hair; indeed you could not avoid feeling it however hard you tried. There was a giant mantis playing a fiddle while being eaten by another mantis, and a man with corkscrews instead of arms bathing in a flat, sadly colored sea beneath a summer sunset. But most of the pictures were not of this kind. At first, most of them seemed rather ordinary, though Mark was a little surprised at the predominance of scriptural themes. It was only at the second or third glance that one discovered certain unaccountable details—something odd about the positions of the figures’ feet or the arrangement of their fingers or the grouping. And who was the person standing between the Christ and the Lazarus? And why were there so many beetles under the table in the Last Supper? What was the curious trick of lighting that made each picture look like something seen in delirium? When once these questions had been raised the apparent ordinariness of the pictures became their supreme menace—like the ominous surface innocence at the beginning of certain dreams. Every fold of drapery, every piece of architecture, had a meaning one could not grasp but which withered the mind. Compared with these the other, surrealistic, pictures were mere foolery. Long ago Mark had read somewhere of “things of that extreme evil which seem innocent to the uninitiate,” and had wondered what sort of things they might be. Now he felt he knew.
If that gets you thinking about the degeneration of art from classical subjects and standards to the presentation of mounds of filth in museums, you’re not alone.
I hold to an admittedly minority view: i.e., that there are objective standards for beauty. By implication, there are objective measures by which to discern beauty from ugliness. The prevailing “eye of the beholder” view crashes against Robert M. Pirsig’s demonstration that there is a reality to Quality:
When I say, “Quality cannot be defined,” I’m really saying formally, “I’m stupid about Quality.”
Fortunately the students didn’t know this. If they’d come up with these objections he wouldn’t have been able to answer them at the time.
But then, below the definition on the blackboard, he wrote, “But even though Quality cannot be defined, you know what Quality is!” and the storm started all over again.
“Oh, no, we don’t!”
“Oh, yes, you do.”
“Oh, no, we don’t!” “Oh, yes, you do!” he said and he had some material ready to demonstrate it to them.
He had selected two examples of student composition. The first was a rambling, disconnected thing with interesting ideas that never built into anything. The second was a magnificent piece by a student who was mystified himself about why it had come out so well.
Phaedrus read both, then asked for a show of hands on who thought the first was best. Two hands went up. He asked how many liked the second better. Twenty-eight hands went up.
“Whatever it is,” he said, “that caused the overwhelming majority to raise their hands for the second one is what I mean by Quality. So you know what it is.”
Pirsig, in his “Phaedrus” persona, had touched what C. S. Lewis called the Tao: the absolutes that are the bedrock of reality itself:
The Chinese also speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar. ‘In ritual’, say the Analects, ‘it is harmony with Nature that is prized.’ The ancient Jews likewise praise the Law as being ‘true’.
This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as ‘the Tao’. Some of the accounts of it which I have quoted will seem, perhaps, to many of you merely quaint or even magical. But what is common to them all is something we cannot neglect. It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.
From here I could spin off into an exhausting ramble about things versus events, and what modern physics tells us we can and cannot know, but I’ll spare you. The point is a simple one:
We know them by their qualities,
Which reflect Quality – The Tao – in greater or lesser measure.
Among those real things are beauty and ugliness.
Artists, like the rest of us, are purposive beings. What they do, they do for a reason or reasons. It’s not always easy or pleasant to infer their reasons.
Contemporary visual art has largely turned away from depictive art: i.e., art that attempts to show the viewer something real or plausible, though perhaps in a heightened or dramatized degree. Some “artists” have departed altogether from art as derived from artifice. Have a tale of a museum janitor who “destroyed” an exhibit by such an artist, because he took it to be trash:
“The most delicious news to emerge from the art world this year,” I wrote at the time, “came in October, courtesy of the BBC.”Under the gratifying headline “Cleaner Dumps Hirst Installation,” the world read that “A cleaner at a London gallery cleared away an installation by artist Damien Hirst having mistaken it for rubbish. Emmanuel Asare came across a pile of beer bottles, coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays and cleared them away at the Eyestorm Gallery on Wednesday morning.”I went on to express the hope that Asare would be immediately given a large raise. “Someone who can make mistakes like that,” I noted, “is an immensely useful chap to have about.”
I also daydreamed about this paragon of the cleaning industry being taken on by some large metropolitan paper, the Daily Telegraph, for example, since he clearly demonstrated sounder aesthetic judgment than most of the fellows calling themselves art critics.
Alas, Asare’s good work was soon undone.
John Q. Smith, the Celebrated Man in the Street, coming upon a heap of “beer bottles, coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays” in the street would unhesitatingly classify it as garbage and ask why it hasn’t been cleared away. Put that same detritus on the floor of a museum and he’d all but certainly react the same way. But what happens when the museum puts a placard on it, naming it and attributing it to an artist? Would it change Smith’s reaction? More pointedly, should it?
Smith is either in harmony with the Tao or he isn’t. If he is, garbage is self-evident to him. If he isn’t, he can be bamboozled, propagandized, led by the nose… trained to celebrate offenses against the Tao. Which brings us, via Miss Lillywhite’s observations through Pirsig and C. S. Lewis, capped by Roger Kimball’s tale, to the point I had in mind.
We have been admonished in stentorian tones not to ask “What is art and what is not?” But unless we insist upon answering that question, we cannot discriminate – we cannot rule some things out of consideration as artistic efforts. A firm answer to the question would make it possible. It would also dethrone quite a number of “artists” and the critics that celebrate them.
The above focuses on visual art, as I intended, but similar questions must be asked about other art forms: sculpture, musical composition, storytelling, poetry, dance, and so on.
There’s a snippet from “Individuality,” a poem by 19th Century poet Sidney Lanier, that comes to mind here:
What the cloud doeth,
The Lord knoweth,
The cloud knoweth not.What the artist doeth,
The Lord knoweth;
Knoweth the artist not?
I submit that the question is an imperative one. We must answer it. Why is the artist doing what he does? What is his intent? Does he have an agenda – and if so, is it for good or for ill?
Many an artist of times past spoke of himself as an instrument: a tool being used by some remote power. For some artists, such talk was a form of “humble-brag.” But some were sincere. George Friedrich Handel said something of the sort when an admirer asked what drove him to compose The Messiah.
But there are powers and powers. Might some self-styled artists be tools in the hand of Satan? Might the filth and degradation they present as “art” – all too often celebrated as “transgressive” by a gaggle of critics – be something more than a jest at our expense? Consider the passage I cited from That Hideous Strength. Perhaps Lewis had seen such “artwork;” he wrote about it piercingly enough.
Do such “artists” know what they’re about?
Do they know what they serve, and do they serve it willingly?
And can we the audience afford not to ponder the implications?
Have a nice day.
