Art & Perception

One lesson we can draw from the 20th C. is that total freedom for the artist is not the path to happiness. Never have there been fewer constraints on what an artist can do, and never has the life of the artist (relative to other professions at least) been so wretched.

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The drawbacks of total freedom should not surprise a physicist or an athlete. Certain mathematical problems are difficult or impossible to solve without a sufficient number of constraints. Without the constraints of rules, sports would be chaos.

We can see evidence for the longing for constraints in the most important painting movement of our time: the Painting a Day phenomenon. What is the explicit purpose of this movement? It is a pure statement of constraint. There must be one painting per day. This constraint severely limits what an artist can produce on a canvas. The enthusiasm with which artists are joining this movement demonstrates the hunger for constraints, for simplicity, for order. After all, you can’t rebel against nothing, can you?

But you don’t need to become a Painting a Day painter to have constraints. All you need to do is think about your own situation as an artist and examine what constraints you already have. And then, of course, to appreciate them and make the most of them.

One year I had no studio for a few months. I needed to work at home, so I drew in my sketchbook each day instead of painting. The work that I designed then I later painted and sold for a lot of money. The constraint of having no studio, temporarily, in fact helped me a great deal.

In order to make the most of your constraints, you need to be aware of what they are. Everyone has limitations of time, space, and talent. The particular mix that you have will influence what you do — much as will the mix of your painting medium or selection of your palette. The practical acceptance of constraints is the key to using the constraints in a positive way. It helps to remember that more opportunity and freedom would not necessarily help you.

So, let’s get to work . . .

If you want to be a scientist, you really should study at a university and get a Ph.D. If you want to be a doctor, you should go to medical school. But if you want to be an artist, will art school help you? Only about half of the successful artists I know went to art school; furthermore, of those who did go to art school, their formal education seems only incidental to their success. What do you think? Is art school a good investment?

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In the Renaissance, an artist apprentice received training from a master by working on the master’s projects. In the most important art how-to book of all time, Cennino Cennini wrote “submit yourself to the direction of a master for instruction as early as you can; and do not leave the master until you have to.” The master had a strong incentive to teach, because good assistants were essential for fulfilling a major commission. Teaching was thus not separate from the master’s own creative work. Instead, it was critical to the productive success of the studio. The result was that apprentice and master collaborated in the process of artistic discovery.

A related method is used for teaching at the highest levels of education today. For example, a graduate student in biology will do research in a specific laboratory, under guidance of a recognized scientist. Only a small part of the student’s education comes through classroom teaching. The scientist has a strong incentive to teach the craft of working in the laboratory to a select group of students, because a group effort is necessary for major research projects. When scientists complain about the burdens of teaching, they are referring to teaching in the classroom. Good scientists know that teaching in the laboratory is essential to success in research. Graduate students thus learn to be scientists in the laboratory, collaborating in the process of discovery.

Art education today is a different story. Artists get paid to do “classroom” teaching at art school. But teaching in this mode does not contribute directly to the artist’s own work. Instead, it becomes an impediment. In art, professors and students do not generally collaborate in the process of creation and discovery in the same meaningful sense as they do in science. The reason probably has to do with our modern notions of artist: the artist (and therefore, the art professor) is supposed to be a loner in the process of creation. Scientists are not burdened with this notion, any more than were artists of the past (which is to say, of course the issue of credit is important, but it is not debilitating to the field).

I did not go to art school, but I had a valuable art education in my high school with one of the most remarkable art teachers in America — Walter Bartman. In his classroom, and on frequent painting excursions, there was an exhilarating sense of collaborating in a process of discovery. An interview with “Mr. Bartman” will appear soon [is here] on Art & Perception.

The satire, “What is Art?” has brought in some intriguing comments. Auspicious commented on public funding of art:

I think that it is also worthwhile remembering the economic drivers. A lot of public money is spent on the arts (yes, I know one can argue whether this is not enough, or too much, but either way it is a lot) and a lot of the big galleries in the major cities are publicly funded.

That means that the average joe is being taxed to allow the purchase and storage of art that is of no interest to them. Worse than that, the art purchased with the money is discussed in terms that seems specifically designed to exclude them.

This could have caused the art elite to direct taste toward the tastes of the average person (to get more money to spend), but it has gone the other way. Art needs to be wacky and not understandable to make it seem special enough to go on taking money from the people who are excluded from the discussion. The art establishment needs to be able to say ‘you will never understand, so trust us, and give us the money anyway.’ If questioned hard enough by the popular press they need to answer in language opaque enough to make people with more interesting things to do give up.

It is a sad fact that the very people who think that art in the Tate is a joke are those who are paying for it.

This comment agrees with the basic premise of the satire, and takes the discussion further. Historically, “public money” has been critical for the arts. Auspicious’ comment shows a potential danger for contemporary art. If art is held in contempt by the ordinary person, then there will be less motivation to support the arts. In a democracy, this suggests that incomprehensible art will dilute support for spending public money on the arts.

I find this argument compelling. However, I’d like to hear some opposing views. Any members of the art elite out there who want to argue either 1) that the “art elite” is a false concept, and hence the satire and the above comment are based on a false premise, or 2) that the “art elite” is in fact essential for art?

I want to expand my blog Art & Perception as a book. Lisa Hunter, author of The Intrepid Art Collector, gave me some excellent advice. [Note, this post was written before Art & Perception became a group blog]

Karl Zipser: We bloggers write what we want to write and act as our own publishers. When you want to publish a book, how does this affect what you can write about?

Lisa Hunter: Writers don’t like to hear this, but commercial publishers really want evidence that the book will sell. They’ll want to know if the author has a “platform” (i.e. whether he/she gives seminars, has a TV show, writes a syndicated newspaper column, etc.) They’ll also want to know what the readership demographic is, and what opportunities for PR exist. And they’ll want a “competition analysis,” which lists all similar books and explains why this one is different or better. At big commercial publishers, the marketing people can be just as important as editors in deciding what books to publish!

Karl: Are books about art a special case with respect to publishing?

Lisa: A major factor with art books is how expensive they are to produce. Color illustrations raise the printing costs substantially (and this is on top of reproduction rights fees.) Oftentimes, a book proposal is shot down because the book would cost so much that few people would buy it. I know this from personal experience. Recently, I had a great idea for a coffee table book that several editors loved, but no one could see how it would be profitable. Sigh.

Karl: Tell me about the writing process itself. Did you write your book first and then look for a publisher?

Lisa: Non-fiction is unique, in that you don’t have to write the book until you have a contract with a publisher. Acceptance is typically based on a proposal, outline and sample chapter. An agent who believes in your project — and who knows what publishers are looking for — is a HUGE help in getting editors to take the project seriously.

Karl: So you get the agent and editors to believe in you with a great proposal, etc, and then . . .

Lisa: Of course, once you have the contract, you actually have to write the book, and if you’ve never written anything 300+ pages before, that can be intimidating. When I was writing The Intrepid Art Collector, I was lucky because the chapters were all stand-alone. I could work on them one-at-a-time, as if I were writing magazine articles. After a while, I had my 80,000 words. For a more narrative type of book, an outline is critical to stay on track. And when writer’s block and deadlines build up stress, I recommend chocolate.

I wrote this satire months ago but never posted it. I was worried about antagonizing some people in a way that could harm my future prospects in the art world. But today Edward Winkleman and Art News Blog both raise the question, “What is Art?” in different ways. I thought, what the heck…

What is Art?

In our time, the answer to this question is under the control of the art elite. The answer to the question is simple:

“Art” is x,

where x is a variable. The value of x is approximately “something that an ordinary person could never understand.”

The reason that x is a variable, and not a constant, is because its value must continually change. If ordinary people begin to understand what x is, then the value must change, so that they do not understand what x is. The reason for this is simple also: If people understood what x was, then they could answer the question “What is Art?” themselves, and there would be no need for the art elite. Thus, the art elite must continually change x, as a matter of survival.

Even though ordinary people cannot understand art (by definition), they can still see it. True, the art elite has developed a form of art called “conceptual art”, but even this is given a physical manifestation. The art elite has not yet, to my knowledge, succeeded in selling tickets to an empty museum.

To continue, ordinary people can see art. But what they see puzzles them, and often they do not like it. In general people are content with things they do not understand, if they like them. They may even be tempted to think they understand the thing that they like. In order to prevent this presumption, the art elite has found it necessary to further refine the definition of Art. Thus,

“Art” is x,

where x is something an ordinary person could never understand, and also something that an ordinary person does not like.

It is clear that the interests of the art elite do not coincide with those of the ordinary person. An ordinary person would like to be able to go to a gallery or a modern art museum and see something he or she likes, and perhaps even understands. The art elite must not allow this to happen.

How can we escape the power of the art elite? It might seem like a good idea to abolish the word “art” altogether. Consider the following situation: you are in a modern art museum, and a member of the art elite points to a pile of plastic dog shit on the floor and says, in a reverent tone, “This is Art.” If we abolished the word “art”, then the sentence would be reduced to “This is . . .” The member of the art elite would be left with an embarrassing silence. And what would be left except a plastic pile of dog shit?

To abolish the word “art” would throw the art elite off balance, but it would not take away their power. The reason is that “art” is only a word, and abolishing the word does not abolish the concept it refers to. It would only take a short time for the art elite to confer and settle upon a new word or symbol (perhaps even x) to refer to the same meaning (or lack of meaning) that the word “art” used to refer to. And we would be no better off than before, except that we would have x museums instead of art museums.

The best way to deal with the art elite is to attack the very source of their power, the control over the question, “What is art?” The way to do this is to make a new definition:

“Art is what [fill in your name here] likes to look at.”

This might seem too simple to be useful. But please, take a moment to think of the implications.

Here is a statement attributed to Michelangelo in Vasari‘s Lives of the Artists that I keep thinking about:

I’ve always had only too harassing a wife in this demanding art of mine, and the works I leave behind will be my sons. Even if they are nothing, they will live for a while. It would have been a disaster for Lorenzo Ghiberti if he hadn’t made the doors of San Giovanni, seeing that they are still standing whereas his children and grandchildren sold and squandered all he left.

I am reading The Merchant of Prato by Iris Origo. The life of the merchant (Francesco di Marco Datini: 1335-1410) was around the same time that Cennini Cennino wrote his Il Libro dell’Arte. This was a period when artists were considered craftsmen who worked for specific commissions. What I found interesting was this example of an order by the merchant for work to be done in Florence in 1373. It is not a direct commission to an artist, but a letter requesting a partner to order the pictures:

A panel of Our Lady on a background of fine gold with two doors, and a pedestal with ornaments and leaves, handsome and the wood well carved, making a fine show, with good and handsome figures by the best painter, with many figures. Let there be in the centre Our Lord on the Cross, or Our Lady, whomsoever you find–I care not, so that the figures be handsome and large, the best and finest you can purvey, and the cost no more than 5 1/2 or 6 1/2 florins. Also a panel of Our Lady in fine gold, of the same kind, but a little smaller, the cost 4 florins, but no more. These two panels must contain good figures: I need them for men who would have them fine.

In some sense these seem like constraining directions that would limit the artist’s creativity. But in fact, the carving and gilding aside, the descriptions given for these pictures could apply to any of hundred of paintings made over several centuries in a wide array of styles.