Gotham Diary:
The Broccoli Problem III
25 July 2014
Tante Hannah
Several months ago, I promised readers that I would set out a warning whenever Hannah Arendt was about to be discussed, and I’m keeping that promise now. Hannah Arendt’s essay, “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Political Significance,” is really the key to this entire Broccoli Problem discussion, and the paragraph that I am about to quote was the lightning bolt that cleared a new perspective in my thinking about art. It is the second paragraph of the essay, following a preliminary discussion of “mass culture” as a contradiction in terms (as, of course, it is). When I read the essay the first time, I was not yet acquainted with the special, stinging meaning that the term “society” had for Arendt, but in the event she explains it in the course of the passage.
The question of mass culture raises first of all another and more fundamental problem, namely, the highly problematic relationship of society and culture. One needs only to recall to what an extent the entire movement of modern art started with a vehement rebellion of the artist against society as such (and not against a still unknown mass society) in order to become aware how much this earlier relationship must have left to be desired and thus to beware of the facile yearning of so many critics of mass culture for a Golden Age of good and genteel society. This yearning is much more widespread today in America than it is in Europe for the simple reason that America, though only too well acquainted with the barbarian philistinism of the nouveaux-riches, has only a nodding acquaintance with the equally annoying culture and educated philistinism of European society, where culture has acquired snob-value, where it has become a matter of status to be educated enough to appreciate culture; this lack of experience may even explain why American literature and painting has suddenly come to play such a decisive role in the development of modern art and why it can make its influence felt in countries whose intellectual and artistic vanguard has adopted outspoken anti-American attitudes. It has, however, the unfortunate consequence that the profound malaise which the very word “culture” is likely to evoke precisely among those who are its foremost representatives may go unnoticed or not be understood in its symptomatic significance.
This passage is all the more dense because Arendt is so far from her usual concerns; the arts and “culture” were rarely the focus of her writing. (One suspects that a good deal of the anti-bourgeois sentiment, as well as the cultural analysis, came from Arendt’s husband, Heinrich Blücher, a man who took a much livelier interest in the arts.) But the central idea is very clear: the modernist movement in art was triggered by a rebellious distaste for the audience for art, circa 1900. It wasn’t that artists felt misunderstood; they no longer wished to be understood, not by the likes of the embourgeoised “cultured” class, whether of commercial or aristocratic background, that constituted the gallery-going public.
Arendt does not claim that there is anything new about the “annoying culture and philistinism of European society,” but she does say that “it has become a matter of status to be educated enough to appreciate culture.” In fact, as we have seen, the ability to appreciate culture was a status marker from the first days of the civil princely courts. What changed, by dribs and drabs throughout the Nineteenth Century, was the source of patronage. Such princes as remained on the scene withdrew from patronage of the arts, a matter now delegated to departments of public works and other more or less “democratic” organizations. Art designed to aggrandize living princes, by associating them with historical and mythological figures from the antique past, was replaced by art designed to extol national virtues. Beauty was no longer in the service of princely magnificence.
***
It took artists about a hundred years to realize that they found no meaning in the pursuit of beauty when it was not illuminated by the reflected glare of princely grandeur. What was beauty, without princes to bear it, to be adorned by it? What could beauty possibly mean, if it were destined for the salons of industrial tycoons of no public or patriotic significance? It is as though princely support had always been the meaning of beauty — just as, more obviously, beauty had given consequence to princes.
This is not to say that artists had never been happy to create beautiful things for patrons of less than princely degree. On the contrary, those lesser patrons constituted a long and lucrative slope, the pinnacle of which, reached only by “the best artists,” was royal commission. Over time, as the early modern period gave way to the high, final season of the ancien régime, it often happened that the best artists were not the ones who got the royal commissions. This interesting dissonance gave rise to the cluster of refusés, artists with ideas of beauty that were not courtly. (Preceding them, we have the lambent examples of Vermeer and Chardin.) But the paramountcy of some idea of beauty was not questioned — not so long as princes contributed to the discussion. When the arbiters of beauty no longer counted princes among them, the artists revolted.
What replaced beauty in the modernist aesthetic was, needless to say, not ugliness, but significance. In vulgar terms, modern art raised the question (as earlier art had not), what does it mean? From the start, the question was not an aesthetic one, but a sociological one, involving a sour joke that artists told about the public. Beauty continued to flash occasionally — the habit of pursuing it did not die all at once. But beauty was no longer taught to young artists, and eventually the connection between beauty and art was lost. Without beauty, however, art lost its meaning. The result is today’s circus of “conceptual art,” which has nothing to do with art at all but is instead a branch of graphic literature.
While significance can be reduced to words, meaning, I believe, cannot. The meaning of beauty is a fine example of ineffability. Beauty crumbles in description. It is also the case that, while anyone who asks what a picture of Louis XIV’s family in Olympian drag means is an idiot, the picture is loaded with significance. The placement of Monsieur in relation to his brother is meaningless (no matter where he sits or stands, he is represented as a god), but nonetheless of considerable significance.
Quibbles aside, beauty lost its authority when it ceased to be endorsed by princes and deployed as decoration for princely courts. That was all the authority it had ever had.
I have ventured to make an argument that beautiful art — as well as the Western eye for beauty that was behind it — was created to enhance the positions of great men — princes — and was itself enhanced by princely patronage. It might appear to follow from what I’ve said that beautiful has gone the way of princes. But although no one has taken the place that princes occupied in early modern Europe, it is possible that the greatness that princes were believed to embody may exist, if not in individuals, then in the hearts of modern cities, which are not so very unlike the old princely courts. The contemporary city is also a marketplace for the exchange of influence and benefit. The developers that rule our cities are neither distinguished nor inspiring, but they are, however short-sighted, as effective as Norman conquerors. There is a hope of better breeding for their successors, and every certainty that, once committed to the greatness of their cities, these collegial princes will call beauty back into service.
I have left something very important out of the discussion. Skilled artists retain a monopoly on the production of art, but their creations can inspire the eye for beauty in anyone who spends time with them, so long as that contact is free and candid — not snob-oriented, not “educated,” not courtly. Leading artists may no longer create beautiful artworks, but beautiful artworks continue to beguile spectators from the walls of galleries around the world. This secondary, unintended effect of beauty couches its deepest meaning. It is what inspires people like me to try to make a case for beauty. So far, as David Lehman’s Book Review talk of “the two cultures” makes clear, the case has not been made. My hunch, implicit throughout this essay, is that it is not that a particular argument, as yet not worked out, needs to be made, but that a particular kind of person has to make it.
A member of the elite — one who does not have a broccoli problem.
May I remind you that, if you can read this blog entry with any kind of ease and interest, you are a member of the elite.
Bon weekend à tous!
Daily Blague news update: Silence and Slow Time.