Beauty Mark:
Why Bother?
28 October 2014
In this biography of Margaret Thatcher, The Iron Lady, John Campbell claims that his subject “was by no means a philistine.” Then he more or less takes it back.
Yet her taste in the arts was characteristically simple and relentlessly functional. She had no patience with complexity or ambiguity, no time for imagination. She thought art should be beautiful, positive and improving, not disturbing or subversive. … Her idea of the arts was essentially didactic. (335)
This rubbed close to the bone, because while I have no problem with complexity or ambiguity, and in fact insist on plenty of both, I do believe that art ought to be beautiful, or at least inviting. It ought to draw me in, to make me want to see and know more. I should not be wondering, as I find myself doing over and over again whenever I see the paintings of Pablo Picasso, whether some sort of insult is intended, and, if so, directed at whom? Nor, as with Jeff Koons, should I have occasion to ask if the work is meant as a joke in the crudest, least witty sense — like a five year-old making farting noises. Gratuitous jokes and insults tear the delicate fabric of civil discourse precisely because they irritate it for no good reason. They pretend to an interest that they do not possess.
It’s the absence of complexity and ambiguity that makes Picasso and Koons unsatisfying as artists. Picasso’s dun-colored exercises of power over women and Koons’s glaringly plasticized consumerism are inappropriate, not complex or ambiguous. I don’t mean to say that they don’t belong in museum galleries. I don’t think that they belong anywhere. They are wastes of materials. Many of my friends feel the same way, however tacitly they defer to the published opinion of art critics. I was unable to find anyone willing to accompany me to a second viewing of the Koons show. What nonsense, everyone said. Why are you going? I went because I wanted to see the objects with my own eyes, to stand in the same room with them, to breathe the air around them. I wanted immediate contact, unedited by journalists, with these notorious creations. I discovered something that ought not to have surprised me: Koons’s pieces photograph “better” than they look “in person.” Shiny and sparkly on the page of a glossy magazine, they’re rather dingy in fact. What looks like stainless steel or even silver through the lens turns out to be cheap plastic, or its visual equivalent. (The balloon toys are the only exception — they’re as taut and polished as advertised. And people who stand in front of them for any time almost always begin to see them as fun-house mirrors, sources of amusing contortions. The cartoon animals thus disappear.) You cannot tell how drab and cheesy those statues of Michael Jackson and the like really are unless you see them for yourself. They’re unspeakably pathetic! Yes, I wanted to see what being in the same room with them would be like. When I found out, I couldn’t wait to leave.
I refuse to entertain the idea of art as a form of social criticism until everybody who claims to be interested in art stops watching television altogether and (yes, there’s more) clamors loudly for a just and equitable national infrastructure. Some things are just too uncomplicated and unambiguous to require the services of art.
In the novel Never Let Me Go, a controversy boils in the background of the story told by Cathy, one of the cloned children fated to die by serving as an organ donor. It seems that Cathy’s small cohort of clones, unlike all the others in what appears to be a nightmarish experiment in barbarism, are brought up to appreciate art. What is the point of that, ask the special school’s critics. What is the point of that, Kazuo Ichiguro’s deadpan text tempts you to cry out — the children are doomed. But then, so are we all. It is no more cruel to teach Cathy a sense of beauty than it is to teach anyone else, when anyone else might die in a senseless automobile crash long before Cathy makes her first donation. No one is going to make it out of here alive.
The point, in fact, of art is to ask, why bother? Why yield to the invitation of art and try to learn more about it? What is the point of that? The point is that you are breathing and asking. You are alive and curious. My difficulty with Picasso and Koons is that they foreclose these questions with their peremptory, “disillusioned” answers. The work of the late Thomas Kincade, replete with illusion, is just as peremptory and just as objectionable. Hipsters line up to see Picasso and Koons and even Kincade because they know that nothing is less cool than curiosity, than the open display of ignorance. The only thing better than having the right answers to a test is no test in the first place.
***
I suppose that I ought to beg pardon. Even I know that Picasso is a serious, substantial artist, as Koons and Kincade are not. If I’m going to beat him up, I ought to do so separately. Perhaps. But Friday’s experience of his starkly unpleasant neurosis about the bodies of women is still fresh. I’m wondering not why I don’t get Picasso but why everyone else is so complacent about his brutality.The significance of these subhuman portrayals seems to be pathological and perversely anti-erotic. Picasso is not telling us something about women that would fail to see if he did not point it out to us. He is telling us that he is troubled. For too long, I think, his totemic figures have been associated with clichés about the horrors and dislocations of modern times. But they strike a note that no other artist of his time or eminence ever sounds.