Leftist Tricks! A Response to John C. Wright's essay

I don't know John C. Wright and I understand that he is a controversial figure in the science fiction world.  I was directed to this essay, "How We've Been Robbed of Beauty by the Left" by a friend who thinks I would be interested in the ideas.  I'm going to try to stick to the ideas in the essay because we clearly see art and art history very differently.  Other writers are also tackling this same subject.


Wright starts his essay:

To be a man means to seek a truth that satisfies the mind, a virtue that sates the conscience, and a beauty that breaks the heart. Deprive a man of any of these things, and he will find neither happiness nor rest.

To a degree, I agree with him here. This is why human beings seem compelled to create.  We use the visual work to express our inner beliefs, to bring them out to where they can be seen by others and shared and discussed (embraced and denied).  But I think that we can't diffuse these three into separate categories.  To a degree--if a work presents a truth that speaks to our understanding of the world, then it is compelling in the same way that beauty is compelling.

Wright seems torn between an idea of "true beauty" and "sublime beauty" and this "Leftist" idea that 

According to the Left, beauty is a matter of taste, and arbitrary taste at that. There is no discussion of taste because to give reasons to prefer tasteful to tasteless things is elitist, nasty, uncouth and inappropriate. To have taste implies that some cultures produce more works of art and better than others, and this raises the uncomfortable possibility that love of beauty is Eurocentric, or even racist. To admire beauty has become a hate crime.

I believe that my idea of beauty is shaped by my own taste.  I like some ways of handling surface better than others--I love the sfumato that draws Correggio's figures from the darkness and gives them such softness.  Cranach's even light and hard edges seem false to me.  I am drawn to some physical types rather than others.  Give me Correggio's Venus over Cranach's any day.  Cranach's elongation of the head and neck, his handling of the transparent drape over the pale skin, his perfect orb breasts were certainly considered beautiful in their day.  But so too were Correggio's handling of skin, shadow and light, and curves and flesh.  In the same period! These two artists were both successful; patrons found their work beautiful at the time.  (History matters to our understanding of beauty)

Lucas Cranach, Venus and Cupid, ca. 1530

Correggio, The Education of Cupid, ca. 1528

 It isn't just a question of "taste" and "tasteless".  It isn't a question of one culture producing "more" works of beauty than others; it is a question of that culture producing more works which appeal to me as a beholder.  I am drawn to European works because I am shaped by that same European culture.  I recognize that there are things to be appreciated in African masks and that they must be considered under the idea of compelling expression.  Do I find them beautiful?  Sometimes.  Do I find them harder to respond to? Often.  Do I find it worthwhile to try to see what the culture felt was beauty in them? Always.

As a relevant aside--Every semester I teach medieval art, some student writes on their evaluation that they wish we had studied more secular art, that all this Christian art is the same.  The fact that the culture prioritized the production of Christian art--putting its economic support behind its values and beliefs--shapes what we have to see now.  Am I drawn to it because I am also a Christian?  Maybe.  But is that iconographic argument going to shut out my appreciation for Muslim geometric ornament?  Probably not.  There we begin to compare apples and oranges.

Wright then gets tries to get us caught in the art versus kitsch controversy.  It's a false controversy.  We all recognize different  venues for decoration.  No one puts the Mona Lisa and wallpaper in the same category of "beauty".  I'm not going to rehearse Clement Greenberg or Walter Benjamin or any of a dozen theorists here.

Wright asserts: "If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then there is no such thing as training the taste."

This is part of what culture does, Mr. Wright.  It trains us to believe certain things are valuable because of an idea of beauty.  This is how we have supermodels--women who embody our cultural ideal of beauty.  (And why none of them look like they were painted by Rubens...)  Our culture trains us in an idea of beauty from the very beginning--colors for genders, Barbies for girls and Batman for boys.  Training the taste is about understanding what a culture values and WHY.

Wright gets at a central tenet of modern artistic theory:

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then anything, anything at all, can be declared to be beautiful merely by the artist. Like God creating light from nothing by the power of His word, the artist creates beauty not by any genius nor craftsmanship, but by his naked fiat. It is beautiful not because he actually created anything, but only because he says so.

But Wright misses the essential dynamic of this equation.  It is only in the viewer's response to the work that the declaration is validated. Willem de Kooning articulates the dynamic really well:

Painting isn’t just the visual thing that reaches your retina, it’s what’s behind it. I’m not interested in ‘abstracting’ or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more and more things in -- drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or an idea. It doesn’t matter if it’s different from mine as long as it comes from the painting which has its own integrity and intensity.

So far, this is all one problem with Wright's argument: beauty isn't easily articulated and agreed upon.

The second problem is the ahistoricity of Wright's discussion.

All of Wright's examples are extremes of artistic discussion, prompted by issues of modernism NOT of issues of beauty.  He cites Duchamp's urinal (1917) as an example of an artist trying to put over this issue of anything being "beautiful".  Duchamp isn't making something "beautiful".  He's making a readymade, a work chosen by an artist to be considered in a new context. And to see Duchamp outside the context of Post World-War I art and the Dada movement, whose aim was to be shocking and to counter expectations of "good taste", or outside the multiple editions of this work, or outside Duchamp's own personality is to fail to understand that moment in history.  You are subjecting historical values to your present moment.  The objectives were totally different.

Among other examples, Wright mentions Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, 1987.

I teach this photograph in my modern art class.  I begin by teaching it without its title.  We talk about the warm colors, the glow of the crucifix, the soft edges, the surface speckles.  The students find it a positive image--often beautiful, Mr. Wright--until you discuss the circumstances of making the photograph.  But as a Catholic, Serrano is addressing the bodily incarnation of human beings and the beauty of the sacrifice of Christ in that human form; Serrano uses his own body to shape that idea.  Serrano describes himself as a Christian artist of today. 

In addition to choosing the most controversial, deliberately un-beautiful works of modern art (such as Piero Manzoni's Artist's Shit 1961, Damien Hirst's A Thousand Years 1990, and Tracy Emin's My Bed 1998), Wright suggests that "Ours is the first generation in the history of Christendom to have no fine arts at all. The public has turned away from the neurotic wallowing in self-disgust that dominates the fine arts and seeks to slake its craving for beauty in the popular arts..."  Nonsense.  John Singer Sargent, the American Impressionist, was still painting in 1915, making him a contemporary of Duchamp.  In the midst of World War I, plenty of artists were trying to make conventionally beautiful works:

Maynard Dixon, Corral Dust, 1915

Louis Comfort Tiffany, 1915

 

Patrick Henry Bruce, Composition I, 1915

It's a question of what you want to believe is "BEAUTIFUL".  Is modern abstraction not beautiful in its undulating shapes and colors (and its desire to communicate artistic feeling without propaganda)?

Wright states: 

At any point before World War One, if you asked any philosopher or intellectual what was the point of art, poetry, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, all of them of each generation all the way back to Socrates would have said the purpose of art is to seek beauty. Socrates himself would have said that by beauty, by the strong love and longing created in the human breast at the sight of something sublime, we are drawn out of ourselves, and are carried step by step away from the mundane to the divine.

Socrates actually said that art is imitative of reality and therefore removed far from the divine.  The ideal of the bed is imitated by the carpenter when he makes a bed and that the painter or poet merely imitates the imitation (Book X of the Republic).  If, as Keats suggests, beauty is truth, then the accurate depiction of the blobfish is beautiful because it is truthful.  You can swing the quotes but "ALL" is simply not true, Mr. Wright, and even our Classical philosophers  had trouble defining beauty.  To bring historicity back into this--World War I changed a lot of things.  And our world is definitively not the world of the Renaissance or the Classical Roman Empire. (Art and politics is tricky--Hitler's support for Aryan inspired figure types? Beautiful from the perspective of line and proportion and color but scary in the ideology it supports.  What about Stalin?)

I find Mr. Wright's degeneration into a class split that reveals the supposed strength of our character reductive and offensive:

Imagine two men: one stands in a bright house, tall with marble columns adorned with lavish art, splendid with shining glass images of saints and heroes, mementos of great sorrow and great victories both past and promised. A polyphonic choir raises their voices in golden song, singing an ode to joy. The other stands in a slum with peeling wallpaper, or a roofless ruin infested with rats, hemmed by feces-splashed gray concrete walls lurid with jagged graffiti, chalked with swearwords and flickering neon signs advertising strip joints. Rap music thuds nearby, ear-splitting, yowling obscenities. A bureaucrat approaches each man and orders him to do some routine and routinely humiliating task, such as pee in a cup to be drug tested, or be fingerprinted, or suffer an anal cavity search, or surrender his weapons, or his money, or his name. Which of the two men is more likely to take a stand on principle not to submit?
Which one will automatically and unconsciously assume that human life is sacred, human rights are sacrosanct, and that Man is made in the image and likeness of God? The man surrounded by godlike images? Or the man surrounded by mocking filth?
Which one, in other words, is more likely to fall prey to the worldview of a dark world cosmos without meaning, without truth, without virtue?

These word portraits are not realities, either one.  The rich are not celebrating their lives in odes to joy; the poor aren't living in the abjection of feces-splashed walls.  These are generic straw men.  What gives Mr. Wright the right to assume that from our slough of despond, despite being surrounded by the filth of our modern lives, we do not aspire to virtue and dignity with a fierceness not experienced by those in the comfort of beauty?