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The Great Art Delusion

Has Life a Share in the Fortunes of a Fighting Word?

BY ALEXANDER BLACK

HEN the new old quarrel about bad good plays (or was it good bad plays?) flamed again in February, and the factions scurried and huddled, here screaming for more morals and there sobbing for more obscenity, one word arose above the uproar with an immemorial persistence. Sometimes it rallied, sometimes it infuriated. It could be the gonfalon and it could be the goat. In In whatever image, it remained, as ever, the symbol of an eternal confusion. It was the word ART.

To repeat the word here is to challenge friendships. The poor noun bleeds.

When there are no more armies or klans or congresses, when the crusading spirit has faltered to its final spark, when rebellion has become senile, Art, if properly brandished, will stir every surviving instinct for violence. Yet one good fighting word deserves another.

In the midst of an earlier crisis, the Mayor of New York was quoted as referring to "art-artists," and there was a burst of joyous derision, leveled not merely at the mayor, but at all who lived in that outer darkness from which the mayor's critics assumed that he had spoken. It was permissible to speak of "dirt farmers" or of different sorts of engineer, but art

artists, it seemed to be felt, expressed a funny discrimination. That the mayor had hit upon a piece of perhaps useful terminology did not appear to be suspected. Least of all was there any apparent feeling that artists, artcritics, or art connoisseurs, might have been responsible for a situation making some such mark a matter of practical necessity to the man in the street, if not to men in city halls or even in art museums.

My first sharp experience of a rebellious discrimination came to me many years ago during my initiation as "art manager" of the New York "Sunday World." An institution with an art department was to be suspected of activities harmonizing with that label, and I had entered upon my office with ambitious enthusiasm. The jolt came when my plain-spoken editor, without bitterness, but without evasion, remarked, "You and I will get along fine if you don't give me any of this damned art."

In time it became clear to me that my plain-spoken editor was quite right. He did not want the thing that was spelled with a capital. It did not matter that technically he was wrong, that the right way to express a thing is by that token the artistic way. He was thinking of filigrees, of ornament

where it did not belong, and he was wise enough to wish that when a thing needed simply to be said, it would not be sung. His prejudice is widely repeated. So is obscurity as to the term art. If that obscurity might be removed by experience, if we might go to a dictionary, to an art manager who was young enough to be sure of everything, or even to an artist who was old enough to have reached his third manner, and thereby get the last word, the case would be different. But what art is, and who is to be called an artist, are matters more debatable than ever. It has been easy to find a first and most obvious explanation of the confusion in modern diversity of function and in resulting subtleties of classification. We used to say "rheumatism" without encountering rebuke. One requires a medical education and some brashness to use the term to-day. Speaking by the card becomes an increasingly nice matter. To the plain man the result is bewildering. The plain man looks at a painting and asks, "Is this art?" No, he is told; this is not art. It tells a story. It is literary. The plain man looks at a book and asks, “Is this art?" and again the answer is, "No." This, he learns, is This, he learns, is

only propaganda. Should the plain man go back and discover that "Don Quixote" and "The Tale of a Tub" and "Pilgrim's Progress" were all of them propaganda, and therefore not art, he would be in a fair way to reach an utterly modern confusion of mind. Where the plain man halts, convinced that he never can know what it is all about, the cognoscenti begin, and the simple truth is that they have reached a bewilderment as great as his.

fearfully muddled. Honest artists and honest critics have, sometimes with genuine ingenuity, sometimes with nothing better than a strong-arm belligerency, struggled to clear up the mess. Yet we seem to get deeper into the mire of the thing. And none of us escapes. The question is not an academic subtlety. Art touches all of us, and art questions, grotesquely remote as they may be made to appear, are matters of common concern. When books are reviewed, when paintings are appraised, when public works are under discussion, when plays are subjected to the pull and haul of professional and popular debate, we may begin to see that confused thinking about art, its privileges and its obligations, particularly when this confusion begins to objectify itself, is not a remote matter, calamitous only to hair-splitting, high-brow specialists, but a matter vital to human comfort. The poor magistrates, for example, who would, I have no doubt, like to be considered as practical men, are quite evidently in a state of bitter perplexity about art. They have reason to wish that art could be kept out of court. Evidently it cannot be kept out of court unless it can be kept out of life. Since not only our statutory intrusions and our public instruction, but our amusements, are constantly affected by notions of art, since we seem doomed to be kept dodging missiles in the brawl between art theorists on the one hand and give-themwhat-they-want theorists on the other, both sides full of disgust for "them," it cannot be grossly reprehensible to ask whether there is not some way in which the problem, always with us, may be simplified a little.

It would be interesting to discover The whole art question has been that word-looters were the real cul

prits in the quarrel, to find, once more, that stealing the appointed clothing of an idea is no small sin against human peace. Many a revolution has started with such a theft.

You may have decided that following this word "art" through the rank jungle of speculation is n't worth the trouble. In the interest of those who may have abandoned the pursuit, let me leap intermediate escapades by quoting the most delightful extremist. There are plenty of extremists, but Mr. Clive Bell has such a gentlemanly way of insulting the accepted, he can be so graciously contemptuous, and he can state the obscure with such charming clearness, that he may well be the spokesman of the art-artists.

Mr. Bell tells us that "the cold white peak of art" is reached in "significant form." This need not be startling even to the profane outsider until he learns what Mr. Bell means by significant form. We are told that, to be significant, form must mean nothing that can possibly bear a name or be associated with any other thinkable thing. "To appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art transports us from the world of man's activity to a world of æsthetic exaltation. . . . We are lifted above the stream of life." Nothing thinkable is to be represented. "Every sacrifice made to representation is something stolen from art." To understand this sort of art "we need to know nothing whatever about history." In fact, "we require nothing but sensibility." A correspondence between the forms of a work of art and the familiar forms of life "cannot possibly provoke aesthetic emotion. Only significant form can do that."

You will guess that all so-called works of art that tell anything except of the sheer ecstasy of the artist are here brushed aside for good and all. If you recognize a single trace, the jig is up. Beholding a painting by Ingres, for example, Mr. Bell perceives human beings. Thumbs down for Ingres. "We do not see the figures as forms, because we immediately think of them as people." Horrors! People! The forms must be devised so that they will have no possible associational import. "All informatory matter is irrelevant and should be eliminated." Thus a picture like "The Doctor"-in the pitiful story-telling category-"not being a work of art, has none of the immense ethical value possessed by all objects that provoke aesthetic ecstasy."

Turning from the pictorial, Mr. Bell remarks that at a concert, "incapable of feeling the austere emotions of art, I begin to read into the musical forms human emotions of terror and mystery, love and hate, and to spend the minutes, pleasantly enough, in a world of turbid and inferior feeling."

In view of this experience we need not be astonished to find Mr. Bell asking, "Why should artists bother about the fate of humanity" when "rapture suffices?" In other words, it is only by not having meaning that forms or sounds can have significance. Yet when he turns to literature (it is only a turn) he remarks, oddly, that "writers with nothing to say soon come to regard the manipulation of words as an end in itself," which surely might seem like an unclubable fling at Gertrude Stein.

But the "white peak" of the art Mr. Bell is thinking of is not wholly isolated. Another white peak is permit

ted to religion. He admits that art has existed as a religion concurrent with other religions. However, to reach this high proximity, religion must have "nothing to do with intellectual beliefs." Other religions are admitted into ecstatic relationship only upon condition that they regard their ecstasy as an end in itself. There is the assumption that what we call religion, if countenanced at all, has no better status than that of a poor relative; for, with an earnestness that must leave us in no doubt of the writer's ardor of conviction, he says that "art is the most universal and the most permanent form of religious expression."

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Of course Mr. Bell is talking about sublimated esthetics. I relinquish the task of discussing whether significance without association is a sane proposal; whether we can carry to anything whatever an emotion not derived from life; whether there can be a single theory of beauty on which nature does not hold the patent; whether any unparented ecstasy can lift itself by its boot-straps and be more or less than natural. Nor is there space to consider all of the things Mr. Bell does n't like because he does like the art-artists; his notion that museums of art are a horror; that "cultivated parents cultivate their children; thousands of wretched little creatures are daily be ing taught to love the beautiful”—and so on. I am concerned at the moment not with Mr. Bell's innocent plea for the sufficiency of an irresponsible esthetic joy, but with the brisk way in which he scampers up his cool peak with that word "art."

It is true that the meaning of a word is to be ascertained not by its an

cestry or previous condition of servitude, but by the reaction it produces. It is true also that words are elected, which implies that they mean what we permit them to mean. Before letting the word "art" vanish into the mists, it is fair to ask whether fundamental every-day needs may not make it worth while to acknowledge the basic blunder in the common as well as in the transcendental use of this word.

The great art delusion, responsible for confusing reactions and endless fumblings in analysis, is that art the expression and art the thing can be named by the use of a single term. Whatever we may agree to call the expression of ideas and emotions, it ought to be plain that this is but one of the elements of a so-called work of art. If we use the word "art" to name the way a thing is done, we cannot, without perpetuating our confusions, go on flatly labeling the thing as art.

The artist+his idea+his expression =a work of art. In such a formulaI make no apology for its elementariness-the word "art" belongs to the element of expression. To apply the word to the element of expression is to give clarity to the use of the word, and to promise a better clarity for our thinking about the work of art. Personality is not art. Ideas are not art. Imagination is not art. Highly original minds exist without a sense of art. Of all the highly original ideas with which we become acquainted by some form of communication, few are expressed with any art knowledge or intention. The conscious communication of personality, of emotions and ideas, is art, and the medium by which the communication is accomplished is an art. Mr. Santayana's phrase has it that the idea is the essence. All transcendentalism is

a search for essences. Perhaps the same might be said of all true philosophy. Mr. Bell finds the uttermost essence in a created shape.

Looking at a work of art with such a formula in mind would have some profitable results. We should be able to estimate the art on its own account as worthy or unworthy of the artist and his subject. We should be able to admit freely that art is essentially and necessarily unmoral, which would be an immense comfort to certain people. Only an art that is irresponsible, as pliantly irresponsible as a pen or brush, can serve the purposes of mediumship. It is not the art, but the artist, that is responsible. No formula can save the artist from responsibility. The more completely irresponsible we make the art, the greater becomes the responsibility of the artist it serves. The more important we make the figure of the artist in the world, the more profoundly certain is it that he will be held to account. He will be held to account not only for his art, but for his ideas. In this respect he will be in the same boat with other men. None of us can hope or decently wish to escape participation in the obligations of human association. If priests of the religions which Mr. Bell has exalted to an equality, or a near-equality, with his religion of significant form are not released, either by their own code or by social expectation, from the ethical imperatives resting upon their fellowcreatures, I cannot see why a priesthood of esthetics, even one strangely disposed not to bother about humanity, should be coddled in a temple consecrated to delirium. I have never known a man-size artist who asked any such boon.

A French painter once produced a

picture showing a heap of bloody entrails on a marble slab. The art was admittedly exquisite, but a critic who refused to be fuddled by a bifurcated word would have had no difficulty in perceiving that the quality of the art made the work of art the nastier. A man capable of exquisite art could have expressed anything; and he chose entrails. Emerson's saying that no object is so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful, was a tribute to the power of art. But foulness still needs an explanation, if not an excuse. Thus, while a thing is not indecent because a moron thinks it is, neither is a blackguardism to be sanctified by a sonnet.

To glorify the illuminating power of art is to fasten upon the artist, in any field, an accountability that cannot be dislodged. A work of art is an act, and no one has ever advanced a good reason why artists should not, like other persons, be subject to consideration for their acts. If anything foul is chosen for either the accusing or the mitigating illumination of art, the artist must accept estimate of his choice, and he will never get much sympathy by urging that he only wanted to show his art. I see beauty as the form of truth, art as carrying the theology of beauty, technic as the ritual of art. As no gorgeousness of ritual could glorify a make-believe religion, no beauty of garment can lighten for the artist the onus of his gesture. He himself will always hover in his picture or in his book. Because all creation is confession, no objectivity of method can obliterate the artist. No splendor of the idea-package can soften our chagrin if we find nothing inside, or if the contents accuse the artist and insult

us.

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