DAVID GALEF

The Art of Art

Standing solemnly in front of a canvas of scribbles and smears,

the young man seemed to be in a staring contest with the painting.
When he finally looked away, having lost the battle with Cy Twombly's
Mice, he uttered the line that modern art critics have come to despise:
"Why is this art?" Two rooms later, I saw him again, this time in
front of an installation consisting of stacked-up metal plates. "I'll bet
I could do that," he murmured. Call it a testament to the enduring
powers of the avant-garde: modern art still befuddles most people.
That the wars over subject, presentation, and context were fought
decades ago doesn't matter to an uninitiated audience.
Despite some celebrated uproars in recent decades, those who
actually make it to a museum aren't so concerned about religious
or sexual improprieties. Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, its crucifix
floating in urine, or Chris Ofili's more recent Holy Virgin Mary, with
elephant dung for a breast, hardly offend your average art-lover. Bath-
room references amuse more than disgust. But people do like to order
their world, and to see, say, a Jeff Koons knockoff from the Banality
series highlighted as art puzzles the public. Too many people rail
against so-called obscene or sacrilegious art without asking the more
salient questions: not "Why is this outrageous?" but rather "How
is this art?" (as opposed to an aggressive brand of sociology), not
"Why does the N.E.A. support offensive art" (someone is always put
off) but instead "How does a government agency come to fund such
mediocre art?" To pose such questions is more anathema than accu-
sations of pornography or sacrilege, which can always be explained
with a shrug at the priggish public. Aesthetics, a term that many
critics would consider quaint, are seemingly pass6 in this era of
politicized art. But in fact, few people these days address what art is
or does, and that's a shame because those who cannot remember the
past are condemned to repeat Marcel Duchamp's urinal.
122 I Southwest Review

Definitions of art were once based on art as imitation, and a work

of art was assessed by how well it captured the essence of nature. In
the Romantic age, art came to be judged by how expressive it was.
But as, on the one hand, increasing abstraction, and on the other,
political context, dominated more and more of the contemporary art
scene, old assumptions about art pertained less and less. Duchamp's
Fountain, the urinal signed "R. Mutt," makes a powerful statement
even today, but the points it addressed"What is the proper subject
of art?" and "What steps transform an object into art?"have never
been adequately answered so much as shrugged at. Any one of Ad
Reinhardt's black canvases questions the notion of aesthetic payoff.
Art must have significant form; it must please aesthetically; it must
but art doesn't have to do anything, and we may never adequately
pin down the essential or necessary conditions of art. One of the
main stumbling blocks, increasingly obvious to all but, say, the ju-
rors of art prizes, is the vast realm of bad art. Mostly, what people
mean when they question a work of art is not the unanswerable query
"Is this art?" but rather the unanswered statement "This is unsatis-
fying." The few attempts to respond to this criticism have tended
snobbishly to label such commentators reactionary (all they like
is pretty pictures), uninformed (don't they know anything about art
after 1890?), or simply philistine (they have crude tastes). What gets
lost in such a dismissal are some basic questions that inform an
audience's artistic judgmentsand always will, probably because such
concerns are hardwired into our brains.

Where's the
The eye is attuned to the natural world, or at least, in our
industrial age, what's out there. When we experience art, we want
something different, something worked upon. Seeing a few pieces of
driftwood on a mat, or a cobblestone in a corner of the gallery, raises
an obvious complaint. It isn't transformed enough from raw materi-
als. Art, linked to artificial, should show some effort toward imposed
design or pattern; otherwise, it's either nature or chaos. Natural
design may show beautymost people admire a rainbowbut it's
nature, not art.
 Galef I 123

On the other hand, what if a light-artist like Rohert Irwin creates a

rainbow arc in a room? The problem, of course, is the impossibility
of locating any clear division between raw material and finished prod-
uct. The other extreme, complete disorder, also fails to supply the
consolation of form. But what about an artist's faithful re-creation of
a wrecking yardor a sanitary landfill? Or Damien Hirst's real but
dead tiger shark floating in a glass tank of formaldehyde?
The artist has supplied an aesthetic eye and a context for further
viewing. But if the main payoff is a statement"even a urinal can be
art"; "this gnawed-at chocolate symbolizes the hunger of feminism";
"this dead shark makes us think of mortality"then maybe it's
simply art of a lesser class than that which also gives an aesthetic
jolt. Or, as a pragmatic viewer might put it, "This artist deserves less
credit." Such an attitude still prevails, perhaps unfairly, in photogra-
phy, where artistic status was slow to emerge.
What about aleatoric art? Art based on chance isn't all John Cage
territory. The great classical example is the Aeolian harp, its strings
stretched across the branches of a tree, which the breezes played.
Today's annoyingly ubiquitous wind chimes are a kitschy knockoff.
The artist has contributed merely the setting or the conditions. Once
again, the credit model makes some sense: The less art that the art-
ist is directly responsible for, the less credit she gets, and the less of
an artist she is. At the horizon of diminishing returns is the question
"Does there have to be an artist for art to exist?" Yes, because other-
wise it's not art, whatever else it may be.

My Five-Year-Old Could Do That

Though many museum-goers have a good eye for detail, they're

not artists, and they know that. But they also know that if they're
not artists, then anything they can execute is therefore not art
or maybe just bad art. Such thinking lies behind the familiar "my
five-year-old can paint better than that" complaint, which has been
derided in public, though most people are familiar with the notion
that anything placed in a museum will occasion studious, artistic
regard, including a blank canvas or a finger-painting by a two-year-
old (as some pranksters have found out).
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As Donald Barthelme once observed, "Art is not difficult because

it wishes to be difficult, rather because it wishes to be art." The dif-
ficulty level has to be high, or else anyone can be an artist. Art isn't
democratic; it's elitist. Why should anyone be able to become a doctor
or an athlete or a physicist? Well, why do we insist that anyone can
be an artist?
In fact, this question is perilously close to an issue raised by the
modernists: "What is the proper stuff of art?" For Virginia Woolf, the
net was all-inclusive: "'The proper stuff of fiction' does not exist;
everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought,
every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes
amiss." The modernist project, including Marcel Duchamp's ready-
madesthat urinal by R. Muttcontinues to its inevitable postmodern
conclusion in Warhol's mass-culture appropriations. These experi-
ments are liberating, though they also contain some legerdemain:
Both Duchamp and Warhol were master craftsmen, applying artistic
skill to supposedly un-art-worthy projects.
But the basic complaint is all too understandable: People want to
experience art that they, as non-artists, couldn't create themselves.

That's Not ArtThat's a Chair

As art-viewers proceed from room to room, eventually some
develop a case of museum feet and plunk themselves down on one of
those hard wooden benches designed to provide relief but not com-
fort. With its strict geometric lines, the bench itself looks like one of
the works of art on display. Or maybe it's just a bench.
But what about a bench with gold inlay? Alternatively, what about
a work of art that merely looks like a bench? Sometimes a great deal
of work has been put into an object, but it appears to be, say, an
ordinary dinner plate. These are the fault lines between art and craft,
well-worn distinctions that occasionally cave in. Craft is useful, pro-
ducing benches and plates. Art is inspired, with no base utilitarian
purpose. But craft raised to a high-enough level is perforce art. Where's
the dividing line? Where the element isn't strictly functional? As
Tom Stoppard has provocatively written: "Skill without imagination
is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wicker-
 Galef I 125

work picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art."

Maybe the issue should be determined through purpose: people use
craft; people appreciate art.
But consensus should probably decide where to locate the dividing
line: If enough skill has been applied to the object so that it repays
most people's aesthetic scrutiny, then craft has been elevated to the
level of art. One sticky issue is that sometimes too much "work"
has been applied to the object, so that what might have been the
handsome lines of a desk are obscured by gingerbread scrolling and
frou-frou detailing; i.e., art has been lowered to the level of kitsch.
Perhaps for this reason, the Bauhaus School of Design famously
championed the credo "Less is more," though Robert Browning
used it decades earlier in his poem "Andrea del Sarto." The history
of modern minimalism has built this credo into a truismthe
Zen artist creates a bamboo stalk with five perfect strokes, not a
flurrybut one shouldn't condemn baroque art out of hand, how-
ever much out of favor it was during large parts of the twentieth
century. Bach is baroque.

That's Not Art, That's fust an Expression

On the other side of the art-craft debate is an argument about
art meant simply to convey an idea. In Tom Wolfe's 1975 screed
against modern art. The Painted Word, the theories behind the art
abstract expressionism, action paintingare often held up as more
intriguing than the art itself. But with minimalism and the finger-
wagging instincts of political correctitude, a great deal of current
art is simply an admonition. How else to explain a recent art work
by Wayne Hill called Weapon of Mass Destruction, which, according
to a New York Times report, "consisted of a clear plastic two-liter
bottle filled with melted ice from the Antarctic. It was, he [Hill] said,
intended to draw attention to the dangers of global warming." Or, to
continue the theme of water, consider Mark McGowan's installa-
tion. The Running Tap, which looks exactly like what its title implies
and is meant as a statement against wasting water. These are perfectly
valid social statements but devoid of much interest.
A historical progression is evident here. If the Romantics emphasized
 I Southwest Review

expressive over merely imitative art, modernists turned expressive

technique into obsession, often producing new v^ays of seeing the
world, and postmodernists questioned the very notions of technique
and production. Though appropriation isn't new, the postmodernists
fetishized it. A cynic might note that such an attitude is useful to
those who lack demanding technique or ideas.

That's Ugly
But what should artistic technique deliver? Something that
gives joy? How should one respond to a man in front of a misshapen
vase that looked as if a kindergartner had sat on it, when the man
whispers to his companion, "That's ugly." Must art be beautiful?
No, in the sense that Picasso's Guernica is also grotesque, or that
Joseph Cornell's boxes, whatever else they are, are desperate stays
against disorder and testaments to loneliness. But there must be some
aesthetic payoff, or else the work should be shelved under sociology,
anthropology, or simply propaganda. Sorhething in the arrangement
should please or at least contain an essential rightness, even if born
from distortion. The question is how to define that, against the vast
array of possible responses to a work of art. How can one explain
that some works in the museum may appear monstrous?
The audience's outrage once meant that the art had failed, whereas
now it's regarded as the sine qua non of the avant-garde. Roger Fry's
post-Impressionist exhibit in 1910 infuriated contemporary critics,
just as Impressionism bedeviled audiences a generation earlier.
Experimental art often excites such a reaction, though eventually
the culture may catch up with it. The critic Anatole Broyard noted
that, if the art still seems experimental after fifty years, it means the
experiment failed. Those with little sense of art history are often
handicapped in judging what's new. The sculpture is distorted; it's
strange; the picture is inaccurate; there's no picture at all. Abstract is
usually harder to grapple with than concrete, in any event.
Art makes one think, but through some sort of aesthetic register-
ing, as opposed to the way, say, a math textbook provokes one to
think. If the art is ugly, it may provoke disgust, which is also an
aesthetic response, but if the reaction is merely aversive, that's not
 Galef I 127

much of a response. The trick of good art is to engage its audience

on an emotional level as it transmits meaning. Bad art engages, at
most, only simple minds.

What's It Meanl
Strictly figurative painting, such as a canvas v^ith a pack of
baying hounds called The Hunt, is easy to figure out. But what about
a Max Ernst canvas like The Robing of the Bride, with its nudes and
their impossibly long hair, and that sinister green swan man, a broken
arrow in his hand? When someone wants to know what a picture
like that means, I'm tempted to mutter something about the sexual
act or intone a line from Archibald MacLeish's "Ars Poetica": "A
poem should not mean but be." Art should convey more than one
possible interpretation, or else it's propagandabut then why do some
people acclaim certain advertisements as art, with the Clio awards
for the best ones? Is Leni Riefenstahl's film Triumph of the Will,
celebrating Hitler as a demigod, a work of art? It's agitprop done with
artistry. These are examples of art in the service of commerce or war,
a tradition with a lineage as long as the patronage of art. Maybe one
should give such an artist less credit, but not for working within a
circumscribed sphere, since all art entails working within some con-
straints, and not until after the Renaissance did some artists make a
living without working on commission. As with so many of these
issues, it's a question of degree: all art is directed, but if the direction
is too obvious, it may spoil the interplay between art and audience.
On the other side of the spectrum is the problem of abstract art:
shapes and colors without any direct figurative equivalent. Abstract
expressionism at least affords the freedom of free association, as
in lying on one's back to interpret cloud masses. Picasso, who was
far too sophisticated to reject these movements, nonetheless asked
of such canvases, "But where's the drama?" Music without words
is usually abstract, except on the level of mimicking, say, a bird,
but sculpture and painting have for millennia concentrated on
mimesis, the reproduction of nature. The emergence of non-repre-
sentational depiction led the philosopher Arthur C. Danto to declare
the end of art.
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Bad art that's abstract to the point of tedium is a fixture in some

galleries, as is bad art that's trying to make a political point through
a plastic medium. There will never be an end to the kind of bad art
that's too uni-directional, mere message-making, or a one-note cliche.

What Did the Artist Have in Mind}

Though the meaning in good art is too complex to sum up in
a sentence, one can still guess what the artist had in mind. Once,
when trailing a couple through a sculpture atrium, I heard them play-
ing a game, guessing at what the artist's favorite facial expression
was, whether he was in a good or bad mood that day, what he had for
lunch, and so on. To know, at least in a general way, what the artist's
ambitions were for the piece, is reassuring. Yet a complete under-
standing of intention will forever elude us. In their famous essay
"The Intentional Fallacy," W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley
observed that an artist's true intentions are unavailablenot irrel-
evant, as some misreaders have claimedand thus are not valid for
assessment purposes. This view is in keeping with the Freudian view
of unconscious motivation, sometimes repressed, so that even if an
artist claims not to be illustrating the myth of Oedipus, for instance,
other viewers may see rage against the father, incest, and blindness
in the work. Intention doesn't equal effect, in any event: this painter's
intention was to depict a brutal crucifixion scene, but instead he's
created a vaguely humorous cartoon. Bad art often betrays an artist
not in control of his medium. Another kind of bad art shows an artist
in such facile control of effects that it's like watching someone on
automatic pilot.
In any event, to ignore the creator of the artwork has always seemed
half ignorant, half insolent. Presumably, a trained critic is specially
versed in interpretation, though therefore not a typical audience. But
here's the perplexity: If I'm facing an installation of plastic branches
painted yellow that to me bespeaks a sunny and therefore idyllic
scene at the park, does it matter whether the artist, an avowed sun-
hater, means her work to convey coldness and cruelty? What does it
mean to misinterpret art, anyway? To go against the audience's con-
sensus? To ignore the artist's program notes? What if one comes away
 Galef I 119

from de Kooning's misogynistic V^oman series with a renewed ap-

preciation of what it means to be female?
There's also the matter of audience projection. People like a story
hehind the pictureor they'll make one up. Mayhe it'll he accompa-
nied hy a guessit's inevitahleahout the artist's intention.

I've Seen This Before

Look through a roomful of cuhist paintings, say, and they he-
gin to fuse together. Georges Braque's heige, hlack, and white Viano
and Mandola resemhles Pahlo Picasso's heige, hlack, and white
The Poet. Does that make one of them less worthy? What ahout
artistic influence and the fuzzy point at which borrowing hecomes
appropriation? The sneering adjective in critical circles used to he
"derivative," though a clever artist manages to make the work
his. At the hack of my mind, I hear the comment, "Mediocre artists
horrow; great artists steal"which has heen attrihuted to the origi-
nators or thieves Johannes Brahms, T. S. Eliot, and Picasso. Certainly
in the puhlic marketplace, one pays less for knockoffs. And people
do value artwork that's somehow different from what they've seen
heforewith the proviso that it not he too hizarrely new, or else it
may he rejected. This not-too-novel approach works equally well in
the supermarket, where the lahel affixed to products hoasts "New
and improved!"
But the real prohlem of originality, or rather the lack of it, will
always he with us. When the preacher in Ecclesiastes ohserves
gloomily, "There is nothing new under the sun," his ohservation has
the sound of an oft-repeated complaint; i.e., the lament against
unoriginality is itself unoriginal. So what separates art from a copy?
Walter Benjamin's famous essay "The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction" confronts the situation raised hy com-
mercial lithography and photography, wherein identical copies of
an original can he reproduced and disseminated. Benjamin posits
some indefinahle aura or luster that invisibly adheres to the original,
hefore he diverges to a Marxist argument ahout the means of produc-
tion. In Jorge Luis Borges's "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,"
a writer has exactly duplicated Cervantes's masterpiece, Don Quixote,
 I Southwest Review

but the very act of presenting it as his own has made it a different
work. The artist Sherrie Levine made a feminist statement hy devel-
oping negatives from famous dead male photographers and signing
the results with her signature, thus appropriating their work and, in
a Marxist mode, taking over the means of production while calling
attention to its usual maleness. Whether such an act makes for in-
teresting art or merely an interesting discussion is another matter.
But the prohlem of originality is more vexed than that. True original-
ity either doesn't quite exist or is exceedingly rare. Rather, originality
is recomhinant: two or more familiar elements put together in a strik-
ingly different way, as with Dali's ants and watches. Juxtaposition is
all we get in some of today's art: a refrigerator flanked hy a tank, for
instance. To cite Donald Barthelme again: Collage is the art of the
twentieth century.
Good art has something new about it, whether it's in subject, pre-
sentation, juxtaposition, context, or something else. Bad art has none
of the preceding. And then there's the situation where an artist makes
a reputation hy reproducing the same kind of art over and over. In
this age of specialization, it's hard to fault a professional for taking
this track, and a career should he judged hy its hest work, hut there is
something to he said for versatility.

Who Decided That<!

After enough museum visits, some audiences grow savvy
enough to ask a larger question: Who's in charge of what gets displayed?
For some viewers, whatever's in a museum is art, though they may
shake their heads at some of it. But every piece in the museum had
to pass some sort of audience approval, even if the harrier is the opin-
ion of the trustees or a curator. One commercial artist I know has
argued that art should please its audience. Truly privileged audiences
may have some entry into how such decisions are made.
Museum and gallery politics are an area that one might like kept
apart from the realm of aesthetics, but that's as impossihle as sepa-
rating art and commerce. Art is what's hought and sold by dealers,
and it forms a charmed circle that keeps out manyan argument
made hy an unsuccessful artist friend of mine, but one that carries
 Galef / 131

some weight. The art critic Hilton Kramer, for instance, seems never
to have made his peace with this issue, pointing out that a lot of
what's hanging in galleries is sanctified drek.
But postmodernists don't believe in absolute standards and learn to
live with arbitrary, relative props. They show that what is often taken
for inherent structure is really just agreed-upon convention. Back in
the Sixties, Danto put forth the provocative statement that it's art if
it's exhibited in an art museum, expanded upon by the aesthetic phi-
losopher George Dickie into what he termed the institutional theory
of art, wherein the institution deems what's art-worthy.
But institutional considerations will never replace the one-on-one
meeting between the art work and an individual, where most inter-
fering context has drifted away to leave an admirer communing with
the object of his enchantment. The institutional theory of art doesn't
account for why, on the way home from a museum, I spied a piece of
bric-a-brac made from colored glass and wire that almost took my
breath away, though it was deposited next to a trash can. Some com-
mentators have suggested that an aesthetic frame of mind is all that's
required to turn anything into an artwork, but that doesn't explain
why some stuff similar to the bric-a-brac, sitting right next to it, did
nothing for me.

The Audience
of course, art by itself does nothing. If a tree falling in a forest
with no one to hear it presents a philosophical conundrum, what's a
work of art without someone to appreciate it? Art is in the eye of the
beholder. The art-viewing public doesn't generally create art, but it
lends it its status as art. Or certain tastemakers do, but the idea is
the same: no opinion, no art. To some extent, this argument parallels
the reader-response theory of literature that grew up in the Seventies
and Eighties, wherein the reader and the writer together produce a
textual reading. Once the author lets go of the text, it's up for grabs.
The radical end of reader-response theory postulates that Donne's
holy sonnets are mere squiggles on the page until the reader ekes
meaning out of them. Understandably, most artists object to such
sharing of the artistic production.
 I Southwest Review

Moreover, the artist has induhitahly produced a work that is in-

variant afterwards (with the exception of some changing artwork,
such as a design drawn in dirt slowly eroded hy alluvial flow). Not
so the audience's reaction, which may vary widely. The affective
fallacy, proposed by Wimsatt and Beardsley, is the kind of hole one
falls into hy hasing meaning solely on close reading. Any reader's
reactions are likely to he hiased and uncritical, and a reader with
certain personal associations will make connections that have
nothing to do with the poem.
Bad art is where you find it. What ahout had audiences?

What's the Definition^

Most intelligent museum-goers will at some time ponder the
vexed question "What makes art?" But in a culture where almost
everything can serve as material for art, the only answer may he the
flip aside "What doesn't make art?" Along these lines, cultural stud-
ies programs in so-called literature departments long ago set aside
the issue of whether a text is literature. To raise the issue of quality
these days is to he branded an elitist. But at least one can argue that
art is a construct, from the Latin ars, which has to do with arrange-
ment. It is some form of order imposed upon reality.
Plato and his ideal Forms suggest what art might he imitating, with
the idea that, the closer the approximation, the hetter. Keats, in the
full flush of romanticism, equated beauty with truth. Picasso called
art the lie that tells the truth. Art is a distortion. Art is the expres-
sion of creativity, the product of the imagination.
In his essay "What Is Art?," Leo Tolstoy stated: "The activity of
art is based on the fact that a man, receiving through his sense of
hearing or sight another man's expression of feeling, is capahle of
experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it."
This claim stresses art's ability to communicate feeling. Clive Bell
insisted that art possesses significant form, which evokes specific
aesthetic responsessuch as color or shapeto be distinguished from
mere emotional reactions, such as affection.
These are just a few essentialist definitions that claim for art an
irreducihle core, without which it cannot he called art. Naturally,
 Galef I 133

any arguments as to why this is art have to include arguments as

to why that isn't. Such definitions may he doomed hecause they're
riddled with exceptions, hut they're useful hecause at least they show
some of what we want in art. A minimal definition might note that
art is simply imposed order, as heavy as a stone carving or as light as
a way of perception, the style of the artist. As Susan Sontag noted:
"In the final analysis, 'style' is art."
In conceptual art, the ohject itself disappears. In Danto and Dickie's
institutional theory of art, which has a fiendish circularity to it, art
is that which is laheled art. But a pocket definition that includes the
notion of audience satisfaction might state it this way: Art is that
which repays revisiting.

Coda
It's easy to grow judgmental over pieces that resemhle, say, a
limp Slinky (laheled Spring] or what looks like uninspired canvas-
dauhing. Herein lies the prohlem of had art: It contains all the ele-
ments one could wish in art, hut done in an inferior manner
inaccurate proportions in the sculpture, hadly mixed colors, the ideas
animating it a hopeless collection of cliches. Or had art is mere tech-
nique (and prohahly had technique, at that), lacking imagination.
So what separates art from not-quite-art? Mayhe a failure of the imagi-
nation. But there are always those who might imagine it otherwise.