The quality of art, and the concept of individual taste as a measuring stick of this quality, are focal points for current discussions of art. Yet, each person tends to feel their own sense of taste as being self-evident and instinctual: Beyond (and below) serious analysis—on the same level as one’s whimsical preferences with food. Or sex.
Untangling this seeming paradox can be helped along by noting the abundance of meaning carried in exactly those last two subjects. Food, despite its seeming mundanity, involves the single most crucial resources in all of society, and thereby lurks at the crossroads of almost every substantial political, economic, and cultural force. And sex, as a private issue that nonetheless shapes every aspect of society, is one of the most implicitly political subjects imaginable. In much the same way, the individual’s taste in art reflects so much embedded meaning that it takes a great deal of effort to experience it as anything other than totally obvious and natural. When an issue is big enough, it gives off the sense of looking at a whole world. The scale of this perspective imbues the observer with a false sense of neutrality, as though they are sifting through the full complexity of reality.
Discussions of modern art lay this all rather bare. The arguments used to reject “abstract” modern art are almost never equivocal. They tend to be brazen and display total certainty in the existence of some deep and self-event truth to their claims. The essence of the issue immediately turns to a kind of instinctual aesthetic disgust at the mere idea of finding value in this “basic”, “uncivilised”, “pretentious” style of art. This is in some level of contrast to other commonly discussed art forms, such as film, literature, video games, or music. With each of those, the discourse is able to evade generalisation by lodging itself in the minutiae of a smaller detail within a given work of art, which can then be debated as a representative totem of the work for eternity. This is more challenging for visual art, where judgements tend to be expressed in terms of holistic feelings or vibes.
With this in mind, I thought it important to directly address the issue of modern art. It is well known that there is a certain breed of conservative who is in part characterised by their disgust for modern art. But I am more interested in speaking to those understated voices who tend to lack a serious posture towards the form, and more or less treat modern art as just a silly joke. Even among those who are otherwise open-minded to new kinds of experience, modern and abstract art are often dismissed as worthless and meaningless expressions of opulence and nothing more. I wish to directly address the arguments of those who take such positions. Not because I feel the need to convince them that they must enjoy modern art in order to be “serious” or “intellectual” or any such nonsense. Instead, I invite them to reflect on the fact that their dislike for such art is not a natural or self-evident response to the intrinsic qualities of the work. Rather, taste reflects certain political and social values. And there are serious problems with uncritically remaining immersed in values that may develop into nasty prejudices and bad habits.
Addressing some conspiracy theories
Before engaging in a real discussion, we must unfortunately waste our time with a fairly pervasive piece of propaganda. Discussions of modern art rarely progress to the content of the style because so many people are taken in by vulgar conspiracy theories. Here is a commonplace example of one:
We cannot move on without making it plain that this line of argument is both false and rather silly. It is a piece of empty rhetoric that specifically relies on the reader having as little knowledge of taxes as possible in order to suggest its narrative. We should firstly establish that ‘writing off’ something in tax terms does not generate money magically. A write-off allows certain kinds of expenses to be taken as a loss that reduces income by a proportionate amount. Now, as should be obvious, even if one’s entire income was ‘written-off’, you would not enter into negative income and start receiving a negative tax bill. Your income would simply be zero. The benefits of a tax write-off are, in simple terms, limited to reducing and eliminating the taxes one would otherwise pay.
Regardless, even if the goal is simply to achieve a tax bill of zero, the mechanism for generating a write-off as described in this scheme is incoherent. In the vast majority of modern (typically Western) economies where such conduct is being alleged, losses are not written-off in a limitless and unconditional manner. Expenses either have to be business expenses, or in the case of donations, taxable deductions are capped at certain proportions of income and limited to registered recipients in pre-defined forms. For example, in the United States, donated artworks are valued directly by the government, and are subject to all of the same caps and limitations as other donations. And more to the point, the gap between the initial purchase value and the appraised value in this scheme constitutes a kind of income that would prevent the donation from being considered an expense at all under the tax laws of many jurisdictions. It is not clear how this donation writes anything off to begin with. The whole scheme has as much sophistication as a SitCom bit:
In reality, when art has been the subject of financial fraud, it has not been blatant and foolish attempts to scam tax officials, but complex affairs where whole criminal organisations have sold stolen works or counterfeit works to collectors and museums, who are taken in by the apparent actual value of these objects in the eyes of real experts. It is worth noting that similar kinds of valuation fraud are attempted all across the economy, in everything from real estate to software. As was well covered by the mainstream media, whole medical companies have been established as elaborate attempts at valuation fraud. And many such scams involve fraudulent works of classical art. There is nothing to this whole theory of modern art except paranoia in place of thought.
In a similar vein, some have attempted to dismiss all modern art due to the CIA’s involvement in the modern art movement of the 1950s. While the facts in this case are more or less true in contrast to the prior issue, it is less suggestive the more one knows of the history. Modern art, as we will explore, was an expansive art movement that was prevalent across the world for almost half a century prior to the CIA’s formation in the Second World War: As a matter of basic logic, the timeline is all wrong for the more insidious versions of this conspiracy theory. In addition, the CIA’s funding of American cultural institutions was universal and undiscriminating. It would be foolish to attempt to dismiss Hollywood films as being invented by the CIA, even when they received similar treatment. The CIA’s goal was to perpetuate American art in order to challenge the Soviet Union. To this end, they funded movements that already had demonstrated appeal under the hope that they would overwhelm the cultural ‘soft power’ of the Soviets. Explaining the rise of modern art as the product of these efforts, rather than its involvement in these efforts as the product of its rise, requires an extremely selective lack of understanding of the relevant history.
Art and creation
In the data economy, self-expression is economic production. A pet theory of mine is that the technology to allow masses of ordinary people to become artists was a necessary precondition to our present culture of mass entertainment. Not just in the sense of allowing for the quantity of content necessary to feed such an industry: Rather, it is that the perpetuation of a mass aspiration to be an artist has informed and shaped our critical lens—our conception of artistic taste. It has become something of a cliché that the majority of novel readers secretly harbour the dream of leaving their job to write their own great novel some day—and failing that, at least to accomplish something novelistic in their retirement. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Walter Benjamin was someone who saw the association between the technological distribution of art and the arrival of a new kind of artistic consumption, saying:
It is inherent in the technology of film, as of sports, that everyone who witnesses these performances does so as a quasi-expert. … For centuries it was in the nature of literature that a small number of writers confronted many thousands of readers. This began to change toward the end of the past century. With the growth and extension of the press, which constantly made new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local journals available to readers, an increasing number of readers—in isolated cases, at first—turned into writers. … The distinction between author and public is about to lose its axiomatic character. The difference becomes functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment, the reader is ready to become a writer.
This symmetry between artist and audience is decisive for the way that we assess art. A potential artist-in-waiting is always scanning through the raw material of art as they consume it, hoping to extract something of use for their own creative process. When the consumption of art is thought of in reference to its process of production in this manner, its artistic value is also framed in terms of its creation. Art which is easy to replicate is useful in some basic sense, but also inherently pedestrian. There is no feeling of envy towards it, because the audience could manage something comparable on their own. By contrast, awe and inspiration are associated with a work of art in proportion to its technical qualities that are beyond reproduction by the audience. With this frame of mind, a masterpiece is defined by the elusiveness and difficulty of the craftsmanship that goes into its production: It cannot be defined in any other way, because other kinds of wonder and delight that the work of art might seek to inspire are not so easily untangled from the admiration felt by a would-be artist in response to a technically impressive work.
On its own, the expertise afforded by the experience of making art is hardly a bad thing for the assessment of art. However, an ugly problem rears its head when such a perspective isolates the critic from alternative means of understanding this art. The expertise of a creator is inescapably tied down to the particulars of what that creator makes: Do we really mean to say that the only valuable response to music can come from musicians? And more particularly, those musicians who operate in a similar enough scope and genre to understand the work in question? Applying such questions to other artistic mediums is enough to reveal the limits of this framework. And more to the point, the problem is not the use of expertise per se. Rather, it is how the flourishing of art as a mass activity conditions artistic appreciation in general towards appreciation of the artist and their production process. The sharpening of this new standard of artistic value, beyond the mere utility of creative expertise, produces a prejudice against the forms of art whose creative processes and distribution have not been perpetuated in this same way.
This whole issue is ever-present in discussions of modern art. The most singularly common kind of derision to be found in the many arguments on the genre centre on its perceived simplicity and lack of value as a technical achievement. For example, if we take the following work (Reflections on the Big Dipper) by Jackson Pollock:
In certain circles, it is likely to invite some variation of a response such as this:
Now, we obviously need not waste any time engaging seriously with random, worthless internet comments. But the most immediate fact to note is that this critique relies on a perceived lack of challenge and craftsmanship within the creative process for art that is composed of so-called scribbles. Of course, it is not too hard to notice that the Pollock piece displays much more effort and individuality than this parody does. However, it is no use treating this lack of discernment as a simple lack of aesthetic taste. The crisis of art runs deeper than that. This can in part be understood via Benjamin’s framework: Visual art is something which often needs to be seen in-person, like theatre, to be understood. The mere reproduction of it in an image is not enough to allow it to be appreciated through its process of creation. Therefore, a contrast develops in the attitude to art as compared to the mediums which better suit this new lens. As Benjamin says:
The technological reproducibility of the artwork changes the relation of the masses to art. The extremely backward attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into a highly progressive reaction to a Chaplin film.
In order to understand why this distinction is a particular crisis for the world of modern art, we must develop an alternative to this creator-centric aesthetic lens.
The colour theory
A painting that adheres to a straightforward application of so-called realism has a clear metric to be measured against. Even if the audience has never drawn before, they can use their own experience of reality as a frame of reference to imagine the technical difficulty involved in reproducing that reality on the canvas. Therefore, art which is recognised as realistic is more legible under the contemporary artistic standards that we discussed in the preceding section. Beyond this, realism is well suited to almost all philosophies of art, since a perceived symmetry between the work and reality is more or less self-justifying—a purpose unto itself. However, this chameleon-like adaptation of realism to radically different artistic schema makes it necessary to highlight its limitations.
Realism is a shortcut: Art exists to render human experiences and ideas in a manner where they can be perceived freshly. That framework which we call realism refers to the particular arrangement of concepts that are agreed upon by culture to represent an ‘objective’ vision of such experiences and ideas. By definition, realism is the universal artistic standard of the consensus. Therefore, some formulation of realism can co-exist with almost any philosophy of art. Yet, to question this consensus necessarily entails the possibility of other valid standards beyond realism—or most accurately, beyond whatever set of values are defined to be realistic in the current zeitgeist.
Disagreements about the so-called critical quality of different works of art are almost always the surface manifestation of tensions between and within these distinct aesthetic values. These values shape the conversation along two key axes: Firstly, they define the boundaries of what is meant by realism from a given perspective. Secondly, they suggest which alternative standards to realism, if any, are allowed. In the context of our present conversation, the disfavour felt by modern art reflects the extent to which its commonplace perception habitually falls outside of one or both of these limiting principles. As we discussed, a key value of the current age is the perspective of the audience-as-artist—the tendency for the audience to assess the craftsmanship present in the work of art from the imagined position of the artist. We would therefore expect that critiques of modern art would find itself shaped by such boundaries. However, the issue is not always as simple as spotting which concept is invoked in commonplace critiques. In a rather dialectical fashion, the cultural values that inform the critical assessment of art are synthesised within the perception of art as a physical object. In our preceding example of so-called ‘scribble’ art, the painting is perceived as being ‘simple’ or ‘childlike’ precisely because it does not correspond to a type or template—that is, the perception of realism or some other existing value—which the audience uses to assess its craftsmanship. In a circular fashion, art’s ability to capture life is defined by its craftsmanship, whilst its craftsmanship is defined by its ability to capture life.
In order to see these limiting principles in action, it is necessary to attempt to approach art from a range of aesthetic standards. Doing so makes it plain how these standards are contingent on different assessments of realism and artistic value. More specifically, we should begin with an example of an aesthetic approach that rates modern art highly, and discern what values are used to judge art under this rubric. If our current standards fail to see realism or meaning in so-called ‘abstract scribbles’, what goes into the standards that see realism and meaning in them, and what does this say about the limits of our present values?
Willard H. Wright—better known by his pseudonym S. S. Van Dine—was an author of fiction, populariser of German philosophy in the English speaking world, and forceful visual art critic. His writings on modern and abstract art were some of the earliest and most comprehensive defences of these forms, and display a very distinct aesthetic sense that challenges assumptions which are still commonly held to this day. For Van Dine, modern art has just as much, if not more, of a claim to realism as the classical styles that preceded it. As is quickly becoming a trademark of this blog, I should let Van Dine speak for himself (hold onto your butts, this quote is quite lengthy):
In one’s failure to distinguish between the apparent and the organic purposes of art lies the greatest obstacle to an appreciation of what has come to be called modern painting. The truths of modern art are no different from those of ancient art. … Serious modern art, despite its often formidable and bizarre appearance, is only a striving to rehabilitate the natural and unalterable principles of rhythmic form to be found in the old masters, and to translate them into relative and more comprehensive terms.
… Therefore it is not remarkable that, with the introduction of new methods, the illustrative side of painting should tend toward minimisation. The elimination of all the superfluities from art is but a part of the striving toward defecation. Since the true test of painting lies in its subjective power, modern artists have sought to divorce their work from all considerations other than those directly allied to its primary function. This process of separation advanced hand in hand with the evolution of new methods. First it took the form of the distortion of natural objects. The accidental shape of trees, hills, houses and even human figures was altered in order to draw them into the exact form demanded by the picture’s composition. Gradually, by the constant practice of this falsification, objects became almost unrecognisable. In the end the illustrative obstacle was entirely done away with. This was the logical outcome of the sterilising modern process. To judge a picture competently, one must not consider it as a mere depiction of life or as an anecdote: one must bring to it an intelligence capable of grasping a complicated counterpoint.
… In the strict sense, the art of painting up to a hundred years ago had been only drawing. Colour was used only for ornamental or dramatic purposes. After the first simple copying of nature’s tints in a wholly restricted manner, the use of colour advanced but little. It progressed toward harmony, but its dramatic possibilities were only dimly felt. Consequently its primitive employment for the enhancement of the decorative side of painting was adhered to. This was not because the older painters were without the necessary pigments. Their colours in many instances were brighter and more permanent than ours. But they were satisfied with the effects obtained from black and white expression. They looked upon colour as a delicacy, an accessory, something to be taken as the gourmet takes dessert. Its true significance was thus obscured beneath the artists’ complacency.
… The history of modern art is broadly the history of the development of form by the means of colour—that is to say, modern art tends toward the purification of painting. Colour is capable of producing all the effects possible to black and white, and in addition of exciting an emotion more acute. … The old static system of copying trees in green, shadows in black and skies in blue did not, as was commonly believed, produce realism. While superficially nature appeared in the colours indicated, a close observation later revealed the fact that a green tree in any light comprises a diversity of colours, that all sunlit skies have a residue of yellow, and hence that shadows are violet rather than black. This newly unearthed realism of light became the battle cry of the younger men in the late decades of the nineteenth century, and reached parturition in the movement erroneously called Impressionism, a word philologically opposed to the thing it wished to elucidate. The ancients had painted landscape as it appeared broadly at a first glance. The Impressionists, being interested in nature as a manifestation in which light plays the all-important part, transferred it bodily onto canvas from that point of view.
For Van Dine, the abstraction of art—its sterilisation—is not opposed to realism, but characteristic of its fuller realisation. He sees traditional notions of realism as only interested in ‘drawing’ reality, and capturing a sketch of its vague form within the limits of black and white. To contrast this, colour is advanced as the vehicle for the evolution of visual art. With colour, art moves beyond a basic interest in separating objects, and considers a deeper kind of existence that emerges from the smaller variations within objects—and a more nuanced depiction of the barriers between them. Van Dine begins this history by illustrating the evolution from Romantics like Eugène Delacroix …
… to Impressionists like Claude Monet …
… in terms of the developing interest in colour as a tool to reach a deeper sense of reality through the abstraction of objects. Once the value of this new tool was realised, art no longer needed to restrict itself to narrow, classical definitions of realism to invoke artistic awe. Even in works that were still nominally rooted in strictly real subjects, artists experimented with the stability of literal space in favour of a sense of reality perpetuated by colour:
And even the works that sought to capture highly specific objects made use of these new techniques:
Understanding these principles allows us to, for example, see the full effects of Van Dine’s sterilisation of realism in the output of several famous artists. Let us consider the work of Vincent Van Gogh, which is a name that is likely to register no matter one’s ignorance of art. Here is Van Dine’s description of Van Gogh’s works:
That Van Gogh was an illustrator is undeniable; but he was an illustrator of the abstract gropings of an unbalanced mind avid for dramatic emotions, rather than of exterior nature. His landscapes seem to portend the calm before some great upheaval, or to express a supernatural energy poised for an act of total annihilation. In them there are frenzied lines running zigzag and at random, and rolling clouds of purple and lurid yellow hanging over raucously bright roofs. His portraits remain with us as memories of a feverish nightmare. They are too hollow and immaterial to appear even as a depiction of form. His colours carried out this feeling of dramatic terror, and because they were not harmonised with either line or tone, they became all the more chaotic.
In the simplest possible terms, Van Gogh transformed the colouring techniques used in our earlier examples into a more raw kind of expression. He saw that the emotions carried within realistic colours could communicate the sense of space and reality within a landscape or portrait, even when the level of abstraction was pushed into the realm of the thoroughly unreal. This much is evident in his work, such as The Starry Night:
Or, in Van Gogh’s equally famous self-portrait:
This is a critical juncture. We have reached this level of abstraction through a largely coherent framework for developing the idea of realism. And yet, if we were to fire-off three quick-fire works that followed on from Van Gogh—starting with a Picasso—the path to the level of abstraction so despised by some viewers will also seem obvious. From Piccaso:
To Futurism:
To Synchromism:
None of these works reject realism as a simple act of rebellion. On the contrary, they extend alternative principles of realism that developed in order to highlight the essence of particular features of reality. They then did away with the redundant and superfluous elements that contextualise those features within a specific real place. That this process of abstraction relied on the evolution of colour as the primary driver of modern art defines the aesthetic theory of sterilisation as developed by S. S. Van Dine.
The anti-interpretive perspective
By utilising Van Dine’s theory of sterilisation, we are able to arrive at an alternative means of assessing realism as compared to the classical or conventional view. This is important as an example of the kinds of value and worth that can be found in works of art that do not correspond to this earlier vision of realism. It allows one to articulate that, even if a painting does not depict a specific real place, it can use artistic techniques such as colour to invoke a deeper sense of meaning and emotion based on a full experience of that reality. Learning to see how abstract art is informed by such aesthetic sensibilities exposes the shallowness of typical arguments against it. It forces modern art’s detractors to articulate the specific critical values that they use to reject it, and once in plain sight, such extremely narrow views of realism tend to fail under the slightest pressure. However, a theory of sterilisation based on colour has its own limits.
As a salient example, we should consider the Dada movement. While Van Dan’s theory of art is premised on the technical areas of continuity between the forms of the 19th and 20th centuries, Dada was a deliberate reaction to the alienating context of the First World War. It consciously stripped art of concrete sources of meaning. One cannot sense the importance of colour implied by Van Dine’s theory of sterilisation:
Instead, its seemingly random combination of disconnected objects invites a feeling of montage. Its chaotic stream of non-meaning was unified in a kind of collage. Often explicitly:
While Van Dine’s approach has limited utility in explaining the values of such styles, the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch made an admirable attempt, saying:
The ultimate form of ‘Expressionism’ was created by the so-called Surrealists; just a small group, but once again that is where the avant-garde is, and furthermore, Surrealism is nothing if not montage … it is an account of the chaos of reality as actually experienced, with all its caesuras and dismantled structures of the past. … In its original form Expressionism meant the shattering of images, it meant breaking up the surface from an original, i.e. subjective, perspective, one which wrenched things apart and dislocated them.
Such an account sits well with the approach taken to modernity in general on this blog in the past. However, the dislocation of meaning invited by the Dadaists was more radical than can be explained with this fairly specific explanation. Take, for example, the (in)famous sculpture work of Marcel Duchamp:
While there is a sense of a “shattering of images, … breaking up the surface from an original” in the act of placing a urinal in an absurd context, its overall feeling cannot be explained with techniques such as montage. Its sense of this kind of abstraction, as in the disconnection of objects, lurks in the background perhaps, but its most direct meaning is the simple one of being a toilet. It is an abrasive rejection of meaning as a concept, whatever other subtextual interpretations can be summoned. We can forgive Van Dine for not fully contextualising such radical art in his attempt at a history—he arrived at something useful regardless. But, so long as we are speaking of the limits of Van Dine’s analysis; a premise of Van Dine’s hypothesis, in how it draws a connection between older forms and modern art, is that the fundamental technologies of painting—that is, paints and canvases—did not change across the period he examined. However, this all changed in 1934 with the invention of acrylic paint. With all of this in mind, we will need to widen our discussion beyond Van Dine’s colour-based approach in order to properly assess the full breadth of modern art.
The most obvious value to begin with is the stance articulated by the Dadaists directly. That is, the rejection of meaning and classical interpretation in art. To put it a little crudely, this whole approach is captured in the ever-popular buzzword of postmodernism, and its conception of meaning as relative. The consciously postmodernist artists and critics emphasised this relativisation of meaning, as embodied by Susan Sontag’s castigation that:
In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. … Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art—and in criticism—today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.
Assessing the full scope of so-called postmodernist theories of culture is far beyond this post. However, it is accurate to say that many defences of modern and contemporary art rest on the claim that art does not exist to communicate concrete meanings but to be taken in as an experience—what Sontag called “the luminousness of the thing in itself.” To understand this view and its articulations, we should make a case study of an abstract work which cannot be understood in terms of Van Dine’s colour theory, and explain its worth in terms of its immediate experience. Let us consider the following works by Dan Walsh. Firstly, Black and White:
And here is Screens by the same artist:
As works that largely stick to a colour palette of unblended shades of black and white, they defy Van Dine’s account of abstraction as the triumph of colour over shapes. And neither do they match with the blunt anti-meaning contrarianism of Dada. They each simply use a range of artistic techniques to create visually interesting abstract images purely out of black and white shapes. Screens is a particularly intriguing case to consider: The sharply in-focus drops attract the eye and distract from the blurred dots that take up the bulk of the image. This creates the illusion of a dimensional barrier between foreground and background despite it being a nominally two-dimensional abstract image. One could consider many metaphorical interpretations for such an effect: Is it about the sensation of distraction—the concept of missing the forest for the trees? Is it, as per the title, about the distorting effects of screens and boundaries; about how vaguely we see things in the background of our lives? Any of these interpretations could work as a stretch, but none emerges as overwhelmingly convincing. However, the fact that there is no single clear purpose to a work does not mean we cannot enjoy it. After all, its overall experience can be taken in without needing to be read as an interpretative metaphor. The visual effect of an abstract division between foreground and background, as applied to such stark, simple colours is the purpose in and of itself.
Such art is not formed as an extension of the principles of realism as per Van Dine’s theory. However, the aesthetic dimensions of appreciating such art from a non-interpretative perspective is not entirely dissimilar to how we appreciate realistic art. Once we do away with a framework that necessitates the literalism of traditional realism, we can take in the sensations of the abstract and evocative as an alternate non-realistic space. Screens does not need to mean something specific, just as a sunrise does not have a rigidly defined meaning. It is a composition constructed through its division between vague, blurred objects and stark, focused objects. This juxtaposition offers an aesthetic experience whose reception is shaped by culture, and which cannot be reduced down to mere symbols and metaphors.
Art is politics
Through the preceding discussions, we have developed some tools that allow us to consider the worth of abstract art along more complex dimensions, rather than crudely applying overly simple understandings of realism. We have built up the ability to assess modern art in terms of how overall compositions combine artistic elements in order to create particular aesthetic effects—what S. S. Van Dine referred to as the ‘rhythm’ of a work of art. But such rhythmic effects are not appreciated in a vacuum. Enjoying the works that we have discussed so far depends upon the idea that there is value in art which uses its rhythm to depict something apart from literal reality. The point of this post is to not merely establish the idea that skill and technique in art can evoke feelings apart from blunt comparisons to reality, but to begin a conversation centred on how different political values emerge in the distinct applications of skill and technique in the framework that we call style.
Putting all of this another way, we have established how craft and aesthetic sensibilities can evoke effects separate from reproducing the natural shapes of reality. But the true cause of distance that audiences feel from modern art is not that they are simply incapable of appreciating these rhythmic effects, it is that many current perspectives are embedded within values that suggest that communicating reality is more important than the esoteric sensations that can be communicated through these abstract shapes. Beyond displays of seeming ignorance in the face of modern art are far more fundamental discussions of politics—and even metaphysics. Understanding this dispute means openly referring to these distinctions.
To close out this post, let us return to the explicitly political and discuss one particularly salient discourse on the value of modern art. Throughout the early 20th century, discussions of art among Marxists took on a very heated form: The emergence of the Soviet Union made the possibility of ‘actual’ communist art into a concrete possibility for the first time, and so stakes of theories of art extended from the classroom to the realm of actual policy. In this context, a lot of the discussion regarding art and aesthetics in the West took the form of a kind of proxy war between two Marxist critics: Georg Lukács and Bertolt Brecht. Lukács was an immensely influential philosopher and voice for Marxist theory in the non-Soviet West, and Brecht was a German Marxist playwright who vocally advocated for certain values in Marxist art.
Brecht was a relatively experimental writer, and pursued new forms of engagement beyond what he considered to be the bourgeois approaches of standard theatre. He is widely remembered today as the first to articulate a communist rationale behind metafictive techniques in his theory of the alienation effect. Lukács, by contrast, emphasises that any Marxist understanding of the world must see culture as being determined within a totalising dialectical system driven by the underlying economic conditions—that is, capitalism. For Lukács, experimental art, abstraction, Surrealism, and the pervading mood of anti-realism as practiced by modern art can only reflect the cultural needs of capitalism. This does not mean that he blindly believes in blunt realism as inherently communist. Rather, he sees capitalism as directing art towards the subjectivity of immediate experience, and therefore anti-capitalist art must present a larger picture. He therefore argues that something modeled on an older style of realism is the only way to present art with enough scale to represent a ‘total’ system of culture that depicts an alternate economic model to capitalism. For example, he argues that:
The modern literary schools of the imperialist era, from Naturalism to Surrealism, which have followed each other in such swift succession, all have one feature in common. They all take reality exactly as it manifests itself to the writer and the characters he creates. The form of this immediate manifestation changes as society changes. These changes, moreover, are both subjective and objective, depending on modifications in the reality of capitalism and also on the ways in which class struggle and changes in class structure produce different reflections on the surface of that reality. It is these changes above all that bring about the swift succession of literary schools together with the embittered internecine quarrels that flare up between them.
But both emotionally and intellectually they all remain frozen in their own immediacy; they fail to pierce the surface to discover the underlying essence, i.e. the real factors that relate their experiences to the hidden social forces that produce them. On the contrary, they all develop their own artistic style—more or less consciously—as a spontaneous expression of their immediate experience. … Artistically, as well as intellectually and politically, the major realists of our age have consistently shown their ability to undertake this arduous task.
Major rifts opened up among Marxist theorists along these lines. Brecht was not solely committed to abstract art by any means, but he was also open to the revolutionary potential of techniques of abstraction such as montage, stream of consciousness, and Surrealism. This was unacceptable to Lukács and others in the realist faction, who only saw the degeneration of art into a commodity in such techniques. In the realm of painting, the division between modern abstract art and earlier realistic styles was understood in this context.
We can see echoes of such disputes in current discussions of art. For all of the simplicity in the arguments deployed against modern art, where it is said that the style is straightforwardly bad, lacks substance, or displays little skill, we should not confuse the issue with a simple difference in taste. Rather, it is that the political projects which view society in terms of a unified whole also tend to blind one to artistic expressions of reality in terms of disconnected, abstract pieces. And the uninterested dismissal of such art on purely instinctual grounds also tends to result from unchallenged political assumptions that, when crystalised, would transfigure into these same totalising ideologies. All discussions of art are, at their core, a consideration of how to understand any structures of meaning as embodied in the communicative work before us: that is, hermeneutics, the analysis of theological texts.
This is why it is necessary to respond with thorough analysis to those cases in life where one has an inexplicable but definite aesthetic response to the world and its works of art. These instincts are not the product of random tastes. They are the embodiment of social values that shape how one interprets and perceives reality, and the values that one uses to assess the worth of the reality that we find using this process. To respond to modern art with blunt derision is not an empty gesture. It is the fragment of a worldview that sees no value in “reality exactly as it manifests itself to the writer,” or artist (Lukács). Rather, such a perspective finds reality as something determined from above the fractured circumstances of individuals, and to be decided upon systematically from such a perspective. Breaking out of this does not require liking and enjoying modern art per se. But it does require developing a sense of morality and logic that is able to make some use of the techniques we have discussed today to see the rhythm and structure of modern art—to see the ideas expressed in abstract montage and “the shattering of images, … breaking up the surface from an original” (Bloch). It requires methods that expose the extent to which critical discussions of taste in art cloak the more suggestive argument that informs it—that of politics.
