CORACLE VOLUME TWO ISSUE SEVEN
Now online: http://mypage.direct.ca/a/ameehan/vol02/07/index.htmlMy reading was interrupted by a late snack: I pulverised the anchovies remaining in a can opened last week, ground them in a mortar with some paprika and soy, and made a kind of anchovy paste, which I spread on crackers and ate with a thin slice of cheddar covered with antipasto from a jar. It was all very tasty. Surprisingly good. I was glad to find a use for anchovies that have been sitting open in the fridge too long. I was worried they might be going off, but was assured that they smelt no worse than they usually do.
I later read another Maugham story, The Voice of the Turtle, about the prima donna with the funny handle, La Falterona. It ends up with his description of her singing the swan song of Wagner's Isolde. I had to get up, and get the track, and play it over the speakers in the bedroom. I went out like a light, smiling.
Later in the week, I read story after story of Maugham. One morning I got up, looking for another book of short stories containing one by Maugham where it gave his dates birth and death. I did not find it. Instead, all I found was an entry in Whit Burnett's anthology of Greatest Living Authors, in The Worlds Best of 1950, when Maugham was still alive.
A selection from his autobiography was chosen for inclusion, under the title, Truth, Beauty, Goodness. I found it too boring to finish, what I read of it seemed uninspired. His view of beauty, as the end of art, left me cold. He reduced it to aesthetics, with are at best subjective, and change from generation to generation, and from place to place. Having based his definition of beauty on this shifting ground, he has to conclude that beauty, and therefore art, is an elusive and unreliable chimera, unless it serve the greater good of all. I do not agree either that beauty is not objectively definable, or that it should serve a moral imperative, as to serve good is as subjective a motive for art as aesthetics.
Aesthetics is not about beauty, is is about what feels good, or pleases the eye, or tickles the palette, or arouses desire, that is, whatever appeals to the senses. That is no more beauty than it is the deifinition of goodness. Beauty, like goodness, are qualities that can be defined philisophically, and therefore objectively. Goodness can be considered as the object of ethical studies, in the same way that beauty is the object of the artist’s lifework. Aesthetics has to do with what is in fashion, as whatever looks good to the trend setter, or whatever is the undustry standard for the look of the moment, beauty spelled with a small-b, only glamour.
The objective quality of beauty, like mercy, is not strained; it droppeth on the glamourous and unglamourous alike; it is in the heart, not the eye of the beholder; it rings true, because it is real. We cannot define these qualities—truth, reality, goodness—but we know them when we witness them, and they awaken the recognition of their existence in us through those rare encounters with the real, the good, the true, in art.
When we encounter any and all of these qualities (for they are one and the same) in art, we can agree objectively that that is beautiful. It may not be pretty, but it rings true. And not only for us, but for anyone with the capacity to appreciate the real thing—not only today, or for a season, or a generation, but for all generations, for all time. This constant, perrenial revelation of great art has the power to make us feel, as Rilke did before the marble of Apollo, “I have to change my life”.
Since Maugham’s argument is so weak, his conclusion is anti-climactic: that beauty in art is that which must improve the lot of humanity or uplift the individual to be a better person: "Goodness is the only value that seems in this world of appearances to have any claim to be an end in itself. Virtue is its own reward. I am ashamed to have reached so commonplace a conclusion. With my instinct for effect I should have liked to end my book with startling and paradoxical announcement or with a cynicism that my reader would have recognised with a chuckle as characteristic. It seems I have little more to say than can be read in any chapbook or heard from any pulpit. I have gone a long way round to discover what everyone knew already."
I believe that beauty in art is the perception of intelligible form. When you first look at a painting, say, without knowing the form, or understanding the artist's intention, the work may be unintelligible. Since the aesthetic reaction does not depend on intelligibility, one may find the painting beautiful, or not, according to your subjective, aesthetic response. This is the level of art appreciation that need not know art, but it knows what it likes. We share this capacity with our pets. Without it, we feel nothing, that is what the word, an-aesthetic, without feeling, implies. The corrollory of this etymological fact is that aesthetics concerns dentistry, or surgery, more than art.
This arbitrary, aesthetic response is not relevant to art work, because whether a particular viewer likes it, is no foundation on which any artist should base his work. Equally, whether anyone will buy the work, is not an artistic concern.
Artists who set out to please the crowd, aiming solely to profit by making art for the market, build their notion of beauty on fickle opinion. The market is the general public, who "don't know anything about art, but know what they like". When an artist guesses what the mass of people, at the present time, like, and delivers it, he is not producing either art or beauty, but what people want at that time, which may not be art, may not be beautiful.
If, on the other hand, the artist is concerned with the form of the medium, and understands what has been done in the field up to that time, and sees a way to take that form forward in a new direction, in a way that allows others to understand the form in a new way, then that work is intelligible. It has meaning, in its own form, which other other artists who work in that form can see, and understand.
It may be a revolution that will encourage the exploration of a new direction, that may even change the course of the history of art. This may in turn become fashionable, as a result of top-down filtering; and it may become identifiable with a certain period; but there are in every art depths of formal intelligibility that can transcend time, such as a painting by Rembrandt which continues to inspire painter centuries after his death, because he reveals a truth about the art of representation of the figure by means of light and colour; a truth about the relation between breadth of handling and the engagement of the viewer's visual imagination; a truth about the representation of the individual humanity of the subject, depicted through the universal language of the body and the facial expression alone.
If the truth of the form is there, the work is beautiful to anyone with the slightest capacity for appreciation, it endures because, to stick with the form of painting for an example, from the formulation of the paint and the handling of the brush, to the choice of subject and its composition, nevermind the theory of light, perspective, colour, and the foundation of drawing underneath all, a Rembrandt painting stands outside of time, untouched by fashion, for all ages, even though it may well have offended the fashion of its own time.
In the same way, Van Gogh changed the history of painting in his work, although his paintings were unintelligible to the market of his own day. They were understood later, as the mass of human beings have come around to appreciate Vincent's work, through the work of all the art movements which sprang up after his death, exploring new ways to use colours, new ways to apply paint, new ways to give vitality and expressiveness to the surface of the canvas, indeed, to recognise that it is nothing else than paint on a surface, and that the medium and the artist's imposition of his feelings are as important, or more so, than the exact resemblance of the likeness of the portrait, or the appearance of the landscape. Vincent's form of painting succeeded because it shocked even painters of greater facility than him to attempt to be more true to themselves, more personally expressive, in their painting. And the mass of people eventually began to judge as beautiful, what first they thought was ugly.
I don't condemn art motivated by the desire to make money; that does not guarantee a beautiful work of art, and if that is the only motive, I question if it is art. To be art, I judge, it would have to have an intelligible form, the artist must demonstrate a knowledge of the form: if it is painting, it must be understandable to painters, as demonstrating a command of the form; to be judged competent, it must meet some standard, or demonstrate some familiarity with accepted forms of the art, even if only to breach the accepted rules. But if it commands a high price, or becomes famous, that alone does not mean that it is successful or even good, as art.
That may seem to go without needing to be said. I only make a point of it in order to draw the comparison with the assumption that virtue or goodness is an acceptable definition of art, as Maugham suggests. Just as an artist may do art chiefly or even totally for money, that does not guarantee that the result will be good art, or necessarily beautiful,even if it commands a high price.
In just the same way, an artist may be motivated to further the public good, whether by social comment or service. However good the cause, the result is not guaranteed to be a beautiful work of art, any more than if the motive was selfish money-grubbing. So, just as money-earning ability should not be taken as a measure of an artist, neither should the social benefit of the work.
From where I sit, it is equally irrelevant to the value of the art whether it is judged beautiful or ugly. A great work of art can depict a subject which may very well affront the moral values of the majority of people who attend its first exhibition. The history of art is full of examples of works which were condemned as decadent or degenerate by the society which viewed them at the time. And so the artist must look further for meaning and purpose of art than income or social relevancy. The market place may praise the work that sells, and the community may reward the artist who serves it, but the praises and rewards of society at large are unfortunately accorded by the masses who care nothing for art, and whose praises or condemnations should therefore properly be ignored by the artist on the trail of truth, goodness and beauty in art.
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