The Purpose of Art Is to Lay Bare the Questions That Have Been Hidden by the Answers

Arlene Goldbard

The purpose of fine art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers. - James Baldwin

Baldwin's epigram reminds us that to thrive, we must be able to come across through imposed realities and prefab solutions. We may be tempted to seek definitive answers, only what we really demand at present is to alive into the questions.

To inhabit questions means to first unpack their assumptions and implications.

What's the context for an enquiry into aesthetics and social justice? When I speak on this topic, someone from the "institution" arts world always asks me this: "What about standards? What well-nigh excellence? A lot of this piece of work isn't very good."

Information technology's an assertion, not a question, and I too hear it from readers. An academic responded to my recent essay on San Francisco's cultural equity controversy by suggesting that customs-based social change work isn't funded considering it isn't very good.

My usual response has four parts:

(1) Some work in all arts sectors isn't very adept. Who's judging? No one sets out to make bad art, simply in that location's also no style to guarantee good work. Critics may pan large-budget films, one thousand opera, blockbuster exhibits. Audience members may flee. Yet in a gazillion arts forums, I've never heard someone ask a major institution director this question.

(2) Why? Because the marble and money heaped onto the red-carpeting arts encases the work in a gilt frame, creating a default assumption of excellence. Proficient execution—but 1 aesthetic dimension—reinforces that. Some frames are so secure that those who find fault with the work they enclose are shamed, told that their displeasure exposes their own deficient sense of taste.

(3) These questioners are frequently making a category fault, treating process elements equally final products. We bloggers could spend all our allotted words listing works of great beauty emerging from collaborative processes. But if you drop into the storefront studio on a random twenty-four hours, if when you visit the barrio you lack the same patience for cultural specificity you typically bring to Rossini, you miss the point.

(four) Add in the tendency to dismiss a whole universe based on a few experiences (the aforementioned bookish lives two,000 miles from the piece of work he dissed), and the result is that some sectors benefit from the default assumption of excellence, immunizing them against such challenge and its consequences.

Consider what happens when the frame is removed. Seven years agone, I wrote about a famous experiment conducted by The Washington Mail service in which violinist Joshua Bong, incognito in jeans and a T-shirt, his violin case open to receive donations, performed for passers-by at a Washington, DC Metro station. The results:

• He attracted an amass audience that could be counted on one's fingers and a total of $32.17 (which included one $20 contribution).
• Sixty-three people passed Bell by before i turned his or her head. Seven people in all stopped for at to the lowest degree a minute. The Mail kept count, and so I can tell you that in the same space of time, i,070 people walked right past Bell without stopping….

I'm not suggesting that Bell is less gifted than commonly supposed. But without the aureate frame—the signpost declaring "Excellence here!"—the assertion that aesthetic quality will triumph seems a little shaky.

I'1000 hugely interested in aesthetic research. I attempt to convey observations and ideas most culture in language that braids beauty and meaning. I often write about questions of beauty and fine art as a form of spiritual do, the sublime as an antidote to despair. My ii well-nigh recent books assert the role of dazzler and meaning in forging a livable time to come. Aesthetics are neither owned past the prestige arts nor new to socially engaged artists. Indeed, making art is engaging with aesthetics, total stop.

I of the questions put here characterizes aesthetics equally "built-in from a western culture/ideal." It's truthful that the give-and-take has Greek roots. But it's a map, not the territory. The many artists I respect in community development and social justice work continuously consider how their work feels, resonates, moves or fails to move. No i is indifferent to the question of beauty.

We demand to avert even accidentally reinforcing the idea that this is an emergent phenomenon rather than an enduring awareness. If the same questions wouldn't be posed to red-carpet artists, if their answers wouldn't have identical bear upon on their funding, then why ask them of artists who pursue a social order of justice tempered by love?

Imagine asking establishment artists "what aesthetic values and outcomes are meaningful in your work?" I'd look general statements about excellence, followed past a range of responses reflecting great freedom to experiment, improvise, and arrange. Why should there be more consensus hither?

I'll close with some other fix of questions that need considering:

Why do so many take the default supposition that the establishment arts have engaged properly with aesthetic concerns, but that socially engaged artists demand to be schooled?

Why do so many take the fiction that crimson-carpet arts piece of work shouldn't be evaluated through the lens of civic purpose when all art either reinforces or challenges "the answers that take been hidden by the questions"? All art is political, but some gets to pretend information technology'south not and be judged appropriately. Why go along?

Why not grant every socially engaged artist freedom to define specific values and outcomes? Artful criteria? Engagement with aesthetics reflecting the pervasive reality of multiple participation, identities, and meanings?

Why not live into the questions?

vazquezhaveracter91.blogspot.com

Source: https://blog.americansforthearts.org/2019/05/15/living-into-the-questions

Share this post