On The Purpose & Nature of Art
‘It is said that analyzing pleasure or beauty destroys it. That is the intention of this article.’
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure & Narrative Cinema
Contents:
1 Plato’s Republic
2 Wilde & ‘Useless’ Art
3 The Failure of Art To Enfranchise
4 Feminist & Marxist Critique of Art
5 Conclusion & Call For Your Work
1 Plato’s Republic:
In Book X of the Republic, Plato argues that art is representation; Once we consider a concept or form of a thing, we can then identify its manufacture in an attempt to resemble it, and an artist’s representation of it as different things. We can imagine a chair, a carpenter’s attempt to replicate it, and a painting of said chair. Thus, the artist is set two degrees away from the thing itself and does not have an accurate conception of the properties of the thing. Plato warns that this may be dangerous if applied to the representation of morals. Thus, we ought to ban art that does not accurately represent good so as not to damage the moral education of the citizens of the Republic. In Plato’s Republic, the only art endorsed by the state is that which produces correct feelings in its citizens: Inspiring patriotism in its soldiers and harmony in its rulers.
2 Wilde & ‘Useless’ Art:
In Oscar Wilde’s preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, he writes that; ‘There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.’ Oscar Wilde denies the existence of any moral properties in art, isolating art to its aesthetic properties. However, within the novel itself, Dorian Gray’s obsession with the aesthetic leads to his eventual moral reckoning. Thus, Wilde’s position is ambiguous; More suitable to art criticism than art philosophy. We are certain however that Wilde rejects moral properties in art that could be accurately realized in a collective morality, in opposition to Plato. As he writes; ‘All art is quite useless.’
3 The Failure of Art To Enfranchise:
In history, society has followed Plato’s warning. In the United Kingdom, D.H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a book depicting the romantic relationship between a working-class man and an upper-class woman, caused moral scandal and faced an obscenity trial. In the United States, William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch received moral outrage and three separate obscenity trials. In either case, the language used by these novels was deemed at odds with consensus social morality, in line with Plato’s view.
What if the dominant moral system is oppressive? If an oppressive state only endorses art for moral instruction, art will become a tool for oppression against a group. In response, one may posit that art can exist within the Republic that while unendorsed by the state is so persuasive to the state’s citizens, that it inspires change within the Republic. We question this assumption. For example, consider Samuel Richardson’s 18th-century novel Pamela. It depicts a ‘virtuous’ young woman resisting sexual harassment & assault from her aristocratic employer before his eventual relenting and marriage proposal as a ‘reward’ for her virtue. Some consider it to be an empathetic depiction of a woman which underlined 18th-century misogynist cruelty, and a proto-Feminist text. However the text is still a misogynistic depiction of a woman, whose value is reduced entirely to her sex & capacity to maintain virginity, placing all agency on the male oppressor. Thus, the text offers 18th-century women enfranchisement, so long as they accept the pre-existing sexist moral structure of society. We extrapolate this case to all art. Under the current system of production, art can only persuade large swaths of the citizen class if it is palatable enough to be marketed and popular. Thus, all a piece of art can accomplish is to present one action or behavior outside the society’s moral code, justify it to the majority, and then reincorporate it into the social moral code. However, an art piece can never challenge the social moral code as a whole, or the society’s method of production. All art that ‘enfranchises’ a group or behavior will present an ultimatum; You will be enfranchised, if you participate in the Republic.
4 Feminist & Marxist Critique of Art:
Let us question Wilde’s claim that there are no moral properties in art; We can examine two disciplines and study how they develop, study or criticize moral properties in art. First, we will consider Feminist Critique of Art. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing studied the way that the ‘male gaze’ informs how women are depicted in art, including traditional, classical and modern art. Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema is a seminal text of particular note in deconstructing masculine dominance in cinema, and in extension all other forms of artistic expression. Mulvey’s essay utilizes Freud & Lacan’s psychoanalysis to study how film has served as an erotic scopophilic fantasy for the male, alienated under contemporary capitalism, furthered by a psychological foundation of the ego on the viewership of image. She also discusses how Phallocentrism reduces a Woman to the role of a passive castrated male, that cannot create meaning but must endure it. Similar study can and has been undertaken in other disciplines to examine how our society’s art is complacent in structures of oppression based on race, ability, or gender assigned at birth.
In Marxism, Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction presents maybe the greatest Marxist analysis of the role of art in contemporary society. It studies how capitalist mass production has removed the aesthetic authority, ‘aura’, of works of art by seeking to mass reproduce and commodify.
Benjamin also studies how art has been separated from religion and has thus lost any ‘cult value’. For art to have cult value, it must be designed to show to a deity or God, and not meant for exhibition to fellow humans. This is the role art has played throughout the majority of human history, both in Greek temples and in Christian cathedrals. But Benjamin claims that art can no longer play this role under the current mode of production and the only remaining value of art is explicitly its exhibition value.
Perhaps Benjamin’s signature work in this essay is his discussion of art’s role in politics. Fascism, Benjamin argues, seeks to offer proletariat masses a form of expression, without challenging the existing property structure of Capitalism. Thus, Fascism’s main effort is to ‘render politics aesthetic,’ culminating in war, the highest mobilization of society and all its resources without challenging the property structure. Fascism’s cry is thus ‘Fiat ars - pereat mundis:’ Let art be created and let the world perish. This claim is not without evidence. Mussolini’s (and subsequently Hitler’s) ideology was built on and supported by the Italian Futurist art movement, which explicitly praised Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia because ‘We Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as anti-aesthetic … Accordingly we state: … War is beautiful…’
It is not difficult to examine our current political world and draw connections. Fascism, and its contemporary analogue, Populism, dominate political conversation not through debate or information but through the brute force of aestheticization, art, and chiefly, beauty. According to Benjamin, mankind has become so self-alienated that it is no longer an object of contemplation for God, but for itself. Mankind can ‘experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.’ Fascism is thus the consummation of the following shout: ‘L’Art pour L’Art!’
Thus, we argue that in the current world: All Art is political, all Art is complacent, all Art is liable, all Art is limited and all Art is fruitless.
L’Art Pour Tout Sauf L’Art!
Is this necessarily true? This is what we wish to debate.
5 Conclusion & Call For Your Work
Perhaps it is best to divide our debate into two. What is the purpose of art and what ought to be the purpose of art. The Platonist gives prescriptive claims about what art ought to do based on Platonic ethics. Aesthetes like Wilde believe that art should be practiced only for its own purpose. Marxism rejects this, and identifies it as the building block for the Fascist ideology. Feminism also identifies moral properties in art and critiques the Republic dominated by patriarchal institutions. To conclude the experience, we invite you to take on the ‘plight of a tortured artist’ and produce a piece of art. It can be a song, poem, short story, scene of dialogue, interpretative dance, the presentation of a photograph, painting, sculpture or film. Whatever you want and can imagine. We will not force you, but your performance is encouraged and the location will have a piano & guitar. In the spirit of late October, you are also invited to dress as an author, poet, musician, playwright or artist. As motivation, Henry has provided the following poem:
So whether the ghost of William Blake manipulates your pen to write a sonnet,
Or Fitzwilliam Darcy puts upon your head Jane Austen's bonnet.
Whether you are inspired to write while immersed in the smoke of a left bank cafe,
Or the beaches of Camus’ Algiers is where you lay,
And whether you are a realist, postmodern or Kafkaesque,
We invite you to entertain your morbid longing for the picturesque.
At all costs.
Henry Wilson-Litt, Carnegie’s Head Of Post-Modern Ironic Techniques