I can’t find a link to this story on the local television station’s website, but I’m going to mention it anyway.

The local ABC news reported last night on a University of Arkansas professor’s findings that artistic genius isn’t that at all. Instead, plain old “hard work” and “practice” result in great artists.

Practice and hard work is definitely important, but it isn’t all that goes into a successful artist. Certain people, I’d argue, are predisposed to creative lifestyles. No one will argue that people are different. Some are good at hard facts, some at visioning. Some are gifted with hospitality, others at crafting. Like I’ve recently noted on the blog, one natural talent isn’t better than another, just different.

This is my third line of thought following up Jack of all arts, crafts, wannabe and Is art defined by communication? It was also prompted by “Mo-Coffee’s” comment on the latter post, in which he paraphrases Tennyson on poetry: “A poem doesn’t ‘mean,’ a poem ‘is.’”

Tennyson’s commentary, it seems to me, more or less represents the idea of art for art’s sake, which Wikipedia defines as “a philosophy that the intrinsic value of art, and the only “true” art, is divorced from any didactic, moral or utilitarian function.” The idea is credited to Theophile Guatier who lived in the mid nineteenth century.

The inclusion of the phrase “the only true art” sends up all kinds of red flags. Perhaps this part of the idea and definition was meant to exclude propaganda in its many forms, but it makes me think of the isolating and — in my opinion — counterproductive and potentially dangerous artist-as-genius mentality (an idea of mine that needs more exploration). That said, let’s look at art for art’s sake as “a philosophy that the intrinsic value of art is divorced from any didactic, moral or utilitarian function.”

Art that “is,” or art for art’s sake, is affirmed by Francis Schaeffer in his little treatise, Art and the Bible, on page 33 of my 1973 edition: “A work of art has value in itself.” He goes on in the same paragraph to point out that “Art is not something we merely analyze or value for its intellectual content. It is something to be enjoyed.” The point is made earlier in the book that certain instructions for for the fabrication of the tabernacle and then the temple were abstract and “for beauty“: Multi-colored pomegranates on garb, chains and pomegranates adorning freestanding pillars and and precious stones for beauty.

What about works of art that are not necessarily “for beauty” — and I say this without desiring, at this point, a discussion on personal aesthetics. What about paintings intended to comment on society, such as Picasso’s Guernica? Do these works also possess innate value though their content is less than pleasant?

But then where do you draw the line between works of art and propaganda, perhaps on the basis of how well-known an artist is? Maybe judging by the quality of the craft?

Agreeing that art bears an intrinsic value — regardless of message, intent or ability to communicate, relevance to a cultural context — lends an incredible amount of validity to modern conceptual or non-representational artwork. If a person agrees with the doctrine of art for art’s sake almost anything can become art. Is this a slippery slope, one that leads to curators fabricating boxes with a set of instructions sent to her by the artist — a box that many people in our culture will, for whatever reason, look at and think “That’s not art?”

I’m going to call this inquisitive ramble part one on art for art’s sake, and hope I can come back to it in the near future.

I’ve avoided, to a large degree, commentary regarding painter-slash-marketer Thomas Kinkade, and the couple times I have mentioned him I tried to maintain the utmost professional decorum. He and his work easily give rise to polarized passions for and against. My personal observation is that — while I grant the artist liberty to depict any subject matter he chooses — the saccharin nature of his works supplant or bury whatever ills he’s suffered or observed in life (this based on reading articles about and interviews with the man). The artist’s personality will always come out in his or her works.

It surprised me last night to see that Gregory Wolfe included an essay talking about Kinkade in his Intruding Upon the Timeless collection, and I was eager to read it. Jumping off of the common criticisms of The Painter of Light, Wolfe’s commentary considers the artist’s seeming love affair with sentimentality. Critics go so far as to call Kinkade’s work “art as a Happy Meal” and “cultural Prozac.” At the same time, Wolfe concedes that the paintings must be meeting a felt need in the culture judging by their popularity.

Wolfe defines sentimentality using R.H. Blyth: “We are being sentimental when we give to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it” and Oscar Wilde: “A sentimentalist is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.” He goes on to use Mark Jefferson’s characterization of sentimentality not as inherent in certain emotions, but instead as a disjuncture between emotion and object. “The heart of the problem is that of a misrepresentation of the world in order to indulge certain emotional states,” Wolfe says. “The essence of Kinkade’s sentimentality is the packaging of nostalgia. It’s an oxymoronic idea, but it has become a major part of our cultural life, as Florence King has noted: ‘True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories . . . but American-style nostalgia is about as ephemeral as copyrighted deja vu.’”

He concludes the essay thus:

“There are times when criticizing sentimentality seems like overkill. But it would be wrong to simply dismiss the phenomenon — and the specific instance I’ve been discussing, religious kitsch — as nothing more than examples of harmless mediocrity. The great theologian, Cardinal Henri de Lubac, once wrote: ‘There is nothing more demanding than the taste for mediocrity. Beneath its ever moderate appearance there is nothing more intemperate; nothing surer in its instinct; nothing more pitiless in its refusals. It suffers no greatness, shows beauty no mercy.’

Perhaps, at its best, sentimentality strives for something approximating the theological virtues of hope and love. But in refusing to see the world as it is, sentimentality reduces hope to nostalgia. And in seeking to escape ambiguity and the consequences of the Fall, it denies the heart of love, which is compassion. Unless compassion means the act of suffering with the other in their otherness, it becomes meaningless. Well-intentioned as the purveyors and consumers of sentiment may be, they still want the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.”

I haven’t personally thought of the marketing guru’s impressionistic works as utopian before, but the word seems appropriate to me now. Kinkade describes his paintings as depicting a “world without the Fall.” As a child I regularly created — in my mind and on paper — such worlds without sin. While bored in high school math class, I devised islands where only Christians were allowed to live, combining (probably) the sense of isolation I was beginning to feel in the church with my fledgling interest in architecture and community planning. In retrospect, I realize these ghettos I dreamt of fly in the face of Christ’s mandates to make disciples of all nations and bear potentially frightening similarities to historically heinous circumstances such as the Nazi concentration camps.

All that to say that as I continue to think about Kinkade and his work, I may be able to more aptly understand where he’s coming from.

What really irks me about the artist is his ceaseless marketing, his dependency on reproductions — no matter how high their quality or how many dots of “light” are applied — and insistence on plastering his paintings on everything from mugs to, apparently, recliners. The man is more of a brand than an artist. It seems as though this is how he wants it, but it makes it very difficult to take him seriously as an artist. And by artist here I mean someone deeply interested in his craft as a vehicle for imaginative and probing communication. The paradox is that his model is all about mass communication. While I don’t understand, personally, the world of artistic reproductions, I have no significant problem allowing a painter or printmaker their limited edition giclees. Kinkade, however, takes this to an astronomical new level, paying no respect (it would seem) to the original, the tactile.

I wonder how Norman Rockwell was perceived in his day, or even Maxfield Parish (one of my favorite illustrators). Perhaps if we think of Kinkade as an illustrator, his wildly successful and ubiquitous marketing endeavors will seem less offensive.

What Kinkade’s paintings lack that Rockwell’s and Parish’s often rely on are images of people. Wolfe, in his essay, points out that Thomas Kinkade’s “genius” is that he never lets us into the “Cotswoldy cottages” that are his staple, “leaving us free to imagine the world within.” But that’s another topic for another time.

Over the last year or so I’ve come to realize how different our perception of artists is from reality. The film Frida, about the life of painter Frida Kahlo, sparked this revelation. I remember the first time I saw a Kahlo painting, in a poetry writing class during college. I was put off at the time, to say the least, even as an art student in a public university. Had I at the time been given some background information on the artist, her paintings would have made sense. Their visceral nature would have been tempered with the knowledge that she suffered physically in many of the ways she depicted on the canvas.

A week or so ago I wrote briefly about Makoto Fujimura’s recent blog post dealing with Vincent van Gogh. Normally, van Gogh is regarded as a modern artistic genius, afflicted with stereotypical artist-slash-genius afflictions; in other words, he was kinda crazy. And then there’s that bit about him cutting off his ear.

What we don’t know — even me with an art degree — is that he came from a very religious family. He wanted to be a priest, but was denied the priesthood by the Dutch church for being too uneducated (he only knew five languages). He was sent as a missionary to a mining community in Belgium. He likely suffered from some unidentified mental illness, which explains the mood swings that caused people to think of him as crazy. And his style, his application of paint to the canvas, was a reflection of his appreciation for Japanese wood cuts.

I took five art history classes as an undergrad: Art Historty Survey I and II, History of Photography, Roman Art and Archeology and History of Architecture. I never learned details like this, details that significantly influence how a person looks at a work of art. Yes, a painting or sculpture possesses merit in and of itself. We don’t need to know the personal history of the artist in order to say “That’s a good painting.” While such knowledge may not necessarily lend additional meaning to his individual pieces, such details do make a work of art infinitely more interesting.

This Boston Globe story exposes how some contemporary gallery art is not actually fabricated by the artist. It’s well worth reading.

The focus of the article is a Tara Donovan work titled “Untitled (Pins).”

As you can see, the piece is cube of pins. Donovan designed the sculpture, but in this case a museum curator actually created the three-dimensional item. The artist did send instructions.

Other examples are given in the article of such collaboration, and the end of the article points out what I was thinking from the beginning: This isn’t such a new phenomenon. Renaissance painters and sculptors (the Globe cites Rubens often employed entire workshops. The masterpieces we know were not necessarily executed by a solitary individual.

This bears very interesting ramifications in our own culture. From the article:

“‘It’s delegation,’ says Baldessari, 76 [a pioneer in the realm of conceptual art]. ‘An architect is a classic example. He doesn’t have to build a house. A composer doesn’t always have to conduct his work so why should an artist?.”

I’m not comfortable with the comparison of a sculptor or painter to an architect (There are generally a lot more aspects to building a house than to stretching a canvas and applying paint, even excepting the building process and considering solely the design process.), but I’m also not necessarily opposed to delegation. Admittedly, I find Donovan’s delegation somewhat flakey; the cube of pins lacks most appearances of learned craft. Indeed, if her work is purchased by private collectors, some assembly is still required.

Such, perhaps, is the nature of conceptual art these days. Duchamp’s urinal could be replicated at will by people with the desire to do so. The importance of an idea supercedes craft. In this light, it’s easy to see how culture perceives artists as geniuses, giving such precedence to their minds. It’s easy to see how southern folk art gains popularity when craft is second class.

Donovan suggests that if she were the one installing her work, she wouldn’t have any time in the studio. “I’m interested in developing the phenomenological aspects of the material. Once that’s done, my part is done.” She’s sold about three dozen of the cubes in different sizes and materials (”Toothpicks” sold for $45,600 last year). As I mentioned above, delegation is fine. I can’t imagine trying to create Pisano’s baptistery on my own. As a comparison, if I was getting paid $45,000, that would give me about nine months to finish the ornate project and still walk away with a lower-middle class wage after taxes. Pisano spent roughly five years on the project with the help of several assistants. He may not have worked solely on the baptistery during that time, but he probably spent more than nine months on it regardless. Hopefully the commission paid significantly more than the the 13th century equivalent of $45,000.

Donovan’s cubes possess a certain aesthetic, but they are more or less conceptual works. She is paid for her ideas, not her craft.

The article points out that people like to feel a connection to the artist through the works they view. When a 23 year old art student was told “Untitled (Pins)” was not actually fabricated by the artist, the student was disappointed. “I’m not really sure it’s a successful piece of work,” she replied.

Edger’s article reminds us that art is a business as well as a calling, whether we talk about Rubens or Donovan.

Above photo from the Boston Globe website.

Another blurb from Gregory Wolfe’s collection of essays:  

“Like the biblical prophet, the artist is often an outsider, one who stands apart and delivers a challenge to the community. The prophets of old employed many of the same tricks used by writers and artists: lofty rhetoric, apocalyptic imagery, biting satire, lyrical evocations of better times, and subversive irony.”

“To speak of the artist as a prophet is to confer praise. But it is important to remember that even in biblical times the prophet was not completely independent of the community. Prophets might have been more free to speak their minds than the average members of society, but they were not autonomous.”

“The prophet and the artist may seek to disturb the existing order of things, but they should do so in the name of a deeper order, not in the name of their own genius. The artist will serve the community best not by worrying about either his own autonomy or the community’s immediate concerns but by remaining open to the transcendent sources of order. By keeping an eye fixed on the distances, the artist will do justice to both art and community.”

The Atheist and the Crucifix, an article written by Washington D.C. artist Menachem Wecker (who also writes for Iconia) is an interesting read. Wecker compiles a series of quotes from atheists and religious types to (unscientifically) gauge how the entirely non-religious — supposedly entirely non-religious — view religious art.

One of the most interesting responses is at the beginning of his article, where The Infidel Guy’s Reginald V. Finley Sr. expresses his disgust with the crucifix: “How would we feel today if I wore a miniature bust of JFK around my neck with two bullet holes in his head?” he asked. “People would call me crazy, nuts, sick and deranged. Yet many Christians do this on a daily basis.”

Christians shouldn’t be surprised at comments like this in light of Scripture such as 1 Corinthians 1:18: “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” For what it’s worth, Protestants generally wear crosses as opposed to crucifixes in my experience; Catholics are more likely to wear a crucifix. Both potentially possess quite visceral implications for anyone with the slightest knowledge of this historical form of capital punishment.

More interesting to me is the (somewhat jumbled) response of blogger Ralph Dumain on Reason and Society. Wecker originally sent a flurry of emails to atheists around the web including Dumain, however in the end Dumain was not interviewed for the article. Dumain suggests that a “creative person would not express himself in the same fashion at every point in time and space, but would push the envelope given the tools and information at hand in any given cultural environment.” This smacks of the artist-as-genius mentality from where I sit. I’m all about “pushing the envelope,” but I’m not about to say that every creative person in the world must do this. After all, if we take Solomon’s wisdom at face value, “there is nothing new under the sun.” And he said this 3000 years ago. All we’re doing as creative people today is rehashing old materials and processes. We may come up with our own styles or masterpieces that are “original,” but originality doesn’t define good art.

I suppose citing Solomon isn’t worth much to an atheist, but what the hay.

Also from Dumain’s post is this:

“The idea that a person would be interested in specifically religious art in the contemporary world rubs me the wrong way, just the stomach-churning feeling I would get from contemplating the notion of “Christian rock”, or Christian music as a pop music form. It’s not that I would not appreciate the religious artistic products of the past, but there is something contrived and dishonest or just plain tacky about this sort of thing in the present.

Why do I think this? Well, one approach to art is propaganda, but I don’t think that art with religious content that genuinely moved people in the past was merely propaganda, and in any case did not have to compete with a secular society in order to prove itself as an alternative message. The conditions of the time, in concert with symbolism and the avenues of expressivity, would tend to create a genuine concrete content that could outlive its time and intention. Someone could have thought to himself: well, I want to create Christian, Buddhist, etc., art, but to do that today, in the Western nations anyway, seems to me rather hollow and kitschy.”

Why would he think that to create “religious” art in modern times is hollow and kitschy in comparison to three or four hundred years ago? Perhaps I posted about one of the reasons earlier this week when talking about craft. Perhaps Betty Spackman gives some insight in her book about Christians and kitsch, which I hope to get as a Christmas gift this year. Regardless, I can’t blame Dumain in general for thinking this way, as sad as that may be. But as we’ve discussed on this blog numerous times in the last year and a half, that is changing — and it’s about time. I’d guess that unless Dumain is very heavily into the modern art world this would be hard for him to see.

Heck, it’s hard for most Christians to see.

This story in The Telegraph ponders “How ‘genius’ disfigured a practical art.” Fabulous question!

Alasdair Palmer’s article is in response to John Silber’s book Architecture of the Absurd. According to Silber, the answer to the above question is Architects: ” . . . many of the most famous designers have ceased to take an interest in the practical effectiveness of their buildings because they have become obsessed with their status as ‘artists’.”

This is believable when we consider buildings by the likes of Frank Gehry. Personally, I’ve always been fascinated by his structures, particularly how they more or less look like sculpture yet (supposedly) function as buildings. I’ve never been in a Gehry building, but I have spent the night in a Frank Lloyd Wright building — The Price Tower — which seemed in some ways to sacrifice function for artistry as Silber suggests. The building is beautiful, and actually does employ some innovative practical solutions such as the exterior copper louvers, but the interior space is generally less than desirable. Rooms are small and oddly shaped, public spaces were also strange and the elevators are minute.

As I’ve said in the past, my own interest in architecture is in part driven by the need to possess a good base of knowledge in a variety of disciplines: Structure, psychology, sociology, community planning, and of course the many aspects of visual design. Apparently the modern “star” architects have forgotten many of the pieces that result in a well-rounded building.

Silber also complains about Daniel Libeskind and I.M. Pei. I don’t know of Libeskind, and my only personal experience with Pei was good. Pei designed the NBC bank building in downtown Lincoln, Nebraska where I banked as a college student. I really liked this building aesthetically and functionally, although it’s probably one of his older works. It seems his buildings have become more “loose”, so to speak, in recent years.

Frank Gehry’s recent Los Angeles Philharmonic building is cited in The Telegraph article as an example of bad architecture. This sculptural phenom, clad in polished aluminum, reflected so much light into nearby apartments (raising the temperature by a reported 15 degrees) that Gehry’s building had to be covered with an unattractive fabric.

It struck me while biking this morning that my post yesterday needed a qualifiation:

Not everyone is an artist.

Regular readers will know that when I say this I’m not attempting to create an exclusive set of people, of art snobs; I’m not setting artists up as some kind of genius. Artists are human beings the same as the rest of humanity, with the same social and cultural responsibilities as the rest of humanity. I’ve more or less said all of this in some form or fashion before, but it is worth reiterating.

I’m not going to further attempt to define an artist here. For this I defer to my post on the definition of art. Suffice it that not everyone is a home builder. Not everyone is a statistician. Not everyone is a baseball player. Not everyone has the same gifts and talents.

Why is it then that the label of artist is applied so broadly in comparison to other lines of work?

Art is for everyone, even people who didn’t study it in college. Even people who’ve never picked up a paintbrush. Even people who’ve never bought an original artwork (Shame on you!).

Last night my wife lamented in the middle of a conversation how she wasn’t an equal to me when we talked about art. “Bologna!” I said in my best Italian accent. Sure, she didn’t study art in college, although she has picked up a paintbrush and bought an original work of art — This aside from her own crocheting. She is very intelligent and her opinion on art is valid.

It must be noted that part of our own struggle as a couple when it comes to discussing art is personality. We approach conversation very differently, and it’s easy for me to inadvertently step on her toes (Isn’t that part of the definition of “husband,” whether we like it or not?). Those of you with rings on your fingers know exactly what I’m talking about here.

Back on topic. It must be noted that not every opinion on art is worthwhile. By this I’m referring mostly to those unconsidered thoughts; and by this I’m referring to people who flaunt their responses to art without knowing why they are saying what they are. A person should be able to elaborate on why they do or don’t like a particular sculpture, even if “It’s just not my personal preference.” No one in their right mind can expect everyone to like every style of architecture or painting or film; we aren’t robots. There is such a thing as a personal aesthetic. Everyone looks at a work of art through a different lens. We all claim different experiences and personalities that give our aesthetic flavor.

That said, I also believe that most Americans don’t begin to think critically about their visual environment (Indeed, I’ve often wondered what percentage of Americans think critically about anything.). Certain people I know exclaim how they are visually inept. That may be, but just because someone isn’t predisposed to artistic greatness or understanding does not entirely exempt them from the conversation.