Art in an enlightened culture

Yesterday I saw a New York Times article titled The New Humanism (if that link doesn’t work, it should be the top article via this link). It’s a fantastic article, well worth the ten minutes to read. In the article author David Brooks examines how the Enlightenment influenced our own American culture, distinguishes between different philosophies within Enlightenment and then talks about how science itself is now disproving much of what the the Enlightenment taught. An excerpt from the article — which will be more clear to author David Brooks’ point than if I tried to restate it — follows.

We have a prevailing view in our society — not only in the policy world, but in many spheres — that we are divided creatures. Reason, which is trustworthy, is separate from the emotions, which are suspect . . .

. . . We emphasize things that are rational and conscious and are inarticulate about the processes down below. We are really good at talking about material things but bad at talking about emotion . . .

. . . Many of our public policies are proposed by experts who are comfortable only with correlations that can be measured, appropriated and quantified, and ignore everything else . . .

. . .First, the unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind, where many of the most impressive feats of thinking take place. Second, emotion is not opposed to reason; our emotions assign value to things and are the basis of reason.

Art is not quantifiable. Artists don’t think in terms of what is or isn’t quantifiable. As artists, we’re not afraid to attempt to articulate the “processes down below.” Art is messy. It readily accepts the challenge of difficult subject matter.

All of this begs a question in my mind: How does living in a culture so reliant on the ability to quantify, so entrenched in the French Enlightenment idea of individualism, effect that culture’s reception to and perception of the arts?

Would the arts have been better off if the Enlightenment had remained a somewhat obscure philosophy, or if the more well-rounded ideas found in the British Enlightenment usurped those of the French? Would the United States be like if it were less focused on science, industry and economy and more focused on relationships and the humanities? Would it be easier to make a living as an artist? Would modernism and its penchant for individaulism have been so prominent?

I don’t have answers, but it’s still interesting to ponder. Carve out a few spare minutes this weekend to give the article a look and tell me what you think.

“Arts funding is job funding”

Interesting little bit I’m reposting — per the author’s request within the post — from Jeffrey Salzberg‘s Facebook notes (someone I don’t know). Salzberg works as a stage lighting designer.

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Recently, I had dinner with some lovely people and the conversation turned, as it so often does these days, to politics and economics. I mentioned the importance of arts funding, and one of my companions — an artist herself — said something like, “I care about arts funding, too, but jobs are more important.”

Whoa.

It’s time we stopped thinking of ourselves as charity cases. Arts jobs are no less important just because we make theatre (or music, or sculptures, or ballets, or . . .) than they would be if we sold cars or built computers — in fact, they have even more impact, proportionally, on our local economies. The arts are huge consumers of materials, which must be manufactured and transported and, of course, artists and other employees of arts organizations buy the same groceries, clothing, automobiles, and other goods as do those in other occupations. People who attend arts events are likely to dine out before, and go to bars afterward. In the United States, more people attend professional arts events than attend professional sports. I’ve seen estimates that every government dollar that goes to arts funding has between six and seven dollars of economic impact.

I’m writing this in September of 2010. In 7 weeks, we’ll be electing senators, members of Congress, legislators, and governors. This is a time when our elected officials — and those who want to be our elected officials — are most likely to listen to us. Ask . . . no, demand . . . that they tell you their positions on arts funding. You can post this note on your own Facebook profile by clicking “Share” below (“Share” also has the option of sending it as a private message), or you can post it as a link on your candidates’ walls by copying the URL and pasting it either as a link or as part of a comment.

Let your message be loud and let it be clear: “Arts funding is jobs funding.”

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The sentiment expressed by the companion artist in the first paragraph is evidence of how poorly the arts are viewed in American culture. It’s not news to regular readers of The Aesthetic Elevator, but still worth reposting in order that we not forget the state of the arts, so to speak.

On the political front, I’m not nearly convinced — in fact I’m not convinced at all that government funding is a good way to create jobs or stimulate the economy, let alone a successful way. It hasn’t really worked so far according to the news reports, not in the timeframe people hoped for sure. However, if the men who redistribute our own tax dollars from their D.C. offices are going to continue to believe that it does work, they may as well be throwing money towards the arts too as Salzberg suggests.

On Musical Form: Is one way better than another?

The one session I didn’t go to at the Hutchmoot was the one dealing with song. I am a fan of music, but my back was not a fan of sitting any longer on that particular day.

Later the same day, however, I got the chance to ask one of the many musicians hanging around at the moot a question I’ve had for a while now:

Why does so much new music follow more or less the same form?

That form goes something like this: verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus. Years ago I noticed that my own musical interests were going a different direction from the norm. I grew up listening, well, to what my friends were listening too, and then migrated to loud “Christian music” because I wanted to be more holy, and then in college began to develop my own ear, so to speak, for music. You can see a little more about this progression in the Soundtrack of My Life.

The musician’s answer was interrupted by someone wanting to buy a CD, but the long and short of his response was that that I was out of the ordinary as an artist and thus making these kinds of observations, and that the form is used in order to make it easier for listeners to remember the songs. He made it pretty clear musicians, in general, in Nashville, want people to easily recall their music.

I did learn something in the brief little conversation, but I still have questions. Shouldn’t musicians be working imaginatively with musical form though as “artists?” Shouldn’t they be creating things that are memorable in new ways? The musician I talked to pointed out some successful diversion from the common popular form, but they still seemed like a simplistic solution in my untrained opinion.

Are a lot of musicians creating for the lowest common denominator?

I’m also trying to figure out if the idea of memorability enters into the mind and process of a visual artist, a painter or a sculptor. It never has for me that I recall, not in the way that the musician in Nashville suggested anyway. Of course, music has a wonderful enigmatic superpower that the other arts just don’t. Our minds are drawn to it in a way they are not necessarily drawn into processing colors on a canvas or words on a page.

An interesting musical contrast to the make-it-memorable-mentality might be Herva, who I wrote about last year in a post titled The importance, and trap, of artistic freedom. Herva wrote

I want to make music with my heart and my hands, to paint or write (or whatever) with my insides (intelligence, spirit, guts, soul) guiding my choices. Will anyone pay for it? I have no idea. Will anyone other than me think it’s good? No clue. But I have to allow myself not to care or worry about that right now. Every creator I’m a fan of creates things oozing in singularity, works that rise out of the sludge due to their originality, clarity, and vision.

This is the opposite end of the spectrum, it would seem, from the person I talked to in Tennessee. Is there a right kind of way to make music? Is there a correct way to paint a painting? Or should the questions be reworded, “Is there a better way to make music, or a painting?”