Does Art have a Value?

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C.D. Calderon, Staff Writer

Until a while ago I would have taken art for granted.  Like most people, I assumed that books, paintings, films, and plays were all made up this great big cultural institution that was safeguarded by the schools and libraries of America.  I now realize the view looks a lot different when seen from street level.  The person who brought this to my attention was a man who hated The Godfather.

This would-be critic (really just a kid somewhere in his teens), was confused by a film that regularly makes its way onto top 100 lists.  A film like the Godfather stands as a complex and intellectually challenging work of art.  It is also, in case no one noticed, a brilliant commentary on how the American Dream can be warped and twisted into the worst possible shape.  In the “Godfather”, what the audience is treated to is a fun-house mirror image of the American Success Story, and how, with the proper twist, that very success can become its own kind of failure.  However, all of this was lost on this one critic.  If it had just been a lone voice in the crowd, that would be one thing.  The problem is he’s not alone.  If you go log on to IMDB and dig around, you’ll find the same sentiments as expressed by the young critic.

They say things like “the film is shallow”, “over-rated”, that it is “boring” or “the acting” is terrible”.  I have never found much use for paying attention to acting.  Like Oxford critic Samuel Leslie Bethell, “I am convinced of the fundamental importance of the words themselves”.  In other words, I believe that the text of any given story is more important than its appearance, regardless of medium.  The problem shared by the critics of Francis Coppola’s film is that they don’t know how to read the story that’s right in front of them.  Even if it is presented in visual form, the nature of the text is so complex that their reading comprehension is unable to catch up.

This places the audience at a disadvantage.  If entertainment is the primary goal of books and film, then the lack of a proper reading comprehension on the part of the audience will always frustrate the very purpose for which all art exists.  The interesting thing to note about all this is what it reveals not just about how audiences relate to art, but also life.  Fiction demands that its audience go below the surface narrative in order to grasp subtle shades of nuance, unspoken subtexts, and hidden meanings.  What is possible to miss is that life operates under the same law as well.  With few exceptions, life is not self-evident.  In order to understand the meaning or purpose of anything, it is necessary to gather all the relevant knowledge concerning any and all possible subjects.

The scope of a person’s knowledge determines in large part how they will react to anything including a work of art.  These days if a book or a movie fails to engage the audience, it is most likely due to a lack of the proper background knowledge that is needed in order to grasp all the nuances of the story.  The reason films adapted from comic books are doing so well at the box-office is because their audience are more knowledgeable about the backstories and various cannons of superheroes more than they are of the contents of the Bill of Rights.  Anything above a certain level of complexity will have to be rejected by this demographic, because the lack of proper knowledge means they will necessarily be unable to grasp anything subtler than meaningless sound and fury.

The demand for a so-called realism is just a request that the story be kept at a level that modern audiences can understand.  To be fair, clarity will always have an important place in a work fiction.  However, to believe that complexity of plot means a lack of clarity is a mistake.  Just as the demand for a simple life is possible only if you remove yourself from society altogether.

At its core, the deficit of public literacy has its roots in a much more fundamental problem.  It is the unstated idea that art, and the knowledge that goes with it, is of little to no value.  The critic John Gray summed up the conundrum in his preface to Edgar Wind’s Art and Anarchy:

The paradox that art was once both the world of power and of escape is shown by the fact that we now live with it on the most comfortable and trivial terms: it neither alters our days nor offers an alternative to them.  The most shocking and sensational modern novel or picture does not change this state of affairs: indeed, by trying so hard it seems to show that it knows it cannot do so.  Lionel Trilling wondered at, and lamented, the fact that a modern humanist education exposes the student to works of profound power, works whose very nature should be to awe and discompose, and yet the student is expected – naturally enough – to study them in a spirit of unmoved enquiry.  As Wind observes ‘Plato did not foresee that the dangers of art, which he feared so greatly, might not affect a people who had become immune to them’.  And modern criticism aids the immunizing process…

“…Wind’s diagnosis shows the part played by these and other factors over the whole spectrum of arts, and the unexpected interplay between them.  T.S. Eliot, for example, made what is now a notorious critical claim that poetry after the seventeenth century underwent a ‘dissociation of sensibility’, that the ‘feel’ of it split up into form and content and ceased to have that complex natural harmony of narrative and emotion which Yeats – also looking backward – called ‘blood, imagination, intellect running together” (Wind xiv – xv).

To believe that literacy has no intrinsic value, however, does little to change the situation.  The fact remains that the only way to ensure both survival, on a social, political, and even personal level means gaining a proficiently high and multi-faceted level of reading comprehension.  The very nature of today’s economy demands it.  What makes the task such a challenge is that it ultimately hinges on the price the audience places not just on art, but on human life in general.  Benjamin Stein sums up the crux of the matter in E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy when he observed:

“The kids…art not mentally prepared to continue the society because they basically do not understand the society well enough to value it”.

If learning to read is a natural necessity, then the first place to start is to find out what first what do audiences value, why, and then to find out how to build on such foundations.

 

Works Cited

Bethell, S.L. Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition.  1944.  Staples Press, 1948.

Hirsch Jr., E.D.  Cultural Literacy: What Every American needs to Know.  1987.  Vintage Books,

1988.

Wind, Edgar.  Art and Anarchy.  1963.  Northwestern University Press, 1985.