Art for our sake

We see that one of two things has happened:

1.) Our own Mark Kaplan has demystified the aesthetic; in response, our own Carl has remystified it.

Or (same links apply):

2.) Our own Mark Kaplan has attacked a reductive, straw-man concept of the aesthetic, to which Carl has replied with a richer account of what the aesthetic is and why it is worth defending.

But why should we choose? It flies in the face of American cable news, this desire to evaluate two positions in order to conclude which one best describes the world as it appears to us. In the interests of fairness and balance, we might say that both Kaplan's and Carl's theses, or a synthesis of them, can fit this complex cultural world of ours. Let's see what third way we can negotiate.

For Kaplan, the aesthetic is at bottom a kind of mystical formalism that swells to crowd out other forms of art criticism. Attending to the aesthetic here means limning what poise the artwork achieves by means of its creator's masterful deployment of its formal properties. Through the creator's manipulations, the artwork becomes just a vehicle for the annunciation of universal human truths. Paradoxically, Kaplan notes, this apparent attention to the artwork in its sensuousness with the aim of revealing its truths actually effaces the artwork, just as we'd prioritize the message of a possessed prophet or oracle over his or her features, clothing, posture. The content of the work of art is dismissed; what's one story, image, proposition more or less if the telos of reading/viewing is to encounter this truth which existed before stories about it, images of it, propositions regarding it? Finally, this universal truth is compatible, Kaplan implies, with everyday life as the world demands we lead it. In fact, the aesthetic here so often means what will help us cope with the world's demands (this seems very much the thesis, for instance, of Harold Bloom's last few books). If a work of art insists on a stance or a set of actions or a vision incompatible with the world's demands, the aesthetic handily reduces them to figures for something else, to elements of the formal composition which is the manifestation of truths that do not necessarily complement the explicit content of the work. To take a more radical and more fundamental example than Kaplan's, though it does risk mixing categories to show how old this aestheticizing tendency is: Jesus said in the synoptic gospels to give away your possessions, disavow your family and follow him? Well, clearly, this is just a metaphor. He means you should write a check to Habitat for Humanity; it's a tax write-off anyway, and Jesus also said you should pay your taxes, didn't he?

As I am not giving away this computer or disavowing my family yet, I had better turn to Carl now. Carl would prefer to see the aesthetic as stance toward the world that doesn't mask or provide consolation for the depredations of power, that instead remains an unenclosed terrain of intellectual and emotional freedom. This is a reclamation project: Kaplan describes the category of the aesthetic and how it actually is employed in journalism and criticism, while Carl describes what the aesthetic could or would be if it belonged to us and not to official discourse. Or am I figuring away Carl's more radical manifest content? Does he mean that the aesthetic is as he describes even when trivialized by movie reviewers? Either way, on this view the aesthetic is not far different from what Kaplan said it was, but, as with the famous anamorph, it looks a lot different from here. A gnosticism is still at work, or the right- and left-wings of gnosticism; Kaplan rightly derides the gnostic reactionaries while Carl enunciates the more liberatory version of that story where fragments of the divine are embedded in the world. The aesthetic is not an encounter with the truth behind the artwork, but is a willingness to become the artwork, to align oneself with it in all its explicit content and sensuousness and local or radical or non-worldly truths. This carries the corollary, though, that this willingness must remain uncoerced. Neither the droning commands of the marketplace nor the infinite critique of the intellect that would uncover the marketplace's desires everywhere usurping our own ought to be allowed to restrain the subject's freedom to become absorbed in whatever art most allows it to flourish. It doesn't matter if they're using Shakespeare to sell soap (while delivering a latent propaganda message about how buying large quantities of soap will allow you to get that promotion or land a date, which implication provides a third level of propaganda about the desirability of advancement in the job market and the importance of creating your very own nuclear family). Nevertheless, the free intellect will stand unabashed before Shakespeare, ready to think with him and through him. What Shakespeare offers is the text, surface and depth, the mastery of the formal composition along with the content it embodies. This, the mind's freedom, is more important than worrying about whether we will want to buy soap or get promoted. The right gnosticism Kaplan attacks would throw out the material to uncover the supposed divine buried within, though this divinity is only one of our masters in a god suit. Left gnosticism: the true divine is inside the material, therefore let us love the material like we love the divine.

But we're too far off in the pleroma. Alphonse van Worden will bring us back to earth:

'Art' : no longer the name for an attribute and action of human producers involving communication and the transformation of material sensually; it no longer designates the technique and skill of which human beings are possessed. Instead contemporary usage of the word Art treats with disdain, by exclusion and implied comparison, its surpassed and defunct referent. It is the name for the absence and indeed the opposite of this former content; the 'Art-ness' of an art object is no longer its craft or the traces of human work in it but is instead the marker for the suppression and erasure of precisely that activity and its traces. "Art" is, simply, the marker of an expropriation and enclosure enacted by an Art Market.

If I would ever go in for one of those sewn, framed, inspiring quotations to hang above my desk, this might be the quotation. Art for art's sake: this shows us just what art's sake might be. Complementary to Kaplan's account of the aesthetic, this proposes that it is not the content of art (which is variable and may be radical or dangerous if taken seriously) that the art market encloses, but rather the category of art itself. An object's status as art, conferred by the accredited and appointed experts, now alone makes it marketable.

I've gone on long enough, so let me simply say this: the only third way worth charting here involves recognizing that Carl's reclamation of the aesthetic is not at variance with Kaplan's or Alphonse's critique. Indeed, writing against “the aesthetic” that is no more than the effacement of human artifacts in their fullness to replace them with the market's recommendations or predicate on their formal status their value within the marketplace also writes in defense of the subject that is prey to these forces, in defense of the subject's freedom to roam an unenclosed mental space and cultivate there for its own nourishment.