The Use and Abuse of Art

Rating:
Summary: An openly infurating series of ideas
Review: Barzun's "Use and Abuse of Art" deserves to be at least as widely read as many of his other, more publicly-minded books. This set of essays, originally delivered as part of a series of lectures in the early Seventies, will probably infuriate as many people as it enlightens, often in the same breath. The problem is that this is less often due to any actual intellectual effort on Barzun's part than it is due to some extremely queer prejudices. Barzun, after all, defended capital punishment on the grounds that killing someone is better than letting them live their life miserably. Since we are the ones responsible for how that person lives, if they live at all, the argument makes no sense. Much like a great many of Barzun's rather hyperthyroid intellectualisms.

This isn't to say there's valuable material here. Most of the book is concerned not so much with art itself but the way our attitudes toward it have evolved -- or not evolved; at one point early on, Barzun rather breezily asserts that one of the points of his essays are to show why Western civilization has not had one new idea in over seventy-five years. He may very well be correct: he exposes a good deal of the "modern" artistic movements as having roots in things that happened in the Nineteenth century, and are nowhere nearly as progressive as they might seem. Fine.

Here and there are some really good nuggets of thought. I was especially enamored of the way Barzun dissects the pseudo-intellectuality of artists who can't be bothered to think their own work through, and expect critics and dumbfounded audiences to come up with all of their excuses for them. For this reason the book is worth reading; the argument is still quite relevant today, and no less merciless in its dissection of pretentiousness. Barzun also makes good points about how art often feels compelled to emulate the sciences, much to the detriment of both. And it's good to see someone see through the extremely uncreative "epater le bourgeois" sentiment which persists to this day in overrated films like "American Beauty". "When the heck are we going to stop setting fire to the same strawmen?" Barzun seems to be saying, in the tone of the exasperated intellectual. And he's right; it's high time we moved on to something better.

Unfortunately, the book's rather one-up tone gets the better of it over its length. In one of the most irritating refrains, he slams fellow Frenchman Albert Camus as an "overrated sentimentalist" (without bothering to defend his position beyond the mere slinging of an invective), and even goes to far as to openly misquote the man. (Camus -never- said "only artists have never harmed mankind"; his statement was more to the effect that artists are the best advocates for man around.) The final chapter, "Art in the Vacuum of Belief", is infuriating in the worst possible way: it's not so much an effective reduction of his ideas into a synopsis than a blanket admission of bankruptcy on his part. Barzun doesn't have much in the way of suggestions for how to improve things, and in the end he sinks to the level of a hectoring nag: "There is too much to read, too much music to hear, too much print, type, color..."

Barzun was and still is one of the better minds around, but this book shows up as many of the flaws in his legacy as there are gems.

Rating:
Summary: An openly infurating series of ideas
Review: Barzun's "Use and Abuse of Art" deserves to be at least as widely read as many of his other, more publicly-minded books. This set of essays, originally delivered as part of a series of lectures in the early Seventies, will probably infuriate as many people as it enlightens, often in the same breath. The problem is that this is less often due to any actual intellectual effort on Barzun's part than it is due to some extremely queer prejudices. Barzun, after all, defended capital punishment on the grounds that killing someone is better than letting them live their life miserably. Since we are the ones responsible for how that person lives, if they live at all, the argument makes no sense. Much like a great many of Barzun's rather hyperthyroid intellectualisms.

This isn't to say there's valuable material here. Most of the book is concerned not so much with art itself but the way our attitudes toward it have evolved -- or not evolved; at one point early on, Barzun rather breezily asserts that one of the points of his essays are to show why Western civilization has not had one new idea in over seventy-five years. He may very well be correct: he exposes a good deal of the "modern" artistic movements as having roots in things that happened in the Nineteenth century, and are nowhere nearly as progressive as they might seem. Fine.

Here and there are some really good nuggets of thought. I was especially enamored of the way Barzun dissects the pseudo-intellectuality of artists who can't be bothered to think their own work through, and expect critics and dumbfounded audiences to come up with all of their excuses for them. For this reason the book is worth reading; the argument is still quite relevant today, and no less merciless in its dissection of pretentiousness. Barzun also makes good points about how art often feels compelled to emulate the sciences, much to the detriment of both. And it's good to see someone see through the extremely uncreative "epater le bourgeois" sentiment which persists to this day in overrated films like "American Beauty". "When the heck are we going to stop setting fire to the same strawmen?" Barzun seems to be saying, in the tone of the exasperated intellectual. And he's right; it's high time we moved on to something better.

Unfortunately, the book's rather one-up tone gets the better of it over its length. In one of the most irritating refrains, he slams fellow Frenchman Albert Camus as an "overrated sentimentalist" (without bothering to defend his position beyond the mere slinging of an invective), and even goes to far as to openly misquote the man. (Camus -never- said "only artists have never harmed mankind"; his statement was more to the effect that artists are the best advocates for man around.) The final chapter, "Art in the Vacuum of Belief", is infuriating in the worst possible way: it's not so much an effective reduction of his ideas into a synopsis than a blanket admission of bankruptcy on his part. Barzun doesn't have much in the way of suggestions for how to improve things, and in the end he sinks to the level of a hectoring nag: "There is too much to read, too much music to hear, too much print, type, color..."

Barzun was and still is one of the better minds around, but this book shows up as many of the flaws in his legacy as there are gems.

Rating:
Summary: How much Art to do we need?
Review: This is the text of set of talks in the series of A W Mellon memorial lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D. C. This is number 22 in the series, delivered in 1973.

Barzun comes as a lover of art, and a lover of progressive, avant garde art moreover, on the evidence of his earlier book The Energies of Art. However he sees a need to challenge art, or Art, on account of the diverse and contradictory theories and interests that are promoted under the banner of Art.

To clarify his concerns he identified "three productive moments in western civilization, all of which unfortunately are called modern." First the Renaissance, representing a break from the Middle Ages from 1400 to 1600. Second, the era from the French Revolution which he labels the Romantic Period from 1789 to 1840. And finally the more recent turn of modernism in ideas, art and manners that he places at the turn of the century from 1890 to 1914.

In the first lecture Barzun examined the complex of institutions and vested interests called Art to consider the contribution that they made to individual people and to society in the large. He justified this examination for two reasons: first, the power and influence that Art can exert as a vehicle of communication and second, the amazingly perverse messages that are being conveyed by Art at the present time "in opposition to every traditional idea, feeling and activity, including art itself" (24).

In the second lecture he examined the rise of art as a substitute for religion in the nineteenth century. Art simultaneously became the "ultimate critic of life and the moral censor of society". The next phase in that development is the topic of the third lecture on Art the Destroyer, treating Estheticism and Abolitionism during the period 1890 to 1914.

He made a rash claim that the world since 1920 "has merely amplified and multiplied what the nineties and early 1920s first achieved...a long list of inventions and activities, from flying machines and motion pictures to skyscrapers, psychoanalysis, and organ transplants, and from the concentration camp to the strip-tease, date not from now but from then. I shall suggest later on why western civilization has not had a new idea in fifty years".

Atomic power and the rise of the computer would appear to test that proposition! But still, getting back to Art, he sketched its destructive function over the last 150 years (now 180). "By the tradition of the New, art unremittingly destroys past art, though by the cognate tradition of historical sympathy we deny ourselves the unity of a contemporary style. By making extreme moral and esthetic demands in the harsh way of shock and insult, art unsettles the self and destroys confidence and spontaneity in individual conduct."

Art in this function has helped to undermine the assumptions that the state and civilized society are valuable or admirable, thus impairing the effectiveness of political and social institutions and proving the destroyers' own case. By linking the growing interest and respect for art in modern times with the "dominance of bourgeoise values" Art has effectively turned on art itself by becoming a vehicle for every kind of assault on traditional standards of beauty, craft, morality and commonsense. This was written thirty years ago and all that has changed is the increased number of students who are exposed to more advanced "theory" to justify the assault of Art on our senses and sensibilities.

In the fourth lecture he moved on to another piece in the crazy pavement of modern art, the function of art as redeemer, linked with the previously noted concept of art as a substitute for religion. Barzun accepted the common ground, that the power exerted by great art on receptive persons is a religious power, and he pursued the defects that follow when that insight is not checked by critical thinking. He discussed the individual and collective forms of salvation through Art that have been promulgated for 200 years. By the term collective salvation he means the appeal of revolutionary art which offers the artist a special role, first as evangelist and later as beneficiary, in the utopian society brought about by the revolution.

In the next lecture he turned his attention to the troubled relationship between Science and Art, describing how artists have entered into competition with scientists to claim some of the respect (and the material benefits) that have been generally granted to modern Science. One of the fruits of this endeavour has been the proliferation of "art bollocks" that is , the use of pretentious jargon to emulate the (supposed) precision and profundity of scientific discourse.

The following passage is an early example of the genre, with a translation provided by a cynical commentator.

For Rousseau a painting was a primary surface on which he relied physically as a means for the projection of his thought [Translation: Rousseau wanted to paint on canvas]. But his thought consisted exclusively of plastic elements. While structure and composition constituted the base, the pictorial substance was distributed gradually as execution progressed. [He painted while painting, since one cannot cover the whole canvas at one stroke]. In his work, what simplicity! Nothing descriptive - only surface relations on the given primary surface. These relations are infinitely varied and, without losing their inherent reality, they can also compete with nature within the limits of the painting. [He drew natural objects in two dimensions, or, to avoid tautology, he drew objects]. Rousseau does not copy the exterior aspect of a tree: he creates an internal rhythmic whole conveying the true, grave expressionism of the essentials of a tree and its leaves in relation to a forest...But his style was established neither derivatively nor in obedience to fashion. It stemmed from the determination of his whole mind as it incarnated his artistic ambitions. [Rousseau painted just as he liked, and he liked painting trees].

Read the following review for a good critical view of this book. When I re-read the last chapter I may have to reduce my rating to four stars.

Rating:
Summary: How much Art to do we need?
Review: This is the text of set of talks in the series of A W Mellon memorial lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D. C. This is number 22 in the series, delivered in 1973.

Barzun comes as a lover of art, and a lover of progressive, avant garde art moreover, on the evidence of his earlier book The Energies of Art. However he sees a need to challenge art, or Art, on account of the diverse and contradictory theories and interests that are promoted under the banner of Art.

To clarify his concerns he identified "three productive moments in western civilization, all of which unfortunately are called modern." First the Renaissance, representing a break from the Middle Ages from 1400 to 1600. Second, the era from the French Revolution which he labels the Romantic Period from 1789 to 1840. And finally the more recent turn of modernism in ideas, art and manners that he places at the turn of the century from 1890 to 1914.

In the first lecture Barzun examined the complex of institutions and vested interests called Art to consider the contribution that they made to individual people and to society in the large. He justified this examination for two reasons: first, the power and influence that Art can exert as a vehicle of communication and second, the amazingly perverse messages that are being conveyed by Art at the present time "in opposition to every traditional idea, feeling and activity, including art itself" (24).

In the second lecture he examined the rise of art as a substitute for religion in the nineteenth century. Art simultaneously became the "ultimate critic of life and the moral censor of society". The next phase in that development is the topic of the third lecture on Art the Destroyer, treating Estheticism and Abolitionism during the period 1890 to 1914.

He made a rash claim that the world since 1920 "has merely amplified and multiplied what the nineties and early 1920s first achieved...a long list of inventions and activities, from flying machines and motion pictures to skyscrapers, psychoanalysis, and organ transplants, and from the concentration camp to the strip-tease, date not from now but from then. I shall suggest later on why western civilization has not had a new idea in fifty years".

Atomic power and the rise of the computer would appear to test that proposition! But still, getting back to Art, he sketched its destructive function over the last 150 years (now 180). "By the tradition of the New, art unremittingly destroys past art, though by the cognate tradition of historical sympathy we deny ourselves the unity of a contemporary style. By making extreme moral and esthetic demands in the harsh way of shock and insult, art unsettles the self and destroys confidence and spontaneity in individual conduct."

Art in this function has helped to undermine the assumptions that the state and civilized society are valuable or admirable, thus impairing the effectiveness of political and social institutions and proving the destroyers' own case. By linking the growing interest and respect for art in modern times with the "dominance of bourgeoise values" Art has effectively turned on art itself by becoming a vehicle for every kind of assault on traditional standards of beauty, craft, morality and commonsense. This was written thirty years ago and all that has changed is the increased number of students who are exposed to more advanced "theory" to justify the assault of Art on our senses and sensibilities.

In the fourth lecture he moved on to another piece in the crazy pavement of modern art, the function of art as redeemer, linked with the previously noted concept of art as a substitute for religion. Barzun accepted the common ground, that the power exerted by great art on receptive persons is a religious power, and he pursued the defects that follow when that insight is not checked by critical thinking. He discussed the individual and collective forms of salvation through Art that have been promulgated for 200 years. By the term collective salvation he means the appeal of revolutionary art which offers the artist a special role, first as evangelist and later as beneficiary, in the utopian society brought about by the revolution.

In the next lecture he turned his attention to the troubled relationship between Science and Art, describing how artists have entered into competition with scientists to claim some of the respect (and the material benefits) that have been generally granted to modern Science. One of the fruits of this endeavour has been the proliferation of "art bollocks" that is , the use of pretentious jargon to emulate the (supposed) precision and profundity of scientific discourse.

The following passage is an early example of the genre, with a translation provided by a cynical commentator.

For Rousseau a painting was a primary surface on which he relied physically as a means for the projection of his thought [Translation: Rousseau wanted to paint on canvas]. But his thought consisted exclusively of plastic elements. While structure and composition constituted the base, the pictorial substance was distributed gradually as execution progressed. [He painted while painting, since one cannot cover the whole canvas at one stroke]. In his work, what simplicity! Nothing descriptive - only surface relations on the given primary surface. These relations are infinitely varied and, without losing their inherent reality, they can also compete with nature within the limits of the painting. [He drew natural objects in two dimensions, or, to avoid tautology, he drew objects]. Rousseau does not copy the exterior aspect of a tree: he creates an internal rhythmic whole conveying the true, grave expressionism of the essentials of a tree and its leaves in relation to a forest...But his style was established neither derivatively nor in obedience to fashion. It stemmed from the determination of his whole mind as it incarnated his artistic ambitions. [Rousseau painted just as he liked, and he liked painting trees].

Read the following review for a good critical view of this book. When I re-read the last chapter I may have to reduce my rating to four stars.