We showed mainly art films, foreign films, and underground and experimental works. While I was in grad school, I helped coordinate a weekly film screening series. It’s only the failed artist and his foolish public who would like to believe otherwise, for if they can honestly imagine that the purpose of art is to teach and to delight, to double the face of the world as though with a mirror, to penetrate those truths which nature is said to hold folded beneath her skirts and keeps modestly hidden from the eyes and paws of science, then they will be able to avoid art’s actual impact altogether, and the artist’s way of life can continue to seem outrageous, bohemian, quaint, a little sinful, irresponsible, hip, and charming, something to visit like the Breton peasants on a holiday, and not a challenge to and denial of their own manner of existence, an accusation concerning their own lack of reality. Gass then criticizes the argument that art’s purpose is moral instruction: But critics, poets, novelists, professors, journalists-those used to shooting off their mouths-they shoot (no danger, it’s only their own mouth’s wash they’ve wallowed their words in) and those used to print, they print but neither wisdom nor goodwill nor magnaminity are the qualities which will win you your way to the rostrum…just plentiful friends in pushy places and a little verbal skill. Composers, sculptors, painters, architects: they have no roled-up magazines to megaphone themselves, and are, in consequence, ignored. Israel makes war, and there are no symposia published by prizefighters, no pronouncements from hairdressers, not a ding from the bellhops, from the dentists not even a drill’s buzz, from the cabbies nary a horn beep, and from the bankers only the muffled chink of money. Gass begins by mocking the commonly-held view that writers need to make direct social statements: As is typical with Gass, his argument is extremely subtle and eloquent, but I’ll nonetheless attempt to summarize it.ġ. Gass addresses the issue of art’s social value from another direction in “The Artist and Society,” the final essay in his collection Fiction and the Figures of Life (Vintage Books, 1971). And that is, for Shklovsky, art’s social value. He stared at the parking lot all around him, then said, “I suddenly can’t tell whether this is another artwork or not.” (And, as with anything else, there is plenty of bad Minimalist art.) Piles of felt.Īs we were exiting the museum, however, and returning to our car, one of my friends paused as though stunned. That is one of the risks it takes by nature of its very existence. Due to its very premise, Minimalism can often seem minor, simple, too easy. Such works challenge some of our most deeply held values concerning art: that it should be big, complex, and difficult to make. To be fair, Minimalist art, and museums like the Dia Beacon, invite this kind of ribbing. And what will we find waiting all alone the next room? Why, piles of felt!” “Oh, look, a room with a big piece of yarn in it. My companions found the museum underwhelming, and spent most of the time playfully criticizing the work. Not too long ago, I took a ride with some friends to the Dia Beacon, a museum mostly dedicated to Minimalist art. Ostranenie, then, is revolutionary in a Nietzschean sense: unsettling, but therefore also life-affirming. (This was my own experience I had another, similar one, upon hearing Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” after a two-year abstinence from rock music.) It is the shock we experience upon seeing The 400 Blows for the first time-but also the shock we feel upon watching a genre noir after we’ve spent a decade watching 1960s European art films. In Shklovsky, ostranenie is a moral concept directly related to art’s vitality, and to life’s vitality. In my last post, I tried to make clear that social value in fact formed the very center of the work done by Viktor Shklovsky and the other Russian Formalists: Whatever strange thing it is that the artist contributes to the culture, it is at best of secondary importance.) (Of course, artists are often faced with the same accusation-hence the logic by which legislators divert money toward math and the sciences. Formalists are often accused of ignoring art’s morality, as well as its other social aspects.
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