On Art and Sport
Last night I had
another one of those maddening conversations about art that have become the
bane of my existence. I was sitting in a bar in Belgium, trying to pass the
time waiting for my furniture to arrive (I just moved to Bruges). The bar TV
was bleating out its incessant meaningless noise through the pall of cigarette
smoke and I was exchanging the odd word with a bar mate, when I happened to
comment, in answer to a question about sport, that I thought it overrated.
Pressed, I admitted that I felt sport to be unimportant. My new friend, clearly
aghast, asked me what I did for a living. I told him and his predictable reply
was, "Well, is art so important?"
I asked him if he could name any artist from before 1900. He rattled off quite
a few names, impressed with his own memory and not seeing where I was going
with this. Then I asked him to name a famous athlete from before 1900. He
looked at me blankly. Finally he came up with someone, but I had to tell him
that Ben Hur didn't count. A cleverer man might have seen he was beaten already
and moved on, but my Belgian friend was not such a one. No, we had to hit all
the art-conversation hot spots—elitism, hierarchy, relativism—likely you know
the drill. Very soon it was I who begged off and flew back to my tower, shaking
the soot and intellectual ash from me as I went.
Re-esconced in my seclusion, I could see and breathe clearly, and I remembered
that the world once contained pockets of sanity. I thought of Thoreau and Emerson, speaking
to each other through no fog, intellectual or otherwise. But then I remembered
that Thoreau retreated to his cabin nonetheless—a cabin that we are not told
had a guest room.
However that may be, I returned to thinking of art and its high place in the
history of man's achievement. In any other century, this would have been
implicitly understood. Arguing about the relative importance of art and sport
would have been ridiculous. Sport, like acting, was a low art if an art at all.
Painting, like music and literature, was a high art. A nobleman might love the
hunt or the Derby, or even a good archery contest, but he would never call them
arts or assert that they were among the finest flowers of civilization.
How have we reached a point where the "great people" are athletes and
actors and pop musicians, and the artist is obsolete? There are no artists of
excellence, universally admired for their achievement. There are only conmen
like Nauman
and Koons,
famous among a confused clique of plastic people—the rich, tasteless,
half-educated insiders who think that memorizing a list of names is the same as
wisdom, who think that reading and writing catalogues is artistic.
How is is that men like Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan have become the
wealthiest and most influential people in society? People whose achievements
are so trifling, whose talents are so inconsequential? It is very easy to see
that it simply does not matter, now or ever, whether Tiger makes that putt or
not. But someone who argued that it does not matter that Michelangelo painted
the Sistine Chapel would have to argue that it does not matter that Shakespeare
wrote Hamlet or that Beethoven wrote the Ninth. Art can be
non-historical only to those who think that history itself does not matter
(admittedly, there is a fair supply of such persons, but I have nothing to say
to them, since by their own admission, they do not matter.)
Many readers, I know, will conclude that I am once again complaining about an
eternal verity: that I am but restating the basic and timeless vulgarity and
ignorance of man. They will think that I might as well rail at water for
running downhill or at the sun for setting at night. But these readers miss my
point. There are things new under the sun, the present is not always a cycle of
the past, and our current decadence is worth understanding for how it is
unique. High achievement has always been rare, and it does take time to sift
the wheat from the chaff. But what if the wheat no longer yields the kernel?
What if the plant is entirely chaff? Or, what if our tastes have themselves run
to chaff? We sift the wheat from the chaff, discard the wheat and eat the
chaff, rubbing our bellies in full content.
This seems to me the nut of our situation and it is a situation unlike any in
history. It is not that the high end is rare or unappreciated by the masses—as
it always has been. It is that the high end is extinct. It has been
theoretically disassembled and put away. In its place an odd monument has been
erected—not a symbol of the loss or an obelisk of fond memory, but an actual
facsimile of the void—a crude attempt
to embody the nothingness that now sits atop the pyramid, watching us with its
lidless eye.
The novelty of this is undeniable. Never in history has a culture believed
itself capable of existing with no higher end, with no goal, with only trunk
but neither upper leaves nor roots. The decadence of Greece, of Rome, of the
French Empire—none exhibited our peculiar symptoms of malaise. The dissolution
into materialism and hedonism was nearly analogous, maybe, but art actually
flourished during the decay of these empires. It could be argued that the
artistic excesses of the elite fueled the collapses: the excessive desire of
the aristocracy for fine things was one of the primary causes of instability.
The members of our
plutocracy, conversely, have no taste for fine things. They have expensive cars
and yachts, maybe, but their homes are ugly, their art is ugly, their music and
literature nonexistent. They are categorically unlike the wealthy people of
Greece or Rome or any other empires. The hierarchy of wealth has lost its
concomitant hierarchy of taste. You can see the precipitous decline from Henry Frick to Walter Annenberg to
David
Geffen. Even the Windsors no longer have the wherewithal to choose
decent portrait painters, and we are presented with the sad spectacle of the
Queen herself painted by Lucian Freud—poor
Elizabeth looking like she has a five-o'clock shadow. Those few of us with eyes
are left to wonder if it is not possible to look your absolte worst for less
than seven figures.
How did we reach this state? It is very simple. Except for a few rare
exceptions, the wealthy have no natural eye for art. Whether they inherit their
money in an empire or earn it in a democracy, the wealthy should be expected to
have no more taste than anyone else. They should be expected to be artistically
blind in the same percentage as every other class of people. The difference is
that in the past the wealthy got their information from creative people—in the
best cases from actual artists and in the worst cases from interior decorators.
But now they learn their taste from critics and art history phDs and other
intellectual charlatans. They are told that the proper words and incantations
can turn dross to gold, and since they don't know the difference anyway, they
accept it all and run. They don't need to be told which cars they like, so they
spend most of their quality time buying and riding in cars; explaining art is
left to bare minimum. The guests should understand that it is expensive and
that a bunch of Yale graduates think it is important. That is the definition of
art for them, whole and complete.
I hope you can see that this turns current wisdom in the Realist camp on is
head. It is believed that all that we have to do is keep painting and
eventually the market will return to us. The wealthy will tire of their
oddities and monstrosities and will gravitate back to "high
decoration." I think even the avant garde fears this. But it hasn't
happened because it can't happen that way. That prediction relies on a false
analysis. It assumes that the wealthy care, at least a little, what their
houses look like. But they don't. They would don snorkels and live in giant
cesspools if someone convinced them that the rest of us would envy them for it.
No, they will return to real art only if they come to believe that we are the
true experts and that the avant garde is made up of false experts. Since the
wealthy cannot follow a cogent argument anymore than they can recognize beauty—they
are too busy—our only hope is some kind of propanganda coup. We have to create
some phony scandal or dig up some sacred skeleton or annoint some veil in the
name of all that is holy and true. Either that or we simply have to outspend
the oppostion. Once our national convention gets bigger and gaudier that the
avant garde convention, we will have won. TIME and CNN will be there and the
21st century is ours.
Maybe then we can apply to get painting as an Olympic sport.