have an antipathy to it for various reasons. This essay will attempt to

chronicle some of those reasons:

 

1. In the interest fairness, I will immediately concede that a good deal of

the problem has been caused by artists, critics, and curators intentionally

alienating the public. Especially since the early romantic period, which

fostered the idea of the artist as misunderstood genius, art has had its role

in the avant-garde as being subversive of the status quo. This led to a great

deal of originality and creativity in early modernism from Impressionism to

Expressionism to Cubism and Abstraction but in the 1960's a combination of

causes changed the status quo and a vast number of people, if not the

majority, began identifying with the avant-garde and against the bourgeoisie.

This not only brought about an increase in the number of self-declared

artists, but by a competition to capture the attention of the public. The

"fifteen minutes of fame" phenomenon, coined by one of the early masters of

the mixed media art of art and public relations (his art was about the

culture of fame, publicity and commercialism), has proliferated so that

recent shows with eviscerated animals or the performance piece of a recorded

sex act between artist and collector is intended to shock the public. You

don't even need to see it in person; the publicity has subsumed the art.

However, even though I make this concession, it was not the art establishment

that first alienated the American public. The American antipathy towards art

precedes the modern era.  Let us look at some, if not all, of the

philosophies, which have prevailed on this continent in the past 350 years.

2.  The Puritan fathers distrusted not only art, but also all adornment.

“Beauty is vain,” as Proverbs 31:30 has it. Even the singing of hymns was

banned and only Psalms and versified Scripture could be sung in a very plain

manner. The organ and the singing of hymns did not enter the Protestant

churches in America until the 19th century.

     This fear of idolatry can be found in other pietistic religious sects,

even to this day. Paradoxically, even as some worldly attractions were

shunned, and pleasure itself mistrusted, the idea of material prosperity as a

sign of God's favor is part of our same Puritan heritage. As Jonathan

Edwards, the evangelist whose preaching helped inaugurate the ongoing revival

known as the Great Awakening, wrote in his book Charity and Its Fruits

(1738), “But if you place your happiness in God, in glorifying Him and in

serving Him by doing good, in this way above all others you will promote your

wealth and honor and pleasure here below, and obtain hereafter a crown of …

glory and pleasure forevermore at God’s right hand.” Prosperity could be both

a sign of Divine favor and predestination and a channel of blessing, but not

a conduit for the ostentatious display of wealth and power through art such

as characterized the estates, the castles and the churches of Europe. The

purchase or commissioning of art would have seemed immodest if not idolatrous

to the Puritan mind.

 

3.  The succession of governing philosophies in America is like layers in

geology or archaeology. The old may be superceded by the new but there is a

residual effect. From the middle of the nineteenth century, a new philosophy

conquered America, again from England. This was called “Utilitarianism.” It

was first promulgated by Jeremy Bentham. The Oxford English Dictionary

defines a Utilitarian as “one who considers utility the standard of whatever

is good for man.” Utility then, according to Bentham, is that property in a

thing “whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or

happiness (all this in the present case comes to the same thing).” He later

added the words “profit, convenience, and emolument” (remuneration).

     The problem is that words, such as “pleasure, “ may mean something

completely different to different people or different times. Bentham was a

Materialist who regarded anything which could not be measured as illusory.

Thus he repudiated any kind of spiritual pleasure such as that afforded by

art or music. Nothing was inherently a source of pleasure, and therefore

good; it was only so in that it provided some profit or convenience or

opportunity for such. As his successor, William Stanley Jevons, so succinctly

put it, “Value depends entirely on utility.” It was the perfect philosophy

for the Industrial Revolution.

     “Yankee practicality" is still admired, which is why so many who have

been materially prospered would think nothing of purchasing a boat or a

snowmobile, or a second snowmobile, or spending lavishly on their home. It is

perceived as practical, ingenious, utilitarian, whereas a work of art is not.

Of course, if art is tied in to the idea of virtue, as happens with

increasing frequency through art auctions for the benefit of worthy causes,

it is then redeemed, its associated guilt neutralized.

     There is hope on the horizon. The 2002 Nobel Prize for economics was

shared by an Israeli psychologist, Daniel Kahneman. His startling

breakthrough: Money can’t buy happiness.  Finally, a scientific negation of

Utilitarianism. In other words, with all the quantification of goods and

services, the question remains, What is the amount of happiness that it

brings? The conclusion: being poor is depressing, but if the basic

necessities are covered, no amount of money will make you happier.  Some of

their experiments also reveal some anomalies in human nature. For example,

the vast majority of people do not make decisions based on a clear assessment

of risk versus reward (pleasure vs. pain).  They are far more risk averse,

much more afraid of losing what they have than desirous of gaining more. And

why shouldn’t they be, when we now know that once a certain threshold is

passed, that no amount more will increase happiness. Yet many of the most

successful have taken more risk and have courted failure. The Constitution

does not vouchsafe happiness for us, only the right to pursue it.

4.    It is my theory that a nation’s capacity for art appreciation is

closely tied to its capacity for meditation.  It is not even necessary that

the majority practice a form of meditation, just that there is an element of

society which does, and that this meditative group is seen as part of the

fabric of society. This is certainly the case in Asian cultures, such as

Japan with its practitioners of Zen Buddhism or China with its history of

court officials retiring in seclusion to practice painting, poetry, and

calligraphy. Also in Europe, playwrites such as Vaslav Havel and writers such

as Andre Malraux have shuttled from the arts and letters to government and

back – and not merely to write their memoirs.

     I believe that this connection between the gross nation output of

meditation and the net appreciation of art has to do with the perception and

definition of time, which is culturally based. The culture which values time

more than possessions will take the time to fall in love with a work of art,

and not a mere infatuation.

     When I mentioned in my theory that not all need to practice some form of

meditation, or art for that matter, I referred to an accepted segmentation of

society that we sometimes forget when we believe everybody to be “created

equal” in terms of abilities.  “Everybody is an artist,” is a catch-phrase

that I hear bandied about all the time, especially by the purveyors of

workshops. Yes, everybody might benefit from learning some of the language

and techniques of art, if only to become a better or happier person, even

patron. The liberal arts, which were already disappearing from our

educational system before my time,

     We have made a virtue out of busyness. A whole new genre of television

drama, taking place in the hospital, or law office, or the White House,

ennobles characters who only have time to carry on a dialogue on the run, in

the corridor, and who have no time for any meaningful personal relationship

outside of their work. Then the commercial shows a soccer mom in the driver’s

seat, hastily accepting a microwaved, pre-packaged cup of soup handed to her

like a baton in a relay race through the window of her car. No wonder so much

of the art which is seen strives to make it on the first impression, either

through shock value or production values. You’re probably asking, what’s

wrong with production values, and we will treat that later.

 

4.    It is not these philosophies and movements themselves that I wish to

examine or to criticize, it is their historical and residual effects on the

American attitude toward art. Mercantilism, for example, was the belief that

wealth consisted ultimately in gold and silver, and that since these metals

were finite in supply, one nation was bound to prosper only at the expense of

another. This idea may have caused a lot of wars, but, after all, something

had to be done with all that gold. Spanish palaces competed with cathedrals

to gild the lilly;  and Spain in turn competed with France and England, and a

lot of a art was produced.

     It happens that the particular philosophical movements which “trickled

down” to become the common, accepted modus operendi, were almost all

iconoclastic, or materialistic, or in some other way antithetical to the

enjoyment of art. There was one exception and, as with the others, its effect

is still felt today.

     Transcendentalism arose as a reaction against Utilitarianism. Emerson,

one of the leading lights of the Transcendental Movement, wrote that

Utilitarianism was a “stinking philosophy.” He, along with Thoreau and Emily

Dickinson constituted a small group of meditative people who, though

“marching to a different drummer,” as Thoreau put it, and not always united

themselves, either created or represented a backlash in the country which

gave rise to most of our great poetry, the Hudson River School of painting

which started the whole idea of American landscape painting, and a net

percentage increase in the national level of graciousness and in the treasury

of tangibles and intangibles.

6.     The valuation of possessions over time both destroys the environment

and devalues art. Materialist ideas such as Utilitarianism do it one way, and

any form of religious asceticism which relegates this world to a position of

inferiority does it another way. The twentieth century gave rise to new forms

of both.

     On the materialist side, the mass-media, first in print, then in its

multi-media forms, gave rise to commercialism, advertising and its twin,

consumerism.  Mass-production began with Henry Ford’s pithy statement that

“they can have any color they want, as long as it’s black,” and has taken off

toward more and more customization. In a “public service” announcement, the

Advertising Council equates greater freedom with greater choice, that is more

choices or more products made possible through more information presented to

us by, guess what, advertising.

     Here’s where those production values come in. Flashy, glossy, or slick

techniques in speech or imagery that is used to persuade the masses to

political or commercial ends is a form of demagoguery. Leni Riefenstahl,

Hitler’s propagandist film-maker, used columns of light projected into the

night sky to dramatize the Nuremburg rally when she filmed it. This awe

inspiring effect was used seventy years later at Ground Zero to accentuate

our national loss of the Twin Towers and the many lives that were destroyed

with it. Propaganda is not inherently evil. When the Roman Catholic Church

coined the word during their Counter-Reformation, it did not carry a

pejorative meaning.

     But public art and its relation to propaganda is a matter fit for

another essay or an entire book at least. I am more concerned here with

phenomena of specifically American origin and their effect on the American

attitude toward art, which is, as I am attempting to show, negative.

      American democracy was originally conceived as a system to bring order

and contentment to a society of independent farmers and yeomen (craftsmen-

proprietors). Production was decentralized and distribution was localized at

the market or the trade fair. Little by little the situation reversed as

production became centralized and consolidated and distribution beat a path

to every door first through the Sears Roebuck Catalog, now through the

internet and the proliferation of big box stores. Today, the artist-

craftsperson is one of the last vestiges of the independent yeoman, flying in

the face of the modern market-driven economy.

     Consumerism has penetrated every aspect of our lives. Even love and

marriage is analyzed as an economic transaction. Politics, religion, and

entertainment are largely driven by market analysis. And because what we

value most, we guard, money has become the last taboo – sex is wholly open to

personal discussion. Consumerism panders and flatters the public into a

suspension of disbelief, so that a mass-marketed product, whether it be a

cruise, a food or beverage, a piece of furniture, or an image is perceived as

“just as good” as an original, fresh creation. In the extreme, many Americans

even prefer the facsimile to the authentic. The Alamo Theme Park erected for

the John Wayne movie attracts as many visitors as the somewhat smaller,

certainly drabber Alamo a hundred miles away. Mass-production smoothes out

the rough spots and introduces a comforting predictability.

     “In a way, I find it as easy to forgive kitsch as I do a baby for

drooling. Given our convictions, how better might the popular arts behave?

Our deepest beliefs in the twentieth century command us to dismiss the arts,

popular or otherwise: they have not had value, they do not have value, they

will not have value.” The quote is from The Decline of Pleasure by Walter

Kerr, who was a renowned theater critic. It was first published in 1962 by

Simon and Schuster (quoted here from the Time Reading Program edition, 1966,

p. 125)

     In the forty odd years since this was written, Consumerism has

succeeded, as the Advertising Council promised, in making more and better

educated consumers out of us. Not only have production values continued to

improve, but originality, honesty, and depth in the popular arts, first in

music, then film, and finally television, have waxed, though sometimes also

waned. On the whole I would say, the quality of the popular arts has improved

from the early 1960’s. Looking at a broadcast of Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten

Commandments,” a lot of it seems like a high school play by comparison.

     The fine arts have been in decline for a hundred years: classical music,

painting, sculpture, and poetry have been withering on the vine to to neglect

verging on contempt. Some critics claim there is no difference between the

popular and the fine arts, between low brow and high brow.

     Igor Stravinsky delivered a series of lectures at Harvard between 1939

and 1940. In one of them he made a brief parenthetical statement which I have

not forgotten: “All art is based on aristocratic culture.” Admittedly, when

he made this statement, he had long since left behind his Nationalist period

when his music was inspired by Russian folk songs. But I don’t think he meant

that all art was inspired by aristocratic sources, or that all artists are

aristocrats. I think he was talking about the type of cultural transaction

that takes place between artist and society. Despite the shrinking of the

Middle Class, which has been taking place over the last half a century,

Americans do not like the idea of an aristocracy.  We are inculcated from a

young age to associate connoisseurship with an indolent leisure class.  In

reality, European and Asian appreciation of their own cultural artifacts is

widespread in their societies. I have heard that the most popular television

program in Iran is a quiz show in which contestants compete to identify

passages of classical Persian poetry.

     Art is a conversation, not only with the broad public or its own time,

but also with its own history. In literature this is called “allusion.” The

writer is conversing not only with the reader, but with other writers past or

present. The more we lose our sense and knowledge of history, the shallower

our art becomes. When the Russians launched Sputnik, we asked ourselves, how

far behind are we in the space race? The result was an improvement in the

science curriculum. Now, how far behind are we in our knowledge and

appreciation of art? Well, how old are the cave paintings of Lascaux? Better