Project for Art Appreciation 2001 | ARTS 2001, Study Guides, Projects, Research of Art

Download Project for Art Appreciation 2001 | ARTS 2001 and more Study Guides, Projects, Research Art in PDF only on Docsity! ARTS 2001. Aesthetics. Mannes article. 09/13/99 ARTS 2001-ART APPRECIATION: Selected Readings How do you know it’s good? By Marya Mannes Suppose there were no critics to tell us how to react to a picture, a play, or a new composition of music. Suppose we wandered innocent as the dawn into an art exhibition of unsigned paintings. By what standards, by what values would we decide whether they were good or bad, talented or untalented, successes or failures? How can we ever know that what we think is right? For the last fifteen or twenty years the fashion in criticism or appreciation of the arts has been to deny the existence of any valid criteria and to make the words “god” and “bad” irrelevant, immaterial, and inapplicable. There is no such thing, we are told, as a set of standards, first acquired through experience and knowledge and later imposed on the subject under discussion. This has been a popular approach, for it relieves the critic of the responsibility of judgment and the public of the necessity of knowledge. It pleases those resentful of disciplines, it flatters the empty-minded by calling them open-minded, it comforts the confused. Under the banner of democracy and the kind of equality which our forefathers did not mean, it says, in effect, “Who are you to tell us what is good or bad?” This is the same cry used so long and so effectively by the producers of mass media who insist that it is the public, not they, who decides what it wants to hear and see, and that for a critic to say that this program is good is purely a reflection of personal taste. Nobody recently has expressed this philosophy more succinctly than Dr. Frank Stanton, the highly intelligent president of CBS television. At a hearing before the Federal Communications Commission, this phrase escaped him under questioning: “One man’s mediocrity is another man’s good program.” There is no better way of saying “No values are absolute.” There is another important aspect to this philosophy of laissez faire: It is the fear, in all observers of all forms of art, of guessing wrong. This fear is well come by, for who has not heard of the contemporary outcries against artists who later were called great? Every age has it arbiters who do not grow with their times, who cannot tell evolution from revolution or the difference between frivolous faddism, amateurish experimentation, and profound and necessary change. Who wants to be caught flagrante delicto [literally, “while the crime is blazing”] with an error of judgment as serious as this? It is far safer, and certainly easier, to look at a picture or a play or a poem and to say “This is hard to understand, but it may be good,” or simply to welcome it as a new form. The word “new”—in our country especially—has magical connotations. What is new must be good; what is old is probably bad. And if a critic can describe the new in language that nobody can understand, he’s safer still. If he has mastered the art of saying nothing with exquisite complexity, nobody can quote him later as saying anything. But all these, I maintain, are forms of abdication from the responsibility of judgment. In creating, the artist commits himself; in appreciating, you have a commitment of your own. For after all, it is the audience which makes the arts. A climate of appreciation is essential to its flowering, and the higher the expectations of the public, the better the performance of the artist. Conversely, only a public ill-served by its critics could have accepted as art and as literature so much in these last years that has been neither. If anything goes, everything goes; and at the bottom of the junkpile lie the discarded standards too. But what are these standards? How do you get them? How do you know they’re the right ones? How can you make a clear pattern out of so many intangibles, including that greatest one, the very private I? Well, for one thing, it’s fairly obvious that the more you read and see and hear, the more equipped you’ll be to practice that art of association which is at the basis of all understanding and judgment. The more you live and the more you look, the more aware you are of a consistent pattern—as universal as the stars, as the tides, as breathing, as night and day—underlying everything. I would call this pattern an this rhythm an order. Not order—an order. Within it exists an incredible diversity of forms. Without it lies chaos. I would further call this order—this incredible diversity held within one pattern—health. And I