A Diversion into Abstraction

Two things I don’t like are close-mindedness and hypocrisy. They often arrive hand-in-hand. Let’s have an example from everyday life:

            ‘I don’t much care for modern art’

            ‘That’s a shame, what didn’t you like?’

            ‘Oh I don’t know particularly. It’s rubbish though, all shapes and colours, there’s nothing there’

            ‘You mean abstract art? Don’t you think that an artist can deal with emotion or ideas without actually drawing an object?’

            ‘Nonsense, it’s just lazy. I like my pictures to be of something’

‘Well each to his own. How do you feel about classical music?’

            ‘I love it! I think Beethoven was a true genius, I could listen for hours!’

I don’t think I need to go on.

Art isn't just a functional item that does a job, like showing us what a person or a landscape looks like. What makes it art is some added element of emotional or political interpretation by the artist. We get abstract art when that artistic element completely eclipses the representation.

Walter Pater wrote that “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” meaning that through music the artist can completely combine subject matter and form,  and so James Whistler moved towards the purity of Beethoven’s medium. A lot of classical music doesn't represent anything tangible but it can still touch us profoundly, why should we reject visual art when it tries to achieve the same thing?

I said I didn’t need to go on; but I will:

This is describing a mirror

             ‘And I don’t think that you should need to read the writing beside the picture to understand it. A picture should speak for itself’

            ‘Well at least you've got Beethoven. Do you know his 3^rd symphony? Eroica?’

‘Oh it’s wonderful! It’s actually very political, you see he originally dedicated it to Napoleon because he admired his revolutionary ideals..’

Art does not exist in a vacuum; it would be a poor, sad thing if it did. So much of the enjoyment of art is through recognition of something from our own experience; if we don’t have the experience it references then why not gain that understanding and then revisit the art? Films about the Holocaust rely on the viewer’s historical knowledge for their gravity, WH Auden’s love poetry doesn’t have resonance until you’ve shared his passion. So, perhaps we can look outside the picture frame for inspiration.

Are you in the same boat as our Socratic victim? Next time you’re at Tate Modern, don’t walk so quickly past the Pollocks.