I’ll begin by saying that I’m not here to diagnose the supposed spiritual sickness that’s been afflicting the art world. It’s extremely difficult even under ideal circumstances to tease apart the difference between how the world changed and how you changed. Was the art “different” or “better” in some way or was it a matter of how you received it? For that matter, did it really make you feel that way, or is that just how you remember it based on your interpretation of how it fits into your understanding of your own history? These are of course loaded questions: of course it was different (everything always is), and what does “better” even mean? And what difference is there actually between your memory of something and how it actually happened?
No, I’m not denying “objectivity” or “truth”: obviously if you tell me that you didn’t steal my sandwich from the refrigerator and I have a video showing you stealing the sandwich then yes you stole it. But a recording can never fully capture the context of an event, and the ultimate significance of an event can only be fully determined by its relationship to both the past and the future. How we remember events and interpret our surroundings doesn’t arbitrarily aim for accuracy but necessarily acts as a guide for action. Much like an oracle, memory tells us what we need to hear in order to render the present intelligible, structuring the past in such a way as to make the present actionable in the same way that a chess piece can only make “moves” insofar that there’s a board. Whatever your immediate reaction to some work of art, no matter what some polygraph or brain scan would hypothetically show you, the way in which it ultimately shapes the trajectory of your life, the way it conditions you, is something continually invented through your subsequent choices.
None of this is to say that there’s no such thing as truth or objectivity, just that these things do not exist in an unmediated fashion, as if one could in principle see how entities would appear through the view from nowhere. Conversely, subjectivity is not some potentially arbitrary theater of representations but a conduit for action: what a given phenomenon “means” to a subject is equivalent to that which all of their respective vectors of conditioning ultimately induce them to produce. There is in fact no denying that there’s a “real world” precisely because there’s no subject without action and no action without something to act on.
If one fails to understand this, however, an understanding of the importance of aesthetics and the function of art slips away with it. Whether or not the “art world” as we know it really is in some kind of alarming rut, a confused stance can easily become the foundation for a faulty doctrine wielded by self-appointed clergy and impressed upon artists that may otherwise have had the good sense to trust their own instincts. And while I’m really not here to clap back against any specific commentator, there’s been an unignorable flurry of discourse lamenting the increasingly shallow and stagnant state of artistic discourse and circulation. There’s been plenty of invective going around for all of the critics (not least between one another), but the real issue is that not that their complaints are entirely invalid but that they’re nonetheless stymied by subtle misunderstandings about the mediating role of both aesthetics and the imagination with respect to subjectivity, history and the future we make for ourselves.
This essay was admittedly instigated by Sean Tatol’s own polemic, Cornering the Critics, and its emphasis on the importance of conditioning and the conclusions it drew from understanding subjectivity as “a contingently built process of individuation”; which is to say that you didn’t just fall out of a Lomex afterparty, you exist in the context of everything that came before your present self. In his opinion, the refusal of artists and patrons alike to develop a historical literacy of the traditions that precede them has broken the continuity necessary to make anything relevant on a timescale larger than the present market cycle and able to produce nothing more than a very superficial kind of novelty. Just as memory is necessary for action insofar that it makes one’s environment and options intelligible, the same is true for history insofar as history is just memory on a larger scale both spatially and temporally.
In the absence of such a continuity to ground artistic practice and discourse, the pretense that past traditions and structures are inherently “oppressive” (or simply stifling) ironically leaves a vacuum that gets filled by the most immediately gratifying feedback loops of short-term profit and social climbing, enabling a system “all the more dominated by crassly atomized individualism, ever more fickle and short-lived fashion cycles, capitalism, etc.” In light of this philistinic gravity well, the job of the critic is to re-introduce more rigorous and nuanced context into a deteriorating discursive matrix in order to more effectively mediate the production and reception of artistic work; not one that simply “returns” to some fetishized static notion of the past, but which engages with the dynamics by which history and the present mutually inform one another.
By and large, he’s right; but despite being directionally correct, the issue remains that he can’t explain why this is a problem other than that he might have to look at art that he doesn’t like. The thing is though, there really is a problem, but his own tough love peters out into cynicism when he throws out the baby with the bathwater by overextending otherwise valid criticisms of Dean Kissick’s recent Harper’s essay, The Painted Protest, and Taylor Ervin’s video series, Scorned by Muses, for demanding that art work harder to push the limits of the imagination. For Tatol, art “never turns into a whole new world”, and to ask that we imagine one is indistinguishable from a demand for escapism or some kind of arbitrary jouissance.
Frankly I don’t know what world he’s living in if he thinks that nothing ever propels us into a new world when life is in fact nothing but change. Now, to be fair, what he’s clearly protesting is an immature wish that art provide us some kind of fantasy that leaves behind the constraints and circumstances we inevitably have to deal with if any kind of real progress is actually to be made, that art is “a subject that explores the mediation of lived experience not to take one out of reality but to be placed more firmly within it.” Insofar as this is what he’s saying, I’m more than inclined to agree, but while he maybe doesn’t say it outright, his eagerness to ridicule Ervin ad-hominem for his alleged hypocrisies as a Marxist™ for having “bourgeois” beliefs about aesthetics rather than rebut the substance of his conceit suggests by omission that he doesn’t see a connection between a strong grasp of reality and an efficacious imagination when these are in fact two sides of the same coin.
To be firmly placed within the world isn’t to passively accumulate facts and impressions like some kind of sensor hooked up to a database but to constantly adapt to an ever fluctuating situation through novel interpretations and responses as correspondingly novel situations arise, and to imagine and invent such novelties isn’t a matter of conjuring hallucinations out of thin air but developing an increasingly nuanced way of navigating the rapids of reality. That is to say, knowledge and imagination alike are a matter of virtuosity.
And while I think Tatol would agree with a lot of what I just said, his unspoken assumptions show through what he omits in his criticism: while he’s right to find it a bit juvenile if not outright inchoate for Kissick to simply yearn for art that “tears open [his] consciousness” and scapegoat “identity politics” without sufficient elaboration, there is an argument leveled by both Kissick and Ervin that Tatol doesn’t address: that artist’s statements can only say so much before they begin to presume to speak for the work. If everything “about” the work can be put into words, then the work itself is not only completely redundant, but fails to actually say anything in the language of its material and affective affordances.
It’s precisely this tacit register, however, that gives art its power to aid in the expansion of the imagination; by working directly with the warp and woof of the material available without necessarily mediating such processes through any kind of overt formalism or familiar motif, the artist is free to act the way an engineer may with respect to textbook science: using theoretical results and broadly applicable models for leverage when needed while not letting it become a procrustean bed that pigeonholes their own context-sensitive process of discovery. Make no mistake though, this critique cuts both ways: discourse in the wrong hands may stifle such a multiplicity of tacit empiricisms, but it can just as easily supplement it in significant and even vital ways. No work of art exists in a vacuum: how such works interact with other works, and in general their broader discursive context, is always part of the game.
While Tatol clearly understands this aspect of the game, he seems to underestimate the stakes, unable to say much more than that “insofar that art has cultural value it needs to be nurtured and cultivated to be sustained, and that opens the door to taste and elitism, but so be it,” failing to elaborate further on what this “cultural value” is as if this were just some heirloom the plebians are defacing with their self-indulgent gimmicks. To be fair, the fault here lies with all three critics: unintentionally or otherwise, the issue of how art ignites the imagination is framed as if it’s supposed to be some ability to manifest an apparition that effectively severs us from the monotony of our lives and brings us to another world from which we bring back some supernaturally manifested vision to shoot for. Imagination, however, does not work that way; the process of imagination involves finding overlooked connections and subtleties in the one world that we all live in and synthesizing them into the germ of something new. To imagine something new always takes a leap of faith with no guaranteed result of any kind, and the final product is always in some way unexpected; the artist (or thinker, or scientist, etc.) provides the genes and does what they can to steward an otherwise contingent process of epigenesis.
The influence of any given piece of art is therefore going to be one that’s indirect, that finds itself as a specific branch or leaf within an entire biome; and every creative leap will be one that remains mathematically incompressible to the extent that no formalism exists to describe it without sufficient hindsight to give it a place within some retroactive narrative. What makes art special then is, well, nothing, other than the fact that it’s one of many unique means of utilizing and contributing to a collective imagination vital to not only the advancement but the very survival of the collective project we call humanity. It may not always be “radical”, and it may not have the same demonstrable material efficacy as a scientific breakthrough, but it serves a role similar to engineering insofar that both operate directly on the unknown-unknowns of the matter at hand.
And while one could debate whether or not some amount of “elitism” may be necessary as a corrective to the excesses of mass narcissism, Tatol’s dismissal of the importance and power of the imagination suggests that he believes the critic’s mission to be not so much to enrich the soil of their artistic ecosystem but rather to ham-fistedly regulate it; as if the issue were that artists left to their own devices have shirked their obligation to calibrate their own feedback loops to what the critics have deemed proper and as such must be treated as children who have proven themselves unable to be trusted to take care of themselves.
If this is what he believes, that’s his prerogative, but the same goes for artists and viewers alike who have their own ideas about what’s worthwhile. I’m not carting out some cliche of “let people enjoy things”, I’m asking what’s in it for everybody else? Everybody has their reasons for what they do, and while many are lured into the arts when they’re young with have-your-cake-and-eat-it fantasies of bohemian glamour, one rarely stays in the game very long if that’s the only thing motivating them.
Now, I’m no artist. I tackle philosophy in much the same self-taught fashion that Tatol grapples with the history of art. I imagine it’s quite likely that, like me, he got into his respective groove because his own dreams of being a musician, much like my own dreams of being an independent video game designer, snagged on a spiral of interminable metacognitive questions of “why?” and “how?” about the gap between what he wanted to bring into the world and what he could deliver in the present moment. The fact of the matter though is that this is what everyone who gives a damn about something goes through: there is a dialectical negative, a shadow if you will, cast upon the terra incognita around us that defines what we suppose to be the space of future possibilities, and we all toil in our practice in order to live up to these unrealized possibilities as best we can and grow out of our old selves as we do so. Each such path, however, is for this reason qualitatively unique as its own dialectic of individuation by which each individual finds their niche and ultimately puts down the roots of their own deep grasp of reality; which is to say I’m not calling him, or myself for that matter, a “failed artist”, just two individuals following our respective callings wherever they may take us.
The tragedy of mass illiteracy and cultural amnesia is precisely in how frustrated so many of us are in these endeavors. We were never meant to be alone: even on the most basic evolutionary level sociality was the key to human intelligence, and every biological tradeoff (bipedalism, extravagant metabolism, relative physical weakness) served to make room for this mother of all affordances. Tradition, education, discourse, etc. all exist in their manifold forms for our benefit, as instruments that one can play in order to amplify their own actions and in turn contribute their own variations to the ever evolving symphony of history. The more respect you show any such instrument by working hard to understand it, the more it will do for you (and the rest of us.)
It’s therefore not the critic’s job to simply impose some lost notion of historical continuity onto the circulation of art by fiat and peg the value of a work to the currency of their ratings; as if history could simply be reversed to the last save point. The task at hand is much more nebulous and contingent than that: to help construct a new common ground that gives practitioners something to buy into; something that doesn’t paternalistically trickle admonitions down to practitioners (and tells them it’s raining) but provides a fulcrum to augment their efficacy. No engineer has a problem with the existence of physics textbooks, but if they had a manager straight out of academia that told them they were doing it all wrong without any empirical appreciation of the idiosyncrasies of the job, they’d have no reason whatsoever to listen to them.
The same goes for the pretense that the connoisseur is somehow fundamentally privileged over the artist’s potentially “spurious” subjectivity, when subjectivity never exists in such a vacuum. Everyone is walking their own path from their own point of origin, and if one wishes to have any kind of discourse by which one can judge the relative validity of any statements or projects, it requires creating a sense of objectivity by doing the irreducible work of integrating countless particulars into some kind of universalizing system relevant to the agendas of all intended participants. I don’t have any quick and easy answers about how to do that, nor should anyone else be expected to; but for that very same reason it requires that we understand one’s subjectivity not to be a brief candle in a cold and uncaring universe, but a torch by which the flame of our collective imagination is passed to future generations.