What Does ‘Art’ Mean Now? [1 ed.] 103244682X, 9781032446820

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Part I: Theory
1 Esthetics Beyond Esthetics: The Demise of the Separated Artwork
2 A Definition of Art for Our Times: Personal Impersonal/ Impersonal Personal
3 Correcting Modernism: Putting the Subjective Back In
4 Nailing the Problem a Century Ago: Dewey’s Art as Experience
5 Our Situation Now: Blurring the Line Between Art and the World
Part II: Museums
6 Audience and Survival: Two Aspects That Define Art
7 Principles of Ordering the Separated Artwork: Museums and Collections
8 Unconventional Ordering: Ripley’s “Believe it—OR NOT!”
9 What Counts as an Artwork: The Small Hard Things of the Bactrian Hoard
10 Do Museums Come to Life at Night?: The Revenge of the Separated Work
Part III: Literature
11 What’s Literature Good For?: Mirroring/Escape and Explanation/Vaccination
12 It Isn’t Fake Anything: Literature and the World
13 Problems with Literature
Who’s the Work For?
What Does the Audience Know?
Inside/Outside: Villette
When We Just Don’t Like a Work
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

WHAT DOES ‘ART’ MEAN NOW?

What Does ‘Art’ Mean Now? asks, and answers, fundamental questions about the nature of aesthetic experience and role of the arts in contemporary society. The Modern Age, Romanticism and beyond, viewed art as something transcending and separated from life, and usually something encountered in museums or classrooms. Nowadays, however, art tends to be defined not by a commonly agreed-upon standard of “quality” or by its forms, such as painting and sculpture, but instead by political and ideological criteria. So how do we connect with the works in museums whose point was precisely that they stood apart from such considerations? Can we and should we be educated to “appreciate” art—and what does it do for us anyway? What are we to make of the so-different newer works—installations, performances, excerpts from the world—held to be art that increasingly make it into museums? Adopting a subjectivist approach, this book argues that in the absence of a universal judgment or standard of taste, the experience of art is one of freedom. The arts give us the means to conceptualize our lives, showing us ourselves as we are and as we might wish—or not wish—to be, as well as where we have been and where we are going. It will appeal to scholars of sociology, philosophy, museum studies, and art history, and to anyone interested in, or puzzled by, museums or college courses and their presentation of art today. Bruce Fleming is the author of over 20 books, and of a novel, essays, short stories, dance criticism, and poetry. Some of these books include four previous works for Routledge, such as The End of the Age of Modernism in Arts and Academia and Masculinity from the Inside: Gender Theory’s Missing Piece. He has taught at the University of Freiburg, Germany, the National University of Rwanda, and the University of Hyderabad, India. Since 1987, he has been an English professor at the US Naval Academy, Annapolis.

WHAT DOES ‘ART’ MEAN NOW? The Personal After the Age of Romanticism and Modernism

Bruce Fleming

Cover image: © Bruce Fleming First published 2023 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Bruce Fleming The right of Bruce Fleming to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fleming, Bruce E. (Bruce Edward), 1954– author. Title: What does ‘art’ mean now? : the personal after the age of Romanticism and Modernism / Bruce Fleming. Description: Abingdon, Oxon : Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022060832 | ISBN 9781032446820 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032446837 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003373377 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Art, Modern—21st century—Appreciation. | Art, Modern—21st century—Philosophy. Classification: LCC N6497 .F59 2023 | DDC 709.05—dc23/eng/20230112 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022060832 ISBN: 978-1-032-44682-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-44683-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-37337-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003373377 Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

Man is a social animal —Spinoza But not too social —Fleming

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix PART I

Theory 1 1 Esthetics Beyond Esthetics: The Demise of the Separated Artwork

3

2 A Definition of Art for Our Times: Personal Impersonal/ Impersonal Personal

18

3 Correcting Modernism: Putting the Subjective Back In

30

4 Nailing the Problem a Century Ago: Dewey’s Art as Experience

41

5 Our Situation Now: Blurring the Line Between Art and the World

49

PART II

Museums 71 6 Audience and Survival: Two Aspects That Define Art

73

viii Contents



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Earlier versions, or parts, of some of the chapters here have appeared in periodicals. An earlier version of Chapter 9 appeared in the Yale Review 101, No. 2 (April 2013) as “Small Hard Things.” Most of Chapter 12 and the first two parts of Chapter 13 appeared in the Antioch Review 56, No. 3 (Summer 1998) as “Skirting the Precipice: Truth and Audience in Literature.” The third part of Chapter 13 appeared in different form in Essays in Literature as “The Coffee-Grounds of the Labassecourian Housemaids: Inside and Outside in Literature” (Spring 1988), and an earlier version of its fourth part appeared in the Southwest Review 77, No. 1 (Winter 1992) under the title “What Makes a Bad Book Bad?” I would like to salute the then-editors of the Yale, Antioch, and Southwest Reviews, who helped forge a new golden age of “little” magazines: respectively, J. D. McClatchy, Robert Fogarty, and Willard Spiegelman.

PART I

Theory

1 ESTHETICS BEYOND ESTHETICS The Demise of the Separated Artwork

The central question of what we call esthetics is this: What is art? This includes not merely the objects we put in what are called art museums, largely painting and sculpture, as well as contemporary works that escape these categories, but also works in other media such as words, music, and movement. All are, for the purposes of esthetics, art. By and large, we in the West no longer ask this question. This means that the combined Romantic/Modernist era past the neo-Classical age, which defines an entire multi-century period of Western intellectual history, has come to an end, or is soon doing so, as all eras ultimately do. Thus, so has esthetics come to an end, understood as the consideration of this central question, because it was the primacy of art that defines this period, first art in general in the Romantic period, and then, in the Modernist era, the artwork. We’ve moved on to touting works that forward the aims of specific groups defined by race, gender, or sexuality; or of minority immigrant groups in the West. In addition, and perhaps primarily, our attention is taken by things filling the space previously devoted to what we called artworks that don’t even position themselves in terms of art or not-art. These come largely from technology unknown during the period of Modernism, from the Internet, and from the world of popular culture that has exploded in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. For a time in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the West was interested in places and peoples outside it. This period of looking outwards is over. Now we look inwards. In fact, there is widespread condemnation of the earlier act of looking outwards and trying to understand the world, as this is held to be a power play by stronger people to the detriment of weaker people. Nowadays we don’t care what art is, given that the answer to this question doesn’t help the situation of whatever group it is whose interests we are defending. So esthetics is attacked, or dead. Can we even still speak of art? I suggest, as an answer to this question, what in German is expressed as “jein,” pronounced DOI: 10.4324/9781003373377-2

4 Theory

“yine”: ja (yes) and nein (no). We still have experiences like those that led the people who spoke of “art,” understood as a separable enterprise or set of objects, to do so. However, these experiences can no longer be understood as involving a separable entity produced by a specific identifiable sort of person, the Artist of the Romantics, or the stand-alone artwork of the Modernists; we largely don’t think that way anymore. People believe they have the right to look at/listen to/ read what they want, and that their satisfaction with the experience they have is all that’s required, not an assurance that what they perceived was “art.” As a result, what we need is an esthetics past esthetics, one that makes the definition of art to some degree subjective and individual. We don’t accept any more that others tell us what art is; fine. We can do so ourselves. Artworks are not art separate from their perception as art; here I echo Bishop Berkeley’s famous dictum with respect to objects, but narrowly tailored only to art: esse est percipi—being art means being perceived as art. This would be esthetics for the age beyond esthetics. And it would spell a new attitude toward the things we used to call “art” that fill our museums and the syllabi of our university courses. The questions I try to answer here are as follows. What is art, if it exists at all in this new age; why and when and under what circumstances do we try to define it? How have art and the attempt to consider it changed over time, and how have they stayed the same? What is this experience/relationship/entity good for? What, that is, is the point of reading/listening to/looking at art, in whatever the medium, including literature and movement/dance? Why, for that matter, are there different media for art? Does art even have to be found in a work? What kind of work? Is there an objective difference between literature (held to be “artistic”) and other written works, or even a difference that’s the effect of our subjective perception? Is there an objective difference between great or even good paintings (or literature or other works) and bad ones, or is making this distinction merely an attempt of individuals to exert power over others? And this: How does the fact that art and literature have become largely codified and are mostly found in the institutions of museums and college classes affect our interaction with them? Is there any other way to interact with art? Finally: Does art make us better people? Does it educate us? Does it, for example, teach us “critical thinking”? Does it show us underlying patterns of life or the universe? No to all of these last questions. So what does it do for us? Why bother? We are in an historical period subsequent to the Modern age, which consisted of Romanticism and Modernism over roughly the last about 250 years. Art as conceived by the Romantics, who gave us the definition of art as something the genius did to shower enlightenment on the non-geniuses (roughly, the view of the nineteenth century), shifted in the Modernist era into a focus on the work, behind which the Artist disappeared (roughly the twentieth century). But Modernist works were difficult, and abstract/abstruse, so they were relegated to college classrooms and museums. Now in the twenty-first century, as a result of various factors, including a huge and well-to-do middle class in the West (and

Esthetics Beyond Esthetics  5

these generalizations about intellectual history pertain to the West and its relation to the world), as well as a diminution of respect for aristocratic and expert values, the difficulty of Modernist artworks, and contemporary technology that allows dissemination among many people at the push of a button, we are surrounded by products meant for entertainment or distraction, products that no one thinks necessary to call “art.” To be sure, “Art” (or “Fine Art”) Museums still exert a pull on self-defined artists clamoring to get their works inside them. But the claim for inclusion is rarely related to artistic quality, instead to political considerations. Most people visit such museums as tourist must-sees in major cities, rather than to contemplate the works. And they visit museums of exclusively contemporary art, if at all, for the snack bar and the air conditioning on hot summer days, or as a way to get out of the cold in winter. Besides, many visitors invariably scoff at most of the works in museums of contemporary art: How ugly! Is that art? My dog could do that! The Artists behind these works disdain these Philistines back, which allows the Artists to imagine themselves in the thick of the Romantic era as Misunderstood Artists. In fact they aren’t misunderstood. Even the scoffers know that a dog couldn’t get something in a museum, though it is possible that marks like this on a canvas could be produced by dipping a dog’s tail in paint and getting him to sit on the canvas. But the Artists are right: the dog wouldn’t see the result as a work, or know what a museum is. Its owner might, but then the art would be the owner offering this thing, not the dog doing it, as a photographer offers things seen in the world by snapping a picture. But yes, late-Modernist (contemporary) art is almost always technique-poor—because the point is no longer the work itself, but instead the idea behind it. The Modernist focus on the work has itself changed to a focus on the statement in the world made by the work. Past Modernism, the separated artwork re-integrates with the world. Both art and the work of art have simply vaporized; esthetics is dead. We see quite clearly the altered attitude of this age past esthetics in the 2022 adoption of a new definition of the word “museum” by the International Council of Museums (ICOM). The older definition from 2007, itself revising definitions from 1946 onwards, saw a museum as a “non-profit institution … that acquires, conserves, researches, communicates, and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study, and enjoyment.”1 This older now-revised understanding affirmed that museums offered items based on qualities intrinsic to them—the key words are “education” (which presupposes a common definition of what we are to be educated to), “study” (which means, things worth studying) and “enjoyment” (everyone is supposed to enjoy the same things, and enjoyment seems to be the only option for response). This view is now dead, and the ICOM has duly replaced it with a definition of the museum that is based on inclusion of various group viewpoints.2

6 Theory

The 2022 definition, which was adopted by over 90% of the participants in the conference, was this: A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing.3 Attempts were made in 2019 to be even more progressive—which means even further from defining museums as places with certain types of objects of a certain degree of excellence:4 The following is the proposed definition that in 2019 failed to make it over the finish line of acceptance by the ICOM, only to be watered down a bit and accepted in weaker form in 2022: Museums are democratizing, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artifacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people. Museums are not for profit. They are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to collect, preserve, research, interpret, exhibit, and enhance understandings of the world, aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing. Note the key phrases in this proposal that couldn’t get over the finish line in 2019, but largely did so in 2022: diverse memories, polyphonic spaces, democratizing, equal rights and equal access, working in partnership with diverse communities—to enhance social justice, global equality, and planetary wellbeing. (Critics who said this didn’t go far enough wanted to include as part of the definition the notion that museums should “deaccession” works to their places of origin—see the discussion of the so-called Benin bronzes below.)5 There’s nothing left now of the idea of museums as being repositories of objects of the highest quality, such as what we used to call art, that viewers come to in order to be educated or to seek enjoyment. Museums are defined as being completely worldly, arms of politics. So much for esthetics. The big changes from earlier views in the version that was accepted are the words “diversity,” “ethically,” “varied experiences,” and “with the participation of communities.” As with the version of 2019, museums no longer hold what experts feel is valuable; they are what the subjects themselves think is the subject for “varied experiences.” The National Museum of the American Indian was already at this point at its conception in 1989. Instead of curators giving an over-arching master narrative

Esthetics Beyond Esthetics  7

of the history of various “peoples” (tribes), it opted to simply give each tribe/ people wall space to present the world as it saw things. This produced the unchallenged claims of many peoples that Indians (as the Museum’s name still calls them) have been in North America since time immemorial—rather than, say, coming over the Bering Strait from Asia at a specific time, as historians have long asserted. A tribe/people’s version of things is presented “with the participation of communities” (to quote the 2022 ICOM definition), not as fact, but just as that people’s version of the way things are remembered. For art museums, this means that the Romantic and Modernist view of art is dead. Museums of any sort, including art museums, are no longer places that present the best objects that edify or uplift us in the view of an elite with the power to define this, they are inclusive places that speak to the desires of various communities. Before continuing in this vein, however, an authorial note: this book was largely written during the period in the early 2020s of the various COVID-19 lockdowns, restrictions, and airline cancellations, which made travel outside one’s immediate area difficult. For me, the immediate area in which I largely stayed was the northeast of the USA. As a result, most of the examples that sprang to mind as I was thinking through the arguments here with museum visits are from museums in that area, ranging from New York City through Philadelphia and Washington, DC and down to Richmond, Virginia. However, any Western country with museums as major as those in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Munich, London, Madrid, Brussels, or Amsterdam, among others, can offer comparable examples, and the hours I’ve spent in these over decades formed the loam that nurtured more recent reflections. For Western museums tend to be organized along the same lines, a subject I treat at some length below; individual museums can be stronger or weaker on specific pieces of the puzzle, but the puzzle is remarkably consistent from one Western country to another. And even developing countries increasingly set up museums based on the same Western principles, and sometimes demand that works originating in the political entities that preceded their country be returned to fill them; the transfer is from Western-style museum to Western-style museum, if it happens, wherever they are located. Museums are Western inventions, that many former colonies have appropriated as well. Thus, the experiences I offer as examples are both specific and generic for the presumed educated Anglophone readership of this book. If that reader is British, therefore, substitute the London National Gallery, Tate Britain and Tate Modern, Victoria and Albert, and British Museum for non-Western and Medieval artifacts (are these art?), or the Courtauld Gallery and the Wallace Collection, for my examples taken from New York’s Metropolitan Museum, Museum of Modern Art, or Frick Collection, the Walters Museum in Baltimore, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, or the Philadelphia or Virginia Museums of Art. Saying that in the twenty-first century, interest in art as a separable activity or product has sunk into the background may seem counter-intuitive in an era of a sizzling art market, where billionaires spend astronomic amounts of money

8 Theory

for things most tourists would scoff at if they saw them in a museum. Or they buy NFTs, computer files that anyone can copy: however, only the NFT is the “original,” bragging rights to which are what drives the market. (The concept of an “original” with a computer file is even more dubious than it was with photographs that can be endlessly printed from the negative. So the photography market made a sharp distinction between an “original” print and otherwise identical later prints.) But this market thrives without a definition of what art or artworks are. We ask less and less what art or the artwork is, and instead define objects by their monetary value—or their institutional frames, these institutions being academia and museums, and perhaps to a lesser extent commercial galleries. I consider these institutions below: briefly, this means that anything that can be put in a museum or on the academic curriculum is what we focus on, independent of claims to their status as art or an artwork. Discussion of art or the work of art, even in the sizzling “art” market, has changed into something else entirely. The museum itself, in our sense of separation of kinds of objects and subdivision into sub-groups of time and geography, was a development of the Modern age. Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Berlin, founded in the early nineteenth century, is usually cited as the first proper museum, after the hodge-podge collections of princes called “Cabinets of Curiosities.” (The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, to which more below, has re-created such a collection of curiosities as it might have been.) American museums are even more recent than the European ones, the fruits of the collections of what we call robber barons in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.6 My “home” gallery, Washington’s National Gallery of Art, was dedicated only in 1941—though the collections were assembled and presented to the nation in earlier decades, notably by Paul Mellon.7 Older European museums, to be sure, are based on or consist almost entirely of the collections of princes, which focus on their own court art and the decorations of their palaces, mostly created during the period of their greatest wealth and power. Madrid’s Prado Museum, for example, is richest in Velazquez and Goya, the greatest court artists of the Spanish Hapsburg and Bourbon monarchs, respectively. But more modern European collections are like the American, such as the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection that was formed with industrial money in the twentieth century and has drifted from country to country, and now has settled up the street from the Prado. These tend to have no such lopsided focus, and came later, along with the American “from scratch” museums such as those in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. In the pre-Modern (pre-Industrial Revolution/Romanticism/Modernism) era of the West, there was little attempt to define a separable entity of art: Bach’s chorales were performed in churches at services, not in concert halls; and the religious paintings that now fill our “art” museums were the altarpieces of churches. Portraits of rulers and the nobility—possible past the Renaissance, with its emphasis on the individual—hung in palaces to aggrandize the rulers’ status. Only with the Industrial Revolution that spread wealth to the non-nobility (the

Esthetics Beyond Esthetics  9

wealth of the nobility was based on land, which could not produce new wealth, as industry could) do we have art for the bourgeoisie. Art from the Western pre-Medieval era and non-Western societies is considered below: we make it such because it meets certain of our criteria—and first of all, it must survive its time and place and make it to ours. Because the notion of art as a separable entity, and the act of talking about it, what we call esthetics, are themselves determined by the state of things in the world, we can say that esthetics, even when in full flower, is related to sociology—part of the physical world, not the metaphysical. There was a time before we spoke of a separable entity of art; now there is a time after, the time in which we currently find ourselves. So we can now look at the period of “art” as a defined one, and consider this period in relation to the world. Why did it come to be? Why has it faded away? Here I am indebted to a diluted version of Marxism: what people think is influenced, albeit—parting ways with Marx—not determined, by the world outside thinking, the real world of houses and societies, wars and economics. Yet despite the real-world underpinning of all this, my view differs from that of sociology of esthetics as usually conceived, even interesting works like Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. This is so because most sociologists are uninterested in the individual perceiver’s role in actually constituting art, which is the core of my conception here. In fact, most sociologists don’t even seem to like art, which is part of an individualized relationship. For most sociologists, it’s only the group, class, or aggregate that counts. But my assertion is that now, past the Romantic/Modernist (Modern) Age, in the age past “art,” the nature of our group situation is that it’s precisely the subjective response of the individual that makes things art. “Taste”—Bourdieu’s subject— isn’t a response to an external object; for me, it makes the object. Besides, while sociological studies have shown correlations between things like class, age, and sex of viewers and the art—or “art”—they prefer, this is arguably not aesthetic theory at all but, well, social observation, which is the basis of sociology. Sociology presupposes or looks beyond the questions I am asking because sociology (a “social science”) by definition verges on the scientific, which is to say calculation in terms of the impersonal, expressed in terms of groups, not the individual. Pure science talks about, say, cancer in the laboratory situation removed from the particulars of the world (the removal is what laboratories accomplish), and then has to apply it to an individual’s cancer, which is not always successful. Laboratories are not life. And sociology gets on thin ice when it argues not merely that these are observed correlations, but that things like age, class and race determine these responses. Such observations leave aside completely the question of what art is for the individual as opposed to other things, merely assuming it as a given before turning to differences among perceiver groups. Saying that, for example, opera is for rich people because it costs so much doesn’t define what (if anything) makes it art for any or all of those people. It merely tells us what kind of bums are going to be in the seats of the opera house:

10 Theory

probably rich, largely white, and probably not very young. Indeed, the graying of audiences for classical music or the “imperial” arts of opera and ballet is the primary unsolved financial problem of arts administrators today. It’s a real problem, just one unrelated to understanding art. Museums can tell us about attendance figures and perhaps break them down by age and race, but this leaves aside the question of what each person (again, my focus here) thought or got from standing in front of the works, if anything at all. Still, our attempts to define art—if we make this attempt at all (and we need not), as well as what we do with art—are social facts. They are acts done not just individually, but usually in groups, collectively. All of these group actions vary over time and in relation to circumstances. Yet we should not make Marx’s mistake and say that either art or a specific conception of it is invariably produced by X or Y set of conditions, which we then proceed to specify. Instead, art and talking about art develop in relation to external events and circumstances, which we can attempt to define, but only after the fact. Some of these circumstances can be impersonal, such as climate events (say, earthquakes or global warming), or so general as to seem impersonal, like wars. And, giving Marx his due as identifying one among many factors, economic givens and changes can also play a role. So the relationship varies between theory and the world in which it exists, and requires discussion; we can’t apply a one-size-fits-all explanation, Marx’s being based on class conflict. The discussion of the relation between what Marx called Basis (the real world) and Űberbau (things like art and metaphysics) is understood as discussion after events, not doctrinaire matrices for predicting them. If my point of view bears kinship to any “ology,” it is perhaps related most closely to Alfred Gell’s consideration of what he calls the “anthropology of time,” which considers mental facts like a conception of time as being embedded by groups in the real world. Gell situates Durkheim at the center of his own conception, and so must I here, at least by extension: “The anthropology of time, in its contemporary form,” Gell begins his work by that name, An Anthropology of Time, “can be traced to a well-known passage in the introductory chapter of Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1915: 9–11).” The core idea of the lengthy excerpt from Durkheim that follows is Durkheim’s assertion that concepts such as “time, space, class, number, cause, personality” are “born in religion and of religion,” and therefore that “it is allowable to suppose that they are rich in social elements” (3 in Gell).8 The affinity here to my point of view of both Gell and the spark of likemindedness he finds in Durkheim is in the idea that ways of thinking about the world, rather than being primary givens, even including such Kantian a prioris as time and space, are themselves social facts. (I am not so interested in religion, Durkheim’s focus in the work from which this passage is drawn, or specifically in what Durkheim calls “primitive” societies.) We came to think of art the way we do because of the larger changes and givens of our world. However, at the same time I stand with the conception that art is a personal relationship, so the possible paradox of my position is to insist on the individuality of the way of thinking that

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is itself a social fact. What is social is the way we conceive of the phenomenon or situation we call that of art, but what is personal is the phenomenon itself. In trying to steer a middle course between art lovers and the social sciences, therefore, I am in sympathy with Janet Wolff’s attempt to do precisely this in her Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art. However, Wolff’s book was originally published in 1983, and one of my claims is that decades later, we have exited the era of “art” conceived of as referring to a set of objects we can define, and external to the perceiver. Popular culture, already formidably strong in 1983, has taken over by 2023, and fills the space hitherto filled by trickle-down versions of what the Romantics and Modernists understood as art. The world has changed: “art” now is relegated to museums and academia. This is why I propose a new way of speaking of what we used to call “art” in this current age past esthetics. When the singer Prince changed his name to an unpronounceable glyph that was a combination of male and female symbols, he was referred to as “The artist formerly known as Prince.” In a similar vein, I use “art” nowadays to mean “what we used to refer to as art.” The experience is probably the same, but the way we conceive of it isn’t. Though we no longer speak of art as a separate realm or the artwork as something we approach from the outside, the conception of what I am calling the Modern age of Romanticism and Modernism, we can, and do, still have the same experience as when we did—and, I assume, even before the Modern age. We just conceived of it differently. A church-goer in a service where a new Bach cantata was sung presumably didn’t think of the service as “art” that could be put on in the concert hall, nor the worshipper before a Fra Angelico painting now in a museum. While I don’t presume to know what people centuries ago felt or thought, it seems safe to say that they knew these experiences were different than looking at a stone, or even at a colorful sunset, or listening to a rushing river or to birdsong. They knew that someone who wasn’t in front of them made the painting or the music, and that they were perceiving or experiencing it. This doesn’t mean everybody had to have such an experience even if standing in front of the painting or sitting in the church. Certainly people dozed during the service in Leipzig, and their thoughts may well have been elsewhere than in the church with the Fra Angelico in front of them. The way we express the personal experience of art is the sociological/ anthropological aspect of my consideration here, not the experience of art itself. Of course, we should be clear that art isn’t something everyone seeks, appreciates, nor (I add) even necessarily needs. Some people need art a lot, some not at all. Some like it well enough if it’s inserted into a social setting, such as a book club where everyone is sipping chardonnay, or in a college class that’s not too early in the day with a charismatic professor who can tell a good joke. Some don’t know they like it until they are shown—such as in the college class, or the book club. Some would sooner die than be dragged to an art gallery; if it’s a museum of contemporary art, they usually wander and make nasty comments about the pile of stones or rags in the corner. If it’s an Old Masters museum, they are interested to see a “real” (say) Rembrandt, because they have heard of Rembrandt. Most

12 Theory

everyone thinks the sunlit fields of the Impressionists are pretty. And usually they can find something that reminds them of their life. That looks like Aunt Susan! That’s a messy desk like mine! I bet those kids looking and being so good took off their dress-up clothes and started fighting the minute the painter was done for the day! But those who like art—and I am one—like it a lot, because it puts them in a specific relation to the physical and social world; this is how art is part of the world, albeit an exception to most social situations—as I consider below. Its place in the world of the social is precisely that it is an exception to interactions with flesh and blood people, which is the stuff of the social sciences. We don’t actually know for how many people art is desirable or even necessary, because some people are potential art lovers and don’t know it. And getting anything from art also presupposes that more basic bodily needs are taken care of—you can’t look at a Claude, Kirchner, or Constable if you’re very hungry, much less actually starving. Or if you’ve just walked out of a car wreck. Or had a fight with your significant other. Nor can you then sit down to read James Joyce. Or even more audience-friendly stuff like Trollope. Even sitting down to a performance of the Olympian works of George Balanchine in New York after braving traffic and the screech of the subway requires severe self-calming. Plus individuals are to some degree unpredictable. You may be indifferent to every painting you’ve ever seen—but suddenly see, say, a Klimt, glowing with gold and colorful spangles, and are enthusiastic. Or you don’t usually read fiction but then, for whatever reason (college class? buddy’s recommendation? girlfriend?) read Hemingway (it’s not likely you’ll fall in love with Musil or Proust if nothing else appeals to you) and are hooked. One class in college—even assuming you take it—might speak to you and turn you into a fan of one author/ composer/painter for life. Maybe you will branch out from Monet to the other Impressionists. Maybe Erich Heckel leads you to Schmidt-Rottluff. Maybe you never have any contact with those after the art or literature class where you discovered these for the first time, but still remember it fondly perhaps because you liked the professor. What will happen now that she’s not in front of the class? Then there’s the fact that some literature typically appeals to certain specific groups to which you don’t (or do?) belong. Maybe you feel too male to find Jane Austen, written from the woman’s point of view, appealing. Or too practical to like Thomas Wolfe’s purple prose. Or maybe you are tired of reading about white people and want books by or about people of color. Or you’re gay and tired of reading about straight people. Or you’re straight and uninterested in a class in college you had to take about gay literature. Plus people change. Maybe you liked author X when you were young, but now that you’re older, this writer doesn’t do it for you anymore. Or the reverse— some author, painter, composer, or choreographer grows on you with age. I find, for example, that the melancholy of Chopin speaks to me increasingly as I age, and the breezy efficiency of Rossini string symphonies seems superficial. I’ve always liked Vermeer (along with everybody else) but Rembrandt self-portraits

Esthetics Beyond Esthetics  13

as he himself aged now speak more to me. When I was young, they seemed ugly. Now they’re just real. There are so many variables about whether I, or you, or anybody will ever get anything from art, or particular works, and if so, what it will be, and when, and for how long, that any consideration of art that starts from the opposite d irection— not with the consumer but with the producer or the thing produced—seems pointless. What do we have if we have an understanding of what art is if most people never get near it, and those who do have such different relationships to it? It makes more sense to ask what happens when it’s clear that the individual is actually interacting with art. Then we are in a position to ask, how is that different than interacting with other things? As a result of starting with the individual rather than the separated artwork, we can say without apology that what’s art for me need not be art for you, and what was considered art before need not be considered art for us. Art past the era of Romanticism/Modernism is not an entity outside of the individual, but a relationship we have with the world that includes what we call the work of art, itself both defining and defined by the relationship we have with it. Art now is the entire relation, a conception appropriate for our age of esthetics beyond esthetics. To be sure, this inclusion of our subjectivity in the very definition of art doesn’t mean that we can, willy-nilly, have this relation to anything we desire. It’s a bit like falling in love. Falling in love involves us, the object of our love, and the relationship between them. We can’t force ourselves to love, though over time we can make generalizations about when we, both as individuals and as types of various sorts, are likely to feel or experience this feeling or relationship. Thus I neither pose nor answer the now-largely-irrelevant question of “what is art?” understood as independent of specific times and places, and also independent of individuals. Different people define art differently, and most don’t define it at all. For some people, art is what you study in an art history course in college, or what is in an “art museum.” Or maybe what is made by someone called an artist (self-styled? by what others? the Spectator or the New York Times?)? Artists liked this definition (art is what artists do) for a time, say the 1950s, at the height of Abstract Expressionism. But of course, that’s a joke because it’s clearly circular: it’s a shrug and a laugh. It means, go away and leave me alone. Some people make art, most don’t. Some people consume or seek it, most don’t. Some people think about it, most don’t. For some people, too, art is only (say) the visual arts—drawings, paintings, sculpture, nowadays concepts too, videos, performances. For others (such as me for this essay), art is a wider category—a quality of other things, literature, music, and dance, television and film, and including many sorts of people behind the scenes. In literature, there is an author and sometimes a very active editor. For example Ezra Pound is as responsible for T. S. Eliot’s poem sequence that Pound re-titled “The Waste Land” as Eliot himself. This is so partly because of the so-important thematic title Pound put in place of Eliot’s original one, focusing on the polyphonic technique of his collage of different quotes and commentaries:

14 Theory

Eliot’s was taken from Dickens, “He Do the Police in Different Voices.” Just as important, if not more so, was Pound’s draconian paring down to a fraction of its length of the unwieldy and wandering original manuscript and the elimination of its less trenchant passages.9 Eliot acknowledged his debt to his pitiless editor by dedicating the result to Pound, “il miglior fabbro,” the better master of construction and technique. (How right he was!) In film, there is the director, as well as the actors, the cinematographer, the editor, the costume designer, and so on, all of whom played a role in the final product. Some people like only one of these categories, some like several, some like all. Dance has costumes and lighting (Martha Graham was exceptional in designing her own costumes) and someone else’s music. And so on. Then there is the problem of what percentage of a given object is art. The tendency of the Modern period was to allow only objects at close to a 100% lack of connection with a social situation to be categorized as art. This was articulated in early form, in the run-up to Romanticism we call the Enlightenment, by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of the Power of Judgment, that the judgment of beauty that is particular to art was both disinterested and universal. We don’t see the beautiful work as being of any use, though it has the form of use. We perceive the form of purposiveness in the beautiful object, not any end outside of it (106). Moreover this is a judgment that everyone not necessarily will, but ought to share. It’s a quality both of the object and of the perceiver/judger. In this melding of perceiver and object, but in this alone, I see affinities between my views and Kant’s. For Kant, to whom I return below, this was a universal fact; for me the uniting is quite individual and I don’t have to explain it. That’s what individuals do: they are the raw material of the generalizations of philosophy, they’re cases of one. That doesn’t mean they are exercising what philosophers call free will, just that they are cases of one. They’re what we start with as givens, so they can be anything. For Kant, the individual necessarily relates in a certain way to an object that, in a sense external to the individual, merely is what it is. That’s why he was forced to postulate a realm beyond both these that acted like a magnet on iron filings and arranged these individual people and individual things in this manner. Because I don’t say this relation has to be common between individuals—I can perceive art/beauty where you don’t, or the reverse—I leave it as given that a single person can be in alignment with a single object in a relation we call art: that’s the level of data we start with, so we can’t say beforehand what they will be. Again, that doesn’t mean I will willy-nilly call anything art: the relation of art involves me and requires me, but is not arbitrary or the result of idle whim. It happens both with and to me. The result for Kant, as for the Romantics he prefigured, was the conclusion that we don’t do anything with the artwork except perceive (judge) its beauty: for Kant, art was “purposeless purposefulness.” Nowadays, however, putting the Romantic period in a larger context requires us to accept degrees of purpose, and hence degrees of artness—an admittedly inelegant term I use a great deal here. The museum itself emphasizes and to a degree creates the non-functionality of

Esthetics Beyond Esthetics  15

its works, for example in displaying African masks in Plexiglas boxes, or hung on white walls, shorn of their raffia and the movements and ceremonies for which they were carved. But all those Madonna and child paintings in the rooms devoted to Renaissance art in any major art museum (NB: a museum of art, not something else) are also stripped of their context, and so are the Goyas and Turners and Pollocks. All we see are the objects, not the social situation in which they were produced. Yet we may be aware that music which we listen to in a concert hall or at home was made for a church, that African masks were made to play a role in dance rituals, or that an Alessi teapot that actually makes tea can be shown in a museum, and that a portrait of Granddad (if we are of the aristocracy) can be shown out of its context in the ancestral manse primarily “as” a painting by artist X in a museum, not as a portrait of Granddad. Nowadays we accept what used to be called “minor” arts, or “female,” or “applied” arts, such as embroidery, as art, as well as design objects, and put these in museums in vitrines or shown against white walls as well. For an example of the last, consider the motorcycles that filled the Guggenheim in New York in 1998 in the exhibit whose title spelled out its purpose, The Art of the Motorcycle. Note, the Art. So now we know how to respond—we can’t buy one of these off the museum floor, or ride off on it. For us to see them as art, or be primarily aware of the artistic aspect of usable machines, they have to be shown in a context (and with an exposition title ramming it home) that announces that they are no longer objects to be bought in the showroom; rather, they are there, and we can look if we like. To be sure, if we encounter them outside the museum, being ridden or in a showroom, we may say, What a beautiful Harley! But in that context, we are likely to let their place in the world take precedence and not call them art. Still, these design qualities can be emphasized over their functionality. They are no longer aimed at us as potential buyers: we are merely to look, and thus they are to that extent made more like art. These examples of objects changing state shows that artness doesn’t have to be 100% or 0%, and it can be increased or decreased, depending on circumstances and presentation. Nor is more artness necessarily a good thing. We can appreciate the beautiful embroidery of a shirt or blouse someone is wearing without asking whether it is art; we can see something that could end up in a good photograph—and refuse, or fail, to push it in that direction by taking and trying to exhibit the photograph. We inherited our museums and our Romantic/Modernist definition of art as being as stripped of context as possible, but we don’t have to force everything to be stripped of context in this way. In fact, it’s the opposite that is ubiquitous these days, not objects in the world that we emphasize the artness of, but rather works we can see are supposed to be art because they are in an art museum, but that seem to be identical to things that aren’t. Fat in vitrines? Neon signs offering political messages? A huge block of plaster representing the interior of a small room? For that matter, paint apparently randomly applied to a canvas? Is that art? Is the embroidery we see at Grandma’s art? Are African masks? Probably nowadays we say, they are if you think they are.

16 Theory

One effect of the past two centuries has been the ordering and classification of works of the arts (Melvil Dewey was seminal in this with his 1876 Dewey Decimal System for books, still universally used), and exemplified in virtually all visual art museums with their chronological and geographical ordering of works into a time-line of schools and their influencers and influenced, and in almost all academic consideration of literature or other arts under the rubrics of periods, languages, or departments. This is why universities teach variations on the same courses, and why so many museums, wherever they are located, are alike. Every major (encyclopedic) art museum, for example, tells the same story, albeit perhaps with different strengths and emphases dependent on local conditions and its own history. However, the artistic situation I am considering that includes the subjective is inimical to institutional study of the arts. I am concerned not with tracing connections between works seen as something external to people, the point of view fundamental to the Modern Era’s academic and institutional study of the arts, but with the situation of an individual person in an individual relationship to an individual work. Each of us gets to say what produces this relationship for us, though not necessarily what (if anything) produces it for others. This point of view may be somewhat threatening to the prestige of the institutions that the Modernist age created to codify its conception of an external objective and codifiable world, and to feed its rage for ordering: academia and museums. What I propose is individualistic (though not chaotic)—freeing the perceiver of art from servitude to the explainers and ordering of museums and academia. It’s a kind of liberation theory for the individual. The institutions have their purpose (in brief, they allow efficient exposure to many things) but must be selectively employed by the individual. If the perceiver sees museums as a collection of separate (if related) works, and “art history” courses as a useful means to expose students to many artworks in some kind of order that makes them easier to grasp at first view, fine. But if the individual works are seen as being part of an objective world order that itself is the end purpose of perceiving them (X influenced Y and produced Z), not fine. In that case we aren’t dealing with art at all, but a kind of memorization of facts rather like the way my sons, as children, memorized all the qualities of various Pokémon characters and their relationships to each other. They are facts, but what’s the point? This essay pleads for us to remember the thrill of experiencing as an individual the sensation of artness of an object, like falling in love. The paradox is that those who read it are likely to be engaged in one way or another with precisely this system of ordering of works seen as external to perceivers, and to be members, or aspiring members, of institutions based on it. But I ask that these people try to remember, or enjoy, being young and in love—with art. That, at any rate, is typically why they thought they wanted to spend their lives considering it. However, what older people who join these institutions discover (younger people, take note!) is that experiencing art isn’t the same as studying it. Many who enter these institutions do the academic “thing” for a while, and then find themselves longing for the lost idealism of their youth. It’s a rare literature

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professor or museum curator who does not sometimes sigh with regret: où sont les neiges d’antan? This book is an attempt to explain this (for many, lost) sensation of artness—“of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower,” to quote William Wordsworth in his “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” lamenting that the innocence and immediacy of his youth was now gone. Perhaps, unlike Wordsworth, they can get it back.

Notes 1 https://hyperallergic.com/513858/icom-museum-definition 2 www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/08/24/what-is-a-museum-icom-finally-decideson-a-new-definition 3 https://icom.museum/en/resources/standards-guidelines/museum-def inition/ ?amp=1 4 www.museumpeil.eu/what-is-a-museum-and-why-did-icom-fail-to-answer-thequestion-in-kyoto 5 www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/08/24/what-is-a-museum-icom-finally-decideson-a-new-definition 6 A useful book about this process is Cynthia Salzman, Old Masters, New World: America’s Raid on Europe’s Great Pictures (New York: Penguin, 2000). 7 National Gallery of Art, “History,” accessed 9  November 2021, www.nga.gov/ about/gallery-history.html. 8 Alfred Gell, An Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and Images (Oxford: Berg, 1992). 9 T. S. Eliot, ed. Valerie Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound (New York: Harcourt, 1971).

2 A DEFINITION OF ART FOR OUR TIMES Personal Impersonal/Impersonal Personal

How (to echo the Passover Haggadah) is the experience we call art different from all other experiences, and what does it do for us? The answer: What makes reading a novel or poetry, walking through an art gallery, or sitting in a chamber music concert different from the time spent doing the other things in our lives that we do—making food, eating it, chatting with neighbors, going for a run, sitting in front of the fire with our beloved, taking care of the dog, working, cussing at things that go wrong, and the thousands of other things of which our days consist—is that we are neither alone nor with other people. We choose to be guided along a path that was constructed by another person or people—and we believe it was constructed by a person rather than being merely random (even artworks about randomness are constructed to have that effect on us), because it clearly has a pattern different from that which occurs naturally. (Mistakes here are possible, and discovering that something we thought the result of human agency was natural changes its status for us: it is no longer art.) And once a few people figure out a way of making these patterns, others typically follow, so that it seems the result is synonymous with art—for example, the discovery of oil paints applied to canvas in the Northern Renaissance. And these were portable enough to be carted away later to museums. When we show frescoes, egg tempera on wet plaster, in museums, it’s typically in sections cut out of their original walls and shown as if they were canvases, or actually transferred to canvas. But this identification of art with method or types of works is just a fact of history, nothing more. In fact, art isn’t a list, as things can enter or leave the category of artworks, and what seems art to us may not to others, and the reverse. When we read or see or hear what we call a work of art, it’s more human an interaction than being alone, appreciating nature, or interacting with animals, because the work was evidently made by people and isn’t accident. That it was accident is the sense of visitors to a contemporary museum who feel that the paint was simply DOI: 10.4324/9781003373377-3

A Definition of Art for Our Times  19

thrown on the canvas randomly—even Pollock, perhaps one of the last of the Modernists, seems to have a purpose as all the loops stay within the rectangle of the canvas—the result of a child playing or a dog dipping its tail in the paint, that makes footsore tourists say, This isn’t art! Similarly, art isn’t a sunset or the pattern of the waves that nobody caused, except perhaps God. For either of these to be art, someone, a person, would have to somehow capture this—in a photograph? in a painting? in words?—and offer the result. It’s the offering by a person that makes it, at least potentially, art. Though art is visibly made by humans, at the same time it lacks the constraints involved with actually being with other people, where we are immediately placed in relation to them and must act accordingly, given who we are and when and where. This lack of constraints gives art the special quality of freedom that the people who like art treasure. It isn’t offered to us personally, so that we have to respond, the way we have to respond if someone offers us food at a meal; it’s just offered. It’s not part of a social situation where we have a role to play. We don’t have to answer questions from the work, or smile at it, or be responsible for it, or be pleasant, or choose our words—there’s nobody there. All actual people have done their thing and left. It’s like visiting a ghost town or an excavated one, like Pompeii, or Bodie, California, the best-preserved abandoned town in the American West. We know people made it, but they are gone. Some of the best-known photographs of Eugène Atget, those of deserted Paris streets and shop windows (others are, for example, of small tradesmen plying their trades on the streets), are art for many viewers, but also a synecdoche for all art. We see the empty streets and the courtyards and the shop windows, frequently with mannequins or dolls that remind us of people. In these photographs, it’s as if the real people have just this minute left the scene; we can still imagine the moving air currents produced by their departure, but now all is silent. And we know the man behind the camera had to have been aware of this sense of active absence as well: that’s what he offered and is still offering in the work, though he himself is long dead. We call the result melancholy, but that may be strengthened by the fact that now the photographs are over a century old, and in sepia, and show a vanished Paris—which means they are even more art for us than they would have been for Atget’s contemporaries. The works have changed nature because of the passage of time. The result waits patiently for us to discover it. And we can discover these photographs, as Berenice Abbot did. Art gives us the warmth of something like human interaction, but without the responsibility. We can stop looking (or reading, or actively listening, etc.) when we want to, we don’t have to say a word, we don’t have to look interested if we aren’t, we don’t have to respect anyone’s feelings, we don’t have to look or sound authoritative, we don’t have to think of something clever—we’ve been given a pass. It’s voyeuristic, like looking in an open window. But we aren’t Peeping Toms, and we aren’t breaking any rules, because the people aren’t flesh and blood. They are in words or paint. So we can look our fill, roam at will. Think

20 Theory

of a movie: the point of showing these people to us is precisely so that we stare at them. Staring isn’t impolite; it’s the point. The interface of reader/viewer/listener and work is therefore personal. If the work has precise qualities, so do we. We are who we are, though the degree to which we are aware of who we are varies with age and degree of introspection. Not all works turn out to be the gardens where we’d like to wander, the maze we’d like to be lost in. We can start a work and find ourselves repelled, so that we throw it down, a response I consider below. Besides, there are a number of situations where the voluntary act of wandering can be turned into a mandatory one. To the extent that happens, the relationship with the (same) work is no longer with an artwork. If we are reading a work under compulsion, say for a university class, we can’t throw it down, at least not for long, but may either be indifferent to it, or come to class full of venom about why we hated it. That’s how art history or literary history can kill the experience of art or literature for students. Or the same for professors, who are treating what they interact with as “texts” to analyze and write articles about. ( John Dewey, below, considers this relationship as not being “esthetic,” and I am obliged to agree, despite my differences with Dewey.) It’s easier, to be sure, to define art as a list of works, rather than as I am doing here, as a variable relationship that happens or doesn’t depending on the work, the reader/viewer/listener, and circumstances, and that can happen to varying degrees and with varying results. The advantage of using an objective (rather than partly subjective, as here) definition of art is that we are free of having to consider all the variations in personal response and relationships with these half-human, half-inhuman things. We know what is on the syllabus, or what to put there, and we know what will be in the art museum. But we’re not on secure ground when we define art as being something on a syllabus’s list or in a building. Many of these works leave many people cold—and it’s not their fault. That’s just the way it is. Nor can we define art in formal terms, because formal qualities are neither necessary nor sufficient. We might want to say that everything painted with oil on a canvas is art, but school daubs and the products of many Sunday painters far outnumber the pieces we’d put in a gallery, and not everything that rhymes is a poem. And there was art, we think, before any of these things. Consider the cave paintings at Lascaux, or the Venus of Willendorf in the Vienna Natural History Museum, or Etruscan or Mayan tomb painting. (T. S. Eliot considers works like this we now call art in his influential essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”) And what of the works that filled the museums of the nineteenth century that now seem kitsch, or leave us bemused by their overwrought and too-meticulous exoticism and attention to detail? What of the contents of twenty-first century museums of contemporary art that are so baffling to so many? And few people like, or even understand, all the books on the syllabus in a college course. And how about the shifting sands of the modern scene, where there are no rules for what form something offered, or accepted, as art might take? Ai Weiwei smashing a Ming vase? Sure. Robert Smithson’s Earthworks? Sure. Or the formerly

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“minor arts,” like embroidery. Sure. So we can’t define art by formal qualities, or any other qualities (such as being written by X person with Y skin color). If we rely on others to tell us what “art” is, as in things on a list, yet others will certainly challenge the list, either to get their own candidates in that list (thereby displacing some already there), or to overturn it completely. Don’t study dead white male painters! Instead, study X or Y contemporary performance artists! Even museums are being revamped to reflect this agenda; see the revised definition of a museum by the International Council of Museums, considered above. Indeed, this process of objects passing in and out of the status of “art” happens all the time: the early Renaissance painters used to be thought “primitives” and were available for purchase at relatively low prices by American collectors a century ago. And the African masks that used to be thought ethnography now fill “art museums.” So an understanding of art based on a relationship being achieved allows us to avoid the problems of defining art through works. This also allows us to admit degrees of artness, though many people see this possibility already, albeit typically only among works already held to be by Great Artists. Early Mozart symphonies are sweet and pleasant, but lack the depth of the later ones. Countless Vivaldi concerti are nice but repetitive, whereas (perhaps) Mahler seems clearly more able to be heard as great art, if at times overwrought and a bit neurotic. Doodles or preliminary studies by artists who made what we call masterpieces may still have a point, but we get the point quickly and move on. We can apply this same understanding of degrees to entire works by less well-known figures, saying, for example, that a contemporary work we see in a museum is different but not for that reason very high-carat art. We don’t have to be intimidated by the fact that it’s in a museum. Some works have a smaller percentage of art than others. Some works have none. Yet it seems unforgiving to immediately reject as not art anything that fails to touch us, especially as age or changing circumstances may well have us revise that opinion. There should, it seems, be a category for art that we acknowledge to have a certain strength but that is simply not for us, or at least, not for us now. I never denied that Rembrandt portraits were art, just said (for decades) that they were too somber and serious for me. I’ve never warmed to Janaček, and too many sun-struck Impressionist fields or pink and fat Renoir nudes cause me to hurry my step. (The Barnes Foundation, considered below, has too many of these.) Thus, though the relation that constitutes art is personal, anything that has stood the test of time ought to be seriously considered. Works that have remained interesting over time, what was derided as “the canon” in the late twentieth century, have attracted general interest from different sorts of people, and may be interesting or artistic for us. This doesn’t mean we have to like Dante, but at least history suggests there is something to appreciate by somebody, many somebodies—maybe us. The probability of our discovering art is much greater than if we consider merely a comparable amount of the world, or even a comparable number of books chosen at random from (say) a used bookstore, which contains books of all sorts and qualities.

22 Theory

Of course, by dint of being historical or from places unlike our own, these works may or indeed will certainly lack certain qualities—say, being by women of color, or being performance art, which is transitory, or made of animal fat, which rots and disintegrates. And this is a good reason to supplement historical works with present-day ones. But it seems historically unwise to reject the past merely because it doesn’t share the most talked-about givens or concerns of our present. I don’t have to see me in all the details of what I read; I can see other aspects that are less obvious. I don’t have to (say) read books by men who live in Maryland, USA, or who come from Salisbury, Maryland, though I do both and am male. I can read and like books by women, and people of color, and non-Americans, and the long-dead—and I don’t even need them to be in my native language of English. So there’s a point to engaging with the works in traditional college curricula, even if this doesn’t mean all, or for that matter any, of them will set up the experience of art for the person engaging with them—just that the probability of this happening is as large as it can be. (This also means that gay women of color, say, can profit from books by dead white males.) A feeling, which is a personal situation, is the thing least amenable to objections from others. This is so because it’s at one end of a scale, where the assertions about what we call the objective world are at the other. It’s the degree of amenability to others’ input that determines whether something is objective or subjective, not the reverse, because things can change place on the scale as people respond to them differently. Assertions of what we call science are the most open to others’ input; in fact, this input by others is demanded. That’s what makes these assertions objective. At the other end of the spectrum, the expression of a personal feeling is not completely free from possible input by others, but is much more so than completely objective assertions at the other end of the scale defined by science. If I say I am enjoying my ice cream, it would take conflicting externally visible evidence to allow someone to object: you sure don’t look as if you are! Or if I say: I really love him/her!, an objection could be, you sure don’t treat him/her as if you do! Even things like “I’m bored” seem to have an objective correlate that allows others to comment or even object: But you look so interested! It’s “mental states” like these that Wittgenstein, in the Philosophical Investigations, declared identical with their external manifestations. But there are things that by definition have no correlate, and these Wittgenstein did not consider. “I’m over him/her” might have action correlates. But “I begin to sense my own mortality” need not—not even sighs or melancholy, or a rueful smile. But then again, depending on circumstances, it might. Thus Gilbert Ryle is wrong, in The Concept of Mind, to object to the (for him) erroneous conception of the mind as a lockbox that others can’t access. He’s right that the lockbox isn’t external to us; we create it. In fact someone outside of us can’t decide beforehand whether something belongs in it or not. The lockbox isn’t a thing, it’s a place we decide to put things. But it is nonetheless very real. Wittgenstein was wrong: there are mental states with no objective correlative, in the lockbox. We put them there. Philosophers always deal in the general, not the specific, so the unpredictability

A Definition of Art for Our Times  23

of the individual case (unpredictable again, not because humans have something called “free will,” but because the individual is by definition not the general) escapes philosophy. Related to the fact that philosophy deals in the general is the nature of science, which also deals in the general and so is always also open to being blind-sided by the particular. We see this by evoking, as philosophy professors do, the distinction between Hume and Kant. This is usually framed as a conflict, but in fact the two are focusing on two different things, Hume on the particular, Kant on another layer entirely. Thus Hume was wrong to say that generalizing from particulars is the only way we create generals. “Human beings” is not created by adding up all living individuals, it’s a Platonic understanding of what they have in common. We don’t have to go through all the coins, bills, cowrie shells, and gold pieces in the world to talk about “money,” we just do. Hume was right that sometimes we generalize about particulars, so that we can never be sure the next particular will be the same. But this is not the same as merely starting at the more abstract level, that we don’t have to climb to—we can just be there. Thus Kant is right that we can get certainty on the level of the general; it’s just that we can’t be sure what the particular situation holds for us. What we’re sure about is the general, not the particular. Kant is on the tops of many mountains, describing the range; Hume is in the valleys. Science is the mountaintops, art is the valleys. It’s true that we can get certainty at the level of the mountaintops, but only for the mountaintops. That doesn’t determine what happens in the valleys. Hume is right: being able to get certainty about the mountaintops doesn’t determine what will take place in the world. But it’s equally true that we don’t get the mountaintops by generalizing about the valleys, which is Kant’s point. Hume’s example was our sense that the sun will rise tomorrow: it always has, so we assume it will. Kant says we can get certainty in science—presumably that the sun will rise tomorrow. And of course it will, if the level of generality that determines that, in this case the Earth spinning, happens as usual. That’s where the certainty comes in. But what if something affects that general? Then we can’t say. A super-nova? The end of the universe? Extra-terrestrials playing with the Earth’s rotation with a technology we can’t even imagine? What the process of scientific development—the laboratory studies designed to eliminate variables from lived experience, the repeatable results—tries to do is rule out things in the world that can affect the general. The medicine only works in X doses and at Y temperature; the rocket only flies when it’s launched with Z fuel, not A or B. Good scientists learn to look under every rock they, or anyone else, know about, and even better scientists aggressively look for even more rocks to turn over. This makes the probability of the conclusions being true in the real world greater. But what if there are yet more rocks those looking for them didn’t find? These may cover surprises. It’s certainly true that if we fail to turn over the rocks that are there (which means: that we know about), we are likely to get false conclusions. Karl Popper, in The Logic of Scientific Discoveries, made waves by saying, in effect, that science was never proven, just waiting to be disproved. Is certainty

24 Theory

(the result of proof ) a state of humans that we get closer to or is it an objective state we can achieve? Does absolute certainty even exist? Reasonable people can disagree, the way we can disagree about whether God actually exists, or whether we just say He does. We’re the ones saying either one, so how much does this fact impact what is said? This is like the fact that we can emphasize either what is seen through the window or the surface of the glass through which we see it, the different emphases of the pre-Modern and Modern ages. Is existence (of God) a “perfection” (as the so-called ontological argument of St. Anselm and Descartes has it), and is this a physical state? We don’t know. Everybody agrees we can get greater degrees of certainty. That’s the scientific process: we turned over every rock we knew of, and everybody else did the same, and we did this for decades. That produces very great certainty indeed. But is it absolute certainty? This is a trivial difference in practical terms, because even if we say we have absolute certainty, it’s only for things we were considering. Say we say we can have 100% certainty, for example, that planes will always fly because of air rushing over and under their wings, and not drop out of the sky—which speaks to all of the conditions among those we have considered. This certainty about wind speed and wing shape doesn’t account for hijackers. Or air suddenly being somehow different. Or plane wings falling off. Of course not! we say. But in the practical world, these things matter. Only not to science, because here the science is only concerned with what it’s concerned with, the wing shape and the speed of the air. We get closer to being comfortable with the notion of absolute certainty the more we remove concepts from the world so that practical things don’t matter, such as we do in pure mathematics, with concepts so far abstracted from the world we never make the connection. But this too is something we decide to do. 1 + 1 always = 2, perhaps, and it seems a bad joke to say that one female rabbit and one male rabbit quickly equals many more. We simply choose to talk about an abstracted concept of number, not rabbits, the way Plato talked about the Idea of Chair, not any particular chair. Plato was also clear that we can’t get to the level of the Idea of Chair by considering many chairs; we have to be a certain kind of person. And in this he was surely right—some people are more drawn to what we call abstractions than others. Perhaps pure science enters this Platonic realm. But much science, as Popper correctly saw, is embedded in the real world, making “if… then” statements about experience. The most real-worldly are branches such as in medicine or what we call engineering. Will the patient’s life be saved (the goal of medicine, as the goal of engineering is to make serviceable bridges that stay up) because we have cured him of his cancer? Will the bridge stay up? If we say we are almost certain (some would say certain) that we can cure this cancer with radiation (because we understand what radiation does to cancer, which is the level of the general), we are not saying that the patient might not have a dozen other problems that cause him to die anyway, or that the side-effects of the radiation might not kill him as well. And we certainly are not saying that the patient, now cured, won’t be hit

A Definition of Art for Our Times  25

by a truck on exiting the hospital. Airplanes will fly, unless—unless what? There is water in the fuel or a mechanic forgot to tighten some nuts, or hijackers bring it down. None of these things are the purview of science or engineering because they are outside the general where we have established (near?) certainty. That’s why we shouldn’t waste our time on the difference between 99.99% and 100% certainty: both states can be run over by a truck, or diverted by hijackers. We don’t enter a new realm with science any more than we enter a new realm with art. It all takes place in the here and now. Both are something people do. But to return to art, we call the means to this sensation of seeing the traces of absent people, its form, the work of art, and the absent person who contrived it, the artist. But we have to establish first that we have this sensation; then we can separate out the work, the person or people who made it, and ourselves. Not the reverse. The relationship has to be established, and because we are only part of it, we don’t have total control over whether this happens. We can’t start with the work as a given. In fact, we don’t know that something we seek out, or happen on, is (for us) an artwork, until we see whether the relationship is set up. This means, more precisely, that we can’t say that (say) all the paintings in the National Gallery, Washington or the National Gallery, London (or any museum) are art or not (“for us” is understood) until we try interacting with them. At most we can say, history has suggested that these works merit consideration; so give them a try? That’s the most fruitful way for professors to present works in the classroom as well. What has worked for countless others may well work for you too. So give it a try. Or not. It’s up to the perceiver, because the point of experiencing the half-warm, half-cold traces of other people making things not aimed at us personally is the sense of connection to the world it offers outside of the constraints imposed by our reality and by what we call situational awareness. We don’t have to respond, as nobody is talking to us, which in turn means that we are not placing ourselves in the reality of our situation that otherwise defines us. The rest of the world, outside art, is defined by our place in it, by our situation. I am not female, short, Armenian, unmarried, or living in 1850 in the south of France. Every day I wake up I meet the constraints of who and where I am, the qualities of me. I’m lucky that I basically like these, or am used to them, but they limit me to being me, at all times. Only not with art. That’s why I can read with interest about a short female Armenian, or an 1850s woman from Provence. I’m not reacting to the character as me at all. Besides, she’d be dead if I met her and had to be polite. (It’s lucky I speak French, but Provençal? No.) Sometimes this decoupling from the gears of our situation in and through art is expressed by saying that we are using our imagination. It’s true that parts of a painting, book or musical composition may cause us to feel we are there in the book (or there in that beautiful sun-dappled Impressionist field) and so to accept as our own, at least temporarily, the things that differ from our reality; as I consider below, all art is a combination of the known and the unknown. The reason we don’t know beforehand whether something will be art for us is that we don’t know for sure where we will draw the line between known and unknown. And

26 Theory

others can’t tell us. The claim of identity-politics groups is that they can: this is a book about (say) a Puerto Rican lesbian and important for that reason. What if that aspect leaves a reader—even a Puerto Rican lesbian reader—unmoved, but another aspect entirely resonates, say the woman’s relationship with her parents, or her struggles to do something the reader also tried to do turns out to be what that person is interested in? Is a straight man from Maryland also allowed to get something from it? If so, it seems that subject matter or identity-group signifiers of characters aren’t so important at all. Because the artwork is overheard rather than heard, we don’t have to situate it in our real-world reaction pattern. When there are other people in front of us, we are caught in a web of relations and situations that require certain sorts of interactions. (Even the cowed passivity of, say, a prisoner who is not allowed to speak is such a situation.) These have a basic layer of determinants—who am I? Who are these people? What is my role? What is theirs? What is our history with each other?, and so on. And they have determinants at increasingly more specific levels too, specific to this day and time, or slightly more general, at the situation that produced this day or time. Am I the professor in a class? The student? Large class or small? Beginning of semester or end? What relationship between students or with the professor has been established, if any? The situation determines some things, and leaves others up to me, or narrows my choices to a greater or lesser extent. Let’s say I’m the professor, and I am to talk about late Wittgenstein, or Botticelli, or a lesson in calculus. That is close to absolute: I can’t just talk about what I want, I have to be addressing the topic on the syllabus whether well or badly. But even this has exceptions. Say it’s Columbia University 1968 and I feel I should talk about the Vietnam War instead. Or wherever 2021 and I should address an offensive graffiti inscription found on campus the previous day. But exceptions always have to be justified as exceptions. Rules can be broken, but we have to know we are breaking rules, not just doing what we want. Let’s say I stick to the lesson. I get to decide how to go about it, what to start with, what examples to use, and so on. Yet what I say is determined by how much time we have and where I am in the (say) hour. And the situation gives certain parameters. I don’t talk about personal issues. I’m the boss, though I have a job to do. I can decide how closely I need to stick to the givens, and how important they are. Still, they are my constraints, even if I loosen or even ignore them. Other situations with people allow far less choice, for example if I am not the professor but the student. Or a subordinate officer (or enlisted) in the army. Or the greeter in a restaurant. Or a waiter. Or a cook. Still, in every situation involving other people, I have to know what is up to me and what isn’t, what my parameters of action are (within which I get to choose), what I may say or not say. I have leeway within these constraints: I as professor can say either “Hello” or “Good morning,” but I can’t walk into a class and say “Goodbye,” or “Fuck you all”—unless I am resigning, or this is a theatrical performance, or I am about to make a point similar to the one I am making in this paragraph.

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In these situations, the personal and social are yin and yang, each interlocked with the other. Who I am determines how I interact with others, but so does who they are, and why we are together. What I do and say is a mixture of freedom and constraint in varying degrees of each. When I interface with an artwork, none of this is true. The constraints in the work itself (if it’s Botticelli it’s not Mozart; if it’s Stendhal it’s not Zola) do not require any choice or reaction on my part in the way we enter the relationship with others. With art, there are no constraints in the personal relation, nor the social, because it’s not a personal relation, nor a social one. Neither is it impersonal/asocial. It’s in between. But this is quite a large swath, this in between. This is the reason why particular objects and situations drift in and out of the bandwidth we call art and whose contents we call artworks. Yakky museum docents who can be heard three rooms away and over-eager professors destroy the relationship of overhearing the work rather than hearing it by making sure they do the talking. The situation of art cannot be forced, and it cannot be entered into under coercion. I have to want it, but that doesn’t mean it will happen. I can prowl a museum or browse library shelves without finding anything with which this relationship is established. Lack of coercion, the freedom of the perceiver to walk away or to engage, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for this particular relationship to be established. Because the artist made this situation that we voluntarily put ourselves in—we read the book, look at the (say) painting, listen to the music—and then left, we can explore the result at our own pace and on our own terms. The work creates a path for us to walk along, if we wish. We can leave it by looking up from the book or painting, or being distracted during the music. (“The Concert” is Jerome Robbins’s witty choreographic take on the fantasies of audience members while a pianist plays Chopin.) Or we can return, or stay immersed. The touch of the absent artist is precisely the fact that there is a path, that the work is something precise (even if, say, it includes situations for reader choice: you choose the ending!). If it has no path, we can’t follow it, and so we stop trying. The artist isn’t there to be complimented or criticized. S/he can’t object to what we do with the situation, nor chide us for not staying on the path. Art decouples us from the precise reactions necessitated by our situation. Sometimes this is expressed by saying that this world of our givens (I am reading this in this room on this day, being this person under these circumstances) is reality, the artwork imagination. Or as Emily Dickinson put it in her poem numbered 1286, making the split between reality and artwork immense, “There is no frigate like a book/to take us lands away.”1 But this makes the distinction too absolute. All artworks are based in reality— the familiar part, that anchors us, which may not be the same for the perceiver as for the world of the work’s original perceivers. Many men of average, or less than average, physiques are riveted by the sight of roided-out musclemen or superheroes on the screen because they recognize the male in themselves. But very few of these men jump off a building and try to fly after seeing a Superman

28 Theory

movie, or try to destroy a phalanx of opponents single-handedly: they know it’s just a movie. As a result of the impersonality of the personal, we cannot feel that the work is actually addressed to the real us, or any group including us, if we are to have this sensation of artness. A political pamphlet that touches our situation bears the traces of absent people, like an object we call art, but we are drawn into a relation with the pamphlet like that of someone saying “Hello” to us. We are called to action: we have to respond. We can’t ignore this, or if we do, we have chosen to respond by being impolite. We can ignore the exhortation of the political pamphlet, but that is still entering into the situation of social relations with another person, just as we can refuse to bite on provocations or simply smile vaguely when someone tries to engage us. Usually, reading a political exhortation in whatever form is like reading, and usually responding to, a text message: it’s written, but we feel it is aimed at us. (There are text messages that are not for us—so-called butt dials, or wrong numbers, or what are clearly spam.) Because of the notion that the artness of the thing that produces the sensation of art is intrinsic to the object rather than being a relation between us and the object, much ink has been spilled to argue that things like these political pamphlets can too be art. But of course they can—if we do not feel (this is the subjective aspect) that they are addressing us. Jonathan Swift’s celebrated essay pretending to argue that the English should eat Irish babies, “A Modest Proposal,” is regularly taught today as art.2 For the English at whom it was aimed in the eighteenth century, however, the artness, while probably not completely absent, would have been much less. Because the contemporary reader does not feel this essay is addressed to a group that includes him/her/them, the artness is much larger. And it’s only people committed to finding all the qualities of art in the object who would find strange the idea that the degree of artness in something can change depending on the circumstances of the world (or indeed to find the notion of “degrees of artness” strange or even repellent). The Romantic insistence that the only proper response to art is merely to perceive it (or be guided by it, assuming its position of authority, like that of a professor), perhaps aided by helpful guides pointing out features they are afraid the viewer/listener would otherwise overlook, has such staying power because the only thing it gets wrong is the causality, not the description of the end effect. Instead, when we distinguish something as art from other things in the world, or when we see a percentage of artness in an object, it’s because we don’t feel that we are called upon to respond. It’s speaking, but not to us. Again: we don’t hear it, we overhear it. And contemplation is only one out of a myriad of possible responses we can have to an object; if we have it, it’s art. But we don’t have to have it. Assuming we do is the mistake of those who think artness is an inherent quality of the object. Our baby crying can’t be art, because we have to respond. Even if someone else’s baby is crying, we might feel that we are to take action. But if the baby’s crying is distanced from us, say by being painted or described in a book, we do not take action, nor are we impelled to. And the result can be art.

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An unnerving, but only modestly interesting, artwork could be a dark room we enter in a museum with the sound of a baby crying. We’d feel some impulse to do something but realize that’s the point of the work. A similarly unnerving, but only moderately interesting, situation is offered by a work at the Glenstone Museum (considered further below), which gives the sense of claustrophobia and panic, or at least the sense that it is trying to induce these feelings. It’s a huge room one enters at one end and leaves at the other, papered floor to ceiling with garish forest wallpaper of entwined trees, and with piles of twine-wrapped newspapers in the corners. A dozen or so faucets in the side walls endlessly pour water (presumably recycled: the viewer realizes immediately they are fountains, not faucets) into sinks below them. We know that if the water is running and we didn’t turn it on, we ought to stop it, or the (say) bathtub will overflow. If, that is, if they were real faucets—but we know they aren’t, so the panic is rather thin. And so many of them! One or two would probably make us more nervous—two whole facing walls full of them seems a bit arranged. We may have a moment where we feel we must do something, feeling trapped by the apparent fake forest we are in—what is really outside?, feel that time has passed from all the unread newspapers—are we a prisoner? Is this our torture? It’s like a Halloween haunted house, only diluted because it’s so symmetrical and we entered willingly and there are gray-clad young folks from the museum to make sure we don’t touch anything. (At Glenstone, everything is gray—the buildings themselves as well as the uniforms on the uniformly young guards, who seem more like its prisoners.) Because this room is set up as something we have to enter, part of the museum circuit, rather than something that we happen to have come upon, it feels aimed at us, rather than oblivious of us, as art is. It’s an interesting example of experiences people can arrange for us, like roller-coasters or haunted houses, that aren’t art. They’re experiences: they address us. We’re the ones who are to feel claustrophobic/unnerved. Like Kaf ka’s door with its keeper in “Vor dem Gesetz,” “Before the Law” from his novel Der Prozess/The Trial, this situation was made for us. To that extent, it isn’t art. The problem with the installation at Glenstone is that it’s set up to produce a specific response, not allowing us to make of it what we will. Everyone finds it at least trying to be claustrophobic and panicinducing, a prison cell that belies its nature with a sneer with painted woodlands and huge size. It’s like something from a nightmare—or would be if we could take it seriously as real rather than a somewhat overheated haunted house. It sees us and knows how we will respond. It is speaking to us, not merely speaking.

Notes 1 Emily Dickinson, “Poem 1286,” Poetry Foundation, accessed 3  September 2021, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52199/there-is-no-frigate-like-a-book-1286 2 Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal,” ReadWriteThink, accessed 3  January 2022, www.readwritethink.org/sites/default/files/resources/30827_modestproposal.pdf

3 CORRECTING MODERNISM Putting the Subjective Back In

As Hegel points out, the owl of Minerva only flies at night, when the events of the day are over. Intellectual history, like all history, is what happened, not what is going to happen. Of course, it is determined by what’s available to us to see (some things, indeed many—most?—things in the past remain hidden or do not survive the passage of time) and what our presuppositions for seeing are. What are we looking for? To some degree this determines what we find. What we see when we look at the past and at what the people (which people? how many?) were talking and writing about is that specific questions come and then, inevitably, go. That’s how we chart events: if people are concerned with the same things (and to an extent they always are: children, parents, youth, age, food, shelter—here we can chart differences in these but not the constant elements), we can’t narrate their history over time. History presupposes things happening, and things happening means things changing. This is most fundamentally why the idea of an entity called art can be charted in historical terms. Before the Modern age, to agree again with almost all commentators, what we now call art came to be for a specific purpose in the world, and was not conceptually separate from it. (The Orson Welles film F for Fake is a meditation on the anonymous nature of the sculptors for the great age of French cathedrals, as well as the slippery notion of what we call a fake. A copy by an excellent student of the master? A workshop collaboration? Fakes presuppose originals, which is another Western Romantic obsession—Chinese art, as one instance, has never shared this negative view of copying from the masters.) In that time, others defined the nature and place of what an individual provided: what survives is what is solid enough to survive—say, because it was made of stone or other hard materials, or what by chance fails to be destroyed—in the case of the French cathedrals, for example, meaning what the French Revolution did not break or obliterate, and what is interesting or valuable enough to people DOI: 10.4324/9781003373377-4

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to have them take care to make it survive, if they have the option of doing so. A modern war with bombs, like World War II, destroys many things that individuals might have preferred to keep. It’s quite usual that some questions dominate an age and then die away, unsolved but also largely unconsidered. Questions about perception of objects— What do we bring to the act of perception? Can we be sure we’re not in error? Do we create objects by our perception of them?—were pressing for an entire age of Western thought, that we call the Empiricist age. Now such questions are merely examples for discussions in philosophy classes. We haven’t answered these questions; we’ve just ceased being interested in them. The question that I am moving beyond here, “What is art?” was a pressing issue in intellectual circles for about a century and a half, from the Enlightenment to the end of the Romantic era—roughly the middle/end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, then morphed into the related question, “What defines the work of art?” for about a century, and now has faded from our mental screens in any form, or is actively rejected as a tool of oppression. (I have argued elsewhere that Modernism could never answer this question because it focused on the work rather than on the larger situation that made it art, as the Romantics had.1)Yet during the period of Romanticism, it seemed that art both had to be defined, and could be. Art did something in the world that needed to be understood, and artists (or poets, as they were sometimes called) were the ones who did it. Indeed, it frequently seemed for those making art that artists/poets were not only indispensable, but the sine qua non of everything worthwhile and good. For Kant, in the lead-up to the Romantic era, the judgment of the beautiful was a required personal reaction to qualities the work possessed intrinsically. But this personal reaction wasn’t just an individual’s taste, it’s a judgment that is universally valid, what he calls the “subjective validity of a singular judgment” (161). As he puts it, combining subjective with objective—which is the key Kantian move, subjective necessarily implying the objective, and hence leaving no distinction between my subjectivity and anybody else’s subjectivity—we all have to reach the same conclusion, bending to the power of Reason: Thus it is not the pleasure but the universal validity this pleasure perceived in the mind as connected with the mere judging of an object that is represented in a judgment of taste as a universal rule for an object of judgment, valid for everyone. It is an empirical judgment that I perceive and judge an object with pleasure. But it is an a priori judgment [this is Kant’s famous synthetic a priori of the Critique of Pure Reason which, he holds, produces the validity of science] that I find it beautiful, i.e., that I may require that satisfaction of everyone as necessary. (169) It’s precisely Kant’s postulate that individual perception, here of beauty, is a universal pan-subjective judgment that our age rejects. For us, universals are inherently suspect because they fail to further the interests of my group. Kant got the

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object and the perceiver right, but left out the important relation between them that has substance of its own, determining whether or not I as an individual have the esthetic experience, presumably what Kant thought the “judgment” of “beauty.” He can insist that this judgment is subject to pan-subjective Reason all he wants, but that denies the substance of my individual relation to this individual object, which is what, in this age of esthetics past esthetics, constitutes art. For Kant, beauty is a quality of the object itself outside the perceiver that is not created, but merely acceded to—presumably, by everyone. Only, it turned out that despite the weight of Kant’s Reason, most people failed to have a common judgment of beauty. Just judging it beautiful—it’s there, I’m here, and the two are not otherwise linked—was what people were to do with it. But clearly not everyone did this. Those pesky individuals, failing to bow to the power of Kant’s Reason! I say: it’s the situation both of us are embedded in that Kant forgot— what’s outside of human perception, judgment, or Reason—that defines art in this age of esthetics past esthetics. We’re caught in the amber of our particularity, not, as Kant thought, our commonality. It’s some form of cosmic justice, to repeat, that the result of marrying the subjective perceiver to the objective perceived, which Kant did in order to bridge the gap Empiricist philosophers such as Hume had created, was that Kant had to justify this by postulating an unknowable “thing in itself ” beyond both (if I’m not powering this perceiving, what is?)—which was the seed for the feeling-centered subjectivity of the Romantic age that followed Kant’s eighteenth century. We can never attain knowledge of things as they actually are; we are stuck in the realm of appearances. I say there’s nothing outside of the relation of the individual with the artwork, because the relationship is what glues together perceiver and perceived as art. We’re not denied access to an unknowable realm beyond us. What we are is part of a relation in the here and now. Nothing powers it: it just happens. Or not. Anyway, why, according to Kant, should we perceive art at all? Correct judgment doesn’t seem to be motivation enough, because it leaves my particularity—my desires, foibles, and whims—out of it. And if there was anything Kant set out to render irrelevant, it is precisely my particularity: I’m to follow Reason like everyone else. It all seemed rather fascist to me, reading this as an undergraduate—and still seems so now. What rankled most was the assumption that we have no choice but to accede to what Kant claimed. Bow to the power of Reason! His own peculiarity didn’t matter either; oh no! He had no dog in this fight! But if this is just a description of what we are obliged to do, why bother to write it down? Or read it? What does he want to change with all this fancy footwork? If nothing, that’s the end of it. If something, how can Reason force us to stop doing something that we are already doing? If Reason is all that necessary, we’re acting according to its dictates or strictures at every moment, even now, pre-change. Of course Kant was a solitary thinker sans wife and kids, I thought. How else could he have concocted such a fever dream of everyone falling into lockstep behind Reason? Having to live with obstreperous individuals on a daily basis would have woken him up. Anyway, if all we do in making judgments of the beautiful (i.e. perceiving works of art) is to follow the laws of Reason, why should we do this? What’s in it

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for me? (This, needless to say, is not a Kantian question.) Take written works. The purpose of studying humanities, we hear over and over from Deans of Humanities and from and the professors, is to develop “critical thinking.” What is this? They don’t say. Does reading King Lear develop this more than studying, say, physics, or math? The comparison is rarely made. And what of those who seem good at critical thinking but who have never read King Lear or studied physics? Is it possible that these capabilities, whatever they are, can be developed in many ways, and that even if reading King Lear (or is it talking about this in a certain way with people of a specific bent or persuasion?) is one of these ways, that there are many others? What if staring into space while daydreaming is one of these ways? Just living and paying attention? It bodes ill for people who want to sell us a product like “critical thinking” through college courses if we can get this off the street. Claims for “critical thinking” aside, colleges and universities are also some of the last places where they can tell you why you should read or listen to X or Y. It’s to fulfill a requirement, or to get a good grade in a course, or perhaps to go to law school so you can make money. It makes sense there: students are paying money for the grade in the course, and want something from the professor. If students really don’t see the point of what they’re doing in classes about the arts and humanities, however, they take only the minimum number of courses. Usually these days the minimum number is zero, as fewer and fewer schools still have mandatory survey courses, or even the requirement to pick one from an assortment of particular topics (the assumption has to be that all teach the same skills—but what, other than how to write a footnote?). And frequently the resistance to mandatory courses comes from the faculty members who want the works they associate with their own group highlighted instead. The best we can do is to say that at university, if we go to a university (college), some of us interact with art and literature in order to graduate. And after? Why should we read or look at artworks after we graduate? Much of the post-college serious reading that occurs nowadays takes place in book clubs, which are a sort of ad hoc class with no professor, typically focused on contemporary literary best-sellers. These have in common with classes that they turn a solitary pursuit into a social one: you have to read the book, or at least some of it, to avoid letting down your friends. That at least reproduces, at a lower level, the social pressure of having to prepare for class. Few people, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, would assert with any degree of conviction that they know what constitutes art. Most people just surf the Internet, play word games, and watch Spotify or YouTube. We hear these sources of diversion, we don’t overhear them, because they are speaking to us. And people don’t seem to miss their not being art. So we’ve moved on. We always do. The topics constituting collectively what we call intellectual history don’t last forever as the topic du jour, or du siècle (or two) because the world itself changes, and with it, what people see as most important. The consideration of art was itself born in the Enlightenment and was popularized as wealth began to be more generally available. Art had been the province of kings and nobility, and as the bourgeoisie began to thrive, they wanted the same

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thing as the nobility. The wealthy American collectors (money from oil or railroads or shipping, the grease of the Industrial Age) who created the American public art collections in an astonishingly limited period, snapping up in a few decades beginning about 1880 what had taken the kings of Europe centuries to accumulate, were trying to live like kings, and were concerned to have what the kings thought of as art to show that they were doing so. (The Thyssen collection now in Madrid was formed under similar circumstances with European industrial money.) So art was clearly defined as objects of a certain sort. But this is now in the past. Now that most Westerners are what they identify as middle class, differences among social classes are conceived of as quantitative differences, not qualitative: rich people are like me, only they have more money. (That the middle class may not, for structural reasons rather than personal, be able to achieve this amount of wealth is a topic for much discussion in the early twenty-first century; still, the differences are not thought of in terms of the qualitative ones of the pre-Modern era.)2 The result of the dissemination of wealth and education of the twentieth century is that the middle classes ceased tying to adopt the same values as the aristocracy. Music historians point out that Beethoven was the first composer to make works without necessarily having a royal patron. If there were no pull factors of royal commissions, push factors—what we call genius in the Romantic movement—had to take their place. Nowadays it’s the pull factors of works amenable to widespread dissemination that power the arts, along with a residual notion of individual genius or expression that still does crop up occasionally. (An interesting documentary about the singer and performer Madonna called Truth or Dare records her, even in our time, playing this card of artistic self-expression to the Toronto police that tried to block her show “Blonde Ambition” as too risqué—“lewd behavior” was the charge—in 1990.) The great age of esthetics, Romanticism and Modernism, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is behind us. The Romantics, such as Shelley in his “Defence of Poetry” (admittedly one of the most assertive of such considerations), insisted that poets were the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers … A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not … [H]e is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue, and glory.3 Moreover, for Shelley, poetry—he considers all the other arts as well—is not merely the font of all that is highest and best; it seems that without art we wouldn’t even remark the world at all. The language of poets marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral

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thoughts; and then if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse … Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it reproduces all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it coexists. Art, according to Shelley, is what gives us the world. No art, it seems, no world. And only artists can make art, and thus give us the world. The art necessarily implies the artist, and these are defined by their function in a world of non-art and non-artists. There seems to be no discussion of whether person X or Y is an artist or work X or Y is art; the distinctions aren’t within the categories considered, but the whole category contrasted with something outside. Other Romantic theoreticians (almost inevitably also poets—the separation of theory from practice didn’t happen until the twentieth century) agreed. Without art and artists, there’s not much sense to life. For Victor Hugo, poets (artists) were like wise men, magi, who brought truth to all others. In his poem “Les Mages,” Hugo asked (my translation): Why do you designate priests when you already have them among you? These are poets, marked on the forehead by God from birth. They are geniuses who see further than others, and who, when they descend from the heights, still have around them the glow of the heights in their hair. Art is defined for the Romantics as something the artist does. So the artist becomes central. For Wordsworth, in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, poetry was the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”—those of the poet of course, though because it was “emotion recollected in tranquility,” it was also something guided and made. The sentence that begins with spontaneous overflow ends in thought: For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: and though this be true, poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man, who being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply. The most widely accepted formulation of Romantic theory in relation to what preceded it is M. H. Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp. Abrams explains his useful pairing of contrasting images in his title: The title of the book identifies two common and antithetic metaphors of mind, one comparing the mind to a reflector of external objects, the other

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to a radiant projector that makes a contribution to the objects it perceives. The first of these was characteristic of much of the thinking from Plato to the eighteenth century; the second typifies the prevailing Romantic conception of the poetic mind. (viii) It’s clear from this pairing that the alteration of emphasis of the Romantics with respect to what preceded them, which set the tone of consideration of art well into the twentieth century, was to see art as somehow problematic. If it’s just a reflection of the world, even—as it usually is in classical and neo-classical theory, a perfected reflection—it apparently just happens, or can be done by anyone, or at least isn’t very hard, or theoretically unproblematic. For the Romantics, by contrast, it isn’t so simple. Art is something only special people do, and it’s an heroic and extraordinary thing. But it’s also problematic theoretically, in that we’re left with what for non-artists is a sort of magic trick. It’s no longer a process that theoretically anyone could do; it’s what others of a different type—artists—do. And it leaves the perceiver powerless to issue an opinion about the result. When art was a form of mimesis, the classical term, it wasn’t mysterious, and we could all judge it: did it reflect the world accurately? Moving to the person-oriented definition of Romanticism, we step aside. Our views are no longer relevant; all we can do is admire and be instructed. To situate my own suggestions with respect to Abrams, I propose that these two things, mirror and lamp, are not an either/or but a both/and—if we tone both down a bit from their extremes. I can still have the experience I may continue to call esthetic when I see/hear/read/perceive an object that we call a work (because somebody made it), that bears the marks of absent people who, I believe, have not aimed it at a group including me. If it’s aimed at a group including me, the real me, Bruce Fleming writing this, I can buy it or use it or eat it, but it can’t be art. It enters my real world, and I have to do something with it—me, in this real day, in this real place. This is my version of Kant’s purpose-free aspect, though I situate this not in the work but in the relationship of work and perceiver. Art, by contrast, isn’t speaking to me; it’s just speaking. This is why I say we overhear art rather than hear it. But for it to be comprehensible, it must, as I have noted above and develop further below, have aspects of both old and new. The old is what we find familiar, what Abrams and classical theorists would call the “mirroring,” and the new is what the absent author/painter/composer etc. adds, the “lamp.” However, we don’t need to say that the old is merely passive reproduction or mirroring, nor does the new necessarily enlighten us. The reason we interact with art is neither merely to appreciate the technique of reproduction, nor to be educated or led by the artist. It is instead to interact with people outside of the constraints of social situations—our situation, what we call reality. My reality is that I am an American, tall, Caucasian, a professor, male, middle class, living on the US Eastern seaboard, late 60s, writing this in 2022. In my life, I have to adhere to these givens, as well as to being 6’2”/200, athletic,

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multi-lingual, a married father living in a specific house in a specific place, having the relatives I have, doing my shopping in specific shops, having the clothes (Italian suits, at one extreme, and gym shorts and T-shirts at the other, in large part) and pet (a black cat, Woody) and the refrigerator contents (I think now it’s shrimp and a chicken among the larger items; I’d have to confirm they haven’t been eaten) that I have—though not all of these facts are relevant in all situations, which means I have to know what’s relevant in what situation. (I don’t talk to a neighbor about the refrigerator contents, unless she needs some eggs or milk.) Being male? Tall? White? Things aimed at a group including me (I put it this way because of course artists don’t necessarily know Bruce Fleming, they just know my type) must adapt to and enter that world. I’m always who I am. Art, however, allows me to sense people who do not require me to be me. They’re not talking to me, and I don’t have to answer them back. They’re real people, but visible only through the traces they leave. The benefit of art is the freedom it gives us to sense these; the drawback is that the people aren’t here in front of us to talk to. It’s a distanced relationship with people, through the work. Nonetheless it is a real one, not an imaginary one. Not everybody wants this relationship, but some, perhaps many, do. I certainly do. I love not having to think of something to say or having to respond. It’s as if I float above my social situation, disembodied and disengaged from it. On one particular day I choose at random, my social situation is this: it’s 2:30, I’m hungry. I’m in Philadelphia this weekend, I’ve just left the galleries of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I have to walk back to Rittenhouse Square, it’s cold out; do I still have my gloves? Shall I go out the back door of the museum or the side? I’m a bit tired as I went running this a.m., so the walk back may be a bit slow. However, when I was looking at the Poussin from the Hermitage that seems to be the birth of Venus but probably isn’t, as I did a few minutes before, none of these things mattered. This is not the switch from imagination or fantasy to reality; it’s from one reality to another. The twentieth century turned its focus from art and the artist to the artwork. If we consider the work isolated from the world, however, we obviously can’t say how it relates to the rest of the world because we’ve narrowed our focus to exclude the world, limiting it only to the work (cf. my Modernism and Its Discontents: Philosophical Problems of Twentieth-Century Literary Theory). And that means, we can’t say what makes the work art. This is where the twentieth century left us: we don’t know what art is, though theory tried to say. Or rather, academia tried. For the Romantics, theory and the definition of art was part of the content of what artists did, so theory and practice went hand in glove. The Modernist focus on the work that was produced, rather than on the artist who produced it, left theory to academics. What was art for the twentieth century? For literature, the theories started in best Modernist fashion with the focus on the work—though there were still the remnants of Romanticism to be seen, as for example in the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky’s insistence in his essay “Art As Technique,” echoing Shelley, that without art we don’t actually perceive the world because we’ve become

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dulled to it: “Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.”4 Even so, Shklovsky’s emphasis is on the work, not the artist. And this was further developed in the Anglo-American New Critics, who identified qualities of (certain) poems that were intrinsically artistic: ambiguity (William Empson), or difficulty of expression (T. S. Eliot).5 Easy art wasn’t art at all. This was the beginning of the twentieth century’s theoretical focus on the work rather than what art is in the world: it takes the work for granted, cutting the artist out of the equation. Indeed, according to French thinkers such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, the author (referring to literature) is dead.6 All of the analysis of Jacques Derrida, who along with Foucault had the greatest effect on the American literary theoretical scene in the late twentieth century, starts with the work—called the “text”: we no longer ask what makes it art, or indeed worthwhile analyzing. As Derrida put it, in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s translation, “there is nothing outside the text.” 7 This is the focus of Modernism and of post-Modernism. Foucault, whose influence waxed as Derrida’s waned, insisted that texts changed the world, establishing relations of dominance because they are the ones doing the expressing. Those expressed about are, by definition, being put in a subordinate position. All writing is the exercise of power.8 (Clearly these people don’t work for the military, as I do; it’s gratifying to English professors to think that their words control the world—though of course they don’t.) Despite widespread hostility from identity-politics groups in the postModernist (contemporary) era to the idea that there is such a thing as art, or classics, or “universal” works, there are remnants of adherence to the idea that the artist is somehow important and should be paid attention to. The presupposition from inside the arts and academia, if not from outside, is still that we should perceive, or rather, study works. However, what these are is usually nowadays chosen not by quality, but by the nature of the artist or the subject matter expressed in terms of racial and gender or sex-defined groups. This tessellation into groups means that we cannot agree on what to perceive/study as we could when it was held that the chosen works were defined by quality, or by what they did for the perceiver. This takes the focus on the work to its bitter end and turns it into a purely personal fight: my works rather than your works. As a correlate to this wrestling for power and exposure in academia but taking place in the world outside it, consider the battle over identity-group museums on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The Smithsonian museums and the National Gallery (alone among the museums on the Mall not a Smithsonian museum) began with the pretense of being general, over-arching, encyclopedic. More recent museums were defined by non-Western and presumably neglected parts of the world: the National Museum of African Art, the Freer/Sackler Museum of Asian Art (there is some American art in the Freer as well, including Whistler’s famous “Peacock Room,” and some Egyptian—and because of pushback to the Sackler family’s role in the opioid crisis, this museum now styles itself the National Museum of Asian Art rather than the trendy “F + S” label

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of recent years). The latest wave is of museums dedicated not to works defined by geography of the world outside, but by sub-groups of people defined by skin color or race, all within our time and place. And their location is everything. All museums simply have to be in the most prime real estate in Washington, on the National Mall: each group wants its museum there and only there. Most recently it was the African-American Museum. Now it is the Latino-American Museum. Another spot than in central DC is not acceptable.9 Real estate determines standing: location, location, location. Who cares what art is? The idea that a bunch of removed-from-the-fray Brahmins get to decide what art is, is precisely what is under attack. And successfully. Under the relentless assault from those resisting an Olympian notion of “art” in favor of works that forward a political purpose, art loses. This is so because people in an actual social situation who can turn up the volume are making the demands to other people in the social situation. In art, the person has left and can’t turn up the volume, and the social situation of person to person contact that makes each one specific is gone. We have to hear people making political demands, we can’t overhear them. And they are by definition louder than the overheard voices of art. Yet it’s not as if what the Brahmins think doesn’t matter, at least for selfproclaimed artists. The delineation operative in the world today is what the museum includes vs. what it excludes. All the effort of artists is focused on getting into the museum; see the ICOM definition of a museum, considered above, as “inclusive.” Getting into the museum is still the point, as if museums were the castle to be assaulted and breached in the Medieval Roman de la Rose. Getting your work in the Museum of Modern Art is still the goal, whatever anybody says. That is entering Valhalla. Still, this is a personal concern of people who consider themselves artists, a small group. Viewers of these things are usually left unmoved. Indeed, usually they roll their eyes at a lot of what is in museums of contemporary art. It’s a fact that this is largely about ideas, not artworks. And so the typical reaction of average tourists who wander by is “My dog could do that!” For artists, the dog people are merely ignorant, the vast unwashed. In fact, this reaction shows how far from the outside world contemporary museum art has strayed, not how much it has responded to it. If museums are just catalogues of the world outside, why go to them? They made sense when they claimed to be different or better or more intense than the world; now that all they want to do is include it, they don’t make sense, at least not for viewers rather than for the self-proclaimed artists who want so desperately to have their products inside.

Notes 1 Bruce Fleming, Modernism and Its Discontents: Philosophical Problems of Twentieth-century Literary Theory (New York: Peter Lang, 1995). 2 See for example Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021). 3 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Defence of Poetry.” Poetry Foundation, accessed 15 December 2021, www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69388/a-defence-of-poetry

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4 NAILING THE PROBLEM A CENTURY AGO Dewey’s Art as Experience

John Dewey opened his Art as Experience—which achieved its current form of collected lectures in the early 1930s after earlier run-ups had appeared, appearing thus in the middle of the by then developed Modernist age that focused not on art but on the work—by putting his finger on the problem that we still have at the bitter end of the Modernist era of talking about art as a separable set of objects, that the Modern age gathered up and put in places called museums. The problem with starting with works is that if they’re here already, we come upon them the way we come upon people or chairs—and it’s not clear that we will have any particular relation with them. What do we do with the objects doubly separated from our lives, first as artworks (what are those?) and then sequestered in big buildings, usually with imposing entrances and lots of guards? Typically, people don’t know, because if you separate things from normal life in this way, they either have to be connected back by secondary means, which I consider below—the “docents” of Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation that Dewey influenced, for example, or audioguides, or interactive displays—or more typically, simply remain alien. That’s the price of the separated artwork of the Modern age. If, however, we talk about art as I do here, as a relationship that is established, by definition we have a relation with the work, because what we’re talking about is a relation. The correlate of this, of course, is that we lack a way of being sure without considering people’s subjective reactions what art is or isn’t. And it involves the changeable individual in the definition of art: what’s art for me may not be so for you. I not only accept this fact, I revel in it. To be sure, that attitude poses a problem for the custodians of institutions such as academia and museums, namely that we can go to a museum or take a college class without assuming that we will encounter anything we can call art. But the payoff of this way of defining art is that art is no longer alien.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003373377-5

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The question remains: Why should we seek this experience/relation of art? Or at least, what is its benefit if we have it? One answer to this is the academic answer. It’s the subject of a course, and students need the credits, and the grade, to graduate. But Dewey was concerned to retain a form of interaction with art similar to that which had been the norm in the nineteenth century. Namely, that average people just go look at it/read it/listen to it. This was possible in the Romantic era because art was aimed at the world: the artist sought to guide, enlighten, tell of ethereal heights. Thus, by paying attention, almost anyone who wanted to get something out of the artwork could do so. The artworks of Modernism, by contrast, were dry, difficult, and intellectual, and many of them were downright off-putting. So it had become difficult to just perceive them. Imagine trying to make sense on your own of academic cubism, or Joyce’s Ulysses, or Ezra Pound’s Cantos, or Schoenberg past Transfigured Night. And older artworks had entered the nineteenth-century museum, where they had about them an aura of stuffy inviolability. Dewey’s solution was to insist that they weren’t scary because they were like things that we were familiar with, what he called experiences. The Achilles heel of his theory is therefore that he never really explains how having the experience of art is different from what we do all the time anyway, and thus why a person would want this particular kind of experience. He suggests that art is an experience that is “refined” and “intensified,” but never explains what this means. Dewey transcends Romanticism with its focus on the artist enlightening the world through the work, and correctly identifies the problems of the postRomantic world that are my starting point here. But he does not solve them. Here’s how he nails the problem of his day, and ours: By one of the ironic perversities that often attend the course of affairs, the existence of the works of art upon which formation of an esthetic theory depends has become an obstruction to theory about them. For one reason: these works are products that exist externally and physically. In common conception, the work of art is often identified with the building, book, painting, or statue in its existence apart from human experience. Since the actual work of art is what the product does with and in experience, the result is not favorable to understanding. In addition, the very perfection of some of these products, the prestige they possess because of a long history of unquestioned admiration, creates conventions that get in the way of fresh insight. When an art product once attains classic status, it somehow becomes isolated from the human conditions under which it was brought into being and from the human consequences it engenders in actual life experience. When artistic objects are separated from both conditions of origin and operation in experience, a wall is built around them that renders almost opaque their general significance, with which esthetic theory deals. Art is remitted to a separate realm, where it is cut off from that association with

Nailing the Problem a Century Ago  43

the materials and aims of every other form of human effort, undergoing, and achievement. A primary task is thus imposed upon one who undertakes to write upon the philosophy of the fine arts. This task is to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience. (3) But if Dewey starts with the real-life experiences of the perceiver who needs to be connected to the work of art—as he later explains, so they can have an experience of the work of art that is presumably one in the spectrum of life experiences—the question remains of why they should want an experience of art if it’s like other experiences. If his goal is to restore continuity between the experience of art and everyday experiences, which means, show how they are alike, why aim at the artistic experience? Why not just stick to life? And if the problem is that people can’t relate to artworks, or stand in awe of them because of centuries of adulation, and thereby have little relation at all to them other than indifference, how can he say that the experience artworks offer is “refined” or “intensified”? Are we just too dumb to see this? Maybe refined or intensified are not good things? Dewey lists several ways the perceiver of the work can see it: “academically, looking for identities with which he is already familiar; or pedantically, looking for material to fit into a literary article he wishes to write, or sentimentally for illustrations of some theme emotionally dear.” Dewey is right here too: this first is the way most people involved with art professionally see artworks—including most professors and many students, and the second is typical (at least to judge from comments I’ve overheard over many decades), of viewers in museums. And we can’t guarantee that their perception will be of the sort Dewey clearly approves of, the esthetic: “But [he continues] if he perceives esthetically, he will create an experience of which the intrinsic subject matter, the substance, is new” (108). So apparently, there is a second-class way to perceive art—say, academically or sentimentally—as well as an esthetic and presumably correct way. Dewey’s mission was to get the perceiver to perceive in the correct way. This is how the Barnes Foundation, considered below, has taken up Dewey’s mission: it tells people how to see “esthetically,” which for the Barnes means formal qualities of the surface of the canvas or shapes in sculptures. Dewey: “A work of art no matter how old and classic is actually, not just potentially, a work of art only when it lives in some individualized experience” (108). “As a piece of parchment, of marble, of canvas, it remains (subject to the ravages of time) self-identical throughout the ages. But as a work of art, it is recreated each time it is esthetically experienced” (108). Thus the problem becomes, is there value in someone experiencing a work in the esthetic (correct) way? Should we encourage this? If so, how? Dewey suggests that “[m]ind” is “the body of organized meanings by means of which the events of the present have significance for us.” Usually these simply “float” in dreams and reveries. “In every work of art, however, these meanings

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become embodied in a material which becomes the medium for their expression.” So apparently, we need art because meanings float otherwise. “This fact constitutes the peculiarity of all experience that is definitely esthetic” (273). So artworks are like solidified dreams? This seems at best poetic, at worst desperate. What happens if we have the wrong kind of perception of artworks? What do we gain if we have the right kind, aside from the circular “esthetic” perception of art? Dewey is stuck with the same problem as before: he wants people to have an esthetic experience of artworks, but how does he make this happen? And why should he want it? What does it do for the perceiver? Dewey’s conclusion is that “art, in its form, unites the very same relation of doing and undergoing, outgoing and incoming energy, that makes an experience to be an experience” (247). But somehow it is purer than a regular experience: Because of elimination of all that does not contribute to mutual organization of the factors of both action and reception into one another, and because of selection of just the aspects and traits that contribute to their interpenetration, of each other, the product is a work of esthetic art. (48) This seems to say that there is such an objective thing as “the work of esthetic art”—or at least a potential one: people still have to perceive it esthetically. The next step is to insist that someone can show them how to do this. But what does experiencing art do for someone that experiencing life doesn’t do? Unclear: Dewey has been too insistent that art is also an experience like life. Dewey gets it right that art is both objective and personal, containing both known and unknown: the artist incorporates the world and also adds his or her own elements or presentation. Here Dewey is trying, I think, to go back to his predecessors the Romantics as a way of escaping the Modernist trap of the separated artwork, which is that people now find it alien. The material out of which a work of art is composed belongs to the common world rather than to the self, and yet there is self-expression in art because the self assimilates that material in a distinctive way to reissue it into the public world in a form that builds a new object. (107) This echoes Wordsworth in the “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads, where the poet tells us this: The principal object [of the poems in the book] was to choose incidents and situations from common life … and at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect. The content of art is both common and uncommon, personal and objective.

Nailing the Problem a Century Ago  45

Dewey is clear that people making art are not merely expressing themselves— they work with the same objective world as others. Thus art isn’t in a separate manifold from reality; a perceiver can see the real world in the artwork. To this end, Dewey delineates two misunderstandings of the work of art: entirely objective or entirely subjective. The first insists that the work is all objective, the other that it is all subjective. The object is purely representative of other objects already in existence. They ignore the individual contribution that makes the object something new. … On the other hand, isolation of the act of expressing from the expressiveness possessed by the object leads to the notion that expression is merely a process of discharging personal emotion. (82) In fact the work is both: A poem and a picture present material passed through the alembic of personal experience. … [T]heir material came from the public world and so has qualities in common with the material of other experiences, while the product awakens in other persons new perceptions of the meanings of the common world. … Expression as personal act and as objective result are organically connected with each other. (82) Dewey continues: The material out of which a work of art is composed belongs to the common world rather than to the self, and yet there is self-expression in art because the self assimilates that material in a distinctive way to reissue it into the public world in a form that builds a new object. (107) The quality of a work of art is sui generis because the manner in which general material is rendered transforms it into a substance that is fresh and vital. (108) But it has to be experienced to become actual rather than potential. And these experiences are radically individual, and not that of the artist. It is absurd to ask what an artist “really” meant by his product; he himself would find different meanings in it at different days and hours and in different stages of his own development. If he could be articulate, he would say, “I meant just that, and that means whatever you or anyone can honestly, in virtue of your own vial experience, get out of it.” The Parthenon, or whatever, is universal because it can continuously inspire new personal realizations in experience. (108–109) It seems that each experience possesses coherence, which is what makes it an experience separable from the rest of life. “The sense of an extensive and underlying

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whole is the context of every experience…” Yet: “A work of art elicits and accentuates this quality of being a whole and of belonging to the larger, all-inclusive whole which is the universe in which we live” (195). How exactly does it do this? Does it do this for everyone? Everyone who perceives it correctly? Who decides what works do this if I think they don’t? Does any experience of the Parthenon pass muster? And what’s in museums? Are they works of art or merely potential works of art? Maybe what’s in the grocery store isn’t food until it’s eaten. But is it just potential food? Isn’t it more food than a rubber tire? At least we have words for the carrots and broccoli, so do we say it’s not art in a museum but paintings and sculpture? It seems a little sad to think they are just waiting here hoping to be perceived, like Christmas trees that never get taken home and decorated. Does it cease to be art the moment someone isn’t looking at it? So instead of the things in the museum coming to life at night, as in the Night at the Museum films, considered below, they die? What if the person perceiving the work isn’t perceiving it esthetically, but to write an article, pedantically? Does it then become art? It seems that the important thing is for the perceiver to have some reaction, any reaction. Presumably indifference or “I’m hungry, let’s go to the snack bar” doesn’t count. Or does it? What if it’s “sentimental”: a sunstruck Impressionist painting reminds me of a day in my youth? Is this okay? Is any (say) oil painting potential art? Apparently not for Dewey, who adds as a throw-away line that John Singer Sargent is not a great painter whereas Cézanne is, despite not being in the “first ranks of technicians” (47). Well, that’s that, and apparently that’s final. I guess we were wrong to think any response was legitimate! And clearly there’s a right (esthetic) way to perceive what does count as art (and Dewey gets to decide?) and many wrong ways. Dewey is so concerned to combat the notion of art as existing in an inaccessible realm, insisting that it’s just like other things in life, that he never adequately answers the question, Why should I go to a museum and allow myself to be instructed in the esthetic way to see these things? And is everything in the museum even capable of being seen in this way? What if I adore Sargent? What if Cézanne leaves me cold? Will I be sent to an esthetic reeducation camp? Almost certainly I won’t pass the Barnes Foundation course to make me a docent there. There’s an indication of what makes art special in the suggestion that, in an artwork, there’s nothing extraneous in the experience because it’s all informed by the sensibility of the artist. In addition to echoing Romantics such as Wordsworth, this sounds like the Hitchcock quote that “movies/drama is life with the boring parts cut out.”1 But if we can also have an “experience” in life, not just art, isn’t the idea that this holds together—that even if there are extraneous parts, they don’t matter because we aren’t too conscious of them? For Dewey, the distinction between extraneous and essential is not between boring and exciting (I consider this below when I talk about the fantasy that art can offer us), but merely noise vs signal. But, once again, do we like more signal and less noise? Should we like it? Can we get all the experiences we need from the world?

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Most fundamentally, if art is only like life (only possibly more so) why should we pursue it? At least the “art is an ethereal realm” people had an answer to this: it’s a higher sort of knowledge. For Dewey, it’s just the same. Besides, life is enough for most people; art seems inaccessible, “classic,” unapproachable. What’s off-putting about it, in fact, may for most people be precisely the lack of “extraneous” material, that makes it seem so monolithic and large and smooth. Where do I begin? And why should I? Dewey was right that most of us don’t know what to do with the things in museums, which for most people are where art goes to die rather than to live. That the vast majority of people who, for whatever reason, enter an old-fashioned museum do sense something like anguish before these so implacable things they are meant to be interested in, should be clear. Just try sitting in a gallery in, say, Washington’s National Gallery. The Impressionist galleries are crowded, those of Renaissance Siena or the Venice of Titian are all but deserted. People clearly like the sun-drenched landscapes they can imagine walking in—always so pleasant to look at, the sugary Renoir women and scenes of what to us seem a more gracious era on the boulevards—no cars, only horses, ladies in long dresses and men with hats. The endless stylized Madonnas and scenes from the grisly martyrdoms of saints are more problematic. Still, most people even in the more popular galleries are on a continual drift, walking and cutting between the few stationary viewers and the painting they are looking at, apparently unaware that anybody could actually stop for a painting. Their eyes are typically at the level of the painter’s name, lower down or on the wall: they register the name, and glance briefly at the painting as if to confirm that it’s really there, and then drift on. After they’ve done this until they are tired, they’re ready to go eat, or go to the gift shop. And the museum can brag it’s had that many more visitors, the number of people who enter (rather than whether or not they got anything from the experience—how to measure this?) being the only metric currently used for museum success. It’s unsurprising that people don’t know what to do with museums, because museums, at least of the old-fashioned sort, are so constructed as to deny us any clear pattern of interaction with these objects. They just sit there, and we have to figure out what to do with them. Most people clearly have no clue, because the museum purposely strips all of the usual ways of interacting with these objects. They are frozen behind glass: no touching, no possessing. Guards yell at us if we lean in too close or if we point with fingers, or an alarm goes off. DON’T TOUCH say the signs on exposed statues: we instinctively want to caress the marble thigh of the nude (wo)man before us. But we mayn’t. It’s not that looking is the point—it’s just that that’s all that’s left when you deny any other way of interacting with them. Babies would put them in their mouths. Baudelaire and other nineteenth-century artists were wont to put the blame for this incomprehension on the people, the hated bourgeoisie. Instead it clearly is simply a logical consequence of the fact that objects in museums lack any social lock and key mechanism. The problem isn’t that the people are too stupid to “get” the objects, it’s in the situation of assuming that when you strip away any

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possibility of interaction, not more than a small cluster of people are going to be drawn to the situation where they have to bring the sandwiches to the picnic. It’s a fairly arcane situation, and one whose historical moment as a mass phenomenon seems to have passed. And this is what Dewey saw clearly, and more forcefully than anyone else I am aware of. We’ve dealt with what Dewey saw not by acknowledging it and solving the root problem of the separated artwork embalmed in museums, but by retrofitting the museums so that they are re-integrated into the social world—with the tours, the headsets, the wall labels, the gift shops. And also by making new kinds of what only by extension can be called a “Museum.” What is the name of the muse of the Holocaust? Of news? Of spies?—to name three popular Washington-area “muse”ums. The museum as it came to be in the Modern era, the early nineteenth century, thus has within it the seeds of its own destruction as people grow frustrated with objects that have no built-in rules for interaction. Older museums are retro-fitted with such rules; newer museums are based on assuming them. Interactive seems the way to go these days to solve Dewey’s dilemma. The newer sort of museum gets visitors to enter a story, as in Washington’s (non-Smithsonian) United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where each student in a visiting group gets a card about a single Holocaust victim or survivor, whose story the visitor can try to correlate to the exhibitions. The buildings have changed too: the self-effacing neo-Classicism of John Russell Pope’s Washington, DC National Gallery or Baltimore Museum of Art have, via Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiral Guggenheim, led to the work-as-building of Frank Gehry, which re-enters the social sphere by looking interesting on the outside. What’s someone who just wants to be left alone with the work to do? Is there any future for people like me, and for others who understand the work as being the traces left by absent people that they overhear—perhaps the readers of this work, and who don’t want fainter voices these drowned out by the reestablishment of a social situation involving the talk of present people, such as docents or guided tours through earphones? These retro-fits of museums that are composed of separated works, to make art part of the social world again, miss the point, and don’t solve the problem, which is: what’s the point of interacting with art at all? The answer can’t merely be checking another box of tourist sights to see. My hope is that this book will help us see again what is different about art, and what it can do for us: it’s social by not being social. It’s a real thing in the real world involving (absent) people.

Note 1 https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/09/19/drama/amp

5 OUR SITUATION NOW Blurring the Line Between Art and the World

The world nowadays starts with the individual. So the question nowadays becomes, not “What is art?” but rather, “What does the individual experience when s/he/they have the experience we formerly defined through the work?” We are integral to the artness of a work: it is art for us as individuals, which is as far as we can go objectively. Moreover, things can be art in varying degrees, and their degree of artness can change. However, what we mean when we say something is art in this new sense, even to a slight degree, is that we sense the presence of a person behind something in the impersonal world, but something not meant for us or people who seem equivalent to us (or: for a group that doesn’t include us). A pot shard from Ur was meant for people, but we still use things like pots, so it can’t be the pot that is art, but some aspect of it, perhaps its shape. I found the earthen cups, those sold on the street in Kolkata with drinks, beautifully shaped, and instead of breaking them, as I was supposed to do at the drink seller’s stall on the street, I took them home and now display them on shelves. Indian friends see things differently, and think I’m odd; they break these after drinking. The cup was for me, but the shape wasn’t. It was just a fact: somebody made it and left. The gold funeral dishes of Queen Pouabi in the University of Pennsylvania (“Penn”) Museum are what we recognize as dishes, so they are art only in a specific aspect, say their form, or perhaps their being made of gold. But what the excavator of the Royal Cemetery at Ur, Sir Leonard Woolley, called after the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac the “ram in the thicket”—actually a goat nibbling at leaves, of which the twin is in the British Museum—is not something we recognize or could integrate into our lives, so it is to a much greater degree art. Many objects, indeed probably all objects from cultures and times different from our own, had a function, only our lives are different, and we do not recognize them as playing a role for us: they weren’t meant for a group including ourselves. Thus it is easier to see them as art. But we’re the ones who define them as such because of who we DOI: 10.4324/9781003373377-6

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are. Drinking vessels that are part of the so-called Avar treasure are in the Metropolitan Museum—and one in the Walters, in Baltimore: are they art? To some extent yes, because our drinking vessels aren’t shaped like this and aren’t typically of gold, and these come from long ago—as we are told. If they were elsewhere and we didn’t know their history, would they be art? Unclear. Do we have to subtract the utility of the object from the object to get the artness? The culmination (or perhaps the decadence) of the Romantic movement, which was concerned with defining art, concluded that art was completely useless—as Oscar Wilde insisted in his Preface to the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. The final sentence is this: “All art is quite useless.”1 The result was the fin-de-siècle doctrine of Art for art’s sake: “l’art pour l’art,” a phrase associated with the writer and diarist Théophile Gautier, though it appears in the writings of other Romantic artists.2 Drinking vessels are for drinking, so to the extent that we use them for this, rather than looking at gold ones in a museum, they are not art. The point of movies may be seen as entertainment with others on a Saturday night, for example—and so these are not, to that extent, art. This, however, is picking things up by the wrong end, as we can see by following this logic to is end, namely to the conclusion that art works are things that have no use, what Kant called “purposeless purposefulness.” Once again, this is the Romantic/Modernist placement of artness in the object, in this case its utility, or lack of utility. Saying, instead of making this a quality of the object, that we feel this was or was not meant for us to determine its degree of artness for us (take the particularly sleek and attractive fork in the hardware store—the forkness can’t be part of its art, though the sleekness can) or people like us (we use pots) places this quality in us, where it can vary in both amount and from person to person, over time. The votive figures of worshippers offered to the gods in the temple at Ur that are found in various art museums—alabaster figures of bald or bearded men with folded hands and wearing a sort of layered skirt and a rather pleased expression, as we see it, on their face—are art for us because they look like Greek statues of humans, only different. But for the Sumerians, they were meant for people to offer the gods for their favor. And when the gods were done with them, they were buried in the temples, frequently broken: they couldn’t be taken home and put on a shelf because they belonged to the gods, as the helpful texts in the Penn Museum explain. All are generically alike: we can’t have hundreds of them in an art museum in our world, but only one or two. As singles they look like statues of people that we can look at. We don’t offer them to the gods, so they can be art for us. African ritual objects are like this too—there exist many multiples of any given type, hundreds and hundreds, though most have rotted in Africa, and an art museum picks only the one or two most expressive by Western standards, or displays the one or two brought back by explorers or anthropologists a century ago. We turn them into art. Thus the demand that these objects-turned-into-art in the West be returned, as art, to Western-style art museums in what are now African countries (that did not exist when these objects left or were taken) misunderstands the Western contribution to their nature.

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Similarly, if we take a fork out of the store and put it in a museum, or get forks from centuries ago and do so, we increase their artness—though we can’t make this go from 0% to 100%. That’s implicitly what Arthur Danto famously asserted with his notion that it was what he called “The Artworld”—theory—that made art art, explaining why Warhol’s painstakingly mimicked Brillo boxes were art, and channeling the attitude of a generation.3 (The idea was later developed by George Dickie.) And the museum is the repository, these days, of theory: art referring to art. Art past Modernism isn’t about the object itself, it’s about the relation of this object to other objects—in the Artworld, in Danto’s term. Not the real world from which most museum visitors come. And this is why most visitors are perplexed by what they see in museums of contemporary art. There’s the Artworld, and the Real World. And the twain shall never—or at least rarely—meet, at least not nowadays. However, placement wasn’t the only factor making it possible for us to see the Warhol Brillo boxes as art. They were also made of painted wood, which is another layer of distancing because it makes them visually sleek and attractive; and the soup cans were in flat images, or made of metal and in odd colors. (Nowadays the tendency is merely to put the equivalent of the cardboard box on a pedestal in a Plexiglas showcase and call it art; Donald Judd has taken the Warhol idea further with his sleek metal skeleton cubes, some with colored surfaces: he had them made, they aren’t things we can put to other uses.) Danto is ahead of this too, noting that if Warhol put a real crushed cardboard Brillo box on display as “crushed Brillo box,” it too would be art—in the Artworld, albeit not in the stockroom (580–581). The problem is precisely that the visitor to contemporary art museums does not acknowledge the existence of an “Artworld,” as Danto does, where these things are art. This belief in the Artworld is the assumption of those yearning to get into museums, and of Ivy-league professors writing (rather turgid) philosophies of art. Not of viewers, who have other places to go. There are forks in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, though with only two tines, and from the Sasanian Era. They look rather beautiful, but this quality comes not just from their form (a modern fork with more tines, usually four, seems visually busy by contrast, so these come off as delicate and beautiful) but also their age and their being in the Met. They had more artness than a modern fork to begin with by their shape and by the historical context of their age, and we’ve increased this yet further by putting them in an art museum. (I still don’t think they achieve the degree of artness of some of the other objects in the same showcase.) If this quality of utility is only found in the object, it can’t vary. And it’s a fundamental fact about our interaction with, and definition of, art that we determine—not collectively as humans (Kant’s perspective) but individually— whether, for me, this object is art or not. A focus on utility or its lack leaves out the “for me” part. Things in the store to be purchased by the likes of us, such as forks or cans of (real) soup, are not art, because they are meant for us to purchase and exist for solely that reason. I return to this subject below when I consider the fantasy that objects in museums come to life at night—just museums, not shops or

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stores. If we are normal middle-class people with normal incomes, however, the works being auctioned at Christie’s or Sotheby’s, though they are for sale to millionaires, are not aimed at us. They are more like museum objects, and indeed published catalogues of expensive auction items can function like museum catalogues for the reader/viewer. Are they art for millionaires? Less so, because they can be acquired and shown off (or put in storage in duty-free depots in Switzerland)—that’s their function for the buyer. Our situation partly determines the degree of artness of objects. We see this too from the fact, considered above, that museums have retrospectively moved to re-coup some of the objects previously walled off from art. The top of three levels in the Metropolitan Museum’s American Wing is devoted, on one side of glass doors (the courtyard side) to things like ceramics and jewelry, the ceramics such as Rockingham ware being the more affordable everyday version and the jewelry being the upper-class one. Jewelry is interesting because when worn, it is less art; when placed in a museum showcase off the body, its artness is increased. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts integrates its Lalique and Tiffany jewelry in showcases next to furniture and lamps, other showcases of belt buckles, and decorative sculptures for the table centerpiece in its Art Nouveau/ Art Deco section. The belt buckles are no longer used with belts, nor the lamps to light a room, nor the furniture to sit in. They are also more art because we no longer use this style of thing, or could never afford it—and we both acknowledge and strengthen this artness by putting them where art is at home. Sometimes after we have changed the status of what we formerly called a minor art form, say embroidery, elevating it to the status of an art form, its proponents castigate those who previously saw it as outside the museum’s purview for once having been excluded, rather than acknowledging that change happens, and welcoming it. This too is a result of continuing to think that qualities of art are found solely in the object rather than partly supplied by the viewer. It’s not that it was insufficiently appreciated before; it’s that its artness was increased by time and distance from us, as well as further by its new home. If we wear elaborately hand-embroidered clothes, which now are increasingly rare in the West, we can appreciate the workmanship of especially good examples that later generations may put in museums, but are unlikely to say when we are wearing them that they are anything but intricately made—not that they are art, as they may later become. It’s only when we cannot see ourselves as the intended audience that they become art. As I write, the National Museum of Asian Art has an exhibit of Persian court embroidery from the Safavid era. Time, culture, and complexity separate their intended users from us. They were intended for people, just not us. For this reason, the only recent clothes that make it to the costume institute of a museum are extraordinary one-of-a-kind pieces. For ordinary (meant for people like us, which means the typical viewer) clothes to make it into a museum, they have to be separated from us by time and custom. There are normal hats of the 1850s in the Berlin Museum of Decorative Arts (Kunstgewerbemuseum), but they aren’t what we wear: they are normal for 1850 but not us. We don’t put a

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white T-shirt in a museum unless it was James Dean’s, or a normal button-down man’s shirt unless it is to typify office wear of today, rather than for its intrinsic interest. Our relationship with the object can change, and that changes the object. The European masters bought by newly rich Americans in the 1890s were useful to them in signaling wealth. So arguably they were not fully (perceived as) art, but as status possessions. It’s just that they didn’t depict the ancestors of the people displaying them. Their function was as painted portraits, not portraits of Granddad. Hanging in (say) the McFadden Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the twenty-first century, they are art for those who visit this museum. Whether something is art or not depends on who is looking at it, when, and under what circumstances. Gardens? We may have a backyard plot, but it is unlikely to look like Versailles or the English Garden in Munich. So these are distanced from us, and can to that extent be seen as having a greater degree of artness. Yet even these gardens are less art if we use them as places to take the family on a Sunday. They gain artness if we see photographs of them in a coffee-table book, such as the moody black and white photographs in a book called Le Nôtre’s Gardens on my coffee table as I write. Still, they were not made for us. If we were kings and queens with gardens like these, the degree of artness would be small. But we aren’t, so the whole garden can gain in artness—and acquire more if reduced in size, and made portable, as in a book. It will be hard for New Yorkers walking in Central Park to see it as art by Olmstead: they use it, and it belongs to them. But in the photographs of a Bruce Davidson, Central Park can become art: the photographs are small, and flat, and black and white.4 An aerial view also makes the park’s patterns clear, and we can’t walk in the aerial view. So size and proximity to us matter in art: too large and it engulfs us, and we can’t see it as a whole—it isn’t distanced enough from us to be art. This is why buildings are at their artiest in photographs or mockups, whereas if we live or work in them, we see our desk and the bed, or the bathroom. The art in the case of my coffee-table book is partly made by the gardener, but also by the book’s author or museum curator, just as the point of a photograph is not the things the camera caught (which the photographer may well not have put there) but the fact of the photographer offering this to us. It’s the offering that give the result artness. The art is with respect to what the photograph is of, and the photograph is the means to express that. Magritte, to whom I return below, was fond of meditating on the similarities and differences of presented world vs. lived world if these look alike. If a painting turned out to be what we see out a window, is what we see out the window art? No, because it isn’t presented, even if the two are visually similar or even identical. His most famous painting may be the one of a pipe with the painted words that say, in French, “this is not a pipe,” ceçi n’est pas une pipe. No: it’s the presentation of the pipe in the painting (note: not representation; the pipe itself is presented as distanced: see below). And of course the words themselves are part of the painting, so they not only comment on the painted pipe, they are also offered as painting. They also are presented. That’s what the painting does: it presents.

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In the case of much of what is offered as art today, the people who made these things, who call themselves artists, and the increasingly important curators who decide what gets into the museum, want to get it recognized as art with no input from viewers. It’s forced on people, with no effort to get them to buy into it as art. The attitude of the institutions and those dependent on them to the viewer seems to be, “Suck it up, you have no choice, this is art.” This ignores the fact that it’s the position of the viewer that also decides whether something is art for that person, and to what degree. The relationship is not determined alone by one of its elements. Modernist art presupposed (perhaps wrongly) that viewers/readers would accept difficulty in the work. The contemporary world goes one step further, assuming that viewers/listeners/etc. like to be puzzled or even repelled. This brings us back to the Glenstone Museum. One work is what seem to be garden sheds made of stone by the side of a path through woods, sheds that are locked in the morning and that open at precisely noon, a friendly woman hurrying toward us with keys tells us. A few minutes later, she opens one. It’s a stone outbuilding but it has no lawnmowers, no rakes. We are to appreciate it as art, however, apparently because of the gray stones (local) of which it is made, and the nice red powdered clay flooring (also local). And maybe because of the sort of tunnel-like three-dimensional bull’s-eye in some sort of clay (or wood?) at the end. The whole mimics a really carefully made garden shed, except for the bull’s-eye, but it’s not meant for rakes. Art isn’t intrinsic to the object alone; it’s about our relation to the object. I’d say garden sheds are too well known to the kind of people who visit Glenstone for this to be seen as art. If we didn’t have potting sheds any more, or all are made of aluminum siding, like the sheds for sale at a garden/hardware store, the possibility for emphasizing artness in these locked-and-at-Glenstone sheds would increase. Old cars that we can’t imagine driving can be more art than contemporary ones, for example, especially in a car “museum” or at a show. Some people nowadays put farm implements—plows, harrows, old wheelbarrows—in their front yard with flowers in them. If they had a farm in 1850, they wouldn’t. Another example is in the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake, New York, with its nineteenth-century sleighs and transportation vehicles inside museum buildings. If they were still in use, they wouldn’t be in a museum. And the Amish, who use buggies and horse plows, probably don’t see these as art. In the carriage houses of European castles, however, the contents may approach art: old, elaborate, not for us, and no longer part of our world. For the nobility of the time, they were just nice carriages. Dead or unused refrigerators on the porch nowadays aren’t art, because their siblings are in our kitchens with food in them. In two centuries and out of Appalachia (or Somerset County, Maryland, where my father was born), they might be. In Rwanda, where I taught for two years, well-to-do people put their refrigerator in the living room of their houses, made with concrete floors and cinderblock walls, as a status object. This is a jot closer to artness than mine, in the kitchen, where it “belongs.”

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If the “sheds” at Glenstone were outbuildings like the famous newly renovated Chinese tea pavilion of Frederick the Great at Potsdam, we might consider them art: few people have a tea pavilion, and nobody except the Prussian kings had one with gold Chinese statues. We’re looking at it, but it wasn’t made for people like us to drink tea in. However, these so-carefully made rustic outbuildings of stone and clay (all local!) at Glenstone do seem made for a group of people that includes us. They are what we see as part of our world. They are more carefully made than our garden sheds, but not enough different from the stone houses of Pennsylvania to signal art. Ceçi n’est pas un abri de jardin. No, but it sure looks like one, as if Magritte had put a real pipe in a case with the label, ceçi n’est pas une pipe. Yes it is, we’d object. It’s just a pipe in a case: this is the essence of much contemporary “art.” Or we could say: That’s right. It isn’t a pipe, because we can smoke a pipe (and some people we know still do; I could if I wanted to, only I don’t), but this one we can’t, or at least may not, because of the glass box and probably also the fact that we know we aren’t to touch—say, in a museum or gallery. If the same pipe were to be on a rack, or even under a glass countertop, in a smoke shop, it wouldn’t be art and it would definitely be a pipe. But Magritte didn’t put a “real” pipe on display and claim it wasn’t a pipe. Instead, he painted it. That’s the layer of offering it but not to me that makes it art. The pipe that’s there is a distanced (real) pipe. That’s the nature of the relationship we call art. We hear it talking but it’s not a person talking, and we don’t have to respond. It’s the art object talking. The Modernists reflected on the fact that paintings are rectangles on the wall. The fact of the painting is what made the assertion of Magritte’s not-pipe painting quite true. (Are the painted words more words for us than the painted pipe is a pipe for us? Class, discuss!) The bubble that encloses the art object was unbroken; it was clear that this was not an object aimed at us, as it so reasonably observes—and nobody thinks we should smoke the painting. Contemporary art, which goes further than Modernist, seems to be playing a tease with us—making the bubble that removes things from being aimed at us even thinner, and daring us to object. I think we should object. We should lose patience, and say: that’s just a pile of stones, or paint-spattered rags, even if they are in museums. Or an outbuilding. Where are the rakes? The separating power of museums, though not insubstantial, builds to some degree on the objects inside them. It feels disrespectful of the viewer to taunt us by removing the layers of distancing that the artist is supposed to add and demanding we don’t even think of objecting. The power of the museum to separate things from us was built on the fact that what was in the museum was objects separated from us: the people were made of marble, the landscapes (or pipes) of paint, and quite small. Much contemporary art seems to take all these qualities of the object away and assume that the museum placement itself is a thick enough bubble to itself make the object art. The famous Méret Oppenheim teacup and saucer covered with fur (and with a spoon in the cup to remind us what it started as—and still is?), or Man Ray’s

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flatiron for pressing clothes with nails glued in a line down the center with the points outward, both in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, are, respectively, a real teacup and saucer and a real iron, just removed from us and no longer speaking “to” us—because unusable as a teacup or an iron. They are just speaking. (A teacup in a Fantin-Latour still-life painting—my favorite is in the Baltimore Museum of Art—is also a distanced teacup. It’s a teacup we can’t drink out of— not a “representation” of a teacup.) This is successful because the object itself has incorporated the layers of distancing. Both works can be seen as art because we see that if we used the iron, it would shred our clothes; and no one would want to drink out of fur, despite the spoon. Both seem successful artworks because we inadvertently have a low-level reaction of distaste, though not one forced on us—it wouldn’t occur to most people to observe that a furry teacup would be disgusting, although it clearly is—and understand them as meditations on the distancing of art itself. Why can’t we use this iron? Why do we not want our tea in the furry cup? We just know we curl our lip, but are probably amused at our own reaction at the same time. Because we in the contemporary world use electric irons rather than this heatable flatiron, the potential for the Man Ray iron to be art even without the nails is greater than the furry teacup, or even the teacup without the fur: we see the shape itself of the flatiron as important. And in fact it’s rather graceful, more than our contemporary electric irons. Nowadays it would be plausible to put a flatiron in a museum even without the row of tacks, because it doesn’t seem to be made for us. These two Dada works are both intellectual and emotional; emotional because of our lip-curling or semi-disgusted reaction, and intellectual because they make us realize how everyday objects can have their aim at us so blunted they become art. It doesn’t take much. The artist just has to figure out a quality that wasn’t foregrounded in the object and nullify that quality, making the nullified quality what we focus on. The primary quality of an iron is probably that it’s hot. But if we nullify its smoothness, something that seems less fundamental, the hotness becomes irrelevant. The primary quality of a teacup is its ability to hold liquid, but the fur nullifies its smoothness, something we might not have thought about. They also make clear, by their affinity with painting or sculpture, that whatever means causes the object to talk, but not to us, can make it art. Only, some objects don’t interest us—I’d put real cardboard Brillo boxes in that category: we simply throw these away. Warhol’s meticulously made permanent versions are too heavy to throw away and too bulky, so their function for us is blunted, they no longer speak to us. But since the non-blunted object itself is not useful or interesting, why bother to muffle its speech? Would dyed plastic granule replicas of dirt and stones be art? Or just silly? In Japanese restaurants, realistic plastic representations of the food on plates are shown in the window—plastic spaghetti, plastic sushi. They are amazingly realistic. For Japanese customers, these are probably not art, because the objects speak to them: that’s how you see what your meal will look like. For us, perhaps they are art. Or do we need a

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Wayne Thiebaud painting of the window? A photo-realist painting or a photograph? The garishly iced cakes on shelves in the round glass showcase refrigerators in diners in New Jersey seem almost art to me, especially gleaming in the fridge on glass shelves, but to the people who go more often to diners than I do, or to the owners, they are probably just cakes you can get a slice of. Or do they almost look like art to me because I’ve seen Thiebaud paintings? The everyday objects like light bulbs (possibly dead) and aluminum foil that wraps them and every other part of the sensational “outsider” artwork (?) known as “The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly” by James Hampton, now in the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, have something of the same effect. It reminds us that light bulbs have their primary function of giving light, but they are also bulbs, an interesting shape. Aluminum foil is used to wrap food, but it is also shiny and silver-colored. This work, a sort of silver-colored throne room with many protrusions, was produced over a period of more than a decade in response to Hampton’s religious visions, and teeters on the edge between artwork and strange mania. If you had seen it in Hampton’s basement or garage and had him explain its purpose for the arrival of Christ, you might not have said it was art. Seen in a museum, preserved behind a velvet rope, with an artist’s name affixed, and without the visions (that leave most of us unmoved), it can become art. But we made it so. Still, the assemblage has qualities that allows itself to be so made: it’s more than (say) a circle of stones, as was on display some years ago in the East Building of Washington’s National Gallery. Was Hampton therefore an artist? We say he was, to show respect, much as we say the carvers of South Sea Island religious figures were “artists”—but only when we have taken their works out of context and put them in our museums, in a period when we are used to using the label of “art.” This period gone, or the museums absent, the artness or not of the objects becomes a moot point. It’s no coincidence that Modernist artists were interested in the works of children, schizophrenics, and non-Western people, as a way of breaking free from the constraints of the then mainstream “realistic” representation. The question remains, are these objects art in their own right? Or just insofar as they are useful to Western artists, people who see themselves as such? We have decided to call them art, as it seems an easy answer, and (as with the visionary Hampton) shows respect for the less powerful. The result is museums of “folk art” such as the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Museum in Williamsburg, of outsider art in Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum, and of course museums of African and Oceanic art in numerous cities—or the incorporation of the objects into already extant art museums, including New York’s Metropolitan Museum, Paris’s Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, Richmond’s Virginia Museum of Fine Art, and the Louvre. Modernism, with its focus on the work, was interested in the mechanism of distancing of art, which is why it was interested in similar types of products that weren’t at that point considered to be art. This included already extant things

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that could with some tweaking even more minimal than Man Ray’s row of tacks be seen as art. Duchamp famously displayed an upside-down urinal as a “fountain,” and a bottle-drying rack as it stood, betting in the second case that most people would have no idea what it was “used for.” (Both are in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which has a large Duchamp collection.) But we note that if the urinal had been in its usual position and without its label, we would have said, What’s a urinal doing outside a bathroom? In both cases, context helped to distance these objects from the viewer—and in the case of the bottle-drying rack, unfamiliarity. African masks as painted by Picasso could offer a new way to make Western faces, as in the “Demoiselles d’Avignon,” in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. If bereft of their raffia, their music, their movement, and the African villages where they came from and put in a Western museum, African ritual objects could be sculpture like the Apollo Belvedere, as in what may be the earliest example of this, the now century-old Barnes Foundation collection. This was the artistic expression of Modernism’s insistence, derived from the Romantic emphasis on the artist, that the artwork was a created or produced work. It took for granted the artist, the center of Romantic interest, and transferred that interest to what the artist created. Thus the central Romantic question, What is the artist?, was replaced in the following century by technical question: How do works function? The result in intellectual circles was the predominance of linguistic philosophy, influenced by Wittgenstein and the logical positivists: How do words mean? For art, this became, What is the nature of what was called “representation,” and its apparently opposing pole, “abstraction?” The relationship of the words to the world, as well as of the artwork to the world, suddenly seemed to need clarification and explanation. Earlier times, and perhaps later, which is to say our own, just present words and works without asking what they are doing. Emphasizing the glass of the window, the flatness of the canvas, the fact that sculpture is made of materials, that writing is in words, and music an arrangement of sounds, was the obsession of the Modernist twentieth century. We can move beyond that emphasis on the representation to include more elements of the nineteenth century’s focus on what is represented. The result is a relation between viewer, work, and world, what I am proposing here. In rejecting the concept of “representation,” I am moving past Modernism. Modernism focused on the pane of glass separating us from the world in a window, while Romanticism had focused on what was seen through it. I say both are relevant because the pane of glass, here equivalent to the distancing mechanisms of the artwork, whatever they are (such as paint or the photograph, or placement in a museum, or being put in an “installation” in a museum that we can look at but not enter), both gives us access to the world, visual or otherwise—the real world—and separates it from us. Most Modernists would have agreed that Magritte’s painting of a pipe that is not a pipe is not in fact a pipe; and would have said: it’s a painted representation of a pipe, not to mention of these words. Or is it the words themselves? Both.

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That’s part of the hall of mirrors fun. We can’t smoke it; you’re looking at a painting (with words painted on it!). Of course it isn’t a pipe. But (as I’ve argued elsewhere) now we’ve exhausted Modernism, and also its subsequent generations that share its presuppositions and focus on works—second- and third-generation developments that we call post-Modernism and beyond.5 We’re in a new era. So we don’t have to be focused on the work, or place artness in the work alone. Rather, we can see art as a relation involving work, perceiver, and the configuration in which they are caught which includes the world, a relation that can change or be changed. Changing the perceiver changes the configuration, changing the work changes the configuration, and changing the relation between them changes the configuration. Accepting the Modernist focus on the work, of course Magritte is right: a painting of a pipe is not a pipe, it’s a painting. But I propose that we need to move beyond this dead-end in the work. I say that Magritte, or at least the text in Magritte’s painting, is wrong: a painting of a pipe is in fact a pipe, only it’s one separated from us through the fact of being painted so its artness is emphasized and created. If the day ever comes when no one smokes a pipe and the huge number of them around dwindles to only a few, we can imagine the pipe itself, with its interesting shape, in museums, like the Sasanian forks. No need to paint it any more. Similarly, a painted landscape isn’t—I propose—primarily a representation of a landscape. It’s a landscape that is distanced from us through several technical means: the flatness of the canvas, its small size (which, again as Magritte showed in other paintings of paintings that turn out to be the landscape seen from the window painted within the painting, is mimicked by a window looking outside), and the fact that it’s in a museum and next to, say, a portrait. (That’s a person, only a flat one with nothing below the waist who doesn’t need to eat or breathe.) What if the landscape were placed in a house as if a window? Someone seeing it for the first time and having no idea what is outside might initially think it was a window. It doesn’t look any different under certain circumstances. That is, if it’s a Courbet forest landscape. If it’s a Poussin or Claude landscape, or a Patinir, we’d say, Wait! There’s Jesus being born! Or Charon! Or a giant! Or a Greek temple—none of these seem likely in this day and age in New York, Philadelphia, or Baltimore, USA. All this presupposes we don’t know what actually is outside. But probably, we do. If it’s an Impressionist landscape, which is more plausible for most of us than the world of a Claude or a Poussin, we’d say, Wait! We’re not in the South of France! And it’s raining! And I live on a street! This can’t be a window! It has to be a painting! Besides, this is all blurry! Do I need glasses? We can, that is, think of paintings as windows to the world, not just panes of glass that reflect us looking at them, even if they are not windows to what is the actuality of our circumstances. My actuality, to give an example of what I mean, is that I am sitting downstairs in front of a computer with a cup of coffee in Maryland, USA; I am wearing my usual computer/writing-outfit of gym shorts and a T-shirt, I have not had breakfast, it’s March 2, 2022, and the cat is snoring in

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the sun near my feet. It’s not true that anything that diverges from this “reality” to any degree is merely “fantasy.” Saying it is merely imaginary (I can imagine it winter again, and remember being younger—do I fantasize about this? I can think of places I’ve never been as well) leads to the insistence that art is about the unreal: imagination and fantasy, when actually it’s about our world. Art is really before us; it isn’t imaginary. It takes us out of our actual social situation, but it is neither imagination nor memory. Of course we can imagine, as we say: daydream, or see in our “mind’s eye.” Or remember things not in front of us: I can picture my first grade teacher, or the beach I went to one day in the South of France, or a Bronzino Portrait of a Young Man I saw in New York, the now-long-dead arrogant youth with the faces in his trousers next to his codpiece and on the table. Or I can imagine myself staying at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm (maybe for a Nobel Prize ceremony!)—I’ve been in the lobby but not the rooms, but I know what hotel rooms generically look like, so that’s what I fill in, not specific rooms I’ve seen. But we are actually looking at the art with the eyes in our face. And we don’t have to answer where imaginary or remembered images come from, because that’s not art. Moreover, the discussion of images rather than perceptions has gotten rather unhelpfully binary, separating into the two opposing camps of ascribing them to patterns we are born with on one extreme, or arrangements of things we perceive at the other. In fact, memory and imagination are as little amenable to analysis as the fact that when we are born, life is breathed into clay, and when we die, it leaves. Where does the ability to smile ruefully rather than be offended come from? The ability to see that someone looks like John but isn’t? To re-arrange the flowers in a vase so they look better? Pick the right tie to go with a jacket? Strike just the right tone of respect without servility with someone we stand in a certain relationship with? These can’t be inborn, but they aren’t merely combinations of the perceived either. Who knows? In any hour of any day there are a million small decisions we make, and they’re all both old and new. At one extreme of this fruitless debate is the Empiricist (and political) philosopher John Locke who held, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, that we never come up with new images. We can imagine something we have never seen, such as a centaur, only by combining as parts of a new whole things we have seen. In the case of a centaur, Locke thought we combine (how? He doesn’t consider the source of this ability—inborn? Acquired?) the torso of a man and the body of a horse. Locke was insisting that we start life with a blank slate, his famous tabula rasa: so he concluded that what we imagine is made of combinations of things we’ve seen. Nor is the only alternative to the tabula rasa the embedded patterns of either a Kant or a Noam Chomsky. We do a million things in life that are neither ingrained patterns nor perceived—such as make and perceive art. (Is that a pattern we’re born with? Something we perceived? How about the pattern to understand Matisse? This painting?) The notion of inborn patterns becomes trivial if it applies to everything, and useless if it is left in skeletal form, as Kant

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and Chomsky have to do. Chomsky can’t tell us why we hesitate after “Well,” or add an “um” before continuing: “I’m not quite sure [what rule book includes the “quite”?] that I’d do it that way” to buffer the blow rather than saying “that’s the wrong way”—and with what tone? All he can say is that we know how to be grammatical, which is relatively uninteresting. And what about when I choose to be ungrammatical? Or just am? Some people are. I read “I would of went” in student papers. Or “I saw the man whom crossed the road”—it’s “who,” but “the man whom I saw.” But people get it wrong. How is that even possible? Many students don’t know the difference between the contraction “it’s” (= it is) and the neural possessive “its”: it’s true that the cat licked its paw. It seems the patterns aren’t engrained very deeply in some people. Why not, and in which ones? In more general terms, we see once again that philosophers, who try to set down unalterable rules for things, are the enemy of artists, who set down particulars. The general is always at war with the particular. When we perceive art, we’re responding to something we’ve never seen before by putting it in a million relations with a million things we have seen. I don’t think we can be born with the pattern to appreciate a particular Matisse. But we’ve also never seen parts of it before. Or heard (perhaps) a Mahler symphony. Still, there it is, and somehow we understand it. What good does it do us to strip the patterns down to a skeleton, as both Chomsky and Kant do? Neither explains how we can speak or perceive the specific. And Plato’s poetics about appealing to the Idea—to explain how we can make a new kind of chair, for instance, we appeal to the Idea of Chair—are revealing for their blurriness. We can’t say what it means to be alive, or do the countless things bring alive implies. We just do them. What is the ability to recognize likeness, even if in a different size and medium? I don’t know, but art reminds us that we have it, just as we have the ability to catch a “sharp” tone in someone’s voice, or to realize they have held our hand a second too long to be appropriate for our relationship. I’ve never seen this forest scene, say of Fontainebleau, but I’ve seen forests and trees like these in a Courbet. Not these trees, not these forests. Still, I recognize these landscapes as being trees and a forest as a forest. Are we born with this capability, or do we develop it? Both, of course. The two alternatives of being born with (Kant/Chomsky) or acquiring (Locke) are too absolute, because the capability is one of the countless things associated with being alive. Life isn’t there, and then it is, and then once again it isn’t. Nobody can explain that. So why should we argue over whether we’re born with patterns or come into the world as a blank slate when all of life is something that is both potential and actual? We are born with the capability to live, which (assuming no mishaps) we proceed to do. Neither of these alternatives captures the mystery of being alive, able to make jokes and associations, be mad or sad, act or not act. Art isn’t a separate realm of fantasy. It’s reality that I don’t have to respond to as the social me. Nor is art in a separate realm between reality and fantasy, the “plausible” of neo-classical theory, understood as a different category of existence,

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Boileau’s vraisemblable that is not always vrai.6 Instead, art is here and now. It’s not to be understood on a scale defined by reality and unreality at opposite ends; instead it’s reality that is distanced from our situation by various means. It doesn’t speak to us personally; it just speaks—which means that people are behind it. And we ourselves are a constituent part of whether this relationship occurs, as is the work, as is our situation in the world. We don’t have to respond, or rather our response is not determined by our situation. That’s the freedom art gives us. But let’s go back to the garden path at Glenstone: The museum is out of the way, even for Washingtonians, and it’s hard to get tickets. So we should linger a while. Another work is a “soundscape”: before you start your walk in the woods, on the path leading by the outbuildings that aren’t, you are given a flier warning you that the battle sounds you hear are from a sound composition that plays among the trees, along with the “artist’s” name. We are not to be afraid, it instructs us. It’s not a battle that can threaten us. It’s (we gather) art. The problem with the battle sounds as a work of art is that we already have the woods and the path, and we are doing what we are supposed to do with them, namely walk along the path and look at the trees. This is not an alien experience to us. It was meant for a group including us. Here, the “artist” wants to take huge hunks of our world like the trees, the path the walk, the woods, and include them in her (the battle sounds) work. She is giving back to us with a signature what belongs to us already. If we heard these sounds on a battlefield, rather than in a peaceful woods, they could not be art. The next step beyond this is somebody saying, I give you New York or Paris. Not a photograph or a painting, a movie or a dance—but the city. Here: I give you New York! I am an artist! We say: it’s not yours to give. And what did you add to it anyway? So this is too far for even contemporary art. Instead, contemporary art tends to re-create whole pieces of the world—like the nonfunctional sheds at Glenstone—with as little distancing as possible. I say: why bother? You can’t give us the world. We have it already. Following the trends of contemporary art (or “art”), we could imagine a whole actual house built to be looked at but not lived in (though made of house materials rather than paper or plaster, and up to code with functioning wiring and appliances and everything else), a whole university where there are no classes, a scrapyard where scraps have been lugged in and arranged. But this too obviously requires too great a financial outlay, and none of these fit in a museum, even an outdoor one like Glenstone. So instead, we get rooms in museums from not-to-be-lived-in houses. Say, a bedroom with an unmade bed and a scarf over the lamp making the lighting pink and a radio playing: the lovers have just left, it seems (Hirshhorn Museum). Or rooms from a tacky suburban house with all the tchotchkes and with tubular aluminum lawn chairs “outside” on fake grass (Baltimore Museum of Art). But the thinness of the offering is jarring. It’s too real. Or we can make useless things in the world outside that look like useful ones, like Christo’s expensive and legally problematic “Running Fence.” This used vast quantities of cloth and steel and countless hours of energy and manpower to create a fence just to be looked at with no use at all, that cut across acres of

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private farmland and ended in the ocean. See? It’s a real fence, only not! But we have real fences. The contemporary art scene signs and offers to us huge chunks of our world, even if they re-create them (effort is not necessarily art, because we personally are meant to appreciate it; the work speaks to us, rather than just speaking). Artists today offer installations, experiences, arranged places in which we are immersed, that demand ascription as a whole to the person behind them. The artists (or “artists”) have retained the Romantic notion that we non-artists need artists to give us the world: we are meant to be grateful for the artists offering us what largely belongs to us anyway. Of course we can be aware of the contributions of others to what belongs to us, though without ascribing the whole experience to others. Failing to see this comes from failing to see that degrees of artness of things can vary from a little to a lot: we’ve inherited the Modernist assumption that the object is always either 0% or 100%, so if there is any artess in it at all, the thing is Art, and we should thank the Artist. We live in a house, let’s say, or an apartment building. So sure, we can ascribe in diluted fashion the experience to an architect. But if the demand is that the entire experience of living there be Art or ascribed to the architect, we can’t live in it. Precisely this demand lies behind the creepy control over inhabitants of Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous western Pennsylvania house “Fallingwater,” with its low ceilings to force people onto balconies, its furniture that was meant never to be removed, and its precise pictures at defined places on the walls. (Even the cutlery comes with the house, and MUST BE USED.) The whole is like a cage, and it looks best in photographs, with the water flowing under it. That’s where its artness is at a maximum. Similarly, Wright’s Robie House in Chicago is a cage, with its denial of curtains on a busy city street and its placing of colored glass in the middle of windows that stand between the looker and anything outside. If they were dollhouses, we could see them as art. But we can’t live in them. And people rarely do, certainly in neither of these. As a museum, or the Alumni House of the University of Chicago, which Robie House was when I was a student there, they work fine. Who, to take another example, would want to live in the melted interior of Gaudí’s Casa Batlló in Barcelona? It isn’t neutral enough to be able to gather your own thoughts in, or to live your life in. It’s better seen from the street, and visited on a tour—which is in fact its current use. Or ending up as photographs in a book. Gaudí or Domènech i Montaner architecture works better in buildings we enter for short periods of time for specific purposes. The Parc Guёll is a fun place, so its lighthearted color and animal forms seem at home for children and outings. The Sagrada Familia, by contrast, makes an inhospitable place to be religious in because it’s visually so overwhelming and busy—and do we really want ice cream cones on top? Only Domènech i Montagner’s Palau de la Música Catalana that we appreciate before and after the concert and in the interval seems appropriate. That the precise objects we call “art” vary over time and place doesn’t mean that art isn’t something precise, just that what has this label changes. Nowadays

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we are re-thinking the choices that led to museums. But the presupposition is still that there is a separate commodity of art, only that it can be expanded. Now, therefore, we are asked to praise artists for doing and making things inside the museum that exist outside the museum. Why is Marina Abramovic sitting still in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art art? Because she is doing it in a museum. It’s not new. It’s just new for a museum.7 Christo wraps big things and it’s art. What of the shrink-wrapped boats one passes by the dozens in the winter months around the Chesapeake Bay? Oh, they are shrink-wrapped boats. Not the Reichstag. We shrink-wrap boats to protect them. There’s no functional reason to wrap the Reichstag, and people in Berlin typically don’t have boats (except on the lakes in the west, like the Wannsee), so it’s art. There are coils of rope on the wall in a museum. This is not new in the world. New for the museum. Academia in the 1980s and 1990s also tried reaching out with both arms to incorporate the world, in what was called “Cultural Studies,” a focus on Barbie dolls and Princess Di, on hip hop and WWF events.8 But the people with the Barbies, and/or those who were greedy for news of Princess Di, didn’t need academics analyzing them. They just did what they did. Efforts to include street motion in high art choreography (tennis shoes in Twyla Tharp) weren’t for those who lived in tennis shoes, but for those who didn’t. Andy Warhol soup cans only seemed cunning and profound to the museum set. To the footsore tourist they seemed odd.9 What’s that doing here? It’s a soup can! Nowadays, the world of fine arts plays the game of seeing how close to the brink it can get and not fall over, or reflecting on its history. The result is piles of cloth in the corner of a gallery, great splotches on a canvas that tourists say their dog could have done, or refined hair-splitting about the facts of art history, such as Jasper John’s career-long obsession with the paint-brush daub removed from any attempt to have it refer to anything outside itself besides obvious trivialities (the flag, numbers) or the surface on which it is painted. The pile of cloth looks like something in your basement, but IT’S IN A MUSEUM—so it’s interesting to artists. The museum (the Artworld) is expanding outwards into the world. Museums contain works defined by the same concerns as those current in the world outside and works that are, formally speaking, like things outside. And the world outside has filled up with products that don’t aspire to the museum but that yet are at least semi-permanent and widely disseminated, and in this way approaching artworks. The result is that the people concerned with defining art are a very small and dwindling number in the hollowed-out outlines of the world defined by aristocracy—the world determining what people talk about, Basis (in Marxist terms) determining Űberbau. After the Modernist explosion of the early twentieth century, as I have considered elsewhere, the view that art could replace the world that was central to it shifted to academia, where it now is dwindling in intensity and petering out.10 And in academia, the consideration of “art” has largely been replaced by people insisting that if you don’t let in the works I want you to let into the highest level of whatever institutions there are, you are racist/ sexist/xist.

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What made the fine arts amenable to being preserved, as I consider further below, was not only that they were made of materials that survived, but also that they were interesting for people outside the immediate circle of those for whom they were produced. And this is what we like to call the “universality” of the fine arts. In our own times, things don’t have to survive thousands of years, because they are right here right now, and we have the technology to get them out of the particular circumstances they were meant for. For contemporary works, where survival is not an issue, we have developed the means to disseminate them—for how long we don’t know (technology has a notoriously short half-life)—but quite broadly for right now. This produces a different sort of product that fills the space in the world once separated more absolutely from art. What defines the Modern World is that the techniques and the money exist, and are far more widely spread than before, to make permanent or at least semi-permanent more evanescent expressions. We call these the products of popular culture, that the Frankfurt School could still vilify in the decades around the Second World War.11 At that point popular culture was fairly weak as a phenomenon, and could be silhouetted against the still-dominant culture of the elites, made to seem an exception and a strange outlier. That is no longer the case. Now it’s the “imperial arts” of opera, symphony orchestras, and chamber music that are faced with dwindling and graying audiences, while popular culture rules the roost. What produced the burgeoning spread of popular culture was something like the desert of Egypt that preserved papyri and grave wrappings, as well as Coptic textiles: real world facts. Namely it was the greater spread of wealth, and the development of technology to allow things to get out of their immediate surroundings where they had a tighter relationship with people’s lives, so that others could see them as art. Of course, this is broad dissemination probably bought at the price of a lack of depth: it’s almost certain that this decade’s popular culture won’t be that of the next decade, or even this year’s next year’s. And none of it will last a millennium. This alteration is what made art all but irrelevant. What the Romantics called art is by definition elitist: it’s precious and rare, and only a few people have it. It can be disseminated to some degree, as it was in the great age of museums—in Europe, the nineteenth century, in America, the early twentieth. But they require reverence from the masses to remain precious, and they have lost this reverence. That’s where we are in the now advanced twenty-first century. This process began in the US, whose popular culture dominates the world (with help from “swinging London” of Carnaby Street and its subsequent dissemination across the industrialized world), with the flowering of American wealth in the Industrial Age, first for the ultra-rich and then gradually moving downward so that ordinary people had the cash for leisure activities or fun. Henry Ford famously said he wanted the workmen on his factory lines making cars to be paid enough to buy the cars they made. Wealth began to be more widely spread into the American middle class. After World War II, the housing

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developments of Levittown on Long Island, NY, and similar estates elsewhere (some also called Levittown) made home owning possible for the middle class. Yet up until the 1950s, popular amusements were inflected and influenced by what were then still seen as high or fine arts. (Now some museums still keep the name “Fine Arts” but simply broaden their collections outwards.) Big Band music of the 1940s, for example, follows the rules of Western classical music, as do film scores from the era that are like diluted versions of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. Even clothes were elitist. One of the most striking aspects of Hollywood movies of the 30s and 40s for viewers today is the fact that the men wear hats and suits when out of the house, and the women gloves and heels. Nowadays everybody wears T-shirts and running shoes/trainers. Of course, there had been country music with fiddles and untrained singers long before Nashville turned into the Capital of Country Music. And then in the 1920s there came jazz, which was seen as the expression of unbridled jungle animality. But everyone knew these were niche tastes—country folks, or the bright young things. The big breakthrough to everyone except the extremes of society began in the 50s and hit its stride in the 60s with Elvis (US) and the Beatles (UK) that responded to what people really wanted to hear: not Beethoven. These were impossible without the money spread around that allowed the technical possibilities of microphones and enhancers to produce a product not based on the human voice, and the mass dissemination through television and films of the physicality of these hugely charismatic performers. (Charisma matters far less for classical performers, where too much personality can even be considered affectation— such as Leonard Bernstein’s famous contortions on the podium, including the “Lenny leap.”) And then came the great rejection of a generation’s values of 1968 and beyond, encapsulated in Mike Nichols’s film The Graduate, where Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin is encouraged to go into “plastics” by a colleague of his father, and then is seduced by the alcoholic wife of one of his parents’ neighbors, memorably played by Anne Bancroft. But he says no to both and runs off with the seductress’s daughter, despite the fact that she has just married a thoroughly establishment-friendly philandering frat-boy husband—to do what? Unclear, except to reject everything his parents stood for. The explosion of popular culture filling the space from the bottom up, formerly filled by art trickling down, seems in retrospect to have been a perfect storm: the money and technology of the parents allowed the rebels to invent and disseminate, say, songs that expressed their dissatisfaction with the parents’ world. And even half a century later, now that the rebels of the 60s are old or dead, this channel for widespread if fairly transitory contemporary feelings lives on, albeit less focused on protest and more focused on commenting on the vagaries of everyday life. Singers (to stay with popular music in the US) don’t need to go to Juilliard in New York or the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia; they can turn a small or breathy voice big with technology. Trained singers at the Metropolitan Opera in New York fill a huge hall with only their voice, but the singers of pop songs breathe into a microphone that is amplified over the instruments,

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and in Broadway musicals, all the singers wear amplifying microphones. In the early years of popular culture, male singers could make love to a standup microphone. Now it’s a wire on the face and a battery pack in the back for everyone, and the sound technician at the board in the back of the hall making them softer or louder. The result of this perfect storm was that popular music independent of the fine arts was born, and became the lingua franca of everyone. (Probably the sheer unlikability of high art music past Schoenberg played a role here too. Even classical music audiences grit their teeth at having to sit through the one contemporary work on the program, if the conductor insists on programming it.) Then the Internet took off, where the sky’s the limit in having a single untrained person amplify his or her individuality in whatever form (images, jokes, writing) to what are potentially millions. Of course, with everyone sharing so much trivia, it’s hard to be heard over the din and chatter. But at least everyone can do it. Yvonne Rainer made her “Trio A” for anybody and any body, which means completely uninteresting movement, and performed it in 1978 at the Museum of Modern Art.12 Now anybody and any body can post countless videos of body motion with no spectacle and no virtuosity on the Internet, and they are not repeated at the Museum of Modern Art. In the 1960s and 70s, this democratization of art was still art, the way the first sprigs of kudzu, introduced as a groundcover to the American South from Japan, initially seemed pretty plants; now the whole South is smothered in it. Popular culture is by its nature transitory because applicable right here right now: next year they’ll be singing other songs, not these. Or wearing other clothes, or watching different movies. Popular music is made not to be archived and saved, but to be superseded. Songs, for instance, are continuously being passed over for new ones, so that an older song is useful only for invoking a time in the listener when s/he heard it for the first time, and what s/he was doing back then. Pop music is the Proustian tisane and madeleine of our times. The same fact of impermanence is true for most movies, and for commercial fiction, and to an even greater degree for Internet videos. So this isn’t art. But it’s something like (temporary) art. And it fills the world. Without the Modern age and its middle class with money, the fine arts would have remained as something aspirational that normal people could participate in to ape their betters. The change was that popular culture took off on its own, fueled by people who were no longer concerned with the fine arts. No more sense of betters. And no more aping. The extent of dissemination of these products of popular culture varies, and is hard to predict. What will go “viral” on the Internet? Few people could say beforehand. Many products of this popular culture are produced, presumably with the same dream of reaching millions of people. But only a few are chosen among the many called. Some even cross the now blurry line into being seen as art. Chance also plays a role, as do other factors that only become visible later on. Reports are that no one making the classic Bogart-Bergman movie Casablanca

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thought it would be more than a temporary theater-filler, if that.13 But it’s a “timeless” favorite. Why? I’d say it was the performances, more precisely that of Bergman, who seemed so sweet and yielding when she says “Oh Rrrick,” it’s a shock to see her in other movies where she plays completely different characters. She was an actress. But perhaps the viewer has the fantasy of being, or being involved with, a woman like that. It’s been suggested that the reason the Frank Capra film It’s a Wonderful Life, about suicide and disappointment, has improbably become a Christmas staple in the US is that it was available for free television dissemination and so was programmed. But it’s only Americans who think this. Many Germans watch a fifteen-minute English television sketch called Dinner for One, where an increasingly drunken butler impersonates deceased guests at an old lady’s holiday dinner and staggers off at the end.14 Americans say whaaaa? But Germans love the repeated line of the old lady, in response to the butler’s question if things will this year be the same as last, “Same procedure as every year.” Sometimes mere repetition breeds love, becoming a sort of shared joke. Walter Benjamin, in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility,” thought it was the reproducibility itself that showed the changed nature of the work. But this isn’t so. It’s just that suddenly with mass dissemination, say of Elvis in a movie—or earlier, in what Adorno and Horkheimer disdainfully referred to as the crooning of Rudy Vallée-type in the 1920s that sounds strangely asexual to us, broadcast on the radio or on vinyl records—these things too became amenable to being consumed by many people. Sheer breadth of dissemination made them fill the space that formerly a watered-down version of aristocratic arts had filled. The personal could be disseminated—the Frankfurt School said commodified. It was no longer a farmer father (say) making a doll for his daughter; it was a public figure making something for all. And now, with everyone online, the personal can be disseminated even further. This nurturing of popular taste has also led to the demise of professional criticism of the arts—why bother when everyone now can enter an opinion online? The result is what Tom Nichols calls The Death of Expertise in the title of his book. Now everybody’s an expert. Certainly the lies of the military brass and politicians during the Vietnam War contributed to this distrust of authority, that we now see in a rejection of science from the right wing: vaccines are dangerous! Nowadays, people are less apt to come to museums and university courses to be instructed: they demand the right to judge. The arts of museums and university courses have been met the skepticism of popular culture, which valorizes the individual’s point of view, that I suggest has to now be central to the definition of the art experience.

Notes 1 Oscar Wilde, “Preface” to The Picture of Dorian Gray (New York: Warbler Classics, 2020), 4. 2 Aaron Shaffer, “Théophile Gautier and l’Art Pour l’Art,” Sewanee Review 36, No. 4 (October 1928), www.jstor.org/stable/27534322. Accessed 2 February 2023.

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­

PART II

Museums

6 AUDIENCE AND SURVIVAL Two Aspects That Define Art

Artworks have to be here for someone to see/hear/read them. If we don’t have them in any form (not even descriptions or quotations, as we have some classical works), we don’t have them. For us, they don’t exist. If Emily Dickinson’s poems had been thrown away rather than being saved and published, they wouldn’t be art—for us, and we’re the ones saying what’s art and what isn’t. If Max Brod had followed Kaf ka’s wishes and destroyed Kaf ka’s manuscripts, we would not have Kaf ka the Great Writer. But would Kaf ka have been in some metaphysical alternate universe a Great Writer even if unknown? Of course, we can speak of “mute inglorious Miltons,” like the poet Gray in his “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” Except that if they are mute, they aren’t Milton. What if Milton had written but nobody read him? If the tree that falls in the forest makes a sound no one hears, we can say the unread piece was still great art, only unknown. But to say that, we have to know it and that it was unknown. What we don’t know, we can’t talk about. If we rescue a neglected masterpiece from the past, we are saying it is art for us. But we have to rescue it in order to be able to say this. What survives can be an artwork; what doesn’t, can’t. That’s why, say, the jewelry of thousands of years ago (and thus, being metal, frequently gold, which survives) can be artworks if dug up. (Much of the contents of museums with ancient art is procured by grave robbery.) They have not only survived, but—and this is related to their survival from the distant past, though not absolutely—are usually also distanced from immediate purpose in our world, which I express as saying: not made for any group including us. Some of these objects show incredible workmanship, especially the Hellenistic pieces found in graves around the Black Sea, so that we see the traces of the hands of long-dead people; one example is the so-called Bactrian Hoard excavated at Tillya Tepe, to which I return below. But it’s not made for us or anyone like us (“us” means the way we see ourselves, as part of a similar group, not us personally): we don’t wear jewelry DOI: 10.4324/9781003373377-8

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like this. If we did, it couldn’t be art. It could be nice, but not art. A wedding ring stolen by a grave robber from a modern burial isn’t art because it’s exactly like what we wear. The Munich Bavarian National Museum displays clothes taken from the bodies of rulers from several hundred years ago. The bodies have decayed, but not the clothes. These are the clothes of specific royals, and are interesting for that reason; they are also far more elaborate than most modern clothing, and they are “old-fashioned,” which distances them enough from us that they approach being art. But we don’t dig up clothes from recent burials, even fancy ones. There is so much Egyptian “art,” as we call it, because the dry climate preserved it in graves, and we dug it up. And it all seems foreign to us. For the Egyptians who buried Tutankhamun, his gold death mask was not art. For us, it is. In order for it to become art, it had to be (in addition to its implacable stare that draws us in) gold, beautiful to us too, and preserved—and unpillaged by ancient grave robbers. It had to wait for the modern ones. The sense of coming from another time/place/world need not be determined by millennia or different continents. Tom Ford’s stylized film A Single Man, set in a Los Angeles apparently oblivious to the Cuban missile crisis unfolding at the time (it’s on a television set we see, but the characters don’t react to it), screams Ford’s take on 1962 in every frame. The English professor of the title, English in nationality and academic specialty (played by Colin Firth with understated sadness), whose male lover has been killed in a car crash and who contemplates suicide, lives in a world coded 1962 (and, as a proper Englishman, in southern California for maximum contrast—it’s based on a novel by Christopher Isherwood of Berlin Stories fame, who moved to California) where his adherence to Old World mores makes him an outsider—as we learn from his interaction with his fellow British expat friend played by Julianne Moore. The vision of this time Ford is giving us is of sticky-sweet ingratiating surface with more than a hint of underlying poison—that’s the threat of the missile crisis to which everyone seems oblivious. And the character is also a study in contrasts, all perfect clothing on the surface and despair beneath. Everything and everybody in this world exhibits this same combination of gleaming surface and corrosion underneath, whereas in fact much of it for the people who lived there then would have been neutral, or something else, or like our world. The professor lives in a Richard Neutra-type glass house, made for solitude in wooded lots, yet situated cheek by jowl with nosy and crushingly “1962” neighbors. The wife in the neighbor couple kisses the unfeeling husband, wearing a suit, who responds to her kiss by putting on his hat. She is characterized by her hair twist and scarlet lipstick and exaggerated friendliness, apparently unaware of how off-putting the husband’s attitude actually is. Her daughter wears patent leather shoes, frilly socks, and a poufy dress, yet talks about how her scorpion finishes off the insects she feeds it; her brother is apparently gay and wants to be a “set designer” (the daughter tells the professor that her father says the professor is “light in his loafers,” and she thinks the brother is “light in

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his loafers” too). The professor drives a car that even for 1962 is vintage; he pulls up in a parking lot in front of a movie poster for the 1960 movie Psycho about a serial knife murderer to have a conversation with a gorgeous hustler, whom he does not ultimately pick up. For Ford, this time is wealthy and slick, like David Hockney’s California pool paintings, but it’s not what it seems. Underneath, it’s off-key. That’s the stylization of time and place. In fact, if we went back to 1962, even as people from 2009, the movie’s date, not everything would strike us as so consistently what Ford is telling us is “1962,” which for him means placid gorgeous surface with multiple unacknowledged problems underneath. The distance created by this stylization removes this (recent) time and (relatively nearby) place from us and makes it art. Even the (unusual for a movie) scene of the title character on the toilet is 1962-ized by having him in a shirt and tie and calf-length socks and looking through slats with enough space between them that the neighbor woman cheerily waves at him. So survival is a necessary but not sufficient condition for something to be seen as art. The stones on the ground are as old as the Earth, but nobody considers them art: they lack the traces of people. But without survival, no artworks. Dirt is a good survival help. Many of the objects J. Pierpont Morgan gave the Metropolitan Museum, from the Avar treasure to the David plates, were dug up from the earth. They were buried to hide them and forgotten, or those who buried them went away, or died. Or they were meant to stay in the earth, like the Sutton Hoo ship burial in the British Museum—as an exception to most ship burials, unpillaged in ancient times. These things from the past that were purposely preserved through being hidden underground by the people themselves (as opposed to buried with bodies they thought would never be dug up) are almost always going to seem art to us. They were valuable to the people then—we share a common reverence for gold—and at the same time seem exotic. For the people then, they were just a very expensive X or Y buried to do honor to the dead for that reason. Now they can be art, since we no longer use things like this. Ancient art skews to the precious. We have the cathedrals but not the houses of the common folk. Only an anomaly like Pompeii, buried all at once in 79 AD, gives us a broader view, and that not by much: this was a resort town of the rich. Even in the pre-Modern age, what we now call art was only the end of a spectrum of other things that were like it to some degree. Art in the museum sense is what has survived, which means what people with the power to preserve objects preserved what by the nature of its material could survive. That also means that they kept the best examples of whatever the object is. The also-rans were swept away by time. And because the divide between social classes was so great—as Monty Python has it, you know someone is a king because he isn’t covered in shit—the division between the products that the aristocracy treasured and saved and the other things in the world was more absolute. Even in 1200, there were carved toys for children, songs sung by mothers to babies and by laborers in the field, and images made for families. But these didn’t survive, because they

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weren’t treasured by the kind of people who could guarantee their survival, were limited in interest to their immediate surroundings, and weren’t of impermeable materials. If the farmer in Appalachia 1820 could have put the corn-husk doll he made his child on the Internet and made it widely available outside the particular circumstances of its production and use, it too could have been art, because widely disseminated, at least potentially—except that at the time, there were probably a lot of corn husk dolls, so this wouldn’t have seemed worth a second glance. (Plus there are many things on the Internet that languish in obscurity.) But then, there was no Internet and no eBay, the doll never left this one house and was a common object, and probably rotted or was burned. Probably no one but the members of his family ever saw it. Its maker wouldn’t have put it up on eBay anyway, even if that had existed, as it was meant for family use. So it’s not art. If we can rescue it, or it somehow miraculously survives to a time when these things seem interesting and rare, it can be. The Barnes Foundation has two carved bed headboards from Ethiopia. On a bed in Ethiopia, they are merely (decorative) parts of a family’s home. On the wall in Philadelphia, they can become art. But at least they are wood, which lasts for a long time, almost as long as stone if kept dry. The few more fragile things from anyplace but the desert that survive are rare, like Medieval shoes in the Musée de Cluny. And they are only art to the extent that they are different from our shoes: pointy and all soft leather—and old, and hence for that reason not for us. The objects in the Rockefeller Folk Art Museum in Williamsburg are all made of these longer-lasting materials of wood or metal rather than corn husks, and have been purposely bought up and saved. Plus most of them are what we think of as “old-fashioned.” That makes them more plausibly art. If we still had functional everyday cigar-store Indians, the collection of such carvings in one part of the museum wouldn’t be art for us—unless they were somehow much better versions of our everyday ones, like contemporary designer dresses in museum Costume Institutes. To reiterate an earlier point, it’s not the fact that cigar-store Indians have no utility that makes them (folk) art, it’s that we don’t see them as being for us. They aren’t part of our world. As the neon signs of the 50s were removed from shops and gas stations—which means, were no longer things aimed at us—they acquired artness. Few people in 1900 would have seen a cigar-store Indian as art. Now we can. We could still put it outside a cigar store, and can put up a neon sign from the 50s, except that we would do this only as an acknowledgment of their “old-fashioned” status. And we wouldn’t put out a really nice one of either, as these are known to have value and would be stolen. We put out our mailboxes by the road, but nobody steals our mailbox, because it’s for mail and everyone has one. And besides, they are factory made and not hand-done, so the trace of people is fainter. An Alessi teapot is also factory made, but its imprint of people is stronger than a mailbox. The objects in the Museum of Modern Art design store in New York,

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or in the Philadelphia Museum shop, are other different/interesting versions of everyday things, like (precisely) creatively shaped teapots, or cool watches, or funky decorative items in strange colors or unusual materials. In the shop in the Washington, DC Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, there are hand-done—carved, batik printed—objects from countries where people still routinely make such things by hand. They typically can be used by us, such as printed shirts, or amusing beaded animals that we use as accent pieces. So they don’t purport to be 100% art, only design—which means maybe 20% art. As another example, the MoMA Design Store in New York has strange-colored phone cases much more interesting than the normal ones. We could get a normal boring phone case, or a factory-made Western shirt, but this hand-printed shirt, or the phone case with Malevich-like shapes melted into the plastic, is funky. They’re functional and decorative, closer to being art than our normal versions of these things, but not quite there. But we and our world are what establish this relation that gives qualities to the object. These become more art if they survive out of the context where we use them; say, if we no longer had phone cases, or no longer wore shirts like this. Art, to repeat, is something with meaning outside the specific context in which it was made. It’s people outside of that context who call it art. A firstgrader’s finger painting is meaningful only for Mom and Dad—unless later someone sees the formal interest of such daubs and mounts a museum show of them. This is what happened with so-called Visionary Art, as at Baltimore’s American Museum of Visionary Art, because the products of outsiders such as schizophrenics look different than the works of people who share many of the same societal and personal givens. The 2007 show at the National Gallery in Washington of American snapshots—called, tellingly to make its alteration of state of the materials clear, “The Art of the American Snapshot”—focused on the almost random and inartistic quality of amateurs’ bad photographs–off-center, blurry, cutting off heads and so on—to celebrate a new esthetic.1 They came from the time before cell phones, back when the photograph could not be easily re-sized or deleted, certainly not by amateur photographers. These were what we would have called the failures, the rejects. They weren’t made as art; it’s the exhibition that turned them into art. Seen from the direction of art, they are a new content to the frame and the fact of being a photograph. The art isn’t in the pictures themselves, but in the curatorial act of offering them to us as a new content for photographs. If we walk through this exhibit and say, Why, these are just bad photographs!, we are seeing them from the direction of the world, not of art. A book of “Boring Postcards” makes the same point—endless roadside motels and highway roundabouts from the 1950s that now we think passé.2 They are offered as bad by the people offering them, who have left, so we can call them art. In the 1950s they were just signs of progress. The changes of nature of African carvings provide, as I noted, a good example of the fact that it’s our relation to the object—which is to say, the nature of the world—that creates it as art. When the first African carvings, typically

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of wood and raffia, entered Western collections, it was as ethnographic objects. The Modernists discovered them in the halls of ethnography museums, and incorporated them into their painting and sculpture. Modernist art rejected the technique-heavy realism of the nineteenth century, so these objects were congenial to their sensibility. With the independence of former colonies, and the rise of the insistence from both North and South that the sources of these objects, now countries with a vote in the United Nations, be considered not as subordinate but as equal, the pressure mounted to display these things in art museums. At first, no attempt was made to identify the anonymous carver. But under attempts to treat them as if they were like Western art objects, some museums began dutifully affixing labels that said “Artist Unknown,” as would be appropriate for Western objects with a written history and a well documented trail of owners. In their own context, they were made by craftsmen for religious festivals, and the carvers were not considered to be “expressing themselves,” but making just the kind of mask necessary for that ritual; they would have been known only in their own village, as the father who made the corn-husk doll would be known only to his family. And they are as a result in a dizzying array of what for us seems expressiveness, now that they are seen outside the ritual, the way there are many mediocre (by current artistic standards) Virgin and Child paintings from the Renaissance. But museums only exhibit the works that work as stand-alones, because they have been shorn of context. The Western/Romantic concept of Artist is foreign to these African objects (and to some degree the Western religious paintings as well), and is imposed by the nature of the Western museum. By this logic, the Rockefeller Folk Art Museum should put “Artist Unknown” on every cigar-store Indian, every metal weathervane. The lottery winners for Western art curators of African objects were therefore those few instances where the works were recent enough and the artist well known enough that we have a name: Oleway of Ife, for example, or the made-up name based on perceived stylistic similarity of the so-called Buli Master of Luba caryatid stools with elongated features. This is based on a Western prototype for grouping works that seem close in style to one primary one, as in the “Baltimore Painter” of Greek vases after one ornate Apulian vase in the Walters Art Museum, or designations like the Master of Saint X or the Master of the So-and-so Altarpiece, after one particular painting. African objects are made for specific circumstances, which most had already outgrown when visiting Westerners took them away by sale or gift or plunder— their ritual powers gone and others of the same type made in their place, as all African “art” is typal, similar objects made over and over for unvarying purposes. Most are made of wood, and would have rotted in Africa; in any case few were consciously preserved there. They survived in Western museums that promoted them to the status of art objects (see the African wing in the Louvre, or the Metropolitan Museum’s Rockefeller Wing, or the Richmond Virginia Museum of Fine Arts). As a result, they acquired Western currency valuations in dollars, pound sterling, euros, and Swiss francs.

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This is why the current demand that these now-valuable objects be returned to the cultures that created them gets the causality wrong. It was the West that made them art, and gave them value in international currencies. Thus the scene in the fantasy film Black Panther where the contemporary African man demands that the Western museum he is visiting return what it has “stolen” has it backward. It’s the “stealing” by the Western museum (not all such objects were taken by force; many were sold or traded voluntarily as being of no further use to the possessors) that gave these objects artistic status and international monetary value, so they could later be demanded for a Western-style museum in Africa. It’s thinking that qualities of artness belong intrinsically to what we call art that leads us to this mistake. These qualities are the result of the world, not just of the object alone, which is the focus of the Modernist century. The argument for returning the “Benin bronzes” (actually most are brass, but Westerners found bronze more worthy of admiration, as Greek bronzes had been) may be, or appear, stronger than with other African objects, as they are made of metal, which lasts even in Africa (wood rots), and were taken by force, even if they had been removed as decorations of the palace of the ruler from whom they were taken in a raid by the British, that was retribution for a massacre of their soldiers. And indeed, several Western institutions in the 2020s have agreed to return their holdings. (The most extensive and largely balanced consideration of this issue in book form is the misleadingly entitled book Loot: Britain and the Benin Bronzes.)3 To be clear, Benin here refers to a region that is now part of the country of anglophone Nigeria, not the francophone country to the West of this area formerly known as Dahomey but now called, in post-colonial times, Benin. The Benin “bronzes” will or would, that is, be returned to the ownership of Nigeria, a country that did not exist in 1897, when they were taken, and to a privately financed museum, not to decorate the palace of the current Oba, still the head of the now non-existent state of Benin. As a result, the current Oba is in conflict with the state of Nigeria of which he is a citizen: to whom do these objects belong?4 Precisely because these objects were made of longer-lasting materials, they convinced Westerners that African artifacts were art. They acted as ambassadors for their brand. Yet this is just why the calls for their return seem so plausible, and are being heeded by some museums. The West transformed their nature into museum objects, wherever the museum is located. Western museums created their artness, and they will be housed in Western-style museums.5 This is not what is sometimes called “decolonization,” it is colonization of the world by Western (museum) values, as is the definition of new nation-states that did not exist before a certain date. What is in process is the breakup of the Western “encyclopedic” museum in which these are one puzzle piece in a world when only the West had museums, in favor of geographically dispersed (and usually relatively inaccessible) Westernstyle or local museums devoted singly to one puzzle piece and defined by the contemporary world order. (Of course they are more accessible to locals in these now-countries, but since it was Westerners who made these objects art, it remains

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to be seen how much local interest there will be in them on the part of Westernizing populaces—and why do we assume that their aspiration is to become fully Westernized?) The Western world vision, interested at one point (no more?) in the world outside, is being challenged, with new entities that didn’t exist when these museums were formed demanding the relationship that countries now are supposed to have with each in the United Nations, where each respects the others and each modern country has one vote in the General Assembly. (Remember that the United Nations was formed to prevent another expansionist leader taking over other countries by force. Now that Russia has veto power as one of the World War II victors, they can do this themselves.) In the same way that former colonies are now nations with theoretical equality with their colonizers, at least in the United Nations, so these objects are demanded by Western-style museums located in places that formerly lacked them. Demanding the return of these objects is the imposition of a later world order on an earlier one. The conflict is between the theory of equal nations as per the General Assembly of the UN and the fact that in reality, some countries are more equal than others—as is shown in the makeup of the Security Council and the simple fact that some countries have more economic and military power than others, that to be sure they are not supposed to use for malevolent purposes, but of course do. It’s the clash of the vision of big and small all playing happily in the same sandbox with the reality that some take up more room than others, that we see playing out. So the small ones call on the theory that makes them the equal of the large, which sometimes works. An interesting clash of ownership between nations is being played out over the Scythian gold of over two millennia ago excavated in what is now Ukraine around the Black Sea. This area, now invaded by Russia, is claimed by Russia, and so therefore are these Scythian objects—which were on display in the Netherlands when Russia took over Crimea, where they were housed, in 2014. Russia demanded their return to Russian-occupied Crimea, whereas Ukraine asserted ownership. Is the ownership of these objects the Crimean museums where they were housed, now controlled by Russia? Or the country of Ukraine? In 2021, a Dutch court found in favor of Ukraine.6 The power that controls the land controls its history? Or not? This case shows us that tensions about control of art objects are not merely between the West and the non-West. We can ask, why should any museum outside France have French paintings? Should Italian Renaissance paintings all be sent back to Italy? They mostly left Italy before the Italian state (unified Italy dates from the mid-nineteenth century) could claim them—but that’s true of the Parthenon marbles whose return modern Greece demands from the British Museum as well, and of the “Benin bronzes.” But now Italy exists; why not claim its treasures retroactively as Nigeria does, or as the now-independent country of Greece, once part of the Ottoman Empire, does as well? In fact Italy is one of the countries that claims ownership of any object newly found or currently located in its territory, even if from a different or pre-Italian

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culture. For this reason, the Greek so-called Euphronios krater that was viewed by hundreds of thousands in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, whose origin was an Etruscan tomb in Italy, was returned to a provincial Italian museum (not a Greek), where viewers are a small fraction of those in New York. What of the vast American art holdings of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid? These were purchased at a time when their value was far less than it now is. Their inclusion in international collections has raised their international status and monetary value, as the inclusion in Western museums has raised the value of African ethnographic objects. Shouldn’t the Americans demand them back on the grounds that the prices paid before were exploitatively lower than their current worth? Many painters sell their early works before they are hot commodities at prices far below those reached by later ones. Can they demand re-negotiation of deals? They agreed, perhaps, but (it can be argued) under the pressures of penury. The price they got is unjust according to current values. Or can their descendants demand current prices for works already in collections bought years earlier? The Italians, it can be argued, have trampled on the rights of cultures like the Etruscans and the Greek colonies on what is now (much later) Italian soil, because the people that became the Romans and by identification, modern Italians, conquered the peninsula where the Etruscans had lived, all this portrayed in poetic form in Vergil’s Aeneid. It was the government of the modern nation of Italy that demanded the return of the krater, not the Etruscans, now long ago subjugated and amalgamated into “Italians.” And why should Greece not demand the return of the krater? The answer is, because all such issues of cultural restitution are governed by a quite recent accord between modern nations, the 1970 United Nations (UNESCO) Convention (it has a long name).7 The United Nations is a post-World War II, post-colonial institution that gives a vote to modern countries. It is therefore clear that it gives power to modern political entities and ignores pre-modern ones. Ars longa, vita brevis. Only the “Benin bronzes,” hard metal objects we now call art hold our attention, not the complex series of human events leading to and culminating in the attack by the British. The history, including the initial wholesale massacre of the intruding British that led to the “Punitive Expedition,” and the scores of human sacrifices the Oba ordered of his own people in an apparent attempt to appease the gods and stave off the attack, has faded away.8 (If it matters, the Benin kingdom had many slaves, and sold some to Europeans.) The objects were not even the point of the expedition, and were in fact sold, once in London, to defray the costs of the military expedition. Sometimes they are called “loot,” but they were just taken to defray the costs of the expedition; they weren’t its point at all. The British didn’t even know they were there to take. But they are what we have left, so they have taken, rather paradoxically, center stage. It’s only the small hard things that survive; people and the stuff of ordinary life die off and are forgotten. The moral outrage these plaques and sculptures inspire nowadays in some people seems created by the conviction that the British

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shouldn’t have been there at all to be massacred. Not moral outrage at the Oba for killing them, or his sacrifice of many of his own people to appease the gods and deter the attackers. Or his slaves. All we say is, they shouldn’t have taken these objects as plunder! But how far back in history do we go with this attitude? UNESCO says, not before 1970. But that seems a bit naïve, though it is comprehensible given that the rules were made by countries extant in 1970. Invaders taking hard transportable objects by force is the rule in human history. All Roman triumphs paraded not only captives but statues and artworks. The famous Roman copy of the “Dying Gaul” in the Capitoline Museums, to take one artwork famous to moderns, was based on a bronze stolen by the Romans from the Attalids of Pergamon. Indeed, most of the objects taken by conquering armies throughout history stay with the conquerors. That’s what it means to conquer. The Mughal crown jewels were taken to Persia in 1740 and never returned. Or were the Mughals themselves conquerors of Hindu India, themselves interlopers? If so, they stayed for centuries and left an indelible footprint, including structures that are internationally known, like the Taj Mahal. At what point do you just give up and say they are part of India? (The current political leaders of India are wrestling with this question.) What if they’re on the tourist posters? Maybe you let pragmatics and money speak and say, sure, they are India. Or not? Or consider Napoleon’s scooping up of Italian artworks, many of which are still in the Louvre, such as Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana, whose robbery and non-return are the subject of a recent book.9 Does it really matter? Tourists don’t think so. Is it about historical resentment or tourist dollars? Unclear which will triumph. Then there are the horses of San Marco, taken from the hippodrome of Constantinople when the (Christian) Venetians sacked (Christian) Byzantium in 1204 as an alternative to their ostensible target, Muslim-held Jerusalem. Then the horses were taken by force to Paris by Napoleon for almost 20 years before his defeat. They are now back in Venice, not Constantinople/Istanbul. Why aren’t we concerned to get each object back to the geographical area that produced it? And what if the system that governs this area now has nothing to do with the system from which it taken? The Ottoman Empire and the Venetian Republic are both gone. Enter UNESCO. Why should we accept the concerns of modern states as primary? Well, clearly because they are the ones making the rules for entities that pre-date them, as do the objects themselves. Art is by definition decontextualized, and so can be housed in a museum anywhere. Art is what loses its link to a specific time and place or situation. So it’s counter-intuitive to try and re-insert it in what in any case is a situation far removed from the original—as if taking it back to a country non-existent at the time of its making somehow solved a problem. If it does solve a problem, it’s a political one, one irrelevant to art, because art is what is taken out of its real-world context, which includes politics. This modern political process turns artworks into hostages. Art museums decontextualize in order to focus on, and partially create, the artness of the object.

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African masks—my favorite example of the Western creation of artness in objects, since I taught for two years at the Université Nationale du Rwanda near the Congolese border—were contextualized to a greater degree in the ethnography museums (such as the Musée de l’Homme in Paris) where they started in the West than in the art museums to which they were later moved. The art museum venue came to be considered more honorific, so it was there that these newly elevated objects were moved. Yet this produced a second wave of demands to recontextualize these objects, this time in the art museum. It seemed that considering these as Western artworks didn’t do them sufficient justice either. This wave of demands for re-contextualization took the form, at the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris, that consolidated almost all the African and Oceanic works in the Musée de l’Homme and the Musée Colonial at the Porte Dorée, of displays along sinuous claustrophobic passageways with niches like caves, and little side-caves with rough-hewn seats where visitors were to sit and watch a video of the village ceremony in which the mask on the wall was “danced.” That’s the verbal construction, to “dance a mask,” and masks that have not been “danced” are held to be worthless, made for tourists, not the real deal— though the forms are usually the same, or can be. (The grandfather of this movement of re-integration of masks into their rituals was Robert Farris Thompson, in his African Art in Motion.) The movement, “dancing the masks,” was done by average village people, and barely rises to the level of folk-dance. So the masks on the wall were always more interesting than the videos of their being danced. There was never a comparable movement to re-integrate the Western church paintings put in museums into their contexts, and the practice of the Philadelphia Museum of Art of placing English aristocratic portraits in period rooms in the McFadden collection has not been widely followed. When a version of this was tried, placing the Lehman collection in a pastiche of Lehman’s New York townhouse with red velvet walls (mimicking the look of their collector’s world, not the world from which they came) in New York’s Metropolitan Museum, it was widely panned.10 But this makes sense. Art is a Western concept, so among Westerners, there are fewer groups demanding re-contextualization. Exceptions are countries with political points to make, such as are exemplified by the famous demands of the Greek government that the Elgin marbles from the Pantheon be returned from Britain to Athens—not to the Parthenon, damaged because of being used as a munitions dump under the Ottomans, and outdoors in a city whose pollution has already required the removal of other Acropolis sculptures, but to another Western-style museum. When they were removed, Greece was not an independent country, and indeed the city-state of ancient Athens that funded these is only coincidentally in the same place as the capital of the country demanding their return. James Cuno has considered these examples of politically motivated “cultural retentionist” policies, and shares some of my sense that this overlooks the artness of the works, or indeed is inimical to it.11 It’s based on contemporary definitions and demands of countries that didn’t exist when most of these objects were made.

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Sometimes the possible audience (and the maker of the object may not know how large this is) is far broader than anything the maker could have intended— always in the case of works that endure for centuries. The works that aren’t capable of having a reception circle larger than their immediate world don’t stay around to be perceived, or don’t ever leave it. (Most that are capable—and we can’t usually say which these are—don’t survive, or are not disseminated outside that circle.) This is why saying that works of art are “universal” means the current reception circle is different from anything the maker could have envisioned. It doesn’t mean everybody has to get something from it. Contemporary arguments that, say, Homer isn’t “universal” because he doesn’t speak to the concerns of (say) queer women of color in the 2020s are setting up a straw man. He doesn’t speak to the concerns of Marylanders either, considered as Marylanders, but he may speak to human beings, or to me, despite my being a Marylander. Much depends on how you define your group, and what you hold primary. Art is the act of our seeing something as art. We see this perhaps most clearly in the case of objects intended for oblivion but wrested from it, objects created for individuals and buried with them, perhaps even created (for some objects) especially to be buried with them. Or the Egyptian mummy portraits of Fayum which survived because of the dry desert sands and willingness of later generations to dig up graves. Pity archeologists of the future! We in the West do not bury our dead, even our rich and powerful, with large amounts of gold jewelry, as the Scythians did. The contemporary descendants of American Indians now protest at the desecration of their ancestors’ graves and demand the return of material found there. Who protests for the Scythians? There is no intrinsic difference between robbing Egyptian graves and robbing American Indian graves; it’s circumstances (perhaps the Islamization of Egypt) that determine whether or not we can do this. The future of works can’t be foretold. People who make things in one set of circumstances can’t say with any degree of assurance what the future and other circumstances will say about their efforts, or even if the future and other places will be able to judge. Surely Homer, or the collective we call Homer, would be surprised to hear that thousands of years later his/their works would be read in foreign tongues that didn’t exist at the time, and be discussed—or even that they would have been the basis of the intervening Greek Classic age culture, and beyond. Subsequent audiences can proclaim something a “classic” or “universal,” but that’s because they value it in different circumstances. We can’t predict forward: will completely different people find this work “universal”? There’s no way of saying. The future reads the past, not the reverse. To sum up, a list of what has to line up for us to call something art: •

It has to exist in some form. I have a book of artworks destroyed by the Second World War. But they exist in photographs and in memory.12 This book was published in 1946, yet many of the destroyed buildings pictured here have been reconstructed. (The paintings have not.) Some years ago,

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•

•

•

the Bode Museum in Berlin (formerly the Kaiser Wilhelm, with the name change itself an effect of war) had an exhibit of works that had been partially destroyed. Those completely destroyed were represented in photographs.13 It has to be something we (can) perceive: another interesting book is The Best Art You’ve Never Seen—only I’ve seen many of them, and the title is misleading because it just means hard to see, or once impossible to see but not now. If nobody has ever seen it, it can’t be art. It has to have relevance for people outside the immediate world for which it was created—which is why Bach’s chorales weren’t seen as art in Leipzig and are now seen (or heard) as art, or the sculptures of the cathedrals. Then, these were the equivalent of a particularly satisfying personal (say) turn of phrase or gesture, objects wedded to specific circumstances—only we’ve taken them out of these circumstances, which was possible because they were small hard things that survived. The object is unchanged, but its context is altered, as are the people looking at it, who see it now as art. What of, say, the Sieg fried Idyll composed by Richard Wagner for Cosima on her birthday? Was it art on the day it was performed for the first time for her, when it was the equivalent of a particularly nice Hallmark birthday card? Or only now for us? It seems safe to say that the composer knew the music would outlive its initial circumstances. Is that enough to make it art? Art is only called art when it escapes its particular circumstances. It’s a fool’s errand to ask, well, what was it before? Many composers, sculptors, or poets have thought their works “art,” only to have others in either their generation or later ones disagree. It has to be in a medium that stays around, even if that medium is memory. The evanescent works of the modern day that challenge this notion by being transitory still beg to be conserved through recording, or at least memorialized in words. Then the words become the artwork, as Shakespeare pointed out in many of his sonnets: human beauty is fleeting, but words endure. Or they can, if we take steps to preserve them.

So what determines if a work has resonance outside its immediate set of circumstances? Partly medium. Partly what the creator does. Partly accident. Partly how the future shapes up. We don’t control all of these. So what is art is partly us, partly the object, partly accident, and partly the odd concatenation of all these forces.

Notes 1 Sarah Greenough and Diane Waggoner, The Art of the American Snapshot 1888–1978 from the Collection of Robert E. Jackson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 2 Matin Parr, Boring Postcards USA (New York: Phaidon, 2004). 3 Barnaby Phillips, Loot: Britain and the Benin Bronzes (Revised and Updated Edition) (London: Oneworld, 2022).

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7 PRINCIPLES OF ORDERING THE SEPARATED ARTWORK Museums and Collections

The modern museum was an outgrowth of the princely “Cabinet of Curiosities” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that mixed shells, stuffed animals, cunningly worked jewels, and paintings. The nineteenth century introduced taxonomy, separation, and classification—natural history to another wing or another museum, separation of geographical areas and time periods. It related objects to each other, rather than each individually to the viewer through our sense of wonder at them. This distanced the objects: they weren’t so much there for us as merely just there. This is the problem we are faced with today. The process of separation and classification still wasn’t complete in the nineteenth century, which stacked paintings floor to ceiling and filled glass cabinets with a pot-pourri of objects: it was possible in our own time to see conscious evocations of this earlier museum style in the grand salon of Washington’s Renwick Gallery (the first Corcoran Gallery of Art; the second Corcoran is now dissolved and dispersed due to its financial woes) as it was some decades ago—now sadly emptied of these things—or Florence’s Pitti Palace today, or in the brimming and dusty glass cases of the Trocadero Museum that only recently gave up its collections to the Musée du Quai Branly, where they are spaced out as individual works. The change is that the high-art museum of the twentieth century almost always lines up individual paintings against a white wall, giving each its own part of the floor-to-ceiling wall; frames are minimized, objects in Plexiglas boxes are picked out by spotlights and surrounded by space in galleries, all rigorously arranged according to chronology, style, and provenance. It was only with the birth of the Modern age that paintings were separated off as art into museums, starting with Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Berlin, when the idea became common that the bourgeoisie should have access to these status items of princes. From this followed the delineation of schools and threads of influence, something that academicians could study, and thus as a result the DOI: 10.4324/9781003373377-9

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now-inevitable chronological and national pattern of larger art museums that now all tell the same story with different works. If in college survey courses of English literature, though these have largely disappeared, it was (in the witty phrase) Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, in museums of painting it’s still Giotto and Duccio to Helen Frankenthaler—and now, in the case of both museums and literature courses, beyond. If you follow the most inviting circuit in a museum, you almost always start back in the thirteenth century with some Byzantine-like church Madonnas, go through the Italian Renaissance and their Flemish contemporaries through the Venetians, Titian and Tintoretto et al., and then Boucher and Fragonard for France, Constable and the English portraitists, Turner, Fontainebleau, the Impressionists, the post-Impressionists, the Modernists, and then Contemporary. It’s like being strapped into a time machine. Or you can do it backwards. That’s more exhilarating, somehow. But why? Such museums are problematic if we don’t know why we should interact with art. If the Romantics thought art could teach us or lift us up (though it’s unclear if it actually did this), that notion died with Modernism, with its insistence that the work itself was the end of the line. And the modern museum taught us to re-conceive of the works of earlier ages outside of their functional surroundings. The modern museum was composed of the flotsam of countless churches, palaces, and large houses, and installed in buildings that took them out of the contexts in which they were individual—the altarpiece neighborhood worshippers saw, the paintings made to flatter a specific king or queen or to decorate a Dutch burgher’s house with images of his life, the portrait of great-uncle Harry, Duke of X. (I have seen interesting pushback to this removal from context in the marigold garlands decorating a statue of the Hindu god Shiva’s bull Nandi in the Freer Gallery in Washington, though I have never seen any Christian use of the countless Christian-themed pictures.) A Madonna and Child was the expression of artist X, not primarily an object for a church—and so they could be taken out of churches, as portraits of great-uncles could be taken out of the ancestral home and put together not with other portraits of members of the same family, but with works by the same artist or contemporaries. Or princely collections of paintings or sculptures assembled as ostentatious displays of power and opulence were nationalized, or made accessible to the bourgeoisie. If you cut the ties of objects that once had a place in a specific world in order to see them as pure art, you have to provide another anchor with a more general version of the world. The modern museum invented, or perhaps was invented by (a chicken and egg problem), the History of Art. Museums, as well as college classes and textbooks, are divided into periods, and sometimes the museums themselves separated into different units: Old Masters, Modern, Contemporary, whether different wings in the same building or different buildings entirely. The result is that all individual works are now conceived of as parts of the same story wherever it is told. We put the Monets with the Monets, or at most with the Renoirs—never with the Titians or Canalettos. And the African masks go either in a separate museum or in another wing of the same building. (The exception

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is the Barnes, to which I return below, which uses another principle than the historical one, namely surface appearance.) History of Art was necessary as a structuring tool. It was touted as a great step forward, an organizing of data. In fact it is a step backward, because it subsumes the individual work to a larger structure: works now merely fill the foreordained slots in a pattern that all works must strive to be part of. What we learn is the structure, not the works that compose it. When this altarpiece was The Altarpiece in Your Neighborhood Church, it had a specific role to play in a specific world—albeit one accessible to a small number of people. It was absolute for that small number. In a museum, taken out of that church, it is merely one element in a larger composition, albeit for more people. All of Velazquez’s pictures of and for Philip IV’s family are now just rectangles on the wall of the Prado, part of the story the museum tells about the development of Spanish painting. The History of Art is larger than any individual museum, thus (almost) all of them follow its dictates. The result of following the same principles of ordering is that each of the encyclopedic museums (which tend not to include the royal collections, at least not to the same degree, emblematic as they are of their own times and place) tells a slightly different version of the same story: in this one another Monet but the same sun-dappled Seine, in that one, another panel of Duccio from Siena but the same legend, another Rembrandt but the same shadows, another Gandhara panel from a stupa—this time the death rather than the birth of Buddha—another Medieval reliquary. All museums that order by time and place according to the History of Art are condemned to tell the same story because they use the same criteria for ordering. Similarly, all libraries are condemned to the (Melvil, not John) Dewey Decimal System, and all colleges divide the music from the literature from the chemistry in the same way, as they do majors and survey courses. It’s the story that’s been institutionalized, not the works. The difference between a library and a museum is that we don’t come to a library as a whole, but usually as a place to find a specific work. (Of course we can browse the shelves of, say, American literature—all under 810.) But in the case of a museum, most visitors come to the whole thing, and must move from room to room. In the modern museum, a viewer has to consciously decouple from the flow to see the individual paintings—and even so, the sameness intrinsic to grouping similar works—all those late Medieval Virgin and Child paintings, for example—means we can largely only see individual works as examples of a type. The type is given; what we are to focus on is what this artist added here to his givens was X or Y. And this is because he studied with Z, who introduced A and B. But what does it do for us? Post-Romantic theory doesn’t know. Most viewers are just overwhelmed at so many variations on the same type, or by so many paintings. Exceptions to the same lockstep History of Art approach to museums nowadays are rare, exceptions that prove the rule rather than offering a real alternative. Seattle’s re-configured Museum of Asian Art that re-opened in 2020 just before the COVID pandemic doesn’t organize by history of art at all, but thematically,

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or, in the case of pottery, by color. (Is this because Westerners have a less developed sense of the history of Asian art?) The African section of the Penn Museum, the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (note: not of “Art”), has showcases with many versions of the same sort of thing, such as musical instruments, and the Greco-Roman section is organized around themes such as daily life and the afterlife. But this foregrounds the ordering even more than the by now passé chronological/geographical lockstep of most museums (or even the Middle Eastern section of the Penn Museum, organized chronologically and geographically). Another exception that proves the rule is a part of Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum (formerly Gallery), that has re-created, in several rooms off its central Italianate court, a mockup of the pre-modern museum. There are butterflies, bugs, an Egyptian child mummy, Medieval reliquaries, paintings, carvings, stuffed animals, animal skeletons, Aztec statues, Goa Christian ivory statues, the horn of a narwhal (thought at the time to be from a unicorn), jewels, a dried hermit crab, and dozens of other interesting things. This is a reproduction of the pre-modern solution of what to do with the objects ripped from their surroundings—namely, just pile them up higgledypiggledy, which was actually a better solution than the modern museum. Museums took a step back 200 (or so) years ago rather than forward when they left the “this is interesting too!” hodge-podge of the princely cabinet of curiosities—shells next to butterflies next to an ivory carving next to a jeweled brooch, all in front of a painting—for the increasingly precise classifications of the several modern museums into which all this was divided. These more modern classifications banished the dead things to the natural history museum, put the jewels in the Applied Arts museum or the Tower, and hung the paintings in the art museum—or even further subdivided them into separate museums or spaces, one of Old Masters and one of Modern Masters, all compartmentalized into schools and periods. In these consciously historicizing rooms, the Walters offers an intentional re-creation of an alternative to the modern museum. It takes as its nucleus (and probably inspiration) a painting, itself part of the Walters collection (and of which an identical version is in the Prado in Madrid), that depicts a Spanish governor in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century visiting a collector’s cabinet, full of objects which are generically similar to those around the visitor. It’s all rather post-Modern self-referential as well, looking both backwards and forwards. As an installation, it’s a stroke of genius (is it itself an artwork? experts can argue). Given the lockstep painting progression of “pre-Giotto through Fra Angelico to Titian to Constable to Turner to Goya to Impressionists to Sargent to Kandinsky and Klee to Barnett Newman and Edward Hopper” chronology of the art museum (curators want an X to fill a gap, and will—or at least will want to— trade their second or certainly tenth Y to get this progression), this collection of things that interested an imaginary nobleman seems deliriously free and utterly fabulous. For starters, it isn’t just painting and sculpture. It’s still got the nowseparated natural history component.

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Still, we can see the Modern world within it, as it contains the seeds of many modern museums: what it lacks in overall order it makes up for in internal groupings. Some of the ordering is geographical: there’s a showcase of Asian things, but that range from a Chinese rhino horn cup to a Goan Christ as Good Shepherd in ivory, and another showcase of African things: masks and statues from various peoples, and some Ghana gold. This prefigures Washington’s Smithsonian with separate African and Asian arts museums facing each other behind the original “castle” building. New York’s Metropolitan has separate wings for each, and San Francisco separates Asian Art, now by City Hall, from the New Guinea works of the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. And the “collector’s study” in the Walters, part of the same mockup installation of rooms related to the cabinet of curiosities, while containing a little of everything, has a series of showcases each with a different theme, though the principle of the theme varies from geography to function to material: Greek, Egyptian, ivory, wood, watches. So even this installation at the Walters doesn’t lack order—most fundamentally as an ordering principle, it attempts to echo as a whole a plausible collection of an earlier age. It’s an “homage.” But compared to the far more advanced ordering of later museums, it seems almost like Michel Foucault’s vision of a world where no distinction between mad and sane was made, but where the village idiots, tolerated and not judged, wandered about at will—and no attempt was made to put people of the not-yet-invented “mad” category in a different place, as the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore showcases the works of schizophrenics and other non-mainstream groups.1 It’s an alternative to the modern museum because it sets out to show us what preceded it, not necessarily what could replace it. It’s an historicist artifact, the exception that proves the rule of the way museums simply are these days. Other alternatives to the otherwise ubiquitous notion of what a museum ought to be occur in prime-time venues as the result of accident. A temporary installation several years back in part of the Harvard University Museums while the galleries were under renovation, a hodge-podge of works just to have something to show tourists, like different styles and pieces of furniture from all sorts of rooms sitting in a warehouse, showed us what museums could once again be: Greek busts stood before twentieth-century paintings, Renaissance portraits next to eighteenth-century landscapes. The necessity of renovation led to “here are some individual works” at Harvard and produced the possibility of the viewer, for once in the last 200 years, making his or her own connections, rather than following those of the art historian. Still, it’s another exception that proves the rule. Most commentators agree that it was the transition from aristocracy and nobility to the bourgeoisie, non-nobles flush with the money of the Industrial Revolution and eager to do what the nobles had done before them, that created the idea of separable Art Objects, and with these the museum. The transfer of the toys of princes to the toys of rich commoners seemed self-evident. But how far down the social order was art supposed to go? In the nineteenth century, the

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attempt was made in countries that had or had had kings to go even further down, to the working man, as with the South Kensington Museums, later Victoria and Albert. One scholar argues (after rejecting the even more top-down theory of Foucault that its purpose was to discipline the common folk) that England “curated the museum explicitly for economic purposes”: Its “primary purpose was … to reform British design education and improve the aesthetic sensibilities of Britain’s workers, benefitting British industry as a result.”2 In the United Sates, with an absence of royalty, where people were delineated in quantitative rather than qualitative terms—how much money they had, which according to lore if not reality could change, in the manner of the Horatio Alger rags to riches stories—this was less of an issue. In America it seemed primarily, if not only, the Barnes Foundation—because Dr. Barnes had been influenced by the views of John Dewey that made education a logical next step in linking art to perceiver—that was interested in educating the common man. When I was a student at Haverford College in the early 1970s, I took the Paoli Local a few stops over to Merion, paid a dollar and signed a list at the gate house, and went in—visitors were limited to I believe 100 a day, and I came early, and besides, Merion was fairly inaccessible. Back then, the story still circulated that decades earlier, when James Michener, later famous for Tales of the South Pacific—the basis for the well known musical South Pacific—and subsequent door-stopper books about places, such as my own Chesapeake area—was a student at Swarthmore College, he had tried to get into the collection and was refused. At that point all would-be visitors had to write a letter to introduce themselves, and his stated correctly that he was a student at the (elite, expensive, private) college. He then tried again posing as a working man, and was admitted. The art world followed closely the 2010 move of the Barnes Foundation collection from tranquil but remote Merion to center city Philadelphia. The will of Dr. Barnes that put his personal collection in Merion had to be broken to allow this, using a law that allowed charitable bequests to be altered if it was impossible financially to carry out their conditions, as it had become with the Barnes. Yet the caveat in allowing the move was that all the paintings be in precisely the same order in a new installation that was the twin of the Merion rooms, with Pennsylvania Dutch ironwork above and beside the works preserved. Dr. Barnes thought that these paintings gained from juxtaposition with others that weren’t of the same period or painter or country, and with his collection of ironwork. And then there are the showcases of apparently random objects that survived the move as well, in exactly the same order in exactly the same showcases in exactly the same rooms with exactly the same other works: American Indian pots, turquoise jewelry, small Greek statues, Chinese fragments. Although its overwhelming tenor is late Impressionist/post-Impressionist, these works hang cheek by jowl in over-crowded profusion with everything else from world art—a Chinese ancestor portrait, Egyptian sculptures, anonymous religious paintings from the Middle Ages, some individual non-Modernist masterpieces such as a Franz Hals portrait of a man, some Chardin still lifes and pictures of serving

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maids going about their business, many forgettable smaller paintings, a plethora of Southwest Indian Navajo turquoise and silver bracelets and necklaces and pots (these are mostly downstairs), several rooms of African carvings (including the most famous of the lot, the Barnes Dogon couple), and the unforgettable ubiquity of interestingly shaped Pennsylvania Dutch ironwork that is usually placed above the highest layer of paintings to have them end in a kind of crowning flourish as the eye travels up the wall. This is the order that appealed to one person, and now we’re all stuck with it. (In the princely cabinet of curiosities, the ordering was equally personal, but random; there was nothing sacred about it.) We’re condemned forever to look at this one painting from the 1920s next to the same Renaissance saint being tortured. In Merion, we could still think these juxtapositions fresh—Dr. Barnes had arranged them this way: Come and see his collection! We hadn’t thought there should be an alternative. Suddenly, it’s clear there can never be one—and the juxtapositions seem controlling, a vast straitjacket: legally unalterable, the ordering reaches out and demands that we make connections. The connections Dr. Barnes apparently saw are usually fairly obvious: he liked visible connections in the here and now, rather than art historical ones. But they end up working the same way on the viewer, namely as constraints that place individual works inside larger contexts. Two paintings next to each other have a big red blotch in the center, or a large foreground and a small distant background, or both swoop up to the right. The Pennsylvania Dutch ironwork interacts in the same way with the paintings as the other paintings: a swoosh in the ironwork is echoed in the painting below, a graceful double-lyre of arms in the painting’s figure is mimicked by the curving arms of the iron. Frequently, they seem like rather trivial visual puns. An individual’s associations have been forced on us all, and the result is scarcely more satisfactory than the lockstep art history approach of the standard museum. Indeed, it may be less satisfactory. The standard art museum with its ho-hum ordering actually allows us to forget the structure more easily than individualized plans. So the paradox is that personal orderings demand more attention than standard ones. Unless it is our own. We hardly think about the coercion a standard house or apartment building or museum plan forces on our life, but in a Frank Gehry museum, or for that matter its spiritual progenitor the Frank Lloyd Wright Guggenheim in New York where we are continuously forced up and down the snail shell circular ramp (except in the more standard add-on gallery room on the side—what a relief!), all we can think about is the building. The coercion at the Barnes is the ordering. The more individual the ordering is, the more we have to be aware of it. For that matter, all creative acts are like this: an individual re-orders the world after his/her vision; later, others can dance to this tune. Certainly Modernist art is of this nature, with pride of place given to individual vision; arguably this is true of all post-Romantic art. Modernism offers encyclopedic versions of the world—but all from the perspective of one person. There is no presupposition of

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objective commonality. And we are condemned to walk within it. Once again, size matters: we can put down a Modernist novel, or turn away from a painting. But a Modernist museum surrounds us: it’s like finding ourselves trapped in a Klee drawing or a Munch painting, rather than being ourselves looking at it. Similarly, personal art can be enthralling if we choose to enter it and can leave; transferred to the political realm of which we are a part and enlarged to encompass everything, a controlling personal view becomes fascist. The Barnes Foundation website notes the influence of John Dewey and cites Dewey’s commitment to education—logical since for Dewey the primary problem of the separated artwork was that it was separated: we’re going to un-separate that! And for everyone! What is never answered is the question, Why should people be educated about art? What does it do for them? What’s the point? The site notes: Following the philosophy of John Dewey—who believed that education was fundamental to democracy—Dr. Barnes held art appreciation lessons at his factory. Each day, for two hours, production stopped as his workers discussed painting and philosophy. Many were women or African Americans to whom, in defiance of the era’s prejudices, Dr. Barnes had extended employment.3 I like the munificence of that “extended employment” bit. Most of us would say that he hired them to work for him because they made products whose sale made him money. And “art appreciation lessons”! Just sit down and do what you’re told! The teaching method of the Barnes is purely formalistic, Modernist to the core, based on comparing works to other works. If you reject the historical approach, that seems a logical alternative. An exhibit in spring of 2022, set up near the coat check and restrooms at the Foundation on the Parkway in Center City Philadelphia, honors the Director of Education for the Foundation from 1950 to 1988 who taught hundreds of students, Violette de Mazia. It lauds her this way: Learning to see was the goal de Mazia set for her students. To recognize a painting’s subject was not enough. Instead, she encouraged them to focus on a work’s visual elements—color, light, lime, and space—and how they work together. This objective, or scientific, approach to art was developed by Dr. Barnes [who was a medical doctor and chemist, by the way, and whose money came from having developed a medicine to prevent infant blindness caused by gonorrhea] and de Mazia put it into practice though her lectures and writings. The showcase under this wall text contains examples from her lectures. One of them compares a fold of cloth in an El Greco to a fold of cloth in a Cézanne. Which, she asks, is more “directly decorative, i.e. catches the eye first. And which is more decorative, i.e. holds the eye longest?” (I have to say I wouldn’t have been

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able to answer her question, had I been her student. And she was French, so I won’t quibble over “longest” rather than “longer.”) This fold to fold across centuries is emblematic of the organization of the collection: surface to surface, shape to shape. The esthetics of the Barnes is most clearly seen on the mezzanine between the ground floor and upper floor. This is a narrow landing halfway up the staircases with an elevator/lift entrance and a line-up of about a dozen stone statues all about four feet/a meter and a half high, some (the slightly shorter) on wooden pedestals and others on the floor between the pedestals, all the subdued hues of gray stone, a few of which show faded paint. They range from a Modigliani bust head, itself seeming to be archaic, to an Indian female (a yaksi, presumably) with voluptuous breasts, to two Jacques Lipschitz sculptures each of a person rendered by flat surfaces breaking up and interrupting the curves, to a Medieval Virgin and Child and various Christian saints. The presentation is framed at the ends with some of the southwest silver belts that Dr. Barnes (as everyone at the Barnes calls him: you have only to listen to the docents giving tours at full volume, all of whom have graduated from the educational program) so cherished, and of which there are many other examples in the museum—along with dozens of Southwest Indian pots and turquoise and silver jewelry in various showcases. The line-up of the two rows of statues makes them equivalent: all about the same size, color, and placement, all with the rounded tops of heads, some on bodies. They are visually quite similar, though they span hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years, and come from traditions ranging from Indian to European Medieval to Modernist. The similarity is the point: you notice that first because of the arrangement and the placement. Later you can comment on the differences in treatment of the heads in, say, the Modigliani and the Medieval Virgin. That’s the relentlessly Modernist view of the museum—the second layer of offering. The artist offered, and Dr. Barnes offered the artist’s offering. We don’t need the ubiquitous docents speaking at the top of their voices, all schooled in Dr. Barnes’s and Mme de Mazia’s formalist approach, to see this: in the hodge-podge of images, we are to be aware of appearance, nothing more. It’s interesting that Dr. Barnes liked figurative paintings, which he arranged following a Modernist (and hence increasingly abstractionist) sensibility. What if he had a collection of late Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, and their ilk? The ordering into visual patterns of equivalence would be redundant, as the paintings themselves are already mostly about visual ordering of elements. (The Matisses, arguably patterns of color, are still about their subject: people, still lifes.) The point of the Barnes is to analyze representational paintings as flat surfaces all existing in the same time and place, in fact on the walls of his museum. That’s his revenge on their content, his Modernist take on non-Modernist works. It doesn’t mean he’s multi-cultural—in fact the opposite. He’s relentlessly of his own time and place. The African statues aren’t there to give a cultural perspective. They’re there because (as the Modernists realized) they look pre-Modernist. They are interesting shapes, and could be from Europe ca. 1900, like the Modigliani head on the mezzanine.

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But there are other ways to see the works in the Barnes Foundation than as patterns of color and line, or as various ways to paint drapery. Namely by seeing not the surface of the window frame, the Modernist obsession, but what is seen through the glass. Even a Mondrian sees an arrangement of line and color through the glass: that’s the content. Of course, insisting that paintings are a flat surface of line and color is not wrong; it’s just that it’s a particular emphasis, a specific focus of the lens that can be changed. The Modernist focus on the work has had its day. Here, for example, are some other possible reactions to paintings in the Barnes Foundation. The El Greco that for de Mazia was a way to paint drapery is an ecstatic vision of the Virgin and Child as envisioned by a Saint Hyacinth—as we can determine with a bit of research; there are no explanatory texts in the Barnes, just the last name of the artist, or supposed artist—and no quibbles or later emendations about “follower of ” or “school of.” The saint’s vision floats on clouds, surrounded by light. We see his ecstasy in his elongated face turned away from us in foreshortened fashion to the vision, and in the beautiful overlong fingers of both the amazed hand we see in front, as well as the other, Saint Hyacinth’s proper right hand (we don’t have to know who he is, as he’s clearly a monk) that flutters against his will to his chest in amazement. The drapery folds contrast with the face and hands, and the eye is led up from the bottom of the painting by the body shape that is like a blunted arrow, following the saint’s gaze to the floating Virgin. Opposite her in the upper part of the painting is a statue of a bishop rendered in shadow and dull stone colors so as not to distract from the glowing apparition. The saint’s amazement and total helplessness are evident, and the apparition in the glowing clouds is as startling to us as to the saint. He’s upright and not collapsed, though he seems about to fall to the ground, completely consumed by the vision. The painting is about the incommensurability of the rare intersections of the earthly with the divine. Usually, these two realms are utterly separate, but sometimes, just sometimes, they touch, and we are amazed. In another room is a Cézanne of a young man sitting in a chair in front of a desk with some papers and looking at a skull set on two books. He’s contemplating it—his right hand supports his head, and he has a solemn expression on his face. He’s facing our left, dressed as a student perhaps, not a laborer. It’s a memento mori, like the de la Tour Mary Magdalene and candle pictures, one of which is in Washington, one in New York, one in Los Angeles, and one in Paris (the candle both gives the light and is a symbol of the evanescence of that light). Only with Mary Magdalene, it’s supposed to be connected with her realizing she has to give up what tradition says were her sinful ways. And she’s a mature if still beautiful woman. Here the boy is scarcely through puberty. He’s a young man who shouldn’t be worried about death, and he’s relentlessly secular in his ordinary well-off clothes. What’s he doing at this young an age contemplating a skull? The unfolded paper may be the clue, as it is to another situation in the newly-uncovered painting of Eros behind the woman reading a letter in

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a Vermeer (Girl Reading a Letter Beside an Open Window, Dresden)—clearly the letter is from a lover. In this painting, perhaps someone has died and he is just now getting the news? In any case what the painting is about is the contrast of the skull, the young man’s meditation, and his youth. Even the young will face death, it tells us, and it’s a sorry day when they realize this. Or a Renoir of a mother and the three children on rocks by the seashore. She has a basket on her back, and looks down at the children. A little research online tells us the title of the painting is Mussel Fishers at Berneval, painted in 1879—but it’s clear to all viewers they have to be here for a practical reason, as all are in ordinary working clothes and the mother has the basket, a large one. She gazes reflectively at her strikingly beautiful children on the left side of the painting, a tow-headed boy and two younger girls, the older of whom is smiling and holding the hand of the youngest child, a slightly darker blonde, the littlest as serious as the mother. The water and rocks recede in the background on the painting’s left over the children, none of whom is older than probably five years old, the boy, going down to perhaps three, the younger girl. The treatment of the water is frothy and beautiful, the colors muted pastels, the children very beautiful indeed. So it’s a painting about natural and human beauty. But the mother and the younger girl are serious, and all the children, whom the mother clearly had in quick succession, are here with her to help her gather mussels—even if you don’t know what it is that’s to be put in the basket on her back, you know it’s something, and that the kids are going to help in their fashion. Neither the littlest child nor the mother is smiling, turning back to make sure all the children are with her and not getting into danger. The older girl looks lovingly at the younger, the older boy seems to hover protectively over the girls and looks inquiringly at the mother. They are caught in a moment; now back to work. It’s the contrast between the beauty of the children and of the surroundings on one hand, and the grim fact of their working at so young an age, that’s the pathos of this painting. Life is both beautiful and grim. What stories of sadness and deprivation are told by these three so-close-in-age children, so beautiful and in such soft tones before this pink and purple water, the contrast of the moment of stillness and the work they have still to do and the fact that they will work all this day, and the next, and the next, and the next. This is the only life the children will probably ever know, and the mother was probably once a child such as her own. And where is the father? Dead? Working in the fields? John Dewey didn’t like remaining on the level of “representation” or “reference,” though these are clearly one way to see artworks, and neither do I. But this doesn’t mean our only alternative is the Barnes Foundation’s relentless formalism. Sanity lies in the middle, seeing the world in artworks, only in a specific form. Dewey, echoing the Romantics, thought this form was the sensibility of the artist; I say it’s the distancing mechanism of the work that the artist has effected, and then left. Art actually includes the world, as I would say, but distanced so we don’t have to respond to it: it doesn’t merely represent it.

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Here’s Dewey, inveighing against nineteenth-century realism: What does it mean to say that a work of art is representative, since it must be representative in some sense if it is expressive? To say in general that a work of art is representative is meaningless. … If literal reproduction is signified by “representative” then the work of art is not of that nature, for such a view ignores the uniqueness of the work due to the personal medium through which scenes and events have passed. But representation may also mean that the work of art tells something to those who enjoy it about the nature of their own experience of the world: that it presents the world in a new experience that they undergo. (83) The “personal medium” bit seems Romantic, like Wordsworth’s emotions of the artist, and it’s unclear why this produces (if it does) a “personal experience.” I believe I can say why, if it does so. The fact that we don’t get wet when we are near a picture of a waterfall does not obligate us to conclude that it is entirely “representation.” A painting, whether “abstract” or “realistic” or in between, relates to the world or part of it with varying degrees of distancing. Imagine the ability to miniaturize a waterfall and put it on our desk. Then imagine it in a video scene projected on the wall. Then imagine the video frozen in time in a single image. That’s the painting or photograph of the waterfall. We might say the magically miniaturized one on our desk is the “real” waterfall, not a representation. But the miniaturization is the same sort of removal from the size and qualities of the waterfall we might see at Yosemite as the movie or the painting. Nor is it true that words, of which literature is made, are intrinsically “referential.” They are integrated into the world, and can interface with its gears to produce motion if the circumstances line up—and there’s no way of saying beforehand whether this will happen. ( John Searle, considered below, was interested in extreme cases he called “speech acts” that he thought turned the gears by themselves, but in fact they too are dependent on their placement in the world to work.) Words, and images (a painted waterfall is to the waterfall as hearing a familiar person speak an unfamiliar language, or acting in a strange way, is to what we normally see) are part of the world, and the arts are specific presentations by an absent presenter, even if a Mondrian or a Malevich. These paintings gain traction with the real world because they are part of it, and we recognize their elements as being from the real world. Like words. How can words gain traction with the world? If I say “I’d like a slice of ham,” we may get the ham in our mouth and eat it (that’s certainly real). If a lot of conditions are met, that is: if it’s appropriate for us to ask and the right place. If it’s a gas station we won’t get it, nor if it’s against dietary restrictions. To get it, we have to correctly speak the language of where we are, and the hearer has to understand, and there has to actually be ham—as well as many other conditions we are unaware of until one of them fails to be fulfilled. Such as “Well, we have ham, but it’s a bit off so I don’t want to serve it to you.” The painting of a waterfall isn’t accurate

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to the real waterfall or not; rather it gives us the same appearance of the waterfall that the world does. A symphony is made of sounds, though they do not have to be the everyday honking horns of Gershwin’s American in Paris. We should perhaps not be too hard on the Barnes Foundation for placing things in juxtaposition that actually come from radically different worlds, and judging them merely on their appearance. The Metropolitan Museum was doing the same in 2022, with a cluster of large stone statues in the hall where the Christmas Tree is set, usually devoted to Medieval Christian art. These formed a semi-circle in the center of the room, and towered over the visitor looking up at them, a pow-wow of a Mayan god, a Christian Virgin, a Khmer statue, and others. (African art does not produce large stone statues, so Africa is absent.) The effect is like the mezzanine of the Barnes: their similarity is merely formal; all are large stone carvings of human shapes. The result is either obvious or a bad visual pun—but what would we have as an alternative to the otherwise relentless classification by time and place of the rest of the museum? Or is it a sort of “It’s a Small World After All” statement? See, everybody makes large stone statues (except Africa). We are all alike! Or consider the way the Met placed African sculptures in galleries of European art while the Rockefeller wing that usually houses them (organized by region) was under renovation. A large Bamana female rises up at one side of the large room the viewer enters after the Tiepolos at the center of the Met’s European paintings galleries. It’s the room with large Neapolitan and Baroque paintings, Guido Reni, Caravaggio, and Guercino. She’s fully as statuesque as any of the Virgin and child Majestà groupings on the walls. The point seems to be: See? There are mothers in all cultures! The complete divergence of meaning between this seated female for the Bamana (related to fertility) and the virgin conception of the Son of God for Christians is completely ignored. As I write, the most obvious and almost jokey (?) of these juxtapositions at the Met is the placement of a large Fang Bieri head from a reliquary bundle, called the Great Bieri, last in the collection of sculptor Jacob Epstein, in front of the Rembrandt painting of Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer. Bust, bust. See? That the Fang head is a generalized ancestor meant to mark bones and not a decorative homage to a foundational poet of the Greek classical era (the clothing in the picture, however, is not classical) goes up in smoke. Like the juxtapositions across time in the Barnes, it seems a strained visual pun. But what’s a poor museum to do that is based on organizing things? This is organization by surface visual similarity. The alternative is the hodge-podge of the princely cabinet of curiosities—or of “Ripley’s Believe It—OR NOT!” considered below, which are almost preferable. Photography, on a related note, is perhaps the most problematic of art forms, and the most Modernist, as all photographs are like the Barnes Foundation collection, an individual’s ordering of objective elements that has been frozen for us all: we can never break apart the elements of a photograph to re-order them ourselves, as we can never re-order the Barnes. Cartier-Bresson is the best example

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of a photographer as obsessed with his own individual ordering as Dr. Barnes was: the perfect moment that happened in a split second and that he froze forever. This too has its own deadness: once we “get” the Cartier-Bresson, it has no more interest. Photography is condemned to instant consumption: it says, look what I saw! I’ve framed it by excerpting it from the world so you can focus on what I want you to focus on. Get it? Yes, we say. We get it. We see what you saw. Susan Sontag, in her essay On Photography, was wrong about photography. She thought the common thread in photography was its implacability, the fact that its reaction to anything it saw was merely a click.4 She underestimates the activity involved in deciding when to click. In fact, photography is like the over-eager student constantly trying for extra credit: I saw a pattern in the kaleidoscope I could make interesting by enclosing what I saw in a rectangle so this is all you can see! We can never break out of the frame of the photograph. Photography imagines the world in fragments and demands credit for getting the frame that would focus viewers on that particular fragment. To understand the photograph, we have to understand the act of excluding all the rest that isn’t there. And we say, okay, I see that if you eliminate everything else, this is interesting. But we can’t do anything further with photographs: each is a full stop, because it excerpts from the flow. Paintings include up to the frame; photographs exclude all that is outside the frame. Paintings start with a blank canvas and add; photographs start with the world and subtract. Photographs are dead ends in a way that paintings are not.

Notes 1 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage, 1988). 2 Lily Cao, “The Educational Objectives of the South Kensington Museum: Developing British Industry Through the Cultivation of Aesthetic Taste,” accessed 15 March 2022. www.eruditionmag.com/home/the-educational-objectives-of-thesouth-kensington-museum-developing-british-industry-through-the-cultivation­ of-aesthetic-taste 3 Barnes Foundation, accessed 7  January 2022, www.barnesfoundation.org/planyour-visit 4 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Noonday, 1989).

8 UNCONVENTIONAL ORDERING Ripley’s “Believe It—OR NOT!”

The notion of art as a separable category of things, and museums as the places where these are enshrined so as to be clearly perceived as such, is clearly defined by time and place—a product of the Modern age. They’re like the cultivated hothouse flowers of florists: we figured out by applying Mendelian principles over many generations how to get wildflowers to make bigger blossoms. But there were flowers before greenhouses and cultivation. The prince who put an interesting shell in his cabinet of curiosities was clearly aware of its aesthetic element, or that of a jeweled carving whose religious subject he also understood. But he didn’t have to justify this by calling it art or the resulting conglomeration by calling it a museum: it was just something that caught his fancy. It was interesting, or looked nice. Similarly, we can have collections of interesting things we don’t call art. Putting things together and opening doors to viewers doesn’t make them art. We know this already from the cabinets of curiosities. We can see it again in what may be the modern equivalent of these, albeit at a more plebian level, the collections marketed in major US cities as Ripley’s Believe It—OR NOT! What to call them? Museums? Collections of oddities/curiosities? These are mere hodgepodges, like the princely cabinets of curiosities, even though both have a sort of minimal internal structure—groupings of similar objects. What’s perhaps most interesting about such hodge-podges is that they allow us to articulate more clearly what makes an object art in the now passé sense, if we want to do this for the sake of intellectual exercise. Some things in the Ripley’s collections could qualify, as many things in the cabinet of curiosities do, at least to judge by the Walters re-creation and the painting on which it is based. In the Walters, we’d immediately rule out calling art the bugs and butterflies in cases on the desk in the center, the starfish and shells, the crocodile, and the narwhal horn. These were created by nature, and so do not bear the traces of DOI: 10.4324/9781003373377-10

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people—unless we are to regard them as being like photographs, where the human element is precisely that someone thought them interesting enough to put them on view. But that makes the act of presenting them the art, not the object itself. That’s possible, but it requires the twentieth century to have this occur to people—at the end of the museum era, not the beginning. For example, putting an artist’s installation in a museum and signing it: a 50s suburban house with all its cringe-worthy tackies, for example. Or a room with potted palms, plush chairs, and piped-in Strauss Waltzes to evoke 1890s Vienna. There is no formal difference between an “installation” with potted palms and plush chairs and the way the main room at the top of the stairs in Washington’s Renwick Gallery was configured in the 1970s and 80s, with potted palms and a plush oval bench in the center and floor-to-ceiling salon paintings. Both evoke an era. But one of them is presented as art and the other isn’t; the second is just interior décor. Or we might say: one is a room to do things in, the other is a room to look at. And frequently, for just this reason, we aren’t allowed to enter an installation in a museum, just look from the doorway. The top floor of the Walters Museum has rooms with nineteenth-century Orientalizing paintings displayed floor to ceiling against dark walls. You feel as if you’ve stepped back to 1850, which is clearly the idea. But in the Walters, the point is to look at the paintings on that floor. In an installation, nothing is this interesting intrinsically, apart from the combination of things before us. In the old Renwick or the top floor at the Walters, we call it skillful museum decoration— someone was behind it, but it’s like landscape design. It’s aimed at us, made for us to live in, to “hear,” and isn’t merely for us to overhear. Its degree of artness is low. But in the case of the Renwick or the Walters, there is no cognitive dissonance about this fact: we know the percentage of artness in the interior décor is supposed to be low, like that of a beautifully set table, or a nice herbaceous border in a garden, or a beautifully executed ice-skating routine. It’s all predictable, but really well done. Nobody’s asking us to separate it off as art, just to appreciate the artistic percentage of something that is part of our life. (This may be the way people saw the cathedral sculptures or heard the Bach cantatas before the separation of art as a distinct entity in the Enlightenment and Romantic Eras.) Nowadays, many things presented as art are actually more like the herbaceous border, with a low percentage of artness. Yet the demand is that we see them as 100%, as what we call simply “art.” We need to remember that there are many things with some degree of art less than anything close to 100%. Plus size matters. If they get too large or are too mutable, they can’t fully be art; they surround us, which means we have to come to terms with them: they are things requiring a response. Art doesn’t, but that’s circular. We call art what bears the traces of absent people but doesn’t require a response, and isn’t aimed at a group that includes us. And it has to be of a certain small size that we can merely overhear, not defend ourselves against or respond to. A small feline can be a cute pet, but a tiger can’t, and we have to admire from behind bars in the zoo, or in photographs, which similarly protect us from danger. Christo’s wrapped buildings have the greatest

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degree of artness in photographs or seen from afar. Standing in front of them, we say: Why is this building covered in cloth? Can I go in and use the bathroom? There are Ripley’s collections in many cities, but the one I happened into, to kill time with my sons before the paddleboats in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor opened, is in that city. Its title of “Odditorium” suggests a place for “odd auditory” stimuli, but it has nothing to do with sound and isn’t even set up in usual “sloping floor with a stage” configuration of modern auditoria. A bit of online poking about provided the information that there have been such Odditoria since 1932 in cities more major than Baltimore.1 In Baltimore, Ripley’s is in the two-level shopping and restaurant strip of the Rouse-built Inner Harbor (Rouse also made the planned community of Reston, VA), and sports a giant two-story plastic snake emerging from its façade. I’d grown up reading the comic strip of Ripley’s Believe It or Not, always found, in my hometown Sunday comics, somewhere near Dick Tracy and Mark Trail and Little Orphan Annie. I associate Ripley’s catch phrase of “Believe It or Not” with the same carney atmosphere as old-time circus sideshows. And by the turnstile at the entrance were store mannequins posed as what in fact seemed classic sideshow attractions, or what would be store mannequins in the world of Charles Addams—a two-headed lady, a porter with a “this way” sign who looked like the wilted potato-dumpling faces of Bavarian farm women that grace the humorous postcards sold in Munich for Oktoberfest. The first things I saw were the over-sized African masks on the way up the stairs. Were these art? Or curiosities to poke fun at? Art museums have many such masks these days. Only, these masks seemed rather bland and too big—the same almost mechanical reproductions that are usually for sale on the sidewalk next to New York’s Museum of Modern Art. There was an undistinguished Bamana antelope mask larger than anything I’d ever seen, and a Baule Goli dance mask that was as large as a table. One way to tell African knockoffs, soullessly reproduced to sell to tourists, is that they are fairly expressionless, and usually too large and ornate. These were all these (bad) things. So (confusingly), other versions of these things could have been art (?). But not these (?). Or nothing here, given their context? We can pick out art in contexts where it doesn’t belong, we feel. Consider the stories told of someone finding a masterpiece at a flea market. So context isn’t everything. But the person who finds this out-of-context masterpiece has to be different from the person usually looking at the flea market (or it would have been snapped up long before), and from the person who filed it under “flea market junk” rather than “artistic masterpiece.” The viewer has to be in the “wrong” context, as arguably I was at the Ripley’s Odditorium in Baltimore. The explanatory text that tried to cast these African made-for-tourist giants (?) as extraordinary emphasized their weight and the claim that they were danced for hours (not likely), as well as the claim that the Bamana antelope was decorated with real monkey fur (!). The cards claimed they had been brought back in the 1930s by Ripley. (I didn’t know until the next room that Ripley was a person, a

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Mayakovski look-alike with a gap between his front teeth who had filled several houses with the acquisitions on numerous pre-World War II voyages.) Surely that spoke for authenticity? Maybe I was the one with the presuppositions. But the question of original vs. copy—and whether it made a difference—was posed over and over again, here in this Odditorium. At the top of the stairs there was a whole showcase of the “British crown jewels.” It didn’t even say “replicas,” though perhaps we were trusted to know that. The display seemed as tacky as a P. T. Barnum “mermaid.” Several rooms later, a Han Chinese jade burial suit, made of hundreds of rectangles, the like of which I had only seen in a museum in Canton/Guangzhou, was protected from theft only by a standard high school trophy case sliding-glass-door lock. The jade suit too had to be a fake (?)—if it were real, surely… But here, the sign—which, like all of the signs, ended with “Believe It—OR NOT!” even when the claims were not particularly sensational—admitted that the metal threads that held the jade plaques together had corroded and been replaced by modern brass wire… which implied the jade itself was not fake. Was it possible it was real? And was it art? The exhibit later on did tell us that a Nuremberg Iron Maiden we saw was a replica… was the jade burial suit? I wasn’t sure. If it was a replica that looked like the original but not identified as such, I wouldn’t be able to see it as art—because it would have been intended for me. To fool me, but for me. The same problem arises with a modern “Vermeer” such as made by the forger Van Meegeren, vs a real one.2 A faithful copy made as such at the time as the original for a collector is more art than a fake made nowadays for profit and passed off as the original. The phrase “believe it or not” implies it’s true, whether or not we believe it. However, the type face of the signs, with “OR NOT” in capital letters and separated from the rest by dashes, suggested that we would be within our rights not to believe it. Were we silly enough to be taken in? Yet other things were clearly real, just odd from a sweetly old-fashioned West-centric cultural view: the clunky ceramic clogs meant to be donned for the period of defecation by Koreans squatting over the hole (it was unclear to me what we weren’t supposed to believe here—perhaps: they squat?), and tiny embroidered cloth shoes for bound feet with X-rays of what was done to the foot to make wearing these possible—I’ve seen an exhibit on this in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. Yes, it’s amazing… but not to believe? This wasn’t so much the unbelievable as what average Westerners would find worthy of comment. Could these tiny embroidered shoes be art? There was a Tibetan dagger too, representative of the thread of “exotic” objects from non-Western places, like the African mask with “real monkey fur.” I’ve forgotten what made it a “Believe It—OR NOT”: that it held the power of life and death perhaps? That it was so large? That Ripley (as the text card told us) made the trek to get it on a camel? That (as the text continued) he barely escaped with his life? This subset of exhibits bore the last traces of a non-accessible world, a world where the Exotic was alive and well and not merely a “you have to experience this!” in the Travel Section of the New York Times. Shrunken heads! Bound feet!

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Ripley’s Believe It or Not seemed to me the mid-American version of the hodge-podge of the princely collection, un-self-conscious rather than retro-chic. And as with the Walters’s re-creation of hodge-podge, many of the individual objects could, following modern rubrics, have been outsourced to the specific museum or part of an extant museum our rage for order has created. What was interesting here was not so much the objects themselves as the fact that they were jumbled cheek by jowl. The African objects were versions of things I have seen in museums; the cultural curiosities were the things of the now-outdated ethnography museums. The shrunken heads—here displayed for yuk value—reminded me of a small exhibit in Montreal’s Redpath Museum on the campus of McGill University, whose point was actually that it’s quite difficult to tell a monkey’s flayed face (which is what a “shrunken head” actually is) from a human, and that many passed off as human are monkeys. Related to these a bit further on in the “Odditorium” were the signs of what is sometimes called the “internal emigration” (a German concept for opponents of the Third Reich who went inwards into their creations rather than getting out of Germany) of obsessed people. Art? To some degree, yes. OR NOT? The artworks, if that’s what they were, were like those of the Visionary Art Museum, located further around the curve of the same Inner Harbor. Some had the same focused intensity of these works by outsiders (as we call them). There were carvings that needed, and received, magnifying lenses affixed to the cases to be appreciated, such as nine literally microscopic camels in the eye of a needle—not just one but nine—a strange commentary on the Biblical parallel (was it silly or profound?), and some that were so random as to be compelling, such as a King Tut head carved on the end of toothpick. There was a diorama arrangement of carpenter ants (which, as far as ants go, are quite large) sprayed so as to be made rigid, clothed, and posed as basketball players on a miniature court that fit in a showcase the size of a couple of shoeboxes. Who would be obsessed enough, and strange enough, to do this? But if it had been at the Visionary Art Museum, we wouldn’t have commented on that, since all the works there were made by the obsessed. Then again, aren’t all artists at least to some degree obsessed? Surely the point of putting these odd things in a museum is to make this very point? Some of the “artworks” were more conventional in size and genre but no less unconventional in end effect. In one room were portraits of Bill and Hillary Clinton made out of the grease of fast food—a combination of Chuck Close’s portraits with fingerprints that I’ve seen in the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, and perhaps Morgan Spurlock’s movie Supersize Me. Or was it Joseph Beuys’s vitrines of fat it reminded me of? But this wasn’t part of a painting gallery subsection in the “Odditorium,” as there was no attempt to separate them by genre. And here it was in a tourist attraction, not in a major “classy” museum. Still, the gray of the grease was seductive—like a Renaissance painting all in black and white, or a Mantegna painting mimicking sculpture in a niche. Was there a political point here? I bet if we tried hard enough, we could find one—why not transfer it to the Hirshhorn Museum?

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In the same room as Bill and Hillary was a mannequin that purported to be a waxwork of a now deceased (literal) one-armed paper hanger. I asked a group of well-educated people later what the phrase “like a one-armed paper hanger” meant to them, and discovered that they had no idea, as none had ever lived in houses with wallpaper, as I had. I’d put up wallpaper as well as taken it down with a kind of over-sized razor blade in a handle that strips it off, six-inch strips at a time (you have to wet it first to dissolve the flour paste between the paper and the wall). Those unfamiliar with wallpapering had little idea of the need for two arms to paint the paste on the wall and then hold, and smooth, the roll up the sticky wall. Thus the phrase is meant to express something that can’t be done; at the very least it means working frenetically and inefficiently. So this was a sort of conceptual pun involving unseen words, far more subtle than contemporary artworks that spell out slogans in neon. Here too was a Chinese coin the size of a large oval table, and an even larger “penny” (with the face of Abraham Lincoln) itself made of real pennies—the very large object for Ripley was apparently as unbelievable as the very small—that won a prize at a Midwestern county fair (the pennies alone worth $840—Believe It— OR NOT!). In an art museum, it could have been a commentary on another set of verbalisms—save your pennies, a penny saved is a penny earned, and somehow a reference to the heartland (county fairs) and to virtue, embodied in Abe Lincoln, and a suggestion that these virtues are now as tarnished as the pennies are daily becoming. Art? Or tacky tourist junk? Both? An evocation of the pathos of quiet dedication—or a commentary on it? The unclarity alone was seductive. All this was real, not fake: no glass crown jewels here. And, also incontrovertibly real, an object whose interest was based on not speaking a non-English language, Norwegian in this case: a small, framed train ticket from the 1930s to a village named Hell, which sounds funny in English but not in Norwegian, where the word is related to “cave” in old Norse (in the related language of modern German, Höhle is cave and Hölle is hell). The Believe It OR NOT explanation billed this as “A ticket to Hell.” Funny, no? Well, if you come from Peoria, maybe. Or am I being unjust to Peoria? Wikipedia tells me that this station is still a tourist attraction for English-speaking foreigners, all of whom want to take pictures of the station sign as proof of having been in “Hell.”3 Next to it was a similar framed ticket, both of them about the size of a Paris metro ticket, to “Paradise.” Was this silly? Or a sophisticated commentary on linguistic isolation? An example of it? Both? Purposely ambiguous? There was, in addition to this hodge-podge of objects, a biography, in bits and pieces, of Ripley—who traveled the world looking for what struck his fancy. What to do with it all after his death? Someone had the brilliant idea of making sideshows for tourists—but were they gullible tourists, like those who would flock to see a two-headed lady, or knowing ones, in on the joke? The two-headed lady at the entrance was after all a mannequin, perhaps a winking reference to what tourists were supposed to want? Was this art? Junk? Ripley’s collection, we were told, had been divided into the Odditoria of various cities, and added to

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after Ripley’s death (cf. Bill and Hillary, the more recent penny of pennies), and earned, for somebody, $20 a pop from visitors. Some years ago, the Whitney Museum in New York showed off a probably half-sized kitchen made of millions of glass beads, by the artist known as Liza Lou—walls, appliances, furniture, plates, cleansing powder, sponges…4 It’s the improbability of someone doing all that repetitive work that moves us. Here too. How are portraits of Bill and Hillary in hamburger fat different from the works of a seaside caricaturist crossed with an Ai Weiwei, who filled the cavernous hall of Tate Modern with a billion ceramic sunflower seeds he didn’t paint himself? There is commentary somewhere, though we’re unsure what it is. Similarly there is commentary somewhere, but we can’t say where, in the useless but highquality stainless steel and canvas “Running Fence” of Christo, and in the documentation on show in the Hirshhorn Museum some years ago of the litigation with farmers who didn’t want to deal with steel cables in their ground. So clearly there are alternatives to the modern ordered art museum. Are they lower-order museums with lower-order objects? The contemporary push to put objects in art museums that in earlier decades would not have qualified as art has blurred the difference between these prestigious orderings of art, at the top of the respect chain, and tacky tourist collections such as we still find in carnival towns, or their more commercial cousins such as Ripley’s Odditoria. What, for that matter, is the difference between these and the table in a flea market with a jumble of objects, some interesting and some not, trash mixed with treasures? All are things made by absent people, usually for people unlike us. Are these objects art? Is the assemblage? A sign on a flea market table one Sunday at the end of the Rambla in Barcelona that I wandered into said, in English for the benefit of tourists, NO PHOTOS. Would forbidden photos of this assemblage of random objects largely from the last century and made for people now long dead, most of the objects having no purpose in our world and hence closer to being art, itself be art? After all, it is offering the hodge-podge. How would such a photo be different from Atget’s photographs of long-vanished assemblages of storefront merchandise and mannequins? Before the push to re-make the modern museum into something inclusive and hence closer to the flea market, we would probably have said that the table of bric-a-brac didn’t contain art, and that a photograph of it wasn’t art either. Now it’s not so clear. Or rather what is clear is that the gray area is so wide and contains so much that we no longer try to differentiate art from non-art. Some of the most enjoyable afternoons of my life, I reflect, have been browsing the Paris marché aux puces at the Porte de Clingancourt, the makeshift flea market that in the Wall era of West Berlin was set up every Sunday across from the Philharmonie on the edge of the Potsdamer Platz that was inaccessible due to being covered by the two layers of the Wall, and the Chor Bazaar in Bombay/Mumbai—and I can’t say the experience was much different than passing time engaged with first one thing and then another in the Walters’s Cabinet of Curiosities, or for that matter wandering through a contemporary art museum.

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Notes 1 www.ripleys.com 2 “Hans Van Meegeeren’s Fake Vermeers,” Essential Vermeer, accessed 2 March 2022. www.essentialvermeer.com/misc/van_meegeren.html 3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Station 4 Liza Lou, “Kitchen: 1991–1996,” Whitney Museum of American Art, accessed 15 March 2022. https://whitney.org/collection/works/34855

9 WHAT COUNTS AS AN ARTWORK The Small Hard Things of the Bactrian Hoard

Objects have to survive for us to see them. And that means that the type of objects we call art from the past tends to be of a specific sort; what I call small hard things. Things usually not in museums can be large hard things too—such as parts of buildings that fell down over time and were buried in the dirt and are now set up again, as in Rome and Greece and countless provincial classical cities around the Mediterranean, in Northern Africa and Iberia. But the Berlin Pergamon Museum houses big things indoors, which proves it’s possible: a re-creation of part of the famous (and huge) Pergamon altar, as well as the entire market gate of Miletus, and its Vorderasiatisches Museum has a re-creation of Babylon’s towering Ishtar Gate and a fragment of its processional way. Even larger things than that generally stay outdoors, especially if they haven’t been or can’t be moved, as in the Roman Forum, Trier’s Porta Nigra, the Pont du Gard of southern France, the Athens Acropolis, or the temple at Sounion—and countless other outdoor excavations where the columns of once-buried temples have been excavated and put back together. The fact that museums as constituted by the Romantic era were full of small hard things has produced the rebellion of a great deal of contemporary art that makes large soft things, just to be original; the Glenstone Museum offers a collection of these. However, this is not a new type of thing. It’s certain that previous eras contained things like these that weren’t offered as art, and do so now outside of the museum—such as a haunted house at a seaside resort, first cousin to the room with the faucets and the piles of newspapers at the Glenstone. It’s just a new type of content for the museum. They’re there now, but are unlikely to survive even a century, being large and soft, and amenable to the vicissitudes of time, and usually also to the natural deterioration of the materials out of which they are made. Small hard things are more portable, seem more compact, and tend to stay around longer. Large soft things don’t. Besides, people will likely DOI: 10.4324/9781003373377-11

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tire of them and find them too bulky to keep, not to mention too like things outside of museums to be worth taking care of. (Contemporary museum curators have trouble keeping the crockery in Julian Schnabel works on the canvas, and even the glopped-on-with-a-palette-knife paintings of the nineteenth-century American visionary artist Albert Pinkham Ryder degrade at alarming rates. And then there’s that animal fat in vitrines to deal with.) Are these things “art” now for as long as it they do survive? Saying they are requires not merely saying this is a new kind of art, but applying a definition of art based on things of high carat value to things of low carat value, objects (or experiences, installations, performances, and so on) with a smaller percentages of artness. Earlier ages had these things, and for that matter we have their cousins now outside the museum, but not with the presupposition that an “Artist” would offer them as “Art.” Calling these a new kind of “art” is applying a Romantic/ Modernist concept to a pre- and post-Romantic/Modernist object. We are supposed to applaud the person behind a work that has (say) a 5% degree of artness as if it were close to 100%. We can only be asked to do this if we believe that anything offered by an Artist or enshrined in a museum will be close to 100%, like the things already there. But things with a low degree of artness are legion in the world outside art and the museum: shrink-wrapped boats, buildings reflected upside down in puddles, odd cacophonies of traffic noise and bird sounds, the cake display refrigerator in a New Jersey diner, a jumble of nineteenth-century objects on a flea market table. They don’t beg to be brought inside the museum, as silence and ambient noise don’t beg to be brought inside the concert hall, though they are in John Cage’s celebrated “4’33”” piece, where a person sits at a keyboard for the length of time of the title without playing and we listen to the air conditioning and people shifting in their seats, as well as the odd stifled cough. Yes, it’s original, but it assumes the very distinction between concert hall (museum) and the world outside that it actually helps dismantle. Bringing the outside in dilutes the concert hall experience and weakens this once-clear distinction between concert hall and outside. If there is no big difference, why go to the concert hall? Once, say in the time of John Cage or Yvonne Rainer, this inclusion of the outside world was exciting; now it’s caused the world we are now in where we no longer speak of art, the formerly daunting distinctions between art and not-art now all but totally erased. Footsore tourists are wrong to say that their dog could do the apparently random paintings in a museum, but they are right to see that somehow these works are not the same as the older ones. Tourists give less respect to the fact of the museum than the makers of these works do, for whom being in a museum changes the nature of their work: that’s Danto’s claim again. Only, Danto was writing at the crest of the Modernist wave; the power of the museum to change the status of objects has diminished to close to zero now that Romanticism and Modernism have had their day. And if we recognize that there are degrees of artness in many objects in and out of the museum, the choices are no longer art or not-art, merely degrees, ranging from a little to a lot. By including many examples of low-carat

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art, museums have lost their association with only high-carat objects. These things being in a museum doesn’t necessarily mean that they have the same degree of artness as older works that have survived, or are a new kind of “art.” And it’s largely only people eager to valorize their large soft things as being like small hard ones by getting them into museums that even talk about “art” at all; that’s a conversation that, as a result, the rest of us don’t need to have any more. The current age creates a disconnect between the people who take the museum for granted, for whom placement of their works inside a museum is of paramount importance, and those outside, for whom museums are things in the larger context of their world that they can enter or not. Something of the same disconnect is seen in the trend of the modern day for stage directors to produce plays and operas (which have fixed scores and scripts) in eras and setting foreign to the originals or the style of the actions or the words. Shakespeare plays now, it seems, simply cannot be set in anything like the Elizabethan era or even the world they ostensibly take place in (say, Venice and Cyprus for Othello). Instead, they are set (say) in the US 20s, or in India of the Raj, or in a post-apocalyptic dystopia of black-clad fascists, to name three examples I have seen in recent years. In this, directors are showing that they are the offspring of the décor-heavy naturalistic nineteenth-century theater, not Shakespeare’s minimalistic Globe. A more successful recent Washington Shakespeare Theater production of The Merchant of Venice, despite some heavy-handed touches (the Jews were black—get it?), simply put it all on a basically naked stage. It worked. In previous centuries, of course, producers felt free to alter the texts themselves; Shakespeare tragedies were put on with happy endings, for example. Now the rules have changed: it’s not considered kosher to alter the text (Shakespeare can be cut and re-arranged to fit time limits, however). So the game is that we are allowed to alter anything else, and the idea is that the audience is to welcome this new layer of setting and costumes. Only this is far more interesting to the people putting on the stage production than to those watching it. I saw a 1930s Hollywood movieland version of Cosi fan tutte at the Seagle Festival in upstate New York that had to alter the translation of the Italian in the surtitles to make the events even plausible, and a Ring cycle in Washington that was set in black walls and on equally somber cantilevered stages, to name only a couple of productions. The statement made by the direction and staging is so insistent that it’s what we notice first and foremost. And usually it seems odd, though we know this is standard these days and so don’t dare object. What are these people doing singing in Italian in the Hollywood of Clara Bow, we wonder? Is the world of the Norse gods so unrelentingly bleak? Or consider a Rosenkavalier I saw in Stockholm that turned the inn scene into a bordello. Possible, perhaps, if implausible for the characters, and not in tune with the elegance of the rest of this work or world. Why this? Probably because the director thought it was modern, and original, and it wasn’t explicitly forbidden by the script. It ended up distracting from the real point, which was the sublime Strauss melodies sung by what in fact were beautiful voices.

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It’s now common for sexual innuendo or tension to be made visually explicit, flirting turned to intercourse, as in a production of Corneille I saw some years ago at the Comédie Française. That shows how modern we are! We’ve brought the stuffy past (actually not so stuffy) into the modern world by making it just like us. Or a 2022 production of Shakespeare’s (?) Henry VIII at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. The female director proudly explained in the program notes that she had re-conceived it to focus on the king’s misogyny, and the production was full of large blow-up balloon phalli (two rubber balls were the well, balls) and mimed sex. It was all about his dick. Of course, everybody sort of knew that already: he was a male and a king, so of course he went through women in search of a male heir. But surely it was not 100% about his dick, which is what this production insisted. Now it’s considered clever to turn up the volume on hints that are quite faint in the original—maybe they are best left that way? A Washington Shakespeare Theater production of Hamlet some years ago gave us a floppy and clearly gay-telegraphing title character. Well, we would say, ok, that’s one explanation for his aversion to Ophelia, but this makes sense for other reasons too (his disgust with his mother’s sexuality and unfaithfulness to his dead father), and it was laid on so thick that’s all the audience could think about. That’s the director being intrusive by spelling things out at high volume that in the original are only whispered, implicit turned into explicit. Yet explicit is not better than implicit; sometimes implicit works just fine. The assumption here is that we don’t want to see primarily the play or opera, but an individual’s re-tooling of it by re-casting it in terms of things we see elsewhere. And that isn’t so, any more than most museum visitors (rather than Artists) care about things new only to museums when we see so many similar things outside. We don’t need to go to a play by Corneille to see explicit sex—the Internet is full of it. But that’s the point, bringing outside in. That’s the originality of the production that now, rather than presenting the work, re-forms it to create a different object. The disconnect is that the director feels s/he/they have to do something new with the text that for him/her/them is a given, put his/her/their own stamp on it, but the viewer typically doesn’t start with the script as a given that is so familiar it has to be gussied up, and thus is usually not looking for a new and outrageously original take on it. Most audience members want the work to be primary, not the production, because most of us haven’t seen Hamlet or Rosenkavalier so often we are tired of it and want to see it “defamiliarized,” to use the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky’s term. The director wants credit for the original take, whereas the viewer is usually uninterested in giving credit to the director, instead going to the opera or play for the opera or play, not the director’s take. (We are more willing to allow movie directors liberties, as we know movies are about the visuals; when we go to an opera or play, that’s less foregrounded.) Hence the viewer’s situation is similar to the visitor to a contemporary arts museum where the artist takes the museum for granted and thinks s/he has scored a victory by getting these startling works inside, and the visitor, to whom these struggles are

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irrelevant and who isn’t so interested in the artist’s victory in entering the museum, is usually merely alienated and merely finds the object odd. But this is the contemporary situation we find ourselves in, which paradoxically takes as given the distinction between museums/concert halls and the world outside, all while busily deconstructing this distinction and seeking credit for doing so. The assumption is that the distinction and barriers will withstand this assault, but in fact they have largely been taken down. This is less a problem with older works, since what we call art from the past is, again, what has survived the natural destruction of more mutable things—like the body. Which brings us to the grave robbery of the Bactrian Hoard. A 2008 exhibit from Afghanistan in Washington’s National Gallery made the distinction clear between transitory and more permanent, between large soft things destined for oblivion and small hard things that stay around.1 It was an exhibit from Kabul’s destroyed National Museum (the catalogue showed it as a bombed-out shell) of its treasures, on US exhibit. It seemed a win-win situation: the imperial power got to show off the treasures of its vassal state, for which it shed its blood; the treasures get a home while their building was, at least in theory, being re-built. In 2021 the Taliban took over again in Afghanistan, and are reportedly searching for these things, that were hidden during their last time in power. What will happen to them if the Taliban find them this time? Will they meet the same fate as the colossal Buddhas of Bamiyan, destroyed by the Taliban in March 2001?2 Or will they be sold to the West, the way Hitler caused works of “degenerate art” to be sold to get money for his war effort? The film that accompanied the exhibition showed the kind of attitude Americans were, at the time, trying to foster in Afghanistan: cosmopolitan curators of the museum hid its treasures from the Taliban (who were busy blowing up the Bamiyan Buddhas, making sure women were veiled, and reimposing shari’a, religious law), and when the all-clear was given, unpacked them. The film that ran continually in a darkened room in the center of the exhibition—everyone entered the back of the projection gallery—showed wooden boxes, pulled from the darkness of a bank vault, being unpacked. Joy was general: the treasures had survived! At least that time. The treasures were of three sorts. The first, and least interesting, were the remnants of a Hellenistic city, of which the Afghans only became aware when the twentieth century was well advanced: the then-king was visiting a rural area, and was shown an unearthed and battered Corinthian capital, whose import he understood. Subsequent excavations produced some of the usual accouterments of provincial cities of the time, though not numerous and not large: a few roof figures, some carvings, a bronze god or two. They could have come from Alexandria, or Sidon, or anywhere in the post-Alexander world. Because they happened to be on territory now ascribed to the country of Afghanistan, they become Afghani heritage. The second cache was from the city of Bagram. It was a treasure trove of objects such as scholars tell us were the mainstay of traders moving along the

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connected series of trails from China to the Middle East that are collectively called the Silk Road. The city had been destroyed for some time when Marco Polo came through, though there was enough of a collective memory for the Venetian to write glowingly of what had been, as transmitted to him by the local people. These were small hard objects with a vengeance, portable luxury items. Only small expensive objects, the catalogue tells us, were considered worth the long and arduous trip along the Silk Road, as they could be packed easily, and were worth the barter at the other end. The Bagram treasure, at least according to most scholars, consists of the contents of a store-room of a particularly well-to-do merchant, or perhaps group of merchants. (The alternative theory is that they were a king’s store of treasures.) The drinking glasses have proved the most mutable. They’ve shattered, but have been pieced together around transparent cores; they are decorated with painted people in bright yellows and blues. Molded metal decorations—griffons, lions: handles for pots—filled another shining showcase. (Similar objects from Bagram are on permanent display in Paris’s Musée Guimet, as the French helped excavate them.) But the high point of the Bagram treasure are the small, intricately-carved ivory panels of voluptuous women in various poses and surrounded by finelyrendered architectural elements, panels that according to scholars must once have all but covered the wooden chair or throne that has now turned to dust. (More of these are in Paris as well.) Only these panels—once you’ve seen one you never forget the faces and bodies of these people, any more than you can fail to recognize another Benin bronze panel of warriors, once having seen a single one— have survived, themselves carved from the only part of the elephant to have survived: small hard pieces attached to things that have disintegrated, themselves small and hard enough to be worth the transport from their place of origin— probably India, it seems—and then taken from the opened room at Bagram, kept in a museum, then a bank vault, then another museum. The third part of the Afghanistan treasure is things that even more clearly survived the people for whom they were meant, as well as their world. It is the “Bactrian Hoard,” the Tillya Tepe treasure, unearthed by chance in Northern Afghanistan after peasants began to talk of a “hill of gold,” a mound where occasionally small bits of gold worked their way to the surface. Soviet archeologists excavated the hill, and found what they determined was the burial mound of wealthy nomads—who in this case took over a much earlier temple, covered over even in their time—rather than making a mound from scratch, as was their usual practice. What’s on display, and what slumbered in bank vaults in Kabul while the Taliban raged outside—what for that matter had slumbered for almost two millennia before bits and pieces found their way to the surface—are the gold and jewels with which the dead and their burial garments were decorated. After the excavations were complete, archeologists were able to say that Tillya Tepe was the burial place of a male chief, who was placed in the center. Around him were several women, including one called the Princess for her more elaborate funeral accouterments. All were buried with gold and gems.

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Graves are plundered all the time: their contents usually end in collections or in museums. Even the dead themselves are not considered off limits, in the case of the Egyptians, so completely has their world disappeared, turned to its small hard things of preserved bodies, their casings, their jewelry, their statues of gods and goddesses, their articles for the afterlife. The act of mummification was the Egyptian attempt to turn the body itself into a small hard thing: it dried up, to be sure, and its organs were removed. But somehow what mattered was the fact that there it all was, the lungs perhaps only a smear in their canopic jar but considered to be available: the soul, the “ka,” would need it all in the afterlife. You might think that a desiccated body and a smear for lungs wouldn’t “count” as preservation, but that would only be the reaction of someone who didn’t know the rules. For in fact there’s nothing immutable about what constitutes a small hard thing, or the form it takes: we decide what stands in for the thing that’s now gone. In Chinese graves, we read, gradually clay statues of people supplanted the slaughtered servants of earlier times. Those were held to work just as well to serve the dead, it seems. Similarly, in the Roman period in Egypt, threedimensional metal masks of the deceased, necessary for the “ka” to recognize its body, were replaced by wax portraits of the person inside, made during idealized life and (scholars think) probably hung in their houses until needed on mummy bundles. A two-dimensional image suddenly “counted” too. So who can say where the small hard thing is to be found? In the two-dimensional image in wax? In the dead body of a servant, or merely in a clay statue? Thank goodness, I imagine archeologists saying, for the burial practices of the ancients, who took all this lovely jewelry and other stuff and put it under the surface so that the tides of humanity walking upon the earth, living, dying, revolting, moving, and staying put, should have no effect on it: not melting it down, not breaking or stealing it, not pulling it from its (to archeologists) all-important context (how archeologists love the dead: they make things stand still), but instead irrelevant to it, so that millennia later they can be displayed for the edification of the imperial power of a later age. And then, perhaps, be destroyed. Nowadays we’re not about to make the mistake of the Pharaohs, whose graves were usually robbed within a few years of their being put in them: we’d say they went to their graves with too much stuff. Thus we will provide poor pickings for the archeologists of the year 4000—assuming anyone is around. Still, like the Pharaohs, we Americans pump our dead full of preservatives that may well help their bodies resist the worms for some decades: the illusion we’re after here is what the Egyptians in fact achieved, the preservation of the body. Too bad nobody could tell them that the bodies might survive, but be reduced to the leering leathery statues of unwrapped mummies. Who would want to reinhabit that? Artificial flowers, such as we put on graves, are to the more fragile real ones as diplomas and the few best photographs are to a person, or the story of his or her life in terms of education, marriage, children, and dates of birth and death. They excerpt, compact, and thus stand for the evanescent, and in effecting this process

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are forced to change it, the way pickling food changes its taste, or that jams never are the same as the fresh fruit. This fact is at the basis of art. When I was young, I was into crafts. I made a fishpond out of stones, wire, and concrete. For a time, I dried flowers: there’s a whole shelf of books on the subject. Sand laced with silica is, I remember, the main preservative, but some flowers dry more successfully than others. This wasn’t the only way I tried to make small hard things of the evanescent. In a brief fury of candle-making, I tried dipping the fragile white flowers of the hedge in wax to see if I could preserve them. They rotted inside of their waxen mummy cases and were thrown away: the experiment wasn’t a success. All these were attempts to make small hard things: the soft things, here the day-to-day changes of the flowers, wash away; what’s achieved is by contrast the immutable. But of course it’s only relative immutability. We seek longer-lasting versions of what we know to be shorter-lived, but they’re still not very longlived in absolute terms. They only seem so by contrast. Plastic and silk flowers on graves ultimately fade, or simply shred with too much weathering. Dried flowers fall prey to jostling, and dust, and years of handling by careless housecleaners— unless, of course, they are made even harder by being enclosed in glass away from the dust. Yet glass can be broken—in terms of centuries, it’s one of the softest of the small hard things. So too the headstones of graves, which we construct of stone because that seems to us to be immutable, but of course that too breaks with time. For those people without access to stones, wood has to do, as in the famous carved grave posts of Madagascar. These stay around only if they’re rooted up and put in climate-controlled Western museums. Still, they are more immutable than nothing at all, or than flowers. Plants are more immutable than their flowers; trees more than plants. Yet trees too are struck by lightning, and have natural lives measured in hundreds of years—except the remote 4,000-year-old bristlecone pines of the Westgaard Pass in the Eastern Sierra. And these only survived so long because they were so remote, and so scrubby. Nowadays the location of the oldest of the bristlecone pines, called the Methuselah Grove, is kept a secret from tourists out of a fear of pillaging or harm. (Curious visitors in the present destroy the past as well— consider how mass tourism has altered cities like Venice, or the reason for the DO NOT TOUCH signs in museums.) No artificial flower survives as long as bristlecone pines: so why do we bother? But of course the artificial flowers aren’t measured in terms of bristlecone pines, but only in terms of what they’re compared with: real flowers. Real flowers, in their turn, last longer than evanescent lighting effects of sun on clouds or water: we don’t capture these by making artificial clouds, but by painting, or admiring Impressionist paintings that hold these for as long as the canvases are protected from their own destruction. Still, wars burn canvases, or destroy huge stone Buddhas. Or perhaps jewelry. Sometimes, things are longer-lasting than we think they will be, but this too is measured against expectations, not other things. Saints’ bodies are all the time producing miracles in that they remained incorruptible (as we say) in the grave

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for centuries, like that of St. Francis Xavier, in Goa. But we’re not surprised that a Roman coin from much longer ago has remained “incorruptible” (we wouldn’t even say this). People spend serious money for “antiques” a hundred years old, but they have only to bend down and pick up rocks that are as old as the Earth itself. Museums are, or at least were, the places we construct to hold the smallest and hardest things chosen from many small hard things, themselves chosen from among countless large soft things that do not get preserved or put on view. When, occasionally in a catalogue of antiques for sale, one sees something described as “museum-quality,” this means that it’s so good it’s worthy of a museum: museums are the crème de la crème, the small hard things of the small hard things. Comparably, in developing nations, approbation is sometimes indicated by calling a product—beer, perhaps—“export quality”: so good it’s worthy to be exported, yet here you are in, say, Bombay (Mumbai), drinking it. It’s worthy of a museum, or to go to Europe, but you can buy it and show it in your own home here in India! Museums contain, or contained in their Romantic/Modernist iterations (now not so much), what we are supposed to save first in case of fire—a fire in our civilization, perhaps, as the Taliban represented for the cosmopolitan museum heads of the National Museum of Afghanistan, protecting the Bactrian Hoard. The person dies; the flesh is the first to go, then the bones—which for some intermediate periods serve as the hard dry things—bundles of bones are put into reliquary boxes among the Fang, and guardians such as the Great Bieri head are perched on top of them; the bones and skulls of monks are used for decoration in some monasteries in Italy and Iberia. And the small hard things survive: merchants transport them across long distances, and so they are lost, and found, together in Bagram. In the same way that museums and the very rich get the pick of the lot—the best Greek vases, the best T’ang grave statues, each of us individually hoards the things that stand for hard small things in our lives. All of us make personal museums; museums are the museums of museums. A person we knew may be long dead, but we keep a photograph on the mantel. We frame our college diploma, representing so much work. We display the Murano vase we bought in Venice. We can’t bring back Venice, but here’s the object we bought there. Nor do we make personal museums only of tangible things. An experience may have been excruciating, but we tell ourselves that what we got from it was the following lesson: this is what we learned, its fruit, the flower of the plant. We are willing to let the chaff go in order to keep the wheat. But this is circular: the wheat is what we can keep, the chaff, what we cannot. If we get so much wheat we’re overwhelmed, we change the sorting technique, and save not all the wheat but instead, only the perfectly shaped wheat. The irregular ones we let go. Yet there can be conflict between the personal museums we all make and the public ones. It’s rare that someone’s personal collection can be transferred without further sorting to a public museum: when this is possible it’s usually been acquired with a view to doing this. Very few people’s collections (photos,

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diplomas) would be of general interest. Sometimes rich people set up the contents of their houses as museums. These are variably interesting: something, an object, may have meant a good deal to an individual, but it’s rare when his or her “house museum” turns out to be of general interest—or if it does, becomes interesting as a slice of life, a time period preserved, not a museum of individually interesting objects. The Krieger Museum in Washington would have been a stunning place to be invited to dinner—a house by Philip Johnson, with Monets on the walls—far beyond the interest level of most houses and most personal art collections. But as a museum, it’s a failure: the house as its own end is not worth the trip or the price of admission, and the paintings are versions of things one can see for free in the National Gallery. Nor is there any apparent reason for these paintings to be displayed in this house: it would have been far better for the house to be inhabited, and the paintings to be dispersed. By contrast, the house museum of Robert Brady in Cuernavaca, Mexico, though containing a few individually interesting works—some Nayarit pre-Columbian pottery, a Frieda Kahlo—makes a far greater impression: filled with colorful junk and open to the semi-tropical air, it seems its own world. In Italy and the South of France, ceramic and photographed portraits of the dead are set on graves: the day may come when they enter museums, like the grave markers of South Yemen or Palmyra. (Will there still be museums then?) They’ll still be small hard things, but not of individual people’s lives, rather of the times in which they lived. Probably there will be so many of them that the curators of the future will be able to be picky about artistic quality: it won’t be a picture of Grandma, it’ll be a picture of a woman, of better or lesser quality. This is the way we consolidate the consolidations: it’s normal, and it’s the way we work. Art history reduces the individual church’s Virgin and Child to examples of a style, and these are ranked by other criteria entirely than those which decided that they would fill the space over the altar of the Chiesa di Santa X. The Romantics made much of the evanescence of all things: think of the fragmented remains of Ozymandias’s statue in Shelley’s famous sonnet, bidding— so the narrator, and perhaps the poet, imagined—the viewer of the statue, the hearer of the story, or reader of the poem, to “look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”3 All passes: it’s the source of the Romantic melancholy. But this is only half the story: the fact that a small hard thing is typically less small and hard than another thing. The other half is that small hard things are smaller and harder than what they’re compared with, as plastic flowers easily outlast real ones. Small hard things are no more defeats than they are victories: the Romantics saw only half the story. People have always been fascinated by gold precisely for its quality of incorruptibility. Silver is similarly shiny, but it tarnishes. The gold death mask of Tutankhamun still gleams as if newly made, but silver jewelry of the same time is usually turned to black corruption. So these people were buried with things that already were the small hard things of their time, which is to say valuable: as valuable as the

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small, compact carved miniatures from the hard part of the elephant that survive today and that provided the reason for the trade along the Silk Road. This is the nature of value: the small and hard. The person passes away, leaving memories; the body decays, leaving gold jewelry. Without the transitory, the never-changing quality of gold would disappear, and with it, the value of gold. The gold that embellished and honored the dead was valuable in its time, as in ours, for its smallness and hardness: even a tiny piece of it glistens forever. And the bits that had begun to work to the surface of the “hill of gold” of Tillya Tepe were only a few of the countless shapes sewn to now-disintegrated clothing. Photographs taken of the graves when opened were displayed as part of the exhibit in Washington along with the gold hoard: the collapsed skull of one of the women and the pile of dust that was her body still retain the gold shapes once sewn into her robes in their pattern on the long-gone cloth or attached to her head. Drawings in the exhibit derived from the position of the gold pieces in the dust show what these people would have worn in death. Still, not l00% of the bodies are gone—but what survives isn’t a part that probably would have interested anyone: we tend to focus on head and front. No, it’s the back skin of the “prince,” pushed into the sand, that has been preserved, cloth fragments and all. From this, archeologists have been able to reconstruct the embroidery and cut of the robes. The Bactrian Hoard is not merely dozens of tiny golden stars or circles sewn in patterns on disintegrated clothing, such as filtered to the surface of the earth. There are daggers (with corroded blades) that lay in the tombs by the disintegrated hands of the dead—that, in any case, could not have clutched them; bracelets that encircled long-disintegrated wrists, brooches, and even a portable crown that could be taken apart and put back together, like an artificial Christmas tree whose branches have to be inserted into the trunk. But to be shown in an art museum, they can’t just be representative of their time: museums don’t usually show pottery shards, of interest only to the most dedicated of history lovers. These objects are not only made of a precious substance, and fragments of their time, but beautiful. As objects, they’re stunners, using the material as part of the object in a way that only completely successful works of art do. The workmanship of these gold objects that the dead took into their graves is amazing. Inset turquoise stones contrast beautifully with the gold, making Earth spirits and various heavenly beings live again (the catalogue points out how surprisingly cosmopolitan these nomads were: the inspiration for the designs comes from lands far away, India or Persia). Now they’re removed from the darkness of their hill, and shimmering with light. And they’re gorgeous, as beautiful as (we assume) the day they were made. More so, in fact: we see them in a way that no one ever saw them in the time from which they came, much as we see the pediments of the Parthenon up close and personal, as no one entering the temple after Phidias had done his work could have seen them, far above and shrouded in shadow as they would have been. They weren’t meant to be looked at, but to be buried with individuals. To us, the individuals are meaningless. So they remain

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small hard things, only of other icebergs—tips of other worlds. We’re re-assigned them as ways to preserve the past. Hence the problem with the fact that nowadays our artists are trying to convince us that this is not in fact the way things are: art museums devoted to the contemporary are filled with large, transitory objects—that we’re asked to treat as if they were small hard things. This is the paradox of much contemporary art, that it breaks the rules of small hard things, and then demands to be treated as if it weren’t doing so: I will too frame the empty space, so many artists seem to say to us, and then be offended if you aren’t as interested in the nothing as in the something of earlier eras.

Notes 1 “Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul,” National Gallery of Art, accessed 3 March 2022. www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2008/afghanistan. html 2 www.mei.edu/publications/death-buddhas-bamiyan 3 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias,” Poetry Foundation, accessed 15 January 2022, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias

10 DO MUSEUMS COME TO LIFE AT NIGHT? The Revenge of the Separated Work

I considered above John Dewey’s realization that the objects in museums seem dead to most visitors. His solution was education, which the Barnes Foundation enthusiastically adopted in formalist terms, because more interesting terms can’t actually be taught in formulae, as formalist ones can. However, from this fact also probably arose the strange recurring fantasy that objects in museums are actually living objects that play dead when we look at them. Considering this fantasy allows us to see the difference between objects we interact with as individuals and those we don’t, as well as between those that are addressed to us as individuals and those that aren’t. It also allows us to return to the fact that works of art are situated in the world, not in another realm of the “imaginative” or the “artistic.” They combine known qualities with unknown, old with new—in Abrams’s terms, the mirror with the lamp, if we tone these terms down a bit. “What happens after the doors close and the lights dim?” first asked the back of Smithsonian Associates in 2012, the magazine for people who “belong to the Smithsonian,” which means, who give them some money. And the way to answer the question was just below: “Spend a night in the museum and find out!” (These sleepovers continued until interrupted by COVID-19, and resumed in 2022.)1 “Smithsonian Sleepovers,” it said, with the four dates available to sleep over in the Natural History Museum of the Smithsonian, of which one was completely full at the time the advertisement went to press. What happens in the museum after the doors close? It’s a question that many people asked, to judge from this ad or what clearly inspired it, the hugely popular Night at the Museum movies 1, 2, and 3 (set respectively in New York, Washington, DC, and London). The Washington movie came out in 2009. The answer according to these, at any rate, was: the objects, apparently so impervious to our gaze during the day, come to life. And what life! Chases down hallways,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003373377-12

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predatory dinosaur skeletons, historical figures spouting some of their famous lines, airplanes that fly again. The idea for these movies came from the children’s book A Night at the Museum by Milan Trenc, but the movies attracted many adults. The advertisement in the Smithsonian Associates magazine was geared to children also, though the advertising text notes, in the small print, that there had to be at least one adult for every three children. And adults without children (who presumably would like to do it too) were not allowed. The idea seems to be that the things in museums aren’t lifeless, they’re just playing dead. This is a sort of revenge on the stillness of the pickled, preserved behind glass do-not-touch objects that are the contents of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century museum. We knew all along—this notion seems to say—that they were just playing possum! They just seem to be different than us, bafflingly blank. In fact, when we’re gone, they reveal themselves to be just like us. The first film of the Night at the Museum series was set in New York’s Museum of Natural History, the second in three different Smithsonian museums in Washington. Most of the buildings on the national Mall, the strip of much-used grass that serves as Frisbee fields and picnic grounds for tourists and college students stretching from the US Capitol to the Washington Monument, collectively comprise the Smithsonian family, with others (such as the National Portrait Gallery, which figured in Night at the Museum 2) off the Mall. The oldest building of the Smithsonian is the so-called “castle”—that nowadays is not really a museum at all, containing nothing but out-of-sight administrative offices, an information booth, and a café, not to mention the all-important-for-tourists restrooms. Bizarrely, it does house the tomb of James Smithson, the Englishman who, though never having gone to America, left the money to found the institution that bears his name: his tomb is in a small room off to the side, a sort of large loving cup of granite, like Napoleon’s tomb in miniature. For a time in the early 20-teens, the “castle” had a pile of plastic movie set “loot” from Night at the Museum 2 as its centerpiece. Tourists checking out the Smithsonian’s oldest and most eye-catching building were offered movie set objects that in the movies masqueraded as content from the real museums, but because they had appeared in real movies about these places, had become real (movie) content. There was always a crowd of admirers around this jumbled pile of largely gold-painted plastic objects. And why not? Comparable movie objects from other, less overtly selfreferential films and TV shows—Dorothy’s red slippers from The Wizard of Oz (one of several pairs used in the movie) and Fonzie’s leather jacket from the TV show Happy Days—are big hits in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History across the Mall, and seem to show what it is that people actually like to see in museums: the “real” X from the mass-market movie or TV show. It seems that the “age of mechanical reproducibility” Walter Benjamin wrote about has given the museum, which houses the original much-photographed object that the mass-produced productions have re-invested with an “aura,” the

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individuality Benjamin thought would disappear.2 Similarly, much reproduced artworks gain value because of the reproduction: people flock to see the real Mona Lisa/La Giaconda in Paris, and take pictures of themselves in front of the picture to show that they were there. Much better than merely buying a reproduction of the picture! The most-visited Smithsonian museum is the Air and Space Museum, where visitors see the real John Glenn capsule, the real Wright Brothers airplane, and so on. They’re adjuncts to reproducibility, the trick on which celebrity culture is based, where people are so near and yet so far. Even in the case of artworks, what seems to interest tourists most is that the object before them was touched by the hands of someone they’ve heard of: paintings have become celebrity objects. A real Rembrandt! The notion of objects faking us out with lifelessness until we leave is behind the success of the Toy Story movies as well, which have the toys playing dead until the people walk away, sometimes with one eye half-slit to make sure they don’t move too soon and blow their cover, and then carrying on with their lives.3 The toys are always careful to position themselves as they were before, so that their people, who apparently need to believe the toys lifeless to buttress their own fragile self-importance, aren’t devastated by the truth when they find these objects in a different place than where they left them. In fact, it turns out the toys’ dramas are more interesting than ours. In the Toy Story movies, the real people lead dull suburban lives, while toys fight for their space and their importance to the child who plays with them, which defines their very essence. Hans Christian Andersen too played on this notion that toys lead complex lives away from our view, in his story about the tin soldier and the dancing doll that was the basis for a scary sequence (too scary for my kids) set to Shostakovich in the re-imagining of the 1940 movie Fantasia, Fantasia 2000. The villain is a leering Jack-in-the-Box, putting the kibosh on the wordless and hence yearning romance of the one-legged (toy) soldier and the (dancing doll) ballerina. Here we identify with the young couple, so the much larger Jack-in-the-Box scares them, and through identification with the young couple (him so valiant, and wounded! her so graceful and beautiful), us. But all are still just toys: we have to identify with the world of the toys to be affected, and the normally inanimate objects do not threaten humans. Unless they are provoked by the humans. What both the earlier and later versions of Fantasia share is the famous brooms-come-to-life Mickey Mouse story of Paul Dukas’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” It was part of the 1940 movie, and was taken over unchanged for incorporation into the newer one, probably because that’s the episode most people remember or have heard of. In this 1940 story, the objects that come to life, the water-carrying brooms, do threaten the humans, or at least the humanized mouse, Mickey, who is apprentice to an apparently human, if cartoon-character, magician. Mismanaged magic on Mickey’s part causes the brooms to multiply and fulfill too well their function of fetching water. The result is a nightmare, the brooms flooding the room with water from their buckets, and threatening death to Mickey. Even our tools can have lives of

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their own, it seems—though it seems we have to actively goad or maltreat them for this to happen. Why is there such a plethora of fantasies about things that we know rationally have no lives outside of our ability to call them to life and exist only for us—the objects displayed in museums, the toys we played with as children? The answer seems to be related to the fact that we can decide whether or not to call them to life. It’s as if we don’t really like all that responsibility. We don’t believe, or don’t like, the fact that without us, they are nothing. It’s like a borscht belt joke (USA post-World War II Jewish humor from the Catskill resorts north of New York City): for us to have a reason to pay attention to them, they have to be something to pay attention to. We can’t be the source of that reason. But if they’re just faking lifelessness, playing possum, as North Americans say with reference to the slow-moving rat-relatives opossums that fake their death to avoid being killed in tense situations, their passivity before our gaze makes sense. It’s not chance that these fantasies of objects coming to life when we aren’t around cluster around museums on one hand, and toys on the other. Museums are the absolutely objective, toys the absolutely subjective. Objects in museums, at least the old-fashioned kinds of museums, are completely outside us. We come to them to check them out, but the objects in them, by definition, play no role in our lives. The result is our usual sense of disconnect with them: what do we do with these things? Yes, there they are, behind glass. So? They are so distant from us! Toys are at the other end of the spectrum: instead of being completely alien to us, they are completely our own. Yet paradoxically enough, this produces a similar sense of “what do I do now?” Because these objects are ours, we have too many options for using them. We have to make these up on our own, or be told what they are—as when someone explains a board game to us for the first time. But why make up one thing rather than another? For many people, this has its own sense of anguish. The fantasy of museums coming to life seems an expression of discomfort, an expression of disbelief that we’re really supposed to be involved with things that have so little defined interface with our lives. With objects whose interaction with us is more well defined, we don’t need and don’t seem to have these fantasies. There is a dearth of similar fantasies about objects coming to life in department stores. There, we’re pretty sure, things simply sit in the dark, not even waiting for us to come back, not animate at all. The exception is toys from the toy departments, that occasionally come to life in teddy-bear stories. But not clothes, not lawn chairs, not food. Why not? They’re not even vaguely humanoid or animal-like, for starters. A dinosaur skeleton in the Museum of Natural History in a Night at the Museum movie can come to life because it has the shape of the dinosaur—but the tubular aluminum deck chair? The boxes of candy? However, there is a more fundamental difference between stores and museums that help us understand why the Romantics said that art was without utility and that the only way to react to it was to perceive it. (They got the order of things wrong: we don’t get to decide what’s art first, but as the result of seeing the

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traces of other people to which we don’t have to respond.) Stores are part of a play of which we are only one character, which lays out possible actions that we can take or not take with other entities within the same script. We interact with the things in stores by buying them, or at least looking at them as if to buy. There’s a next step beyond the display, and indeed the display is not an end in itself, just a means to an end. We are necessary because we act out only one role in a larger play that includes us. They are outside and can be brought in; interaction with them involves a clear action on our part that we’re aware of, one which we can decide to take or not. They speak to us. We hear them, we don’t overhear them. Objects in a store set up a situation where our action is necessary, as when someone says “Hello” to us at a party (“Hello” on the street is not the same, as it can seem presumptuous, and we can ignore it); we’re supposed to say “Hello” back. We don’t say “Hello” to people we see from afar, or the speaker in the front of the room at a conference. But in a shop, we either have to buy or not buy. Objects are offered to us, and speak to us. In a museum, they don’t. They’re just there. Objects in museums and toys are the two extremes of things that bracket the communication situation; in neither case are we part of a back and forth with the world, as we are more usually with objects. We typically call these objects of use: the glass tumbler exists to hold our drink and we know how to convey it to our mouth; the chair exists to be sat in. This is the mainstream use of such things, at any rate. We can depart from the main path of use with most objects, but we have to make a conscious decision to do so. We know a fork is for eating, but we can use it for a million other things, like opening a cellophane bag, or pulling out something that fell in the fish tank. And these are only the most obvious “off the label” uses, to use the terminology of drugs that are approved for one use but that can be prescribed for another. Once the fork belongs to us, it may be that nobody cares what we use it for. Or maybe someone does: a bossy family member saying, “That’s not what that is for!” or even a parent aware that a child can hurt himself using the fork to open a plastic bag. “That’s what scissors are for!” we might say—adults see the danger of “off the label” uses that the child does not. This gray area shows the shifting sands between public and private, and hence the gray area of degrees of artness, which can change. We might say that if the fork belongs to us, we can use it for what we want. But other people, or our own conscience, may protest, invoking the rules for forks, whether ours or not. Similarly, the boundary between private behavior and public behavior shifts: some people may think it all right, when they are alone, to engage in behavior they wouldn’t engage in socially, like picking their nose or sexual activities, whereas others may assert that “God always sees” or that picking your nose is always disgusting. The objects in a store are displayed for a purpose: we buy them, or not. Of course, stores are a bit different from (say) our own cutlery or glasses, a bit closer on the scale to museums than toys. We need not say “Hello” back to any individual item in a store, though we do have to use or not use our own forks or glasses.

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But we understand that they are there so that someone will say “Hello” back to something. And it could be us. Of course, it’s possible to refuse the relationship of the store, to walk through a store looking neither right nor left, as when we cut through a store in a shopping mall on our way to someplace else—but even there, we’re part of the larger back and forth, the unit of interaction being the whole mall, rather than one individual store: we’re not loitering, and the salespeople are still supposed to look pleasant. Even the people who use malls as spaces for something else entirely, like those who mall walk in the mornings, do so before the shops are open, thus adapting themselves to the real function of the space rather than refusing or challenging it. Once we get the object home, of course, that’s the end of the action that the store sets up: the object said “Buy me,” we said “OK,” and we did. After that, the store doesn’t care, though others may. Toys are merely those objects which are completely private, like the decision whether to have vanilla or chocolate—nobody cares. But it’s the fact that nobody cares what we do with them that makes them toys, not their intrinsic qualities. And someone may come to care: Barbies, they say, create self-destructive body images for women. Jet skis pollute lakes and scare away birds. These things aside, nobody cares about whether we play with our toys except us. Objects in a museum are the opposite: if we possess toys too completely, we never possess objects in a museum at all. The objects in old-fashioned museums have no established pattern of interaction with their content, no way for us to fit into them or they to us. And this is so by design: they’re the places where communication is reduced to zero. Communication with our partner is usually maximal, but with a person on a podium in a crowded concert or lecture hall, it’s reduced to almost zero. If that person is a statue in a museum or the garden, it is in fact zero. The things in museums don’t actually come to life when we turn out the lights, any more than our toys do when we walk away from the room. This fantasy is our revenge on the old-fashioned museum, where the objects are, by their nature, utterly inert. The way hand has formed glove and the reverse is symbiotic: initially those objects that were put in museums were the ones that best lent themselves to this situation; then we made works to fit. Now we’re in a period where we insist that any work can fit—and in doing so, have lost our audience, as the uncomprehending complaints of visitors to contemporary art museums show. The museum can take the object out of its context to some degree, as when paintings formerly over the altar of a church are shown with other paintings unrelated to them. But the objects have to be discrete, small, hard things that can be plausibly separated from their context (the way we simply remove a painting from a church; we don’t put the whole church in the museum), or the museum can’t take the separation further. The Barcelona National Museum of Catalonian Art has numerous wall paintings and apse decorations from now-destroyed Medieval churches—but even there, it’s never the whole church. Nowadays, with museums full of objects that are very little more than what can be found outside them, the stretch to see them separated from the world is too much for most people.

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Most people reject as art the things presented as such in museums that, as we might say, have too great utility, simply because they can see how to interact with them: bury the carcass, for example, don’t look at it! In my terms, this means that they see the object as aimed at a group that includes themselves: they know what role it plays in their world. Art up until the mid-twentieth century accepted that things too clearly utilitarian were too far away from the necessities of the museum to be art. Hence the tendency of the nineteenth century to think artworks were defined by formal qualities—paintings, and of such and such a sort, sculptures of allegorical subjects. These at least had no clear other function—save of course those functions that the Modern artists rejected as legitimate for Art, to decorate walls or fill up the space in large houses or show one’s wealth. This got the causality backwards: art isn’t art because it is in a frame on canvas, any more than art is art because it’s in a museum. Being in a frame is just the clear signal that this is not a peanut butter sandwich, as Magritte might have said. Plus you can’t eat it. If you can, it seems odd to put it in a museum. Odd, at least, to those outside the small circle of people who take the museum for granted. If, as Walter Pater held, all art aspires to the condition of music, much contemporary art aspires to the condition of the lecture. Contemporary art talks to us too: or rather, it is impelled to explain itself, because it takes things that don’t clearly work as the “sort of thing” that is art, and insists they are. It claims it seeks to challenge presuppositions, but all it’s challenging is the premise of the museum—inside the museum. So it’s all an insider’s game. It presupposes the museum; what if we don’t? Hence the need for the academic side of art exhibitions: the tours, the headphones, the catalogues that explain things to us. I’ve had visits to art galleries turned into something else by chatty guards who want to make sure we see X or Y, or the guards in New York’s Frick Collection who are simply very proud of the whole place and want to make sure we appreciate it. But if we remove the repartee with the guards, take away the headsets, refuse to read the labels (or if there are none: the Frick lacks them) the result is daunting to most people. In fact, they are apparently so daunting that we indulge in fantasies that they can’t really be this inert, this dead—they’re playing dead, with one eye cracked, and spring to life the moment the doors are locked. That at least is some comfort for most people. There is nothing in the artwork that even begins to define a social situation. And that is why so many people work so hard to re-integrate it into one. It’s also the nature of the inertness of the work of art, and its frustrating immobility for most people. The notion of objects that utterly lack interface with the social world is an Enlightenment, then a Romantic one: it’s a sort of object congenial only to the heroic individual, blazing his or her own path. It sounds a bit Nietzschean, but is nonetheless true, to say that there aren’t many such people. The retrofitting of the Enlightenment museum as a magnet for the public—special exhibits, docents, recorded tours, and gift shops—is an effort to respond to this reality. Indeed, the crisis of the high arts generally in the twenty-first century in the West—the graying of audiences, the fact that fewer children grow up

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playing orchestral instruments or knowing what a painting is, or taking literature courses in college—has produced a similar set of retrofits. But they may be too little too late: it’s not clear that jugglers at the symphony concert or putting “The Three Tenors” in a football stadium will produce the kind of repeat audience that balances the budget.

Notes 1 Smithsonian, accessed 6 March 2022. https://smithsoniansleepovers.org 2 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Time of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 3 Brandon Katz, “A Definitive Ranking of All Four ‘Toy Story’ Movies,” Observer. com, June 13, 2019, accessed 15  September 2021. https://observer.com/2019/06/ toy-story-4-movie-ranking-rotten-tomatoes-disney-pixar

PART III

Literature

11 WHAT’S LITERATURE GOOD FOR? Mirroring/Escape and Explanation/Vaccination Bruce Fleming

Art is a commentary on life. We can only understand it if we have lived, and its function is to help us conceptualize life. Academic consideration of art emphasizes by definition relationships between artworks, not of the work with the world through the viewer. This was the effect of the Romantic/Modernist view of art. Now that this has seen its day, we have to get back to allowing the individual person to link, or not, with the individual work. Mainly, this means just presenting the work and creating a space, as academia can in fact (but usually doesn’t) do, to allow people to linger over it. But the relationship of art cannot be forced by others, because we don’t know other individuals well enough to know what they might find meaningful in any work, nor they us. Indeed, what they find, if they find it, may be something we, if the presenter, haven’t seen ourselves. This is why, for example, it is so destructive for the arts to be taught by young professors out to change the world—or older ones either, though older ones tend to have the sharp edges worn off as pragmatism takes over. The younger and more idealistic ones tend to force complex works into very narrow holes and demand that students do the same, showing off the shiny new theories they learned in graduate school that are almost always completely irrelevant to their students’ lives. Still, there are some general things to be said about how people interact with literature, if they do, without knowing how, or indeed whether, any individual will respond in this way. I offer two pairs of concepts that we can use to understand the helpful ways we may interact with literature; the not so helpful relations with literature figure below. These pairs are interlocking concepts, both within the pairs and between them. It won’t necessarily be clear at any time how much of any term is involved; they are merely emphases. The first: mirroring/escape. The second: explanation/vaccination. Both of these pairs relate art to our life, but the first pair is what linguists call the synchronic pairing, relevant to a single point in our life, whereas the second is diachronic, referring to comparisons over time. DOI: 10.4324/9781003373377-14

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Mirroring as one of four concepts is the same word that M. H. Abrams used to refer to all pre-Romantic art theory. As Abrams points out, the closest the pre-Romantic world got to explaining how this mirroring took place as an active process was to suggest that what was mirrored was an improved reality. How this improvement took place by the (what was later called) artist was of course never explained. The process was imagined in the passive voice. It happened because of the mirror—where did that come from? held by whom?—and we didn’t have to explain how, because we had the work integrated in an unproblematic way with the world. Works were made for specific and very clear social purposes, even if that purpose was the amusement of the nobles or aristocracy. Romantic theory, which came to be in tandem with the emphasis on the individual of the Enlightenment that made social structures something that people constructed (see the US Declaration of Independence), made the work problematic. We can’t take the world for granted any more. Kings aren’t what they used to be, wealth can be created, and each person is on his (or later her) own—having to define for him- or herself what happiness s/he wishes to pursue. So we can appropriate this idea of mirroring, now that we have gone through Romanticism and Modernism, without seeing it as passive, thereby removing it from the position Abrams assigns it of contrast to the Romantic lamp. The fact is that people like to see their lives mirrored by others, or as we may say, reflected, or portrayed. We like watching ourselves because it is the one perspective we don’t get on our own lives. It makes us seem interesting. This is because somebody else is showing us to ourselves, which means, has taken an interest in us. Thus, in contrast to the Russian Formalist Shklovsky who proposed that poetry/ literature/the arts “defamiliarized” the world, I propose that they give us the familiar. This is what, below, I call the “inside” in literature: what we recognize, what is part of the known. The unfamiliar, the new, the outside, is what’s in the “gray area” of our real knowledge, to use terms I consider further below. The known is given, or mirrored, back to us. It’s the giving we like, the fact that someone not ourselves has shown us our world from the one perspective we can never have—except in a literal mirror (which may be why mirrors play a role in sex, perhaps especially for men: we like to see what we look like doing it). We see others, but we don’t see ourselves, because we’re inside ourselves. So we like seeing what we look like to others. Jean-Paul Sartre considers this difference at length in Being and Nothingness. The big distinction is between the way we seem to ourselves and the way others see us. To ourselves, as Sartre expresses it, we are all becoming, and no being (which is solid): we’re a whoosh, always in the process. To others, however, we seem solid. Seeing ourselves mirrored in various ways and aspects gives us the sense of solidity we have of others, only about ourselves. The mirroring doesn’t have to be absolute. If we see people unlike ourselves in some ways, they may be like us in others. Pictures of people online or printed can have some element of this mirroring, and hence of artness: someone offered them to us. We’d say a fashion shoot is more art than a picture we take of relatives with the iPhone—but we see our world in all these pictures: what

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we look like or not, what we wear or not, places we’d like to go or not. And this in turn is linked to the flip-side concept of mirroring, namely escape: maybe we want to look like this person, or go to this place. Mirroring, moreover, can provide more than the idle pleasure of catching a glimpse of ourselves as we pass a literal mirror, so that we smile in acknowledgment that we have shaved correctly or that our hat is on straight—especially in the young. Typically young adults have not had the time to get used to themselves. Seeing a character or sentiment in literature that seems strangely familiar, they can suddenly come to the realization that this is who they themselves are. The most striking examples are probably those that deal with sexuality: a young man realizes he himself is gay by reading a novel with a gay plot or sub-plot: that, he thinks, looks awfully nice. Or seeing an annoying character who— surprise— acts just like him, realizes that he himself is annoying in just this way. Or at lower levels of importance, that he (or she/they) likes just what this character likes, or likes what the character doesn’t, or wants to go to X or Y like (or unlike) the character. Literature, that is, helps the young see who they are—which is a discovery for most. We fashion the person we are from the givens we discover in ourselves, which we develop or minimize depending on whether they are what we want to be, or not: all of us have raw material that we start with, and that most of us have to discover. Do I like X and hate Y? At first I won’t know: this is a discovery. Older people experience fewer surprises, typically, unless they have been unselfconscious through young adulthood. This is probably what produces the famous midlife crisis, where (usually) a suddenly middle-aged man sees his life from the outside in a way he had not before, and is appalled, or scared. If you know what you look like in the (literal) mirror, you just (in the best case) flex or preen for it and say “hey sexy” and move on. But when you notice the first wrinkles or gray hair, or are dealing with a sudden injury or scar, you are glued to the mirror. Is this me? And if by chance we encounter literature that contains a character dealing with such a sudden physical alteration, we see ourselves in that person. (Here is where things like gender or skin color matter less: if the person with the sudden scar, say, is female and another skin color, a—say—white male can still see himself mirrored in that person’s situation.) Nor need the mirroring be only in what characters in literature that has characters do or say. It can be in how they do it or say it. The characters in Hemingway’s young things in Paris novel, The Sun Also Rises, exuded a defeatist cool that I found vastly appealing when I was young and figuring things out. It was a phase, of course, but the young go through many phases. And young aspiring writers are typically infatuated to the point of mimicry with a succession of established writers, going through phases echoing or openly imitating each until they identify the overlap of styles that attracted them at the center of the writers’ Venn diagram and settle into their own voice. Less obviously people-centered works—in whatever medium—can also offer mirroring, and this can even occur in later years after we have defined the core of ourselves and are seeking to understand more momentary situations. If I am upset

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for whatever reason, the cool classicism of a Poussin or a Raphael may soothe me, or I may see the explosions in myself in a late Kandinsky. This helps us get our arms around what hitherto had controlled us, at least possibly. Or maybe we are in Kandinsky mood and find Raphael unfeeling or even (in his Perugino phase) simpering and too sweet. Or we don’t know we are, or in the mood to be, as acerbic as (say) a George Grosz drawing of Weimar street life until we see one. So literature and the arts can have major effects and be full of surprises. Most importantly, perhaps they work better for self-definition than a real person telling us face to face what we discover in it, because it is overheard rather than heard. Nobody is talking to us, so there is no initial resistance or defensiveness at taking on board information we may not welcome or that we may at least find surprising. Besides, all person-to-person interactions follow rules we have to adhere to: tone of voice? Hesitation? What is our relationship to this person? With literature, all these confining and defining qualities are gone. We are free to come to it, if we choose, and listen to it, not have it intrude on us. So mirroring is potentially an active, even cataclysmic activity, especially in one’s young adulthood where one is growing into a new body and with new tastes, the opening up of the sexual world and the taking of one’s place within the social world. This is exponentially more serious stuff than the “mirroring” of the classical and neo-classical world, which seems to stop at the merely pleasing. This kind of mirroring can be life-changing. Also where I leave the classical and neo-classical notion of mirroring behind is that I don’t propose that any entire work is mirroring. Instead, mirroring is an element that can be more or less prominent. And of course the proportion of mirroring in the work depends on the medium, on the work, and on the perceiver. So there can be differences of opinion between people about how much of this kind of depiction of life is going on. Besides, my life isn’t yours, so what is mirroring for me may not be for you. Some media seem more amenable to more of this mirroring, or (to use the standard Greek term) mimesis, than others.1 Literature uses words, which we use daily as part of our lives, so we are accustomed to using words to interface with life. Even so, words can be more or less evocative of life, and in different ways. There can be meticulous articulation of small emotional tremors, such as the young Marcel’s difficulty in falling asleep at night in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, or what it feels like to him to wake up in the middle of the night in a strange place, say a hotel, and realize it is barely midnight rather than morning, and that the sounds he hears are the sounds of a world settling down, not waking up. Words have their own qualities too—poetry uses some of these as a sideline; when this sideline takes over, as in Gertrude Stein, the result is more abstract, as we say, more opaque to the world. But words function in the world; they aren’t merely a transparent pane of glass. “F… you” produces different results depending on who says it, to whom, and under what circumstances. (The strange quest of the logical positivists was to find unvarying language unrelated to circumstances, which doesn’t exist.)

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Music? Sounds are facts in our life too, though the sound of (say) a saxophone is one we may be less or more familiar with, aside from hearing it in a nightclub or a concert. We can always have new sensations, whether through art or the world outside to which it is related. Colors are real too, so even a totally abstract painting is an arrangement of something we see. But everybody would agree that early Kandinsky is more mimetic than middle, where the churches of his Murnau paintings, in the Lenbachhaus in Munich, become dark-outlined towers, or than later paintings in adjoining rooms of the same museum, which seem only arrangements of color. The wall-filling historical or allegory paintings of the nineteenth century may have been “outside” in terms of their major plot—the three or four largest figures, or their meaning, but they were mirrors/mimetic in terms of landscape and vegetation: the sky is up in these allegories as well. (The Prado in Madrid has used the space it opened in its downstairs galleries to display these to great effect. They seem so un-Modern! But we have been conditioned by Modernist paintings, which rejected all that these stood for.) Nor is this to say that we are always aware of the same mimetic elements in a work, or that a work is mimetic in the same way for all people in all times. Is a Dutch still life realistic? It may be so for us in different ways than for the wealthy burghers of the seventeenth century. It’s got the shine off the goblet—but the goblet itself is so elaborate we can’t really see it as part of our world, as the Dutch may have done. It gets the graininess of the lemon peel, and we have lemons to judge; it gets the crumbly nature of the crust on the pie that is spilling its insides, and we have pie crusts. Yet the arrangement is too neat to be real, and overheated by our standards, a relic of a different world and hence, to this degree, not mimetic for us. We don’t have to fall in the trap of saying the whole work is or is not mimetic to be able to identify what elements in it are so for us. Movies are rarely 100% mimetic: the people are usually too beautiful and their lives too exciting. But even in alternative reality or superhero movies, there are many elements that mirror our world. People wear clothes (if not quite our style), they walk rather than fly, they eat with knives and forks—and if they fly and eat with their hands, they still put the food in their mouths, not their ears. It’s the combination of the mirroring of the old, the mirroring of what we know, with the new that makes a work. The prolific children’s author Beverly Cleary said that she came to write her books because, as a children’s librarian, she didn’t see works she could recommend that showed children the life they knew.2 The result was a series of books about middle-class white children in post-WWII America living in towns and cities where they could walk to the library, take a bus across town, go pick berries on the weekend with their families, and horn in on mom’s dance class. (In the case of Otis Spofford, who does the last, there is no dad in the picture, which is clearly why he is difficult.) Women washed their hair on weekends and made their own applesauce, girls embroidered potholders, and boys had paper routes. Now this world seems like a vanished idyllic world. I felt so alienated from the academic treatment of literature I encountered at the University of Chicago, my

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first graduate school, that I spent hours in Regenstein Library immersing myself in Cleary’s dream of what for me was a vanished world. Partly real, partly not. But certainly I was aware of the mirroring—as well as of the escape, the other term of the pair. Cleary’s world was, mutatis mutandis, my childhood—certainly more than the world of Rabelais, in whom I was taking a course. The pre-Romantics were wrong that the mirroring aspect of literature was somehow transmuted in an act of beautification. They remain mirrors. Diane Arbus photographs, for example, capture the reality of 1950s America—the mirroring/inside. But they are also deeply weird—the outside. The pituitary giant at home with his parents is set in a soulless suburban room that we recognize. The two slightly off kilter twin girls are dressed in clothes we recognize. The photographs of Alexander Rodchenko are taken of the familiar world from odd angles— out a high window, for example, so that people seen from above and blotches on the asphalt are combinations of mimetic and odd. Shklovsky would have said the world was “defamiliarized.” But if something is made completely unfamiliar, it is just alien. Shklovsky thought this defamiliarization gave us back the world again— in my terms, that the outside/escape gave us back the familiar/mimetic. But we can see mirroring without the strangeness, and we never lost this world. Instead, art is a combination of these elements in various degrees: the Russian Formalists over-emphasized the necessity of the second element of escape, which is why the art they produced or that was affiliated with them is so stylized. We don’t need the unfamiliar to have mirroring. It doesn’t seem likely that we will appreciate the blotches on the road more when we are walking on that road after having seen them from Rodchenko’s odd angles. And our world isn’t made unfamiliar. Instead, the mimetic elements are combined with the new. Nabokov’s Lolita has a truly weird plot, the love of a middle-aged man for an underage girl, something that now seems simply immoral. But his lust is something we can probably identify with, if not the object of that lust, and the portrayal of the string of soulless motels on the post-World War II American landscape he takes her to is something I can identify with from my childhood. The Janus face of mirroring is what I call escape because it liberates us from the bonds of our existence: we see new things. Perhaps the strongest form of escape is the aspirational kind: people who do things we would like to do, have things we would like to have, or are what we want to be. Not all escape, however, is aspirational. Nobody wants to escape to the weirdness of a Diane Arbus photograph. But we do find them interesting, one reaction I consider below as an alternative to finding a book bad: both are responses to the new part, the outside, what isn’t our lives. This is commonly called our imagination, or fantasy. The people in books or movies or the sense in paintings—or the arrangement of colors in more abstract works, the soaring or intellectual sounds of various musical compositions—evoke something not us, possibly what we’d like to be or see or feel. But it isn’t fantasy; it’s real not-us, or real better-than-us. We are more likely to engage with these works that allow us to see ourselves as better than we are than with those that have us see ourselves as worse. This

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is the core of Aristotle’s sense that tragedy was in this sense initially escape, that scratched the itch of seeing more powerful people, like kings, only to reassure us at the end by their self-caused downfall that we actually are doing all right compared to them. Kings were the movie stars of the past. We watch movie stars because they are more something than we are—beautiful, muscular, athletic, charismatic—but they have to be put through the wringer, they can’t just be beautiful. And they aren’t imaginary; they exist in a real relation to ourselves. Thus some works are more aspirational escape than others: romance novels about timid women who meet assertive men who fall in love with them are escape for some women. Escape for men tends to be found in war movies where the good guy survives, or at least wins the decisive battle (we say the viewer is meant to “identify” with him), or movies like the James Bond or Mission: Impossible or Jason Bourne films. But the choreographer George Balanchine’s impossibly beautiful works (such as the “Diamonds” section from his three-part Jewels), in which men are courtly and noble and women are agile and adored, are also escape from the humdrum world for many viewers—as are so-geometrical and beautiful-in-blue Raphael paintings, and even the lines and squares of Mondrian: so clear and geometrical! Such a contrast to our messy reality! It takes someone weary of such aspirational escape to fully appreciate other kinds of escape, works that show ordinary people not ourselves, or just different—or not people at all, but more abstract aspects of our life. (That’s why more people like the James Bond movies than what we call “serious” literature. And art without people tends to lose most perceivers, as we are most primarily aware of being human.) But anything that interests us is escape. Abrams’s contrast of mirror and lamp is too absolute, making one element absolutely impersonal and the other absolutely personal. The mirror as Abrams conceives of it merely reflects, much more passively than the lamp, which has to be lit and perhaps held aloft. But considering the act of holding up a mirror, rather than focusing on the effect of the mirror, makes clear that holding a mirror is also an action of a person, and presupposes the light from some source. Holding up a lamp also presupposes that there is something that the light i lluminates. These are two different emphases of the same thing, not two divergent approaches. The point of the Romantic emphasis was to get people to see specific things— not everything. Hence the image of the lamp, that casts a limited light. We are supposed to see what the artist shows us. But that is true with the “mirror” as well, because the mirror is held by the artist too. We are shown things, even if less specific things than what the limited circumference of the lamp shows. And the assumption clearly is that with the lamp but not the mirror, it’s otherwise dark; if it weren’t, we wouldn’t need the lamp. With the image of the mirror, it’s daylight, so we aren’t limited to only what the lamp held by the artist’s hand shows us. The personal tinge is diluted with respect to the Romantic, but it is not non-existent. What the two metaphors have in common is that in each one, we see our world from a specific perspective. Of course, this is more striking in the case of Romantic

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art, which frequently shows us the artist’s sensibility—also part of our world, as it too has elements that are familiar to us and elements that are unfamiliar. We see a combination of things we find familiar and things we find different, and we make this distinction by knowing what is so in the world. All art is mimesis, if we understand this as including both the mirror and the lamp. And all art shows us something new, the escape. That’s why we can’t understand art if we haven’t lived in the world. The more we live in the world, the more we understand art. Conversely, the point of art is to help us understand life: this is where the second pair, considered below, comes in, the diachronic pair of vaccination/explanation. The novel that most notably, instead of offering escape through literature, considers it as a theme, is Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Though the novel is usually praised as “realistic,” the way the main character Emma (perhaps also the title character: there are three Mesdames Bovary in the book, though Emma is the most important—Charles Bovary’s mother and first wife are the others) deals with books is part of the unfamiliar. It’s not realistic at all. Emma is a truly strange person, and while we can see some of her responses as mimetic to normalcy, she as a character is merely an invention of Flaubert to make a pedagogic point. The novel is set in 1830s France. Emma read only the romance novels smuggled into her convent—where she has been sent as a girl to get what passed as education for women at the time—by the ancien régime era noblewoman who now works as the convent laundress. Because all the men in these novels were dashing alpha males, Emma came to believe (and this belief on her part is the strange part that simply seems unreal) that all men were like this. So when she marries Charles, a less than usually masculine but otherwise perfectly ordinary doctor (not the higher-qualified sort; not, apparently there were two levels), she’s surprised and scornful that he seems to lack libido and dash. Yet if she had been more mimetic as a person (her clothes and situation are the mimetic part of the novel), she would have looked around her and realized that other men, starting with her father, were more like Charles than like the men in her novels. She dreams of better things than being married to a plodding country doctor, and has affairs with two men with more to offer, one who has more testosterone, the other who has more culture. Neither one is the combination of these two that she read about in the novels, and she grows dissatisfied with these men as well. Emma’s problem, famously, is that she can’t tell the mirroring in her books from the escape. The men in the lurid romances she read as a girl look like men, after all, with beards and male voices and figures, and wear the usual clothes. They also do things like hunt and shoot and seduce women, and all are dashing and wealthy aristocrats who lead exciting lives. We are asked to believe that Emma thinks all this is also mirroring rather than escape; clearly she knows these men don’t mirror her convent life. Yet Flaubert suggests that she thinks this is the world outside the convent. How mimetic (realistic, we’d say) is this for a farmer’s daughter who lived among workers and peasants for many years before being sent to the convent? She doesn’t realize that these books are escape, even for people outside the convent. Seriously?

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Even worse, Emma fails to learn anything from the world outside once she is back in it as an adult woman. Any normal woman would have realized after the convent but before her marriage from many clues that Charles was not like the men in her books. Emma knew, for example, that it wasn’t even Charles who asked for her hand in marriage, but her father on Charles’s behalf. And Charles has never given her “the look” that says “I want you,” as her subsequent lover Rodolphe does. In fact, Emma is a cartoon character, a postulate in a thesis book—despite Flaubert’s reputation for realism. The details are our mirroring; it’s the plot that’s not just outside, but something we know to be all but impossible. We know this isn’t the way things are. Any real (mirrored) person would have begun connecting the dots. But Emma never does. She seems like a mistake on Flaubert’s part like saying with no other intension such as satire or allegory that Queen Victoria re-married after Albert’s death, or so unrealistic as to verge on being a more serious problem that leads us to call aspects of works simply bad—all of which I consider below. If Flaubert admitted she was unreal, things would be fine. But he doesn’t. So this is a didactic novel, one written against the lurid romances of the early Romantic age, a novel of boredom, of ticking clocks, and of walks down the main street of a village with the walker, Emma, noting nothing that pleases her. Life is intrinsically boring, Flaubert tells us. Of course it isn’t, because of the pleasure of mirroring—we see ourselves as if from the outside—and also because of what we understand as the temporary escape of art. Emma doesn’t realize it’s escape, nor for that matter does she get pleasure from the mirroring. She doesn’t understand either aspect of art. It’s odd that a novel about literature would take as its central figure someone who fails so completely to understand its nature. Yet Flaubert seems to offer Emma as someone like us, rather than the truly abnormal character she is. Cervantes’s much older (early seventeenth-century) Don Quixote, stripped of its inserted stories and its picaresque jumble, gave the pattern for works about people mistaking the escape of art for something that can be replicated in life. I don’t think this is an actual problem in the real world, but it’s clear it interests the people who make art. The good Don reads, we are told, so many chivalric romances that his brain shrinks to the size of a pea. At least Cervantes isn’t suggesting, as Flaubert does of his main character Emma, that this is a normal state. Don Q isn’t just demented, he’s ridiculous, if endearing. We see from the novel that life isn’t exciting in this way, and we can laugh at ourselves—perhaps for going to James Bond movies. But we knew all along they are escape wrapped in mimesis. And Cervantes isn’t pretending otherwise. Don Quixote puts on a barber’s basin as a helmet and goes out to save the world, imagining a washer woman as his lady love, and windmills (famously) as giants. Don Quixote was the first to tilt at windmills. Many have done so since. Most people aren’t, however, as delusional as either Emma Bovary or the good Don. They know that fantasy isn’t reality, and that reality wins if the two are set in conflict. You might be in a movie theater enjoying your action movie or your

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rom-com, but if you get a text from the baby-sitter saying something has happened to your child, you get up immediately and hurry home. However, art also proposes the opposite end of the spectrum of the relation between art and life, where, though both are still present, life immediately wins over art. The opening scene of Puccini’s opera La Bohème, whose libretto is based on Henri (sometimes Henry) Murger’s Scènes de la Vie de Bohème and credited to Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, is actually somewhat startling for the cynical and desperate, if flippant, way in which the artists starving in a Parisian garret for the sake of their art immediately acknowledge the stranglehold of physical reality on art when the two come in conflict. It’s winter; they are freezing cold, and they are so desperate that they propose to burn the chair for firewood. This would leave them without a place to sit, so the painter Marcello proposes instead that they burn the canvas of the parting of the Red Sea that he has been laboring over for weeks if not months, thereby reducing his inspiration to its physical components of paint and cloth. The poet Rodolpho, perhaps sensing that canvas burns badly, proposes instead burning his three-act tragedy, turning his weeks and months of artistic creation into a pile of what might as well be scrap paper. It’s hard to believe that burning the paper produces much heat in their cavernous shared space, and they acknowledge the brevity of what little warmth it does produce. But what’s bizarre and a bit unbelievable is that when faced with a bit more physical privation on top of what they’ve already suffered, these struggling artists are immediately ready to see their art—the source of their suffering and the cause to which they are clearly dedicated—as nothing but the physical materials of their products. It’s doubly puzzling in that they are hardly unaware of what is going up in smoke. They joke, as the paper on which Rodolpho has expended so much time and energy burns, about the “ardent” (fiery) love scene burning, and that the crackling is the sound of the kisses. Why would these young men live under such conditions for the sake of their art if they were willing to have it all be reduced to a few moments of weak heat? And burning the play turns out to be a useless gesture: a minute or two later, others of their group of artists enter with a load of firewood they have purchased with money earned from another job, and food as well. There is no regret expressed for the play, now reduced to ashes. It’s almost the opposite of Don Quixote or Emma, this jocular revenge on the world of the imagination. But most audience members probably are swept away by the young men being young men with their joshing and buffoonery, and by Puccini’s soaring melodies, and fail to find it as odd as, on reflection, it actually seems. So what’s in the middle between these two poles of too-great devotion to fantasy on one hand and apparent disdain for it (by the people who suffer to make it!)? The work I am aware of that seems most successfully to acknowledge the power of escape offered by art and literature without veering into abnormality, as well as being the most fun, is E. F. Benson’s Secret Lives, set in London of the 1930s. It concerns a geographically defined cast of characters, all of whom live on a London square (more properly an oblong) with a garden in the middle, that is enclosed and limited by dint of being a cul-de-sac. The first of the two

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major secret lives of the title is that of a priggish widow named Mrs. Mantrip, who queens it over the other residents of the square, or at least, those who figure in the novel. She does this partly because she owns the houses these characters lease, and partly because of her literary pretensions which, she holds, qualify her to be the local arbiter of taste. She reads Chekhov, for example, which the others are unfamiliar with—or at least she says she reads Chekhov, though it’s not clear she actually does so: she’s something of a liar to gain an advantage and keep up her cultural pretensions, as we soon learn. Central to her cultural pretensions is her claim to be writing a book herself, a biography of her father—that she would have to pay to have published, and that of course no one would buy, even if it actually existed. But it doesn’t, nor (Benson makes clear) will it ever, and Mrs. Mantrip’s mendacious claims to be busy writing it are part of her bid for power over the others. The father of whom she purports to be writing the biography was apparently quite as priggish as his daughter, an Anglian preacher who years before declared war on the ladies of the night who were occupying the houses on the square for professional purposes. Then, because the area was at that point was considered undesirable on account of these ladies, he bought up houses cheaply as they became vacant, upgraded them to respectability (at an enormous profit), and at his death, passed them on to his daughter Mrs. Mantrip. She now rents them out, but the leases are, at least by American standards, long—20 years seems to be the usual, and the residents must pay for any improvements they make, such as added rooms or elevators, which Mrs. Mantrip inherits at no cost to her when they leave. In fact, she is going to raise the rent of one tenant when he has to renew after twenty years, precisely because the house is so much more valuable than it was before with the improvements he has put in. She hasn’t written more than a few sentences of this book about which she talks constantly to the others in the square. (Benson makes clear it would be dreadful even if she did, so no big loss.) Mrs. Mantrip’s secret life, what keeps her going and fills large parts of her day, is that she is addicted to the lurid overheated romance novels (with a sadistic streak) written by the best-selling author who signs himself Rudolf da Vinci. The books have lots of stripping naked and whips, as well as muscle-bound men who look like Apollo and the pure and exquisite women whom they worship. These inevitably end up together after escaping the clutches of the evil bad guy, usually as the bells ring on Christmas Day. These books sell like hotcakes to an adoring public, but Mrs. Mantrip has to keep up the pretense that she is above all that. She tells the other denizens of the square she reads Chekhov instead, not admitting to her infatuation with Rudolf da Vinci. But at least she is no Emma Bovary: at no point does Benson have Mrs. Mantrip mistake these books for reality. Of course, her adoration of melodramatic cliché-ridden trash novels (people who see life for what it is aren’t supposed to be addicted to works like this, that are so clearly not plausible) doesn’t go with her public persona of literary doyenne of the square by dint of claiming to be deeply involved in the task of writing her father’s life, which interests no one,

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not even his daughter, or with her prim and moralist exterior. So she hides this side of her life—which in fact is the happy side—from her tenants and friends. The plot of Secret Lives centers on the ramifications of an apparently insignificant middle-aged woman moving into one of Mrs. Mantrip’s houses (we never hear about who left). She has some peculiarities: she likes loud music all day and much of the night (these houses are adjoining row houses, so this bothers the neighbors) and her house is decorated with sumptuous and overheated lack of taste (orange legs on the piano, for example, and lots of turquoise, alabaster, and malachite). She is lower-class with money, and faux-genteel, as the neighbors discover by inviting her to lunch where she holds up her little finger to eat and makes grammar mistakes, as well as calling the sister of a Marquis who is one of the residents not by her proper title of Lady Eva but by her non-aristocratic husband’s name, Lady Lowndes—showing she doesn’t understand how titles work. As a result, she is thereafter snubbed by Mrs. Mantrip, who has such strong pretensions to being an arbiter of taste. The delicious irony of the book, which Benson leaks early on, is that Rudolf da Vinci is the pen name of this insignificant woman, the source of all of “his” works, snubbed by the Rudolf da Vinci fan Mrs. Mantrip. The author(ess) is given the enchantingly unromantic name of Miss Susan Leg, and Benson makes her a frumpy middle-aged spinster. (Her/their first Rudolf da Vinci novel was called, equally enchantingly in the opposite direction, Apples of Sodom—Benson doesn’t miss a trick.) Her money (she has a chef who makes really good food, and her décor isn’t cheap—and she has a butler and a chauffeur) comes from penning these lurid romances that she writes to the blaring sound of the loud music that so annoys her neighbors. She needs the music, Benson tells us in what seems a stroke of genius on his part, because she started her working life in a typewriting agency in Brighton where the clatter of scores of typewriters became second nature to her. She isn’t an Emma Bovary either. When Miss Leg is in the throes of her creative frenzy, she imagines the scenes and the phrases, and they carry her away momentarily. But when she puts down the pen, she returns to reality. After she finishes her latest potboiler (she writes several a year), we are told that, on her way to spend the weekend at Brighton, Susan was conscious of an undercurrent of flatness. The princes and prelates, the high-bred and dastardly folk, who for the past weeks had drawn their shining furrows, meteor-like, across her brain, had fulfilled their destinies and gone out like candles. They had been lovely or atrocious realities to her, and now they were extinguished … (133) Her characters are called into life, and then they exit, leaving her with a sense of “loneliness” (133). She knows the difference between literature (if that’s what her books are, more escape than mirroring, surely) and life. To be sure, there is some intersection of escape and reality: the décor of her house is patterned on what she thinks to be aristocratic taste in her novels (one of

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her characters is a now-penniless duchess who turns interior decorator, working in very much in this ornate style), the sales of which allow her to indulge this taste in reality. So it may be that for her, this aspect of the books isn’t escape, but mirroring. Or perhaps her life has begun to mirror that of her books—for example she comes to affect the little-girl laugh she imagined for one of her heroines. While writing, she’s caught up in the moment. But still, despite allowing herself to mirror some aspects of her characters, she knows it’s all made up. The book’s plot therefore revolves around Mrs. Mantrip snubbing the very person (if she only knew it) she adores, and the bond between the two women being precisely these novels of unprosaic life so far outside their reality—more unprosaic perhaps for Mrs. Mantrip than for Miss Leg, who eats expensive food and is able to decorate her house to her lurid taste. (Benson’s further joke is that apparently the vast unwashed masses—in addition to at least this one of the washed as well—devour these books, which pour out from under Susan’s pen like the music from her gramophone.) Apparently reality is gray and unsatisfying for most people as well. What Benson doesn’t consider is the real-world question of whether we have to resort to ridiculous fantasies like Miss Leg’s to cope, or whether there is anything we can do aside from reading a clearly escapist book that will make life interesting. Of course, he’s an author, so he wants us to read books. But the answer may be Secret Lives rather than Apples of Sodom—with Benson’s book a sort of Madame Bovary reimagined for the real world. The message of Benson’s novel (not Susan’s novels) seems to be that escape is (to be sure) all we have, but it has to be kept within bounds; it can’t be ridiculous, because that makes the thinness of the pretense all too evident. If Flaubert had been more like Benson, Emma would have spent her time reading Balzac rather than having affairs with unsuitable men. Far safer, but is that all there is? Actually, yes. Alas (?). Of course, the two main characters in Secret Lives reconcile at the end—to the sound of Christmas bells, as inevitably happens in Miss Leg’s sickeningly sentimental fantasies. Things have rather a downer feeling by that point in the Benson novel, due to the fact that of course it wasn’t Miss Susan Leg that Mrs. Mantrip adored, but the imaginary alpha male Rudolf da Vinci. Miss Leg (here the plot is too complex to summarize, except for the fact that it involves the intermediary of the equally enchantingly named Miss Mimps) even sends out a picture of a handsome steely-jawed man as if it is of Rudolf da Vinci, and Mrs. Mantrip contrives to buy this, and to forge part of an accompanying letter to make it seem as if addressed to her. (These are Benson’s flights of fancy, fully as complex as Susan Leg’s.) The steely-jawed man in the photo is actually the nephew of Miss Leg’s butler, and a gossip columnist with a female pen name of Ursula. Benson loves gender switches, as well as the winking suggestion that virile he-men don’t actually exist, but are actually the fantasies of plain spinsters. The large and manly Lady Eva (the one whom Susan calls Lady Lowndes) is married to an insignificant wisp of an unassuming husband, and another main character and resident is the

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clearly gay Jimmy Mason, the music lover who squeals in a falsetto and who gives “romps” (parties in his house) for young people where he can hug both girls and boys. And Mrs. Mantrip is only “Mrs.” (which implies heterosexual intimacy) because of a very brief marriage to a man outside the square who, we are told, conveniently died and was quickly (and deservedly) forgotten. So the end of the book makes clear even to Mrs. Mantrip that her fantasies of virile heroes and equally virile authors are nonsense. She reconciles with her hero/heroine author(ess), but understands that she was in love not only with a world that didn’t exist, but with a handsome male author who turned out to be a faux-genteel and dumpy middle-aged woman. It seems okay by her, which is probably not a little fantasy on Benson’s part. Most people would be disappointed. What makes the books of “Rudolf da Vinci” plausible for readers is that they have many elements of mirroring: there is usually a dog (dogs being permitted or not permitted in the garden of the square is a hot issue that for a time boils over into daggers-drawn animosity between the two camps), people fall in love (with the other gender), female beauty follows the same clichéd pattern as in the real world, as does male virility (gender is quite binary in R. da Vinci’s books, if fluid in the book we are reading called Secret Lives); bad guys are bad guys in the books Miss Leg writes, as Benson has done in his book, and they all walk or motor or ride horses rather than flying through the air. And they do it in and around a London that seems geographically accurate. So the works of “Mr.” da Vinci combine mirroring with escape. But this brings us back to the Poetics of Aristotle, who also posits a two-sided nature to art—in his case, tragedy. The mirroring is the nature of what constitutes a higher or lower position in the world. The spectators are in the same world as a king, only lower placed. Kings are real. That’s mirroring—or was for the Greeks. For moderns, reading or seeing the plays of Sophocles that are usually taken as Aristotle’s model, we have a character put before us whose kingliness is part of what is postulated, which is probably supposed to be interesting, and hence escape. Yet even for the Greeks, the specific king was mythical, such as Oedipus. So that aspect is escape as well. But his being a single powerful leader— like, say, Pericles—wasn’t. For them, that was mirroring; for us perhaps escape. Yet here is the king, talking so we can hear him—that’s probably escape for the Greeks. For us? Unclear. Perhaps mirroring: these characters talk normally, at least when translated into modern languages, though their concerns are abnormal. Yet even for us they are people we listen in on, something we can’t do in the real world. We are there with them; we are privy to their thoughts. That’s escape. But they end up worse than us; if they remained powerful, it would all simply be too predictable. Something has to happen that is more interesting than mirroring. They fall, and what we feel is a form of Schadenfreude: we may not be a king, we (or the spectators of the Greek Classic Age) exit the theater thinking, but at least we haven’t married our mother and killed our father. Arthur Miller evoked Aristotelian theory and proposed, with his essay “Tragedy and the Common Man,” about his now-classic Death of a Salesman, that he

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was writing a tragedy not of a king, but of a mere salesman. 3 It makes sense for the age of democracy. But the fact is that most people find this a bit dreary. We can feel perhaps fear, the first of the things Aristotle said tragedy made us feel—that this might happen to us. But pity—the other? Willy Loman just seems pitiable, which is not quite the same thing. Sad, we say. Or bless his heart. But because the play doesn’t give us any aspirational escape, doesn’t lift us up as much as a play about someone we envy or admire or simply like to look at, it doesn’t purge us either when things go south (Aristotle’s catharsis). We exit the theater in a somber mood: life’s a bitch and then you die. No great forces battling. No great storms. Just a few squalls. Clearly it’s a play with little escape. Does it do better at the mirroring? Willy seems so deflated it’s difficult to see him as a real character. Bertolt Brecht took aim at the other aspect of Aristotelean theory, not the escape but the mirroring, the mimesis. Instead of having us imagine ourselves watching a king, he stripped the stage bare (as in fact it had been for Sophocles) and hung signs to designate place, and had the characters speak to the audience, both of these to insist on the theatricality of what we see, not its relation to the world. Yet Brecht’s rebellion was more nearly against the décor-laden spectacles of the nineteenth century, not the bare stage of the Greeks with its commenting chorus, or Shakespeare’s jolting scene changes from palace to woods, evoked in the dialogue: So this is the forest of Arden. And as numerous commentators have noted, the viewer does feel empathy for many of Brecht’s characters. Mother Courage isn’t a queen, but she is in circumstances that get the blood racing, under fire in war, not selling brushes door to door. And she ends up worse off than us. There’s plenty of material for catharsis here. It turns out that the alternative to a tragic king is not necessarily a squashed cabbage leaf like Willy Loman: there are plenty of people who strive against great forces to save the things they love. Aristotle’s sense that we are fascinated by people better than we are—higher placed, richer, better looking—is borne out in our idea of movie stars. They have to be easy on the eyes, for starters—we still call people “movie star gorgeous,” even if now there are average looking movie stars. Even these have something we don’t—presence? Charisma? What they have most of all is the fact that the camera is looking at them and showing them to us. We can look at these people without any fear of being found rude. That’s what they’re here for, to be looked at. We respond to the act of offering. They’re different than we are, but also like us in some ways. And the camera is looking at them, and so by extension, us. The movie combines mirroring with escape. Bond, James Bond, is better looking and stronger than we are, but he is a man who does many things like male viewers, and in the five recent ones with Daniel Craig, has some of the same problems—mostly, with aging and the wearing out of the body. Still, he carries off stunts we can’t, and achieves goals far beyond our normal everyday ones—but he also has to solve problems we too would have to solve. He lives in a world that is our own—though only in beautiful places out of a tourist magazine. Matt Damon, in the Jason Bourne movies, is not better looking than we are, but he plays a character who’s far stronger and knows how

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to do things we don’t. And his life is more exciting—even if this means it comes with threats our lives don’t have. Both Bond and Bourne live through crisis after crisis—which is escape from our humdrum lives of quiet desperation, as Thoreau called them. We wouldn’t survive even one of the narrow escapes of these guys, that involve things like jumping off buildings or onto trains from mile-high scaffolding with a murderous thug as their opponent. In real life, we look both ways before crossing the street, brush our teeth, take our vitamins, and do a thousand other things to deflect the threats of the world. The thrill for us in watching a strong indefatigable man overcome all obstacles is in watching the world be overcome, the world that threatens us at every turn. And also seeing someone who dares what we do not, and runs risks we have learned never to run: he lives dangerously, as we by and large cannot afford to do. Look at the audience exiting the movie theater after one of these movies—they are too old, or too young, too overweight, and just too average to have any chance of doing a millionth of what the character in the movie does. But at least, unlike Emma Bovary, they know it was just a movie: they don’t try to replicate the stunts they just saw. They look both ways before they cross the street in the parking lot, and are careful backing the car. And they know that the actor isn’t the character. The actor only does these things (if he does any of his own stunts, like Tom Cruise) for the duration of each of the film’s thousands of individual takes, which are spliced together with other shots to give the illusion of continuous indefatigability. And nobody is really out to kill the actor, just his character. There is, to be sure, some overlap of actor and character: the actor has inevitably had to spend all day for months beforehand getting in physical shape for the role. The Internet is full of sites telling viewers what actor X or Y did to get jacked for the muscle-man role in movie Z. Typically the star goes into an intense training program of working out and eating protein that lasts until the filming is over, at which point he returns to his normal average self. His shirtless and roided-out body in the movie is both mirroring and escape for the male viewer. But even the most fantasy-based film or novel is, to repeat this important point, based in reality to a large degree. The sky is up. People walk or run rather than float through the air (and if they do float there are other elements that are like our world). We sense both what’s familiar and what’s different. Without the familiar, we can’t have the different focused against that background. More precisely, it isn’t just reality. It’s mirrored reality, our lives being presented to us as if we were outside them. We sense the feeling of the distant familiar, presented by absent people, and not to us personally. We can go to the movies or not. The producers hope we will, but the movie just may not be for us. So all art includes (not just “represents”) the world that we know; it holds the mirror not so much up to nature as to us. (If we don’t recognize the mirrored world, it isn’t mirrored.) To take a snapshot in time from a personal example: as I write, I am reading Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, about a vanished world with people living in a different time and place than I do, and far

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wealthier. Still, what I have seem in Book I alone, as mimetic, that relates to me, so far, include these things, in addition to the fact that the people sit in chairs and look out windows and wear clothing: •

•

•

•

The personality of Ralph Marvell, whom the unlikeable “heroine” Undine marries because she thinks him a springboard to her social climbing: he is a dreamer, an esthete, who loves Europe, especially Italy, and wants to write—like me perhaps, at least at a younger age. Ralph’s being drawn to Undine for her beauty, not understanding how limited and venal she actually is (I was in a bad first marriage where I projected my wants onto a childhood friend I had always been attracted to). The description of Siena, where they spend part of their honeymoon—I spent a summer in Siena, and images of the Banchi di Sopra and Banchi di Sotto and of the Palio crowded my mind—so far as I can tell this is the real Siena that Wharton loved, not an invention. Undine walking into Central Park off Central Park West near 73rd Street and heading down to The Ramble: I crossed Central Park there last week.

What is not my world: the specifics of late nineteenth-century New York society. So this is perhaps escape for me (?). All these people had their worries and now are all dead, or would be, if they had ever lived. And to anticipate the second pairing of terms, explanation/vaccination, based on reading the book to the end: the fact that Undine uses men could be a warning (vaccination) for the male reader, letting him know what the future can hold so he avoids this fate. But for me, it is probably explanation of some (few) of the women I have met. The fact that she ends up at the end with husband number one, as she should have done to begin with, could be explanation for me: we don’t actually make much progress in life, and, as T. S. Eliot says in the “Four Quartets,” “in my end is my beginning.” At my age of late 60s, I’m going to see more explanation than vaccination in literature anyway. With younger readers, it’s probably the opposite. Mirroring and escape are completely separable only conceptually, rarely so in the work. There is a Poussin in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York that shows a giant striding across a landscape. We can’t say that the landscape is real but the giant isn’t, because the giant has real limbs and is walking like us. He’s just large. And the landscape is something that may not exist anywhere; in any case I’ve never seen it. But trees exist, and I’ve seen them. What’s new is the relation of man to the landscape. I’ve seen a man (the giant is clearly a male) and I’ve seen a landscape. But have I seen this relation? Certainly I understand it. My cat looks bigger up close than he does far away, so that’s mirrored here: the giant is an up-close man in a far-away landscape (?). The world is more than separable parts of things, so Locke, who might seem relevant here, doesn’t seem helpful as the proto-logical positivist he is, thinking that only nouns in sentences refer to elements in the world, not anything else—like relations. The Poussin is

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a combination of mirroring and escape, and it’s hard if not impossible to separate these two aspects. Still, it helps our understanding of what’s going on to try. John Dewey liked the neo-classical idea that the work was somehow more something—cleaner, in his view, leaving out more extraneous details than life, like getting a clear signal from a radio rather than one with static. But there are as many loose ends in the Poussin painting as in life. Does the tree on the right have to be just this way? Perhaps for balance it has to be a big shape. But this particular big shape? These particular leaves? There are many extraneous elements in art works that just come along for the ride, in both mirroring and escape. (Emma’s lover Rodolphe could have had other qualities than he did—lived elsewhere, had blond hair rather than dark—though he probably couldn’t be bald, just so long as he was good-looking and an ardent lover.) These elements don’t fuse in the work to create an amalgam, what the neo-classical world called the “plausible,” difficult though they may be to separate in analysis. Vaccination gives us things for the future, telling us what will happen, so when it does, we aren’t blown away or even surprised; whereas explanation helps us see what has happened. That’s why the young, in a college course, will get perhaps more vaccination than explanation. The problem with the young is that they don’t know what awaits them, so they may not take the vaccinations seriously: at age 19, I found Madame Bovary pointless. I’m never going to be in this situation! But to some degree we all eventually are: boredom is boredom for us all, and being trapped feels the same for each of us. So being an older person teaching younger is frequently rather frustrating. That doesn’t mean bridging this gap shouldn’t be attempted, just that it’s not guaranteed to meet with much success. And the teacher ought to be aware of the obstacles to the comprehension of young people—not because they are stupid, but just because they haven’t lived very much. The older person leading the class should try to work around the problems as much as possible, perhaps by addressing them directly and with good humor rather than getting frustrated. Some works of literature are probably just not for the young, “Four Quartets,” for example. We can put them on the syllabus, but most likely they will be read (at best) rather intellectually, as I read many works of literature at 17 and 18. I understood them, but I didn’t understand them. And there would have been no way of explaining to me that my understanding was superficial, logical rather than emotional. Yet though I was unable to see the point of Madame Bovary when I read it as a late teenager, it offered a sort of vaccination. I stored it away, and when I got older and found myself disappointed by my dreams of what my life would be, I remembered it, and could got back to it. Or was it explanation? That too. That we invariably have to deal with boredom: what a discovery! It’s not just me! Everybody’s life is like that, with empty rooms and ticking clocks. Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken”—its title is already tinged with regret, which is not usually an emotion associated with the young—offers both vaccination—telling us how we’re going to talk when we get old (we’re going to beat our chest and say we took the road less traveled by, though the poem

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makes clear we’re always traveling blind)—and explanation—oh, so that’s why we regret not being able to go back and take the other road: way leads on to way. (Of course it may be trivially true that we always take the road less traveled by, because the road we travel is only our own—that’s a sadness the young probably don’t understand.) Or take Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which tells us that every time we achieve a goal, we need a new one to keep going, as the point is the pursuit and that achieving the goal invariably a let-down. Understanding this can be both vaccination (so we don’t get blind-sided by the disappointment) and an explanation when looking backwards at our life. Even the more abstract arts like music and dance can have roughly the same effect of explanation and/or vaccination. The modern dancer and choreographer Martha Graham liked to tell the story of a woman who came up to her after a performance of her dance “Lamentation,” where Graham sat and contorted on a bench, her whole body from head to toe enclosed in a stretchy tubular sheath that the arms, legs, and head moved open and twisted, to say that she had been unable to grieve for the death of her child, but finally could after seeing Graham’s dance. Mirroring? Explanation?4 So art and literature are things we interact with in the world. They are part of life. If you don’t live, you can’t understand literature. But by the same token, literature can help prepare us for life. This means that the arts are related to us and our situation in variable ways, since our situations vary both with respect to each other and over time. Considerations of literature therefore must be imprecise, making generalizations without certainty, saying things that seem mostly true but are never always so. This acceptance of imprecision, of plausible generalizations rather than certainty, with respect to literature—starting with the question of what literature is—is what I propose to replace the speciously sharp-edged academic consideration of “texts” that has taken over the Modernist twentieth century. I propose to substitute the blurry for the clear, the inductive generalization for the deductive scientific, the layperson for the specialist, and the general reader for the professional. Academia has co-opted art and literature to its own purposes, which require lockstep repeatability and predictability (always the same course on the roster, with a syllabus, tests, papers, and grades that students are paying for). Academia requires codification, generally agreed-upon definitions, specialist knowledge, and the pretense that we can learn more in objective terms about literature, the way we can learn more about the objective world, aiming at certainty—even if for some commentators this certainty is radical unknowability. I propose, by contrast, that blurry trumps certain, and that everything we think we know regarding art and literature is at best generally true rather than certainly so, and can change over time. I therefore echo Susan Sontag’s influential essay “Against Interpretation,” which held, in its most memorable phrase, that “interpretation is the revenge of intellect upon art.”5 Following Wittgenstein as well, who wrote his so-influential philosophical tract (that G. E. Moore named the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) to put an end to philosophy, I seek to put

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an end to the academic study of literature and replace it by something humbler and more reader-oriented, proposing but not forcing of works that may be (but need not be) appropriate to what the young—as most students are—know, and what they don’t. Thinking of literature as a way for people to process, and interact with, life has several advantages. First, it answers the question of why we should read it— or offer it to be read in a classroom—at all: the mantra of the last decades, that we liberate people by showing how texts (as we call them) have oppressed nonWestern or non-standard Western people, is problematic. The ongoing wars of the US of the first decades of the twenty-first century have shown that power does in fact, or does not, come out of the barrel of a gun (as Mao held)—it certainly isn’t to be found in the increasingly deserted classrooms of the humanities and social sciences, whose students have gone on to majors that will, they think, get them jobs with McKinsey to pay off their staggering student debts. What can young people reading literature in a controlled classroom run by older people accomplish? It can help people, especially the young, discover who they are through the mirroring, escape, explanation, and vaccination of literature that they use to define their own lives. And the process of understanding who they are and what their options are is the primary work of the young. If this doesn’t happen relatively early, people struggle all their lives, lurching from uncomprehended crisis to crisis, lost in the fog, unable to guide their own way and at the mercy of circumstances, and of others who see themselves more clearly. Not liking a work can tell a reader as much as liking it. But the purpose is not to get readers to appreciate the “texts,” but to let readers use them to their own purposes: the text has no honor to defend. That’s what makes it, at least potentially, art. Of course, this is a squishy process. It’s one of the great paradoxes of teaching that people who wanted to use literature as a crowbar for liberation of group X see it as a tool with which to beat less involved or even recalcitrant and downright oppositional students over the head. We need professors without a doctrinal axe to grind, who know they neither can nor should control the reactions of 20-year-olds to literature, but who can be there to guide, to suggest. Yet they have to be charismatic too. That’s a rare combination. Every classroom hour is a show, with the professor in front: embrace this fact. (Many young people are too self-conscious or unsure; many older ones too uninterested in the young.) Professors should remember that literature is about people, and look for ways to connect what may be far-away lands and times to the reality of the students’ lives. That doesn’t mean translating Shakespeare into teen-speak. But it could mean being aware not only of what makes his characters not just unlike us, but like us as well. What hopes and dreams do we share with them? What separates us? The professor has to be able to move in a thousand directions, based on student enthusiasm, or their indifference. Wide reading and life experiences help. Humor, some theatricality. Some corniness. Some seriousness. Literature is a way for all of us to become aware of the nuances of how we are people: how do we react to others? What happens when we do X or Y?

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What are the results of not doing Z? The purpose of reading literature is to be able to articulate what we see and what happens to us, so that we can go on functioning—better perhaps than before. We do learn things from reading and discussing literature, but very little of it is scientific in nature: it’s all more specific and less provable than science. But so is most of life. How do we know somebody is in a bad mood? That it’s the right moment to enter traffic? That we have hesitated too long to ask our question and so have lost the moment? Science can’t tell us, but literature can help us think about it. Most of the things we know about our lives are of this nature, in fact. I know where my keys are likely to be, how adolescents are likely to act, how women may react to indicate assent on a date, and a million other squishy things that literature mirrors, includes, discusses, and refers to. Seeing these in literature can lead to us being more aware of them in the world. Adding to our store of “sometimes and usually and rarely” knowledge is what keeps us functioning smoothly. Professors do it, students do it, and literature can help all of us. What professors have in common with their students is that we’re all human. So here’s some advice to teachers and professors: Try to expand students’ horizons, but be aware that not all literature works for all readers—so tread lightly. Leave at home and back in graduate school your own desire to change the world. You won’t succeed. If you try to force your own obsessions on students, you’ll just frustrate and alienate them, as many college professors nowadays do. Most fundamentally: Readers aren’t you. They know what they know because of who they are in the world. They are different people than you, at a different place in the voyage of life. Treat that with respect. And here’s some advice for students: give the work an honest try, rather than judging it based on what you think you know about it, or its author, or its characters, or its reputation or what other people have said about it. It may not work for you. But then again, it may, and in surprising ways.

Notes 1 This concept is most famously explored in literature by Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 2 “Beverly Cleary,” Biography.com, March 26, 2021, accessed 15  February 2022, www.biography.com/.amp/writer/beverly-cleary 3 Arthur Miller, “Tragedy and the Common Man,” New York Times, February 27, 1949, accessed 4  August 2021. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/ books/00/11/12/specials/miller-common.html?mcubz=0 4 https://marthagraham.org/portfolio-items/lamentation-1930 5 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Dell, 1969).

12 IT ISN’T FAKE ANYTHING Literature and the World

The last chapter emphasized what literature can do for us when our relationship with it is positive. But the times when we are immediately in sync with literature are relatively few. More typical are situations of what we might call partial sync where we see some things as being true to the world, but not others. These can range from isolated mistakes to thinking the entire work bad, a range of possibilities I consider here. But the reason we have these responses is that we are in a real world situation with a work, which is also something in the real world: we are who we are, and the work is what it is. Art is imbedded in reality, and we have to understand this to have it mean anything for us. It’s a relationship between an absent person from what may have been a completely different situation than ours, mediated through an unchanging work, that we choose to pick up and try to understand in our world and given who we are. That means that first, what it’s not is a person speaking to us the way someone speaks to us face to face. Thinking it is has led to the recurring error of thinking that literature is either untrue, or somehow putting us on. So it’s to this misconception I turn first. All literature implicitly begins with this: “Consider the following, if you will, O unknown reader.” It’s a bit like the introduction to the scenes of the playwithin-a-play “The Small House of Uncle Thomas” that Jerome Robbins choreographed for the stage production, and then film, of The King and I. The narrator, the slave Tuptim (or as we say now, enslaved person), puts on the play as a protest against her own enslaver (or is this “enslaving person”?), based as it is on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—said to have ignited the American Civil War with its portrayal of the brutality of slavery in the American South. Tuptim introduces every character by saying, “I beg to put before you”—and then the character appears and the scene is played out. The only variation from this is when she introduces Simon Legree, the slave master. Here she says, “I regret to put before you Simon of Legree”—the “most wicked king in all America.” So DOI: 10.4324/9781003373377-15

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she is adding cues to the audience on how to react, as well as what I call appeals to the “inside” audience—see below, and the interaction with the audience is personal. In fact, the Siamese king, who is prime among the attendees (though ostensibly it’s a play put on to impress the visiting English diplomats), is offended after Tuptim begins to editorialize on the evils of slavery. “I beg to put before you” is perhaps part of the play, but further addressing the audience seems to break the fourth wall. Literature can’t do this, unless the address to the audience is part of the script, like the Stage Manager’s part in Thornton Wilder’s much-performed play Our Town, or the songs that comment on the action in Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera. Is this breaking the fourth wall, or part of the performance? Sometimes things aren’t clear. Eighteenth century literature addressed “dear reader” a good deal; is this part of the work or breaking its surface? Perhaps both. For me, it’s always a jolt when the conductor of a symphony concert—as Marin Alsop liked to do in Baltimore during her tenure as Music Director of the Baltimore Symphony —picks up the microphone and explains to the audience what they are going to hear and tells stories about the compositions or composers, as if all concerts were like Leonard Bernstein’s famous Young People’s Concerts, that are actually classes with examples. Yet the fact that literature is merely presented—I beg to set X before you— and that it is outside of a social situation and not presented to us personally—has failed to be clear to millennia of thinkers, who worry about a book that opens with a disembodied someone telling them (as they see it) that, say, “the countess left at ten.” What countess? they ask? Do I know her? If she isn’t real, why are you, the author, saying she is? Thinkers from Plato to John Searle have failed to understand the fact that literature isn’t speaking to us, and the person behind it is gone. We don’t hear it; we overhear it. There’s nothing weird about a novel that starts “I am born” if we realize that it is prefaced by “I beg to put before you a character who says…” But where do we get this implicit placing? That’s where the understanding of how art fits into the world comes in. If we think words are only used by someone talking to the real me right here right now, we fail to understand art. Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. There are people who thrive on the interaction with other people— all the time. Any less immediately personal situation is for them so puzzling as to be meaningless. Perhaps a sympathetic professor could help them see the benefits of less personal interactions—for example, if it helps us see our own world and our place in it (what I call the pairing of mirroring/escape), and both explain what has happened and helps us understand things that will happen when they do (what I call explanation/vaccination). An advertising slogan for the synthetic fiber Dynel in the 1950s, coined by the advertising genius Jane Trahey, announced that “It’s not fake anything. It’s real Dynel!”1 Similarly the arts aren’t fake anything, they’re really a book or a painting, a dance or a film. They take up room, take time to make and disseminate, and have their own economy. And they relate to the world in various

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degrees—it’s a scale ranging from very close to fairly distanced, not a binary choice of real world vs. unreal art. (What is the wintertime television channel that shows a roaring fireplace and whose large flat screen can be placed at fireplace level? Real? Not real?) The question is how they relate, not whether. The fact that we don’t get wet from a painting of a waterfall or warm from the television fire is part of the mechanism of offering in a painting or an electronic image. Nowadays people would set up a whole waterfall as an installation and demand credit as the artist. But it would be an offered waterfall, just as the painting is an offered waterfall. Both the installation that can get us wet and the painting that can’t would offer a waterfall, in different ways (and, as we say, different media). In the painting, the offering becomes thicker relative to what is offered than the installation waterfall (what about a backyard fountain or fishpond waterfall? Real or not? clearly both), and it is more removed from us. The painting has a greater percentage of artness than the installation waterfall or the backyard waterfall into a fishpond because it’s more clearly overheard than heard. The artist has removed it further from us. And so we don’t have to integrate it any further into our world. With an installation waterfall, we might have to move back to avoid getting wet. And so it would be more difficult to overhear rather than hear. To a much greater degree than the painting or photograph, it would be someone speaking directly to us—and thus to that degree, have a lesser percentage of artness. Literature isn’t fake anything; it’s one form of social relation, involving something absent people have done. Yet many philosophers (who typically don’t like dealing with the messy reality of social situations) have said: What’s this nonsense? You’re either there or not there. If literature isn’t standing by its assertions, it’s simply false. All assertions are like face-to-face speech. Something done by absent people for other people to react to is not an option. Only it is, because that’s the nature of art, based on the social relation I call the personal impersonal/ impersonal personal. I’ve admitted that art isn’t for everyone, so there are a lot of people who don’t see the point of art, don’t understand it, and don’t want or need it. But as a result they get art wrong. The list is long. Plato, speaking through Socrates in The Republic, proposed that poetry, being the shadow of a shadow (the latter being what we call “reality”: as in the shadow of the eternal Ideas), should be banned from his ideal polis. He’s wrong that poetry isn’t real; it is just real in a way he didn’t seem to understand. Aristotle, in the Poetics, sought to defend tragedy, which was “more philosophical” than history. But he did this by mistaking a side effect for its intended or principal effect, casting it as integrated into the social sphere, rather than where it actually is, situated outside of it: tragedy, he thought, had the positive effect of purging our emotions, rather like a good emetic for the feeling glands. Sir Philip Sidney, in his Apology for Poetry, seems to agree with me: poetry isn’t false: “The poet nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth.” Yet he too looked for the social purpose of poetry (we would say, the arts). Poetry, thought Sidney, following Horace, showed things as they should be, not as they are.

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In the twentieth century, which was obsessed with words and took them as primary, John Searle, in “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse,” worried the same question of affirmation in literature, reaching the dispiriting conclusion that the assertions of fiction have the form but not the substance of true assertions.2 (He would have liked my grandmother, a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century oneroom schoolteacher on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, who would read only school books and the Bible: they were, she told me, the only things that were true.) Searle begins his essay by asking why Plato was wrong to say that poets lie. His answer is that they aren’t lying, they’re pretending, though Searle can’t say why. Searle’s is a common response to literature, as far as that goes. As I noted above, many readers too wake up one morning to find fiction odd, or abruptly wonder, on opening a novel, what they are dealing with. (People not understanding that art escapes being a personal address to them that requires a response is the reason I wrote this book.) “I was born … on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night,” David Copperfield tells us. What have we just learned? And from whom have we learned it? Who is this David Copperfield? Was he born or was he not? If this is an assertion, we might ask, along with Searle, is it true or is it not? Searle agrees with me, below, that fiction can have nonfictional elements, such as getting the geography of a real city correct. He also allows as a real assertion the author giving us a moral to the story, or making a general assertion about real people, like Tolstoy’s famous assertion about happy families, which the author says are alike, at the beginning of Anna Karenina. But what of the fictional assertions? Searle’s example of “fictional discourse” is Iris Murdoch’s “pretend” assertions about a fictional Lieutenant in Dublin in 1916, which he cannot justify. It isn’t clear to him what “illocutionary acts” (such as assertions) are exhibited by pretending to make assertions. There’s speech between real people, and anything else is apparently suspect. Searle, a philosopher, wants to make a list of invariable rubrics that all particular things we do with words, such as questions and assertions, these “illocutionary acts,” must be ordered under; his list eliminates the necessity to consider the particular cases of which life is in fact composed—and more fundamentally, denies the possibility that the rubrics are not neatly defined categories. In fact, I think they aren’t: we can say something that is a question, an assertion, and an exclamation, as well as having elements of other “illocutionary acts,” and all these in varying degrees that only the situation can help us sort out. Usually there’s no point in doing so, because by that point we’ve moved on to more messy reality without the artificial clarity of Searle’s categories. For example: “Well isn’t that the craziest damn thing!” Only the situation can tell us what this means, what the tone of voice is, whom is it said to and what is their relation is (which determines how aggressive and/or loving this is) or what will happen next. Is it merely venting? Does it portend violence? Is it fun or scary? Is it justified or unjustified? Evidence of a healthy or unhealthy mind? In Searle’s terms, is it a question? An assertion? An expletive like “Damn!”? Searle starts with words divorced from their social situation, whereas my definition of art starts and ends with situations. I suppose it’s progress that he thinks

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in terms of sentences rather than in terms of individual words, as the logical positivists tended to do, and imagines one person talking to another, who must respond and must know whether what was said is true or not. This is one sort of social situation, to be sure, face-to-face communication, or even reading the newspaper that (we hope) is true. But it’s not the only social situation. Absent people who left traces in a material object (that produces the situation we call art) isn’t communication between two people, but it’s a real relation. And you can’t tell much from the form of a sentence alone. The function and meaning of “I am hot” (let’s say written, in a text) depends on who is writing it and why and in what situation and to whom. Is it a joke? An observation? A request for the receiver of the text to do something? A code phrase? Does it mean temperature or sexual allure? Searle thinks newspaper assertions about the happenings of the day are real assertions, but they too are determined by who is writing and to whom, although we may never have to respond to the reporter (nowadays we can write an online comment, or be inspired to vote or go to a demonstration). We can’t do much about, nor do we typically care about, a reporter’s being hot or not, or even what sense of “hot” this is. So the reporter doesn’t write this. Every written phrase or sentence or paragraph or book is a different relationship with a reader. And this is the kind of sentence we probably wouldn’t read in a newspaper, where we are in a different relationship with the writer. Searle also seems dated in his conviction that what is printed or written is always a real assertion. The blurring of the line between ostensible fact in newspapers (and hence for Searle real assertions) and the populist rabblerousing of the Internet or television, sometimes called “alternative facts,” has altered the circumstances he would nowadays have to address. Searle’s focus on words rather than social situations is why the closest he gets to social situations is his “speech acts,” considered below, which he imagines as turning a key in the lock of the world and effecting things all by themselves, so that the words control the people rather than the reverse. His focus is so much on the elements that are intrinsically part of a larger whole that he fails to understand the larger whole. But words are part of larger social relations, which Searle fails to consider. If he had started with a series of musical notes, such as do-re-mi, he’d wonder how they could be part of a sonata, or how a movement of unfolding the arm could be part of a dance by Balanchine or Graham. Of course he ends up unable to say what art is (or his preferred subject, fiction, which he distinguishes from its fancier cousin, literature—though this distinction is never fully explained). There’s no unit larger than “illocutionary acts” and fiction is full of things not on his list of illocutionary acts. Why would we pretend to assert? Searle has no clue. In fact, they aren’t pretend assertions at all, so Searle can stop worrying. It’s not fake anything, it’s real art. Though Searle is aware (as I am) that there are real-world aspects of fiction (or perhaps even literature—he apparently thinks Iris Murdoch merely the first, not the more honorific second), he locates these in proper-name places, where he admits there can be mistakes. If you put Piccadilly next to the Houses of

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Parliament in what you call London in a book (fiction or literature?), that’s a mistake. But the real world enters literature in many common-noun instances of mirroring—people wear clothes and walk on the ground. The real world is also extant in what Searle calls pretend assertions. Telling a story about a Jane Smith who was a servant in Bath in the Victorian age is no less real than writing about Queen Victoria. It’s in the area of what the author apparently assumes (or as we may say, the work presupposes) to be beyond the knowledge of the reader. It’s not fake anything. Saying that Jane Smith was almost six feet tall isn’t a mistake, whereas saying that Queen Victoria was is a mistake—but not because Queen Victoria was real and Jane Smith wasn’t (see below). If we happen to know the names and heights of all the servants in Bath during this period (presumably, unless we see evidence to the contrary, the same 1850s as the one we know about), we can say that Jane Smith is a mistake if there was no such, or if among the 1,667 (?) female servants in Bath at the time, none was six feet tall. The difference between fact and fiction is one of knowledge, not essence. Bertrand Russell analyzed the seemingly paradoxical statement “the present King of France is bald” (there being no present King of France, so is the statement true or false?) as consisting of two assertions: first, the implicit one that there is a present King of France, and second, that that person was bald. If the first assertion is false, the whole assertion is false. But Russell didn’t ask what the social context of the sentence is. Maybe it’s a perfectly reasonable assertion in a philosophy essay? The twentieth century, with its emphasis on the window rather than what is seen through it, saw words first, not the people using them: words seem to stay still, but people and situations change in so many ways we can’t codify them. If it’s words in a novel, it might be true for the time period of the story, or (if the novel is set now) a sign that the speaker was—was what? Deluded? Kidding? Referring to having read Bertrand Russell? We don’t know just from the words. But if David Copperfield did not exist (the comparable first implied assertion, according to Russell), then why read a book of falsehoods? That is the question I am trying to answer here, by agreeing with Sydney that they aren’t false, they’re something else entirely. You just have to see how they function in the world. The real world. Because the arts are in the real world. The short version of their function is not, as Sydney thought, to transport us to a fantasy world of things as they should be. It’s that, by considering a panoply of things put before us, some of which mirrors our world and some of which doesn’t, we can conceptualize our own lives, see what their nature is and both where they are going, and where they have been. Art gets us out of the givens of our here and now. Note I do not say, “out of our reality” (which would make art imaginary). It’s real that I may end a certain way, or was a certain way, or that others are so and so, as real as the fact that this is a Monday morning and I am typing downstairs in my house of a certain address, having eaten whatever at whatever time, me being X old and X tall and in X mood and X marital state—and X whatever. The aversion to seeing

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tendencies and character traits as real is left over from the logical positivists, who (following the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus), wanted to eliminate everything in language except statements linked to specifics in the world, something they never succeeded in defining. And this is why Russell was simply wrong that “the present King of France is bald” starts with the implied assertion that there is such a person. I can say this and be parodying Russell, or saying it to let off steam, or saying it to mock aristocracy (there are self-described heirs to the French throne; perhaps I am referring to the current one in a sarcastic way) or giving an example of iambic tetrameter. In an artwork, this set of words starts not with an assertion that there is such a person but with an implied “I beg to put before you.” The purpose of doing so remains to be determined. Linguistic philosophy of the early twentieth century was maddeningly limited, as anything that starts with words rather than people using words would be—and the late Wittgenstein, or Searle’s speech act theory, didn’t broaden it appreciably. All philosophy wants to reduce the countless alterations of the world to a limited number of entities occurring in predictable patterns; in doing so, it deforms reality. Nelson Goodman, in Ways of Worldmaking, among other books, attempted to redeem the honor of art by asserting that it too, like hard science, gives information, merely a different kind of information from science. He was wrong. We see our reality from outside, and patterns that either we have exhibited or can exhibit in the future. What the arts give us is not information, but ways of understanding our lives. Usually it is the positivist/objectivist viewpoint of the scientist that is taken by those who question the validity of art. But there is a point to literature in its own right, which has nothing to do with transmitting information, even if we cannot articulate what it is. What we learn from literature isn’t information, and it isn’t science. It’s to contextualize our reality, as well as where we’ve been and where we may be going. We can see this by comparing fiction with biography, which overlap. And the relation of fiction, which doesn’t seem “true,” to biography, which does, is Searle’s question, only taken out of the level of single assertions where Searle likes to be, and into the level of the whole work. It has seemed to many readers that fiction and biography are peaks separated by an abyss, distinct ways of doing things that can be combined only at the author’s peril. Lytton Strachey, for example, drew Virginia Woolf ’s disapproval (“The Art of Biography”) for placing into the mind of his subject Queen Elizabeth I thoughts and motivations to which he, as her biographer, could not possibly have been privy. Biography, Woolf pointed out, bound itself to more rigid rules than did fiction, where the author could by definition be everywhere and know everything about one’s characters, who after all were inventions of one’s own imagination. Fiction, therefore, on the one side; biography on the other. What is the difference between writing a book about a character one calls “Queen Elizabeth” (or Queen Victoria, Searle’s example) and a book about a character named “Jane Smith”? It’s not that one is true and the other isn’t. It’s that social groups (and by extension, groups of readers) are defined by their

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acceptance of generally known facts that at some point simply drift off into the grayness of ignorance. This pattern of generally held knowledge determines both what has to be included in a work that will be familiar to that group, and what can be filled in by the author. All works depart to some degree from generally known knowledge: if they didn’t, there wouldn’t be any reason for reading them. What makes works different one from another individually, and different in the clusters we call genres, are the kinds of things that are filled in. Not the amount, the kinds: a biography doesn’t invent less than a work of fiction. It’s just that (following Virginia Woolf ) it can’t invent the same kinds of things as fiction if it hopes to be accepted as biography. At or near the top of the list of givens regarding the nineteenth century of most educated people in the Anglophone world is that the queen who reigned from 1837 to 1901 was named Victoria. Also given would, probably, be the name of her capital city, the country of which she was sovereign, her elevation to Empress of India, and a few other basic facts about her reign. We cannot easily imagine a book of either fiction or nonfiction in which such a person is named Margaret, or a Victoria who is said to have reigned for a mere three decades, or a Victoria who was in fact an Edward, not a queen at all but a king. As Searle notes, there might be a reason for this—satire? An alternative world? But what if the divergence from reality was much smaller, and seemed merely a blooper on the part of an author not caught by an inattentive editor? Let’s say it got the date wrong when she was named Empress of India? We would call such things mistakes. But whether or not you think it a mistake depends on who you are, not just the work—this is what Searle fails to see. Literature exists in the world, not apart from it. Usually such mistakes make clear to us the intended or eventual audience of works: if we see them as mistakes, we are not part of the intended audience (assuming audience to be the same as a group that accepts the premises of the work), or at least not part of the eventual one. I read a Japanese novel that sent one of its characters to the “University of Georgetown” in the US, in a place not at all like Washington, DC. For a Japanese audience, of course, this causes no problems, any more than inventing a Wild West town name would do to us now. The problem comes in the translation into English, and the marketing to the American audience. Indeed, even for a North American who doesn’t know where Georgetown University is in fact located, this might well pass muster. But its basketball team is well known enough, if nothing else, that this might be difficult. Hollywood movies are full of what audience members with any specialized knowledge would regard as mistakes. I enjoyed watching the heroine in a Brian de Palma movie called Dressed to Kill walk up the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and step into the front hallway of the Philadelphia Museum, take part in a lengthy scene in that museum’s modern art galleries (a scene based on a comparable scene in Hitchcock’s Vertigo), then exit back into Manhattan traffic, all without benefit of the Metroliner train connecting these cities. For movie-goers unfamiliar with museums, all blur. For someone who knows, such a generic view of museums seems ludicrous.

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We can be aware of such mistakes and at the same time acknowledge that the information their recognition presupposes is too specialized to matter. The thriller Patriot Games, based on a Tom Clancy novel of the same name, was shot in and around Annapolis, my hometown, as well as at the US Naval Academy, my home institution. The Academy was real (filming was in my building): this, apparently, could not be invented, pawning off, say, a local college as the Naval Academy. (That said, a later movie called Annapolis and ostensibly set at the Academy was shot at an architecturally dissimilar private high school in Philadelphia when the Academy refused permission to shoot on its grounds because it deemed the script—which includes violence against officers among other nonos—unacceptable. Apparently fewer people than I imagined have any idea what the Naval Academy looks like.) But the chase scenes on a highway purportedly outside Annapolis were shot elsewhere: Los Angeles? Those freeways are generically identical to our own, at least to people who don’t specialize in roads, but where did those buildings we see behind the freeways come from? Still, who but an Annapolitan would know that there are no such buildings off highways around here? The insider group for a movie like this is small; we locals would note the mistake and forgive, knowing that the intended audience was far larger than merely ourselves. Single mistakes are only mistakes; lots of mistakes in a meaningful arrangement suddenly aren’t mistakes any more. In satire or allegory, which is to say a world that represents major parts of publicly shared grids incorrectly, things are incorrect in a perceptible pattern. Satire and allegory tend to work in opposite directions. Allegory works by establishing divergence and pushing us toward a realization of similarity with our own world (a remote desert island is discovered where people’s actions, though outlandish by normal criteria, are remarkably similar to givens of our own world); satire works by establishing identity and diverging in particular instances, say, the proper names of the protagonists. There is no intrinsic difference between the incorrectness of allegory (in which, say, animals talk and eat and comport themselves like humans) and mistakes in literature (an incorrect date for something we can look up). The difference is in quantity and consistency. Though many of the details we insist on seeing in any acceptable rendering are things we have memorized or know off hand (such as Victoria’s name and dates of reign), these are only the tip of the information iceberg. Next in line for those things that must be conformed to would certainly be items that we may not know ourselves, yet which, we are aware, can be readily found out: newspapers and political records, for example, provide the precise sequence of Victoria’s prime ministers (or any ministers), the process of wars, and so on. Eventually, however, we leave altogether the realm of the generally known or easily found-out, and enter the gray area of ignorance. In this area, for example, lie the names of people who came to Kensington Palace in May 1847 (even if somehow records come to light listing names of visitors), or what the Queen ate for breakfast on any given day (the menus might exist somewhere, but no one

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cares), or what so-and-so was wearing (not the Queen: this we know, at least after Albert’s death). These blur, in the same way that museums or freeways blur for Hollywood audiences, and constitute the gray area. Thus such things may be “invented,” or filled in, by an author, whether of fiction or biography. Yet even these things may not be filled in at will: it is general knowledge that people of the time did not wear Mary Quant mini-skirts, so this stricture may not be violated, unless it is violated in a pattern (if this were the only thing “different” about this world, we would find it hard to see the point). So the knowledge of the kind of things people wore at the time may itself be part of the general list of known things that must be adhered to. And we should be leery of inventing a queen’s thoughts (Woolf ’s point), because virtually everything else about her is a matter of public record; we are thus acutely aware that such things as thoughts are not. Gray areas remain gray areas only so long as we are unaware of their being such: when we become aware of them, we feel the need to confirm or reject. The trick is to dabble in the gray area we are unaware of being such, or have no reason to care about. Thus any particular content of a novel can be different from what we know it to be in the world, but it must be consistently different if we are not simply to reject the result. Not all of its contents can differ from reality, or we are left unable to distinguish the familiar elements from those peculiar to the particular work, those that make it worth reading. The distinction between what must be adhered to and what may be (as we say) “invented” (see below: this really means, in a zone beyond our collective knowledge) is not the same as the distinction between fiction and fact. There is no intrinsic difference between the elements of a novel or a biography that must correspond to the known world and those that need not: that the Queen was named Victoria is just as much, or as little, a “fact” as what she had for breakfast on March 28, 1873. The distinction between them is based on the difference between things readers tend to know or can easily find out and things they do not. The distinction between what must be adhered to and what may be invented is also, and as a direct result, not absolute; it can vary from group to group. Indeed, any individual can change his or her degree of knowledge, and thus, reaction to a work. Something that seemed plausible to us at one reading may seem wrong at another; this shows a shift of our gray areas. Because the names of all the women who worked as serving girls in, say, Bath, in 1842, are not generally known, a novel could well be written about one of them, called (say) Jane Smith. Yet if we are writing a paper for the (presumably imaginary) Society of Scholars Researching Nineteenth-Century Bath Serving Girls, we are not allowed to invent Jane Smith. So it is not the case that scholarship is true and fiction is not. It may seem that I am arguing a deeply relativist position: fact is no different from fiction. The very bases of truth-claims seem to be impinged. Am I saying that a statement like “the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor occurred on December 7, 1941” is not fact? Or that it has the same status as David Copperfield’s assertion of his birth? Not at all, for we can shine the flashlight on any particular statement

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and decide whether it is in the category of givens (such as this fact about Pearl Harbor is) or in the gray area. And deciding it is in the gray area means making it a candidate for deciding whether it is true or false. We can verify the statement about Pearl Harbor. But how could we verify statements about David Copperfield? We can tell that’s in our gray area, and that we can’t verify them. If we see a way to verify them, they become potential facts, or mistakes. This is a real fact, not a fictional one. Fiction is situated in a real part of our knowledge landscape. We have to put it there, which means we have to know what the landscape is, a fact. One fact is having gray areas where our knowledge does not reach. The gray area is that area of things on which we have no impetus to shine the light: we do not care whether Jane Smith existed or not. But we can come to care, and if we do, we won’t be able to invent her. What of a statement like “the agony of the fourth man to be killed at Pearl Harbor was extreme”? Is this fact or fiction? This falls in everyone’s gray area, though if we had access to God’s mind, the flashlight could be shone even here. It seems to be like an assertion about Victoria’s thought processes unsupported by external evidence: we are too aware that no one can decide it. So we are conscious in reading such an assertion that it is an invention. The way to gain acceptance is to hide the seams, invent what no one is in a position to refute. What of a statement like “the third battleship to be sunk at Pearl Harbor was the USS California”? I don’t know if this is correct, but since it is a wild guess at a name, I assume that it isn’t, and know that the world is full of historians and World War II buffs who would catch me on it. So I don’t make such a statement. I can invent a character named Joe Smith, an American seaman who survives Pearl Harbor. I cannot invent an American pilot named Joe Smith who flew the Enola Gay to drop the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima. The distinction is simply between the area of the generally known (or easily knowable) and the unknown. There were so many people involved in Pearl Harbor we don’t know all their names, but since the pilot of the Enola Gay was only one, we do know his name, or can find it out. Nor am I making a kind of pragmatist claim, or a group-relativist one for truth, that truth is what I can get away with, or get away with before a certain group. It’s true that if I am lecturing in Japan, I might well be able to get away with referring to a University of Georgetown and placing it somewhere other than in Washington, DC; that doesn’t mean it’s true. I would know it wasn’t true even if the audience didn’t. A sophisticated audience in Tokyo undoubtedly would contain people who would know, but perhaps not a more provincial non-academic gathering. It would be embarrassing to assume ignorance if someone knew the truth. A claim I might be able to get away with for one group (say, that there was a Jane Smith who worked as a serving girl in Bath) and not with another can in fact be challenged: if we shine the flashlight on it, we can call it false and correct it. To challenge a statement like this already, by definition, means to be outside the group that would accept it: our challenge is, of course, from another point of view. But all challenges always are. This doesn’t mean they’re illegitimate. Both

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fiction and nonfiction are linked to, and exploit, states of knowledge that may change over time and vary from reader to reader. Like nonfiction, fiction takes many things from the world, and plays in the gray area of many others. Yet this doesn’t make fiction identical to nonfiction. If Queen Victoria occupies a great deal of the book’s attention and/or figures in the title, the result is likely to be nonfiction. If Jane Smith, living in the reign of Queen Victoria, is the subject, the result is likely to be fiction. But even the biography of Queen Victoria will have “invented” as many details as the novel about Jane Smith; they will simply have something to do with Queen Victoria or her entourage. Many people besides John Searle are comfortable with the notion that books may be hybrids of fiction and nonfiction; E. L. Doctorow became famous for mixing into his novels vignettes of historical figures. Searle thinks fiction a different undertaking from nonfiction but holds that fiction may contain nonfictional proper name elements, such as, for example, Queen Victoria. This view of fiction as a fundamentally different kind of cake than nonfiction, containing though it may nonfictional bits, tends to locate the nonfictional (and hence alien) bits in the facts about names of known people and known places. But my point is that it’s the degree of “knownness” on the part of both author and audience (if these coincide—and they don’t have to) that makes the difference between the factual bits and the fictional ones. Victoria is fact because she’s known, not the reverse. Jane Smith is fictional because she is unknown, not the reverse. And even the least “historical” fiction is largely factual. The sky—as I say—is up, clouds cause rain, and most people in the West eat with knife and fork. There is something strange going on if the creatures in a book eat through their nostrils or greet each other as friends by slashing with knives, because such behavior contradicts what is known about humans, at least in our own society. In the same way, the particular clothes a character was wearing in 1842 could be invented, but the author would still have to leave out the mini-skirts. It’s merely the names of (say) Catherine Earnshaw or Becky Sharp that are in the gray areas, not what these women do and say. In no book is all of the narration in the gray areas: we wouldn’t be able to follow if it were; I give examples below of two books that for me are too much in the gray area. It’s a mistake to say that fictional characters live in a separate realm, that of the plausible, or the true-to-life: the French vraisemblable (as Boileau observes, “what’s true can sometimes not be plausible,” my translation).3 We say, Becky Sharp could have existed. But plausible, which is to say possible, isn’t an ontological state. What we mean is, we have no evidence to suggest that this didn’t happen: this name and configuration of known things is within the gray area of our knowledge. So the author is free to work, putting together a character to put before us out of other things than the proper names that are on our short list of givens, our knowledge of how people function and what they do. But if our knowledge of the time were such that we could list all the people who lived at that time and what they did, saying that a woman named Becky Sharp did such and so becomes a mistake.

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If we can speak in the world of “someone” eating, and mean, as we might say, a person (not otherwise specified) inserting food into his or her mouth and chewing, a book can use this phrase as well. Indeed, we can, to make clear that we are not referring to a known person, call this someone eating “David Copperfield” (a person whose name is in our collective gray area). We use “eating” (as a gerund) meaningfully, even though the more Platonic thinkers might well tell us we are referring to a particular entity that exists on some higher ontic level: Eating, as opposed to you eating, or me eating. Nor is it the case that verbal assertion can be judged true or false in a way that other kinds of artistic portrayals cannot (Goodman’s chief virtue is in seeing the continuity between, say, painting and literature). A Dutch Golden Age still life, to return to this example of some of my favorite paintings, may be judged true in some ways (or, if we prefer to use the word “true” only for verbal assertions, “correct”; there is little difference), false (or incorrect) in others, and in the gray area in others: ewers in the light look like this (true), lemons are not this transparent (false) but they are yellow and segmented (true), cookies of that time may or may not have this peculiarly floury texture (everybody’s gray area nowadays); I’ve never seen any box like this in the painting, but assume others might have (my own gray area). Some thinkers have held that the problem of reference is a general one with words (in doing this, they group books with speech and leave out the paintings; we can just as well group paintings with books and leave out the speech). If we say to someone whom we know (call him John) who has a muffin to which (a social fact) we are entitled, “Could I please have the muffin?” and John gives us the muffin, we probably say “thank you” and enjoy our muffin. On the other hand, we can think about it so much it all seems strange: how did these funny squeaks from my throat influence John to give me the actual muffin, buttery and warm? I remember when my then five-year-old daughter learned that the painted wooden doll on the German Christmas pyramid “is” Snow White. It remains, of course, at the same time a figure that turns around; probably she recognized that there was a relation between this figure and human beings, and more specifically women. I told her that this “is” Snow White, and confirm that she knows it “is” a woman, because I know the world expects her to know these things. But there is no deep ontological sense in which she is bereft of all information if she knows merely that it “is” a woman and not that it is, or is somehow named, Snow White, or even if she knows only that it is a colored, hard figure (as perhaps a dog would know). I, for my part, can learn that a female nude in a painting “is” Flora (who didn’t exist), or the Duchess of Parma (who did). This shows us just how little changes in the case of an artwork when we know that it presents to us in painted form not an allegorical figure, but one whose name can be found on the census records: many portraits also present their unnamed and unknown sitters, but looking at the portrait as the figure of a person is not nothing for the viewer. I have certainly learned something in learning a real name, but what I knew before was not

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nothing. At least I knew that these paint daubs were meant to evoke a woman. Some people might not know this, but they might find them a pleasing pattern of colors. This too is something. What if, coming from a non-Christian context, I find merely confusing all these women holding babies that so fill Western art to the Renaissance and beyond? Have I misperceived them if I do not understand they are “really” the Virgin and Child? According to one set of rules, perhaps. Social groups overlap with audience groups because of knowledge held to be necessary. In the set we move in, it may be necessary to recognize the daubs as portraying a woman, but not to recognize that this woman is Flora. We may, therefore, insist on people knowing certain relations, but we cannot insist on their knowing all relations. We may know enough to tip our hat to a lady. Do we have to know that this is related to, derived from, the medieval gesture of a knight opening his visor? Where does a man’s four-in-hand tie come from? I think I read, from a piece of seventeenth-century cloth worn round the neck at the French Court. Or was it the Russian? I know enough to put one on before I go to the office. I know too that if a curfew is declared, I had better observe it. Do I have to know that this word is a corruption, rendered acceptable by time and distance, of the much more comprehensible French couvre-feu, the time when fires had to be covered? Do we know nothing if we do not know everything? We can never know everything. The fact that something seems problematic, such as meaning in words, or representation in art works, doesn’t mean that it is problematic to everyone, only to the person who has found it so. Creativity may in fact start with amazement, for example at how squeaks from my throat get me a mouthful of muffin: the glue holding together the world is thin indeed, and we can stop at any moment and break its joints. It’s like ice that is strong enough to hold us if we keep skating on it, but too thin to hold us if we stomp on it. Alterations in the topics that compose intellectual history occur when many something seems problematic to many people that didn’t before, when the world suddenly breaks apart and, for a number of people, has to be put back together again. But absolutely anything in the world can, in this way, abruptly seem problematic: the fact of seeming problematic doesn’t distinguish fiction (which seems problematic to people like Searle) from other undertakings. What does it mean to be angry? What is thinking? Do I really see the coffee cup? How do I know that helping a starving person is good? What is the justification of following the dicta of a president? Our conscience? In each case, something we hitherto took for granted now suddenly seems strange. This is not to say that it will seem problematic in this sense for all people; our articulation of the position from which it seems problematic may, however, sway them to adopt this point of view. Philosophy doesn’t convince, it just shows things from our point of view, one that others may decide they share. We may hold that the arts are intrinsically mimetic. This works until we realize that paintings are flat (they may give the illusion of distance, but the flatness

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and the shine are not themselves mimetic), or until we reflect that the people portrayed in books are not just any old people, but people of a certain sort, or until we see a late Mondrian: we don’t know what it is, but somehow it makes sense. If the arts really are mimetic (that is, to the exclusion of other qualities, or even primarily), why do we need them at all? This is the point at which we begin to massage the theory. We are led to the plethora of neoclassical explanations of types and representative individuals (artworks don’t show the world as it is, but typally), or to Sidney’s moralistic view of the arts (life as it should be), or to neo-Platonisms, or to theories of symbolic forms like that of Susanne Langer. What reality does a string quartet portray? Well, not the world as we perceive it, clearly: if we are committed to the assertion of mimesis, however, we have to find something that it portrays. For Langer, it is the structure of feeling. What all these miss is that the arts are what they are because of the role they play in the world. They don’t need justifying. What are they and how do they function? Not: what justifies them? Thinking that literature is false because the sentences of which it is composed sometimes make what, if in a person-toperson context, would be assertions, shows ignorance of the fact that words work d ifferently in different situations. The author isn’t in front of me, saying this to me. The book and everything in it are something proposed for the consideration of anyone who chooses to consider it. Literature is something specific people write, and it is something specific people read. It’s a real thing in the real world. However, we’re looking for the wrong reality if we ask why we don’t get wet in front of a painting of a waterfall, or whether the Napoleonic soldiers in War and Peace can shoot us. A book doesn’t serve us dinner either, or give us a haircut, but that isn’t held against it. So why do we hold against literature that it’s not our spouse saying “Dinner’s ready” or “John is coming soon” (both these phrases may be in the book), which may feed us, or announce the real John? The point of literature is precisely to be distanced from us so we don’t have to respond. The author has accomplished the distancing for us. Instead of demanding that literature do something it was never capable of doing, we should ask what it is capable of doing. Words are real, and using the words “Napoleonic soldiers” in a novel doesn’t have to be any less real than saying, there were (historically) Napoleonic soldiers, or seeing a placard in a museum, that says, in front of a mannequin wearing a uniform, “Uniform of a Napoleonic soldier.” Nor is this a distinction between realistic and unrealistic art and literature. Even a late Kandinsky is an arrangement of real colors. The problems seem to arise when literature/art does things the world does too—such as use words, or paint recognizable scenes. We’d never ask of a painting by Mondrian why the squares of color don’t shoot us. In a painting of soldiers, we might well ask this, because we recognize what we see as a form of soldier. And the answer to why they don’t shoot us is, because the medium distances them from us—it shrinks them and puts them on the wall on a surface, for starters. That’s the artness.

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They are rendered in a form where they can merely be offered. Soldiers who can shoot us won’t usually be offered; if they are, the result is not art, but an attack. Take cover! There may also be an offered Napoleon in a painting too, one that isn’t dead and that fits in the frame on the wall and doesn’t need food or water. The paint and canvas are the means of offering people that don’t die and can’t shoot us. Shakespeare, to repeat, made a similar point in many of his sonnets: it’s the actual beauty of the young man, who will age and die, that lives on in the sonnet—and this is possible because it is in words. I am insisting that art isn’t make-believe, it’s reality in changed form, to let us come upon it when we will, like the berries in preserves: they’re changed in shape, consistency, color, and taste with respect to fresh berries—but that’s what’s necessary to let them sit on the shelf in a jar until we’re ready to eat them, rather than rotting. We can set up a progression of the following: First is Fido yapping at our feet, demanding to be fed. Second is the neighbor’s Fido we see and hear yapping to be fed in the next yard. Third is a Fido we hear but don’t see in another far-away house or apartment of people we don’t know. Fourth is a stuffed Fido that we see in a taxidermy studio. Fifth is a Fido in a movie. Sixth is a description of Fido in a book. All of them are Fido, only progressively more distanced in social terms, and with a progressively diminishing necessity for us to do anything at all. These stages of distancing are layers of offering. The offering by absent others means we don’t have to get up and find the dog food or even wonder why someone else doesn’t. Few people would say that the only actual Fido is the one yapping at our feet that we have to feed. But if the Fido we don’t have to interact with because he’s just a yap on the next floor of the apartment building is actual, so is the Fido in a movie. Or a painting. Or a book. Similarly, it’s the putting before us that means we don’t get wet by a painting of a waterfall. Or get shot reading War and Peace. The colors or the “Napoleonic soldiers” in art or literature are not reference or representation. They’re real soldiers or colors, but rendered in a form to allow them to be put before the world and on the wall in a frame, or in the pages of a book. The rendering has changed them from flesh and blood to what they are when offered in that changed form. It’s a more extreme example of what happens to berries when they are turned into jam. We can’t fold a real landscape into a frame and hang it on the wall, or put real soldiers in a book, so we subject them to alteration that allows somebody to offer it and walk away. What effects this change is the pulling out of the social situation where I have to interact and respond: soldiers in the room can be dangerous, and real waterfalls are too big for my house, as well as wet. The postcard of Yosemite Falls may seem more really the falls than a painting of it, and both more real than merely using the words “Yosemite Falls,” but all these are in the same progression of increasing layers of offering. None of them requires a trip to California. Linguistic philosophers, to return to this topic, have focused on words stripped from their individualized social contexts—and art is a specific social context.

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That’s what makes them linguistic philosophers, not artists. For philosophers of X, the focus is on the general, what they can nail down for all situations. For linguistic philosophers, the constant is the words, considered outside the particular cases (philosophy aims at the general and ignores the particular: from individual chairs, to speak in Platonic terms, it goes up to the Idea of Chair). The result of separating words from their specific context was the obsession of the twentieth century, how words relate to the world—not what one person can do with them. What one person does is the domain of the arts: the philosopher, focused on the general rule, is the enemy of the artist, who tries to capture the specific. The early Wittgenstein (of the Tractatus) and his followers in the Vienna Circle tried to convince themselves that if they tortured words sufficiently (and threw out most of them), they could force what was left to somehow reach out and touch the world. Then the later Wittgenstein (of the Philosophical Investigations) gave up on this, focusing instead on the astonishing (general) fact that language was actually used by people between themselves. (He thought things had to be expressed between people to exist: so no hidden “mental states.”) This allowed later philosophers like W. V. O. Quine (“Two Dogmas of Empiricism”), drawing on Ferdinand de Saussure’s focus on the relation of words not to the world, but to each other (Course in General Linguistics), to hold that words got their meaning by being part of a big structure like a net made of other words, not a one-on-one relationship with the world. All linguistic philosophy, however, whatever the content of its general statements, makes, well, general statements, in this case about words, and is uninterested in what I am interested in here, the specific use of words (or paint, or sounds, or whatever) in art or indeed in lie that art offers to the spectator/viewer/auditor. My position is therefore an anti-philosophical one, focusing on the particular rather than the general—here the particular use of words in artworks, or for that matter, real life, because these are all positions on the same progression of social interaction. Linguistic philosophy of whatever cast makes statements about words in general, and is uninterested in the fact that the word, say, “shit” can fit into countless situations: as me expressing fury when the spaghetti falls on the floor, as a way to denigrate an opponent’s argument, as a description of what’s in the cat’s litter box or on a city sidewalk, and so on—in slightly different intonations and contexts. So can what is apparently a declarative sentence such as “This is shit!”—or merely “This is shit.”—and do I mutter it or yell it, and at whom and how many times, and how upset am I, and what is my body language, and is it socially appropriate for me to do this and and and…? It may not be a declaration at all. It may merely be an attempt to shock a staid audience. We can focus on the commonality of all these uses, which means withdrawing upwards one layer into abstractions we can nail down (usually the written word “shit,” or the distinction between a statement and a question or an interjection), or we can remain on the level of actual life, what Plato denigrated as mere appearance. Actually, life is the reality: the Ideas (philosophy) are the abstractions that misrepresent the reality, but are necessary to getting through the weeds. Nobody is just Man, Woman, or

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non-Binary, but always a specific man, woman, or non-binary person. No house is just House but my house with my things (or yours), and no use of “shit” is like the other, whether verbal or written. Philosophy seeks to get vertical, moving up to a level of abstraction it can codify. No philosophy—by dint of thinking in terms of qualities that are always the case (and qualities that are always the case are the stuff of philosophy, even if they always vary)—deals with the horizontal variations, that cannot be codified in advance. If I, Bruce, say to my real time wife Meg, “Do we have muffins?” it may be about real muffins in the drawer, the muffins I buy at the store. Or is it a joke, a reference to the time we over-bought muffins? Or am I mimicking someone we heard in a movie? Do I pronounce it “moo-fahns” like my mother-in-law who is pretending she is “fahncy” and French as a joke? If so, am I making fun of her (not on your life!), or am I evoking her humor to say my mother-in-law is funny? (Or both?) If my wife understands, she responds in radically different ways. But of course she can misunderstand, as I might say, and that generates another whole conversation. No philosopher can tell what I said merely by looking at the words on the page (which are themselves an abstraction of speech with its intonation). Or even by hearing them. Not even my wife may know what I said. That’s real life. Philosophers like John Austin (How to Do Things with Words) and Searle (Speech Acts) took larger units than just words, usually phrases, what they called “speech acts” that functioned in a specific way in the world. This seemed for a time a way to get out of the binary trap of having to choose between either external reference, or internal relations among words. But they focused on one specific set of phrases that are very closely related to the world between people in one specific kind of situation—and there are countless others. And they exaggerated the actual power of the words. Searle imagined that saying “I do” in a wedding ceremony is what actually gets you married—it’s speech, but it’s an action in the world. See how that escapes the binary choice? The phrase that does something like getting you married is the action. But of course it isn’t these words that accomplish the action, it’s the social understanding that this is what you do when asked the proper question. Nodding your head might work too. Nor is saying this particular phrase a requirement to getting married; I don’t think that this question was asked in my wedding at all, and I have the certificate to show I am in fact married. We say “I do” in many situations other than a wedding and it doesn’t get us married. And if I said “I do” in a wedding, even as the groom, while giggling hysterically and running away, I don’t think I’d be considered married. Similarly, it’s signing your name that nowadays obligates us to many things—in the old days merely an X from the illiterate. Or a fingerprint, or now an “e-signature.” All are things we agree on; the gestures (or words) have no power of their own. If I hear the question, “Do we have muffins?” on a television ad (or see it printed in an ad), I know it’s an ad—I’m supposed to think of muffins. But it’s not a question I have to answer. This phrase is a real question in either case, but

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one of them applies to me and one of them doesn’t: the television doesn’t know I’m there. In a book, it’s what one character says, or an example in a situation presented as a situation, as here. This is not an “imaginary” or “fictional” use of his phrase, it’s just further removed from something the person who reads it (or if this is read aloud, hears it) is supposed to interact with. We overhear it, just as if we hear someone in the next apartment yell it. It’s not for us to respond to. Actually, even less, because the people next door could appear at our door. Besides, it might be that Bruce is hearing this in Bruce’s real apartment, and it affects Bruce. I might not have to respond, but I may have an angry response internally or even verbally. So it is closer on the spectrum to my having to respond, the real me, than the same phrase in a book. Literature is situated in the world, not another realm. This means that it can be relevant or irrelevant depending on who in the real world reads it. Even the situation of “I beg to put before whomever” is a fact in the world, the situation involving people that escapes the particularities of the social situation. I escape the problems of linguistic philosophy, created by starting with words or phrases and then asking, “Now, how do they relate to the world?” by assuming that art is already in the world, and trying to define its place. And I reiterate my central assertion here: literature is neither true nor false, nor a beautified version of reality, not what reality “should” look like. It is a social use of words of a particular sort. Our job is to understand what the social situation of literature (and art) is. I have suggested that the arts are things made by absent people that we are not called upon to react to, so that we interact with people through what they did and walked away from, not with them. This means that the author is both present and absent: it’s too personal to ask for authorial “intention,” and it’s too impersonal to pretend that the work is a natural occurrence like stones. The artwork is something made by now-absent people.

Notes 1 Anne-Marie Schiro, “Jane Trahey, Ad Executive and Author Is Dead at 76,” New York Times, April 25, 2000, www.nytimes.com/2000/04/25/business/jane-traheyad-executive-and-author-is-dead-at-76.html?referringSource=articleShare, accessed 10 February 2023. 2 John Searle, “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse,” New Literary History 6, No. 2 (Winter 1975): 319–32. 3 Boileau, L’Art Poetique.

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Who’s the Work For? Literature is like a message put in a bottle and flung into the sea. There’s usually no Tuptim presenting it to us in a face-to-face social situation, and usually no professor either to bridge the gap between what the work presupposes and who and where we are. The writer has no idea who will pick it up, if anyone, and if ever—and even then, no idea what that person’s circumstances will be. Yet for it to exist at all, the writer has to have an idea who could possibly understand it and interact with it. (Even a literal message in a bottle is written in a specific language, and if it asks for rescue from a desert island, presupposes somebody with access to a ship or plane.) Because the people who see it are unpredictable, especially if the work gets out of its original time and place, we can’t say how they will react. Literature is one step beyond the automat, which I remember from my childhood, which is one step beyond a cafeteria line, itself one step beyond a meal ordered and brought out in a restaurant by a waiter. The restaurant meal is chosen by us, and made for us. The waiter brings it to us personally and we interact verbally with that person, as we have interacted with him or her to order. Of course, the rules of this personal interaction are quite strict: s/he can’t tell the story of his/her life or share problems, nor can the diner. Both have to stick to the script: specials, questions about preparation, I think I’ll have that, “Good choice!” the waiter sometimes says—what would be a bad choice, I always wonder. But the food is mine if I ordered it. I can choose to share it if the person I am with is on intimate terms with me, in my case usually my wife. With another man, I don’t usually share food. Only if I have pushed the plate away with a heaping serving of, say, French fries still on it, can a good male friend say, “Are you going to eat those?” “They’re all yours,” I say, and he digs in. I never in any DOI: 10.4324/9781003373377-16

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of these interactions leave the givens of myself: I remain who I am in relation to this person and in this social situation. In a cafeteria, however, the food is offered to anyone in the line, not to me personally. I choose what I want, smile at the server, say what I’d like, and thank him or her. It wasn’t made for me. So it’s one level more impersonal than the restaurant, though there are real interactions involved. In the automat, the layer of impersonality becomes thicker. I look at the sandwich or pie behind the glass and either put my coins in the slot and open the door, or not. I may see the flitting hands of people replenishing the pie slices, but I am not locked into interactions with them. I don’t even have to say “thank you.” And literature is even more impersonal than the automat. We don’t see the pie being replenished, and indeed there is nobody behind the windows. The windows were filled long ago and the people went away. Here’s where the analogy breaks down—food will rot, but literature doesn’t, it just sometimes loses its traction with the world—leading to us saying it is bad or irrelevant, as I consider below. Art is impersonal, but it’s not without qualities. These qualities of the audience, whether assumed or eventual, are the connection of the work to the world. We don’t know beforehand whether we’re the work’s ideal audience or not, though we may be able to guess. Young men, we know, are more likely to like muscle-guy buddy movies with lots of violence than are young women, and the young men aren’t likely to want to sit through a “chick flick.” But we can always be surprised. Maybe there will be something else that appeals to a member of a group not assumed to be the target audience? The work can’t predict the responses of those overhearing it, sometimes at great temporal or geographical remove. The offering by the author is impersonal, but our response is personal. This fact is the Achilles heel of all attempts to “teach” literature as if it were as objective as science, which characterizes the academia of our day. All literature is related to its situation, and our own. The possibility of a later reader responding differently than the original reader, or than—it seems—the author intended (though this is informed guessing, and not necessarily relevant to reader response), is stronger with written or permanently recorded words that stay around to enter new contexts than with (more transitory) speech, which we may be able to re-calibrate and fix in the moment in a way we cannot with written works. Saying “What do you mean?” when the listener is confused or puzzled usually produces another explanation the person does understand. Professors re-cast statements daily for uncomprehending students. A blank look from a friend at something we say usually produces from us a laugh, an apology, and another try. But written works are fixed and not responsive to their reading, so the longer they stay around and the more alien they are to the situation of the readers, the more they tend to generate reams of fixes that we call commentary. To be sure, the distinction between written works and spoken ones has become blurred, and indeed the classroom situation where the professor and students talk about a written work is itself the best example of such a blurring, or of a hybrid situation. The purpose of the talk is to bridge the gap between

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the written work at home in its own context, and our own. Written words used to be clearly different from spoken ones—until the invention of means such as recording devices to make the spoken words stay around past the initial situation that produced them. Speech seemed transitory, writing permanent. This distinction was never more than relative, however, as something said could be repeated to others, and of course could make the transition to writing, as Plato and Xenophon wrote down what they remembered of what Socrates said, or Wittgenstein’s students wrote down what they heard of his lectures. Nowadays, speech and writing are even more blurred. We have recordings of speech, and videos; and even written utterances under the influence of the Internet come to seem more like speech, complete with signs to show intonation or emotion. Yet we’re not at all clear about the implications of this blurring of speech and writing. Many people consider tweets or Internet chat postings as if they were speech that disappears, and are surprised when records of them from decades before surface and are used against them. So the wall between writing and speech, never absolute, has become even less so in recent decades. Still, it seems that writing is even now the medium for more complex and longer-lasting utterances. Or not? TED talks are forever (it seems) on the Internet too. And written papers are sometimes given verbally, as at literature conferences—though the hope is always that they will make it into a possible collection in written form of conference papers. Blogs and other publications on the Internet are somewhere in between these two states of speaking and writing: they can stay around for quite some time, but can also disappear. Of course, so can books. Libraries deaccession books all the time, pruning their shelves. And privately printed (self-published) works are even less likely to last or be widely accessible. That is not much different from the situation when books were individually copied: Beowulf came down to us by chance, in a single copy. All this means that there is a spectrum of permanence, which means varying degrees to which an utterance links to a specific situation. “What’s for dinner?” said to a spouse is tightly linked, whereas “The countess left at ten” as the opening of a book is not. At one end is a transitory unrecorded comment to a single person who never repeats it, which is used up in an instant and doesn’t need explanation, and on the other, a big publisher edition in a Western capital of tens of thousands of copies that reach many different people perhaps much later. But if it’s a scale, it’s a barbell-shaped one with the ends of speech and writing vastly larger than the blurred middle. Still, the possibility that something written for one situation can be accessed or inserted into another is stronger than if it were spoken, which still has a greater likelihood of simply disappearing into the air and being unretrievable. Whether spoken or written, words are one way we have to bridge the intrinsic gap between people—that is, the use of words means the gap is presupposed. Thus even with written works, we can sometimes, perhaps even usually, figure out what the context of the writing was. This allows us to distinguish what I call, below, the inside from the outside in literature: what does it take for granted?

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What does it have to explain to the reader? We do have human contact that does not require words, such as flirting with glances, or sex, or silent disapproval, or beaming approval. But frequently we have to have recourse to words, which come to be no differently than shrugs or moues. They’re just a different medium, and if they are recorded or written down, they can stay around (so can recorded facial motions). Words thus always straddle two worlds: the us and the not us. And they are made to order for that situation—whether well or badly. What we write or say is determined by the relationship. We want to put a round peg in a round hole, but we have to realize the hole is round and know something about the size so we can try to insert the right size. We can be more or less skillful at doing this, and with written works that stay around, the hole for which it was made frequently disappears with time and distance, and we don’t understand why the words are that shape and that size. We shape what we say or write to fit specific situations—that’s the content, not something added to the content like packing material around something in a box. We try to craft the words to fill the whole box. If we walk up to a stranger and say, “How is Marge?” the person is likely to stare blankly, or if by chance knows or perhaps even is married to, or is, a Marge, will say, “Do I know you?” Or “How do you know her?” There are ways to ask a stranger about Marge; perhaps: “Hi, excuse me, I noticed you just came out of that store, and I wondered if you saw a young woman with red hair? That’s my wife and all of a sudden she was gone! Her name is Marge.” But most things, we wouldn’t even think to ask a stranger—certainly not about someone we know they don’t know. The relationship determines not just how we say something, but what we say. Of course, we can ask Marge’s sister how she is—unless we are supposed to know, say by being married to Marge. Then we’d get a strange look. Or maybe Marge has left us and is staying with the sister? Then it’s unclear if we should ask or not. Will the sister bite our head off? Assuming we can ask the same question of a stranger as of someone nearer to us (which is rare), the form of the words changes, perhaps the tone of voice as well. With the stranger, we say “Excuse me, can you tell me the time?” With a spouse, we say merely “What time is it?” Or we tap our watch and look questioningly. To a spouse we say, “Dinner won’t be ready till seven.” To a guest we say, “We usually eat dinner at six but today seven is the best I can manage.” Or just: “Dinner at seven, OK?” To a spouse we say, “Fifi [dog—the spouse knows who Fifi is] threw up again but I cleaned it up.” To a guest we probably say nothing. Or if we do, knowing the guest has a dog, we might chuckle and say, “We’ve had problems with Fifi throwing up recently. Like this morning! Do you ever have problems with Fido?” We can walk in and say to a roommate, “She dumped me,” and the roommate knows what we are talking about. That won’t work with many other people. What the soldier on deployment writes to Mom and what s/ he says to a platoon-mate are different things. Assuming we speak or otherwise act at all (we don’t ask the sister about Marge if the sister hates our guts and we are under a restraining order with Marge),

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crafting the right-sized and -shaped peg to fit in the hole produced by our situation and relation to the other people, sometimes retro-fitting an intimacy to a stranger, isn’t as simple as saying “Excuse me” first. With graduate students in English literature, a professor can start right in with a particular Shakespeare sonnet. With undergraduates, we have to give background on Shakespeare, the fact of the sonnets, their pattern and number, the nature of a sonnet, and so on. So we choose the amount of buffering or background based on the relationship and what we think the other person knows. This buffering is not extraneous to what we say or write; it determines the content. We can immediately tell the difference between a written or spoken undergraduate lecture and a specialist’s paper. Even the specialist’s paper establishes its (different) context, usually by summarizing prior research and making the problem clear. This is part of the paper, not merely its introduction. This is true in longer or more complex written works as well. Shakespeare’s sonnet “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” makes clear by being so reactive that somebody else would have compared her eyes to the sun—and her other body parts to similarly fabulous things. Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones makes clear from what is in the book itself that there is a way of writing novels the author wishes to counter, and that the author attacks continually for comic effect. Cervantes’s Don Quixote sets the stage by explaining why the good Don acts the way he does. Flaubert gives Emma Bovary’s upbringing in the convent to explain, as best anyone can explain, her infuriating unwillingness to adapt to reality. But many works simply start in as if asking a stranger about Marge and leave the reader to see what is being done—or more usually, leave it to a professor to explain it. Or they seem that way because the current audience is so different in so many ways from the initial one, or from the audience (we can infer) the author had in mind. Many Modernist works, from Joyce’s Ulysses to Gertrude Stein to Virginia Woolf ’s novels largely about the minutiae of life and the passage of time, don’t bother defining an audience; they just start in and leave the professor to explain it all to baffled students. (Stein, however, spent her later years explaining and explaining, to the point where the explanations are more interesting than the works.) The person taking the initiative to use words has to think words are needed at all, and if so, both of what is to be said and why: a sense, that is, of both the hole and the peg—of what the other person(s) knows, and what needs to be said. What is said/written is something the speaker/writer thinks the recipient doesn’t know and needs to know. (The writer can be wrong about both.) The person using the words offers the unknown to the known. The known is the set of presuppositions of what the two people (in the simplest case) do know and what they don’t. What the other person is thought not to know is the germ of why the speaker (say) speaks, but it is buried deep in what is known which can be assumed if the two are intimate, or must be laid out if they are not. This is why, in the case of longer written works that, by dint of being preserved, stay around to transcend their circumstances, the possibility that the new reader

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will be different from that presupposed by the original writer grows exponentially. This is also true of all products of humans like buildings and houses, clothes and hairstyles, expressions and things taken to be of general interest. People a half century ago apparently thought the buildings of the 60s and 70s of concrete that we call Brutalist were, if not classically beautiful, then just what was needed. Now we tend to find them just ugly. Why did New York think the airy neo-classical Pennsylvania Railroad Station outdated and tear it down in the 1960s to replace it with a (to us) colossally ugly arena and underground station? Does a building merit architectural protection, or is it just something to be removed by the wrecking ball? We are continually trying to assess the relationship between our actions and the situation in which the action is projected. Why act at all? What specific action? Do we need a building here? If so, what building? Words? What words? The world changes, and what we do or say or write changes too. Comic strips in the newspapers are in fashion and go out of fashion, which means they no longer have an insider group to justify their taking up space. Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie, Alley Oop, and Pogo are some of the comic strips of my youth that came to seem strange, and disappeared. Even Doonsbury, so seminal in the post-Vietnam age, is gone. Is there an audience for new play X or Y, musical Z? The more complex the utterance or product, the less we can be absolutely sure. What movies will catch on? Which ones will tank? Sometimes producers are pleasantly surprised, sometimes unpleasantly. Nor are variations merely temporally large ones measured perhaps in decades or even centuries, such as of architectural styles. A single person can be the right audience for very different works. Sometimes what kind of audience we are varies by what we call mood: Sometimes I can read only P. G. Wodehouse, other times I want to wade through Schopenhauer or Hegel. Our time of life can determine whether we are in sync with a work or not: when I was 20, I devoured Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir, because it’s about a young man with dreams of glory, as I was (not the same dreams as Julien Sorel, let it be said), and about his erotic attentions to an older woman. It’s a young man’s book, that clearly young men can identify with best. Will I read it later in life, even with a fond smile of remembrance? Unclear. When I was younger, I found Jane Austen insufferable and claustrophobic. I identified with the men who rode in on horses, not with the females waiting for them to come in the door. In later life, I saw that claustrophobia afflicts us all, male or female, and came to appreciate the point of view of the housebound. Our reactions can be determined by content or style of writing, or both, just as our reaction to what someone says is determined not just by what they say but how they say it. When I was younger, I loved elaborate prose (Pynchon and even Firbank); now I find it tiresome. So too at one point I found Hemingway’s brief sentences attractive; now they annoy me. Sometimes I find Henry James appealing; sometimes appalling. How could someone have been so bloodless, all added-on qualifications to anything that might have been in danger of being a direct and forceful statement, all murmured whispers and sidelong glances, and

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people who “hang fire”? Just do it! I want to shout. Still, he wrote well. The same is true with painting. At times, Boucher is just the escapist ticket; other times it just seems like too many chocolate creams or eclairs. Our reaction to something that seems not for us varies, as I consider in more detail below, culminating in calling a book simply bad. We can take this merely personally and close the book, or we can vent on the Internet about how awful it is and give it one star. We can give tepid applause to the new play we haven’t really liked and dismiss it with a shrug, write a scathing review online—or yell “booooo” at the curtain calls. Similarly, if someone makes a snarky remark to us, we can either snark back or simply turn away. Our responses are always up to us. If someone cuts us off on the road, we can either ignore it (or merely sigh), or speed off after them, horn blaring. If we are walking idly through a gallery of contemporary art, we are likely merely to walk past things that don’t speak to us. If we have to write a reaction piece on our visit for a college course after such a visit, we are likely to be negative, yet our written response will probably also be determined by what we think the professor wants to hear. Similarly, an offensive person can either be ignored or told off, depending on the circumstances: Who is s/he? Who am I with respect to that person? Do I have other things I have to do? Do I have to watch my blood pressure? Is someone taking a video? Sometimes we are disgusted and appalled in varying ways by something, say in a literary work presented to us as an object of admiration. Or just unmoved. At the University of Chicago, I earned the exasperation of my professor by objecting to the style of Rabelais: it wasn’t what I was trying to define for myself as a writer. Besides, Rabelaisian humor seemed coarse and off-key. But of course, the university wasn’t teaching it so aspiring writers could say whether this was what they wanted to write themselves, so in a sense I was the one out of place, not the audience presupposed by the situation. Professors take the works for granted: rejecting them is not an option. Instead, they are after comprehension. Better professors will explain to new audiences how works that are different from the current norm are to be seen: this is one way of dealing with the perception that a work is not straddling the same inside/outside as the reader (developed below)— bring the reader to the place of the work. More intractable professors will simply decline to see, much less address, the problem. Education can bring us out of the givens of our world, but we have to want to be educated. I could have said, it’s not the style or content I’m looking for myself, but it is what it is. But I was too focused on finding myself to be this dispassionate about things I sensed were a dead end for me. To this day I cannot and do not read Rabelais. I tell this story somewhat guiltily, because it makes clear I should have some sympathy with the fashion of our times for demanding that everything in the outside world fit our own view of inside, that everything dovetail with our own givens, no matter how young we are or how unworldly. In a sense, that is what I was demanding of Rabelais. Yet we take it too far. The fashion of our times is for encouraging offense for anything that does not speak to us personally, usually with the numbingly repetitive reactions to any differentiation of race or gender as

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racist and sexist. A good test is Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. No one these days takes umbrage at Huck’s disrespect towards his father, forbidden in the Ten Commandments. Many people however take umbrage at seeing what we euphemistically call “the ‘n’ word” in print. And if the professor or teacher has to read it out loud, this is held to be an affront to all right-thinking people. Professors are usually quick to point out that the novel itself is not sending the message that black people are inferior, focusing on the point where Huck has to reject what he has been taught and try to free Jim. None of this matters to the single-issue voters who toss the novel at the first sight of the “n” word, standard at the time. So literature is not an undifferentiated field through which we can roam regardless of our own orientations and beliefs. It is instead only the collection of individual products in written form dealing with human problems, from which we will pick and choose those that seem relevant to our own situations. Even literary scholars, who tend to adopt the rhetoric of objective consideration, betray the fundamental subjectivity of the process of reading and reaction by limiting their gaze to specific works and schools. To be sure, as the Derridean deconstructionists insisted, all of it is writing. But this fact, being the lowest common denominator of a large group of activities, is of limited interest. Nor is literature only a body of texts, except trivially, and it is not a corpus of facts to be learned. Instead, it is a collection of objects that will be arranged by each individual in a force field according to the particular shape of his or her mental configuration. The order in which they are distributed in the lines of force is irrelevant. Conveniently enough, however, this realization does not oblige us to reject the chronological history of literature approach adopted by most college courses, as this approach may be the most efficient way of exposing people to a large body of material from which they can choose what is most useful for their needs. But there is no such thing in literature as “covering the material,” or “completeness,” except trivially. The completeness we attain is only that of having filled in all the squares of an arbitrarily constructed grid. The “study” of literature is a radically monadic enterprise, one that lacks the accretive nature of science. In fact, it’s only honorifically or by analogy that it can be called a study at all, and there exists no theoretical compulsion at all to read a particular book. It’s precisely the fact that literature isn’t a study that is its virtue, and that makes it so indispensable in a life as full of compulsions as ours. Art (which includes literature) is part of life, and helps us understand life. It offers a moment of siting on the sidelines watching runners that may include ourselves, and helps us understand both the race that we have just run, and races we have yet to run.

What Does the Audience Know? Whether a work “works” for a later audience—or indeed the one the author may have visualized, because the author may be wrong about that—is determined by many factors, few of which are in the power of the author/artist once s/he walks

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away from the work. The world changes, and so usually the work is being read out of its initial context. Reaching an audience or not will therefore depend upon whether the new reader is anything like the old—or perhaps is interested by aspects the original audience was not. The influential literary scholar Wayne Booth argued, in The Rhetoric of Fiction, that all literature had an intended effect on the reader. Certainly works come to be under specific circumstances, and would never be written if the author hadn’t seen a situation s/he somehow wished to address or correct. In this sense literature (as Booth correctly intuits) is related to the world. But there is a scale of how directly the work reaches out the world; not all works are equally insistent in doing so. Booth was writing to counter the Modernist view of the literary work as floating above the surface of things, and he wanted to point out that it doesn’t. Yet some works address more clearly defined situations than others. “Hmmm, I wonder if we should think about getting a hot tub?” is a less direct address than “Let’s get a hot tub!” or, even more direct, “We’re getting a hot tub.” Plus the audience for a work in different times and places may be quite different from the one the author was trying (if s/he was) to address. For this reason, I prefer to speak of the work’s assumed inside and outside, what it seems to take for granted and what it seems to present as new. This may or may not correlate to what an eventual reader knows/takes for granted and what s/he doesn’t. I know the difference between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum, and thus to that extent diverge from the “inside” of Dressed to Kill, and I know there are no freeways like that around Annapolis in Patriot Games, and so to that extent am outside for that film. What I am calling “inside” in literature is the part the audience, whether the original or subsequent, seems assumed to know. If there is a match between work and reader so that the result is the relationship between them all of which we call art, the inside for the reader may be largely the same as the inside for the work. Under these circumstances, we probably aren’t even aware of it, the way we are less aware of people doing usual or expected things than unexpected. It’s also possible for the reader to think to be inside that which in the work is presented as outside: to see his or her own situation in what for the purposes of the work is seen as something extraordinary, that has to be explained. An autistic reader might have a very different response to a book like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, with an autistic main character, than a non-autistic one. For the autistic reader, this may be mirroring, whereas for the non-autistic reader it is the new part, the escape. In this case, as in other cases of disconnect with the work I consider below, we feel that the work fails to line up with us. And we can try to figure out why, or just (in an extreme case below) close the book—or throw it down in disgust. The book can’t answer back, and it can’t adapt itself to us. But neither do we have to adapt ourselves to it. Tuptim, to return to my earlier example of “The Small House of Uncle Thomas,” makes assumptions about her audience. Jerome Robbins makes some too, which we may fail to accept. Nowadays we may find this ballet demeaning

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or racist—to the Siamese, but maybe to Uncle Thomas and Topsy too, as they wag their heads and flap their hands in accordance with the style of the dance form that influences the movement. Tuptim assumes the audience knows what a king and a kingdom are, and what “wicked” means. This is what I call “inside.” She doesn’t have to explain. The new things are what is added, the outside—the particular characters we are asked to consider, like Topsy and Simon of Legree and Uncle Thomas. Stanley Fish, in such works as Is There a Text in This Class?, has written as if the groups that are somehow the perfect receptors of works, those whose world-view the works correspond to and express, which he calls “interpretive communities,” are well-defined entities that virtually never overlap and have little possibility of dialoguing with each other. In fact, they are not so well defined, and they do overlap. We may at once be the member of many groups: male as well as a short-order cook, Mexican as well as tall, twenty-something as well as a pianist, straight (or gay) as well as red-haired. It does not make sense to speak of the groups associated with a particular work’s “world” (a term Nelson Goodman, too, is overly fond of ) as if they were self-enclosed monads, so that other works, other “worlds,” need not apply. More important is the fact that we don’t know beforehand who the members of this group might be whose existence Fish holds necessary for perfect or correct reception of work X. They become a group through their reaction to a work, not the reverse. We define our own world-view, if we can call it that, through seeing which works we like: we cannot say beforehand. (This is why the notion of worlds or groups of perfect readers is circular.) How many times have we opened a book expecting, based on press releases, reviews, and peer report, to like it, and find ourselves otherwise inclined? Years ago, I was asked by a major newspaper to review a book by the director of the writing program of a stellar university, himself a powerful figure; I am convinced that the paper was hoping for a positive response. They sent it to me, I think, because it was set in Tennessee, where I had lived; it dealt with the Great War and Modernism, my academic “period.” Yet despite these prima facie reasons for my liking it, I found it long-winded and predictable, and said so: I was never asked to write another review for the paper. It turned out I didn’t belong to the group who shared that book’s “world-view.” But how could I have known beforehand? How could they? We can never make a complete list of all the things in a book that would have to be presupposed by a group: that people normally stand upright, perhaps, is such a given, but who would think to list it unless we read a book in which all people walked on their hands? The fact that the people speak English, or a comprehensible language, rather than gibberish, may be another such quality. But we take this for granted: who would list it? Indeed, we are made aware of what we take for granted only by seeing a work that does not offer this. We see what the “world” of the work is by reading the work; we determine the group it fits with by seeing who likes it.

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Writing a novel or poem puts the message in the bottle; who picks up the bottle is a separable question. And the bottle may float on the waves for a long time. Many works later generations find great had little or no audience in their immediate world at all, nor need their maker have visualized one in the world as it was; the “greatness” of these works became clear (as we say) only when the people around them had changed. Thinkers such as Goodman or Fish who speak in terms of worlds of works or world-views of groups run into the same problem: the metaphor of multiple worlds (intended, of course, to make works seem sui generis or at least unrelated), stretched to begin with, breaks down into monadism or worse, unpredictable grouping and clustering, none of which seem to have anything to do with entities as large as a world. Audience groups are fluid, ill defined, and largely ex post facto to the works. Yet this doesn’t mean that we can’t say anything about them. We can say a lot about them, but only based on particular works read by specific people in specific times and places, and under specific circumstances. There may be nothing God-given about groups, but they do a pretty good job of defining our lives in the here-and-now. Once we have the work in front of us, we can usually try to sketch the audience the work would appeal to, if any (not necessarily an “intended” audience). But this is contingent on our own knowledge of the world, and of course we may be wrong. To return to the work, literature frequently allows us to characterize its implied or assumed audience by the things the narrator feels necessary to tell us. To make clear the distinction between what is presupposed and what must be told, it helps to consider not a whole work, but a specific scene in a work where the characters engage in precisely this act of telling people what they (are thought to) need to know, thereby making clear what is presupposed. It comes from Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. The remembering narrator, John Ryder, tells of bringing an acquaintance, one Jorkins, home to dinner in London, his home, with his widower father (68–70). The eccentric and manipulative father insists on treating Jorkins as if he were an American, though the father knows Jorkins is English. “How nice of you to come all this way,” he greets Jorkins—though Jorkins has come from a few streets over, not from America. “Are you over here on business?” the father asks. “Well, I’m in business,” the bewildered guest replies. The father continues his game by explaining the familiar British expression “to come a cropper” by Americanizing it: “you would no doubt say that he ‘folded up.’” (The emphasis on the “you” implies you-all, by implication you Americans.) He also explains any other Britishisms, and translates pounds into dollars—but he is sly, and is careful not to be caught in this game. He tells Jorkins that, living in London as Jorkins now does, he must miss his “national game” (by implication, baseball), and when Jorkins thinks he is going to clear up the misconception by repeating “my national game?” the father triumphantly replies “cricket!” There are whole books that leave us like Jorkins, feeling that somehow what we are reading has gotten something fundamentally wrong about who we are and what we know, whether as over-explanation (in the case of the father in

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Waugh) or under-explanation, if Jorkins had been American and the father had merely referred to things unfamiliar to him without explaining them. Sometimes we can identify the audience the work should have, as opposed to the one it does, say a book marketed and to all appearances aimed at children whose content is clearly too adult, or a book clearly aimed at adults that explains things every child knows. Or works that seem aimed at an audience outside of our culture or world but that are in fact being marketed to us—so that we are unable to distinguish what it has taken from the real world from its gray area, which is how we make sense of art and literature. What’s new? What’s old? Maybe they weren’t meant for us at all? In this case, we can merely shrug and say that these were aimed at an insider audience of which we are not a part, like a performance of an art form we are totally unfamiliar with, such as Indonesian gamelan music heard for the first time, or Indian dance for Westerners. Or ballet for someone from the West who has never seen ballet. For some (most?) people even in the West, all classical music blurs, and they can’t tell Bach from Beethoven. They can’t say what is standard and what is new, what is good and what is bad. And here we are perhaps most conscious of the work’s presupposed audience, by being excluded. The works that really stick in our craw are the ones we know have to assume us as their insider audience who will understand them, because they are written and published in our own language and our familiar geographical area (say, the Anglophone world); nonetheless they have too much blur for us, too much that we cannot sort into the two categories of the old and the new. If a novel, the characters clearly know what is normal for their world, but we don’t. We can repeat what happens in the plot, but we don’t understand it. It’s as if a concert in an unfamiliar musical idiom, instead of being presented to us by someone who explains what we are to hear and what to look for, were offered instead as if we would be familiar with it. We have gone, say, to a symphony concert where we expect composers like Brahms and Mozart, and find a gamelan performance instead, with no explanation of the switch. On Java this would be normal; in Peoria, not so much. I give examples of two books that create dissonance in their actual audiences by seeming either openly or implicitly to be for another audience entirely that should understand them—only we, the actual audience, don’t. Both have been successful commercially and critically: clearly the things that bother me do not bother others, or if they do, do not cause others as much pain. Maybe I am not the audience for either? The first is a book whose cover mischievously informs us that it is Memoirs of a Geisha/A novel by Arthur Golden (a novel? Or a memoir?); the other is Booker-Prizewinning historical fiction based on the early life of the German poet Novalis, né Friedrich von Hardenberg, Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower. Golden’s book, taking the form of a memoir, is written in the first person. It traces the career of a young girl born in a fishing village and sold by her ailing father to a sadistic “madam” (the word is my Western approximation) as an apprentice geisha. Subsequently she is taken under the wing of a famous geisha of

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the time. She tells of her career, which brought her, she tells us, fame. Only she’s not famous to us, so this is assumed to be to another audience. But what audience? The book plays the game common to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction of pretending to be edited or translated. We may think of Voltaire’s Candide, ostensibly translated from German, of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, or virtually any epistolary novel. Here, “Professor Jacob Haarhuis” (a house of hair, rather than of cards? In any case, knowledge of all professors isn’t within the ken of book audiences), the “Arnold Rusoff Professor of Japanese History” (is this a real chair? we don’t know) at the very real New York University (this would be difficult to invent and keep the Western audience) purports to have translated this work for us. Haarhuis (which is to say, Golden, taking his character) writes in the “Translator’s Note” of having watched the geisha at a Kabuki performance in 1936 and of the circumstances of her preparation of the manuscript that, in translated form, purportedly follows. We are therefore meant to get the joke, not be taken in by the subterfuge. The title page that makes things clear, after all, comes first. We are never to lose sight of the fact that the author is Arthur Golden, whose picture and biography appear on the dust jacket: a young white man who grew up and was educated in the United States. Admire my imaginative displacement! the novel all but commands us. And virtually all reviewers did so, commenting on the fact that the author so convincingly evoked the world and persona of someone apparently so unlike himself. The author’s Western white maledom, in short, looms over every page, every line. And this is at the center of the novel’s problems. We know that this is no memoir, and was not translated. No single person, living or dead, saw or experienced the things Sayuri (itself a professional name) purportedly narrates to us, certainly not the author. Thus we know that the things the narrator and heroine “sees” and “experiences” had to have been meticulously researched. How did a Japanese fishing hut in the 1930s look? What would its inhabitants have eaten? How would a geisha have spent her day? These are facts, and a representation of them can be true or false. Precisely the foregrounding of the displacement, moreover, impels us to question them. (This is an example of shining the flashlight on all of a book; here it is almost a floodlight.) We want to know: are they true? Or are they mistakes? And we have no way of answering this question from the book itself, no way except by research of our own that it’s unlikely we’d do (and unfair to novel readers). Where are the footnotes? It seems we are not the audience for this, yet we are. Nor is it merely externals Golden represents; he shows us inside the characters too, their thoughts. Sayuri, for example, analyzes the personalities of her parents in very un-Western terms, as having too much of the elements of water and wood; she compares the man who first discovered her to her bodhisattva, her kind of patron saint (a rough Western approximation). Would such a person typically have thought in this way? Or is this peculiar to her? We can’t judge. Audiences are defined by what the author feels necessary to tell them. So we wonder: is what she says in the knowledge area of a Japanese audience, apparently

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inside? It’s our gray area, as is most of the book. Is it theirs? What if it’s wrong? We wouldn’t know; would they? We don’t know. The problem is that Golden is playing at talking to one audience, and in fact talking to another. The result is a kind of double vision of the position at which the book is actually aimed, and of that at which it is ostensibly aimed. Maybe it’s all untrue? Full of mistakes? We don’t know. Some of this positioning for audience takes place within the memoir, if not the novel. Sayuri, for example, explains to the reader about China Clay, a makeup used by geishas of a previous generation, that turned out to contain lead and so ruined their skin. This explanation, perhaps, is still appropriate for an audience such as we might imagine for a real geisha’s memoirs: even educated Japanese might not know this, and it’s a previous generation. And sometimes she tells us things her ostensible audience would surely know, but we don’t. For example, she notes that so-and-so is one of the most famous of the pieces put on by the Kabuki. The fiction of her writing for a Japanese audience here is too thin. For us it is necessary information, for them it undoubtedly would not be (for who would pick up the memoirs of a geisha who did not know the first thing about the theater world in which many geishas dabbled?). This would be like a celebrated Western ballet dancer writing in her memoirs that Swan Lake was the most famous ballet. Anyone who read her book would know this. If imagined, however, as a book for an even more specialized audience, say for geishas, the work has no point at all: all works delineate an imaginary group that finds them interesting, and much of this book is nothing but portrayals of things that for geishas would merely be commonplaces. This is how, for example, we see that Chinua Achebe’s seminal Things Fall Apart is clearly meant for a non-Igbo audience, though it is about Igbo society before the arrival of the English. It presents to us things it knows we will find different; for the Igbo they would be taken for granted. And it’s written in English—for us, or perhaps Anglophone Igbo from the 1950s like the author. But Achebe makes his audience of later Anglophones clear by describing so many of the details of ordinary Igbo life: their games, their marriages, their festivals, what gives prestige—things an Igbo reader would know. Indeed, most of this book is simple cataloguing of everyday Igbo life before the arrival of the British, its apparent primary purpose. This is how it’s clear the book is aimed at a Western (British) audience. See? it says. We had a world before you, O you who are reading this! For this reason, Achebe presents; he doesn’t just mention in passing, as the narrator of Golden’s novel does. Anthropology is never written for the home audience, and all literature, in a sense, is anthropology, describing the goings-on of one group for another, even if the first group is a unit of one. Is Golden’s book a memoir? A novel? I noted above that both biography (or here, autobiography) and fiction contain elements of old and new, known and unknown. What differentiates them is merely the proportions of these and what is presented as each category. Novels contain much that is true and occasionally things that are false, but biography has to be more careful about where it situates its new things, the audience’s gray area. This book plays at being both memoir and novel simultaneously, two works in one. The problem is that what

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the memoir takes for granted cannot be taken for granted in the novel, written and published for a literate Anglophone audience. For this audience, most of the novel is in the gray area. We can repeat what happens, but don’t understand it because too much of it is simply alien, and is not presented to us as what for us is new information, as Achebe presents Igbo life. We don’t know whether fishing villages such as Golden describes were common in the 1930s in Japan, or whether young girls were, in the manner of the narrator, sold into what we would now call sexual servitude. For that matter we don’t even know if China Clay was actually used in an earlier generation, or if it contained lead. The difference between Sayuri’s audience and the book’s real audience, the audience for the memoir and the audience for the novel it in fact is, is between saying to a roommate, “She dumped me,” and framing it for an outsider: “My girlfriend Marge—we’ve been together six months—just up and left one day with no explanation. She dumped me.” The roommate knows the girlfriend is Marge, and how long the two have been together. So the information can be pared down to the dumping. If girls were sold into sexual servitude in 1930s Japan, this can’t be mentioned in passing for the novel as something the i maginary reader of the memoir knows (we don’t), it has to be presented as new information—to us. Only it isn’t presented, it’s assumed. The novel wars with the memoir, and because the novel is presented as coming out on top (see the title: Memoirs… a novel by Arthur Golden), the book leaves the audience adrift. The problem with Fitzgerald’s novel The Blue Flower is related to that posed by Golden’s “memoir.” For here we are once again in the gray area for virtually all readers, not just those defined by nationality and language. The author’s note prefatory to the text expresses her debt to the editors of the complete work of Friedrich von Hardenberg (“all the surviving work, letters from and to him, the diaries and official and private documents”), implying not only that she has ploughed through all of this, but that the story itself follows an externally extant matrix of fact, and thus is a sort of novelized biography. To this extent it is unlike the “memoir,” which we know to be based on a fictional (as we say) rather than factual life pattern. The two are alike, however, in that in neither do we know what, or how much, corresponds to a set of publicly shared facts. Here again the issue is one of audiences. Novalis, as Hardenberg later signed himself, is largely unknown in the Anglophone world. Even in the German-speaking world, nobody but a handful of professors (who alone cannot constitute the audience of commercially published novels) knows what the man Friedrich von Hardenberg did as an adolescent. We have to hope that Fitzgerald has done her homework. But once again we have no way of saying, at least not without a degree of scholarship virtually nobody has and that the work surely, we reflect, cannot be presupposing. Presumably Fitzgerald has taken the publicly verifiable points of von Hardenberg’s life and filled in what she didn’t know. But which is which? We can’t follow her. Too much of the book, as in the case of Golden’s “memoir,” is in our perceptual gray area. This book, like the other, itself raises the question of the relation

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between true and false, and then walks away without giving us any way to solve the problem. We are to understand that the author has gone somewhere we have not. Yet there is no way to test what she has brought back for our delectation; we must either believe, or throw it down in frustration with what is being asked of us. I threw it down, then trudged through its remainder only to explain to myself why I had become so impatient. The Blue Flower plays, moreover, to an interest I call secondarily prurient. Given that this is a novel for an Anglophone audience, it is unlikely that the book’s reader has also read Novalis, or indeed even heard of him. Yet, in the prefatory “Author’s Note,” we are given the information that Novalis is “famous.” This single bit of information alone is apparently supposed to power our interest in the book: the events narrated have almost no interest in and of themselves. So this is what fill-in-the-blank was like before s/he became famous! This is the attitude that informs movie star biographies: the interest of the person buying the book is not in any particular set of intimacies about to be shared, merely in the fact of their being intimacies at all. But at least the large, public events narrated in such stories must be verifiable, or set in the matrix of well-known facts of history; this is what it means to be reading a biography. The peculiarly stilted nature of the prose in The Blue Flower, in addition, seems an attempt to refer at every turn to the foreignness of the world being evoked, to make us taste the sweat expended by the author in bringing it to us. It insists, therefore, precisely on this factual aspect (brought to you at great expense from a real world outside) that is so utterly unverifiable. From the first sentence to the last, from direct discourse to narrative intervention, the English is again and again a horrible English that is meant to put us in mind of German. “Jacob Dietmahler was not such a fool that he could not see that they had arrived at his friend’s home on the washday,” reads the book’s first sentence. Too many negatives for English; “on the washday,” indeed! Random probes produce such crippled Teutonic echoes as the following: “‘He was giving an impersonation of myself. That I could make out quite well as I approached.’” “His so good manners, where have they gone?” “Why do you not come with me next week?” “Sophie’s cough soon put Günther’s into the shade.” And so on, in apparent imitation of Hemingway’s howler “translations” from the Spanish in For Whom the Bell Tolls. In both the Golden “memoir” and the Fitzgerald novel, the effect of insisting on the virtuoso nature of the feat being pulled off, which is to say, the effect of insisting that larger quantities than normal of the work in question are in most readers’ gray areas, is to make us feel helpless, at the mercy of the authors. We are asked, in short, to accept too much: but acceptance becomes an issue only because the authors have made it one.

Inside/Outside: Villette Mr. Ryder, the father in the Waugh novel, needles his son’s guest by overexplaining. But sometimes explanations are just what we need, making the

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outside comprehensible to an audience. When we get them, we can identify what the assumed audience knows, and what it doesn’t. This establishes the relationship between what I call the inside and the outside of the work of literature. Problems with reading literature arise, to repeat, when the actual audience now diverges from this, so that the work seems to us to either over- or under-explain. We can see this relationship between inside and outside more clearly in some works than in others. And we see it quite clearly in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. At the beginning of Chapter 23, the English heroine Lucy Snowe has just received a letter from the handsome and vain doctor with whom she is infatuated, Dr. John Bretton. She hides it and, waiting until the girls’ school in a country that is clearly Belgium but that the novelist calls “Labassecour” (more on this below), and where she teaches English, is quiet for the evening, goes first upstairs and then down, looking for a place to read her letter in peace. After rejecting the dormitory for this activity (there are girls there), she thinks of going to the classrooms, and explains why she is forced to continue her search for solitude. The classes were undergoing their periodic sweeping and purification by candlelight, according to hebdomadal custom: benches were piled on desks, the air was dim with dust, damp coffee-grounds (used by the Labassecourian housemaids instead of tea leaves) darkened the floor; all was hopeless confusion. Baffled but not beaten, I withdrew. (323) Finally she goes to the attic, where we leave her with her letter. For here it’s not Lucy Snow who interests us but the coffee grounds dotting the floor of the room she abandons. Or more precisely, what’s interesting is the parenthetical remark the narrator feels obliged to provide after this detail. In this detail and its parenthetical explanation, we have the clearest and most compact example that Villette provides of its overall strategy of explaining outside to inside. It’s the word “instead” that’s interesting. All readers understand that here a normal state of affairs is referred to, and being contrasted with, an abnormal one. Having the remains of hot beverage preparation on the floor is clearly normal for the narrator, as no attempt is made to explain or justify it, any more than the use of candles is justified, or the piling of benches to get them out of the way, or the idea that benches are what people sit on. We could imagine a novel of our own time where the first detail would call for an explanation, such as that the electricity was out. We can also imagine a case where, because of (say) the delicacy of furniture, piling benches would be seen as an expression of barbarism. And in our world of carpeting, no one would put tea leaves or coffee grounds on the floor; probably even people with hardwood floors don’t. Nowadays, we don’t need either the remains either of tea or coffee to gather up the dust bunnies, as we have vacuum cleaners. But these things are normal for the narrator, and we know this because the narrator doesn’t comment on them. What’s abnormal is merely that these damp dregs should come from coffee, rather than tea. And the source of this abnormality lies, we are told, in the fact that the housemaids are

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Labassecourian. And this in turn evokes not merely a geographical fact but the entire ways of life associated with both Labassecour and the only other country treated at any length in Villette: England. The parenthetical remark assures us that despite this culturally determined difference of substance, the function of these two substances in both cases is identical (“used … instead of ”). And the generic similarity of tea leaves and coffee grounds, both the remains of hot beverage preparation, forms a second point of resemblance, as if the products used by all peoples for this purpose were found in generally the same realm. Similarities do exist between the two countries. Yet readers in other times or places may have trouble immediately identifying what the function of both is. It may not be clear to all readers that the word “darkening” is not merely a description of a visual effect but at least partly a purpose as well. We are meant to understand first that the floors are wood, and that the coffee grounds (or tea leaves elsewhere) are spread across them to help give them a pleasing dark hue. (If it weren’t pleasing the narrator would have somehow excused this effect, or acknowledged it as undesirable.) We might find it necessary to provide just such explanations for ourselves or for others as we already find within the text. But the narrator stops here. The reason is clear: more explanation is unnecessary. It didn’t occur to the narrator, and by extension the author, that any of this required explanation would be necessary. Literature takes for granted the givens of a particular group—only we don’t know before reading the text what that group is, and whether we belong to it or not. Probably we don’t use either coffee grounds or tea leaves on our wooden floors. (As it happens, I did try coffee grounds to darken a white patch on our granite kitchen counters and it worked to a degree. So am I part of the inside group or not?) Readers from another group, time, or place may have problems. This is the starting point of hermeneutics, and the starting point of semiotics—literary commentary and explanations to retrofit static written works to new surroundings, as we can usually clarify immediate verbal interactions on the spot. These theoreticians usually speak as if the reader group—what Stanley Fish, above, calls the “interpretive community”—determines responses to the work. Only we don’t know what group is inside or outside for the work until we read it, or whether we belong to it or not. Even then, that group has few characteristics other than that it’s defined by the work. We may recognize or assume the world the work considers inside as I am doing here, because inside is identified by country name as England is, and nothing suggests this is not the real England of the Victorians. The same is true for Mr. Ryder’s game with the “American.” But usually the work defines only the inside and outside it defines, which we have to describe in the terms of the work. There is usually no shorthand description of the group that is fit to the work aside from it being the one that fits the work, or that the work fits. And every individual reader has to find out if the work fits or not. We may assume that (say) white male readers will fit book X or Y and have this usually true, but not for all white males. So we have to work from the work

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outward, not from an assumption about the world outside to limit the work. (Contemporary academics typically do the latter.) Villette offers a clear contrast between the inside of England (Protestant, Anglophone, Anglo-Saxon, and well, English) and the outside of Belgium (Catholic, Continental, Latin, and well, Belgian). And of course, the book is written in English, not French or Dutch (Flemish). Pages at a time are included only because they describe and thereby render comprehensible to an Anglophone audience this alien-looking and alien-thinking world, performing the function of a travel book for stay-at-homes—rather like Achebe’s guide to the pre-colonialized Igbo in Things Fall Apart. The girls’ school cannot be merely referred to, for then we would assume it was merely the same as an English school—not that all English readers know how girls’, or for that matter boys’, schools work, yet some familiarity would be assumed, as almost all English readers would have gone to such an institution. Instead, it has to be described. If Madame Beck’s peculiar deviousbut-not-evil character were a normal (English) one, the book would not contain all the pages it does situating it explicitly as Continental and Catholic. Even Lucy Snowe’s still-waters-run-deep quality is produced by her being set in this alien world. If this contrast between the individual and the larger surroundings were set inside, in England, Lucy would be more a personal aberration, a misfit, unless she were alien to some segment of society itself alien to the mainstream. Because her surroundings are alien, her withdrawal from them can be extreme and yet seem normal to the reference group. These descriptions of an alien setting play yet another role in the novel: they make clear the heroine’s position as an outsider to her surrounding, as unseen and misunderstood, so that the contrasts of geography, religion, language, and mores that are insisted upon combine to give us a sense of her mental isolation. Yet if everyone in England had the same knowledge of Brussels that Lucy Snowe comes to have, neither she nor the author could use these details, as they now stand, to express alienation. The author or narrator would have to present details that would be strange from the point of view of the English who knew Belgium. By the same token, an English person less suspicious of Popery, more sophisticated in understanding of Catholicism, would fail to find even worthy of mention the other half of Lucy Snowe’s strange love-hate relation with Catholicism that is presented as something that has to be explained. And what about a Belgian reader, say of a translated version of this novel reading in the 1850s? Such a reader might well find the work insulting or just silly, and call it bad—the subject of my last consideration, below. For such a reader, what is presented as outside would in fact be inside. How would such a reader react? Angrily? With bemusement? We can’t say, but it would be clear that the actual reader was not the audience the author imagined. Just one person in this place who is different would rupture the illusion that the whole place is characterized by the same qualities. And in fact, this rupture is what happens in Villette, which is the source of its ultimate shortcomings as a novel. An outside is first evoked as outside, then presented as familiar. Of course,

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to the extent that the reader sees the fundamental similarity of the English and continental worlds (monarchical both, industrialized, bourgeois, and sentimental), that reader may see Lucy Snowe as a structural misfit, the outsider, because a woman and without money in a society ruled by men and money. Any work evokes several such inside-outside distinctions. Lucy Snowe, like each of us, is a member of various groups: in her case women, schoolteachers, foreigners, Britishers, and sensitive souls, among other groups. At the same time the work puts these groups in a certain order, making some more important than others. The distinction between schoolteachers and non-schoolteachers is of minimal importance in this world when it is compared to that between Protestants and Catholics. And this ordering may diverge from what readers expect or know or take for granted. In a unified work, only one such hierarchy is established; this is what we expect from something that presents itself as a single work. If this doesn’t happen, we feel that the boundaries of the work have been badly drawn, and that we’re dealing with two or more potential works, not one. Works situate themselves with respect to life through their delineation of inside and outside. In life, the distinction between inside and outside does not change without a reason. If it changes with no apparent reason in a work, we have cause for criticizing a work on formal grounds. Even feminist theoreticians who defend this work as somehow expressing a female consciousness rather than formal perfection, which is somehow male, can’t get around the fact that it is in fact an object and not a consciousness. Villette contains just such an unjustified alteration, which means a structural fault, between the first two volumes of the book and the third, between the narrator’s infatuation with Dr. John and her love for M. Paul. Only the first relationship is governed by the sketch of inside and outside outlined here. Dr. John is the ideal of an English gentleman, with an idealized Anglo-Saxon physiognomy—who moreover saves Lucy from two Labassecourian mashers on her arrival in town. At this point, M. Paul’s impenetrable shifts of mood are chalked up to his being a foreigner, and one with Spanish blood at that—part of the furnishings of this strange world in which Lucy finds herself. However, by the end of the book the heroine is deeply in love with this other man—a foreigner, a Latin, and a Catholic. She sees his apparent cruelty as merely impatience with stupidity, and his religious creed as excusable. In order to make this shift comprehensible to the reader, she must explain by relating inside to outside—like the coffee grounds. In doing so, she alters the inside to which she is relating; we learn that things must be seen from a more personal point of view. Some individual non-English Catholics may in fact be acceptable. Of course, such alterations are possible, and can be made to seem believable in the book. For an example, this alteration could be made believable if the story were told concurrent with the events, say in a diary, or by an invisible narrator. The problem with the book as it stands is that the narrator, Lucy Snowe who writes, has even by the first page of the book lived through both relationships,

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and so the conception of geographical Otherness that dominates the first twothirds of the book should have been ruptured. Yet she narrates the first part as if the later one has no power to diminish, alter, or place into perspective the first. Thus the reader concludes that it doesn’t, and the first point of view retains its strength. Lucy Snowe remembers too well her initial perception of otherness; the reasons behind her first perception of otherness haven’t ceased to be valid by the time she gets to the second. The question isn’t of two kinds of love, or of two men—at least, not as it’s initially posed. The point of view governing the first relationship is so convincingly established, the split between the inner world of the narrator and the outer so absolute, with her first infatuation with the doctor a shorthand for her alienation from the Continent and a reminder of her essential Englishness—she likes him because he’s so English—that we can’t subsequently reconcile this with Lucy’s acceptance of any other man at all, much less one with the qualities of M. Paul. It’s not as if she gets used to Belgium, or that it’s any less outside (people do get used to what they initially found strange); she just changes crushes. The final effect of this abrupt switch may be to make the reader meditate on the unpredictability of the human heart. If this is our ultimate reaction—which is to say, a reconciliation at a meta-level of these two distinct configurations of the line between inside and outside—we buy it at the price of rejecting Lucy Snowe’s assessment of the weight of her initial infatuation, based as it was on her alienated position in a geographic Other. This makes the lengthy analysis of the first relation excessive, a mis-location of the line between inside and outside, like explaining coffee grounds to someone who knows perfectly well what coffee grounds are used for. Literature tells people what they don’t know, but it does this by relating what they don’t know to what they do. We may best consider the implications of this by considering, finally, the aspect of this novel that may strike twenty-first century readers the most forcefully of all: the fact that the narrator begins her journey in England, a real country now and in the nineteenth century, whose capital is London (really so, now and then), takes a boat—as one must still do to remain on the surface of the Earth and leave England—and ends up in “Labassecour,” a country whose capital city is “Villette.” For us nowadays, it’s difficult to see any reason short of satire—which doesn’t seem to be the point here—for calling one Western European country by its real name and another by an invented one as if we weren’t supposed to notice. And we rule out the possibility that satire is intended in making Belgium the part of the farmyard where the geese are kept, or calling Brussels a small city, since it’s never suggested that the city is provincial and the country less developed. Only this one country is re-named, not England, nor France, nor Germany. The reader concludes that for the Victorian British reader, the Continent was sufficiently blurred to make such invented names less than jarring—as we might invent a fictional South German state in the same era (there were so many of them! And so small!—Thackeray’s “Pumpernickel” in Vanity Fair to stand in for

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Weimar, for example) or the way we speak of a Ruritania to mean a central or Eastern European monarchy that was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire or in its orbit. So many! For someone who knows exactly which small monarchies existed in these parts of the world, this seems ridiculous, and makes clear that reader’s divergence from the postulated audience of the work. (This is the distinction between writing about Jane Smith of Bath and Queen Victoria.) It seems clear that no one today can write a novel in a Western European language that blurs the Continent the way Villette does. For this to be possible, these things have to be lost in the mists of time and the way out yonder, which they are not for us. Everybody has a view of the world rather like Saul Steinberg’s celebrated New Yorker cover of the way the world looks to Manhattanites: local landmarks loom large, but beyond the Hudson River is just “Jersey” and Europe scarcely figures at all. And not just Europe; we can imagine an English-language novel set in China a century after Villette’s publication that made up names for towns and even cities that would have caused no comment, because such things would have been in the gray area of the insider audience. Nowadays, however, there is much greater knowledge of China in the West, as well as Chinese poised to correct any misconception or negative view. What people know and think important changes as the world changes. And this influences their reaction to literature. A few short decades ago, the use by characters in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn of what we now call “the n-word” caused no comment. Now it results in demands that the book be banned. Changes in our general knowledge move things in literature from the gray area where invention is possible and into the light. This causes new audiences to see them as mistakes, offensive, or odd, as I considered above. Literature isn’t a separate world from reality; it situates itself within one reality. How much does the altered world determine our response to Villette? I’d say it causes raised eyebrows over the strange labels for Belgium and Brussels, and literary critical discomfort when the book shifts in the third part with the second object of Lucy’s attentions. But for me at least, neither is an absolute disqualifier, because so much of the book is otherwise interesting and insightful. Such disqualifiers do exist with respect to other works, however, and I turn to a crescendo of these, beginning with isolated bad aspects of some works and ending with the conclusion that some works are unredeemable.

When We Just Don’t Like a Work There’s no use pretending that our interactions with art or literature are always positive and fruitful, because they aren’t. We’ve seen mistakes, above, and also the failure of actual audiences to line up with what are clearly assumed audiences in works. These failures can be close to absolute. We can’t guarantee that all personal interactions with people we have to respond to in our social world will be positive, and the same is true of our interactions with art. Disliking what we see in artworks is a human interaction, and part of life, just as we are not enamored

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of all the people who fit into our social situation. (I am trying to avoid saying “our real life,” because that implies that art isn’t real, which it is. It’s personal too, but an impersonal personal.) We have personal reactions to the arts, among them to literature. Some books just puzzle us. Some have characters doing or saying things we object to. But some we find actually repellent; we don’t always like the works our friends, or the professor, or the book critics, say we ought to like. This is perhaps especially true with works from something other than our own time and place: the chances of our being alienated are so much greater. But what do we mean when we say, for example, that a novel is actually bad? Is it merely a generalized expression of subjective distaste? I think we mean something specific when we say that a book is bad, and that we can say what this is. I take as examples three books that seem to me to be bad in part or whole. The Octopus of Frank Norris falls in the first category, while Jack London’s Martin Eden as well as Allan Paton’s Too Late the Phalarope end up, at least for me, in the second category. Other readers may react differently to these works, but my claims are for the general phenomenon. I’m only interested in what we mean when we do call a book bad, not whether any particular book is so for individuals. This is part of my insistence that the definition of a work of art is at least partly constituted by the viewer; it isn’t to be found in its entirety in a work. Some people won’t ascribe badness in an objective sense to anything. And they probably wouldn’t accept the use of bad in a subjective sense either. Literary theory of the second half of the twentieth century treated all written works as “texts” and demanded that we consider literary works without the value judgments that once divided literature into high and low art, trivial and non-trivial. But I’m not starting with the claim that there is such thing as a bad novel, which is the position that academic theorists might contest. I’m saying only that many readers say there is. And when we do speak in these qualitative terms, it’s for a specific reason. My point of departure is the situation of someone throwing down a book in disgust, because along with our reaction that a book is bad, we frequently have a feeling of outrage, of distress, of insult—the feeling that we have somehow been betrayed. Betrayed, because in order for a work of art to give itself to us, we must give ourselves to it. We have trusted this object, and it has let us down. It seems probable that readers who are unwilling to call any work bad do not, in this sense, give themselves to works, and so never feel betrayed by them. When I talk of giving ourselves to the work, I mean a relation that is like no other one—the relation between reader and work. Jean-Paul Sartre comes closer than any other writer I know of in defining this relationship when, in “Why Write?,” he insists that the work is a free appeal to the freedom of the reader, each confirming the freedom of the other. What’s important here is the idea that subservience to the work that we have freely chosen makes us more free, rather than less so. Reading, Sartre says, is “the synthesis of perception and creation.” The reader “must invent … in a continual exceeding of the written thing. To be

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sure, the author guides him, but all he does is guide him.” Reading is “directed creation” (39).1 This notion of directed creation, through which the work liberates rather than constrains the reader, presents a place for literature in our lives that can serve as an alternative to academic theories that trace their genesis from Friedrich Nietzsche via Michel Foucault. These seem to conceive of the (postulated) absence of the author to be liberating and the (postulated) existence of an author to be constraining, and to think that these two alternatives are mutually exclusive. I suggest that it’s not a specific author that we see behind the work when we see it as art, just the traces of an absent somebody. We tend to visualize a specific author when we feel betrayed. That bastard! What seems best about Sartre’s vision is the insistence that we must be attentive to the work, in an almost courtly sense, to enjoy the gifts it has to give us. We can’t force the work to give us anything. Instead, we have to throw ourselves on its mercy, at which point it will return our trust by working its will on us. This is also the reason we can be betrayed by a work; we have to open ourselves to it, and so can be disappointed as a result. I’m not saying it’s possible to approach a work with no preconceptions (as hermeneutic theory is quick to point out). The fact that we necessarily approach a work with preconceptions lets us distinguish two more possible reactions to the work other than saying it is bad or (as above) not something we can follow: the reaction that a work is interesting, or that it’s boring. These two reactions are produced when we see a work in the light of our presuppositions, and either confirm these or find them challenged to some degree. We find a work boring when it conforms too closely to our preconceptions. For example, let’s say we pick up a book expecting to find the story of a handsome young doctor (pictured on the embossed cover) who enters the life of an attractive young nurse just when she has begun to despair of finding the Right Man and (after certain difficulties) declares himself Violently In Love With Her (as she will of course be with him). If we find only this, we are likely to be bored. It will avoid being boring only if it includes, say, descriptions of the young doctor that are somehow unexpected, or when it actually works out the initial difficulties between antagonists. We may find the adherence to what we expect satisfying—it fulfills our fantasies—but the secondary details have to freshen it up, or we will probably admit that we are bored. But while boredom may be avoided in a case like this, the result isn’t interest, at least not the way I’m using the term. Interest is the end result of another situation entirely, when some of our expectations in approaching a work are actually overturned. Let’s say the narrator of a murder story turns out to be the murderer, or a Western is told from the point of view sympathetic to Native Americans. Unfortunately, this kind of interest is self-consuming: we can’t find the book interesting twice, at least not for the same reason. And it may be because “interesting” is a short-lived or disposable response that differentiates an interesting book from a truly good one. The expectations that make Agatha Christie’s pathbreaking The

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Murder of Roger Ackroyd interesting (it defies these expectations because the narrator is the murderer) are fairly widespread among people who might be reading this, so many people will have the same reaction for the same reason. Yet we sometimes find works interesting that our neighbors don’t. It’s our own experience, both literary and personal. That gives us different expectations and so impels us to find different works interesting, even if we consume them and, in a sense, use them up no less absolutely (nothing is like the first time we discover a work). Works make up the process of our development. They fit, or don’t fit, at specific times into the structure of continuous becoming that makes up our lives. So I’m not claiming, as the Russian Formalists like Shklovsky did, that the work of art actually has to give us a sort of shock; Shklovsky’s claim was that literature “defamiliarized” the world.2 Finding things we didn’t predict, which prevents boredom, is not the same as finding things we didn’t expect, which produces interest. Still, the difference between what we didn’t predict and what we didn’t expect is one of degree rather than kind. Thus the commonplaces of a good deal of late twentieth-century German theory derived from the Frankfurt School, with its distinction between art (good) and popular culture (bad), seems specious. For this line of thought, only art challenges our presuppositions; pop culture confirms it. Almost all literature contains some surprises, and in this sense questions our presuppositions. At the same time, almost all literature confirms some of our presuppositions. The reaction that a work is bad is different from the reaction that it is boring or interesting, because this reaction isn’t directly related to expectations at all, whether challenged or confirmed. Instead, we find a work bad when we sense a conflict between the way we see it and the way it presents itself. This isn’t a conflict between expectations and presuppositions and the work, but instead a conflict within the work itself. We can see this conflict by looking at an excerpt from The Octopus by Frank Norris, specifically a plot thread involving the shepherd Vanamee—whose name is already overblown and perhaps funny. The tragedy of Vanamee is the loss of his beloved Angele many years before, a loss he has been brooding over ever since. Finding himself alone with one of the priests of the nearby California mission, he demands that the priest “tell his God to give her back” to him. And suddenly the priest understands Vanamee’s state: Out into the wilderness, the vast arid desert of the Southwest, Vanamee had carried his grief. For days, for weeks, months even, he had been alone, a solitary speck lost in the immensity of the horizons. Continually he was brooding, haunted with his sorrow, thinking, thinking, often hard put to it for food … [His state] was the pitch of mysticism, the imagination harassed and goaded beyond the normal round, suddenly flipping from the circumference, spinning off at a tangent out into the void where all things seemed possible, hurtling through the dark there, groping for the supernatural. (147)

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Vanamee’s difficulties, when he is again alone, continue: “His sorrow assaulted him like the flagellations of a fine whiplash, and his love for Angele rose again in his heart, it seemed to him never so deep, so tender, so infinitely strong.” Finally, he throws himself on Angele’s grave, “his lips pressed against the grass with which it was covered.” And he calls her: “Come to me—Angele—don’t you hear? Come to me.” But the answer was not in the grave. Below him the voiceless earth lay silent, motionless, withholding the secret, jealous of that which it held so close in its grip, refusing to give up that which had been confided to its keeping, untouched by the human anguish that above there, on its surface, clutched with despairing hands at a grave long made. The earth … now at night, holding death within its embrace, guarding inviolate the secret of the grave, was deaf to all entreaty, refused the answer. (154) I think most people would call this passage, perhaps the entire business with Vanamee and Angele, very bad indeed. The problem is that it signals one thing and delivers another. The whole idea of this relation between a mysticallyinclined shepherd and the woman he has never been able to forget cries “profound, emotion-laden, and important,” and delivers only verbiage and bathos—it betrays us. For though we are prepared for jewels, we are given glass, so we may well throw down the book and cry “foul.” We understand the game we are expected to play, and can’t play it. And our reaction that this work is bad is partly the result of our resentment at having been taken in. This reaction is distinguishable from recognition that a book has certain flaws, such as, for me, Villette, considered above. The perception of a flaw in the work implies that the larger structure has succeeded, that there is a commonality of intention or understanding between the reader and the work. We don’t feel betrayed as we do when we think the work bad. Nonetheless, these two reactions are similar—precisely because in both cases (opposed to the cases where we feel boredom or interest), we ascribe responsibility for our reactions to an author. We cause the author to exist by postulating him or her as an entity. What this shows us is that, contrary to the claims of theorists such as E. D. Hirsch, Jr., in his book Validity in Interpretation, authorial intention is not a given in all works. It is needed only in specific cases. In contrast to the claims of the followers of Foucault, who famously proclaimed the “death of the author,” however, it’s necessary in at least these cases. For though we’re impelled to posit the author when we’re out of sync with the work, with the works that seem more aligned with what we ourselves take for granted, we don’t have to think of the author as a separable entity at all—just as, when the world conforms to our desires, we conceive it as an extension of ourselves. In fact, it’s only when we sense conflict that we objectivize the external world at all—the moment, in the terminology of the nineteenth-century philosopher C. S. Peirce, when “secondness” (basically, the world) intrudes upon our “firstness” (our sense of ourselves).

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Sometimes we don’t even think about the work’s implied audience, because it’s largely the same as its actual audience: us. The more out of sync with a work we are, the more we need a sense of an author if we are to enjoy it. It’s possible to be in sync with the author but not the work, what Susan Sontag categorized as “camp”—things we sophisticates know are awful but are presented as awful, so we can all enjoy their awfulness.3 In camp, something is offered that, were it not for the intention of an agent standing behind it, would be bad. But because we understand how it is being offered, it becomes good. From the stuffy interiors of nineteenth-century Biedermeier taste to the sequined eyeglasses of the 1950s, all things in bad taste become amusing, and hence good, if offered knowingly—a knowingly that we are aware of. Bad ballet becomes good if men dressed up as women are doing it (as in the all-male pointe shoe and tutu group called the Ballets Trockadero de Monte-Carlo), hoary Hollywood footage becomes funny if offered in sepia-tinted repetitive loops of a Joseph Cornell film. Even the programming of a film like the original King Kong with Faye Wray for college audiences can become an act of camp. They know they are supposed to titter. So they do. In such cases, an agent doing the offering—which is to say, an author—must be posited, or we’re left only with the reaction that the work in question is bad. Of course it’s bad; in camp, this is the point. A bad work offered as bad establishes contact between reader (viewer) and author (director etc.). But we respond differently if the work seems just bad—not offered as bad, merely bad. And then, the author comes to the fore as well. The plot thread of The Octopus involving Vanamee is, I’d say, a single tainted dish in a larger meal. In the case of London’s Martin Eden, however, it’s the entire meal that seems bad—though, to be sure, it’s fascinating for its very vileness. The fundamental problem is that the flaws in the relationship between the main male character Martin and the main female character Ruth—which the hero requires an entire book to perceive—are evident to the reader from the beginning. Ruth’s spirituality and her cultural pretensions are sad rather than impressive, and Martin is a fool for taking her for a representative of a better, higher, purer world. This woman, the reader perceives instantly, is a ninny. Not just mistaken or lovably off-center, but dangerous. Yet there is no indication that either author or character senses this reality. What a novel’s character discovers should be, at least to some extent, the discovery of a reader as well. If we can’t in some sense participate in this discovery, it’s like being asked to take an interest in the process of a child not our own learning its ABCs. It’s not interesting to an outsider who knows what the end result of this process must be. As a result, the description of this silly girl offered from Martin’s smitten point of view simply exasperates the reader. It’s as if London thought we would somehow conveniently fail to notice the true state of affairs until his character had gotten around to discovering it as well. Nor is Martin’s intellectual development more satisfying to follow. His rather comical devotion to Herbert Spencer, his breathy and sophomoric discovery that there is a larger scheme to things than meets the eye, his shocking conclusion that

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opera is frequently silly, his oh-so-serious conversation with a professor that ends with his solemn judgment that the man “has gone to the bottom of things and is … afraid of what he saw” (247)—the list goes on. Martin Eden is bad precisely to the extent that we sense we are supposed to be fascinated. And this is the point where we posit an author. For clearly someone is offering Martin’s discoveries as proudly as a meal that has been prepared with great care, has been arranged with garnishes, and is presented with flourishes of waiters—which does not merely contain too much pepper or sage (which would be a fault), but is rotten, and cannot be eaten at all. Another example of a fundamentally bad work is Alan Paton’s second novel, Too Late the Phalarope—a book as bad as Paton’s first novel Cry, The Beloved Country, is good. At the center of that novel is the subject of black-white sexual relations. For most North Americans and Western Europeans nowadays, this theme has ceased to be important or to shock, so the question of whether the lieutenant in Paton’s novel had intercourse with a black woman seems trivial and stupid. And this means that the Biblical-apocalyptic language of the spinster aunt who narrates this tale of how the man is (in her word) “lost”—with motivation provided so meticulously by his wife’s frigidity and his father’s harshness—becomes so much over-careful claptrap. A modern reader will feel that the entire attempt to explain and motivate the action which forms the book’s substance is simply misguided. The problem is that we can’t accept the fundamental presuppositions of the dominant voice in the book, the aunt. And the result is that we think her entire perception of the meaning, even of the interest, of the events in question wrong. The aunt accepts, and never questions, that her nephew is “lost,” and offers a logic, through the story of his childhood and marriage, in his inability to come to terms with his society, which leads to his seeking out what she perceives as the forces of darkness. The contemporary Western reader sees no such weight in this act, or intrinsic interest that merits writing an entire book about it. In fact, it seems trivial, banal, and uninteresting. And the fact that the point of view that dominates the work (and whose presuppositions are never in any way questioned) doesn’t see this makes the experience of reading it infuriating. It produces the feeling of betrayal that leads to our calling the work bad. Of course, it can be a useful historical artifact—say in a course taught most likely by a black female professor at a liberal arts college in the history of racism or the history of South Africa. But then it’s not art either; it’s part of a course in history or politics. There are circumstances where we could accept the voice of the aunt as the dominant voice. The first is what we call nowadays the unreliable narrator, whose interest lies in the fact that we gradually discover, or have revealed to us, the narrator’s fallibility (say in Henry James novels, or The Blithedale Romance of Nathaniel Hawthorne). But in Paton’s work, the narrator’s fallibility is all too clear to the reader from the beginning, whereas the author never arrives at this conclusion. We see too soon that the narrator of Paton’s novel is misguided in her conviction that she is dealing with a great and weighty action, just as we

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see immediately that poor Martin Eden’s problems are interesting to no one but himself. The second situation in which we could accept the voice of the narrator aunt is if it appeared in a context that somehow made it part of a larger relationship of voices. This could be achieved if the point of view itself were called into question—perhaps by authorial irony—or if it were only one viewpoint among many. In that case, of course, the book would become the story of the lieutenant victimized by accepting what he need not have accepted—a different work entirely. Many works present as victims someone who accepts a moral system we reject. Kleist’s The Marquise of O… is one of the most compelling because the narrator doesn’t seem to accept that moral system either. Yet we pronounce bad a work that takes the point of view of the perpetrators of such a system: nowhere is the lieutenant more a victim than any other character (say, the aunt, in Paton). And because the contrast necessary to portraying him as such a victim in Paton’s work is nowhere in the book itself, but only in subsequent understanding, or in outside commentary, we may legitimately feel betrayed by the book, and call it bad. Its badness is the result of a conflict between reality and the view that the work presents, whereas if something the reader knows to be contingent is presented as being so, there is no such conflict. In order for most of us to escape the reaction that such a work as this is bad, we have to refuse to give ourselves, in Sartre’s sense, to the work at all. We have to adopt the consciously distanced perspectives of historians or literary scholars who look at the work as (again following Sartre) an object, thereby perceiving it in what Sartre calls “bad faith.” A book we read for pleasure somehow unfolds differently from one we read to review, or to prepare a lecture—which is John Dewey’s point as well, and both are surely right, as both students and professors can attest. We can be genuinely moved by it, since we assume the posture of attentiveness. With a book we are reviewing or that we have to give a class report on, by contrast, we assume the position of a judge listening to the defendant in order to render an opinion—we are the one in charge, and the power relation is reversed. This whole discussion may for some people smack of moral absolutism. Such and such a book is uninteresting, such and such a book is not worth the time spent on it. But my claim is merely that moral or societal ideals can alter, or that people may hold conflicting moral notions, yet a reader who accepts new or different ideals will think a work bad if it does not in some way qualify or present as less than absolute the ideals that threaten the reader’s own. Only when these ideals are so antiquated or currently in such ill repute that they pose no viable threat can we read with equanimity a work that takes for granted ideals that are not our own. This doesn’t mean that the works we read have to valorize whatever our current views and prejudices might be. But it does mean that the work must establish a fundamental basis of agreement with its reader, a common fund of

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shared presuppositions, before it can begin to call other things into question. Our own inside has to jibe with the work’s inside, at least to some degree. Like successful reformers, works must first put us at our ease by telling us what we are doing right before we will listen to their accounts of what we are doing wrong. These points of initial agreement can themselves be put into question—but only in another work that establishes commonality on some other basis. Related to this is the question of whether we have to believe in the moral or religious presuppositions of the author in order to appreciate the work as literature. We can deal with this question most effectively by differentiating between the two subcategories hidden within the reaction of not believing, namely disagreement and indifference. If we disagree, we will find the work bad; if we are only indifferent, we’ll only find it uninteresting. Indifference to literature is a fact of life as well. I would say that most honest readers—even, or perhaps especially, careful ones—will acknowledge that they remain fundamentally indifferent to most works, and are conscious of this indifference so rarely only because they already ignore so many works, having no reason even to pick them up. Literature is part of life. It’s not the same as personal interactions, but it’s not something completely impersonal either. So we can have a range of reactions to it, from enthusiastic to disgusted. Mine need not be the same as yours, and these reactions can change over time. The interaction with literature and the arts is mine, or yours, alone. That’s what produces the possibility of calling these things art.

Notes 1 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Why Write?” in What Is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Harper, 1965), 32–60. 2 Shklovsky, “Art as Technique.” 3 Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” Monoskop, 2022, accessed 15 March 2022, https:// monoskop.org/images/5/59/Sontag_Susan_1964_Notes_on_Camp.pdf

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INDEX

Abbot, B. 19 Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum 57, 76, 78 Abramovic, M. 64 Abrams, M. H. 35, 36, 121, 132, 137 Abstract Expressionism 13 Achebe, C. 184–85, 189 Addams, C. 103 Adirondack Museum 54 Adorno, T. 68 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,The 178, 192 Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art 11 Afghanistan 113–14 African art 77, 79, 83, 99 African Art in Motion 83 African Art Museum (Smithsonian) 38, 77 African-American Museum (Smithsonian) 39 “Against Interpretation” 149 Ai Weiwei 20, 107 Alessi 15, 76 Alger, H. 92 Alsop, M. 153 Altes Museum 8, 87 ”American in Paris, An” 99 American Museum of Natural History 122 American Visionary Art Museum 57 77, 105 Andersen, H. C. 123 Anna Karenina 155 Annapolis (film) 160 Annapolis, Maryland 160, 179 Anselm, St. 24 “Apology for Poetry. The” 154

Arbus, D. 136 Aristotle (Poetics) 137. 144, 145, 154 Art as Experience 41–48 “Art as Technique” 37 “Art of Biography, The” 158 “Art of the American Snapshot, The” 77 “Art of the Motorcycle, The” 15 “Artwork in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, The” 68, 122 Asian Art Museum (San Francisco) 91 Asian Art Museum (Seattle) 89 Asian Art Museum (Smithsonian) 38, 52, 91 Atget, E. 19, 107 Attalids 82 Austen, J. 12, 176 Austin, J. 169 Avar treasure 50 Bactrian Hoard 73, 113–14, 117 Bagram 117 Balanchine, G. 12, 137, 156 Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, Les 197 Baltimore Museum of Art 48, 56, 62 Baltimore Symphony Orchestra 153 Bamana 99, 103 Bamiyan Buddhas 113 Bancroft, A. 66 Barbie 64, 126 Barnes Foundation 41, 43, 46, 58, 76, 92–100, 121 Barnum, P. T. 104 Barthes, R. 38 Baudelaire, C. 47

206 Index

Bavarian National Museum 74 Beatles, The 66 Beethoven, L. v. 34, 66 Being and Nothingness 132 Benin bronzes 6, 79–81 Benjamin, W. 68, 122–23 Benson, E. F. 140–44 Beowulf 88, 173 Bergman, I. 67–68 Berkeley, G. 4 Berlin Stories,The 74 Bernstein, L. 66, 153 Best Art You’ve Never Seen,The 85 Beuys, J. 105 Black Panther (film) 79 Blithedale Romance,The 198 Blue Flower,The 182, 185–86 Bode Museum 85 Bodie, C. A. 19 Bogart, H. 67 Boileau, N. 62, 163 Bond, J. 137, 139, 145–46 Booth, W. 179 Boring Postcards 77 Botticelli, S. 26, 27 Boucher, F. 88, 177 Bourdieu, P. 9 Bourne, J. 137, 145, 146 Brady, R. 118 Brecht, B. 145, 153 Brideshead Revisited 181 Brod, M. 73 Bronzino 60 British Museum 7, 49, 75, 80 brutalist architecture 176 Buli master 78 Cage, J. 110 camp 197 Canaletto 88 Candide 183 Capitoline Museum 82 Capra, F. 68 Caravaggio 99 Cartier-Bresson, H. 99–100 Casablanca (film) 67–68 Cervantes, M. de 139, 175 Cézanne, P. 45, 46, 94 Chardin, J. B. S. 92–93 Chomsky, N. 60–61 Chopin, F. 12, 27 Christo 62, 64, 102, 107 Christy, A. 194–95 Clancy, T. 160

Claude le Lorrain 12, 59 Cleary, B. 135, 136 Clinton, B. 105 Clinton H. 105 Close, C. 105 Cluny, Musée de 76 Columbia University 26 Comédie Française 112 Concept of Mind,The 22 “Concert, The” 27 Constable, J. 12, 88, 90 Constantinople 82 Corcoran Museum 87 Corneille, P. 112 Cornell, J. 197 Courbe, G. 59, 61 Course in General Linguistics 168 Courtauld Institute of Art 7 Craig, D. 145 Critique of Judgment 14, 31–33, 36 Critique of Pure Reason 31 Cruise, T. 145 Cry, the Beloved Country 198–200 Cuernavaca 118 cultural studies 64 Cuno, J. 83 Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The 179 Curtis Institute 66 Custom of the Country,The 146–47 Dada 56 Damon, M. 145 Dante 21 Danto, A. 51, 110 David plates 108 Davidson, B. 53 De la Tour, G. 96 De Mazia,V. 94–95, 96 De Palma, B. 159 De Young Museum 91 Death of a Salesman 144–45 Death of Expertise,The 68 Declaration of Independence, The (US) 132 defamiliarization 136 “Defense of Poetry” 34 “Demoiselles d’Avignon, Les” 58 Derrida, J. 38 Dewey, J. 20, 41–48, 92, 94, 97–98, 121 Dewey, M. 16, 89 Dewey Decimal System 16, 89 Diana, Princess of Wales 64 Dickie, G. 51 Dickinson, E. 27, 73

Index  207

“Dinner for One” 68 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste 9 Doctorow, E. L. 163 Domènech i Montagner, L. 63 Don Quixote 139, 175 Dracula 183 Dresden Art Museum 97 Dressed to Kill (film) 159, 179 Duccio 88 Dukas, P. 123 “Dying Gaul, The” 82 El Greco 94, 96 “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” 73 Elgin Marbles 83 Eliot, T. S. 13–14, 20, 48, 147 Empiricism 31–32, 60 Empson, W. 38 English Garden (Munich) 53 Epstein, J. 99 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An 60 F for Fake (film) 30 Fallingwater 63 Fantasia (film) 123 Fantasia 2000 (film) 123 Fantin-Latour, H. 56 Fielding, H. 175 Firth, C. 74 Fish, S. 180–81, 188 Fitzgerald, P. 182, 185–86 Flaubert, G. 138–39, 143, 175 For Whom the Bell Tolls 186 Ford, H. 65 Ford, T. 74 Foucault, M. 38, 91, 92, 194, 196 Fragonard, J.-H. 88 Frankenthaler, H. 88 Frankfurt School 65, 68, 195 Freer Gallery of Art 38, 88 French Revolution 30 Frick Collection 127 Frost, R. 148–49 Gaudí, A. 63 Gautier, T. 50 Gehry, F. 48, 93 Gershwin, G. 99 Glenn, J. 123 Glenstone Museum 29, 54–55, 62 Golden, A. 182–86

Goodman, N. 158, 164, 180, 181 Goya, F. 8, 15, 90 Graduate,The 66 Graham, M. 14, 149, 156 Gray, T. 73 Great Bieri 99 Grosz, G. 134 Guercino 99 Guggenheim Museum (New York) 15, 48, 93 Guimet, Musée 114 Hals, F. 92 Hampton, J. 57 “Happy Days” 122 Harvard University Museums 91 Haverford College 92 Hawthorne, N. 198 Heckel, E. 12 Hegel, G. W. F. 30, 176 Hemingway, E. 12, 133, 176, 186 Hermitage Museum 37 Hirsch, E. D. 196 Hirshhorn Museum 62, 105, 107 Hitchcock, A. 46, 159 Hockney, D. 75 Hoffman, D. 66 Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington, D.C.) 48 Homer 84 Horace 154 Horkheimer, M. 68 How to Do Things with Words 169 Hugo,V. 35 Hume, D. 23, 32 Impressionism 12, 45, 47, 59, 88, 92 Is There a Text in This Class? 180 Isherwood, C. 74 It’s a Wonderful Life (film) 68 James, H. 176, 198 Janaček, L. 21 Jewels (ballet) 137 John, J. 64 Johnson, P. 118 Joyce, J. 12, 42, 175 Judd, D. 51 Juilliard School 66 Kafka, F. 29, 73 Kahlo, F. 118 Kandinsky, W. 90, 95, 134, 136, 166 Kant, I. 14, 23, 31–32, 50, 60, 61

208 Index

Keats, J. 149 King and I,The (film) 152 King Kong (film) 197 King Lear 33 Kirchner, E. L. 12 Kleist, H. von 199 Klimt, G. 12 Kolkata 49 Krieger Museum 118 Lalique, R. 52 “Lamentation” (dance) 149 Langer, S. 166 Lascaux caves 20 Latino-American Museum 39 Le Nôtre, A. 53 Lehman Collection 83 Lenbachhaus 135 Levittown 66 Lipschitz, J. 95 Liza Lou 107 Locke, J. 60, 61, 147 “Logical Status of Fictional Discourse, The” 155–56 Lolita 136 London, J. 193, 197–98 Louvre Museum 57, 78, 82 McFadden Collection 53, 83 McGill University 105 Madame Bovary 138–43, 146, 148, 175 Madonna (singer) 34 “Mages, Les” 35 Magritte, R. 53, 55, 58–59 Mahler, G. 21, 61 Malevich, K. 77, 95 Mantegna, A. 105 Marco Polo 114 Marquise of O,The 199 Martin Eden 193, 197–99 Marx, K. 9, 10, 64 Mayakovski,V. 104 Memoires of a Geisha 182–85 Merchant of Venice,The 111 Merion, PA 92–93 Metropolitan Museum of Art 50–52, 57, 75, 78, 81, 83, 91, 99, 147, 159, 179 Metropolitan Opera 66 Michener, J. 92 Miller, A. 144–45 Milton, J. 73 mimesis 134, 138, 139, 145 Mirror and the Lamp,The 135–36 Mission: Impossible (films) 137 Modernism and Its Discontents 37

“Modest Proposal, A” 28 Modigliani, A. 95 Mona Lisa (La Giocanda) 123 Mondrian, P. 95, 96, 137, 166 Monet, C. 12, 88, 89, 118 Moore, G. E. 149 Moore, J. 74 Morgan, J. P. 75 Monty Python 75 Mother Courage 145 Mozart, W. A. 21, 27, 182 Murano 117 Murder of Roger Ackroyd,The 194–95 Murdoch, I. 155–56 Museum of Asian Art Seattle 89 Museum of Decorative Arts Berlin 152 Museum of Modern Art (NY) 7, 39, 55, 56, 58, 64, 67, 76 Musil, R. 12 Nabokov,V. 136 Napoleon I 82 National Gallery (London) 7, 25 National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.) 8, 25, 38, 47, 48, 57, 77 National Museum Kabul 113 National Portrait Gallery (Washington, D.C.) 112 Naval Academy, US 160 Neutra, R. 74 New Critics 38 New York Times 13, 104 Nichols, M. 66 Nichols, T. 68 Nietzsche, F. 127, 194 Night at the Museum (book) 122 Night at the Museum (films) 121–22, 124 Norris, F. 193, 195 Octopus,The 193, 195–97 “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” 17 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” 149 Oleway of Ife 78 Oppenheim, M. 55 Othello 111 Our Town 153 “Ozymandias” 118 Parthenon 45, 46, 80, 83, 119 Passover Haggadah 18 Pater, W. 127 Patinir, J. 89 Paton, A. 193, 198–99 Patriot Games (film) 160 Peirce, C. S. 196

Index  209

Penn Museum (University of Pennsylvania) 49, 50, 90 Pennsylvania Station New York 176 Pergamon 89 Pergamon Museum 109 Pericles 144 Phidias 119 Philadelphia Museum of Art 37, 53, 58, 77, 83, 159, 179 Philip IV 89 Philosophical Investigations 22, 168 Picasso, P. 58 Picture of Dorian Gray,The 50 Pitti Palace 87 Plato 24, 36, 61, 153–55, 164, 168, 173 Poetics 144, 154 Pokémon 16 Pollock, J. 19 Pompeii 19 Pope, J. R. 48 Potsdam Chinese tea pavilion 55 Pound, E. 13–14 Poussin, N. 37, 59, 134, 147, 148 Prado Museum 8, 89, 90, 135 Presley, Elvis 66 Preface to Lyrical Ballads 35 Prince 11 Proust, M. 12, 67, 134 Pouabi, Queen 49 Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, Musée du 53, 83, 87 Quant, M. 161 Quine, W.V. O. 168 Rabelais, F. 136, 177 Rainer,Y. 67 Raphael 134, 137 Ray, M. 55–56, 58 Redpath Museum 105 Rembrandt 11, 12, 21, 89, 99, 123 Reni, G. 99 Renoir, P.-A. 21, 47, 88, 97 Renwick Gallery 87, 102 representation 53, 56–59, 97–98, 165, 167, 183 Rhetoric of Fiction,The 179 Ripley’s Believe it Or Not 99, 101–109 “Road Not Taken, The” 148–49 Robbins, J. 27, 152, 179 Robie House 63 Rockingham Ware 52 Rodchenko, A. 136 Rosenkavalier, Der 111 Rouse Company 103

“Running Fence” 62, 107 Russell, B. 157–58 Russian Formalists 112, 132, 136, 195 Rwanda 54, 83 Ryle, G. 22 Sargent, J. S. 46, 90 Sartre, J.-P. 132, 193, 194, 199 Saussure, F. de 168 Schinkel, K. 8, 87 Schmidt-Rottluff, K. 12 Schoenberg, A. 42, 67 Searle, J. 98, 153, 155–56, 158–59, 163, 165, 169 Secret Lives 140–44 Shakespeare, W. 85, 111–12, 145, 150, 167, 175 Shelley, P. 34, 35, 37, 118 Shklovsky,V. 37, 38, 112, 132, 136, 195 Shostakovich, D. 123 Sidney, Sir P. 154, 166 “Siegfried Idyll” 85 “Single Man, A” 74 “Small House of Uncle Thomas, The” 152–53 Smithson, J. 122 Smithson, R. 20 Smithsonian Air and Space Museum 123 Smithsonian American Art Museum 57 Smithsonian Associates 121–22 Smithsonian Institution 38, 91, 122 Smithsonian National Museum of African Art 77 Smithsonian National Museum of American History 171 Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History 121 sociology 9 Sontag, S. 100, 149, 197 Sophocles 144, 145 “Sorcerer’s Apprentice, The” 123 South Kensington Museums 92 South Pacific (musical) 92 Spectator,The 13 Speech Acts 169 Spencer, H. 197 Spivak, G. 38 Spurlock, M. 105 Stein, G. 134, 175 Steinberg, S. 192 Stendhal 27, 176 Stoker, B. 183 Stowe, H. B. 152 Strachey, L. 158 Sumerians 50

210 Index

Sun Also Rises,The 133 Supersize Me (film) 105 Sutton Hoo 75 Swift, J. 28 Tales of the South Pacific 92 Tate Britain 7 Tate Modern 7, 107 Tharp, T. 64 Thiebaud, W. 57 Things Fall Apart 184, 189 Thompson, R. F. 83 Thoreau, H. 146 Threepenny Opera,The 153 Tiepolo, G. B. 99 Tiffany, L. 52 Tillya Tepe 73, 114, 119 Tintoretto 88 Titian 47, 88, 90 Tolstoy, L. 155 Tom Jones 175 Too Late the Phalarope 193, 198–99 Toy Story (films) 123 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 149, 158, 168 “Tradition and the Individual Talent” 20 “Tragedy and the Common Man” 144–45 Trahey, J. 153 Trenc, M. 122 “Trio A” 67 Trollope, A. 12 Truth or Dare (film) 34 Turner, J. M. W. 15, 88, 90 Tutankhamun 74, 118 Twain, M. 178 “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” 168 Ulysses 42, 175 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 152 University of Chicago 63, 135, 177 Ur 49

Van Meegeren, H. 104 Vermeer, J. 12, 97, 104 Velazquez, D. 89 Venice 47, 82, 107, 111 Venus of Willendorf 20 Veronese, P. 82 Versailles 53 Victoria and Albert Museum 7, 92 Vienna Circle 168 Vienna Natural History Museum 20 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts 7, 52, 57, 78 Vivaldi, A. 21 Voltaire 183 Wallace Collection 7 Walters Art Museum 7, 8, 50, 78, 90, 91, 101–102, 107 War and Peace 166, 167 Warhol, A. 51, 56, 64 Waugh, E. 181 Ways of Worldmaking 158 Welles, O. 30 Wharton, E. 146 Whitney Museum of American Art 107 Wilde, O. 50 Wilder, T. 153 Wittgenstein, L.: Philosophical Investigations 22, 168; Tractatus 149, 158, 168 Wizard of Oz (film) 122 Wolfe, T. 12 Woolf, J. 11 Woolf,V. 88, 158–59, 161, 175 Woolley, Sir L. 49 Wordsworth, W. 17, 35, 44, 46, 98 Wray, F. 197 Wright, F. L. 48, 63, 93 Wright Brothers 123 Xenophon 173 Zola, E. 27