the aesthetic moment
"A modernist would have to rewrite Pater's dictum that all art aspires to the condition of music," Susan Sontag announced in her series of essays On Photography. "Now all art aspires to the condition of photography."
p1, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970, Henry M Sayre, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London 1989
I believe that art should aspire to a condition similar to, but distinct from, either of these. Both are attempts to record a moment that's already passing away. That moment is the aesthetic experience, and both Pater and Sontag's formulae seem to place its initial recognition, if not its generation, in a third party called the 'artist'. But I think this is wrong, and underestimates the ability of audiences to make their own judgements. If audiences need artists or facilitators to tell them where art is then why bother telling them at all since they are clearly so incapable of aesthetic appreciation? It's been clear since early in the 20th century that art doesn't live only in galleries, theatres and concert halls, or in technical and formal rigour only fully appreciated by a minority. Art is fragmentary, contingent, accidental, individual. In trying to come up with a formula that might echo Walter Pater and Susan Sontag I keep coming up against what seems to be an irreducible cluster of ideas. Art should be like a scream, or a laugh, or a huge wave of fear, or any other strong surge of emotion out of your control. It might be recordable, but that recording will not always have an aesthetic impact, since that's dependent on the time and conditions of experiencing the recording. Because of this, and as I've said elsewhere, the aesthetic experience might be in anything - from hearing a song to being punched and beyond in every direction. Art is too chimeric to be compared to a single object.
But over 15 years at least the notion of art as a scream has remained remarkably persistent. Maybe half of my writing career has been an attempt to set down that primal moment of release, communication, and containment through utterance on the page. But I always immediately remember it doesn't have to be a scream, or even vocalised; that it can be from within, or from response to something external. So maybe art aspires to the condition of living and feeling emotion. Maybe the aesthetic experience is everywhere and anywhere, and art is a more or less sophisticated attempt to distill and stimulate the accidents we find most vivid.
This leads us to the problem that 'art' as commonly used is an extremely broad term. It has to cover the aesthetic moment, it has to be those concious artefacts and recordings of an aesthetic moment, and it has to be the technical, formal, critical and commercial infrastructure dedicated to creating, disseminating and preserving those artefacts and recordings. This is really for another essay, but as a preliminary, it doesn't seem in any way consistent to remove any one of these three items from the description. The only one with any real autonomy is the aesthetic moment, but it's impossible to separate from the other two.
p1, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970, Henry M Sayre, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London 1989
I believe that art should aspire to a condition similar to, but distinct from, either of these. Both are attempts to record a moment that's already passing away. That moment is the aesthetic experience, and both Pater and Sontag's formulae seem to place its initial recognition, if not its generation, in a third party called the 'artist'. But I think this is wrong, and underestimates the ability of audiences to make their own judgements. If audiences need artists or facilitators to tell them where art is then why bother telling them at all since they are clearly so incapable of aesthetic appreciation? It's been clear since early in the 20th century that art doesn't live only in galleries, theatres and concert halls, or in technical and formal rigour only fully appreciated by a minority. Art is fragmentary, contingent, accidental, individual. In trying to come up with a formula that might echo Walter Pater and Susan Sontag I keep coming up against what seems to be an irreducible cluster of ideas. Art should be like a scream, or a laugh, or a huge wave of fear, or any other strong surge of emotion out of your control. It might be recordable, but that recording will not always have an aesthetic impact, since that's dependent on the time and conditions of experiencing the recording. Because of this, and as I've said elsewhere, the aesthetic experience might be in anything - from hearing a song to being punched and beyond in every direction. Art is too chimeric to be compared to a single object.
But over 15 years at least the notion of art as a scream has remained remarkably persistent. Maybe half of my writing career has been an attempt to set down that primal moment of release, communication, and containment through utterance on the page. But I always immediately remember it doesn't have to be a scream, or even vocalised; that it can be from within, or from response to something external. So maybe art aspires to the condition of living and feeling emotion. Maybe the aesthetic experience is everywhere and anywhere, and art is a more or less sophisticated attempt to distill and stimulate the accidents we find most vivid.
This leads us to the problem that 'art' as commonly used is an extremely broad term. It has to cover the aesthetic moment, it has to be those concious artefacts and recordings of an aesthetic moment, and it has to be the technical, formal, critical and commercial infrastructure dedicated to creating, disseminating and preserving those artefacts and recordings. This is really for another essay, but as a preliminary, it doesn't seem in any way consistent to remove any one of these three items from the description. The only one with any real autonomy is the aesthetic moment, but it's impossible to separate from the other two.
Comments
ner ner ner ner ner.
Chimeric is what art is. Or if it isn't, it should be.
Make mine a minotaur.
Okay, so I missed a couple of words, sorry 'bout that. I'd say it won't happen again, but it will, so tough.