The Use and Abuse of Art by Jacques Barzun

Author:Jacques Barzun
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

The competition of drugs, sex, and yogi exercises suggests that chemical or physical action is being thought more reliable.

In its present incarnations art is further weakened by excess. We continue to absorb it in the old way, naming the artist, trying to remember the title and appearance of his works. But more and more these blur into the semblance of interchangeable parts. It is often an accident of time (or the result of a planned outrage) when an item otherwise indistinguishable from the mass achieves particularity. And even then, it is as a label in the memory rather than as a source of energy to which we return of set purpose, grateful and overawed. It is reasonable to suppose that the type of shock by brutality that has become usual interferes with the deeper, less obvious shock that used to make works of art seem to convey religious tidings.

The confusion by violence and by numbers has another consequence. Whatever the upshot of these assaults on our sensibilities, we are not redeemed together. It is not solely that we lack the communicative warmth that arises from the varieties of a single style agitating many minds; it is that we are thrown back too exclusively on our own resources. “See what you make of it!” says the canvas or poem. “Unchain your unconscious and ‘relate’ ” says the theater of the absurd and the obscene. The relation is unspecified. The depths that are stirred, if any, vary in density. Even momentary gratification is a matter of luck. We would expect a religion to do better and channel the expected flow of lava. The works of nineteenth-century art that are now considered too great, too pompous and heaven-storming, at least prevented the onlooker’s imagination from straying away in self-indulgence. And they did create around themselves a body of lovers linked together quasi-religiously; whereas the gayer, more modestly democratic and “disposable” works of today, content to give a nudge and leave the rest to us, succeed only in arousing what they cannot satisfy.

To this verdict there is of course the exception of revolutionary art. Its doctrine can be reactionary, theological, or anarchist: message is the unifier and director of destinies. Whoever is moved by such art knows what fulfillment to look for not merely in the next artistic experience but in human life as well.

Unfortunately revolutionary art tends to be strong in message and weak in art. All the great revolutions since 1789 have given art encouragement, but evidently not of the right kind or not to the right artists. Propaganda art has proved ineffectual as art, and the exceptions have confirmed the rule by being ineffectual as propaganda, the message being lost in the excitement of the art. Has anyone ever turned Calvinist from even the most enthralled reading of Paradise Lost? Who thinks of Tolstoy’s theory of history when remembering War and Peace? We are back at lesson one about the nature of art, which is that its contents defy literal expression.

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