What Is the Quality of Art Based On?

Walking into an art gallery can be a confusing experience. I think Thomas Sowell helps explain the cause of this confusion when he writes: 

Unlike great cultural achievements of the past, such as magnificent cathedrals, which were intended to inspire kings and peasants alike, the hallmark of self-consciously "modern" art and music is its inaccessibility to the masses and often even its deliberate offensiveness to, or mockery of, the masses.[1]

As I read this, Marcel Duchamp's Fountain and Piero Manzoni's Artist's Shit immediately come to mind. I would also add that "inaccessibility to the masses" applies just as well to contemporary art. I recall an acquaintance telling me about an exhibition where the artist sat in a chair while a bunch of children ran around the room. Apparently the children running around was the art. It's difficult not to simply laugh at the thought of this, but if I were to be charitable, maybe the purpose of the exhibit was to locate the artistic within the ordinary. I understand the attraction of adjusting one's way of seeing the world in order to make it more interesting, but showcases such as this are overly theoretical and perhaps even elitist.

Having said all that, I wouldn't be so quick to pit modern (not to mention contemporary) art against that of the Middle Ages. I don't mean to dismiss the grandeur of Europe's Gothic cathedrals. (I wouldn't mind seeing some of them in person someday, after all!) And of course, they're much more impressive than the previously mentioned works by Duchamp and Manzoni. But not all modern art is so lacking in quality.

As Francis Schaeffer points out, being more attached to the past than we have to be is to our detriment:

There is no living language which does not undergo constant change. The languages which do not change, Latin, for example, are dead. As long as one has a living art, its forms will change. The past art forms, therefore, are not necessarily the right ones for today or tomorrow. To demand the art forms of yesterday in either word systems or art is a bourgeois failure.[2]

Consider these modern works in the collage to the right: In Blue by Wassily Kandinsky, Errand Boy (Ausläufer) by Paul Klee, The Frog by Rufino Tamayo, and Le Corsaire (The Pirate) by Giorgio de Chirico. These are good paintings. They're imaginative, not needlessly offensive, and they're also interesting in terms of the colours and shapes used.

So what does the quality of art ultimately rely on if realism has been ruled out? Some people like to say that modern and contemporary art isn't beautiful, and that's what makes it bad. Is good art necessarily beautiful? I don't think so. Francisco Goya's The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters is frightening (without being distasteful, I might add), yet it's still a technically impressive print that communicates an important message.

I think that the quality of art ultimately depends on its being interesting to look at. Perhaps the reader will roll their eyes at me for such a practical and unsophisticated answer, but it is the visual arts we have been focusing on in this article, after all. If I were to guess the main cause of failure within modern and contemporary art, my hunch would be that it is so theoretical and activistic to the point where there is hardly anything interesting to see.

Notes

[1] Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p. 546.

[2] Francis A. Schaeffer, Art and the Bible, p. 73.

Praise and Blame

If we cannot blame those who do terrible things, then we should not praise those who do excellent things either.

Defining "Woke"

What makes something or somebody "woke"?

While ideas and people belonging to the left are much more likely to be labelled "woke" than those on the right, I don't suspect it's as simple as saying that "woke" is a synonym for "left-wing politics." Chris Hedges, who is not particularly friendly to the right, interviewed Christian Parenti on his article “The Cargo Cult of Woke.” Based on a brief skim of Hedges' interview, both him and Parenti seem very left-wing and also very uninterested in wokeness.

So if "woke" isn't just shorthand for "left-wing," then what exactly does it mean? I would put forward the following definition: For something or somebody to be "woke" is for it/them to contain the most superficial, self-congratulatory, and intolerant aspects of left-wing politics.

Western culture abounds with wokeness. Whether it's a research paper on the relationship between queerness and parkour or a rabble-rauser in a public library cursing at a senior over offensive words used in a quotation, woke ideas and behaviours are running at full speed and don't appear to be slowing down any time soon. These two examples belong to my province, Saskatchewan, by the way, which is hardly a bastion of progressivism. Most people don't even know that Saskatchewan exists (a fact that is perhaps slightly buffered by the occasional cultural phenomenon like Corner Gas).

Dream Sequence

You dream that you have gone to church. The service ends, and you walk around the parking lot looking for your car. You can't find it. You walk around again. No luck!

Then you realize that parking the car was never part of the dream. How could you have possibly found your car when you had never parked it in the first place?

It appears that even in dreams the sequence of events matter. You can't necessarily add in important details retroactively. Dreams are not just some colouring books of the imagination, where sections can be filled in any order.

The Vices of Virtue Ethics

Last year, I read Moral Theory: An Introduction by Mark Timmons. While I came away appreciating divine command theory, and especially natural law theory, the impression I received of virtue ethics was not particularly positive. I might even go so far as to say that utilitarianism is more cogent—at least it's practical! Heck, even boring old Kantian ethics might have an edge over virtue ethics for being more objective.

Virtue ethics, by contrast, begins on shaky ground, as its "primary focus of moral inquiry is on questions of what sort of person to be: excellence of character rather than right conduct is of primary concern here."[1]

I don't like this framing; it's causally confused. Virtue ethics gives special attention to character instead of right conduct, yet character has no meaning without right conduct, for character is expressed and perceived through action. It's difficult to imagine what the former would even be without the latter.

To be fair, later in the chapter Timmons writes that "virtue ethics does provide an account of right action," delineating obligatory, wrong, and optional actions.[2]

Despite this, when the emphasis is on "cultivating virtues and avoiding vices," in which duties and obligations take a back seat, virtue ethics has that same wishy-washy, subjective ring to it that moral relativism so clearly possesses. You can practically hear radical individualists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau cheering from the ponds of New England in the background!

If there's one thing I do like about virtue ethics, it's the doctrine of the mean. According to Aristotle, virtue exists between two vices, one being deficient and the other being excessive. For example, courage (virtue) lies between cowardliness (deficient vice) and rashness (excessive vice).[3]

This seems pretty reasonable. Of course, it sort of has that same "I don't pick sides, I pick between them" attitude that we see in centrist politics. It's not exactly self-evident what it is about choosing the middle option that makes it correct.

I realize I'm sort of shooting from the hip with this post. Perhaps I'll come to appreciate virtue ethics more in the future. The next author I plan to read on ethics is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who at least seems adjacent to virtue ethics, as he "sees judgments of character and not action as fundamental to moral evaluation."[4]

As well, in an article comparing a Christian version of intelligent design psychology with a naturalistic version of evolutionary psychology, J.P. Moreland writes that "humans will be strongly inclined toward deontological and virtue ethics,"[5] on the assumption that the former version of psychology is true. I do appreciate intelligent design, so I guess that's a point in virtue ethics' favour!

But if I had to pick an ethical theory that offered either universal or context-specific morality, the former is the clear winner, as it's more consistent and reliable. When the zeitgeist of the West is a mixture of moral relativism, truth relativism, and liberalism, where our only principles seem to be "happiness," "authenticity," "consent," and "freedom," it is perhaps in our best interest to endorse a more rigid ethical theory to keep at bay the distortions that these principles so easily produce.

Notes

1. Mark Timmons, Moral Theory: An Introduction, p. 211.

2. Ibid., pp. 220, 223.

3. Ibid., p. 218.

4. Douglas Huff, "Dietrich Bonhoeffer," Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

5. J.P. Moreland, "Intelligent Design and Evolutionary Psychology as Research Programs:  A Comparison of Their Most Pluasible Specifications," included in Robert B. Stewart (editor), Intelligent Design: William A. Dembski & Michael Ruse in Dialogue, p. 119.