I say “tends not to be present,” but there are instances of art that do require that presence for the work to have its functioning. I am thinking of performance art, wherein the living, breathing intelligence of the artist must not only be present, but be subjected to time, and its elapsing, in a way that recorded art is not.
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But yes…art is the site of a communing that involves at least two intelligences. And the fact that one of these intelligences, that of the artist, tends not to be present, or is present only evidentially, in what it has produced, is important only insofar as it reveals the position of insight and intensity from which it addresses itself to the second intelligence, that of the audience.
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But it is to say that if a civilization is to make room inside of it for a tradition of imaginative expression that is open to the efforts of anyone, is imbued with a spirit of subjectivity (or a critical apparatus that has been diffused by patterns of economic reward, and the democratization of taste), and yet is nonetheless characterized by denominations of talent and ability, there will always be occasions when works of lesser achievement are showcased alongside, or given exposure that could also belong to, works that are greater.
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Which isn’t to say that bad art has no right to exist, for of course it does, as in many instances (perhaps even most instances) it arrives out of noble or benign intentions, and, even when it doesn’t, is still only posing as art, the extent of whose influence (and thus potential harm) isn’t boundless.
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For the processes of mind that we must initiate, so that any encounter, with any object in reality, becomes comprehensible to us, require time; and even when that time is relatively modest, it is still time that we think of as our own, by which I mean belonging to that commodity that we correctly understand to mark the duration of our life.
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One of the reasons art gets an unfortunate reputation (as snooty, or pretentious, or whatever) is that the humility and sincerity that all art requires an audience approach it with, in order that the audience might enter into its discourse, and mode of seeing, is made a mockery of when it is wasted, or brought to nothing, by bad art.
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Which is to say that the work required of an audience, that they might understand a piece of art, while it may involve the application of the intellect, is more pointedly related to the systems of perception and valuation to which each audience, in their individual way, has become habituated.
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And while some works of art can be said to be more ‘difficult’ than others, all of them, I think, will open themselves, on some level, to an audience that makes an effort to meet them with a corresponding openness, or an act of inwardly directed perception, which can be described as ‘work’ insofar as it involves a disarmament of the ego.
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Which isn’t to say that a person who recognizes their own soulfulness can simply present themself to a work of art and expect it to have an effect on them. For while the onus of work we associate with art always belongs to the artist, as opposed to the audience, and while that work might end whenever the artist declares it to be in a state of completion (whatever that term might mean to his or her mind), the meaning that a given work will introduce to reality remains at large until the audience involves itself in an effort of apprehension.
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And so the soul that encounters any accomplished work (even when that work involves a subject that has been rendered before, by a different artist) will be moved by it in a way that cannot be duplicated.
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Which is why I would say that art that attempts to reproduce ‘reality’ in its most crystalline sense, and thus aspires to a sort of mimetic perfection, as if such a thing were possible, while sometimes admirable as a technical achievement, separates itself from a source of vitality without which, I suspect, it cannot persist in more than one dimension of meaning.
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In other words, while I am seeing, with my eyes, the crows that are flying above a field of wheat, I am also seeing, with another kind of vision, some part of Van Gogh’s nature that was so essential to him as to find its expression in any of his subjects, however ordinary.
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When I look at the painting Wheatfield with Crows, for example, I never lose sight of the landscape to which the title refers. And yet my most singular impression of that painting is not what it is of, but how what it is of has been communicated to me, and what that communication has caused me to feel.
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It might even be said that the subject of any work of art, regardless of what it portends to be ‘about,’ is the artist themself. For whatever the content an artist chooses to depict, that content is subjected, by way of the artist’s style, to such a transfiguration that, while it may not lose the reality of its semblance, it introduces to the audience an element of ‘whatness’ that can belong only to the deepest part of the artist’s identity.
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If it is personality, then, that contributes, by way of style, to an artist’s rendering of a subject, the fact that there is only a finite number of subjects in reality for artists to depict is not a significant dilemma. For it is in the nature of personality to be so varied and subtle, across the spectrum from which it can emerge, that any artist in command of their talent will produce, regardless of their subject, a work that is different, in its emotive character or spirit, than that of any other artist. So that what one filmmaker might express about war, for example, will not be the same as what another filmmaker would express about the same subject, though the two might be comparable, and might even be said to be ‘in conversation’ with each other.
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For a musical note is a musical note, and a word is a word, and a dab of paint is a dab of paint, which is to say that any moment or instance within a work of art can be said to retain the semblance of its ordinary or mundane nature. And yet, when encountered in its relation to the larger arrangement of the work in which it has been brought to participate, such an instance will assume something of the grandeur or mystery to which the work in its entirety alludes.
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Another way to state this is that the function of any medium, prior to its incorporation into a work of art, is ordinary, and that, after its incorporation, it is extraordinary, and that the process by which it obtains from the one condition to the other, while depending only on the orderings and manipulations (which isn’t to say tricks) of the artist, which in no way are hidden, is yet in some way mysterious.
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To be specific, style is produced when the function of a medium, which is impersonal, and the mood that is bestowed upon that function, which is personal, are fused. If no fusion has occurred, no style can be found. Or, anyway, any style that is there to be found will not have resulted from the integration of these two disparate elements, and thus will seem forced, or distracting.
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For style is not merely an abundance of, say, noise and movement and color, though these things might be found, as attributes of varying quantity or degree, within any given style. It is, instead, something like a dimension of personality that, arising from the facility that an artist can be said to have with the medium in which they work, observes and elucidates truth.
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Truth, of course, needs neither defense nor adornment, but it can be brought into relief. Which is why we sometimes describe art as a heightened expression of truth.