Second only perhaps to God, nothing has been more eulogized in recent decades than Art. Commercial concerns have killed it, we hear. TV is its poison. Vulgarity and an overriding concern for celebrity have castrated painting, poetry, music, theater and literature. Pop is pap. Funders don’t understand art’s Significance. And so on. Yet an inevitable cycle of catastrophic events ensure Art’s repeated resurrection, and new technologies expedite its dissemination. Moreover, post-modern, post-colonial, post-feminist and post-post examinations of Art’s condition, including the high/low divide, continue to inspire critical discussion. Aptly, art is a different creature than it was, say, 200 years ago when the obsessions of an elite defined the aesthetic considerations of a generation and capitalism had not yet sucked poetics into its maw. But does this difference signal newfound irrelevance? Does destiny spell doom and gloom for the arts?
A group of scholars have made this very topic the subject of a two-day symposium, “The Fate of the Arts.” The Institute for Advanced Cultural Studies has invited well-established poets, painters, critics and philosophers to convene on UVA Grounds April 2-3 to discuss the subject. Judging from interviews and early looks at some of the papers that will be presented at the end of this week, reports of Art’s death may be greatly exaggerated—which is not to say contemporary arts lack issues or that the patient is completely healthy. Still, it seems that the answer to the fate of the arts depends on where you look for art, what you mean by art and how willing you are to confront your own assumptions about the arts.
UVA’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, an interdisciplinary offshoot of UVA’s sociology department, regularly hosts a spring colloquium that addresses its principal areas of investigation, which co-program director Jennifer Geddes identifies as technology, commodification and politics. That is to say, the IASC, which she says “is taking a reading on contemporary culture” and looking at its “deep undercurrents” sees these three forces as shaping our ever-changing culture. Yet, until this year, the Institute had not turned its gaze to the arts. Now that it has, Geddes says, the questions that surface concern the presumed role the arts once had in society and the apparently diminished role that the contemporary arts hold in a technologically overrun, highly commodified, chronically politicized world.
There were once high ideals for the fine arts, she asserts, but nowadays “you don’t see people turning to the arts for a sense of meaning or purpose.”
Geddes’ list of follow-up questions runs long: “Why do the arts seem irrelevant? What does capitalism or commodity culture have to do with that? Should we be thinking about having the same hopes for the arts but looking at different arts? Is it that previous art forms have been replaced by other art forms, such that those hopes are still active?”
In other words, if the arts are now decoration where they were once (in the 18th and 19th centuries) transcendent and inspiring, what accounts for the change?
Maybe it’s a provocative question to raise in a town that just anointed a municipal arts task force and celebrates its newfound urban maturity with festivals dedicated to books and movies. And that’s not even taking into account the surfeit of music venues and graphic designer/waiter/musicians who paper the streets with news of their next gigs. M.F.A. candidates percolate through Mudhouse; painters leave nary a wall bare.
In Charlottesville, like many places throughout the nation, the arts are indisputably in full force. But are they meaningful? That’s the Institute’s question.
Adam Zagajewski, who is among the six speakers addressing “The Fate of the Arts,” is not pessimistic. As a member of the Polish New Wave of poets in the 1960s, he came of age in a politically charged climate. Ultimately he was exiled after the government crackdown on Solidarity, first settling in France and then the United States. Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” was the sole poem published in The New Yorker immediately following the attacks of September 11. “It was a poem published in response to a major national tragedy that people did find very relevant,” Geddes says. “Again, an interesting example of the connection between the arts and broader cultural conversations at the time.”
Speaking recently to C-VILLE, Zagajewski says, “I cannot say that there is a real diminishment of poetry’s action, though this action is very limited. It seems to me it had been limited, as well. Of course, we have this tendency to aggrandize the past action of art when we look back, especially in the field of visual arts. We are fascinated by posthumous success of artists, which didn’t always correspond to their successes and transformative action when they were alive.
“My poetic road started with poetry which was politically committed,” Zagajewski says. “Of course it has changed in Poland, too. Now the place of poetry is more modest, and yet I still see this as a kind of volcano that can erupt at any moment. At least in my country, poetry is still very much in the public place.”
When Zagajewski says “public place,” he is not talking about an actual location someplace where poets herald the day’s news to a gathering of civilians. Rather he means the imagined place of cultural and political discourse where the voice of a poet belongs as well as the voice of an economist or philosopher in addressing society’s woes.
Artist and critic Suzi Gablik, another colloquium speaker, calls for a similar kind of integrated aesthetic, and where she finds it, she too is relatively optimistic about the fate of the arts. Gablik trained as a painter with abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell. She says she hasn’t made art in 30 years. Indeed, she is best known currently for a wide body of theoretical and critical writing.
“Gablik has the sense that the arts should have a social impact—there should be a social role to the visual arts,” says Geddes. “We thought that was interesting and provocative—the idea that a painting should affect the world.”
Like Zagajewski, Gablik is positive on the current state of the arts. “Many people are feeling a pull away from the kind of dried-up art scene that is out there,” she told C-VILLE. “My sense is what we’re talking about here is a major paradigm shift in the whole culture.”
Gablik calls for artists to infuse their creativity with spirit—“the kind,” she says, “that embodies the altruistic attitude in using your creativity in the service of others.” That can mean, for instance, the kind of direct service typical of someone like potter John Hartoum, who transformed his ceramics work into social-healing work through Empty Bowls, a grassroots movement to eradicate worldwide hunger. At Empty Bowls, guests are invited to simple meals in exchange for a charitable cash donation; as a token of their gesture, they may keep the handmade ceramic bowls from which they’ve eaten their meal.
The artist, Gablik says, should operate within an “integral paradigm,” in other words, as a person connected to the real-life concerns of others.
Pablo Picasso exemplified the old, “nonintegral” approach, she says. “You could be a classic shit and be barely acceptable as a person, but if you make master works then it was O.K. That’s the old Cartesian, Kantian paradigm—separation of mind and body, separation of art and life. Ultimately it led to the idea of professionalization and a separation of disciplines.”
If the arts face a dark day, then segmentation will have to share some of the blame.
About his own field, Zagajewski makes a similar point: “Poetry is not an individual sport. There is a collective dimension,” he says. Zagajewski teaches M.F.A. students at the University of Houston, and his students, he notices “with horror,” don’t read history or philosophy. Their “narrow idea of what it means to be a poet” manifests in their work, which, he says with apparent frustration, “gains relevance more from this inner dialogue with poets than with nonpoetic voices.”
The idea of the demise of artistic relevance is rooted in a reading of 18th- and 19th-century culture that privileges the transcendent potential of the arts and credits as representative the writings of that era’s artists and philosophers. In other words, 200 years ago an elite of art-makers and art-commentators (but not average audiences, as far as anybody knows) said that art would soothe the world’s ills in a way that religion perhaps once had done. Nowadays, no one makes the same claim for the arts—least of all its audiences—so something must have gone terribly wrong in the interim.
Yale Divinity School Professor Nicholas Wolterstorff doesn’t buy the premise. He’ll be presenting his view at the symposium, too, and Geddes says he was selected specifically because he can address the Romantic idea “that the arts would replace religion,” she says, “that they would become the new religion.”
Wolterstorff says that taken as a whole, the fate of the arts is more positive than negative. But the foretelling of a gloomy scenario doesn’t surprise him because, “in the high arts for two centuries we have had a story we’ve told ourselves that said, among other things, that art is somehow lifted above ordinary social dynamics, and if things are going well the artist is a prophet.”
But the theoretical developments of the past three decades, says Wolterstorff, have made that story about the arts and their quasi-religious status untenable. “There have been all kinds of studies by scholars rubbing our noses in the racism and sexism and colonialism of art,” he says. “It becomes virtually impossible to tell ourselves the same old story anymore, and there’s a sense of cultural disappointment.”
Bill Ivey, who for three years directed the National Endowment for the Arts, would suggest that in significant ways the stories we tell ourselves about why the arts matter and which arts matter is, in fact, perilously unchanged. Now a visiting scholar at Vanderbilt University, the founder and director for 28 years of the Country Music Association has drafted a paper that questions why, despite slim employment opportunities at symphonies and other high arts establishments around the nation, conservatories continue to pump out classically trained musicians by the hundreds annually. Why, Ivey asks, does this supply-side practice in the arts continue unabated? Does it have to do with the class-based myth we tell ourselves as a society about which arts really matter? Simultaneously, Ivey wonders, why do arts that are more collaborative and vernacular, such as film or recorded music of many diverse genres, remain almost exclusively relegated to an ever-consolidating for-profit realm that treats these artifacts simply as products? How do profit motives and elitist notions of important art combine to bequeath government funding to arts that don’t really have a wide market and abuse through base capitalism the arts that are popular, vernacular and modern?
Ivey was invited to the symposium precisely because he will tackle the messy matter of money. “Ivey is asking the kind of questions about the relationship between money and art that are not very popular questions but are really important to ask,” says Geddes.
The other two members of this all-white, mostly male panel of scholars are literary critics Terry Eagleton and Krzysztof Ziarek. The former is on board, says Geddes, because besides being a star of what’s called cultural theory (he’s now on the faculty of the University of Manchester) and having earned many prestigious academic appointments at a young age, he is “a literary critic who still believes in art’s ability to change the world for good,” says Kevin Seidel, who is a graduate fellow at the Institute for Advances Studies in Culture. And Ziarek, a professor of comparative literature at the State University of New York-Buffalo “is good at grappling at big ideas in a clear accessible way,” says Seidel. “He can talk about philosophy and aesthetics.”
It’s heady stuff, this business of foretelling the fate of the arts. But if you’ve ever attended a First Fridays opening or sat through a movie thinking, “Who cares? What does this work want to say? What am I doing here? What does this have to do with anything?” then you might sympathize with the motives of the conference planners. How can something that is so abundant—the arts—seem at times so vapid? Does everybody feel this way, you might wonder. Have they always? Must this be how it is?
IACS will publish the six scholars’ papers in its summer edition of Hedgehog, the quarterly journal it has produced since 1999. So if you do not make it to the vaunted Dome Room of UVA’s Rotunda on Friday or Saturday, you will not have missed your only opportunity to feast on the fecund words of these thinkers. That said, Geddes is realistic, modest even, when asked about her expectations for the outcome of the free conference, to which all locals, by the way, are invited.
“We hope it will spawn more informed conversations,” Geddes says. “Ideally in this symposium, we would offer something that would elicit and inform the conversations happening here about the arts.”