0. Orientation
0-0 Orientation
Each of the three terms comprising the moniker Real Populist Aesthetics is loaded and multifarious in its own right. Dubious readers may reasonably expect some explanation: first of each separately, then of the ensemble. Alternatively, they (and any others) may safely skip these preliminaries if desired.
0-1 Aesthetics
Aesthetics here indicates a basic concern with art: its conception, realization, transmission, reception, critique, preservation, and (perhaps) destruction.
This is an imprecise and overbroad usage, and also a common usage. In some contexts (and more so the earlier) the body of knowledge denoted by aesthetics encompasses only one or a few of the above matters; perhaps only the part of them dealing specifically with perception, with surface as against depth, or, most narrowly of all, with "beauty" in the abstract. Some people think of aesthetics as a strictly visual concept, though the term has been applied to music since the nineteenth century. Yet other scholars may refer to, say, "relational aesthetics," a coinage which only makes sense if the second term transcends metier and refers to something more than the "contemplation" of an artwork's "beauty."
A narrow term deployed into a broad field of endeavor is apt to acquire all sorts of broader associations along the way. Loss of precision leaves writers awkwardly grasping at replacements, but this loss may also be a gain if the new, broader usage does in fact capture some other (newly) important idea. In the case of aesthetics, that idea is that art is no longer only about "beauty," and that perhaps it never was only about beauty. Still, art continues to be conceived, realized, transmitted, received, critiqued, preserved, and destroyed, just like always. Hence the currency of a broader (perhaps downright metaphorical) usage of aesthetics to denote concern with how this all unfolds; hence also a certain absurdity in putting forward an "aesthetics" in the twenty-first century, by which time art can be (and can be about) almost anything and thus challenges words-about-art to mean almost anything too.
If an aesthetics is to be both populist and real, it must be as broad in conception as art itself. It is obvious that art long ago burst the bounds of surfaces and senses. What is less obvious (it has rarely occurred to populists) is that the outmoded, narrower usage connoting beauty and contemplation hones in on something far broader even than the metiers afforded the contemporary artist. "The experience of beauty is," as Paul Goodman put it, "preconceptual."
[C1 99]
Which is to say: Everything is aesthetic, much as according to a once-radical insight, "everything is political."
Even as the idea of artists working obliquely to surfaces and senses, working around them, perhaps against them, even as this has become first imaginable, then accepted, eventually in a few select milieux even expected and inevitably after that rejected as passé, nonetheless
the properly aesthetic quality of everything has never been more conclusively and eloquently attested to by so many disparate areas of inquiry.
From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, the observation that everything is aesthetic meets a potentially powerful confounding factor and counterargument in the theoretical construct (and the widely observable phenomenon) of "aestheticization." The word itself denotes a process acting upon that which is not aesthetic to begin with.
Variously: Beauty is weaponized to sell products that people don't "really" need or want; Judgments made in a blink are held responsible for most every kind of prejudice; Surface is rhetorically equated with shallowness, as if subjects possess some hardwired instinct to meet their depth of visual or physical penetration of the object with a corresponding cognitive depth of reflection or contemplation. The aesthetic part of life, then, is pure weakness. It stands directly in the way of so many quests for essential knowledge, knowledge of both self and other.
In short, the error of classical "aesthetics" was not to set up surface as the gatekeeper of artworks but rather to set it up only there. Much ostensibly populist fervor has been directed against the "aesthetic" orientation on the basis of its gatekeeping function. Some of this skepticism is plausible. What is not plausible, though, is that things could be any other way. (This folk-rejoinder falls under the Real part of the three-part moniker, of which more later.)
In most if not all usages of "aesthetics," the surface-depth dichotomy is misleading. In all but exceptional cases, the so-called "surface" is everything, as in, e.g., Oscar Wilde's famous remark. This is because "surface" happens first: it is nonsensical to speak of progressing temporally from depth to surface while experiencing an artwork; only with great effort could any sense could be made of a claim to have met the depth and the surface simulataneously. In other words, the spatial metaphor of surface-depth holds together only if this metaphor is a metaphor of or for time. The upshot, then, is that surface-depth becomes as irreversible as time itself, through which human beings (for now) pass in one direction only.
Surface happens now, depth happens later. Hence depth is where the action is as far as most theories of "aesthetics" are concerned. There is not much to be said about an aesthetic experience in the very moment that it is happening. But what action? Why? And to what end? Conventionally, all aesthetics reconverge here: this is how people get what they need from the work of art, whether that need be social, recreational, political, or some properly "aesthetic" benefit which is unique from these others. This is fine as far as it goes, but it omits a crucial piece of the puzzle.
In social psychology, there is a broad consensus around distinguishing between the "slow" and the "fast" brain. Kahneman labels these System 1 and System 2. The terminology is arbitrary but the aesthetic implications are clear: human beings judge in a "blink," to invoke the highest-profile popularization of this science, and this fast-brain judging comes from and goes to different places than does the slow brain. And this is to say that there really are two kinds of aesthetic judgments which correlate only partially with the surface-depth distinction. Depth in this sense may be a System 1 judgment of a detail that was previously unnoticed, or it may be a System 2 judgment which emerges only after the mind has churned over the original experience for a while. The conventional surface-depth distinction has not always accounted for the ambiguity and obliquity of these two "depths."
It is immediately apparent which of these various boxes most of the existing "aesthetics" can and cannot be placed in. Conceptual art, including especially political activist art, quite unmistakably (and often explicitly) is a System 2 concern; it may deploy "surface" beauty incidentally, or it may deploy it quite intentionally in order to best capture the attention of audiences via their System 1, but it is not "about" this beauty at all, and it has become customary for such artists to make their intentions to this effect unmistakeably known. Both conventionally and colloquially there are thought to be works that are "about" technique rather than beauty, or wherein the first is thought to generate the second rather than merely serving it; generate it, that is, by way of a rumination and reflection. Technique can be greatly simplified for purposes of explanation, usually without incident, but still it is not understood in a mere "blink."
Of course these colloquialisms verge on platitudes, or they can easily become platitudes by being misapplied or misrendered. Still, their very ubiquity suggests a collective grasping at something real, even if it ultimately proves difficult to describe clearly.
Even if "surface" and "System 1" could simply be lumped together rhetorically, this would not really simplify anything because System 1 does not represent mere emotion-as-against-thought. Kahneman is clear, actually, that it is a form of thought: blink judgment is cognitive, just not in the deliberate vein that is implied by the aesthetic notion of "contemplation." Sudden visceral digust or elation may lead to certain "feelings," but the "fast brain" is conditioned by experience every bit as is the "slow brain."
In the case of finding a mate, it has often been pointed out that an initial fast-brain decision can become self-fulfilling, i.e. that the most attractive trait in a potential mate is the reciprocation of interest rather than anything more substantive like intelligence, beauty, or alignment of worldview. Artworks are not animate and hence cannot literally "show interest" in the onlooker, but in colloquial parlance certain artworks do "grab" certain audiences. It is crude projection to speak this way, certainly, and yet it is closer to the truth than most of the more well-thought-out theories of reception simply because it acknowledges that the audience has not made their choice via the customary avenue of choice. They have not paused and had a frank conversation with themselves as to whether or not this is what they really want, what they ought to want, what other people will think about them once it is revealed that this is among the things they want, and so on. In short, they are told the story of their life rather than being the ones to spin out a narrative on their own behalf. They are reduced to the position of an onlooker upon their own lifework in progress. To be "grabbed" by an aesthetic object is thus to experience the most profound loss of control, no matter if the object itself or the experience of it is really all that profound. The involuntary double-take at the sight of a fender-bender and the cupid's-arrow phenomenon are more similar than different in the one respect which matters most. When their stories are subsequently written by the Slow Brain, the differences are exaggerated so as to pleasure the ego. But in the moment, the subject is grabbed; they do not do the grabbing.
The orientation suggested a discourse of populism which posits an "elite" to which "the people" oppose themselves. The implications of this, for once, are not merely aesthetic: they are very practical implications of power and the exercise of power; perhaps also (or instead), this is a matter of what more recently has been called hegemony.
Like any other human construct, the power of one person or group over another person or group can be imagined by one or both sides more easily than it can be instantiated in reality. Well-characterized psychological phenonomena such as projection, along with simple misperception and misrecollection, can give rise to illusory feelings of both powerfulness and powerlessness.
While Ben Shapiro, for example, has made a name and a reputation insisting that "facts don't care about your feelings," the sheer weight and pervasiveness of "feelings" in human interaction, their capacity to unify or disintegrate relationships and voluntary associations, all of this suggests that a certain amount of pragmatism is necessary to keep relationships and associations together, the more so the greater the societal scale. Overlaid on the discourse of populism and elitism, then, as in any such broad political discourse, is this question of what is projected and what is Real?
The artworld is no stranger to discourses of "elitism." At times it can seem veritably obsessed with such questions. The bases for the claim are as varied as the people making it. This section sets out to consider as soberly as possible a certain subset of those claims which purport to identify a real power disparity which favors an identifiable "elite."
Richard Sennett, The Craftsman<.i>
the virtuouso makes the less-virtuosic audience member "feel small"
Christopher Lasch's critique of the "helping professions" in Haven in a Heartless World
Asger Jorn
One problem with each and all of these critiques is that, in Shapiro's parlance, they center on "feelings" rather than "facts." Under democratic formalism, all roads on such matters lead to pragmatic rather than principled remediation: "feelings" are ineffable, nontransferable, and infinitely subtle, thus demanding the broadest possible accommodation from any pragmatic measures that might be proposed. Clearly the burden of this ineffable quality is on those called upon to make the intervention rather than on those leveling the claim, for how else could the above writers level this claim about such specific (and historically contingent) events as the proliferation of social workers and the institutionalization and museumization of art?
The demand for pragmatic, actionable solutions to nontransferable human emotions is a formidable demand, but even this is not the most severe or most basic problem with the above critiques from Sennett, Lasch and Jorn. The basic problem, rather, is that these are baldfacedly consequentialist arguments. None of these writers here have made much effort to marshal scientifically-gathered evidence, relying instead on anecdotes to suggest that a given set of conditions is likely to lead to a given outcome.
At the level of meeting anecdotes with anecdotes, it is surely possible to argue that none of these "feelings" of inferiority are in fact inevitable. Surely there are some people who have taken what they need from social workers and left the rest behind; just as surely there are some artists who have thrived in insitutional settings without being much in synchrony with the formal strictures of the institution that supports them. Whether these cases are a majority or a minority is, for now, irrelevant. The point is, at any point short of full certainty, the consequentialist line runs aground, for whereas the properly scientific approach demands a "preponderance of evidence," an anecdotal and consequentialist case is sunk by a single documented case. And in the case of artists and institutions, the existence of such cases is too obvious to require elaboration here.
All of this being as it is, clearly these writers are not merely howling at the moon. Power disparities clearly do have this effect on people, all the same whether these disparities are real or imagined, whether they are artifacts of "fact" or of "feelings." If it were possible to identify and characterize the difference between the real and the imagined varieties of inferioty-feelings, this would go a long way toward advancing the search for pragmatic solutions. Without purporting to achieve quite this much, there is at least one line open to the Populist in making such an effort. It is a line opened by the aphorism usually attibuted to Eleanor Roosevelt: "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
Unlike most such aphroisms, there is a deep wisdom and a whole world of pregnant scientific inquiry encapsulated in these mere ten words. This aspect has been unfurled in many, many more words by laboratory psychologists, social psychologists, and psychoanalysts, e.g. Lacan on Sade; the gist being that if a listener "feels small" while listening to a virtuoso, that listener must somehow be "giving permission" to that virtuoso to make them feel that way. And by this time, "permssion," the word itself, will not serve well enough in its merely aphoristic usage to sustain this crucial point. What Eleanor (and/or whoever else) is suggesting here is that, in the example of the listener and the virtuoso, there is something about the virtuoso that the listener cares deeply about: perhaps the instrument, the composition, the social environment and social actors surrounding the performance, or perhaps the virtuoso him- or herself; there is something here which that listener who feels small would like to have for themselves, in order to feel "big."
The importance of this soft-Lacanian view of the transaction between big-feeling virtuoso and small-feeling listener is that it gives lie to a headline tenet of vulgar populism: that virtuosity is dispensible and "feelings" central. If virtuosity were so dispensible, no one (or at least many fewer people) would be made to "feel small" by the virtuoso. It is no part of the present project to argue that this does not happen; quite clearly it does happen, leading to all manner of efforts at remedial measures both soft and hard. The present exercise, rather, is to show that the positing, at once, of a meaningless display eliciting quite meaningful emotional impacts, this account is highly implausible. If "no one can make you feel inferior without your permission," then feelings of inferiority are feelings for which you have given permission to someone or something. Surely the reality of individual cases will be more complex; but by itself this strongly suggests that any possible remediation is individual rather than collective. The "conservatives" in the Shapiro mold are correct at least in these abstract terms.
Kendall Walton, "Categories of Art"
the VERY FIRST paragraph
lurches between the narrow and (a) broader sense of "aesthetics" in a way which is...disappointing
(see FE post)
Binkley, Piece...
again, the very opening draws a contrast between two usages, one narrower and one broader