To change things up a bit, this time I'd like to start with a bit of verse:
“When the blush of a newborn sun fell first on the green and gold of Eden,
Our father Adam sat under the tree and scratched at the mold with a stick;
And the first rude outline the world had seen was the joy of his great heart,
Until the devil whispered from behind the leaves, ‘It's pretty, but is it art?’”
It's a really nice fragment, isn't it? It's not mine (I don't think I'd be able to write something like that,), it's by the famed English poet Rudyard Kipling.
There is a curious story about the poem from which this comes (The Conundrum Workshop): it seems that the poem was written by Kipling in response to the criticism of art made by Oscar Wilde in his novel The portrait of Dorian Grey. Kipling already loathed Wilde (he felt that Wilde had stolen many of the ideas he had already presented in his novel The Night that Failed to use them in Dorian Gray) so Wilde's faint artistic criticisms were just an opportunity to try to discredit him through verse (it was the “rap beef” of his day, if you will). In essence, what the poem is trying to tell Oscar Wilde is that there has always been a devil asking people if what they do could be considered art, that there was nothing new about what he was doing.
It would seem, then, that Kipling was a very open-minded person who did not like the idea of anyone questioning the artistic value of a work, but Kipling himself was a terrible elitist. However, he did not question whether something was art, he was one hundred percent sure that he could recognize the artistic value of something.
Kipling's disdain was focused on the followers of the estheticism, an artistic movement that was more interested in the aesthetic value of artistic works than in the social and political issues addressed in them (“art for art's sake”), usually composed of young people with long hair, peculiar speech affectations and eccentric clothing (coincidentally, Oscar Wilde was the greatest exponent of this movement).
Perhaps Kipling's hatred was based on simple homophobia, but it's certainly amusing to think of the old English poet shouting from his window at a bunch of shaggy boys obsessed with the goals and merits of art to stop wondering about those things and get on with doing something worthwhile instead of just making up pretty things.
The whole background of Kipling's poem fascinates me because it reveals a peculiar question: who decides what is art?
To begin with, what is art? Well, art is any expression of human creativity and imagination whose intention is to be admired for its aesthetic, conceptual or technical content (a very short definition, I know, but it's the one I'll use. Nobody tell that to my Art History teachers in college, please). A very easy thing to answer, isn't it? Of course it is, however, the wonderfully problematic thing about that easy answer is all the things that slip through the cracks of it. For example: is rap music art? You don't have to be particularly open-minded to agree that it is (or at least understand why anyone would consider it so). Rap is based on lyrical constructions that follow the same rules as classical poetry; meter, cadence style, rhyme and metaphor are essential elements in constructing a good rap verse. That being the case, I don't think it's hard to consider songs by 2Pac or Kendrick Lamar as art.
Again, that seemed pretty easy to answer didn't it? Here's where it gets tricky: let's think of a bad rap song, for practical purposes let's use rapper Lil’ Pump's song. Gucci Gang, whose main feature is the repetition of the phrase “Gucci Gang” a total of fifty-three times Is Lil Pump's song art? You and I will probably disagree on this point, but I do consider it art because it fits the description of art already presented; it is an expression of its author's creativity and imagination (that there is little of either is not important), it was created to be admired for its beauty, its concept, and its technique (even when there is so little of each of those qualities). Moreover, the song falls within the standards of classic poetry that rap follows, even the trick of repeating for emphasis is one widely used in poetry (e.g., in the poem Silence Eugen Gomringer which consists of a constant repetition of the word “Silence”).
With the above evidence I hope I have convinced you of the horror that, in effect, the song Gucci Gang is art. Now surely their answer/relief for such a horrible question is to simply say something like “Well, there is art to art” and they are certainly right, there is good art and there is bad art, I don't dispute that, what strikes me is our difficulty in considering something “art” in the first place and I think the answer to that problem lies in a peculiar interpretation as to what implies that something is “good art” and therefore can carry this last part of the label as a synonym for its quality and status.
Here a question would be pertinent: Where do they go when they want to listen to live music? Their answer will probably vary depending on the type of music they like. If they like KISS, they will probably go to a stadium, while if they like Stravinsky they might prefer a somewhat more formal venue like a concert hall. Why do these two musical styles have such different venues to be enjoyed? There are various logistical reasons, of course, (KISS is a corporate behemoth that makes a living out of playing shows for as many people as possible, while Stravinsky's music is much more niche), still, concentrating solely on the music, there is not much reason for this to be the case. Perhaps you might think it has something to do with acoustics (since concert halls are built with classical music performance in mind), but a good audio engineer can take any acoustic difficulty and throw it away. No, the reality is much simpler: because people who enjoy music in concert halls and those who enjoy it in stadiums are different; not different in a sense of who has more or less cultural capital, but different for those who offer stadiums and concert halls as music venues.
It is at this point that we enter the murky waters of the two opposing forces that threaten to kill each other if left in the same place for too long, “high culture” and “mass culture”. One is (if you believe what it proposes) full of all the creative virtues of man and the other (if you believe what “high culture” has to say about it) is a cancer that rots the brain and is the reason that all of humanity is going to shit. In both cases it is a terrible exaggeration, which surprisingly does not prevent that there are people who actually believe those things.
The reason we can buy into that idea about high culture is that it works under a “haves and have-nots” mentality, like a country club; there are all those, poor devils, who read Paulo Cohello and then there are the members of “high culture entangled” in deep conversations about the philosophical questions within Moby Dick. If your goal is to become a little more educated, which of the two categories would you want to fall into?
In principle, if the only goal of “high culture” were to present a more cerebral alternative to art, then there would be no problem; we could all go on with our lives and occasionally take a look at high culture to enrich our lives, but that is not the case.
For one thing to be worth more than another, it is necessary to depreciate the value of the latter in the eyes of those who can choose between one or the other (the good is only good if there is something bad). Examples abound, there is Kipling, as we have already mentioned, but there is also Frank Sinatra saying of rock music “it is made by the deficient who sing malicious, lewd lyrics. It is the most brutal, nauseating, desperate and vicious form of expression I have ever had the misfortune to hear”. (which didn't stop him from singing a cover of the song Something by The Beatles) or Mario Vargas Llosa strongly criticizing what he called “the culture of the spectacle” citing Woody Allen, Paul Auster and the magazine Hello! as examples of “escapes from reflection and anything but fun” (which does not prevent it from appearing in the same magazine). Hello! from time to time).
It's a question in which who's at the top seems to have the right to tell everyone at the bottom that they're shit, who's at the top and why are such nebulous concepts that they're hardly worth analyzing. The best way to sum them up would be with a quote from University of Michigan literature professor Jan Stryz about the creation of the English literary canon: “Some scholars claim that writing has traditionally been seen as defined by the dominant culture as a white male activity.” This would be “white academics” reading white men's books. The same applies to all the arts (it is no coincidence that our understanding of art has a lot of European in it).
This puts us in a terrible predicament. We cannot freely define what art is because our perception is tainted by the construct of “high culture” which in turn is constructed based on the European canon. It's all a mess and robs us of many art forms that don't fit that mold: the rap of 2Pac, the performance art of Marina Abramovic, the all-blue paintings of Yves Klein, the change music of John Cage. Worse, it makes us believe that there is a separation, a line between what we can enjoy: don't get caught listening to The Beach Boys between Mozart songs, let alone band or reggaeton songs in between, don't let anyone find out you like Van Gogh and Jack Kirby, don't let yourself be caught reading John Green and Shakespeare.
Fortunately for everyone, there is a very simple solution to this problem.
Closer to the beginning of this paper I posed the question “Who decides what is art?” While we used to be at the mercy of “high culture”, we now have a tool that allows us to counteract its effect. We live in the information age, the internet has given us access to everything we might need culturally speaking. This tool is not available to everyone (and there are many problems to solve in the world before thinking of something as silly as a “universal right to the internet”), but, if we have it, it is our duty to exploit its full potential.
Something catches your attention? Seek it out, share it, make it the new canon through the weapon of foolishness. Create playlists full of The Pixies, Mayhem, Vivaldi and Ximena Sariñana. Read any book you want, mix Dante Aligheri with Stephen King, James Joyce, Garcia Marquez and Dr. Seuss. Talk about Pixar, Goddard, Cuarón, El Santo and Spielberg movies in the same paragraph. Put paintings by Basquiat, Frank Frazetta, Monet and huipiles on Facebook, all in the same album. Watch Merce Cunningham's ballets and dance reguetón.
I know what the risk is here. If we accept everything as art of the same level (note that I do not say of the same quality), then we invite the charlatans to sell us their imaginary paintings or their conceptual works consisting of buckets of water, but I assure you that the benefit is far greater than any harm that such hustlers can bring. The benefit is true freedom of critical thinking.
“Who decides what is art?” We decide, and, with apologies to Rudyard Kipling, we will be the devil who asks, “It's pretty, but is it art?”
Photographers: the mirror closes the universe
Terrible writer that's very good at acting like a good one.