As I think about my first visit to Zankel Hall, and what I wrote about it yesterday, I’m struck by something that ought to be more obvious than it is: I took for granted that the architectural design of the hall ought to be of subordinate interest to its function. Beyond a description of the hall’s appearance and a succinct expression of my reaction to it (“I found the results to be attractive enough but somewhat sterile-looking, a typical exercise in safe concert-hall modernism”), I devoted myself exclusively to practical matters. How did the hall sound? Were the public areas comfortable? What about subway noise? Short of talking about the bathrooms (which I didn’t visit), I couldn’t have been much less aesthetic-minded than that.
I know what you’re thinking, and quite rightly, too: It’s a concert hall, for God’s sake. If the acoustics are lousy, who cares how it looks? Of course it isn’t quite that simple. The eye can fool the ear into thinking that an ugly hall “sounds” bad (this was part of the problem with Lincoln Center’s old Philharmonic Hall). Still, the basic premise holds true under most circumstances. First and foremost, a concert hall must sound good. After that, it must be congenial, meaning that going there should be a pleasant experience rather than an oppressive one. If the seats are uncomfortable, you won’t notice the acoustics–you’ll be too busy squirming. Once these enabling conditions are met, you start thinking about the visual appeal of the building, if then.
I mention all this because of the recent intramural squabble over the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, which some arts bloggers like and others loathe. Now I’m a dyed-in-the-wool aesthete who would dearly love to live in an exceptionally beautiful house and would willingly put up with a significant amount of nuisance value (i.e., leaky roofs) in order to do so…but not an unlimited amount. To put it as drastically as possible, I wouldn’t want to live in Fallingwater if it didn’t have indoor plumbing–and I might well think twice about it if there wasn’t a good place to hang my John Marin etching, either.
Clement Greenberg, the great art critic whom I not infrequently have occasion to quote, said something highly relevant in this connection:
There are, of course, more important things than art: life itself, what actually happens to you. This may sound silly, but I have to say it, given what I’ve heard art-silly people say all my life: I say that if you have to choose between life and happiness or art, remember always to choose life and happiness. Art solves nothing, either for the artist himself or for those who receive his art.
I think these words ought to be done in cross-stitch and hung in the homes of artists and art-lovers everywhere, if not necessarily in the living room. Art is not the most important thing in the world. Earthly beauty is not an absolute value. (Among many other things, it isn’t worth killing for.) I may disagree with City Comforts about whether or not Frank Lloyd Wright was a genius, but I think we’re all basically dealing from the same deck when it comes to this larger question, and I suspect you are, too, whether you’ve thought about it or not.
If you haven’t, try it the very next time you find yourself sitting in a concert hall or theater. Sure, the very best auditoriums are both beautiful and functional. These two qualities need not be incompatible. But if you have to choose, and if the choices are mutually exclusive, there’s really no choice, is there? The trick is to keep them from becoming mutually exclusive–which is one of the many reasons why arts bloggers blog.
I close with these thought-provoking words
from City Comforts:
The two cultures which concern me are the one of people who carefully observe the built environment and the…what do I call it?….rest of our society. I haven’t quite figured out how to term it but I know that there is such a lack of knowldge and sophistication as to be quite remarkable. And mind you, this is amongst otherwise very bright people, all of them alive and living inside the built world. Yet, to my ears, they seem blissfully unaware of it or if somewhat interested, then often somewhat lacking in knowledge, compared to their general knowledge of other aspects of society. At least that’s my take. The built world is just a given, part of the background of their lives and over which, perhaps, they have so little control that understanding seems a pointless endeavor. I honestly don’t know. But I find it interesting, appalling and a bit confusing….
Are many intellectuals scared of it because it is so vast and complex? Maybe all. And that, if I dare suggest it, is why we have starchitecture running riot: there are far too few intellectual police with the confidence to put such work in its proper place.
We don’t agree about everything, but about this we are in perfect sync.