Over at Brainstorm, Laurie Fendrich has been writing about art in America, so to speak — beginning with the line: “I’ve noticed, during the nearly three years I’ve been blogging for Brainstorm that whenever I blog on art, the reaction is deafening silence. When I blog on politics, on the other hand, people are at the ready with their opinions.”
That caught my attention because, on the surface at least, it basically says that people don’t care enough about art to argue about it.
Fendrich argues the case somewhat differently: she believes that people react to a work of art in one of three ways — they like it, they don’t like it, or they’re indifferent to it — and also that, the heck with specialists like art historians and curators, “people firmly believe that art is a subjective matter, and that all opinions about it are therefore equally valid.”
At the same time, she continues, a lot of people — even sophisticated people — think modern art is a joke, but the sophisticated ones don’t want to admit to that. So people don’t talk because they feel they don’t know enough. Getting aesthetic taste to “broaden,” she writes, would require a lot of direct experience with art, like hanging around museums.
That was her Part One. I agree with it, mostly — except I think the bigger problem is that people don’t care enough to know enough. They’re not interested in spending more time looking at art, and they think it’s a closed circle.
In Part Two, Fendrich almost makes that reticence a virtue as she dissects why everyone feels so free and almost obligated to talk about politics: “For most of us, talking about politics has become merely another means of self-expression — another way to yell (if we’re bullies), rant (if we’re full of tension), sound reasonable (if we’re nice people).”
But that has consequences: “People eagerly opine about politics because talking about politics today has deteriorated into nothing but a game of chatter–a way of responding to the unsettling modern world that seems so devoid of much that’s beautiful or good.”
So cheer up, art-lovers. Would you rather have a lot of people blather on and on about something, even when they don’t know much, or remain quiet because they don’t know much?
We’re in the second universe today, and I think I prefer it.
We’d all love it if more people cared about art (and visited museums and galleries), but can you imagine the heated rantings (and more) that contemporary art could cause if people felt uninhibited?