In today’s instalment, I venture into new territory. In my previous instalment I tentatively suggested that the content an artwork possesses is irrelevant, that aesthetic pleasure arises simply out of the viewer’s process of interpretation. On the other hand, I have also implicitly argued that we enjoy those artworks most that we can relate back to our own life and World. My intention now is to attempt to resolve this apparent contradiction.
The reason why I have been ambivalent about this question is that, if we survey the entirety of art, we find that it is enormously heterogenous. Not only can we find an enormous range of subject matter, we find that the statements made by some artworks contradict the statements made by others. An artwork can apparently say anything. This is the reason why I asserted that it is the manner in which an artwork communicates its content rather than the content itself that matters.
Certainly, the diversity we find in art debunks the thesis that art communicates eternal truths. The number of eternal truths is surely much smaller than the number of false beliefs; consequently we would expect to find much more repetition in good art that we in fact do. It is interesting to note that Baudelaire, for instance, has claimed, at different times, that good art conveys eternal truths and that good art necessarily has a quality of strangeness. If art conveys eternal truths we would surely not find it strange! Baudelaire has contradicted himself (though I should believe that the latter claim comes closer to the truth).
The diversity we find in art also puts a strain on the idea that art reproduces an ideology shared by artist and audience. Although we can find commonalities in the art of a particular period, the works of an era still show too much variation for us to say that they possess a common ideology. This is particularly true of modern art.
In fact, the diversity of art can only be explained by assuming a certain qualities in the nature of humanity. The bold claim that I would like to make is that people possess an appetite for meaning. We might term this appetite an “epistemic hunger” (this term may not be original, but I do not know who coined it). The World of most people is heterogenous and rife with contradiction, one’s own beliefs are usually provisional and pragmatic. Nevertheless, we possess a strong need that the world be meaningful. It this need that art satisfies. Our epistemic hunger is so strong that we are quite prepared to believe, temporarily, in anything an artwork says; we suspend our disbelief for the duration of time that we focus on a particular work. Our appetite for meaning is stronger than our need for a stable and consistent ideological framework. We do not ask of an artwork that it be true, only that it be plausible.
We might even go so far as to say that that the statements we prefer are those that differ most from our everyday experience but which we desperately want to believe. For example, my most intense experience visiting an art gallery occurred when I was at the height of my psychosis. At that time my views about society were such that I felt utterly alienated from it; I believed moreover that I possessed a truth about society (it had come to me by revelation) that people were too scared to say aloud. At the Wanganui Art Gallery, it seemed to me that the modern artists in the exhibition suffered from the same kind of censorship but were nevertheless trying to communicate the ideas I believed. The themes of alienation and imprisonment in the exhibition resonated with my own feelings and made me feel part of a wider community, oppressed and anguished but a community nevertheless, a community that was familiar with my situation.
Needless to say, my appreciation of these artworks was directly proportional to the lack of evidence I found in the wider world for my beliefs. One does not need to be psychotic to have this kind of attitude. Marxism, that reductive and overly simplified theory of anthropology so prevalent in the early part of the twentieth century, has encouraged its adherents to seek in art and literature the support for their views that they cannot find in the real world. There could be nothing more ridiculous than a Marxist interpretation of Kafka’s “Metamorphoses” – and yet it has been carried out. In this case, as in many cases, it is precisely the divergence between the ‘message’ of a work and the real world that creates pleasure. The aesthetic value of the work originates in it asserting something that we want to believe but about which we entertain serious doubt. Or in other words, the artwork is concerned less with truth than with desire.