Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mess

[Dr. Rat]

I referenced this article in another thread about jazz recording practice, and I'd like to clarify that jazz has generally NOT allowed the drift away from technical skill that is described here in the visual arts, but I think it gets to some of the same points I made elsewhere about the rising importance of "being an artist" over and above "making good art," which I think is strongly tied to the overvaluation of spontaneity as an element of art.

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i39/39b00601.htm

From the issue dated June 3, 2005

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mess

By LAURIE FENDRICH

For centuries, aspiring artists got their starts by observing and practicing what professional artists did inside their workshops. After mastering enough skills, they would then head off on their own. Modern art, starting in the middle of the 19th century, changed all that by calling into question what constitutes a work of art. Art began manifesting two things in tandem -- radicality for its own sake and self-expression. Aspiring artists no longer needed to go to workshops or studios to become artists because being avant-garde and self-expressive did not depend on learning crafts, techniques, or studio methods.

For 100 years, from the mid-19th century up to World War II, artists flocked to Paris in droves, absorbing the spirit of the avant-garde in bars, cabarets, theaters, and salons, and developing their styles either as loners in their ateliers or as members of various bohemian groups convening over absinthe. But after World War II, when the center of the modern-art world shifted to New York, the education of artists began to take place more and more in colleges and universities. In the United States, part of that was due to an influx of government money, much of it disseminated through the GI Bill. Many artists who were perceived as avant-garde, and who therefore couldn't support themselves through their work, found that they could support themselves by teaching in academe. Ambitious young art students gravitated toward college art departments where these avant-garde artists were teaching, if only to hang around other artists and pick up their bohemian attitudes.

Although plenty of solid teaching and learning has gone on in art schools and in colleges and universities, by the 1990s, as Howard Singerman argues in Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (1999), art education no longer demanded the acquisition of specific skills, but instead became simply a shortcut to an artistic identity.

Now, however, a tug of war is going on over what exactly constitutes an artistic identity. The result is that art education (by which I mean the education of artists for the professional contemporary art world, as opposed to the education of high-school art teachers, which is an entirely separate matter) has become a hodgepodge of attitudes, self-expression, news bulletins from hot galleries, and an almost random selection of technical skills that cannot help but leave most art students confused about their ultimate purpose as artists.

This mishmash approach has been going on for so long that it amounts to an orthodoxy. It dominates the education of artists both in colleges like my own and in such art schools as the Otis College of Art and Design, in Los Angeles, and the Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn. In this aleatory orthodoxy, it falls to first- and second-year "foundation" courses to provide any meaningful link to art of the past. Those courses -- "Basic Design," "Beginning Drawing," and so on -- teach line, tone, shape, form, proportion, color, and some fundamental "hand skills."

On the opposite side are what are sometimes referred to as "post-studio" programs, which are growing increasingly popular. They, too, offer "foundation" courses, but instead of studying techniques and studio skills, the would-be artists, often fresh from high school, study ideas and concepts -- the putative social, cultural, and theoretical issues having to do with art. This kind of program is the visual-arts equivalent of the liberal arts' "critical thinking." Its premise is that only by shaking off the dust of the past can students become either viable commercial artists or successful gallery artists in the 21st century; it directly transfers what's trendy in the galleries or advertising agencies onto the plates of undergraduates. Its overriding assumption is that although 21st-century art may contain some keystroking and button-pushing references to old-fashioned, handcrafted beauty, most of it will be otherwise engaged.

The seeping of more and more theory as well as "critical thinking" and new technology into traditional studio-art courses makes sense if art is seen as the product of a conceptual education rather than the result of the acquisition of creaky 19th-century skills that are attached to now-defunct ideas about beauty. At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, for example -- where I did my graduate work in painting in the late 1970s, when video art had just been added to the M.F.A. program -- the revised first-year program instituted last year requires all incoming undergraduates to purchase a laptop computer. Students are even given special lockers for their computers that, in effect, pre-empt space that otherwise would be designated for such messy art supplies as paint or charcoal.

What happens at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago matters: It is one of the nation's oldest and largest art schools and is therefore seen as a leader in art education.

One of the two required first-semester courses in the new SAIC program is "Core Studio Practice," whose catalog description begins: "Core Studio Practice is an interdisciplinary investigation of technical practice and conceptual and critical skills common to various areas of creative production." The description of the other required first-semester course, "Research Studio I," begins this way: "Research Studio I offers students an opportunity to explore creative research strategies used by artists and designers."

The words describing those courses jolt old-school art professors like me who are oriented more toward drawing and painting than theory. Keep in mind that as late as the 1990s, Art Institute first-year students were required to take 12 hours of drawing.

Because much of the de facto curriculum at the Art Institute is determined by what individual instructors decide to teach under the loose rubric of course descriptions, there is no way of knowing for sure exactly how much development of studio skills goes on. But by using such terms as "creative production" instead of "creativity" and "critical skills" instead of "skills," and in citing drawing as just one among several "notational systems," the catalog descriptions make the practice of skills appear to be a very low priority. The first-year curriculum seems to promote a Web-oriented workplace full of computers, where students work antiseptically and collaboratively with others, behave like wannabe public intellectuals, and develop "concepts" that borrow heavily from the vocabularies of sociology, computer science, and government bureaucracy. Within this matrix, artists develop "research methods" for their "studio practice." Whatever odd tool is deemed necessary for their "practice" (formerly known as "work of art") -- whether it is colored plastic bags, city-sewage-system diagrams, LCD displays, Webcams, or, however unlikely, a piece of drawing charcoal -- is picked up and used without benefit of prerequisite courses that teach specific skills with a specific tool.

Instead of students individually observing art and life, steadily focusing within an art discipline, and working toward developing a signature style marked by self-expression, the "studio practice" has its practitioner busily collecting data, working in groups, constructing theoretical systems, and participating in interdisciplinary projects. "Studio practice" and "creative production" are conveniently nebulous terms -- it is unclear, in fact, if they even need to culminate in a work of art.

As uncomfortable as I am with this sort of curriculum and "practice" of art making, I recognize how attractive it probably is to 18-year-olds who have grown up with the ubiquitousness of computers and an industrial-strength popular culture. By patting their most facile drawing protégés reassuringly on the back, art professors cannot really protect the foundation-skills courses that they profess to love. There are, after all, some aspects of the new programs that will prove useful to the next generation of artists, who will grapple with an even more digitized world than our present one. Besides, in a short time many of the same fine-arts students nurtured in the foundation courses offering traditional art skills will invariably turn around and metaphorically slay their old teachers by making their professional debuts not with tenderly painted easel paintings but with sexy video installations or cool interactive Web sites.

On the other hand, educators who love traditional art but who, out of fear of being left behind, are jumping onto a theory-driven bandwagon are marching off to a land ruled by dilettante sociology, bogus community activism, and unrigorous science and philosophy. The notion that there could be a fusion of "studio practice" with old-fashioned artistic skills that would yield a wondrous hybrid in the same way that African and Western music together produced jazz hasn't panned out, at least not yet. The reason? Whereas African and Western music, for all their differences, were both about how things sound, theory-driven art and traditional visual art are not both about how things look. In art, the fusion merely strips the traditional art object (that is, one well-crafted physical object) of meaning while replacing it with a jumble of fatuous words.

The heart of the problem lies in the fact that ever since the birth of modern art 150 years ago, all artists -- no matter what their visual style or theoretical intention -- have been riding the great wave of Romanticism, which has been rolling across the arts for almost 300 years. With Romanticism, the autonomous self as the basis for all knowledge trumps everything. And even though the Romantic, "authentic" self of Odilon Redon or Lee Krasner has been adulterated by postmodernism and turned into a constructed, artificial self, today's artists remain exactly like their early modern counterparts. Deep down, they consider themselves to be morally superior to nonartists -- more intensely emotional and sensitive -- and pitted against a cold and corrupt society.

Artists justified the esoteric nature of modern art with the idea that if something came from an authentic artist, it didn't need orthodox social justification. Modern artists defined their work as worthy, and themselves as special people, simply because they were artists. The audience for modern art long ago gave up expecting or wanting skills, talent, or beauty from artists and willingly acceded to the idea that an artist is a creative outsider whose usefulness lies mainly in being critical of everything. Think "court jester" without the humor.

Before modern art, though, artists had to take account of the larger society because they were forced to, by either the limits of patronage or official censorship. Since the advent of modern art, however, few if any artists consider the larger society beyond the art-world cognoscenti. To do so would mean either selling out to some version of Thomas Kinkadian aesthetics or, equally frightening, assuming a massively difficult chore.

Yet reassuming that task is precisely what artists must do. The future for thoughtful artists lies in rethinking how art fits into society as a whole -- and not just as a self-righteous, intellectually fashionable social or political critique. The time has come, in other words, for artists to think about how they fit into society. What do they really give to it? Are they necessary to it? Who, exactly, constitutes their audience?

In this case the only way to leap forward is to go backward -- to ideas that had credibility before modern art. We need to dig them out, however, from beneath the accumulated rubble of history. The idea I have in mind is one of the oldest of all -- that artists need to consciously consider their audience.

The basis for a truly interdisciplinary art education of the future requires art students to read some of the great treatises on the role of art and artists in society. Without turning art students into research scholars, we can guide future artists to be more philosophical and relevant to our culture as a whole than most artists -- even those with the best of intentions -- are today. We need to direct art students to serious thinkers from the past who have reflected on the nature of art and the artist, in philosophy, history, or fiction, and whose historical distance allows us to see ourselves, in effect, from the outside.

For example, by having art students read Leonardo da Vinci's paragone (a rhetorical device used to explore the merits of the different arts developed during the Renaissance) on painting -- without an art-historical or philosophical intermediary -- college art professors would expose aspiring artists to an articulate master whose thinking about art led to art's being accepted into the university in the first place. Moreover, younger artists would learn not to dismiss Leonardo as a mere archaeological relic of 15th-century Italy, as so much current theory is inclined to do.

When students read Laocoön, written in 1766 by the Enlightenment essayist Ephraim Gotthold Lessing, they are prompted to think about the differences between the spatial and temporal arts (in Lessing's lexicon, painting and poetry). Laocoön contains a down-and-dirty struggle over what constitutes our visceral reaction that something is ugly and whether, or to what extent, we can get around our aversion to specific physical things or our attraction to beauty.

If you really want to wake up 18-year-olds, discuss with them why a mole located very close to the mouth (an actual Lessing example) makes so many people squeamish. Talk with them about the risks artists take in using visually disgusting subject matter (which Lessing also writes about) without historicizing Lessing into an "example" from the Enlightenment. Talk about, as he does, the natural limits imposed on the arts by our sense of smell. Point out to them that so-called risky contemporary artists like Paul McCarthy, who uses bloodied meatlike figures in his art, or Karen Finley, who notoriously smeared chocolate over her naked body in a series of performance pieces, implying all the while that she was smearing excrement, are actually not that risky. Both are merely simulators of the disgusting.

By teaching students Rousseau's "Letter to d'Alembert on Theater," an attack on the arts that recapitulates Plato's examination of the generally uncritical assumption that art has some inherent social value, students would be prompted to ponder whether art is automatically good for people, in all times and all places. In that context, students could be asked to think through whether becoming an artist is actually closer to becoming a swindler than a social worker. Selected passages on art in Tocqueville's Democracy in America would reveal the particular pressures on artists that result from living in a democracy, compared with living in an aristocracy, and lead them to see the inevitable tension between social equality and excellence in the arts.

For art professors whose cup of tea isn't hard-core philosophy, why not teach fiction that puts artists in real predicaments about their purpose? For example, in Balzac's allegorical short story "The Unknown Masterpiece," the lead character, Frenhofer -- a character who loomed large in the imaginations of Cézanne, Picasso, and de Kooning -- gets sucked into the black hole of artistic self-absorption. In John Fowles's The Ebony Tower, two artists clash over the meaning of abstract art in what is clearly a metaphor for the meaning of artistic freedom.

R eadings from outside the modern and postmodern box would shake up art students who have learned bromides in high school such as "Art is a form of communication," only to have them replaced by gaseous pseudosociological truisms along the lines of "Art derives from myriad socially constructed 'truths' based on the repression of the Other," or "Global nomadism produces hybridized cultures." Wrestling with perennial questions about how art fits into a good society, or how it might function differently in a bad society, would inject an intellectual and moral rigor into art education.

A new reading curriculum such as the one I am suggesting could prove stronger at salvaging hands-on arts such as drawing and painting than the head-in-the-sand, keep-on-trucking attitude now favored by professors who believe in the centrality of drawing and painting. For it was art itself that inspired Leonardo, Lessing, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and Balzac to think so deeply in the first place.

In any event, the most crucial job at hand is to steer art students away from the self-congratulatory, self-indulgent deconstructionesque platitudes that increasingly guide their educations. After all, why major in art just to become a half-baked social scientist? When things get this messed up, it's time to go back to the future.

Laurie Fendrich is a professor of fine arts at Hofstra University.

http://chronicle.com

Section: The Chronicle Review

Volume 51, Issue 39, Page B6

[JSngry]

Too much math for R&B.

[SGUD missile]

Actually, very interesting in many ways ( if a tad long winded in an academic way )

It seems to boil down to ( after a quick read through ):

Learning basic skills vs. b*******ting

( or basics vs. new technology )

Inherent meaning vs. societal usefulness

( are you attempting to say something or "create" a sellable thing )

learning from reading other points of view from other disciplines to form a view of your own.

More after I read it again ...

[Jazzmoose]

Maybe it's just me, but this looks like a fancied up version of the "why can't they paint stuff that looks real anymore?" argument to me...

[JSngry]

If the complaint is that nobody's learning the rules before they break them any more, I'm sympathetic to the principle, although I have some serious doubts about how much of that is really going on in the "upper echelons" of any art. There's always been frauds and posers, and there always will be, and, yeah, sometimes they get a little bit of play. But they don't last, and if they don't invest wisely, neither does whatever bit of money they get out the deal. The radicals who stick around, who ultimately really matter, quite often understand the rules better than those who defend them (the rules, that is). At least the ones who I dig do.

If, otoh, the argument is that the rules are being broken, well, hey, tough. And get over it, becuase inevitably today's broken rules become, to one extent or the other, tomorrow's orthodoxy. Don't like where things are now? Be patient and live a long life. Odds are good that things will come back your way to at least some extent sooner or later, if only for a little while. That's just the way it goes.

Of course, if we're talking about art in a society that is flirting with destroying its fundamental character for whatever reason, all bets are off. But since this ain't the Political Forum, no need to go there...

[Dr. Rat]

I don't think it's about representation in art. The above is the author's work, and while it's far from radical, it's definitely modern and non-representational.

Part of the point she's making is that art schools are failing to teach young artists basic technique. (Which as I point out is something that jazz and jazz education has largely avoided, to its credit.)

The other part of her point, I think, is that the reason technique is not being taught is that the artist has something--a critical standpoint on society, some sort of intellectual/moral/spitiual superiority--that is the real point of art. Technique is merely the means of conveying that "artist-ness" to the audience.

In the visual arts, this line of thinking has become so dominant that technique is being neglected--the means is seen as so much less important that the intellectual/critical/spiritual content, that it really doesn't matter a whole lot.

So she sees a general drift away from caring about the thingee-ness of the art object, to a deep concern with "being an artist" and "being with the artist" or "knowing the artist."

Anyhow, that's my take

--eric

[JSngry]

The other part of her point, I think, is that the reason technique is not being taught is that the artist has something--a critical standpoint on society, some sort of intellectual/moral/spitiual superiority--that is the real point of art.

Intentional or not, that's quite a mixed message right there.

Of course an artist has "something". But who says that haveing it confers "superiority". Not me.

Of course, ego does come into play, sometimes healthily and necessarily, sometimes narcissistically, and sometimes a some ghastly combination.

But yeah - that "something" is the point of art, all art. Think about it.

Which leads us to this:

Technique is merely the means of conveying that "artist-ness" to the audience.

Another perhaps unintentionally mixed message. Technique is indeed the means of conveying the message, and the better technique one has, the more options one has at one's disposal. And the more options one has, the more choices one cn make, which, ideally, leads to more specific statements being made (even if the statement is about "vagueness"!). So in that sense, technique is more than "merely" anything.

But taken to the next level, technique is indeed "merely" a tool to an end. If that end is relatively slight, all the technique in the world can't disguise the fact. But it can fool some of the people some of the time, just as can a lack of technique in the service of of a passionate yet unfocused vision (those who present this type of work are usually found out to be "one trick ponies", and after the enthusias for the initial passion dies down, these people find themselves wondering where all their "fans" went. On to the next verse of the same song, that's where, most likely...).

Technique is one of those thigs that can either liberate you or imprison you. I'm very tempted to say that no schooling in the world can alter the outcome, that one's true self will come through no matter what, that a person who truly needs to make an involved statement will learn the technique needed to do so out of internal necessity, and that those who have relatively little to say will still have that much to say with any amount or lack of technique. So when all is said and done, technique is "merely" a tool, albeit a crucial one.

And let's not overlook that there are a vast variety of specialized "techniques", each with its own set of rules and standards, and each useful for a specific goal (Monk, and those who explore the implications of his work, comes to mind almost immediately). But still - the fault of a work beiong shallow or otherwise lacking is not the fault of the technique(s) employed, it's the fault of the person doing the employing. And it's this "everybody is special, everybody is an artist" mentality that drives me nuts. Yes, everybody is special, and yes, everybody is an artist, but all that gives us is a starting point, not a finish line. Big, BIG, difference.

What I think you're talking about is a variant of the old "cult of personality" bizness, and it's older than Methusala. What really needs to ne examined, I think, is not if the supposed emphasis on "individuality" is harmful (hell, there is no greatness without individuality), but rather the hows and whys of what kind of people are willing to settle for standing at the starting point thinking that they've crossed the finish line. That's got next to nothing to do with slash-and-burn questionings of the nature/processes of art and more than a little to do with the basic nature of the people involed in the processes. Don't rail against the tools or the concepts, rail against the people who are actually using them. It ain't the song, it's the player, dig?

Given the exact same set of tools, training, and cultural "surroundings", shallow people will produce shallow art, and great people will produce great art. Simple as that.

Just my opinion.

[Jazzmoose]

I don't think it's about representation in art. The above is the author's work, and while it's far from radical, it's definitely modern and non-representational.

←

Okay; ignore my reaction then. I'm kinda sensitive about that particular argument so I tend to see it when it isn't there. Which just may be the whole point...

[Dr. Rat]

. . . Technique is indeed the means of conveying the message, and the better technique one has, the more options one has at one's disposal. And the more options one has, the more choices one cn make, which, ideally, leads to more specific statements being made (even if the statement is about "vagueness"!). So in that sense, technique is more than "merely" anything.

But taken to the next level, technique is indeed "merely" a tool to an end. If that end is relatively slight, all the technique in the world can't disguise the fact. But it can fool some of the people some of the time, just as can a lack of technique in the service of of a passionate yet unfocused vision (those who present this type of work are usually found out to be "one trick ponies", and after the enthusias for the initial passion dies down, these people find themselves wondering where all their "fans" went. On to the next verse of the same song, that's where, most likely...).

Technique is one of those thigs that can either liberate you or imprison you. I'm very tempted to say that no schooling in the world can alter the outcome, that one's true self will come through no matter what, that a person who truly needs to make an involved statement will learn the technique needed to do so out of internal necessity, and that those who have relatively little to say will still have that much to say with any amount or lack of technique. So when all is said and done, technique is "merely" a tool, albeit a crucial one.

And let's not overlook that there are a vast variety of specialized "techniques", each with its own set of rules and standards, and each useful for a specific goal (Monk, and those who explore the implications of his work, comes to mind almost immediately). But still - the fault of a work beiong shallow or otherwise lacking is not the fault of the technique(s) employed, it's the fault of the person doing the employing. And it's this "everybody is special, everybody is an artist" mentality that drives me nuts. Yes, everybody is special, and yes, everybody is an artist, but all that gives us is a starting point, not a finish line. Big, BIG, difference.

What I think you're talking about is a variant of the old "cult of personality" bizness, and it's older than Methusala. What really needs to ne examined, I think, is not if the supposed emphasis on "individuality" is harmful (hell, there is no greatness without individuality), but rather the hows and whys of what kind of people are willing to settle for standing at the starting point thinking that they've crossed the finish line. That's got next to nothing to do with slash-and-burn questionings of the nature/processes of art and more than a little to do with the basic nature of the people involed in the processes. Don't rail against the tools or the concepts, rail against the people who are actually using them. It ain't the song, it's the player, dig?

Given the exact same set of tools, training, and cultural "surroundings", shallow people will produce shallow art, and great people will produce great art. Simple as that.

Just my opinion.

←

I'm thinking that there must be another way of conceptualizing this that gives better place to technique (and the art object itself) that "means."

I'm a bit taken up with trying to buy a damned house right now, so I don't have the time to spell this all out. Anyone? Some kind of "formalism light?"

Anyhow, I'll continue to ponder,

--eric

[JSngry]

Good luck on the house!

Sorry, but technique is a "mean". In the art that moves us the most profoundly, it is indeed "just" a mean, which is not to say that it is unimportant. But - it's not the technique itself that moves us, it's what that technique is in the service of that gets ahold of us. Of course, there are those who think that Maynard Fervuson is the shit and that Don Cherry souldn't play his way out of a wet paper bag, but even then, I think that's a matter of what their respective techniques are seen/felt to be in the service of that drives those choices rather than an objective type of "I think Maynard is better than Cherry because Maynard can play higher notes" type of thing. Yeah, right, that's all it is...

And btw, that goes the other way too. I don't think that anybody responds purely to technique, be it in music, visual arts, anything. There's always "more" to it than that.

If I'm reading you right, Eric, what seems to be bugging you more than anything else is what you perceive to be a lack of appreciation for craftsmanship. And I would certainly agree that to dismiss quality craftsmanship as "irrelevant" is a huge error, just as I would certainly agree that there is no lack of art in same. Achievement a high level of mastery in one's craft is no small feat, and there is much to be gained from the appreciation of it.

But by the same token, I also think that it's an equally huge error to assume that craftsmanship is "all there is". For some, that may well be the case, but there is such a thing as vision, imagination, daring, and all that other "arty" stuff. That's the stuff that keeps us collectively moving, for better and/or for worse. You know that as well as I do.

It's also a huge error to think that all the arty stuff alone is enough to sustain growth. It's not. You gotta have the means to carry out the vision, and that is going to inexcapably require craftsmanship, and a high level of it. Now, different visions will require different types of craftsmanship, "technique" if you will, but a vision that is not followed up by an outbreak of parallel and sympathetic craftsmanship is going to remain just that - a vision, not a reality. Tough lesson to learn sometimes, but there it be.

I also think (I think too much...) that it's a huge mistake to assume that anybody who places a significant value on the more intangible qualities of "art" is somehow dismissive or otherwise lacking in an appreciation, a deep appreciation, for the other things. Sure, there are the "tragically hip", but they have always been amongst us, and they always will be. But to assume that everybody who wants/needs/enjoys "more" than "just" good, or even great, craftsmanship does so out of a sense of disdain/superiority/neo-romanticism/whatever is just plain wrong. Loving the sky doesn't meant that you don't care about your lawn, if you know what I mean.

Believe me when I tell you that there are plenty of people for whom the choices aren't "either/or". To me, it's a mark of maturity is to appreciate, love, even, many different things, yet still maintain a set of personal priorities, one that fully enjoys everything w/o succumbing to the urge to think that "it's really all the same" (yes, it isn't, but no, it is...), and that the presence or absence of certain personally-perceived qualities "doesn't really matter" (doing that leads us right back to the "everybody's special, everybody's an artist" position). To do so takes intellectual honesty, emotional disciplince, and cognitive craftsmanship. The end is, hopefully, a life artfully lived. Farmers can do it (better than many, actually...), mechanics can do it, hillbillies can do it, even painters and musicians can do it! It's not some sort of secret society. It's simply an individual choice, and one that damn near everybody makes in some form or fashion, and letting people know what their options might be is no sin.

Honesty, discipline, and craftsmanshsip in the service of an artful life. Who could ask for anything more?

Edited June 3, 2005 by JSngry

[Joe G]

Inspiring stuff, Jim.

[Dr. Rat]

Jim-

I think, as seems to be usual when we disagree, we don't actually disagree very much.

Anyhow, I tracked down some of the ideas I had careening around my head over the weekend and it turns out that the argument that we're having was a big thing in Germany in the late 1850s. (These issues are eternal!).

The disputants in the 1850s debate were much more polarized than we are, but I think I am trying to stake out a revised Hanslick/formalist position, while you seem to be taking a more Wagnerian position.

Anyhow here's a little summary of angry German musicians, circa 1857:

wiki: The War of the Romantics is a term that has been used by music historians among others to describe some of the disagreements among musicians of the 19th century, about how musical works should go and where music should be going. Some of the more important of these disagreements were about the nature of musical structure, about absolute versus program music, and the limits of harmony. As the "opposing camps" crystallized during the 1850s, one camp centered around Berlin and Leipzig and around, particularly, Johannes Brahms, and both Robert and Clara Schumann; the other party organized in Weimar around Franz Liszt, and in exile at the time, Richard Wagner.

wiki: Edouard Hanslick is best known today for his critical praise of the music of Brahms and denunciation of the music of Wagner, an episode in 19th century music history sometimes called the War of the Romantics. Critic Richard Pohl, of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, represented the other side, the progressive composers of the "Music of the Future", which also included Franz Liszt. They adored Wagner, and in some of their more hyperbolic writings assigned him a semi-divine status; conversely, many of them despised Brahms.

Notes on Hanslick from Grove:

The core of Hanslick’s treatise is in its first three chapters. Here he lays out the logical deficiencies of the traditional ‘aesthetics of feeling’ that had dominated writing on music for at least 100 years (chapter 1) and presents his own ‘negative thesis’ that the expression or representation of distinct feelings cannot be considered the ‘content’ of music or the basis of its aesthetic value (chapter 2), which should instead be sought in the properties of its own ‘sonically moving forms’ (tönend bewegte Formen) – the alternative, ‘positive thesis’ expounded in chapter 3. Another positive thesis, or an important concession, is developed in chapter 2: that music will often possess the dynamic properties characteristic of different emotional states, while the correlation is not sufficiently direct or consistent to qualify as representation. . . .

The torrent of responses to Hanslick’s radical ‘contribution to the revision of musical aesthetics’ (as it is subtitled) began almost immediately and shows that he had struck a nerve in contemporary musical thought. While earlier Romantic critical theory prepared the way for an aesthetic of autonomous art, and while many philosophers and scholars of Hanslick’s own generation shifted their allegiances from idealism toward positivist materialism, little of that is reflected in the reception of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen by musicians and critics. Many, like Lobe, Franz Brendel or Hanslick’s long-time associate Ambros, worried that Hanslick’s rigorous, unsentimental objectivity threatened music’s precarious new status as a significant cultural product. Others, like Ferdinand Graf Laurencin (a Viennese acquaintance), wilfully ignored the logic of Hanslick’s arguments, motivated by a blind sense of chivalrous duty to defend the honour of musical expression. Even though Hanslick was arguing in favour of a ‘specifically musical’ aesthetics that would be accountable to the technical specifications of the medium, his advocates came principally from the ranks of philosophers and writers rather than musicians; among them were his childhood friend Robert Zimmermann, Hermann Lotzte, F.T. Vischer, Karl Köstlin, D.F. Strauss and the Englishman James Sully but also the music theorist Hauptmann and the acoustical researcher Helmholtz.

By the end of the 19th century the combined influence of Wagner, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on German aesthetic thought tended to prejudice even professional philosophers (such as E. von Hartmann) as well as aestheticians of music (F. von Hausegger, F. Stade, Arthur Seidl) against Hanslick, although he was eventually able to cite Nietzsche’s later writings in defence of his own anti-Wagnerism.

Nietzsche figures in all of this through his first (very much Wagner-influenced) book The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. I was surprised how much you (Jim Sangrey) sound like this Nietzsche sometimes with all your talk of life force, etc. A conscious influence?

--eric

[Dr. Rat]

Some stuff on Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy:

In this book, Nietzsche, originally educated as a classicist, discusses the history of the Greek tragedy, and introduces an intellectual dichotomy between the Dionysian and the Apollonian (very loosely: wild emotion or sensation vs. calm reason or ideation). Nietzsche claims life has always involved a struggle between these two elements, each battling for control over the existence of man. In Nietzsche's words, "Wherever the Dionysian prevailed, the Apollonian was checked and destroyed...wherever the first Dionysian onslaught was successfully withstood, the authority and majesty of the Delphic god [Apollo] exhibited itself as more rigid and menacing than ever." Yet neither side ever prevails due to each containing the other in an eternal, natural check, or balance.

Nietzsche presents the claim that the tragedy of Ancient Greece was the highest form of art yet created due to their mixture of both Apollonian and Dionysian elements into one seamless whole, allowing the spectator to experience the full spectrum of the human condition. The Dionysiac element was to be found in the music of the chorus, while the Apollonian element was found in the dialogue which gave a concrete symbolism that balanced the Dionysiac revelry. Basically, the Apollonian was able to give form to the abstract Dionysian.

Before the tragedy, there was an era of static, idealized plastic art in the form of sculpture that represented the Apollonian view of the world. The Dionysian element was to be found in the wild revelry of festivals and drunkenness, but, most importantly, in music. The combination of these two into one art form gave birth to tragedy.

After the age of Aeschylus and Sophocles, there was an age where tragedy died. Nietzsche ties this to the influence of writers like Euripides and the coming of rationality, represented by Socrates. Euripides much reduced the use of the chorus and was more naturalistic in his representation of human drama, making it more reflective the realities of daily life. Socrates, while as a man was still seen as a beautiful incarnation of the Apollonian spirit, overvalued reason to a point that diffused the value of myth and suffering to human knowledge. By seeing things too clearly, these two intellectuals helped drain the ability of the individual to participate in forms of art. The participation mystique aspect of art and myth was lost, and along with it, much of man's ability to live creatively in optimistic harmony with the sufferings of life.

Later Nietzsche became disaffected with Wagner and the wagnerian, and reformulated Dionysus to be more like "controlled passion" than the more unchecked (but by Apollo) sort of pasison he seems to endorse in BoT.

[JSngry]

I was surprised how much  you (Jim Sangrey) sound like this Nietzsche sometimes with all your talk of life force, etc. A conscious influence?

No. I still remember the Ice Bowl.

Honestly and seriously, I've never read him. Lots of holes in my "classical" education when it comes to stuff like that. But in the circles I've ran in most of my adult life, it's kinda like Top 40 - you hear so much of it "in the air" that the inclination to buy the record is severely thwarted.

Really, I do enough thinking on my own (too much, sometimes) so that getting all tied up in somebody else's perspective on the meaning of life would take time away from formulating my own (those books are so long, and life is so short!). But I'm thankful for those who have taken the time to do all the heavy reading and who constantly bring it up in conversations. Thanks to them, I think I've gotten the gist of "it". Maybe not all the specifics, but geez, everybody I know who has gotten all the specifics can tell you what somebody else thinks a lot easier than they can tell you what they think. As a dedicated jazz-person, that's kind of a turnoff. Transcribing a solo or two of any given player is enough to give you the most vital information that you'll need. After that, what's the point, other than learning mimmickry? I listen like a mofo, though.

Transcribing is usually more literal, listening is usually more imaginative. There's certainly a crucial place for both, but in the end, like the man said, "you gotta sing your own song".

[Dr. Rat]

OK. The funny thing here is that I've always despised formalism, and for some reason I feel drawn to it at the moment as a better solution.

But anyhow, here is a reformulation of formalism, tamed down Hanslick.

Hanslick chose a bad enemy in Wagner, because Wagner was very good at imposing the terms of any argument, and forcing aopponents into extreme positions complimentary to his own.

But anyway, domesticated formalism:

The artistic has to be set off from the everyday in order for us to recognize it. There's something that allows us to, say, distinguish comprehensible speech from babble. That's form (structure, if you will). And if we work hard enough we can even distinguish between babble and speech we cannot comprehend--we can distiguish form even if we cannot distinguish content.

A special case of speech, with even more highly developed forms, is eloquence--artistic speech.

To translate this to music, we might distiguish between a five year old just blowing into a saxophone (babble), the alto playing of a Salvation army carol group (speech/competence) and Johnny Hodges (art).

Can Mr. Salvo suddenly become inspired and create something on the horn that may be art? yes. Is it likely? no. Why not? Because he does not have the technical command to create the array of musical forms that someone like Hodges can.

So instrument technique IS a means, but it is a means to creating and manipulating musical form, and it is this the apprehension and appreciation of this manipulation: representing established forms, juxtaposing them, breaking them down and recreating them . . . this is what we recognize as "beauty."

In this formulation, beauty mainly lies in the art object itself, independent of any reference to anything else (be it commonality of human experience, the spiritual, whatever).

Not that these other things may not lend to and lend profundity to the experience, but they are not essential to the experience. Profoundly wise observation of the human condition is not itself beautiful; even a lie can be beautifully expressed.

So the artist is much more of a technician, not just in his technical manipulation of the admitted "means": her saxophone, his paintbrush--but also in his manipulation of form within his/her distinct medium/media.

The details of the way this sort of manipulation works could, in principle, be apprehensible to science.

Not sure whether I beleive this to be true myself yet, but it definitely has its appeal to me at the moment.

--eric