‘Tarnished we! Tarnished! Wastrels all!
And yet the art goes on, goes on.
Broken our strength, yea as crushed reeds we fall,
And yet the art, the art goes on.’
– Ezra Pound
2020 was, without doubt, the most tumultuous year so far this century. Unfortunately, the simple passing from December to January did not miraculously lift all of its curses, 2021 is already looking to be a close second, if not worse. For many years we have lived in the vortex of the 24-hour news cycle but never before has staying abreast of the near-constant developments and fluctuations been a matter of such universal priority – even a matter of life and death. Updates on viruses and vaccines, faceless, ever-rising statistics in red numerals on every screen, as well as convoluted and contradictory restrictions and rules that must be learnt and re-learnt, have all vied to dominate our increasingly empty and local lives.
In the face of a cacophony of disaster, works of art can have an appealing quality – they are their own contained universes, created from, but often unaffected by, our own. The finite edges of a painting, the constancy of a sculpture, or the familiar reproduction of symphonic notes, offer a fixed point against which to observe and contextualise our own moment of flux. But more than this, the fixed point of an artwork contains its own unfolding and enveloping network of connections, emotions, interpretations, and histories. One work of art can reveal a forest of paths to explore. Although rather hackneyed, the phrase to ‘get lost in a good book’ rings true.
However, what Art does for us is much more than simple escapism. For one thing, it is the most assured maker of the continuity of civilisation, the unbroken chain of creating and leaving our mark that stretches back thousands of years. Despite all that has happened in the intervening centuries, war, plague, famine, and disaster, Bellini’s The Virgin and Child has been handed down to us from the fifteenth century. Over 250 years of ‘doing the rounds’ haven’t tarnished Beethoven’s late quartets one bit – nothing outside of Art can stake such a claim. It is reassuring that there will be something left of us, that our descendants can enjoy the fruits of our labours, as we enjoy those left to us. But also that such things can exist independently of the trails of everyday life, that such beauty can be created for its own sake, or at least can survive the years on the merits of its beauty alone.
Beauty. When discussing the function (or lack thereof) of Art the idea of Beauty can never be far from our minds. However, this does not make it any less of a slippery concept. Attempts to define it have run as long as attempts to capture it, and over two thousand years later it still remains mysterious. The Ancients mostly thought it was an objective quality, Hume and Kant argued that it lies in the eye of the beholder. Christopher Wren isolated two different ‘causes’ of Beauty, one objective, to be found in the ‘correct’ proportions of things, and the other subjective, inspired by idiosyncratic tastes and experiences, but he never quite pinned down exactly what it was that they ‘caused’.
I do not pretend to have my own convincing theory of Beauty, much greater minds than mine have fallen at its hurdle and I do not have the hubris to attempt the leap. That being said, I do believe Beauty exists and, when suitably intoxicated, I have been known to bore pub-loads of people senseless with my thoughts on which works of art ‘objectively’ possess it. I am sure that Beauty’s nature must be rooted in those qualities of Art I have already mentioned, its consistency, continuity and separateness from life, and yet it extends well beyond these to reaches of the soul unknown. Does Art need to be Beautiful in order to be ‘good’? No, I do not believe it does, but then to argue this I must define what ‘good’ art is…probably best to leave that one for now as I’ve hardly got to the bottom of Beauty.
It is this kind of thinking, as provoked by Art, that is key to what it does for us. It is an invitation to think, to feel, and to philosophise freely, to step out of the ceaseless flow, to gather our sense of our self and our context. To engage with Art is to be taught, by the past, something about our present and our future, and then to re-enter the now, with a better understanding and a broader range of perception.
During this pandemic, we have been repeatedly told that many have ‘turned to Art for comfort.’ This is simply not true. Everyone has lived with Art all their lives on some or other level, nobody has turned to it just now and certainly not just for comfort. What I’m getting at here is that to think of Art as an option, something we can choose to turn to like one might choose to treat oneself to some chocolate or a glass of wine, is to not only miss the point but to reduce art to some casual entertainment. Rather, what should be noted is that Art is what remained, unshaken and unshakable when the rest of life was stripped away. Art never went anywhere, and neither was it taken out the cupboard and dusted down for an airing when we had nothing better to do. Art was the birdsong that had been there all along but only became clearer when the guns stopped. Art goes on as long as we go on, our job, in our time, is to package not only Beauty but all that we are into Art so it may be washed downstream into posterity.
“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.”
-John Keats
Morgan Haigh 