________________________________ Under Saul's definition, I suppose the Constitution of the US would qualify as a work of art.
Or Mt. Rushmore. Or any one of a hundred mediocre statues gracing the public buildings, parks and plazas across America. A good work of art is essentially empty, a container for all those economic, social, cultural values Saul mentions. You can dump any value you choose into a good work of art; in fact, the more you can dump in (project into) the better for the artwork with respect to content. Since in good art nothing (no content) can be easily excluded the only thing left to judge for the sake of discovering standards is formal nature of the work by means of comparison and contrast. This is why overtly propagandistic art -- that which resists projection of paradoxical societal values in favor of clearly limited values -- fails. All societies, all of their values, are always complex, competing, paradoxical, contradictory and that's what you realize in analysis of great works of art. Great art solves no puzzles, preaches no gospel, and rejects simplification of human endeavors. It spills the guts of humanity at your feet. It invites analysis and re-experience of the human struggle for knowledge and goodness. In fact, if you want clear, often precise, illustration of economic, social, and cultural values in art, look to the vast array of second-rate and mediocre art where such one-dimensional aims are vivid and commonplace. Advertising and popular imagery are good places to start. No wonder that popular culture imagery has become so ubiquitous is serious contemporary art. No wonder that almost none of it is great art. I'll go out on a limb and say that the more clear the message in art, the less art it is. I believe it was art historian T.J. Clark who was the first to bring scholarly attention to the social, etc., content implications of early modernist art. It's been overdone. Until that time, John Rewald was the one who most codified the formal approach to that same art, dismissing the latent sociological evocations that Clark later emphasized. That was overdone. I realize that there were earlier "social art histories" going back to Burkhardt's famous treatise re Renaissance culture and art, and others. But the standard approach to modernist art through the late 1960s, generally, was formal, a study of style. What is relevant now is a balanced examination of both formal and social content. A serious artist aims for the whole tragic, messy, stinking, hopeful, beautiful, enticing bag of human reality presented as something spiritual and therefore fundamentally noble. Try putting that into a Warhol or a Rembrandt portrait and see which work gags and suffocates and which swallows it all whole. WC Saul Ostrow said: this ability to reflect something of the economic (the system by which the exchange of values is regulated, etc.), social(the relationship that organize a community,etc.) , and cultural (common standards, criteria, traditions,etc.) circumstances of its audience is not a mark of its makers success - but that of the successful work of art, and this can happen either in the time of its making or after -- ____________________________________________ Saul Ostrow | Visual Arts & Technologies Environment Chair, Sculpture Voice: 216-421-7927 | [email protected] | www.cia.edu<http://www.cia.edu/> The Cleveland Institute of Art | 11141 East Boulevard, Cleveland, OH 44106
