Who’s Afraid of Modern Art? by Daniel Siedell
Chapter 1, “The Ear” (all quotes, unless otherwise indicated, are from the book)
From Previous Week:
“We are easily impressed with visual displays of power, wealth, and beauty…To listen to a work of art requires a moment of passivity, of receptivity that allows the work of art to be active, to allow it to speak…to make a claim on us. A work of art has agency and to listen to it allows it, as literary critic George Steiner once said, to have the run of our inner chambers. But we like our art – and our religion – visually pleasing. We like it practical, useful, maybe even a little therapeutic. We want to be active, so we can use art and religion for our own purposes – to elevate, empower, and even entertain us.” page 17
Quotes:
“The fact is, all Western consciousness of and reflection upon art have remained within the confines staked out by the Greek theory of art as mimesis or representation. It is through this theory that art as such – above and beyond given works of art – becomes problematic, in need of defense. And it is the defense of art which gives birth to the odd vision by which something we have learned to call ‘form’ is separated off from something we have learned to call ‘content,’ and to the well-intentioned move which makes content essential and form accessory. Even in modern times, when most artists and critics have discarded the theory of art as representation of an outer reality in favor of the theory of art as subjective expression, the main feature of the mimetic theory persists. Whether we conceive of the work of art on the model of a picture (art as a picture of reality) or on the model of a statement (art as the statement of the artist), content still comes first. The content may have changed. It may now be less figurative, less lucidly realistic. But it is still assumed taht a work of art is its content. Or, as it’s usually put today, that a work of art by definition says something. (‘What X is saying is…,’ ‘What X is trying to say is…,’ ‘What X said is…’ etc., etc.)” Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation
“What the over emphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation. And, conversely, it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art.” Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation
Question:
Responses? Is this the only aim of interpretation? How does one NOT interpret anything let alone art? What about the difference between understanding and interpretation – what is it and how are these related to each other?
Quote:
Siedell is writing about the relationship between “metanarratives” and art, he writes: “…art and metanarratives fight against one another. The work of art exists in a world in its own glorious singularity. The metanarrative is all encompassing. It is a unified world view, a framework within which everything has a place and everything makes sense…For these interpretations, whether Marxist, Freudian, Formalist, or Neo-Calvinist, art is significant only insofar as it affirms and strengthens the metanarrative confessed by the interpreter. What do metanarratives presume and why do works of art resist them? Metanarratives are stories that presume The End. But they presume not only that there is such an End but also how particular works of art fit into it. The consequences are dire. Arts comes to possess its integrity only insofar as it can be used in an interpreter’s metanarrative, grist for the interpreter’s ideological mill. Art is deprived of its own integrity as a world-making and space-creating work – as an artifact of human intentionality that pushes back on our metanarrative urges to reconcile the past and the future, to make sense of it all from our vantage point.” pages 25-26
Question:
Is this true? Is this always wrong? Doesn’t the work of art become its own “metanarrative”?
