Against Art Education

Years ago I visited the Art Institute of Chicago with a friend from out of town. In front of the Berthe Morisot painting Woman at her Toilette (1875-80), my friend made a joke about the titular woman being on the toilet. Suddenly, an old bat approached the both of us, vehemently explaining that the “toilette” was where a woman applied her make-up. He apologized but she kept repeating what she had said, not releasing us from her grip until she had satisfied herself at least three more times. Yet after she made her point, she vacated the presence of the painting, leaving us alone with it. We both laughed a little to ourselves, but I was then struck watching my friend continue to move his eyes across the canvas. On one side of the painting is a mirror, and on the other is a wall which is built out with furious dashes of brushstrokes, which despite an apparent randomness, always seem to lead your eyes back to the subject at the center, a bourgeois woman observing herself. Her dress recedes into the wall, her bare shoulders and head coming forward as the single thing not completely conformable to the room's pale decoration. It’s a portrait of someone observing themselves receding into the enclosed world, and I wondered what my friend was thinking as I observed him observing the painting, and why the museum-goer, apparently defending the painting, didn’t bother giving it the benefit of her attention. Maybe my friend’s comment was something of an insight. Our private worlds have so little privacy, that contemporary artists must in fact show something like someone on a toilet to elicit the solitude that a woman’s toilette would previously suggest.

For years I have used this anecdote to humorously explain Schiller’s categories of the Savage and the Barbarian to students. My friend plays the role of the Savage, one with culture but no laws, where “feeling predominates over principle;” and the museum-goer plays the Barbarian, one with laws and no culture, where “principle destroys feeling.” While neither my friend nor the museum-goer are really adequate to these categories, which are in fact speculative and are meant to diagnose an impasse in man’s capacity for Reason and Sentiment, the anecdote has some explanatory power. Anyone really interested in art cannot help but notice that the “educated” are often wanting for feeling, while it is the apparently “uneducated” who seem to be really receptive to the work of art. Being the Savage feels infinitely preferable to all of us who are in fact Barbarians. We cannot be the Savage, not even my friend who I might compare to one. Barbarism produces Barbarians.

Like Schiller said of the Barbarian with regards to Nature, we with our art education, are slaves of our slave: art, or rather, the dead weight of art history. Our art education does not produce artists or critics, but little art historians – worse, librarians! We are what Nietzsche described as “idlers in the garden of knowledge,” individuals with an Alexandrian relationship with art, art as an infinite archive of “works” to be perused, art as mere culture. Our spirit transforms art into artifacts.

Our art education is an education in kitsch, an education in barbarism, providing the educated an “understanding,” really, a power over artworks. Kitsch, as Clement Greenberg remarked, is the cancellation of experience: “predigested experience.” Kitsch is the experience of approaching an artwork, recognizing what it’s “doing” or who made it or why, and then turning away, apparently satiated (or exhausted) by one’s own understanding. 

Yet, if we now need an “education” to experience this, then even our capacity to receive kitsch as kitsch has atrophied. Why is the museum, the “institution which sustains the illusion that art exists,” full of wall texts which allegedly explain works of art to the crowds which fill the white halls? We no longer trust our own perception when we approach artworks, we require the intervention of experts to interpret the work for us. But these interpretations do not satisfy. Really, the wall text is like a magic ward for the uninitiated to stave away the horrific silence of the work of art. Art education has become the means to make the magic of the wall text portable and deployable at will. The wall text and the art education are as much about quieting one’s own thoughts as it is about quieting the noisy exterior world. Both are not unlike the urban shock suppressors we've invented for ourselves: earbuds and sunglasses. Rawdogging experience has become traumatizing. Encountering the insane homeless is like encountering what is most uncomfortable in oneself, similar to encountering the stray disturbing thought upon a moment of rare peace. Both unsettle the false order in the world, and thus one’s place in it. Better then, to muzzle our thoughts and shield our eyes. So too with the homeless work of art. Unsettled from its comfortable home in art history by a world that’s apparently been excommunicated from history itself, it seems to the viewer (unarmed with magic wards) to be crying out for help. But artworks do not really cry out for help. Actually, allowing oneself to look at an artwork is the discovery of one’s own unmooredness. The familiar characters in the museum who use their cameras like Perseus’s mirror to capture images of every artwork know something of this terror. The artwork is Medusan.

But is the proliferation of the wall text the fault of the museum? The wall text itself was not a conspiracy of curators, but rather was first popularized in 1857 when the British House of Commons instituted a law which required “a brief Description there-of,” of all objects in national museums, “with the view of conveying useful Information to the Public, and of sparing them the expense of a Catalogue.” The mid-19th century was the beginning of mass culture and mass democracy. The mute objects of the museum could not speak to those who lacked an education to receive them, and yet there was a new mass demand for art as more moved into the great urban centers and left behind traditional folk culture. In other words, the wall text was a response to a real need. 

The lack of a social base for the masses to be educated required state intervention — what Marxism called Bonapartism, the state intervening in society when society could no longer manage its own crises. In this sphere, this took the form of public education reforms and things like this law on museum catalogue descriptions. The education of the masses would be supplemented by the intervention of experts whose existence was both founded upon mass demand and was secured by the persistence of social stratification. But the wall text gives the perspective of the art historian, revealing the work of art’s “context,” and has a tendency to reduce the artwork to be merely a product of that context. Such context can give the work of art a false immediacy. Alexandrianism (when culture becomes a library) and the demand for kitsch (predigested experience) were interlinked from the beginning in modernity. Mass proliferation of the wall text revealed that in popular experience, artworks had transformed into artifacts, not objects in and for themselves, but fragments, pieces of a larger culture. Art may indeed have the character of a fragment to us in modernity, but if every such fragment, every work of art, was gathered together into one massive library, it would not reassemble into a total culture. Rather artworks mimetically express our own fragmentary experience. For art to be art and not artifact, it must exceed the confines of the mere art object in the beholder’s experience of it.

The New Left problematized the museum and similar cultural institutions, producing so-called institutional critique. Now this critique has been totally absorbed. Museums commission artists to produce institutional critiques of themselves. “Follow the money” has entered into popular parlance. The New Left also problematized Modernism and art per se, producing art which would forego the object, opting instead for process oriented art, and art which would forego the subject, the medium of experience for art. Both of these tendencies were directed against an institutionalized Modernism which had grown calcified. Now, the modes of thought that the New Left developed as its critique against the museum and institutionalized Modernism, have themselves become institutionalized. Yet the art teachers, themselves often the students of students of originary Postmodernists, no longer remember what the object of the education they give students even is. 

Will we make the same mistake they made, becoming childish students leveling “institutional critiques” against our equally childish schoolmasters? Our bad critiques will ultimately be a call for more state intervention, as Trump is actualizing now by reforming the Smithsonian’s apparatus, fulfilling a bottom-up demand which began with institutional critique. We cannot really make a call to reform our art education. This education was itself a provisional remedy for the collapse of something more central, the breakdown of our sentimental faculty, and its midwife, the sentimental education. These were the means by which art could be received as art, playgrounds for the imagination. 

The sentimental education is not only an education in art, but in all that is encompassed by sentiment and feeling — one's own sentimental experiences with oneself, others, nature, society, politics, and art — and how these experiences develop one's own personality, taste and judgement. What this presumes is a capacity for self-reflection. Sentiment is not only the development of one’s own sense of feeling but the capacity to make feeling meaningful. A sentimental education is not something that can be acquired in the classroom, but through personal reflection on one’s own social experience. The dictum “know thyself” was never limited to the sphere of the isolated individual. Rather, it presumed that the individual was the means by which one came to know the world. The development of personal history is the tool by which one could grasp history at large. But who today can tell a satisfying story of themselves? It isn’t surprising that most autobiographies are outsourced to specialists who allegedly make sense of the unending list of non-events that one might rattle off when asked to give an account of one’s life. It also will not surprise that those who cannot ascribe meaning to their own lives have created a taboo on meaning in history. History appears as a bunch of things that happened. Too much history makes us seem without a history. Our barbarism is so complete we take on the appearance of the Savage, as the immense cultural heritage we’ve received seems to eradicate our ability to receive it as tradition.

There is much less space today for self-reflection. We are coming later and later to meet our own self-reflective capacities, if they develop at all. While experiences may be happening to us, we're failing to be active participants in these experiences. Sentimental education has become worthless when our experience is so overstuffed that it violates any preparation for it. Barbarism is the overproduction of culture. We have seen so much that we’ve grown blind, and every new generation feels that they live in a different world by the time they’ve become old. And this has been the case since at least the 19th century. Sentimental Education by Flaubert as well as In Search of Lost Time by Proust already expressed that the great French novel had become farcical. Historically, the novel objectified the development of characters’ own sensuous encounters with the world and their sentimental development, granting (by some indirect means) the reader a kind of self-education (e.g. Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther). But by the mid-19th century sentiment couldn’t be developed in the same way as previous novels hinted. Sentimental Education begins in such a way that feels almost self-parodic, events happening in such a cursory and archetypical manner that the reader might feel themself embarrassed by the familiarity they have with such episodes. The characters themselves reference previous novels of apparently the same type, Deslauriers suggesting to Frédéric he could become like Rastignac in la Comédie humaine, ironically prodding his friend onto a path which surely means disenchantment towards the society he enters. By the 19th century, such novels had become mere models of lives which were becoming more and more rigidified as society began to close in on itself, experience becoming both more crowded and prescribed. Life had become something which felt laid down in advance, contrary to the spirit of the bourgeois novel which actually expressed society’s newfound freedom via its characters — Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders. By Flaubert’s time, the recognition that one could experience something genuinely new and different through the experience of oneself had become esoteric. Flaubert’s search for le mot juste, already hinted a paranoia on the part of the author that literary transference was becoming more and more difficult for a readership who did not really have time for art, and thus, time for themselves. Literature was meeting this readership with tropes, characters, stories, even words — that the audience already knew the meaning of in advance and, like a door to door salesman, would only require, “just a minute of your time, ma’am!” 

This crisis of experience was formally objectified in Proust’s method, which took for granted a flow of experience that could seldom be held onto in its own moment, but might be recovered coincidentally through memory. By Proust’s time, the sentimental education was something to be reproduced ex post facto — in the antechamber of memory while the protagonist (and Proust) are literally on their deathbeds. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the development of sentiment was something only the dying had time for. Flaubert and Proust's works were not just satirical, in the same way that Machiavelli’s The Prince was not just a satire of mirrors for princes. These were authentic attempts to write bildungsromans true to their own time, reinventing the genre when its social basis had been violated by a world where one could no longer develop the sentimental faculty in the same way. They’re exemplary attempts to give form to changes in experience, but their neutralizations as more great novels in a literary pantheon transforms them into mere sign-posts with which one can temporalize developments in the history of barbarism. Treating these books as more great works that one must learn to appreciate does an injustice to their real attempts to give form to a bad life. These novels presume a fragmented subjectivity, and are rather nasty compared with what preceded them. The stupid seriousness of art appreciation seldom appreciates the hate and the humor art in modernity often expresses. If art becomes “art appreciation” — Alexandrianism — then there is no art. 

Sometimes in the afternoon sky a white moon would creep up like a little cloud, furtive, without display, suggesting an actress who does not have to 'come on' for a while, and so goes 'in front' in her ordinary clothes to watch the rest of the company for a moment, but keeps in the background, not wishing to attract attention to herself. I was glad to find her image reproduced in books and paintings, though these works of art were very different—at least in my earlier years, before Bloch had attuned my eyes and mind to more subtle harmonies—from those in which the moon seems fair to me to-day, but in which I should not have recognised her then. It might be, for instance, some novel by Saintine, some landscape by Gleyre, in which she is cut out sharply against the sky, in the form of a silver sickle, some work as unsophisticated and as incomplete as were, at that date, my own impressions, and which it enraged my grandmother's sisters to see me admire. They held that one ought to set before children, and that children shewed their own innate good taste in admiring, only such books and pictures as they would continue to admire when their minds were developed and mature. No doubt they regarded aesthetic values as material objects which an unclouded vision could not fail to discern, without needing to have their equivalent in experience of life stored up and slowly ripening in one's heart.

Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way [my italics]

Here, Proust’s narrator reflects on how the development of taste requires personal development in one’s own life. To become cultivated one must pass through dilettantism. Early aesthetic encounters become guideposts on the path of one’s own self-cultivation, and seem to be recalled at later moments when one is gripped by an aesthetic experience. Yet his great-aunts don’t appreciate this process of sentimental education, taking beauty as something merely endowed in the object. This is the dilettante encountering the philistine, not unlike my friend’s encounter with the museum-goer. The idea that art is simply something within the object has become the common view of the educated. So too do the neo-modernists secretly believe that aesthetic experience is just something that lies dormant in the object. But art resides as much in the experience of the object as in the object itself. The disbelief that the philistine has that someone does not “appreciate” the work of art really fails to appreciate the personal development required to acquire taste, and gives lie to the fact that they themselves failed to complete this development. But lack of self-reflection and the allergy to the development of the sentimental faculty can’t be marked down as a personal failing. Sentimentality is hard to come by when there’s not one thing in this world that encourages it. Conformist self-distraction becomes the most effective protection against experience that has grown unwieldy and dangerous. Yet art is and must be an objectified expression of experience. 

In modernity, the experience objectified in the artwork is often an encounter with another work of art. Artists must be good art viewers. For those willing to see, each artwork is a pedagogue which teaches only about itself — but art's antisocial sociability means this has a “secret cargo.” The discovery of an artwork's formal laws is simultaneously the discovery of the lack of such laws in society at large. The artwork objectifies the particular experience that most people do not have the time to lend their attention to. Nor would they want to — absorption has detrimental effects. The artist and the art viewer have the dangerous task of arresting experience — for the artist this is the beginning of 'inspiration.' Following inspiration, the artist must submit themselves to immanent laws of their own adolescent artwork in order to finish it. Robert Henri described this process well.

There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. 

It is in the nature of all people to have these experiences; but in our time and under the conditions of our lives, it is only a rare few who are able to continue in the experience and find expression for it.

***

If one but could recall his vision by some sort of sign. It was in this hope that the arts were invented. Sign-posts on the way to what may be. Sign-posts towards greater knowledge.

Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

For the beholder, the sentimental insights dispensed with by the experience of the artwork can arrest those naturalized products of one’s experience that are passed by everyday, even in the experience of oneself. Caillebotte’s painting Young Man at his Window (1876) shows a bourgeois man looking out from his balcony onto the labyrinthine Paris streets below, and in shadow a woman crosses from one end of the street to the other. This is a painting in keeping with one of the key subjects of modernist figurative painting and photography: looking at looking. The view of the beholder is redirected back at themselves. Here, the painting puts us at crossed purposes. On the one hand, the feeling of the new city as something like the labyrinth, in which phenomena might spontaneously appear around the corner at any time — in this case a woman which our eyes are guided to by following the vision of the eponymous man — but one might also imagine all the surprises, frights, curios and strange encounters which seem to leap out at one as they traverse a city. This is different from the work of quattrocento painter Giovanni di Paulo, where, beyond the vistas of a landscape or the confines of ancient city walls, one can see the geometrical abstraction of labyrinthine-like planes or mountains or farms, such as with his frescos of John the Baptist. For di Paulo, the labyrinth was the world outside, the world of Nature, that which lies beyond the city walls, the mountains and plains where one dares not go. For Caillebotte and ourselves, the labyrinth is the condition of our world within the walls. The labyrinth is in us. 

Caillebotte’s painting is like a reimagining of Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818). The heroic bourgeois subject meeting the sublime forces of Nature by the force of his own subjectivity, is replaced by a more inward bourgeois domestic dweller whose subjectivity comes up against not Nature, but the city. Caillebotte’s man’s posture is similar but it lacks something of the dynamism of Friedrich’s: his feet are planted where Friedrich’s is stepping forward. Friedrich’s man looks like he just arrived at his place on the cliffside, while Caillebotte’s is statue-like. We’re no longer dealing with Nature, but the city, the new Paris; the Sublime force of Nature becomes the Sublime labyrinth of the city. But the city is not a product of Nature's caprice, but the processes of society, mankind itself. The bourgeois heroism of Friedrich becomes farcical when the Sublime becomes the product of our own self-activity. 

The other “purpose” in this painting is a kind of formal objective found in much of Caillebotte’s art, which apparently seeks to capture life "as it is" — that is, a spontaneous matter-of-factness, with no part of the image asserting a great deal of dominion over any other part of the painting, imitating photography in its uniform continuum of the picture plane. The woman might be centered in the picture, but little is done to make her figure stand out. She’s in shadow, and is not given more accent and detail than anything else in the painting. These two ends in the painting — the experience of the new city as a labyrinth and the sheer matter-of-factness of it — find themselves in tension. The magic of the new seems to be met by a subjectivity which lives by the imperative nil admirari, let nothing astonish you. Already the man in the painting is not in the middle of the street where he might be vulnerable, but from the observation deck of a balcony. The balcony hardly looks different from a theater box seat, where one can safely watch the stage with opera glasses. The spontaneous appearance of the beautiful woman is suppressed by a jaded perception which has “seen it all,” and knows that each new potential romantic encounter will end in disappointment. The woman’s beauty and thus the perceptibility to it are kept at a safe distance. In fact, we don’t even know if he is looking at the woman. He could just as easily be looking inward with the street below as the incidental background for this activity. The painting is fundamentally ambiguous regarding if the man is looking at anything. As the viewer, one might ask, “Am I even supposed to be looking at the woman, or is it really about the window itself?” These questions ricochet back at the viewer upon the realization that what underlies them, is the treatment of the man at the window as the primary discrete image. The ambiguity of that image pushes the viewer's eyes to the rest of the painting. The photographic effect of the painting makes the view of the painter and the viewer coincide, as if we ourselves are in the room with this character. If the man in the painting seems paralyzed by contemplation and closed off from being viewed at all, what does it mean for the painting to be gripped by such an image? Contemplation of contemplation turns the painting into an ellipsis, inviting the viewer to identify with the figure but not giving them the proximity to make that identification complete. Impressionism pursued an increasing identity between the view of the painter and the view of the viewer, apparently mimicking the immediacy of vision, but only apparently so. Actually it takes a great deal of compositional attention to achieve such immediacy. By such a method, composition is not undermined but expanded. Identifying the view of the painter to the view of the viewer — everyday sight — trains the viewer to be more receptive to their own sight. Searching for meaning in the painting seems to push the viewer to look within, to search for meaning in our own experience, a task most often overlooked. 

Exemplary works of art are attentive to historical changes in experience, and in fact participate in enacting those changes by working on the perception of those who experience them. Modernism in the 19th century was extremely conscious of such changes in subjectivity, particularly the disintegration of experience which coincided with the emergence of capitalism. Yet now these changes have been naturalized, and most artists are unconcerned with them. Self-distraction has become normative, and the exceptional core of the artist which allowed them to transcend the busy-ness of the everyday, has been broken apart by artists mostly concerned with producing work conformable to mere busy-ness or the everyday. Artists are still tasked with changing the perception of their viewers, readers, listeners — but most of them seem just as allergic to reality as their audience. A perspective which is closed off to reality would have difficulty taking anything as an object — man, woman or painting — and the capacity to transform something into an object is a prerequisite to digest experience. But the shock of the world produces a desire to close oneself from experience, to escape the world of objects (objects of our own creation) and retreat into a glossy-eyed experience of the world as the sensuous manifold. This is an antinomical situation for art. The imperative of nil admirari towards the world is at cross purposes with a subjectivity which is fit to receive art as art. Art and aesthetic experience require a receptiveness – actual open-ness to the world. Yet in our situation, subjects are educated to buttress themselves from receptiveness, to steel themselves from the shock of the world. Without reading any ancient philosophy, normal people spontaneously inculcate a studied stoicism. 

To ask people today to be more receptive would perhaps be inadequate, even cruel, when the world doubly revenges itself upon those who want to actually experience it. And receptivity alone is not enough. One who is merely receptive is just a dilettante. But receptivity is the prerequisite for anyone who wants to take art seriously — one must pass through dilettantism to come to know the world by one's sentiment. Those few who have the sick ambition to reconquer Bohemia must act against the mantra nil admirari. As damaging as this might be to oneself, I do not think it’s impossible today. Allowing oneself to be open to the world requires as much sadomasochism as the conformity which everyone must adopt in order to close oneself off from it. For an artist or a critic, becoming jaded is the worst thing. Kant was aware that to practice aesthetic judgement, indifference was required. But today we are not dealing with Kant’s indifference but Freud’s — lack of investment. Indifference for Kant was not reducible to psychology, it was rather descriptive of a state, a lack of excitement which could color an experience or distract from one. Today indifference is simply descriptive of normative psychology, a psychology which prohibits us from achieving what Kant called indifference. It in fact takes a lot of exertion to be “indifferent,” to be divested from experience. Indifference for Kant required relaxation, flexibility rather than rigidity, the openness to being surprised. Today, the cultivated “indifference” we’re dealing with is built to barricade oneself against all surprise, not different from the indifference which Nietzsche blamed Kant himself for. It is not openness but a closedness which masquerades as openness. If one wants to cultivate one’s own sentimental capacities, to really learn what art is, ask oneself: can I withstand the world’s loudness? Can I withstand art’s silence? 

Sapere aude.

Berthe Morisot, Woman at her Toilette. (1875-80)
Art Institute of Chicago

Still from Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut

Gustave Caillebotte, Young Man at His Window. (1848–1894)
Oil on canvas, 117 x 82cm
Collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum 

Giovanni di Paulo, The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist. (c.1455)
Art Institute of Chicago

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. (c.1818)
94.8 × 74.8 cm
Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg