“Art for art’s sake” is a concept that always generates discussion and passion. My last post (Art for Art’s Sake Revisited) was no exception. My good friend Andrew Taylor took me to task both for things I said and for some he assumed I did. (See his comments following the post.) He forced me to refine the intent of that post and in the process several things were clarified for me.
There are two points I was trying to make. First and by far the more important one in the context of this blog was that AfAS is insider baseball that is mystifying to outsiders and, potentially, an impediment to bringing them to an appreciation of the power of the arts. That’s the critical thing for the issue of attempting to build relationships with new communities.
Second–and I see this now as something I perhaps should have addressed separately–is an observation that we should examine our insider use of the phrase AfAS like I was suggesting with my observations about “music is the universal language.” The words AfAS do not really mean what most people who use them intend: art for the sake of art. I continue to believe the face value meaning of those words is not what we are trying to say. Our allegiance to AfAS as a truism is rooted in our understanding of what the phrase represents. (I did not intend for my framing of “art being important” as being the only meaning of it, though I can see how it can be read that way.)
In the back and forth on this topic, my buddy Bill Cleveland got in touch and shared an article of his from the 10/20/15 issue of Public Art Review. (Bravo, Sort of) He reminds us that if we use exclusionary language, people will hear it. “Haven’t we learned the hard way that, in our media-saturated world, there is no longer such a thing as a private conversation—and, surprise, surprise, that the way we communicate about art is often more impactful than the art itself?”
Also, George Tzougros from the Wisconsin Art Board shared this with me: Chancellor endorses art for art’s sake. It was published the same day of my post. 🙂 As I told George, We mean so many things by AfAS. But rarely if ever what the words by themselves suggest. I’m totally on board with the Chancellor of the Exchequer saying that the arts have far more importance than economic impact. It’s just that, again, it’s not for the sake of art, it’s for the sake of human beings (even “just” the artist!).
My interest in this blog is not to address the issue of artists and their relationship with the community. (I will continue to suggest that there may be ways of expanding opportunity for as well as the depth of artistic expression in artists being more community aware, but that’s a very different topic.) My self-assigned portfolio is arts organizations and here again Andrew made a good point. I sometimes conflate artists and arts organizations subconsciously because I come to this work from having been a composer and conductor. The artist frame of reference is easy to fall into. But my work in this blog and in my books, except where otherwise stated, is intended to focus exclusively on the relationship between arts organizations and their communities.
Engage!
Doug
Historically, ‘arts for arts sake’ arises as a principle near the end of the Romantic period, the early 1900s CE. It stood in opposition to the so-called ‘Horation platitude,” the dictum from Horace in his “Ars Poetica” of 19 BCE, that art’s purpose is to instruct and delight. The “instruct” part has taken many forms over the centuries, and has been used by the powers that were in most every era and locale to control art, to turn art into propaganda or censor it. AfAS historically argued for the primacy of the artistic experience, the delight–and to hell with the instruction. It argued for more freedom for the artist in subject matter, form, and impact. As Oscar Wilde quipped, “Art never expresses anything but itself.”
Is Wilde right? Some of his own works contradict him. Still the sentiment was potent in its time as the arts were breaking from religion, government, censorship, and the many academies.
It’s funny to think of the MGM movie logo, the roaring lion surrounded by a ribbon on which is written “ARS GRATIA ARTIS.” Is there any arts media in the last century or so more interested in the bottom line than Hollywood studio movies? AfAS, my ass. MGM was lyin’.
Tim, Allow me to make an important clarification. The phrase AfAS was more in line with Horace’s sentiment than you think. Originally credited to Theodor Gautier and Edgar allen Poe it soon became a rallying cry for the idea that art was valuable as art. It is not that the value couldn’t include instruction and delight. Lots of great works of art delight us and instruct us about something that the artist is thinking about.
The point was that the value of art is to be savored on it’s own terms and not dictated by political, social, or religious power. The point is that the intrinsic quality of art has value for people and it still does today.
The language we use to talk about art, to describe it, to communicate it’s intrinsic values is no more “exclusionary” or “insider” language than language used in any other field. We shouldn’t be critical of Art or artists, or arts institutions for the language of art they use. We should be critical of social situations that are failing people in their understanding of simple aesthetic principles.