Welcome to the second Blogger Book Club. Today we dive into Dave Hickey’s The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty. For anyone out there who would like to play along, please don’t be shy about jumping in. We’ll pass the Chex Mix your way.
In preparation for this convo, Corey and I had a quick phone chat yesterday about how Hickey’s arguments, based in the world of visual art, can and cannot be applied to the field of music. Has music faced the same conflicts in the 20th century that Hickey points to in the art world? Has the result been the same? Corey and I came up with a lot of questions about approaching these ideas, but I can’t say we hit on any brilliant summary judgments just yet.
On the surface of things, there were some easy parallels to chart as I read. Something of a “Who Cares If You Look?” change in the relationship between the artist, the art, and the observer, in which the observer–once the point in this ménage à trois–was made to feel unwelcome, abused, or blatantly ignored. Yup, that arguments has a familiar refrain to it. Then, there was Hickey’s mention of the sheer wrongness of approaching the work of a living artist in the same way we approach classics from the canon whose context and political struggles are so far detached from our own reality. Been there, seen that in music as well. But the most frequent point the essays came back to was how it’s not the marketplace, but the protective institutions that have sprung up around the “art” and the “bureaucrats” who run them that filters our consumption of art and skews how we digest it, all in the name of good shepherding. Our private impressions of art outside of these institutions and the language we most respond to is something different than the experience of encountering art on a white wall and reading a wall tag about it, and the cultural impact of that is huge. Hickey suggests that new art might do well to exist outside the museums for a bit, that there might be “work for them to do in the world among the living” first. Can we say the same when it comes to music?
The book, of course, is a collection of “essays on beauty”, not so much describing what it is (For definitions, he points to Baudelaire: that what is beautiful is “always strangely familiar and vaguely surprising.”) as what it can do (sell, seduce, advertise, connect, challenge, change). What is beauty in music and is it employed to do the same kinds of things?
from page 13 of “The Invisible Dragon:”
One must suspect that we are denied the direct appeal of beauty for much the same reason that Caravaggio’s supplicants were denied direct appeal to the virgin: to sustain the jobs of bureaucrats. Caravaggio, at least, shows us the Virgin [see below], in all her gorgeous autonomy, before instructing us not to look at her and redirecting our guilty eyes to that string of wooden beads hanging from the priest’s fingers. The priests of the new church [the institutions, the academy] are not so generous. Beauty has been banished from their domain and we are left counting the beads and muttering the texts of academic sincerity.
Caravaggio Madonna of the Rosary with Saint Dominic and Saint Peter Martyr 1607
Albert Camus said “beauty is unbearable, driving us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.†I think of beauty in music as something that is an intimation of an underlying “wholeness” or “rightness” in the music. When we hear beauty we know for ourselves because we have that ‘ah, yes’ connective moment with the work; I guess it is subjective like that definition of pornography (“I know it when I see it”) so of course we may not agree on what is beautiful, but that something is beauty (to us) if does make that connection. And it is something that doesn’t need a conduit (or priest or critic) to tell us what we know/feel, in reference to the above page 13 quote from Corey.
In terms of what beauty in music can do, I think it can and does do all of those things Molly mentions: sell, seduce, advertise, connect, challenge, change. Can’t beauty sometimes just be an easy way ‘in’ to a work? The facade that draws us to it, and once we are interested, leads us to discover the inner beauty that can move us, challenge us, change us, etc.