bookclubII

By Corey Dargel

In the first essay from The Invisible Dragon, Dave Hickey argues that arbiters and artists care too much about the meaning of art and not enough about whether it gives us pleasure. His focus is on visual art:

Since pleasure is the true occasion for looking at anything, any theory of images that is not grounded in the pleasure of the beholder begs the question of art’s efficacy and dooms itself to inconsequence… If [images] only do things after we have talked about them, then they aren’t doing things, we are. [p. 2]

However, Hickey believes that beautiful works of art tend to use their beauty to persuade us. They make something strange look beautiful, in order to seduce the viewer into accepting and ultimately appreciating what is portrayed. The artwork’s power comes not from criticizing the mainstream–which only acknowledges the mainstream’s importance and ghettoizes the artist–but from celebrating the margins of society, and doing so “persuasively, powerfully, and beautifully.” [p. 15]. Of Robert Mapplethorpe’s pornographic photographs (NSFW), which inspired the essay, Hickey writes:

A single artist with a single group of images had somehow overcome the aura of moral isolation, gentrification, and mystification that surrounds the practice of contemporary art in this nation and directly threatened those in actual power with his celebration of marginality… It was the celebration… that made these images dangerous. [p. 14]

Can Hickey’s argument be transplanted from the genre of visual art to the genre of music? I am skeptical but anxious to be persuaded. The problem, it seems to me, is that instrumental music is too abstract to “celebrate the margins of society” in a way that would be apparent to all listeners. Music that relies on text has an easier time celebrating the margins–songs by The Smiths and operas by Robert Ashley come to mind–as does music that interacts with other disciplines like Meredith Monk’s Ellis Island. Are we allowed to take the artist’s biography and background into consideration, for example in the cases of Arthur Russell, Harry Partch, and Julius Eastman?

Tell me if I’m missing something: Can you think of any music that celebrates the margins, that makes something strange seem beautiful, without resorting to textual or visual elements, and without requiring a knowledge of the composer’s or performer’s biography?

* Andy Warhol, Ambulance Disaster, 1963-64. Founding Collection, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh

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?

I’m cruising (okay, okay, more like trudging) through the end of next week’s blogger book club book: The Invisible Dragon, by Dave Hickey. I’ve found it to be a great read, brimming with ideas I want to try out in the context of music, but it’s also been a challenge. There are a considerable number of visual art scene insider references and grad-school vocabulary words. Seriously, it’s really only at times like these that I think I may have missed out by passing on getting an advanced degree. I haven’t done a lot of reading or argument analysis in this style of rhetoric, as the pace at which I have consumed this slim 120-page volume attests.

Still, Hickey’s thinking has brought out some interesting concepts that I’m greatly looking forward to exploring with the gang next week. I’ll give you a taste of what we’re in for with this quote from the book’s final essay (One of the more easily digestible ones, promise):

As Americans, we are citizens of a large, secular, commercial democracy; we are relentlessly borne forth on the flux of historical change, routinely flung laterally by the exigencies of dreams and commerce. We are bereft of the internalized commonalities of race, culture, language, region, and religion that traditionally define “peoples.” As such we are social creatures charged with inventing the conditions of our sociability out of the fragile resource of our private pleasures and secret desires. So, lacking the terms for communication, we correlate. We gather around icons from the worlds of fashion, sports, the arts, and entertainment as we would about the hearth. We trace infinite lines of transit around these strange attractors. We organize ourselves in nonexclusive communities of desire. We stay or go according to the whims of romance or the climate of the times. This “weather map” model of social organization may be construed as beguiling or appalling, but there us no denying its efficacy, its appropriateness, or its provenance.

Okay, yeah, obviously. But still, isn’t that a concept that our average audience expansion and development initiatives in the arts seem never to have fully acknowledged/integrated? Enjoyed, when it happens for them, sure, but not really taken advantage of or (successfully, artificially) engineered. Maybe it can’t be, but something about The Bachelorette still being on the air makes me think it can.