Where’s the Art?

“I do not, as a rule, go to art to be lectured about poverty, genocide, or environmental depredation. I go to other places for that – places where these lectures belong. I go to art for aesthetic experience, for hope, for pleasure, for insight, for sustenance so that I may find a way to endure the reality of poverty, genocide, and environmental depredation.”

                                                                        K. B. Dixon

At a photography festival I attended recently, I was reminded of the shrinking hamburger patty TV ad with the punch line, “Where’s the beef?” The keynote speaker gave a longish slide presentation about their new book, a research project with extensive texts and vintage photographs as well as contemporary staged photographs depicting the injustice of certain historical events.

The speaker was a salaried university art professor safely ensconced in a cultural milieu where their work didn’t have to please, entertain, surprise, or fight for public attention. They had been certified as an artist and therefore what they produced must be art. Plus the work dealt with a right-minded subject that explored the importance of remembering racially-motivated historical injustices.

But was this art? And if not, why was this being presented at an art festival? During the question session I wanted to ask, “Where’s the art?”

Nobody questioned the speaker or challenged them. The audience respectfully sat through the dry, predictable presentation that alternated slides and commentary. But why didn’t the “artist” turn their presentation into art? Use music, high-interest visuals, the graphic power of strong images, the poetry of well-crafted language, to give the audience the experience of what they were talking about?

I am preparing an upcoming slide show / talk on my work and my goal is to wow my audience, to grab their attention and sustain it, to win them over. I want them to leave my talk juiced and excited by the experience. I want them to tell their friends about it. I want them to buy my books.

I am hardly the first person to point out the downside of academic artists. Ben Shahn’s comments on the subject in his book The Shape of Content aptly described the awkwardness of the situation. Artists who, if they are to do their art well, must undermine and transcend existing norms, placed in a position of power that upholds and enforces those existing norms. Artists have to earn a living, though, and all of us will not make it in a market-driven environment, so I guess some have to teach. But what does that mean for their art? Imagine pop music professors whose work didn’t have to compete to survive in the marketplace. Laughable, I know, just like the official socialist realism art of the Soviet Union.

If more people don’t view art professor / artists as dubious, it may be because their work typically comes wrapped up in virtue-signaling and insider art-tech explanations, and language trumps mute visuals when it comes to the power of suggestion. That is why I look at the art before reading anything, so that my eyes are fresh and have not been influenced by suggested interpretations. If I do not get it, then I circle back to see what I have supposedly missed.

Ultimately, however, you always have to ask photographer Robert Adams’ third question for viewing art: Was it worth it?  Was it memorable? Did it communicate an important experience? Did it help you understand something better? Did it wake you up, delight you, make you laugh, make you cry, show you something new? 

If usually does when the art embodies its message, when the form does its content, as in William Carlos Williams’ formulation, “No ideas but in things.”

You can agree or disagree with K. B. Dixon, but his comment conveniently frames the conversation about what is art, or what is meaningful art. In my own pantheon of significant works there are more than a few whose themes include poverty, genocide, and environmental depredation. But they cannot be reduced to the mere propaganda content of their message. If they have value as memorable, important works of art it is because of so much more.