Themes

            One thread we see in this section’s readings is a question: is art free from the political world, and if not, what is its relationship? In Plato’s Symposium, we saw addressed art’s potential to be a motivating factor. This, we recognized, can lead to two conclusions: first, art can motivate us to work towards whatever we find beautiful about it; and second, we may be manipulated by artworks, and in turn by artists or other agents—we may face propaganda. The possibility of manipulation may be reduced by contemplation of an artwork, but even then there is no guarantee that one will escape without fulfilling some aspect of someone else’s agenda. If art has the potential to make us the objects of someone else’s will, is it a good thing? I think the risk is worth taking, especially if we train ourselves to be contemplative and aware when we approach artworks.

            Schiller viewed art as necessarily involved in politics, since politics itself lacked the means to achieve its ends. This lack existed due to what Schiller believed to be politics’ primarily imaginary existence—it could posit new ends, make new laws, but could not change what people wanted. There is a sense in which Schiller is simply wrong—many people will obey laws for reasons that have nothing to do with art, and both tyranny and just government may rely on the threat of force to ensure adherence to law (desegregation, for example, required the presence of the national guard). What these conditions imply, however, is the lack of understanding and desire on the part of the citizen, which we hope they would generally have. Of course, understanding all laws is beyond us unless we make it our profession, but a general sense is not outside our grasp. Art, Schiller suggests, helps us to desire a different world and thereby manifest and use the motivation to make it that way.

            Benjamin was concerned with the “aura” of art and the effect of art on the viewer; but to say ‘the viewer’ is misleading, as Benjamin argued that art had moved away from the realm of individual contemplation and into a ‘mass’ possession, something divested of its sacred aura turned into a popular plaything. Benjamin certainly saw the potential for manipulation in film, of the sort we saw in Plato and can imagine in Schiller. Camera work, especially, delimits our view into the movie, but if a movie is working properly, we think only about what is on the screen, not about the fact that it is on the screen because of a choice, that this is a shot, and that this is not an aperspectival view of the world. His suggestion that film invites, indeed causes, distracted attention explains not only many of our problems in the modern world, but how we can easily be manipulated in ways we do not understand. That we become used to engaging in only distracted attention is itself problematic in that it limits our ability to engage contemplatively and intelligently with the problems of the real world and puts the average member of ‘the mass’ at the mercy of someone who has those skills—or at least has the skills to put together a film that manipulates the viewer.

Sontag noted similar issues in his analysis of photography, particularly of framing and the problem of non-intervention—in order to be photographing, one must choose not to intervene in what takes place. Yet the possibility of preparing a shot also exists. The sheer volume of photos available also diminishes the effect of each one, and as eras pass, once-seminal, moving photographs become important only historically, and moving only indirectly or intellectually, but not sentimentally—we gain layers of distance. This problem makes photography self-destruct; it cannot preserve what makes it special and evocative, it is claimed. This is not, I think, true as an extreme; we have seen that photos still do affect people. As far as relevance goes, this, too, is true, and we can see the same issue at stake in the adjustment required for one to really enjoy many older works of literature, that had different horizons of expectations, and even, I would argue, for one to enjoy older paintings, like the unrealistic and somewhat bland paintings that adorn so many religious sites throughout history. Each of these is made more powerful by understanding and contextual awareness; each effect diminishes with the distance between us and it.

Not least among these, Adorno recognized the originally ritual function of art and its role as a sacred object, and discussed art as a kind of ‘negative’ in the sense of photo negativity. The demystification of the artwork via knowledge about it (and perhaps rules of taste, or something similar—a point I must investigate) allows us to justify claims about its artistry. Art is dependent on the world, but the question arises: if art is a negative, does not reality depend on art? To me this suggests the degree to which we shape our world by contemplative fictions, in the intellectual and psychological realm, and the way in which we live according to principles and constructs that are identifiable—even if they are merely a macroscopic picture of what can be defined more mechanically and perhaps without account of agency at a lower level. Art is, at all accounts, tied into reality and truth, but in a way that suggests it both produces interpretation and is itself, of course, produced. Whether or not its interpretation is truthful, or truth-conducive, at any rate, or not is a question all of these authors raise. Another is whether art might not be something to the side of truth—related to it, but not limited to truth or untruth at all.