Art, from the Ground Up
This is a public draft that attempts to summarise my thoughts on the arts. I’ve toyed with the core of these ideas for several years. What is presented here is a snapshot as at now, of the solutions I’ve found to problems that have plagued me since I started looking seriously at the creative output of the world around me.
Following a conversation with a friend about “Art Music”, I wish to layout an approach to thinking about the arts in general, and Art in particular.
I tackle this from a kind of first principles: whereas art begins with human intentionality (and the recognition of such), the sense of art must begin from the human judgement of its natural surrounding. The aesthetic response should have a natural, pre-sapient basis, in recognising that some things in nature are good, bad or so and so.
Value Judgement
I take a materialist position and assert that human value judgement has its basis in its bestial aspect, and only evolves into what we’re familiar with with the development of more sophisticated cognitive faculties.
While this is true of the individual and the society, things gets more interesting with the latter. Individual value judgements inform and are informed by the social context. This interaction creates a system of shared values that is somewhat objective, even as it retains what is particular about the social grouping that maintains it.
The system of shared values cuts across many domains: morality, economy, aesthetics; I haven’t made time to delve into the diversity of this list, but the case I’m making should be easy to grasp. I should also point out that this system is far from static. It undergoes constant refinement because of the volatile nature of individual judgement, and the fact that generations die and are replaced. And, like many dynamic systems, it must be subject to such things as feedback loops, crests and falls, breakdowns, revivals, revolutions.
Value systems are a complicated mess; rarely uniform, unevenly distributed across even small populations or the lifespan of an individual, and nuanced to the extreme. In spite of some emergent unity when looked at from afar, any honest enquiry into any slice of this pie will expose the tumult of competing visions that make up this fabric.
Applied Value Judgement
Now to the supply side; art is rooted in human intentionality. It begins to take form when some value system is used to judge the result of said action.
At such low resolution, I’ll admit that other non-artsy things satisfy the “evaluating the result of human intentionality against a pre-defined value system” definition: the sense of good and evil informs moral codes and ethical standards, laws and justice, etc. The economic value judgement applied to goods and services makes a market. And so, when talking art, we must be biased towards aesthetic judgement and the results of human intentionality that can be perceived (and judged) aesthetically.
But it was useful to begin at that level, because you’ll find that often, these somewhat distinct domains of value systems (like the moral and economic I cited in the previous paragraph) will bleed into each other, creating such cross-domain judgements such as beauty being equated to moral good, or expensive, rare items having more positive aesthetics. This is because the system of shared values exists as a unity, even though its constituent parts can be isolated.
Aesthetics and Desire
So, aesthetics. Again, to lean towards a materialist point of view, this sense must be rooted in nature and the mechanics of survival and propagation of the individual and its species.
At the root of it all must be those things conducive to the above. Following from that, the evolution of the human mind allows our species to divorce the faculty of desire from natural needs, and engage with it as a thing on its own, in ways far more advanced than other creatures have been able to achieve.
I have found that aesthetics has a lot in common with love and desire, in its apparently irrational, elective, irreducible character. A hungry person might be satisfied with any food that meets some minimum requirement for nutrition or satiation, and there may be several of those within reach. But on this day, at this time, a person will want this particular fruit, or that specific beverage, such that most other viable substitutes will be valued less than the specific thing the faculty fixes itself on.
The reality of aesthetics means the following: that things can be evaluated along aesthetic lines — they can be judged for their beauty; that individuals have a faculty that causes them to desire things, however general or particular; that this desire scales to the social group.
This system of desire and desirability that aesthetics exposes is, I assert, at the root of practically everything within (and many outside) this particular domain. It is the driving force behind things as varied as fashion trends, free markets, political change, viral memes and religious practice. More to the point of this essay, it is the framework within which art exists.
The Argument
Broadly speaking, art encompasses the entirety of human creation, material and immaterial, with a strong bias towards intentionality, aesthetic value and judgement, within some system of values defined or apparent.
More to the point of the discussion that caused me to write this is the phenomenon of high brow and low brow art. I have fixated on this for almost nineteen years. With respect to music, the question “What is Art Music?” captures the essence of the debate.
The most recent episode of this conversation came while I was reading through my friend’s thesis, in which he cited two significant authorities, George Dor and Kwabena Nketia, concerning their definitions of African Art Music. I leaned more towards Nketia’s proposition, which seemed to situate African Art Music within the context of Art Music, within the context of Art. It was a more bottom-up approach to defining the subject of the chapter, which aligned with my own biases towards evaluation from first principles.
Naturally, I favoured a more abstract approach, and argued that Art Music must be understood from the point of view of Art (here, capitalised to mean “high brow”, or “serious” art), which exists primarily within the aesthetic regions of a value system.
I argued that things that meet the bar — that are called “Art” — tend to rank higher within that system, usually across multiple domains (remember that the value system exists as a unity, and that what can stand as distinct domains often bleed into each other), and that, the statistical reality of spectra means that, within any scope of human activity, (say, music), there will always be those things that occupy the upper echelons of value judgement.
And those things will be described as having some artistic merit. And those things will be called Art.
Grounding the Argument
Unfortunately, terms such as “Art” and “Art Music” are overloaded with meaning, and hard to divorce from their usual connotations, but I find that this approach generalises well.
Take, for instance, technical documentation (of a piece of software, appliance, etc) which is generally not thought of as art. For the social context made up of people that care about documentation, there will exist a certain aesthetic to it (some internalised logic of beauty) — hard to perceive from the outside world — that will guide their evaluation of various pieces of documentation. And there will be those pieces of documentation that cause a peculiar quality of response from those who care most about such things, a quality of response that shares a lot in common with the response to canonical art objects.
If you have seen someone call a mathematical equation, scientific theory, the performance of a sportsperson, a plumbing solution or a piece of code “a work of Art”, you have seen this phenomenon play out.
(There is a reverential quality to it that should be obvious to you, the reader, which I choose not to explore in any detail here as the specifics of the response may distract from the larger point. I will just nudge you in that direction.)
The Debate
Following from my approach, and outside of any specific cultural or historical context, Art Music is a natural consequence of musical activity existing within a society willing to judge music for its artistic merit.
My primary issue with the citation from Dor was that, it seemed to predicate the existence of an African Art Music on the existence of European Classical (and Art) Music. Knowing that I see these things as human universals, I was mildly offended by the suggestion that before Europe’s cultural intervention, there wasn’t an African Art Music. It felt, for a moment, like an attack on the capacity of the African for cultural sophistication with respect to music.
To be fair to the citation from Dor, it adopts a valid, top-down approach to answering the question, observing the reality of African Art Music as it is practiced today, and reporting what it has seen. There’s no reason to shoot the messenger.
And to be more than fair to him, I must admit that he is mostly right. African Art Music today, from the perspective of those in the arena, is largely dependent on European theory and practice. At various levels it is either actually a Europeanised indigenous activity, or an Africanised European tradition.
It only took me 4 days after reflecting on the conversation to realise that the existence of Art Music is not a given. The process of making music is as intentional as the process of evaluating it along aesthetic, and then artistic lines. It is as intentional as the process of making music in response to this kind of evaluation. Because all of this is rooted in intentionality, in spite of the favourable statistics, I had to accept that it was possible for a society to elect to not do some of the above. My emphasis on “willing to judge” a few paragraphs up captures this realisation.
We cannot expect all human societies to value the creation and propagation of music as Europeans have done in the past, and as we do today. After all, if all of this rests on the peculiar values of a people, the argument must allow for them to exercise agency in making their judgements. Hints of this can be seen from some periods of European musical development where far greater value was placed on extra-musical concerns. Different values, different output.
Although I will admit my bias and insist that it is a poor and dim society that is artless, I cannot take that position too seriously because it is grossly anti-humanist.
Conclusion
To bring this to a close, I have spent most of this text delving into the phenomena that underlies Art. I take a materialist point of view, making a case for the existence of Art from the ground up, without respect to any particular reality experienced today.
My preferred approach intentionally steps away from the peculiarities of the Europeanised character of global art culture. Such things as individuation, authorship, or the museumification of the art object, are seen as accidental. Oddly, it is these things that I find as fascinating as their root causes. They must remain out of the scope of this essay.
What I haven’t done is explore an alternative approach to the question, “What is Art Music?”, that looks almost exclusively at the historical evolution of this phenomenon. I believe that will provide an even more grounded explanation.
This essay also did not focus its attention on the subjects of the interactions that enliven this phenomenon: the individuals and societies that maintain this value system central to the existence of Art. They are a subject as fascinating as the activity they partake in, and spending more time on them will, again, provide a more grounded text that touches on the economics, politics, and biological realities, as well as the complex negotiations that inform these value systems on which the world of Art sits.
