What might a new aesthetics consist of in the visual arts? What follows is something of an answer.

First though, it would be shoddy of me not to gesture briefly at what the question sets aside, that minor matter of why it is any major aesthetic of endurance—an artistic movement or style characterizing a class of artworks that speak for their own time but are not reducible to it (in the social, psychological, and technological terms that cultural products may be reduced to or explained by); and that are not confined to their time in their ability to carry meaning but speak for themselves, with voices heard differently yet nevertheless heard down through the centuries; and that have consequences for art’s history, refracting the light we see the “existing monuments” of the past in, and consequences most importantly for art’s future, opening new corridors of formal and expressive possibility—why it is such an aesthetic, the new, ever arises.

If a reason can be given, in the cleanest possible language it was given by implication in a statement Martin Gurri made the other month: “A new aesthetics requires a new metaphysics.” To me this is incontrovertible. Social, psychological, and technological change, together and apart, are insufficient causes of aesthetic revolution, these domains too narrow to influence anything more than trends or experimental blips in art. Transformations across these domains have washed over us for a generation! And a major artistic movement has not automatically followed.

For a new art to flourish, the metaphysical system woven among it need not be organized, nor thrashed out in public, nor broadly subscribed to, nor particularly consistent. Through their works and their professed ideas and beliefs, artists within the same aesthetic movement have always given differing, incompatible, and contradictory answers to the major questions goading them. What they have tended to agree on, rather than answers, are the all-consuming questions themselves—their substance and unabating significance.

If I had to guess—and this is the kind of speculation we are free to make and should—I would say that artists working in a recognizable new aesthetic register will concern themselves variously with how the universe is more than a naturalistic system; with the layered nature of reality; with those aspects of embodiment that data cannot touch; with the soul as mortal or immortal; with the soul’s relation to matter, particularly the tactile matter we call visual art; with where a hard new line between private and public should be drawn; with art as a nonpersonal practice; with how the body is not a prison; with the possibility for certainty that makes uncertainty consequential; and with the good that is pleasure.

None of this is to say that art is a pure product of a metaphysics. Artists, not the nebulous belief systems they subscribe to or invent, create artworks. Here is one way among many, though perhaps the primary way, in which art and mass culture are distinct: The minimalist grayscale living and retail space materialized unbidden out of the present era’s ethos of sterile efficiency and end-of-history longings. The same unbidden occurring never happens with art.

I leave further aside how it’s all the other way around in the case of masterpieces—artworks that do not present or illustrate a certain understanding of reality but originate a new understanding.

My book on the Muses I’m hoping will do its part in all this and is entirely about art’s history, and existing works of art (individual paintings, compositions, novels, sculptures, poems), and not all these grim and bothersome abstractions.

Whether ours is a time of great freedoms or great conventions in art depends on whom you ask. Giving an overview of the state of contemporary art is not my remit here; artistic practices are so heterogeneous that summaries tend to say a lot of nothing, but allow me to make a few points.

By now it should be obvious that the supposed break from history1 occasioned by contemporary art never happened. Conceptualism is of course now an historical movement, though its strategies are deployed in much contemporary art that forgets, doesn’t care, or never knew its procedures are fifty+ years old. The post-historical period in which aesthetics become what only theory can determine has turned out to be another period in history, another finite chapter in the narrative that gets tiresome at times but never ends. In this chapter it is simply pluralism and open-ended inquiry instead of a distinct aesthetic vocabulary that are burning out in imaginative exhaustion.

The art market can be squarely blamed for the faux-modernist, novelty-for-novelty’s-sake logic that has prevailed in contemporary art for decades. But anyone who feels art has reached an impasse has to look beyond the corrupting influence of undiscerning capital and see how artists’ relation to history—whether they create in the illiterate zone of believing the past never happened, or whether they take up history as their subject and material—is why this chapter is ending so vapidly.

Historicism and citation (art about history, employing appropriation, quotation, direct critique, reenactment, or research-based and archival practices) are the long-established modes for contemporary artists to make use of the past, more often than not as a means of commenting on the present. The less dedicated sprinkle historical references into their artist statements in a transparent attempt at lending gravitas to the enterprise. Studied types treat history as an external resource to be mined.

The choice to recognize art’s history as a live chain of influence and elected inheritance was never not available. It can be made by whomever, whenever. My view is that artists working in a new aesthetic, seeing the past in art as more likely than the present to point to the future, will make that choice.

A new aesthetics will be cool, sexy, and soaring or will never transpire. Three artists who should be forebears of a new art: Uccello, Correggio, Tiepolo.

If you were Lorenzo de’ Medici and the opportunity arose for you to forcibly seize Paolo Uccello’s San Romano battle paintings from the palace home of the family that had commissioned them, you would take them for yourself as he did. The three panels, now at the Uffizi, the Louvre, and the National Gallery in London, are the painter’s great works, as magnetic as anything in art.

Their weirdness doesn’t diminish, no matter how well you know them. Take the London painting: Why this pink carpet-like ground with its broken breadstick lances? The pasted-on carousel horses? Why the military leader Niccolò da Tolentino’s unfeasible, spectacular red-wool-and-gold-thread turban? And the huge abundant oranges, glowing with life in a battlefield. Across the panel, a horizontal band of baby blue, made brighter by the horses’ gold insignias, stands out above the pink earth. Who is fighting whom, exactly?

It’s the early Renaissance; Uccello is modeling his figures geometrically with spheres and cylinders. Fifty years later, observing from nature and allowing for classical idealization, Raphael and Leonardo will depict horses with an anatomical accuracy not seen in art since antiquity, if ever. Looking at them now, their illusionism (the horses’ realistically tensed muscles, their violent twisting, the truer shading) feels in no way like an improvement on Uccello’s taut, iconic forms.

The artist’s obsessive experimentation with linear perspective, that new invention, is evident in each panel, in the grids the broken lances on the ground make, the foreshortening of figures and armor. Despite the backgrounds in the London and Uffizi paintings, where soldiers fight on the distant rolling hills, any depth here cannot begin to forsake or compromise the paintings’ flatness, their end-to-end saturation with shape, their insistence on form that isn’t a Gothic insistence but what looks to our eye like a Modernist one. It’s no wonder Barnett Newman found the sensation and the logic of his own aesthetic in these works, painted half a millennium before abstract expressionism.2

The paintings give meaning back to the hollowed-out word “design.”3 Every angle of the raised lances matters. Mixed in among flat, unbroken passages of paint, detail and pattern are engrossing. All colours and tones communicate, together and apart, even with the losses sustained through damage and age (notably, all the soldiers’ armor, which has oxidized to gray, was originally gleaming silver leaf).

Like Botticelli, Uccello isn’t lost in the liminal transition phase between major aesthetic periods but stands prominent. Neither earlier Gothic nor later Renaissance artists achieved the charismatic graphic quality for which we know them both. The determining factor in Uccello is that he is himself completely. His mathematics never made him cold or mechanical, rather it made his art into something the opposite of generic—more individual, and therefore intimate. Self-determining, or put another way, self-pleasing, doing only his own weird thing, Uccello made in these works some of the coolest paintings of all time.

Correggio’s sexiness certainly had not been achieved in painting before him and would not be repeated until perhaps Velázquez more than a hundred years later.

It’s inconceivable he found the trace of this quality elsewhere and developed it, either consciously or unconsciously, let alone learned it in another master’s workshop. Correggio’s mythological nudes4 are all different women in different situations, but not one has any of the kind of ceremony about her that you find in Titian’s beguiling goddesses, and that’s present in even the most frolicking nude by Rubens, whose love for the female form was devotional. Correggio’s lack of ceremony is what makes his nudes, the “sacred” as well as the “profane,” so gorgeous.

More specifically, their state of ease—complete abandon in Io’s case—is a function of their faces, postures, and settings when coupled with the painter’s technique, his unequalled rendering of light (warm moon-like light) on skin that makes them appear luminous and yet somehow not illuminated. His sfumato is as fine as Giorgione’s or Leonardo’s—more fine, since it is more suitable to Correggio’s subjects.

The collapse of private into public, public into private that we’ve lived through over the last thirty years, accelerating in the past decade, has to be undone in the future, for reasons that are evident throughout society. New art will relate or perhaps even mark those lines redefining the two realms for us. Correggio is the prime example from art’s history of how it can be done. The universe of difference between private show and public display is realized in his mythological paintings.

After Correggio we can skip the Baroque,5 go straight to Italian Rococo.

If Tiepolo is mere decoration, life in an undecorated world may not be worth living. His art proves, contra moralists from Plato to Adolf Loos, that sumptuous visual experience can issue from and appeal to the intellect, and Tiepolo’s is an operatic intelligence. The wonder of his works today is that this opera-like art remains spectacular without descending into kitsch. If kitsch, which so much contemporary art monumentalizes, has a chance of being excised from art in the future, we might consider how Tiepolo did it.

Compare his grand frescoes on ceilings and walls to others of the period and you can see that no other painter orchestrates both an ensemble cast and the spaces between them—whether ethereal clouds or pure light—with his delicacy and daring. In addition to the frescoes are certain large allegorical paintings on canvas6 that in content and form are similarly celestial.

Renaissance perspective was above all rational and bounded. Tiepolo, painting two centuries later, took three-dimensional illusion to an untethered extreme, ruining our earthbound sense of space, velocity, and direction. Space does not vanish to a point but curves in, blows itself open. Tiepolo treats us to the experience of being surrounded by divine activity, gods solid and weightless, ourselves simultaneously beneath and behind and around them. We might be another tumbling putto or lesser deity, soaring and ascending as we look on.

The artist understood people’s love for fat baby thighs and haughty beautiful women, and he understood colour at its most recklessly attractive. The scale of his subjects in these works—myth, epic, the triumph of empire, glorification of his patrons—allowed for an unembarrassed theatricality impossible to imagine today. Return to anything like this style of ceiling painting cannot happen. What our time shares with his art is a heightened self-consciousness—a state we’re burdened with for as long as digital surveillance and photography dominate society. Tiepolo, on the other hand, gives us self-consciousness without a trace of anxiety, and no art than his could appear less encumbered.

My concern here has been with paint, as that’s where my allegiance lies. I’ve no expectation that the great paintings of the near future will necessarily be figurative; the last century’s masterpieces were more often abstract than not.7 Painting will be at the heart of visual artistic practices for as long as we live between walls.

I opened here with the question of what a new aesthetics would “consist of,” not “look like.” It’s not my intention to say the vocabularies or styles of these very different painters will be taken up in the future, or ought to be. I simply hold that certain elements of each artist’s aesthetic register—their impact—not only call to us today but are moreover those elements thus far unexhausted in art.

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If one painter could replace another in the popular imagination, for the sake of the arts and for society it should be a Frenchman for a Hollander, both of the nineteenth century—Eugène Delacroix for Vincent van Gogh. In Delacroix (1798–1863) we have an artist who saw humanity in the uncompromising light of our immutable dual character, part animal, part divine. Civilization, Delacroix knew, was not a given, never guaranteed, and as both history and the newspapers showed then and still show, threats to civilization come not only from without. Delacroix refused to leave the eternally relevant subject of tyranny to political actors and historians, and so his paintings encompassed scenes from the present day and distant past, from North Africa and the Near East, from literature and myth.

These paintings tell us as much as the greatest volumes of fiction and philosophy can. To engage Delacroix’s great canvases [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] “requires an effort of will,” Kenneth Clark wrote, and the will to give one’s time and sustained attention, so one may begin taking from the insane riches offered by his pictorially maximalist paintings—their thrusting busyness, bodies and forms ambiguously related in space, colour and shape that enrich and further complicate those relations by conveying their own pulsing energies, the allover visible oil strokes carrying on a whole other plane the painter’s energy in applying them—is one part of this. We must look a long time. The other demand on our will is emotional. Delacroix asks—and we struggle with this more than audiences of his own time did—that we have the openness and fortitude to engage the dark heart of nature, including human nature, without the promise of catharsis. If his most violent paintings are theatrical, and dare us not to take pleasure in the theater, they are also devoid of irony, sentimentality, smugness.

The concept of social and technological progress was as alive in the artist’s day as it is in our own. For Delacroix, whereas the industrialists, the revolutionaries, and the bourgeoisie believed through progress man would overcome his bestial nature, he instead saw the march of progress as a descent into barbarism, that man’s cruelty and vulgarity were not being absolved, suppressed, or educated away but rather newly unleashed. It may seem strange to us that a person deeply ambivalent about, if not downright hostile to, social and technological progress was the most aesthetically forward-looking, critical, and experimental major artist of his time. Any seeming contradiction evaporates when we accept that banner terms like conservative or progressive do not transfer between the social and the aesthetic realms. In the latter realm in fact, in art, they are as good as useless—as Delacroix’s essay I’m introducing here proves.

Vanishingly few of history’s great visual artists are especially good writers. Delacroix is one of the handful of exceptions, an intellectual with the linguistic ability to externalize his thoughts in writing and a commitment to doing so, both in his private journals and essays he published regularly in French magazines beginning in the 1840s. In his journal we find Delacroix, as well-read as any visual artist ever, preoccupied over the course of his life with the different affordances of his medium versus the other art forms to which he was so dedicated, literature and music. What could painting do best, do at all, that novels and symphonies could not?

We are immensely fortunate to have the essay that follows, in which the last Old Master painter—and, equally, the painter who first anticipated modernism—takes up the matter of beauty, of an artist’s proper relation to the beautiful in art and to the past. Delacroix here is in his mid-fifties and a celebrated painter; he has gone from scandalizing at the Salon to being commissioned to paint ceilings at the Palais Bourbon and the Louvre, without ever compromising his vision. A decade from now the emperor will permit the display of paintings rejected by the Academy at the first Salon des Refusés, and in two decades’ time the Impressionists, indebted to Delacroix, will appall the art world and mount their own rival salons.

In 1854, the year this essay appeared, all this was yet to happen. What Delacroix delivers is a synthesis of truths he has known since he first became an artist and an art lover. Those who slavishly follow after the art of the ancients do not have the final say on the beautiful—they barely have a say at all. Delacroix is no aesthetic relativist: He emulated and adored the art of antiquity no less than his rival Neoclassicists did. The difference is that they misunderstood and sanitized the past, deriving from it false instructions that the ancients themselves never followed, making dead rubrics out of the vital classics. For evidence he draws from the greatest works in the Western tradition, from the Italian and Northern Renaissances, the Dutch Golden Age, the Baroque, all the while offering comparisons between the paintings that illuminate their varied inheritances from antiquity, the branching routes that beauty has taken since.

“Questions on the Beautiful,” which has never appeared before now in English, was published in the July 1854 issue of the Revue des deux mondes, a magazine to which Delacroix regularly contributed. Blake Bartlett, my husband and collaborator, and I are the translators. Together we are working on an English edition of Delacroix’s writings for Census Press. In the meantime, in the coming weeks I hope to publish a short series of close readings of paintings by the artist that can be seen in public collections. Also in the meantime I will share an update about my book on the Muses, which I’m halfway through writing.

For now the question: Have we the honesty, the fortitude, to love Delacroix?

—Alice Gribbin

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Questions on the Beautiful

In the presence of a truly beautiful object, a secret instinct alerts us to its value and makes us admire it in spite of our prejudices or antipathies. That people of good faith agree about this proves that just as all men feel love, hate, and all the same kinds of passions, just as they can be drunk on the same pleasures or torn apart by the same suffering, so they are equally moved in the presence of the beautiful, as they are wounded by the sight of ugliness, of imperfection.

And yet it happens that when they have had time to gather themselves and reflect on their first impressions, whether by discourse or with pen in hand, these admirers, so unanimous one moment, no longer agree with each other, not even on the basic points of their admiration; the habits of school, the prejudices of education or nationality, overtake their spirits once again. Then it seems that the more competent the judges, the more disposed they are to contradiction; because people without such pretense either are weakly moved or hold tight to their admiration. We don’t include among these diverse categories the cohort of the envious, who always despair at the beautiful.

Is the sentiment of the beautiful what seizes us when we look indifferently at a painting by Raphael or Rembrandt, or a scene from Shakespeare or Corneille, and say: “How beautiful!” or is the feeling limited to our admiration for certain archetypes that define the beautiful? In a word, are the Antinous, the Venus, the Gladiator, and in general the pure models that connect us to the ancients the invariable rule, the canon from which we cannot depart under pain of falling into the monstrous? Do these models necessarily imply the idea of uniformity, along with the idea of grace, of life itself?

Antiquity has not transmitted only these archetypes to us. The Silenus is beautiful, the Faun is beautiful, even the Socrates is beautiful: This head is full of a certain beauty despite its little crushed nose, lippy mouth, and small eyes. It is not radiant, that’s true, with symmetry and the lovely proportions of its features, but it is animated by reflective thought and inner loftiness. The Silenus, the Faun, and so many other faces with character are ancient stone. We easily conceive how stone, bronze, and marble demand in the expression of some features a certain sobriety that is ugly and dry when imitated in painting. Painting distinguishes itself from sculpture through color, effect, and its accommodation of spontaneity, which allows for more exciting, less conventional details.

The modern schools have forbidden whatever deviates from antiquity’s authority. Even in embellishing the Faun and Silenus, in removing the wrinkles of age, in suppressing the inevitable disgraces, often those characteristics that bear the natural accidents and the work of representing the human form, the modern schools have naively shown that the beautiful for them is only a set of instructions. They have taught the beautiful as one teaches algebra, and not only that, but they also use facile examples. What could be simpler? To imitate all the characteristics of a unique model, to attenuate, to efface the profound differences in nature that separate the diverse temperaments and ages of man, to avoid complicated expressions or violent movements capable of disturbing the harmony of features or limbs—these are, in short, the principles that help one take the beautiful in hand! The beautiful is turned into a classroom exercise and made easily transmittable from one generation to the next, like a deposit.

Throughout history the sight of beautiful works proves that the beautiful is not met under such conditions; it is neither transmitted nor conferred like the inheritance of a farm; it is the fruit of inspiration’s perseverance, which can only follow stubborn labors; it comes from the gut with pain and thrashing, as with everything destined to live; it charms and consoles men and cannot be the fruit of a passing phase or a banal tradition. Vulgar laurels crown vulgar efforts. A fleeting delight accompanies works of caprice for the duration of their success, but the pursuit of glory demands other attempts: An endless battle wins one of glory’s smiles, and a small one at that. To get it, a thousand gifts and destiny’s blessing must reunite.

Simple tradition could never produce a work which makes one cry out: “How beautiful!” A genius sprung from the earth, an unknown and gifted man who abolishes the scaffolding of doctrines that the whole world rests on and that produces nothing. A Holbein, with his scrupulous imitation of his models’ wrinkles, who counts, in a manner of speaking, every hair on their heads; a Rembrandt, with his vulgar archetypes, full of such profound expression; these Germans and Italians of the primitive schools with their skinny and sinuous figures and their complete ignorance of the art of the ancients: All these sparkle with beauties and with the ideal that the schools seek with a measuring rod. Guided by naive inspiration, drawing from the nature around them, and doing so with profound sentiment, the inspiration that erudition cannot counterfeit, geniuses fill the crowd and cultivated men with passion. They express sentiments that are in all souls: They have found in their natures the priceless jewel that a useless science demands in vain from experience and from precepts.

Rubens saw Italy and the ancients; but, dominated by an instinct superior to all the exemplars, he returned from the place where beauty was born and stayed Flemish. He found the beauty of the people and the apostles, simple men, in the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, where he painted Christ saying to Simon: “Leave your nets there and follow me; I will make you fisher of men.” I don’t believe the Man-God said this to Raphael’s well-groomed disciples while granting them the institution. Without the admirable composition, without this clever positioning that puts Christ all alone on one side and the apostles arranged together facing him, and that puts Saint Peter on his knees receiving the keys, perhaps we would be shocked by a certain affectation in the poses and dispositions. Rubens, on the other hand, gives us broken and disjointed lines, inelegant and tossed about drapes, which blight the sublimity and simplicity of his characters: He is no longer beautiful in this respect.1

If we compare Raphael’s Disputation of the Holy Sacrament to Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana, in the first we find a harmony of lines, a grace of invention that is a pleasure for the eyes as for the spirit. However, the contrasting movements of the figures and the great care taken with forms in general give the composition a sort of coldness; these saints and Doctors seem not to know each other, and each of them seems to be frozen for eternity. In Veronese’s feast, I see men as I encounter them around me, varied faces and moods, conversing and exchanging ideas, the sanguine beside the bilious, the flirtatious beside the indifferent or distracted woman; in sum, life and movement. I do not speak of the air, the light, or the effects of color, which are incomparable.

Is the beautiful equally present in these two works? Yes, without a doubt, but in different ways: There are no differences of degree in the beautiful; only the manner of exciting the sentiment of the beautiful differs. The style of each painter is equally strong because it consists in a powerful originality. You can imitate certain tricks for portraying draped cloth and balancing the lines of a composition, you can seek the purest forms, and still you will not attain the charm and nobility of Raphael’s ideas; you can copy models with their lifelike details or studiously wrought illusions and still not encounter this life, this warmth, that is present everywhere and that forms the magic of The Wedding at Cana.

When David2 affirmed the liveliest admiration for Rubens’s Christ on the Cross, and in general for the most spirited paintings of this master, was it because of its resemblance to the paintings of antiquity, which he idolized?

Where does the charm of the Flemish landscape come from? What do the vigorous and surprising landscapes of Constable, the father of our landscape school and so remarkable in any context, have in common with the landscapes of Poussin? Doesn’t the search for style in the most conventional trees spoil Claude Lorrain’s a bit?

One remembers what Diderot said to the painter who made his father’s portrait, and who, instead of representing a simple man in his work clothes (he was a cutler), dressed him in his best clothes: “You have painted my Sunday father, and I wanted my everyday father.” Diderot’s painter is like almost all painters, who seem to believe that nature is wrong for making men as they are. They apply make-up, they Sunday their figures, and far from being everyday men, they are not even men: There is nothing under their curled wigs, their posed drapes. They are masks without spirit and without body.

If the style of the ancients imposed the limit, if we only find the last word on art in absolute uniformity, how do we rank Michelangelo, with his bizarre concepts, tormented forms, outrageous or completely false geometries, which superficially imitate nature? You will be forced to say that he is sublime to excuse yourself from granting him beauty.

Michelangelo saw the statues from antiquity as we do; history tells us of the cult that he professed for these marvelous remains, and his admiration was ours; however, the sight of and esteem for these fragments changed nothing about his vocation or his nature; he did not cease to be himself, and his innovations should be admired alongside those of antiquity.

Among a master’s works, we observe that the most consistent are not always the most perfect. I cite Beethoven as a particularly good example. In his entire work, which seems to be only a long cry of pain, we notice three distinct phases. In the first, he strived to imitate the purest tradition: Besides imitating Mozart, who spoke the language of the gods, we already felt the breath, it is true, of melancholy, of passionate aspirations that at times betrayed his inner fire, like the whimpers of volcanoes between explosions; but as the abundance of his ideas pushed him to create unknown forms, he neglected correction and rigorous proportions. At the same time his sphere enlarged, and his talent reached its greatest power. I know well that the savants and the connoisseurs refuse to follow him through the last phase of his work: In the presence of these grandiose and singular productions, still obscure and perhaps destined to remain so forever, the artists, the professionals, are reluctant to see what must be gleaned from them; but if one remembers that the works of his second period, found inscrutable at first, have conquered public sentiment and are now regarded as masterworks, I will stand with him even against my own feelings, and I will believe, now, as many others do, that we must always bet on genius.

Critics do not always agree about the essential qualities that establish perfection. Those who are tempted to condemn Beethoven or Michelangelo today for not being uniform or pure would have absolved and praised them in other times, when other principles won the day. Thus, the schools have placed these principles at time in drawing, at times in color, at times in expression, at times—who would believe it?—in the absence of all color and expression. The English painters of the last century and the beginning of this one, an eminent school little appreciated in France, saw these essential qualities above all in the effects of shadow and light, as today we want to see these qualities only in contour, which is to say in the complete absence of effect.

It is permissible to think that the great artists of all time did not respect all these distinctions. Color and drawing being the necessary elements of their work, they didn’t strive to make one or the other predominate. Their own penchants led them to unknowingly emphasize some merits over others. Is it reasonable to think that a masterwork of painting might not present in some measure the reunion of this art’s essential qualities? Each of the great painters used color or drawing as his spirit deemed fit, which gave to his work this supreme quality the schools do not speak of, and which they cannot teach: the poetries of form and of color. It’s on this ground that they all meet, in all schools.

Before a morning landscape, bathed in dew, animated by birdsong, embellished with all the natural charms that touch the heart, the savant and the average man will think neither of line nor of chiaroscuro: They will be moved the same way, their senses will be penetrated by a hidden harmony, by this delectation that Poussin made the unique object of his paintings.

In his famous Painters Score Card, de Piles3 gravely reveals the different doses of color, chiaroscuro, and drawing that contribute to the talent of each celebrated artist. He does not give any of them a perfect score; the number 20 being regarded as the highest, he gives Raphael, for example, only an 18 for illustration, while Michelangelo earns a 19. On the other hand, Titian and Rubens, whom he scores liberally for their colors, present a considerable gap with respect to their drawings: He shows us the assets and liabilities of talents.

The amusing chemistry that analyzes great men! The precious discovery that they can be reconstituted to suit criticism; to take, for example, a part of a Michelangelo drawing that stifles with overabundance, in order to combine it with an unfortunate Rubens drowning in an excess of color! How the philosopher is chagrined to find Correggio’s contour perish in the chiaroscuro that envelops it and of which he is master; while Poussin, whose compositions burst with science that would suffice ten painters, is frighteningly short of chiaroscuro! The good de Piles appears convinced that with determination and some effort, each of these remarkable men could establish equilibrium between what he sees as their qualities, and according to him, if this equilibrium could be established, they would have come much closer to true beauty.

Nature has given each talent a particular talisman that I would compare to those inestimable metals alloyed with one thousand precious others, and that make sounds, both charming and terrible, according to the diverse proportions of the elements forming them. It is so with refined talents that cannot be easily satisfied. Attentive to captivating the spirit, they address it by all the means that art puts at their disposal: They revise a detail one hundred times, they sacrifice the brushstroke, studied execution, making the details emerge this or that much for the unity and profundity of the impression. Thus is Leonardo da Vinci, as is Titian. There are other talents, like Tintoretto, better still, like Rubens, and I prefer the latter because he goes further in expression; these artists let themselves be carried away by a sort of verve in their blood and hands. The force of certain strokes, to which they do not return, gives to these masters’ works an animation and vigor, which a more circumspect execution would not necessarily achieve. We must compare such effects to these singular sallies of orators who, carried away by their subject, by the moment, by the audience, rise to a height that overtakes their composure. We are satisfied with calling these particular flights that ravish the auditor and the orator improvisation. We easily conceive that in painting, no more than in the art of oratory, the kind of improvisation, if one wants to call it that, would only produce vulgar effects if these effects were not prepared and planned, in advance, by patient work, either through artistic practice in general, or with the material that is the orator’s or painter’s object. We typically pretend that effects of this kind do not bear scrutiny, like the effects produced by works with a more disciplined form. Mirabeau’s speeches, for example, do not answer, when one reads them, to the idea that his contemporaries have given us of their prodigious brilliance at the podium: Did they fall short of satisfying the condition of the beautiful when he delivered them, when he moved, mobilized, not only an assembly but an entire nation? Is it not possible that such speeches, widely read, even powerfully felt in the silence of the study, were received with cold approbation in the forum before thousands of listeners? Has a picture, so irreproachable in the studio, always fulfilled, on the great day of an exhibition, or when placed at the necessary height and in its own special place, the expectations of its admirers and the public?

We must see the beautiful where the artist intended to put it. Don’t ask the virgins of Murillo for the chaste unctuousness, the timid prudery, of Raphael’s virgins: Revel in the traits of their faces and their attitude of divine ecstasy, the persistent curse of a mortal creature elevated to unknown splendors. If either of these painters adds some of these legendary figures of pious worship or sainthood to pictures of the virgin in her glory, we are charmed in Raphael by their noble simplicity and the grace of their movements; in Murillo, we admire above all the expression of what infuses them. These monks, these anchorites that he shows us in the desert or in their cells, prostrate before the cross and thoroughly marked by pious practices, fill us in turn with a sentiment of abnegation and belief.

Is the beautiful absent in such penetrating compositions, which carry us to regions so different from those that surround us, which make us conceive the mortification of the senses, the power of sacrifice and contemplation, in the midst of our skepticism and the puerile distractions consuming our lives? And if the beautiful actually lives and breathes to a certain degree in these works, would they gain what they lack by resembling antiquity more?

We may wonder how the ancients got by without antiquity. Rembrandt, who was in a similar position, since he had never left the marshes of Holland, would have pointed to the mortar and pestle he used for preparing color pigments and said: Here is my antiquity.

We are correct to find that the imitation of antiquity can be excellent because we find there the observation of the laws that eternally regulate the arts, which is to say expression in just measure, the natural and its elevation altogether; what’s more, the practical means of execution are the most sensible, the most proper to produce the effect. These means can be employed for something besides the endless reproduction of the gods of Olympus, who are no longer our gods, and the heroes of antiquity. Rembrandt, in making the portrait of a beggar in rags, obeyed the same laws of taste as Phidias sculpting his Jupiter or his Athena. The great and necessary principles of unity and variety, of proportion and expression, is no less powerful in one or the other; only the qualities are encountered there in different degrees of excellence or inferiority because of the object represented, the particular temperament of the artist, and the predominating taste of the epoch.

We reproach Racine for having heroes that are not Greek and Roman heroes: I am tempted to congratulate him for it, and to be sure, he does not care. Shakespeare draws upon antiquity much more, whatever the classicists may say. His characters are modeled on Plutarch: His Coriolanus, his Anthony, his Cleopatra, his Brutus, and so many others are those of history, but this would hardly be a merit if the characters were not true; they are the men that Shakespeare wanted to paint, and they are the men that he and Racine have painted. What do I care that Burrus, Nero, Agrippa are from Tacitus? At the theatre, in an auditorium that doesn’t care about Tacitus or Plutarch, I want to see all their impassioned movements mingling with an interesting and poetic action that captivates me more than real history.

We have seen bizarre imitations at the theatre several times, where plays follow the great tragedies step by step; they were inspired by a certain color of primitive simplicity that is no longer a part of our customs and that leaves us cold. Tragedies made for the American savages would not have surprised us more. When an author of merit recently wanted to stage episodes from the Odyssey, he spoiled, to my mind, very interesting scenes, presented in beautiful verse, with misguided research on customs that baffle us. The swineherds of the divine Laertes astonished me more than they interested me; I would say as much of the curses that Odysseus and Telemachus address to Penelope’s suitors, and of the thousands of details of customs that can prick the curiosity in an original narration, but that ruin all action in the theater.

The ancients gave their plays choruses that were nothing but a personification of the audiences’ reasoning through what was being represented on stage. To our minds, the spectators extract the moral from what they see; they should make their own reflections on the fly, without additional reflections distracting them from the diverse events of the play and the developing characters. The Greeks became habituated to the choruses, which gave them transitions and a sense of what was to come. As a result, they were overly dependent on foregrounded effects that one can get from the play itself and the logical progression of scenes, a merit at which the moderns have excelled.

Fashion, which uses talent like a silk handkerchief and tells people what to think, has always provoked the question of the beautiful; fashion’s frivolous influence thinks it even extends to the immutable. Images of the beautiful are in the spirit of all men, and those who have yet to be born will recognize it by the same signs. Neither fashion nor books show us these signs: A beautiful action, a beautiful work responds in a flash to a faculty of the soul, the most noble one no doubt. A certain dose of culture can add something very fragile to the pleasure aroused by the beautiful, can unveil those obscure beauties hidden from the least experienced eyes; but this culture, often indiscreet, can also truly falsify judgment and mislead natural sentiment.

What! The beautiful, this need and pure satisfaction of our nature, flourishes only in the countries we romanticize, and we forbid ourselves to seek it around us! Greek beauty is the only beauty! Those who credit this blasphemy are men who do not feel beauty in any latitude, and who do not carry in them this internal echo that trembles in the presence of the beautiful and the grand. I don’t believe that God reserved for the Greeks alone to produce what we, the men of the north, must prefer; so much the worse for eyes and ears that are closed and for these connoisseurs who want neither to know nor, by consequence, to admire! This impossibility of admiration is in proportion to the impossibility of elevation. The elite intelligences have the task of reuniting, with their predilections, the different types of perfection between which the savants see nothing but abysses. Before a panel composed only of great men, disputes of this type would not last very long. I imagine the living lights of art reunited, these models of grace and power, this Raphael, this Titian, this Michelangelo, this Rubens, and their rivals—I imagine them reunited to classify talents and distribute glory, to those who have respectfully followed their traces, and to give one another the justice that centuries of appreciation have not refused them: They would arrive very quickly at their common mark, at this power of expressing the beautiful, but also of attaining it by different routes.

—Eugène Delacroix4

The film discussed in this essay can be streamed here, on the recently restored Internet Archive (archive.org), the greatest website on the internet.

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It helps when first watching The Party and the Guests not to know a thing about its plot or the film’s fate, about Jan Němec, about FAMU (the Prague film school) and Czech New Wave cinema, about post-1948 Czechoslovak society and that state’s government and the Union of which it was part. It helps to be a real idiot, ignorant of these facts of history, and it helps to be a careful observer of people, alert to our nonverbal communicative powers, attentive to how the human character is underwritten by our moment-by-moment reactions to the behaviour of others.

What might have been a blunt political allegory is instead an exquisitely subtle study in conformity. And yet, these are personalities barely sketched, the actors handpicked from among the writers’ friends, their performances competent. And what do any of them suffer? Besides some jostling, no violence is committed, direct threats issued, or even voices raised. The villains only want everybody, no exceptions, to enjoy themselves. The ordinary people accept the pleasures and friendship offered. If there is something like a hero, he is heroic in his absence. “They kept pushing us about and laughing” is how the women describe their treatment under authoritarian rule.

The central characters’ torments pale in comparison to those of Kafka’s protagonists, but their predicament has rightly been called Kafkaesque. Out of nowhere, the seven men and women are detained on opaque charges. What the unnamed officials know about them, of what they are guilty, is impossible to guess. They share our confusion—though more confusing for us, still, are the men’s half allusions to prior relationships with what otherwise seem to be strangers. Much of their speech is disjointed. Some of what they say—calling themselves democrats, each repeating the same words after another—is blatantly nonsense. The crucial difference between this world and Kafka’s or Ionesco’s is that, while their speech may be meaningless at times, their lives are not. Their actions have meaning. They are possessed of free will.

A menacing hum, rising and falling in pitch, is sustained through much of The Party and the Guests, and this atmosphere compels the viewer to question whether our main characters are helpless. By the end, we know that all along they were not. One helps himself from within the system; five of them get along in it; the last gets the fuck out. Ester Krumbachová, who cowrote the screenplay with Němec, and on whose earlier short story their script was based, called the film “an attack on indifference.”

In writings about Jan Němec, his assertion that the thinking person living in an unfree society must “attack obstacles to freedom in every way at his disposal” appears time and again. A statement he made in the next moment is not widely quoted: “The immediate problems of society have finally been picked up by their rightful bearers: TV, radio, the press; and art is no longer obliged to do their job for them, to be covertly journalistic.” Němec was speaking in July 1968, one month before the Warsaw Pact invasion crushed the reformist Prague Spring movement and the Soviets reestablished control over Czechoslovakia. More than thirty years later, he would express a related sentiment about film’s affordances while lamenting the state of contemporary Czech cinema. “Film is in decay these days,” he said. The reason? “Everybody makes films that could be a serial, novel, picture documentary, radio play, or romance novel.”

The qualities that are unique to film, having no equivalent in other mediums—film’s formal and aesthetic means of storytelling—are Němec’s concern, as they are every great director’s. The works of his cited influences, Bresson and Resnais and Buñuel, Fellini and Bergman, “could be told as stories, but the cardinal experience is from the film itself.”

Just so, to reduce The Party and the Guests to its major and minor events, so as to detail how those events bear on the allegory beneath, as if the film were a narrative that by sheer accident is told through moving image and sound, rather than the form of, say, a novella, is to engage it in a way that is degrading to the art form. The full cinematic texture of The Party and the Guests, not the story’s political valence, is responsible for its significance.

Twenty or so wordless seconds midway through the film epitomize Němec’s method. The party’s host (the head of state) has arrived unexpectedly, welcomed the main characters, and reprimanded his adopted son (chief of the secret police) for harassing them in his “game” gone too far. Keen above all to show her good nature, the buxom wife compliments Rudolph’s acting, then turns to her husband for his agreement. The husband, his expression something beyond dispirited, turns and locks eyes with his wife. One by one, we see the other women and men of their group observe the husband. He breaks her gaze and moves his eyes to the ground, unanswering.

At this point in the story, the audience ought to feel relief, as the women picnickers do. With the host’s appearance, the threat posed by the thugs has passed. Instead, a new dynamic—more hidden, equally sinister—is being established. The threat of danger will no longer come from an outside, authoritarian figure but from their own, individual willingness to participate in a shared fiction.

The Party and the Guests is divided into three acts, each of which opens with a stylized group shot. Němec throughout insists that we see the main characters both as individuals and as a collective, a society of seven. Together they form a small mass of dispositions, each only glanced at, hard to distinguish on first viewing. Their fragmented and context-ambiguous dialogue swims about them. The camera captures the group as full figures. Conversely, shots of individual characters are always from the torso or shoulders up.

At the picnic, the opening scene, they laugh the laughs of adults. The film begins with these middle-class friends enjoying one another’s company, and wine, and a horrible aspic sponge cake. The women strip down at the nearby running brook to freshen themselves, like out of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Are they decadent? Probably they all work hard during the week. The men speak abstractly of a decision that needs making. The wives are blithely happy.

When the group turns our way to watch the wedding revelers coming over the hill, they appear to us as a tableau in the grass. Two scenes later, a moving camera stops to catch them in their next group shot, standing on a path in the forest and facing us again, but vulnerable now, and suspicious. They look on as a stranger from nowhere approaches one of them and takes him by the arm. Before even addressing Karel, Rudolph asserts an ironic dominance over him by synchronizing their steps so that they walk as a twosome, comrades through coercion. This moment will be echoed in the next act when Josef, who in a few words has acquiesced to the thugs on behalf of the group and then ingratiated himself, marches in unison with Rudolph around his imaginarily penned-in friends, no coercion necessary.

Act two opens with the picnickers shown together from behind in a clearing, loosely circled by Rudolph’s associates. We spy a man hiding among the trees. The thugs are relaxed and bored; this is ordinary business for them. The camera jumps between each of the picnickers as they strategize, their nervousness compounding. The next group shot occurs when they have been told to separate themselves. Acting as one, they pause, silently confer, and do not comply. Their unity will fracture soon after this. In a brief episode, Rudolph speaks of the birds and, with the sound of birdsong turned up artificially high, we see the listening faces of both the picnickers and the thugs. That he instructs them all with only a flicker of his eyes, and that the volume is so loud, makes the moment weirdly dictatorial. Culture determines nature, Rudolph’s conduct says. You will enjoy what you are told to. The composer Jan Klusák, who appears in Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970) as another major freak, is unforgettable as Rudolph, his mocking smile and singsong voice implausibly threatening.

After the earlier tensions, act three opens like a painting, a scene of civility. The lake cuts the frame diagonally, long tables form a perspective line alongside a row of thin poplar trees that divide the banquet from the woods, and seven smartly dressed men and women who are not our picnickers stand in the foreground. The original group is already divided, though we don’t know it yet. The husband will soon make his break. During the meal, people are behaving themselves, the atmosphere is tense, the host is silently furious. His new right-hand man, Josef, who has already gone from civilian to collaborator, now advances to instigator by proposing that Rudolph pursue the missing husband. Josef’s public speech rouses the guests to collectively right this wrong. Out of brotherly love, the men rush up to go, and the rest follow.

The host would like to see a hunt—he never has before. The picnickers admire the skill of a German shepherd that will sniff out the husband. The wife expresses fear while looking coy, her words meaningless.

“People belong to people,” the host had said. The mind game of this statement is equivalent to Rudolph’s circle drawn in the gravel around the picnickers. When words and actions are not meaningless, their meanings are still entirely contingent on context—and how can we possibly, with confidence, know the minds of other people?

Earlier in the film, a ledger of the secret police turned into a party guest list. Now a wedding party has become a hunting group. These are the principal tonal shifts in The Party and the Guests, and form the basis of the plot, but throughout are extraneous details that psychologically disorient the audience, that set the uneasy mood: Laughing, a woman calls after her friends for a knife; a desk and chair are carried out of the woods; an authoritarian madly wags his fingers like a toddler; thugs rough up a man by tossing him in the air as though celebrating; sinister men hiding in the trees, their mouths covered with handkerchiefs, emerge and are welcomed as old friends; banqueters play musical chairs; the leader’s son muses lyrically about shooting himself in the head; a wife miraculously changes into her third outfit of the day, a hunting jacket, to join a search party for her husband; her friend questions her while he plays with a rifle, and their other friends stuff themselves with dessert and wine. Watching, it is impossible to settle on any feeling. The stakes are high and low. We doubt even our animal sense of dread. Whether or not this doubt makes us indifferent conformists is the film’s provocation.

The Party and the Guests is notorious for being one of four films “banned forever” in its home country, a fact that is cool if you’re a teenager, important if you’re interested in historical artefacts, and almost irrelevant if you care about film. As a classroom exercise, the reasons why it was prohibited by the government censors—twice, the first time at the ordering of Czechoslovak President Antonín Novotný—can be teased out: It was seen as unintelligible and therefore subversive. Ivan Vyskočil, who played the host, was thought to look like Lenin. In the role of the dissident, hunted-down husband was Czech director Evald Schorm, whose own film Courage for Every Day (1965) had been banned the year before.

To a viewer of The Party and the Guests, what do these bits of trivia matter? If there are people watching the film in two hundred years’ time—a faraway future in the history of cinema, a little while from now in the history of storytelling—they will be doing so because of how its story is told, because of the cardinal experience its audience endures and enjoys.

I’m writing a book on the Muses, a remystification of the arts, that expands on this essay. It will be published by Census Press in 2025.

It is curious to the point of bafflement that one should need to rewrite Pound’s “The Serious Artist” in the year of grace 2024. Across the preceding centuries, other centers of civilization had decided that good art was a blessing and that bad art was criminal, and they had spent some time and thought in trying to find means whereby to distinguish the true art from the sham. But the wisdom of the present is freedom from history. For the living to cultivate their discernment would be needless: Art is good when it makes us feel good in ourselves and about our opinions. Still, in the age of Houellebecq as in the age of Woolf, we are asked what position the arts are to hold in the ideal republic, whatever that may be. And it is obviously the opinion of many people, the age’s foremost Shakespeareans among them, that the slop on streaming platforms is somehow related to art.

The arts give us a great percentage of the lasting and unassailable data regarding the nature of the human, the immaterial human, the human considered as a thinking and social and sentient creature. It is from the arts that we discover what sort of animal humans are. That the premier question for the arts, “What are we?,” has been superseded by “Who am I?,” an infinitely less compelling question of the self, is the nub of our waywardness.

This brings us to the immorality of bad art. Bad art is inaccurate art. It is art that makes false reports.

If an artist falsifies his reports as to the nature of the human, as to his own nature, as to the nature of the perfect, as to the nature of his ideal of this, that, or the other, of the gods, if the gods exist, of the life force, loss, delusion, of the nature of good and evil, if good and evil exist, perception, of the force with which he believes this, that, or the other, of the degree in which he suffers or triumphs; if the artist falsifies his reports on these matters or any other matter in order that he may conform to the taste of his time, to the proprieties of his class, to the conveniences of a set of wildly contingent social values, then the artist lies. If he lies out of deliberate will to lie, if he lies out of carelessness or ignorance, out of cowardice, out of any sort of negligence whatsoever, he nevertheless lies and he should be despised in proportion to the seriousness of his offence.

It takes a great deal of typing to convince a layman that bad art is “immoral.” And that good art, however “immoral” it is, is wholly a thing of virtue. Purely and simply that good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness. Not to virtual problems. Not for the artist to be seen witnessing. Not witness borne within pseudoreality. I mean art that is the most precise. You can be wholly precise in representing a vagueness. You can be wholly a liar in pretending that the particular vagueness was precise in its outline.

To take three pages to say nothing, to say clever waffle, is not style, in the serious sense of that word. Ornamentation, decoration, are play upon a surface. Aesthetics are concerned with depths.

By precision I mean maximum efficiency of expression, I mean that the artist has expressed something in such a way that one cannot resay it more effectively. I also mean something associated with discovery—either of life itself or of the means of expression. Much great art of the previous century alienates those unwilling to acquire a sense of how the means of expression have in the last hundred years exploded. Not all new means however entail discovery. Very rarely is expression significant.

Under our liberal order, we accept as good and proper the separation of church and state. Those autonomous realms of the human experience are kept, as much as is possible, from meddling one with the other. Why then should the arts, another wholly sovereign realm, be brought under the jurisdiction of whatever the reigning political philosophy? Why the arts’ forced alignment with secular humanism? The principles by which an ideal society may be run cannot be, are not, the same principles governing art.

Our culture’s humanistic aspect, necessary perhaps for our living peaceably, certainly necessary for our climate of tolerance, meanwhile permits art’s degradation. An overbearing humanism cares more for whether the aspiring artist is furnished with state resources than for the substance of his art.

A fatal tolerance of mediocrity has many causes, among them the employment of a majority of artists in the apparent role of educating the next generation in their form. These artist-teachers, in seeking only to nurture within their protégés the speck of the relative good, forgive the blindingly pervasive bad. Their generosity of instruction dims their judgment, numbs them to the derivative, so that they themselves, unsuspecting, produce art that cannot be other than complacent. The teaching poet’s audience is shrunk down to the schoolroom, the poem to an object for supervised discussion among fee-paying youths.

Young artists should not be encouraged. Their encouragement yields only misery and inferior products.

That art is a civilizing force is obvious. How it is so is not. When Sidney wrote of “the ending end of all earthly learning being virtuous action,” and of poetry as the best subject for such learning, he could only have hoped so many nonreaders of his four centuries hence would be in agreement. Plainly Sidney was mistaken, and it must fall to historians working comparatively across the wide ranging arts, of music and architecture, painting and poesy, across the great sweep of centuries and cultures, not bound within their quibbling disciplines, to expound for us how it is art constitutes civilization.  

As there are in medicine the art of diagnosis and the art of cure, so in the particular arts, literary and performing and visual, there is the art of diagnosis and the art of cure. We may call one the cult of ugliness and the other the cult of beauty.

The cult of beauty is the hygiene, it is the sun, air, and the sea, and high-quality animal protein and good sex. The cult of ugliness, Coetzee, Michaux, Tamura Ryuichi, Celan, are diagnosis. Marlene Dumas is diagnosis.

Beauty in art reminds one what is worthwhile. I am not now speaking of shams. I mean beauty, not slither, not sentimentalizing about beauty, by either trad or lib, not telling people that beauty is the proper and respectable thing. I mean beauty.

Whether the institutions held in esteem across generations, whomever may constitute those institutions in any moment, deserve respect in the present is an issue the serious artist can no longer refuse to countenance.

Art never asks anybody to do anything, or to think anything, or to be anything.

You are a fool to seek the kind of art you don’t like. You are a fool to read the classics or your contemporaries because others do and not because you like them. You are a fool to aspire to good taste if you haven’t naturally got it. If there is one place where it is idiotic to sham, that place is before a work of art. Also you are a fool not to have an open mind, not to see how vital is the separation of high and low, not to be eager to enjoy something you might enjoy but don’t know how to.

We have no want of a beyond. “That green thrust is itself the divine event, the fruit of the marriage at Eleusis.”

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On the latest episode of the Manifesto! podcast, I join Phil Klay and Jacob Siegel to discuss Ezra Pound’s 1913 essay “The Serious Artist” and Eliot Weinberger’s The Life of Tu Fu, a new book of verse that should send painters to their watercolours, give rise to great series of huge works on paper. Listen here.

In a recent review of a work of contemporary video art, the novelist and poet Ben Lerner made a bizarre admission:

I’ve always thought of artworks as a kind of CAPTCHA test that I might not pass. Am I feeling the right things at the right pitch of intensity? What if I’m discovered to be lacking in some fundamental capacity—what if I’m the avatar or replicant? [reference to Blade Runner]

Are these the words of a neurotic adolescent or a highly successful writer, the recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships and a Distinguished Professor, about whose works four-day academic conferences in Paris are held?

The gist of Lerner’s analogy is clear enough. He thinks of art, like those bot-filtering online prompts, as a challenge to his humanness. Besides this main point, Lerner’s choice of analogy and his rhetorical questions that follow imply all sorts of other things: that his feelings about an artwork fall somewhere along a continuum between very right and very wrong; that an authority, perhaps the artist or critics or scholarly consensus, exists to determine the “right” feelings; that somehow, since his own feelings are at risk of discovery, he is being surveilled when engaging an artwork. It’s all rather paranoid.

The condition of self-surveillance is endemic to our time; Lerner is admitting or feigning a personal orientation towards art likely shared by very many of his readers. (Prevalent today, too, is the figure of the artist as lifelong good student.) Those people among us who worry whether their feelings about a work of art are correct or not deserve our sympathies. An unfortunate way to live! Another implication of the test analogy, no less regrettable, is that aesthetic encounters are discrete—open and shut, fail or “pass.” All art lovers know this is false: The mark of a masterpiece is that it cannot be finished with. It haunts us. Our encounters with great art are never confined to a moment but ongoing, our responses—now active, now passive, through recollection and revisits—coming in waves. At times, we feel aesthetic revelation not with an initial encounter but when later finding a work in its nascent form, as an earlier version or draft. In the draft, we see what the Muse saw. And in what the draft lacks, we discover how the Muse inspired the artist.

Don’t wait for inspiration. It comes while one is working. —Henri Matisse, 1945 interview

The Red Studio by Matisse is emphatically red—a red more meditative than emotive, not hot but warm. The pigment, Venetian red, was the shade most commonly used in Renaissance painting and is derived from iron oxide, or rust.

The best Rothkos have something like The Red Studio’s presence. (Also like Rothkos, all is lost in reproduction.) As with the great Abstract Expressionist works painted some forty-plus years later, The Red Studio has no stuck-in-time historical baggage about it. More than a century’s experiments on canvas between 1911 and now do not lessen its impact. Yet the painting is not a statement or an outburst or a corrective.1 It marries the figurative and the abstract without any aggression. What strikes you immediately is how weird it is. That weirdness becomes more exciting the longer you look.

How does one get to grips with this image? Curators Ann Temkin and Dorthe Aagesen describe how a viewer’s eyes swim about in the allover red:

The Red Studio invites a process of looking not tethered to any single target of attention or point of focus. The scene maps out the entirety of the canvas in a ringlike arrangement that suggests centrifugal force. This keeps the eye moving around the work’s surface. . . . The round ceramic plate in the foreground, with its wreath of flowers and curled-up nude, exemplifies this circularity.2

Two types of object are shown in the room, artworks (numerous paintings, the ceramic plate, sculptures in plaster, terracotta, bronze) and non-artworks (two tables, a grandfather clock, drawers, stools, two chairs, a wine glass, other knickknacks). While the artist’s works are identifiable and maintain their pictorial integrity, the pieces of furniture are subsumed by the red, only their edges remaining.

Edges, not outlines. One aspect of The Red Studio that is so compelling, which draws the viewer in, is the spectral quality of these uneven edge-lines.3 Had Matisse painted a truly allover red background and then traced over it the furniture’s outlines in long strokes of a thin, painted-charged brush, the result would be an entirely different painting. Instead, without having to get especially close, a viewer can see how the Venetian red has seeped around and within what were pre-existing forms and stopped when it reached their edges. The remnants of a painted layer beneath the allover surface give the composition an idea of depth that the visual mass of Venetian red totally rejects. The contradiction is exhilarating.

Seeing The Red Studio for the first time, you might perceive and feel all of this. If the painting affects you enough, instinctively you will go on to consider it alongside other works by Matisse. Two in particular, by comparison, might heighten your sense of The Red Studio’s arresting qualities. The Pink Studio (above left), a more realistic depiction of the same room, was painted earlier that year. His watercolour study after The Red Studio (above right), made at the prospective buyer’s request, is charming and has none of the extremity of the original. In contrast with the translucent watercolour pigment, the Venetian red oil appears even more matte, and flat, and hummingly dense.

We now know The Red Studio had been, in a word, conventional. Like The Pink Studio, its furniture and floor and walls were originally painted distinct colours—ochre and pink and blue with green vertical lines, respectively. (This was already a nonnatural depiction. Historical records show Matisse’s Issy-les-Moulineaux workspace had a wood floor and paneled walls painted white.) Art historians had long suspected the interior scene was differently coloured at an earlier stage. Recent analysis by MoMA conservators has shown how the painting was initially conceived, and executed, by the artist.4

The conservators not only found The Red Studio’s original colour scheme. They also proved that before Matisse painted over more than two-thirds of the canvas with Venetian red—which he did in fast and decisive strokes, losing brush bristles as he went—the painting’s underlayer had fully dried. For a month or more, he had left the painting alone. And one day, in a single session, he covered the foreground and background almost entirely in red.

Around that time, Matisse told an interviewer visiting his studio that the painting “hasn’t become the way I originally envisioned it. I like it, but I don’t completely understand it. I don’t know why I painted it precisely this way.”

He doesn’t know because he didn’t paint it: The Muse did, through him. The Red Studio is electrifying on first encounter. Knowing Matisse introduced the red in a delayed yet sudden act, outside his own volition, makes the painting, seen again, all the more electrifying.

The story of how Picasso came to create Guernica is legendary, it does not need repeating. Anyone who has read up on its history or visited the Reina Sofia knows of Dora Maar’s photographs documenting his process. In 28 black-and-white shots taken at the artist’s studio, Maar captured how Guernica’s composition morphed over four of the five weeks it took him to complete the mural-sized painting.

Directly on the canvas, Picasso reworked Guernica’s form and content over multiple stages—adding and removing figures, altering their poses, adjusting the placement and density of forms, bringing clarity and chaos into greater tension.5 Seeing in Maar’s photographs how the artist laboured to produce his final composition only makes us marvel anew at the awful perfection of the completed work. However, to grasp why a particular image in the painting is so searing, and to feel most fully the pathos of that image, an art lover might turn to Picasso’s earlier sketches for Guernica on paper.

He began sketching on May 1, 1937. In two drawings made on May 8 and one on May 9 (above, from left), the artist sketches in increasing detail the figure of a woman on her hands and knees, holding a dead child and wailing to the sky. A full composition study that he drafts on May 9 (below left) has in it the same mother and child. Also on May 9, and then on May 10 (below center and right), he draws the same figure again but now on a ladder, so that the woman’s pose is rotated ninety-degrees clockwise. The infant’s body hangs in the opposite direction and the mother’s head tips fully back. All the drawings are disturbing.

Dora Maar’s first photograph of the Guernica canvas is taken on May 11 and shows Picasso’s initial completed design (below). A lot would change; few elements remain unaltered in the final painting. At the canvas’s far left on May 11 is the painted outline of a wailing mother holding in one arm the limp body of her dead child. This image is basically what it will be in Guernica.

But it is not the figure of mother and child transposed from one of the drawings. On canvas, the dead infant falls with his head to the left, the wailing woman kneels, her free hand gestures emptily to the right, and she throws back her head in a scream so that her gaping mouth points to the sky and, crucially, her hair falls straight down. The pose takes aspects from the artist’s sketches but is not a copy of them. Comparing the painted woman to the women in the drawings, we see why her scream is the most piercing. She doesn’t try to move, to go anywhere. The fully exposed neck leading to her bared breasts, which will never again nurse her child; the more agonized, unnatural angle of her head; the empty hand; the limp, hanging hair: It is an image of total pain and total helplessness, beyond desperation. How Picasso went from the May 8–10 drawings to the May 11 painted outline is a marvel. The Muse must have interceded.

What art communicates is never divorced from how it does so. And the how—an artwork’s aesthetics—is always and in the first place what impresses upon our spirit and our senses. In a draft or earlier version, we often find much the same content as in the completed work, but its authority lacking, its impression on us—and thereby its meaning—muted.

Conversely, our appreciation of an artwork can be hindered by its overt meaning. The late, great Marjorie Perloff, in her last book of literary criticism, Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics (2021), offers a remarkable close reading of T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” from his own final poetry volume, Four Quartets (1943). A lover of Eliot’s early poems, Perloff previously found the Quartets “too contrived in their exposition of Christian doctrine.” Through comparing a manuscript draft of the opening verse from “Little Gidding” to the published poem, detecting in the latter how “every phoneme, every morpheme, word, phrase, rhythm, and syntactic contour has been chosen with an eye to creating a brilliant verbal, visual, and sound structure,” she locates in its aesthetics the poem’s enduring power. Though he barely changes the passage’s semantic meaning, Eliot so modifies its “aural effects” as to elevate the poem to a state of “distinction and authority.”6 His amendments bring the Muse’s music to our ears.

This approach to poetry is entirely concerned with aesthetic sensitivity. In her introduction, Perloff all-too-patiently dismisses the conflation of her “micropoetics” close reading with the outdated methods of New Criticism.7 Why the New Critics are still invoked—why that half-century-dead horse continues to be flogged—in order to write off lovers of art is no mystery. Only those half-numb can be so knowing. For reasons of their own insecurities, many simply cannot countenance art’s autonomy. The rest of us, with the days we’re given, seek out traces of the Muse.

This is the second installment of a two-part essay. Read “Muse among the Drafts: Part I,” about Sandro Botticelli’s Saint Sebastian, here.

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P.S., Look out for the new issue of Liberties (amazingly orange cover), in which I have five poems. Me right before Vendler on Whitman, ha! Here is one:

Saint Sebastian by Sandro Botticelli is the first superlative nude in the history of Western painting.1 No male figure in art could be said to be more beautiful than Botticelli’s saint. His beauty is haunting—which is to say, he is more than beautiful. An artwork may be supremely beautiful and utterly forgettable. What is it about this painting that is haunting?

It was hung on January 10, the saint’s feast day, 1474, inside the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Florence, a short walk from the neighbourhood where Botticelli was born, died, was buried, and, not counting his year in Rome painting the walls of the Sistine Chapel, lived his entire life. Its subject was immensely popular in art throughout Europe at the time. Legend held that Sebastian, a praetorian guard in the Roman army, was sentenced by Diocletian to death by arrow-fire for his faith and conversion of soldiers and prisoners under his watch. The saint’s cult arose in the fourth century; he would come to be worshipped as a protector against the plague. By the time of Botticelli’s commission, veneration of the saint was at its peak. Thousands of Sebastians would be painted for churches and chapels over the next two centuries.

A hundred years earlier, a new altarpiece at Florence Cathedral depicted the saint surrounded by archers, his body—wretchedly, though hardly realistically—pierced all over with arrows. Artists by this time were portraying Sebastian nude and at the scene of his martyrdom, but the impersonality of the medieval saint lingers into the fourteenth century.2 In the Early Renaissance, Botticelli’s elders typically represent Sebastian accepting his persecution willfully or passively. He gazes attentively up at the Lord in the large left panel of Piero’s Misericordia polyptych; in a fresco by Gozzoli—painted, though only nine years before Botticelli’s work, in an altogether late-Gothic style—he appears unbothered, as in a Crivelli altarpiece; appropriate to his figurine-like body is his stunned and distant expression in a triptych by the Bellinis.

Of course Sebastians of the Renaissance are classically beautiful: the god Apollo, after a long millennium, returned. The saint’s physique and face now take on differing characters. Typically he looks heavenward, whether in contemplation (Perugino), wistfulness (Antonello), or longing (Leonardo); in suffering (Mantegna’s Vienna and Louvre Sebastians) or dreadful supplication (Signorelli, Pollaiuolo brothers, Il Sodoma). Otherwise he looks off elsewhere3—his bearing one of terrible sadness, in Foppa; of heroic struggle, in Titian; of resignation, in Durer; but also, conversely, of innocent and elegant indifference in paintings by Cima.4 During the Counter-Reformation, worshippers become newly intimate with Sebastian, who suffers now in a state of ecstasy. He is defiant in a late Titian, wholly transcendent in a Tanzio. The fact of his being tied up becomes the pretext for sensational displays of the male body in works by El Greco, Rubens, and Reni.5

Botticelli’s saint has a quality none of these paintings share. Compared with the one-man melodramas of the Baroque, his Sebastian should appear sedate. Instead, after those he strikes us only more intensely. Comparison with other paintings shows mainly what he is not. What is that unforgettable quality in him? The question we should be asking is, What hand did the Muse have in Saint Sebastian? Botticelli’s drawing made in preparation for the painting reveals it. Looking between the artist’s draft and his completed work, we see exactly how the Muse guided Sandro Botticelli.

The study is on a sheet roughly 20 centimetres long, a tenth the size of the two-metre-tall painting. Different attributions for the drawing were proposed in the twentieth century; it was long thought to have been copied from Saint Sebastian and was recognized only recently as a preparatory study by the artist.6 To render the figure’s anatomy, Botticelli has used two materials and techniques: metalpoint, for outlining the body’s contours, and white-gouache shading, for its muscular definition. Light strikes from the left, accentuating the torso’s vertical plane. You could mistake it for a drawing after a lost Greek bronze.

Saint Sebastian has a sculptural character owing to this same gorgeous interplay of lighting and physique. What the painting does not share with the drawing is the charge of the earlier figure’s pose. From the hips down, their forms are similar. Above the hips, the drawn figure—unlike the painted—is straining, possibly in pain. His wrists are held higher against his back, with radiating effects: The arms bend more, the back arches, the chest juts out, the muscles tense, the shoulders slant at an angle, and the whole body adopts a pronounced contrapposto. Absent any details showing the figure as bound and wounded, the pose is almost exhibitionistic.

Here is where the Muse intervened.

Everything about Botticelli’s Sebastian depends on his stance not being one of physical tension. Unlike almost every Saint Sebastian of the Renaissance and Baroque, he looks out at us directly. There is no shame in his face—nor is there humility, provocation, yearning, or pride. Imagine, now, that cocked head on the posturing body of the drawing. His whole demeanor would shift: The heavy-lidded eyes and prominent jaw would appear conceited. That unreadable face we know, the face we cannot forget, would be suddenly legible: an audacious, proud face. Had the artist painted the saint’s upper body as he sketched it, Sebastian would be another man entirely. He would be posing before an audience. Like all posers, a desire for the viewer’s attention and approval would animate him.

The haunting figure of the painting does not perform for an imagined audience. It would never occur to Sebastian to wonder what we think of him. The Muse understood this—and under her direction, the artist diverged from the straining pose of his earlier study. For his gaze to hold us as it does, Sebastian could not be posturing. Only the noble body in repose could have been married to that face.7

On account of his classical beauty, Saint Sebastian has been called the first heir to Donatello’s bronze David, sculpted some thirty or forty years earlier.8 I believe the nudes are equals less because they share some uncommon measure of beauty, and both manifest a reverence for the human form not seen since antiquity, but more fundamentally because each is one of those inexplicable beings, in art as in life, that is the total embodiment of an attitude.

Botticelli’s Sebastian is the embodiment of self-possession. Every element of him communicates this. He has to look us in the eye. His expression, the Muse knew, must be permitted to convey nothing but that quiet, passionate confidence. He is not some Stoic who overcomes his suffering through calculated reason, and is not distractedly indifferent like the saints of Piero and Cima and Perugino. Rather, he is the supreme individual who takes no special interest in the self or the self’s suffering. No other figure in art is more at odds with our performative, traumatized time. Sebastian’s unforgettable attitude, transmitted to us through his face and comportment, is of complete self-possession, as like a god.

This is the first installment of a two-part essay. “Muse among the Drafts: Part II,” on Matisse, T. S. Eliot, and others, will post two weeks from today.

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While I work on my next Substack essay, on the Epicureanism of the aesthete, allow me to briefly share two recent publications.

A poem of mine titled “Rough Slabs of Jade” appears in the current (November 23, 2023) issue of The New York Review of Books. It can be read online, though the formatting there is off. If you aren’t a print subscriber, consider picking up the issue.

For the web-based journal of NYC independent movie theatre Metrograph, I wrote a little essay on a short film by the experimental filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh. Metrograph, if you don’t know it, is one of the great new institutions of our time: consistently excellent programming, fine restaurant, a streaming library full of treasures.

Sometime in the new year, too, I will have a suite of five poems out in the journal Liberties—also one of our great new institutions. I hope you’ll look out for those.

Published today in Tablet magazine is a new essay by me on the incidental, noninherent relation between politics and art. You can read it here (no paywall). An excerpt:

“All art is political,” a notion with which we are bludgeoned, derives from two facts of formidable substance: that (i) artworks are produced by and exist for people, and that (ii) wherever there are people, there are politics. Gut bacteria also are present wherever there are people, though are we advised less frequently to seek in poems and sculptures hard truths about the microbiome.

The essay’s definition of politics will be too narrow for some; “the business of governing the polis” is not what they mean by the term. In cultural spheres a broader working definition, broad to the point of total nebulousness, is operative. Politics are relational, speculative, a matter of being and becoming. Politics is about power.

How political subject matters are treated in art is the topic at issue, but readers of a certain academic disposition will counter that artworks’ forms, no less than their contents, have politics. Whitman’s use of parataxis—his long lines within and across which nouns, the people and places and things of the world, are granted equal importance—is a rejection of hierarchy. (They are called subordinating conjunctions for a reason.) Leaves of Grass, the argument follows, is formally democratic. Literary artists who abstain from capitalizing or punctuating do so, we have been told, as an expression of their radical politics. The great Catherine Liu recently recalled the scholarly-artistic trend of associating narrative closure with authoritarianism (persons who like the former are said to love the latter).

As an exercise, analogizing the forms taken by artworks to forms of social arrangement can yield some passably entertaining results, if you go for that sort of thing. Academics, it should be remembered, are no different from the man in the street. They will find a way to talk about what they want to talk about.

On the question of art’s political efficacy, the poet George Oppen was honest as few artists are today. A man, and a poet, of rare integrity, Oppen in 1933 joined the American Communist Party and thereafter ceased writing. Along with his wife, Mary, Oppen gave his time and energies over to organizing for worker’s rights in New York; as a poet, he refused to produce propaganda for the Party. (“To use verse for the purpose [of politics], as everyone perfectly well knows, is merely excruciating,” he would later write.) By the early forties, at odds with CPUSA’s activities and principles, Oppen left his job as a toolmaker and mechanic to enlist in the army. He fought in France and Germany, including at the Battle of the Bulge, and was seriously wounded by flying shrapnel—he survived and would receive a Purple Heart for his service. In 1950, under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee for their prewar political activism, George and Mary, along with their ten-year-old daughter, left the United States for Mexico, where they remained for eight years. Only on returning home, in 1958, did Oppen return to poetry.

If you decide to do something politically, you do something that has political efficacy. And if you decide to write poetry, then you write poetry, not something that you hope, or deceive yourself into believing, can save people who are suffering. —George Oppen, 1969 interview

Oppen’s maintaining that his commitments to poetry and to politics were separate did not stop his acolytes—poets of the next generation who established Oppen’s place in the American canon—from deeming his poetics as political. That he did not write poetry for a quarter century has even been deemed political. For Michael Davidson, Oppen’s “silence was political in that it represented the inability of art to provide an adequate image of human suffering.” Davidson’s definition of political is, I fear, too nuanced for me to grasp. Eliot Weinberger states his opinion absent any underlying reasoning: “Oppen’s silence was political and not personal, ideological and not ‘writer’s block.’” Little can be gained from disputing such claims. I would simply restate my argument in the essay, that to situate all human thought and belief, utterance and action, nonutterance and inaction(!), on a political axis is to misapprehend the full (and finally unknowable) scope of our nature.

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Elsewhere in his otherwise wonderful preface to Oppen’s New Collected Poems, Weinberger offers an example of the political force exerted by the poet’s compact verses:

All of those elders [Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, Lorine Niedecker, Louis Zukofsky, Carl Rakosi] enlarged the possibilities of poetry . . . but only Oppen, among them, spoke directly to the political consciousness and the political crisis of the time. In 1968, amidst the powerful (and still powerful) overtly political poems being written by Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, and so many others, it was Oppen’s Of Being Numerous that, from its opening words, struck me, still a teenager, as the poetry that had captured the interior essence of where we are, who we are, right now:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

There are things
We live among ‘and to see them
Is to know ourselves’.

These lines are now philosophical, but they were once political, for then the things we lived among included the first televised scenes of war and the photographs of napalmed children: Was seeing them seeing ourselves? Over and over Oppen emphasized that the function of poetry was a test of truth; he may have been the last writer in the West to use the word “truth” without irony.

Weinberger recognizes that his politicized interpretation of Oppen’s lines was bound to his and his peers’ context. For a time, the poem was read politically. But even then, those readers who understood the lines as speaking to their political moment believed the lines to be philosophically true: The poem, for them, expressed a truth about society and the self that—for them, again—had political consequences. The political reading was always derivative of the philosophical reading.

One might say that Oppen is an important poet still because the United States is always at war, its citizenry always implicated in the bloodstained project of imperialism. Or, instead, one could say Oppen is important now as then because his worldview, like that of all great poets, is worth the effort of meeting and challenging, taking from and being burdened with.

Click here to read “Why Good Politics Makes for Bad Art.”

No other word so characterizes the confusion of our age as progress. Progress is made by the hour—new technologies, terminology, shibboleths, identities are born. Those developing and coining and cultivating the new see themselves as making advancements, as irrefutably improving on things. The advent of the new that is necessarily better by virtue of its novelty: This is progress.

Art lovers know best the fundamental apartness of newness and improvement. They know “the obvious fact,” as did T. S. Eliot, “that art never improves.” Eliot was struck by the fact, as Hugh Kenner tells it, while standing in a cave in southern France, looking upon drawn black lines of magnesium oxide that form the shapes of roaming bison. What has been drawn since then, in any medium upon any surface, with more exquisite sensitivity? The artist had stood in the poet’s place some thirteen thousand years earlier.

It would be nonsense to say that Manet—because later, because he depicted scenes closer to those we know as modern life, because he made rougher and bolder an already loosening brush stroke—is a better painter than Titian, or the free verse of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” more advanced than the terza rima of “Ode to the West Wind.” The history of art, rather than a story of improvement, is one of development, change, and genuine innovation. Aesthetic leaps, small and large, are real. To recognize them where they occur is to be an aesthete—to know great artworks, however familiar they might seem, as fundamentally miraculous, the most uninevitable of all phenomena.

When in the early fourteenth century Giotto painted with light and shadow the deep folds of her blue robe hanging weightily—realistically—between the Madonna’s knees, he was sloughing off the Byzantine convention, orthodox for hundreds of years, of two-dimensional damp-fold drapery. Giotto’s developments upon that wooden panel, subtle and profound, cannot be explained away as adaptations of or play on another artist’s style, nor as the expected byproduct of social, technological, or even psychological change in the period. He was not carried off the shoulders of his predecessors and contemporaries on a wind bound inexorably for the aesthetic magnificence of the sixteenth century. Though Giotto’s innovations eventuated in High Renaissance art, they no more had to, in some predestined sense, than his hand had to dip his brush in that dark blue tempera and apply the pigment as he precisely did.  

Novelty alone makes for dryly interesting art—worth discussing once, never returning to again—not masterpieces. But the masterpiece is always that which distinguishes itself from other works not by degrees but fully, in kind. It is a singularity, not a variation. How does the singularity come about?

*

We have masterpieces because the gods will it. Throughout history, artists have admitted and refused to admit their role. When the gods go unnamed, various metaphors are cited in their place: The artist has been given gifts, or has acted as a medium, or has availed herself of chance or the unconscious. But these are metaphors, all pointing to the same reality. Across art forms, great works have been made to exist by artists acting with an agency lent them, temporarily, briefly, by the Muses. Aesthetic leaps are a consequence of the Muses’ inspiration.

The visionary is another metaphor. An artist with vision can see through the world as it is, past the art surrounding and preceding him, and then realize (make real, tangible and visible) what others could not see. His is a sight in excess of human vision. More accurately, the visionary is an artist whom the Muses routinely visit.

Inevitably, artists implore the gods. Yet their appearances are spontaneous, unpredictable. They cannot be commanded, just as the artist cannot command the right words to fill the page, no more than she can command a snow leopard before her.

*

They are there in the name of those institutions that collect and display for the public our great visual artworks. From Mοῦσᾰ (Moûsa), “Muse” in English, comes Μουσεῖον (Mouseîon), “the seat, or shrine, of the Muses.” The museum is a temple to the goddesses of the arts.

Who are these gods? Accounts among the poets differ.1 Throughout antiquity, most commonly there are held to be nine Muses, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, goddess of memory. Different art forms fall under the auspices of each Muse.

Further details about the nine can be catalogued. What matters is how exactly the gods preside over the arts. Pindar’s invocations are varied: The lyric poet assists the Muse, receives her aid, is her herald, is her partner in verse. Appealing to the Muse for knowledge is one of Homer’s motifs. Such references are in no small part rhetorical, bound by tradition to the poet’s genre. But Hesiod in the Theogony is our guiding source here, his description of the spontaneous encounter between artist and Muse the earliest we have:

And they once taught Hesiod the art of singing verse,
While he pastured his lambs on holy Helicon’s slopes.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And they gave me a staff, a branch of good sappy laurel,
Plucking it off, spectacular. And they breathed into me
A voice divine, so I might celebrate past and future.

Here, near the beginning of this 2,700-year-old epic poem, we meet inspiration with all its meaning intact. The poet has been granted a new voice, verbally reanimated, by the Muses. Hesiod’s language is Ionic Greek. What has made its way to us is the Latin: in + spirare (from spiritus, “breath, or spirit”) becomes “into” + “(to) breathe.” The gods inspire the artist; they breathe into him their song.

Of course, this is no longer inspiration’s commonplace meaning. The Muses’ act has long been secularized out of all recognition. Inspiration is an industry, catering to all. Events, images, and especially human stories (of success, of hardships overcome) inspire individuals and the public en mass. There’s a diffuse, ongoing sense to all this inspiration. It hangs in the air, clings to those passing through, and trails behind them like perfume.

Even for artists today, inspiration is markedly secularized. “This poem was inspired by . . .” something witnessed, a cryptic element in another artist’s work, historical facts, a life experience, the sky at dawn. Or even more diffusely: “I felt inspired today.” Secular inspiration generates the very impetus for artworks to be made.

The gods operate otherwise. Inspiration, source of the aesthetic leap, is bound to artistic process. For the Muse to lend her agency to him, the artist must already be at work. Her voice, for a moment, for some hours, replaces that voice already singing.

*

What of the atheist artist, who denies the gods? I write of the Muses as real. But even the most trenchantly irreligious artists, those who would scoff at my terms, have recourse to concepts of a requisite power outside their control—a power clearly analogous to the Muses’.

I always think of myself not so much as a painter but as a medium for accident and chance. . . . By all this I hope you won’t get the idea that I think I’m inspired—I just think that I receive.

Seemingly out of modesty, the painter Francis Bacon rejected the notion of inspiration. He spoke fluently about the internal conditions necessary to art making: the forces of will and of artistic instinct (inexplicable, though to some extent cultivated). An external, third force—that of chance, or accident2—was a recurrent subject of Bacon’s engrossing conversations on his painting practice:

As one conditions oneself by time and by working to what happens, one becomes more alive to what the accident has proposed for one. . . . I feel that anything I’ve ever liked at all has been the result of an accident on which I have been able to work.

Your critical side comes into play and you begin to construct on this basis which seems to have been organically, by chance, given to you.

Bacon spoke repeatedly of the images that his paintings manifested having been “handed” to him by chance. “You can’t order chance,” he asserted. But on more than one occasion he suggests that the medium of chance is in fact paint itself, which can assert its own intention over and above the artist’s: “I find that if I am on my own I can allow the paint to dictate to me.”

Bacon is no crude materialist. Though he disclaims inspiration, as is his prerogative, he speaks of paint as though it were imbued with something like an animistic force, an autonomous will that guides the artist. Choosing to acknowledge that will as the Muse’s is our own prerogative.

*

The gods are not slandered; they are utterly forgotten. To wave a hand and attribute this fact to secularism’s ascent over the past two centuries is inadmissible. Advanced over decades and from various directions, campaigns to demystify art—to make art legible, unmysterious, or more accessible—have obscured its nature, perversely. Those most involved in arts and culture have led the campaigns.

There is the grinding insistence on artworks as social artifacts, pure products of their contexts. Academics have long trained students in lifting veils. For them, ideology—not the Muse—makes a mouthpiece of the artist. Jed Perl, our most important living art critic, wrote a quarter century ago of how a manifestation of the contextualist approach—“the assumption . . . that art is born, lives, and dies in the public sphere”—had brought about a state of “systemic crisis” in the contemporary art and museum worlds. The crisis stands; similar crises afflict the performing arts and book publishing. As Perl explains, contextualists do not believe in art’s freestanding value, since “the very idea of value is regarded as a social construct.”

There is the new sentimentalism, an especially crass fixation on “beauty” as the determining factor of great art. No one’s diet is as bland as the sentimentalist’s. Devoted to drab naturalism, he confuses technical precision for genius and simplifies aesthetic experience to the point of gross distortion. The supposed ugliness of modernism he scorns—yet somehow the great strains of bawdiness and perversion, of the menacing and horrific, that course through the Western canon have evaded this noble defender of tradition. He is, in other words, parochial, ignorant. By refusing to recognize the tradition of aesthetic innovation that constitutes the history of art, the sentimentalist in his own way denies the Muse.

There is the profaning of the Muse herself. Great significance is assigned to the real-life “artist’s muse,” a subject beloved of film, radio, and print. Whether an artist referred to his muse as such is irrelevant. Too little attention has been paid to her life and her talents, too much to the work of the man she inspired. The Muse, of course, bears no relation to this living figure and her inspiration. Commonly, those lacking all aesthetic sensitivity fix on the secular muse as a way to wrangle distracting trivia from an artwork. They can talk about this woman instead of talking about art.  

*

But the demystification campaign that has been waged most urgently, most gravely, most unremittingly, is that against the dirty myth of artistic genius.

Tracts against genius are remarkable in their similarity: the strident tone, the idle prose. Arguments are not made in these tracts. Typically, they call upon an essay published half a century ago by the art historian Linda Nochlin. “Genius” is gendered, obscures privilege, and is therefore fraudulent, because Linda Nochlin told us so.3

Underlying the question about woman as artist, then, we find the myth of the Great Artist—subject of a hundred monographs, unique, godlike—bearing within his person since birth a mysterious essence . . . called Genius or Talent, which, like murder, must always out, no matter how unlikely or unpromising the circumstances.

The scholar does not make the case that works of artistic genius are nonexistent. The myth she points to is, in fact, not genius precisely but “the apparently miraculous, non-determined and a-social nature of artistic achievement.” She calls on her colleagues to be contextualists, to concern themselves with artists’ “pre-conditions for achievement”—instead, presumably, of artists’ actual achievements.

I see no reason whatsoever why, in the twenty-first century, belief in the reality of genius should carry with it belief that the genius artist was destined to be such; could never be thwarted; required neither exposure to art nor training nor certain freedoms (some borne of will and disposition, some socially granted) of spirit, body, and mind. Why would the Muses visit just anyone? By their repeated visits, the gods make geniuses of those artists whose discipline, nurtured skill, and dedication are unquestionable.

Artist biopics, trashy and fun, keep representations of artistic genius alive. Among the highly credentialled, relatively cultured population, the myth of genius has largely stuck. Like the canon itself, genius is taken to be a construct—a tool of power. For many within the arts, for some artist themselves, believing in genius is at best uncouth, a mark of unsophistication. It is at worst morally suspect.

*

A fair response to my account could cite the art market as proof that belief in genius, far from being undone, has over the last fifty years been consolidated. The basis on which artworks go up at auction for hundreds of millions rather than hundreds is their authenticity, an absence of doubt about the maker’s identity. An Agnes Martin copied in another’s hand will not do. Furthermore, the valuation of masterpieces tends in one direction only; genius is reified with every fall of the auctioneer’s gavel.

In truth, the market’s perversity is all the more reason to affirm the singularity of works of genius—specifically, to assert their concrete aesthetic worth over their abstract monetary value. For the market to hold, as in principle it does, that one Mondrian is the equivalent of a dozen Frankenthalers is ludicrous. Because the gods willed them to exist, the greatest artworks belong not in private homes and storage vaults but on display, for all, at shrines to the Muses—in museums.  

*

That no great artist is wholly responsible for his or her work is today a truism. We continue to be informed, by pedants who think the idea somehow unstale, that artists are influenced; that they borrow and steal; that they require innate talent, yes, but equally encouragement, ambition, training, opportunity, resources, and time.  

It amounts to an odd formula, this list of requirements. Here the input: And the output is art. It should come as no surprise that even serious lovers of art have met the prospect of a future in which AI replaces artists with defensiveness and concern. If artwork now means “the output of one for whom the listed conditions are met,” an artificially intelligent machine could well be an artist.

Briefly, two reasons why AI art has been treated with any seriousness at all—albeit erroneously—are worth elaborating. First, a total confusion of categories plagues our culturally illiterate time. Parallel to the mistaking of pop culture for all culture has been the inflating of “artist” to include illustrators and digital designers, people who make not artworks but rather visual commercial products. These artists whose images are informational and embellishing; whose work appears in ads and articles, on websites, posters, and book covers; who make cartoons from the sacred text of Linda Nochlin—these artists will absolutely lose their livelihoods to AI. Writers with equivalent careers—producers of “copy,” op-eds, pop culture reviews, and genre fiction—will also be replaced. They should have our sympathy, and we should not mistake them for artists.

The second reason, more pertinent, is that postmodernism’s rejection of originality, its disbelief in the possibility for newness in art, has been blithely accepted. Once this coarse proposition is taken for fact, it follows that all art is understood as assemblage, juxtaposition, appropriation, remixing. And of what, and what only, is AI capable? Its standard request is to render, in either image or text, a subject x in the style of y. From the internet, the AI culls preexisting contents (subjects) and forms (styles), and reassembles, juxtaposes, appropriates, and remixes them.

And if we simply . . . do not subscribe to postmodernism’s theory of art? Then, the limitations of AI are immediately apparent. It will never produce anything of novel aesthetic value, anything remotely approximating great art. The Muse cannot breathe her inspiration into a machine.

*

It would also be a vanity to suggest that what one does oneself might help to thicken life. But, of course, we do know that our lives have been thickened by great art. One of the very few ways in which life has been really thickened is by the great things that a few people have left. —Francis Bacon, interview with David Sylvester

We need only survey the state of the arts to deduce there is nothing inevitable about masterpieces. Decades of social, technological, and psychological change precede us. The future for art, if works of genius are to be realized, depends on art being remystified, both in the public psyche and in the minds of artists. Despite our longstanding misapprehension of art’s nature, the gods, as Ezra Pound knew, have never left us.

If you do not hold that your life has been thickened by great art, I will not attempt to convince you it has. One knows only for oneself. Paradoxically, in recalling the Muses, art lovers are brought back to the significance of the individual artist and her process—to the artwork as a result, always and ultimately, of the most passionate and dedicated human endeavor. The Muse returns us to the nonnegotiable humanness of art.

The unappeal of op-ed writing is at least twofold. First, here is a writer who presupposes that her own opinion on events from only a moment ago, the circumstances of which she might have no broader understanding about, is so insightful as to be very interesting to strangers. Unless she writes with panache or is extraordinarily wise, hers is not a sensibility that appeals. Second, here is a written thing characterized by its very disposability. It is mass-market writing that expires upon being read.

I've no commentary to offer on the mess that was made two weeks ago at the National Gallery. But in room 43 of the museum that morning, in a voice posher than mine, a question rang out—a question so amazingly oblivious, on hearing it I was taken immediately out of the context of its utterance, and I thought instead about other matters, and that I might write on them, briefly.

“What is worth more, art or life?” To call absurd the dichotomy this question puts forth would be an affront to the glories of absurdism. Yet we recognize the dichotomy, which persists. We meet it in various forms, such as the idea of art (whether in the making or in the enjoying) as escapism. There is the world that we live in, with all its attendant troubles; then there’s this other place, where we can vacation for a stint—the world of art. 

Last month I started and finished one novel, J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus (2013). Episodic and dialogue-heavy, the form of the book makes it appropriate for reading with a new baby in the home. A description of only what is strange about the novel would catalogue most of what it contains. The label “dystopian” or “speculative” fiction, however, does not adequately account for its strangeness.

There’s the time and place of the story, which do not map onto a time or place we know of. There’s the society our protagonist, Simón, finds himself in, in which a man can be safe, and treated well by others, and have his material needs largely met, and still feel dehumanized. Emotionally, carnally, Simón is ill-suited to this world, as most of us would be, ourselves.

There is the frustrating passivity of his peers. But then Simón’s own psyche is oddly stunted. He indicates little distress, and no pain, at having lost his former life. Hauntingly, he has the “memory of having a memory.” As the story progresses, his behaviour too becomes harder to understand. His actions and speech make a kind of logical sense to the reader—until they do not. The same is of course true of any well-established character in a novel: We feel a character is real when he is not always, or even often, entirely rational. But with such oscillations—passionate, reasonable, patient; irresponsible, indignant, resigned—Simón by the novel’s end seems entirely lacking a state of equilibrium.

There is the staged, almost puppet-show, quality of every scene; Coetzee’s stringent prose; the explicitly philosophical content; the form of the Platonic dialogue that many conversations take. Work, relationships, sustenance, desire: All appear here in conversation not as the stuff of individuals’ lives, but as topics in the abstract, the nonstuff of metaphysics. It is why all the characters can be mildly infuriating. It’s also why, inevitably, the novel reads like an allegory.

But I don’t think it is one. The provocation of the title is insistent. The boy, David, like his ward Simón, proves to be a capricious character—on the one hand, ordinary and spoiled; on the other hand, brilliant. Whether or not David is divine seems to be a central question, and so every incident involving him in the book’s second half wants to be read as suggesting an answer.

What is the significance of the child’s attitude to mathematics, language, mortality, brotherhood? What does it all mean? And what is the novel saying about delusion, family, imagination, faith? What’s the broader meaning of all this?

While reading and on finishing The Childhood of Jesus, I felt a low hum of excitement and quietly frustrated. A week or two later, thinking back on the novel, my frustration had gone and I felt quietly thrilled. In this work so concerned with signification, with the gaps between words and ideas and the experiences and things to which they relate, my difficulty in knowing the significance of any one event or conversation to the wider story—my difficulty, put another way, in discerning the allegory—no longer bothered me. On reflection, it’s an artwork that helps me articulate for myself something difficult to express about being alive.

The ultimate strangeness of the novel is its indeterminacy. A reader cannot say what is and is not important in it. Besides all the talking, dramatic and consequential and sometimes implausible things happen. Yet on the scale of a character’s predicament, suffering a near-fatal workplace injury is not necessarily any more significant than one particular instance of unblocking a toilet.

Again, this is not undifferentiated writing. Mundane conversation follows the theoretical or profound. Quite bizarre and domestic events occur in turn. That which feels major or pivotal in the moment, in the reading—central to the novel’s meaning or allegory—really might not be. A small remark could be more important.

I’ve no interpretation of the novel to offer but instead the strange fact it held up to me about living: the fact that any moment’s significance doesn’t arrive then, with the moment. Whether something that happens or is said will echo through your life, accruing meaning and importance or simply remaining in memory, as that which can be revisited, be known again—whether a moment has significance is not, in the moment, yours to know.

Of all the forms and mediums of art, fiction is, for me, that which at its best brings my attention to the strangeness of living. I love many Modernist novels for this reason. The great invention of the stream-of-consciousness mode is that it captured in language the mind’s movement as it feels to have a mind and to be in the world, as one always is, going about one’s business. Stream of consciousness is the true form of realism in fiction.

I’m not putting forth any rules about great literature here, simply making observations. Just as a fictional work employing stream of consciousness may well be overblown, so the indeterminacy I’m ascribing to The Childhood of Jesus could, in a different writer’s hands, result in a tedious, underwritten novel. Specific evaluations of artworks (“this one work is extraordinary because”) are typically worthwhile; generic statements about art (“novels that do such and such succeed”) are always suspect.

Those aspects of Coetzee’s novel another reader might take issue with—its indeterminacy, its elusive allegory, its strangeness—for me are not faults, no more than Van Gogh’s all-too-excessive use of paint is in any way a fault.

Since the last post here, I gave birth and have been occupied with loving and getting to know my child. Though this Substack is intended for essays on the arts, recently I’ve been writing only poetry—have had, for a stretch, no inclination towards prose. As a one-off, please indulge me: a new poem, and after it, an older one.

Latch

I

Do you know the way to the feast?

You who have read 
all the books, read each word 
in every one, hungry for what 
cannot be found there.

You who have touched 
every other brick, 
placed shard and shard in place, 
hoarded the years, left no stone 
unclassified, 
waiting for the earth to be more solid. 
Is it yet? 

How overaware you seem,
forever naming each thing: subject 

subject 
object object, or 
neither, or both. But what 
of the feast, meanwhile, and being there?


II

Two parts and not one
of us thinks about the where, and how, and how
long for. She needs feeding and so the baby
is fed, is fastened, 
fastens herself to her mother. 
Having a body takes practice. 
Instinct does not preclude bewilderment, no. Here 
	bewilderment follows it, close, 
a breath away only. 
Complaints, coaxings, her hand
or hands interfering,
insistent nipple, insistent
tiny mouth,
our few square 
inches of chaos, 
of soft incoherence, are quieted 
when baby at once latches. 

More than once, 
one breast impossible with milk, exorbitantly full, 
wet from a shower, needy, naked, I’ve rushed to her.

The Rocks

You cannot make a metaphor of war. 
I will be here forever, saying so. Having come from the place 
	where bones melt 
how could I long for 
anywhere, telling you with my straight rock face 
poetry should take us 
away from here. 
And what would I long for anyway, an earth more habitable to rocks? 
The dead need us here, loving them. 
Why else do we sit all day in the sun, feeling its rays, warming, lifeless, 
	if not for them. 
Could you love all the dead? 
Ask us why there are no scenes in nature. You cannot count 
the directions of our love. 

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A long-form essay originally meant for this Substack was published today in Tablet magazine. I hope you will read it. My subject is the visual art world’s ruinous and indiscriminate reframing of the artwork as a message-delivery system, an approach to art that can be summarized as follows: “One visits a museum seeking not aesthetic experiences but the feeling of knowingness—that placid state of mind, the elevated station. If one gets Rothko, and Sargent, and Nevelson, and Brancusi, one has them. Now, on to the new acquisitions.” I describe the utilitarian turn taken by institutional bureaucrats within museums and galleries, universities, the art media, and the nonprofit, for-profit, and state-run agencies and foundations that fund the arts, and offer one explanation for how the great debasing of art has come about. In illustration of the state of things, I describe two recently mounted major exhibitions: Hogarth and Europe at Tate Britain, which closed in March, and Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast, currently on display at the Met in New York.

Here’s the opening of the essay:

Artworks are not to be experienced but to be understood: From all directions, across the visual art world’s many arenas, the relationship between art and the viewer has come to be framed in this way. An artwork communicates a message, and comprehending that message is the work of its audience. Paintings are their images; physically encountering an original is nice, yes, but it’s not as if any essence resides there. Even a verbal description of a painting provides enough information for its message to be clear.

Read it in full here (no paywall).

A companion essay, “On Craft; or, When Museums Sold Their Souls,” is forthcoming.

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For as long as it has been articulated, the concept of “art for art’s sake” has been dismissed as degenerate and trivial. But is it obsolete? Ask the question of artists today and the response will most likely be equivocal; ask it within an arts institution and the answer will almost certainly be “Yes: dead and gone.”

That we are living through a period in which the mainstream attitude toward the arts is stridently utilitarian is undeniable. An artwork’s social, political, or moral function is seen to be its essence. The expectation that artworks instruct, that they generate audiences with commitments and produce results for the present, is widely operative. Critics bestow the words “relevant” and “urgent” on books, films, and exhibitions as the highest praise. One might consider the postponing of painter Philip Guston’s retrospective in 2020 by four world-class museums, on the basis of the artist’s own political beliefs not being made explicit enough in the show, as emblematic of the time. Earlier that year, chastised by a swath of the poetry community for being “unfit to respond to the crises of our times” (crises including the “genocide against Black people”), the Poetry Foundation solemnly apologized for its “institutional silence,” pushed out its president and board chairman, announced a five-step process to addressing its “debts to Black poets,” and pledged to redirect funds to a host of social justice efforts. Writers and artists today seeking private funding would be wise to frame their work as attending to issues such as inequality, incarceration, repair, activism, and the violence of U.S. imperialism, judging by those who were named 2021 MacArthur Foundation fellows. 

The current priorities of arts institutions are signaled in part by their recent hires and the statements that accompany them. Leading art school RISD has selected for its new president the diversity, equity, and inclusion head of Boston University for her “deep commitment to leading change”: “Art, education, and equity and justice are the three foundational focuses of my life,” she said in the announcement. The Serpentine Gallery’s new director of curatorial affairs has pointed to the role of museums in “today’s imperative to attend to the most vulnerable and disenfranchised in society while dismantling white supremacy.” Two newly hired deputy directors at the Brooklyn Museum will further the institution’s “social-change efforts” and “develop a sustained, multiyear strategy to engage audiences around issues . . . including mass criminalization and climate change.” The museum also has a new president, who stated her commitments upon her appointment: “From a very young age I dreamed of leading a cultural institution, not only for my love of the arts but for the power of the arts to enact social change.” Curator of the 2023 Liverpool Biennial has been chosen on the basis of her “longstanding curatorial concerns around care and repair.” A recent profile in ARTnews of Elizabeth Alexander, head of the Mellon Foundation, says she has been “transforming . . . the nation’s largest funder of the arts and humanities, since she became president in 2018, by [in Alexander’s words] ‘doing all the work, every penny, through a social justice lens.’”

* 

Our utilitarian era, as “change”-oriented as it is, must be historicized. Little about the imperatives newly governing the contemporary art and book worlds is new. The utilitarians are not so inventive. Throughout the 20th century in the democratic West, art movements driven by political and social messaging in pursuit of change have enjoyed widespread popularity among the public and, sooner or later, institutional backing. What was considered valuable about individual artworks was their ability to diagnose, address, and even remedy social ills. Leftist muralists and printmakers of the thirties and feminist performance artists of the seventies have their places in the history of art. Possibly what distinguishes the status of art today is the seeming rush by institutions to align themselves with the change-demanders. But even this phenomenon—whether driven by market forces, the sincere ethical commitments of provosts and executives, or something else—is far from historically unique. The Fireside poets (Longfellow, Bryant, Holmes, and Whittier) are near equivalents to the popular political poets of today, when one looks beyond their race and gender. Both then and now, these are poets acclaimed by institutions; their faces grace magazines; they teach at private universities. These are poems of the classroom—topical, moral, frequently (in the old and new definitions of the term) abolitionist.

How best to elucidate our time, to make clear the values that are obsolete and those that are alive? Which values should we claim and promote? Art for art’s sake appears to be a thoroughly neglected concept, bordering on the taboo. Yet the history of l’art pour l’art in France is not only fascinating but notably instructive. The origins and usage of the term by artists, critics, and intellectuals from the 1810s through to the 1860s are specific to the period. But the concept itself, I posit, is not historical or antiquated but has eternal life. We are subjects of our time: Consciousness, the self, social relations are all conditioned. We require concepts for understanding ourselves and the world—including the world of art—that are particular to now, whenever now is. The contours of art for art’s sake can and should be redrawn for the present. Engaging with the various adoptions and repudiations of l’art pour l’art in 19th-century France can help us in doing so.

Lovers of art in this century: There is every reason for you to espouse art for art’s sake.

*

Coming upon a reference to how Charles Baudelaire or Arthur Rimbaud spoke disparagingly of l’art pour l’art will naturally colour a person’s feelings about the term. After all, these are two of our most aesthetically important modern poets in the art form’s genealogy, whose writings were consequential not only for the generations of French writers that followed them but also for international Modernism in the 20th century. Were Baudelaire and Rimbaud wrong? A better question is, What exactly were they criticizing?

We must go back to before either was born. Artists associated with the Romantic movement in France dominated for the first five decades of the 19th century. (Any discussion of artistic movements or groups, rather than discussion of individual artists’ projects, can obscure more than it reveals. However, throughout the 19th century French artists, especially writers, often overtly associated themselves with various groups, so some generalizations are worth making.) Romanticism in music, painting, sculpture, and literature arose during the period of social turmoil following the French Revolution and in reaction to the previous era of Neoclassicism in the arts. Romantic artists shunned the Enlightenment ideals of reason and order; many of them glorified nature. More stringent definitions are not especially helpful, but it’s fair to say that by midcentury, literary Romanticism’s abandonment of fixed forms was coupled with an embrace of personal, emotional, and politically or morally minded subject matters. With the fall of the Bourbon Restoration in 1830 and the unrest it precipitated, some Romantic writers doubled down on their commitment to serving society: George Sand championed “proletarian” literature; poet Alphonse de Lamartine entered politics and helped found the Second Republic; Victor Hugo wrote novels, poems, and plays in defense of the poor and oppressed.

Amid this era of social Romanticism, the concept of l’art pour l’art takes off. The most ardent broadcaster of the term is Théophile Gautier—on the one hand a Romantic and anticlassical writer, on the other a public opposer of utilitarianism in art, who declares in the preface to an 1835 novel, “All that is useful is ugly.” L’art pour l’art has been circulating among French litterateurs for a couple of decades, since émigré writers Madame de Staël and Benjamin Constant returned to France from Germany, bringing with them news from the German literary and philosophical scenes, including news about the latest aesthetic theories. A professor and one of de Staël’s readers, Victor Cousin visited some of those German thinkers, pored over an eclectic mix of philosophical works, and from 1818 started lecturing to huge audiences back in Paris on aesthetics and espousing l’art pour l’art: “We must have . . . art for art’s sake,” he told audiences at the Sorbonne. “The beautiful cannot be the way to what is useful, or to what is good, or to what is holy; it leads only to itself.”

By 1860 a new generation of writers—tired of Romantic lyric poetry’s preoccupation with emotional subjectivity, tired of sentimentality, and tired of the demand that literature serve society—come to align themselves with Gautier. The group calls itself le Parnasse, the Parnassians (after Mount Parnassus, home of the Muses in Greek mythology). Aesthetically, the Parnassians turn back to Neoclassicism; they embrace the strict old metrical forms over the lax prosody of Romantic verse. They write impersonal poems, precise as clear-cut gems, on the subject of beautiful things. And like Gautier, they present themselves as endorsers of art for art’s sake.

*

We come to see it is the Parnassians whom Baudelaire and Rimbaud disparage. In the Parnassian usage, the l’art pour l’art slogan has come to mean, on the one hand, an elevation of formal technique over content and, on the other, emotional vacancy. Neither Baudelaire nor Rimbaud has given his life over to poetry only to treat the art form as an arena for demonstrating skill. It is no mystery why both poets, committed as they are to the imagination, to the ecstasies and torments of the spirit, resist; why Baudelaire calls the art-for-art’s-sake school “sterile” and a “puerile utopia”; why Rimbaud can submit poems to the Parnassians at age fifteen and rail against them a year later in his lettres du voyant. To Rimbaud, the failure of contemporary verse is clear: “We require new ideas and forms of our poets.” Shunning the l’art pour l’art movement, in this period in France, is in no way equivalent to denying the autonomy of art.

*

Ah— but Baudelaire never insists on the separation of art from its social context, and Rimbaud is inspired by the Paris Commune, scholars will retort. This assertion confuses social criticism, rebellion against sexual mores, support for revolting workers, and attacks on bourgeois values with promotion of a political agenda. Neither poet in his literary works ever had anything close to an activist agenda. But such scholars also would have us think of both men as politico-aesthetic theorists first and poets second.

Deep in their ideologies, academics have long tried to explain away art for art’s sake in the period as a mistaken concept. Some, beholden to the more enervating strains of Marxist critique, have argued l’art pour l’art can be understood as market-driven, as though art is no different from journalism or factory parts. Still others have written off the Parnassian and Symbolist movements as forebears of Surrealism in their shunning of “real life”—in favour, presumably, of some other, fake sort of life. If this critique sounds resolutely utilitarian, that’s because it is. Today’s academics will tend to argue that art for art’s sake is nonviable because they are desperate to see their own work as socially responsible.

What both Baudelaire and Rimbaud do insist is that artists can take on anything as their subject matter. Today’s aesthete—the nonutilitarian lover of art—knows the significance of this imperative, without which Modernism will never go on to happen. No subject is off-limits to Baudelaire and Rimbaud! Their paying attention to marginalized figures does not make them political poets.   

*

Baudelaire:

A crowd of people think that the goal of poetry is a kind of lesson, that it must fortify the conscience, perfect social mores, and ultimately demonstrate in some way or another its utility. Poetry, provided that one is willing to descend into oneself, interrogate one’s soul, recall one’s memories of enthusiasm, has no other goal than Itself. . . . I don’t mean that poetry doesn’t ennoble our mores—let me be understood—or that its final result is not to elevate humankind above the level of vulgar interests; that would be an evident absurdity. I mean that if the poet pursues a moral goal, it diminishes his poetic power; and it would not be imprudent to bet that his work will be bad. (“Théophile Gautier” in L’Artiste, 1859)

*

L’art pour l’art is free of the Parnassian baggage for other artists. As an expression of belief in the autonomy of art, and a refusal to value art on the basis of its political, religious, or moral utility, the concept appeals to stylistically diverse writers and painters. (Asserting his commitment to social justice, Hugo in 1864 makes the rather insipid statement, “Art for art’s sake can be beautiful, but art for progress is more beautiful.”) In the visual arts, the concept is adopted particularly by those who oppose the new Realist movement, itself a turn away from Romanticism. Novelist Émile Zola, writing in 1866, invokes art for art’s sake in celebration of Édouard Manet, who is helping usher in Impressionism, the great development in painting after Realism: “One must not judge him as a moralist or as a writer; one must judge him as a painter. . . . He knows neither how to sing nor how to philosophize. He knows how to paint, and that’s it.” No moralizing veil overlays Manet’s images, which are not allegorical or drawn from history. Manet paints scenes from his social environment, but not as a documentarian. He cares about the image, the experience of beholding the image, and the paint.

A close friend of Manet’s, poet Stéphane Mallarmé comes to be closely associated with le symbolisme, France’s late 19th-century Symbolist movement. In 1891 Mallarmé will describe Symbolism’s departure from other poetic modes: The Parnassians disappoint because their poems “lack mystery; they steal from readers’ minds the delicious joy of believing that they create.” With Mallarmé, the “art for art’s sake” concept becomes articulated in the ideal of “pure” art, l’oeuvre pure. For him there are two types of language—that of “elementary discourse,” which is descriptive, utilitarian, and brute; and that of poetry, “which is primarily dream and song” and is essential.

*

“But this ‘art for art’s sake’ business did not spontaneously begin with the French,” philosophically minded critics will insist. In tracing the concept’s history, we are not helped by those thinkers who construe every noteworthy idea from 1800 onward as a bastardization of something first expressed by Immanuel Kant. Exactly how many paintings did he see in Königsberg before forming his theory of aesthetic judgment? In their visits to Germany, de Staël, Constant, and Cousin had become acquainted with aspects of Kant’s aesthetic theories, as well as those of philosophers Schiller and Schelling. This fact aside, it does not follow that any culture’s or individual’s appreciation of art necessarily owes much at all to these thinkers. Try as the art lover might, she will find Kant’s writings of little help when developing her own aesthetic sensibility. In the first place, Kant proposes in his 1790 Critique of Judgment an analysis of aesthetic judgment that is concerned not with art but instead with beauty. But we go on. For Kant, aesthetic judgments are unlike other judgments—say, about what things one likes or about what is morally good—in that aesthetic judgments are “disinterested,” meaning they are “merely contemplative” and “indifferent to the existence of the object.” The kind of pleasure one takes in beautiful things depends on the harmonious play of one’s imagination and understanding. And while beautiful things do not serve any presupposed purpose—that is, they do not serve as means to any ends—still they have the quality of “formal purposiveness.”

Why are not aesthetes drawn to unifying theories of art? you may wonder. Building on his assertion that beauty is “purposive without a purpose,” Kant goes on to relate how beautiful things are, indeed, “purposive in reference to the moral feeling.” So while it’s true that one’s aesthetic judgments are disinterested, so too is it true that engaging with art makes one grow as a moral and social being. From there, Kant goes on to argue in his closing passages for the binding together of beauty and ethics. For the individual, art—he tells us—civilizes. This dubious idea is totally alive among artists and audiences today. We hear it expressed by those novelists and filmmakers who will plainly state that their intention is to improve and educate their readers and viewers.

I hope a short, two-part retort will suffice. For Kant the faculties involved in aesthetic judgment are imagination and understanding—and not, specifically, the faculty of cognition. Whereas for the aesthete, or really anyone capable of being affected by an artwork, responding to art involves a whole range of attentivenesses, all working in combination: the spiritual, emotional, psychological, sensual, and intellectual.

Second, the person who cares about art, who has no doubt that experiences of art have made her life more worthwhile, in an instinctual way understands aesthetics not as a series of principles she holds but as an activity she carries out. It is by aesthetics that she lives her life. In comparison to her are those who don’t care about art, whose lives have not been enriched by artworks, and for whom aesthetics might at best be something of a philosophical posture.

*

Regrettably, writing in the early 20th century, Walter Benjamin misrepresented the Baudelairean figure, the modern flâneur, as one alienated by modern life. Sociologists from midcentury to the present have similarly argued that art for art’s sake reflects the alienation of the artist in bourgeois society. Baudelaire, however, wrote of the modern artist in no such way. His flâneur is explicitly not a dandy—not indifferent, not an idle wanderer—but “ruled by an insatiable passion.” His is more accurately a Nietzschean figure, a passionate lover of life.

Nietzsche himself, writing in 1888, took issue with the idea of l’art pour l’art, and in the process advanced what might be considered a different but related concept, what we might term “art for life’s sake.” In Nietzsche’s words:

The struggle against purpose in art is always a struggle against the moralizing tendency in art, against the subordination of art to morality. L’art pour l’art means: “the devil take morality!” — But this very hostility betrays that moral prejudice is still dominant. When one has excluded from art the purpose of moral preaching and human improvement it by no means follows that art is completely purposeless, goalless, meaningless. . . . Art is the great stimulus to life: how could it be thought purposeless, aimless, l’art pour l’art? (Twilight of the Idols)

I adore the vigour of Nietzsche’s statement—again, what might be expressed as “art for life’s sake.” I struggle to challenge or correct it. That art is the great stimulus to life, its great validator—that the appreciation of art gives purpose and value to life—is a tenet absolutely held by art lovers.

It is not my project here to offer a full definition of “life” in Nietzsche’s terms. Certainly Nietzsche was concerned with how we live, how our minds and days are shaped for and by us.  For the aesthete’s purposes, “life” in “art for life’s sake” need not be abstract but can instead refer to the finite and brief life of the individual art lover. For her, deriving meaning from artworks involves hours upon hours of attention and the slow cultivation of taste, art-historical knowledge, and an aesthetic sensibility.

And yet: What “art for life’s sake” does not encapsulate is, for the aesthete, the singularly important fact of art’s autonomy. Art—for the art lover, and intrinsic to her appreciation of artworks—has its own life, an inorganic vitality. The life of art is entwined with but separable from the life of humankind. Art’s genealogy, stretching back through the centuries and millennia, is alive at every point, along every line of descendance. Older art does not “live on” in what succeeds it, but lives; its insights are obtainable always. Unlike individuals and institutions, species and social systems, great art never dies, dissolves, or goes extinct. Long after the artist and his way of being in the world are gone, great art remains.

Ultimately, the aesthete appreciates great artworks not only because of what they do for her but because of what they are, and what they have made—or will make—possible for the future of their artistic medium. Recognition of this fact makes the “art for art’s sake” formulation necessarily true for the present.

Finally, I do have a small disagreement with Nietzsche on the purported “hostility” of l’art pour l’art. The inaccuracy of this claim—that the concept betrays itself as a reaction against “moral prejudice . . . still dominant”—is easier to see from the vantage point of the early 21st century, and can be shown by reflecting, briefly, on the deep history of art.

*

Simply stated, for those artists who believe in the autonomy of art, their creations do not need or seek any external justification. The “art for art’s sake” expression is, in one language or another, most likely a few centuries old. But the foundational concept under consideration—that of appreciating or making art for its own sake—is every bit as old as the first artworks, which is to say, far older than society and its groupings, certainly older than the self (a later invention). A simple desire courses through the blood of our species: to make, to make things other than tools, and not just because particular problems need to be solved but because it is in our nature to make. Possibly all hominins shared with us this drive.

Neanderthals, we’re learning, made some of the oldest known cave paintings. A zigzag pattern scratched with a shark tooth into a mussel shell around five hundred thousand years ago, which experts disagree on whether to consider the earliest example of art, was made by someone of the homo erectus species, an ancestor to Neanderthals and us both. As long as three million years ago, our prehuman ancestors were collecting stones, minerals, shells, and fossils for their visual and tactile qualities, for their weight, colours, and shapes. Early humans, unfulfilled by nature’s pleasing objects, later began working nature’s products through sculpture and marking for nonutilitarian purposes. Cupules, indentations made in rock by pecking, would evolve from the first artists’ gestures into abstract forms, then on to the earliest figurative engravings. Incidental marks found on animal bones became the basis of carved geometric patterns.

The archaeological record shows how gradually across the planet, over hundreds of millennia, artistic phenomena emerged, withdrew, spread, and developed. By the Upper Paleolithic, humans were creating figurative art objects and cave paintings, works often of overwhelming majesty and naturalism that demonstrate irrefutably the refinement of those artists. What symbolic or mystical significance art held for Paleolithic people can only be guessed at, but we do know that their spiritual concerns were independent of their need for survival.

From early in the life of the species, the human imagination, our spirit, has found expression in aesthetic and symbolic gestures. Because of this deep history of ours, the “art for art’s sake” concept always will be best understood not as reactive—in rejecting this or that political, social, or moral dictate—but as active: generative, innate, spirit-affirming. It is the original value system of art.

The bland supposition that art can foster empathy was once both easy to concede and easy to ignore. “Does reading novels and looking at paintings, in fact, make one a more empathic person?” “Well yes, maybe, probably. But let’s talk about this book.” That was before. Today, arts institutions and artists are enthralled by empathy to the point of dependence. Without it, their work has no meaning. Empathy is the product they are in the business of advancing—a world-transforming product, of which the world can never have too much.

Others are no less enthralled. Psychologists and cognitive scientists clamor to prove a link between empathy and art, so ripe is the desire to brand the old supposition a scientific fact. In this new century, scholars, educators, curators, arts writers, museum administrators, and cultural critics have made empathy their great basis for defending and promoting the arts. As they now see it, encounters with artworks engage and strengthen our ability to empathize, and herein lies art’s value to humankind.

A thinking person might ask, If the value of art is not in the art itself but in the empathy it fosters, what’s the value of that? By activating our inborn capacity for empathy, the reasoning goes, art can be a tool of social transformation—an unadulterated good. Administered effectively, art is a means by which people can be coaxed into greater emotional understanding of others, and this in turn will impact their behavior in myriad favorable ways. Empathy makes one a better person and citizen. But it does not end with the individual. Somehow, too, empathy makes us better collectively. To see this, first one must make the very sophisticated diagnosis that our political, institutional, economic, and social problems are the direct result of a perceivable lack of interpersonal understanding on the scale of individuals. From there, it can tidily be deduced that greater empathy will lead to progress in all areas. All this from how we choose to read poems and look at frescoes.

The empathy racket is the clearest indication of how chronically insecure and beleaguered from within are the arts.

*

The empathy racket and the political activism now ascendant in contemporary arts and letters are parallel phenomena. Both are utilitarian. The empath and the activist regard art fundamentally as a delivery system for messages and awarenesses. They believe that the output of an artwork, its effect on audiences, can be controlled and predetermined. According to both frameworks, we should be goal-oriented in our thoughts and feelings when visiting a gallery or opening a book. Our responses matter to the world. The well-being of society is at stake.

This results-based management of aesthetic experience inevitably treats as superfluous all but a sliver of the responses in an individual that great art enlivens. Unruly imagination, with its proclivity for the carnal and macabre, the empath shuns. Personal connection is all: On this basis alone are a work’s formal and material qualities interesting. Awe, for the empath, is a feeling of intense connection between her and the artist or the artist’s subject. Cleaved from its etymology, awe is no longer an experience of dread and reverence, a response to the majestic or uncanny. Such elements in art are beside the point.

So too are entire works that do not elicit empathy for their characters, subject, or maker. The empathy racket treats as automatically canonical any art that memorializes certain historical events, art as documentary, and art of witness, whatever its quality or degree of originality. Those forces inexplicable to the human that great art from Hellenistic sculpture to the Jodhpur-Marwar court paintings to Modernist poetry has concerned itself with—forces unconscious, spiritual, natural, chthonic—do not interest the empath.

*

Academic studies in the literary and performing arts are awash in recent books on empathy. Humanities scholarship has a trendy new subject—and this focus, also found in countless resources for teachers, more broadly reflects how literature and art are being treated in the classroom.

Representative of the push in higher education is Of Human Kindness, published earlier this year by Yale University Press. At under 150 pages excluding notes, with wide margins and a large font, the monograph has been written and marketed less as a contribution to scholarship than as a trade book. Its target audience—not academics but students and the general reader—is signaled most patently by the subtitle, “What Shakespeare Teaches Us About Empathy.” In his keen blurb, the Wall Street Journal’s drama critic implies that the book’s focus on the Bard as an inadvertent writer of self-help may go some way to rehabilitating his reputation among “suspicious” young readers. The author is clear that this was her intention. Against the charge, now common, that Shakespeare is “complicit in the exploitative, imperialistic nature of his society,” she argues instead that the plays, read chronologically, exhibit their author’s growing awareness of the “inequities and injustices” of his era. Shakespeare, she contends, was woke—and for this reason the plays are “primers to awareness and empathy in us,” “a spur to revision and change.” Feelings engendered in her by the plays’ characters, she writes, “made me a better person.”

Shakespeare should be central to the academic curriculum, Of Human Kindness’s author argues, and I would argue the same. Criticism of the empathy racket can sound like criticism of the subject of an empath’s passion, and of passion itself, and of empathy. But the reasoning behind the default to empathy is what’s shallow and deadening. Indeed, Shakespeare gave action and voice to some of the most complex psyches—frequently pathological or violent—in all of literature, so penetrating was his insight into the human mind. Ignoring for a moment his linguistic virtuosity (which, it turns out, one can never conscionably ignore; the plays and characters within them are their speech, constellations of metaphor), the fact that Shakespeare developed many-layered sentient beings, living by motivations both lucid and opaque, is simply that: a fact. Whether we say that fact stems from his empathy or his being touched by the divine makes no difference to it. Yet for this educator, the “gift” of Shakespeare, the reason the plays ought to be read, is that he saw “beyond his society’s horizon” and can inspire you to do the same. For the empath, reading Shakespeare is not, as the author contends, an “intellectual adventure” but a moral one.

It distorts and devalues the literary arts to conflate an education in the history and interpretation of literature with an education in morality. The empathy emphasis subjugates art by placing the burden of virtue on artworks, and, by association, on artists themselves. Given our scant knowledge of his life and relying on the various portrayals of “the Other” in the plays, it’s certainly possible to present William Shakespeare as a man who would pass the purity test that artists today are subject to. Writers about whom we know a little more—Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, Woolf—would fail it. But the empathy emphasis also burdens a third constituent: those who engage art. Students with an empath as their teacher will quickly come to understand that some aesthetic experiences are more correct than others. Reading well means reading for sentiment.

The pious and dreary insistence on heightened empathy as a proper or desirable response to art is made only by those with a stunted understanding of what art is. The concept of empathy was originated by psychologists, now half-forgotten, with this same stunted understanding.

*

In the 1870s, German psychologists lurched into the domain of art appreciation. At the crossroads of philosophy and physiology, psychology as an independent scientific discipline had emerged in the previous decade. The sensory and mental activity of perception, long a subject of interest within the academy, became the basis of early psychological study—in particular, aesthetic perception. Different ideas were proposed for explaining how it is that we apprehend visual form, and the theory of Einfühlung, literally “feeling into,” was one of them. The theory holds that aesthetic experience involves the projection of one’s bodily and emotional feelings onto the object of interest, as a means of interpreting it. By the turn of the century, philosopher and psychologist Theodor Lipps had popularized the term Einfühlung.

At that time, a theorist of Lipps’s ilk would say of a painting that its formal qualities are expressionless in themselves; rather, it is by our own unconscious state of mind and imagined physical sensations that we project meaning onto the painted image’s proportions and shapes. (John Ruskin, decades earlier, had termed this kind of personification the “pathetic fallacy.”) The theory’s description of aesthetic experience later came to be seen as a way of bringing art to the masses. No prior knowledge—of history, culture, or the development of artistic practices—was necessary. Art appreciation was emotional projection.

The word “empathy” entered our lexicon in 1909 as a proposed English equivalent of Einfühlung. That original meaning is altogether different from, and in a way the opposite of, empathy as it’s defined today—as the ability to vicariously experience in oneself the feelings and thoughts of another. By the Second World War, empathy’s definition was splintering within psychology. Gradually it lost its close association with art. As the term caught on with the general public after the war, empathy’s meaning cohered as an emotional ability related to sympathy, but stronger: the ability to feel how another feels. This meaning we have inherited. Today psychologists disagree over how many “phenomena” can be considered forms of empathy. Some say there are eight.

*

Although early empathy theorists wrote on aesthetics, it would be a mistake to suppose that means they had refined taste in art—or any aesthetic sensibility whatsoever. Of course philosophers of aesthetics have made valuable contributions to the arts over the past three hundred years. But the emergence of the human sciences, along with the Kantian universal categories, provided humanists and scientists alike the license to make art criticism and aesthetic theory a strictly abstract and cognitive affair. To such thinkers, the art-historical or aesthetic value of an artwork is completely irrelevant. Today’s empaths and empathy’s originators use the term differently, but they approach the individual work of art with the same deliberate ignorances: to the work’s material, technical, and formal reality; to its allusions and influences or use of archetypes; about its historical context and significance within the development of the medium; to their own minds, spirits, and senses. Narrowly defined affect and internalized moralism replace all this.

*

Today empathy is one of the mistiest words in our language, which why popular books on the subject have such awful covers. The business world likes empathy; Forbes calls it a “pivotal leadership effectiveness tool in today’s global market.” Because it signals so many noble abstractions—kindness, understanding, connection, progress—the term is highly marketable. Among those who know this best are grant-seeking artists and arts institutions.

In 2017 the Minneapolis Institute of Art received $750,000 from the Mellon Foundaton to establish the Center for Empathy and Visual Arts (CEVA), the first such institution of its kind. (The grant is dwarfed by the $250 million Mellon committed in late 2020 to its five-year Monuments Project and the $72 million it has awarded in the past year to scholars addressing racial justice and social equality.) CEVA’s objective is to research and develop best practices for fostering empathy, through art, in museum audiences. CEVA hosts think tanks and conferences; it works with curators and psychologists, artists and neuroscientists. Its partners include the UC Berkeley Social Interaction Laboratory. The first sentence on CEVA’s About page—and, one imagines, the first sentence of its Mellon application—cites the divisive issues of our time: “politics, racial inequities, marriage equality, global warming, income disparities, and immigration policies.” The page quotes empath Roman Krznaric of The School of Life, a company that offers self-betterment workshops and books for the crowd who read only the Lifestyle section of the newspaper. “In our increasingly divisive world,” the text reads, “it becomes clear that our failures to understand other people’s feelings are exacerbating prejudice, conflict, and inequality.” How exactly such a thing becomes clear need not be specified. We all know, do we not, that the world is being ruined by misunderstood feelings?

Reading through CEVA’s limited materials online, I did wonder whether the center’s interdisciplinary approach has made a misty concept still mistier. CEVA’s own white paper bizarrely claims “we became empathic when we became human,” a nonsense statement given that various mammals share with us this trait. Did the bonobo become empathic when it became the bonobo? If CEVA is not entirely precise about empathy’s evolutionary basis, the institution is clear-eyed regarding its own purpose and that of museums: namely, to engineer society. “How can our work positively impact and challenge our visitors to think or act differently?” asks CEVA’s director. Art museums, she says, should “amplify their public value by participating in and leading social change efforts.” Such activist efforts are at the heart of the growing “empathy movement” across museums, which shares much of its platform with the growing antiracism movement.

*

Museum goers—not to say taxpayers—may well ask themselves whether it should be the responsibility of museums to attend to society’s present-day ills or instead to preserve and display culturally significant artefacts and art. In 2019, an attempt by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) to update its long-standing definition of “museum” generated enormous controversy. ICOM represents 20,000 institutions worldwide. Twenty-four national branches of ICOM called for the vote on the new wording to be postponed. Included in the proposed definition are the statements that museums “are democratising,” “[address] the conflicts and challenges of the present,” and “[aim] to contribute to . . . human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing”; missing are the words “education” and “institution.” The disagreement continues. In my opinion, addressing society’s (or the world’s) problems ought not to be the primary charge of curators, arts programmers, and museum directors, because, in the first place, they are not trained in conducting social scientific research and therefore not professionally capable of evaluating what those economic, political, geopolitical, and social problems even are.

If museums must justify their existence, they should to do so honestly, on the basis of what the items in their collections demonstrate for audiences. Museums teach history. Museums present the heterogeneous intellectual and artistic heritages that any person, living in a liberal society of individual freedoms, can claim for herself. Art and artifacts, carefully contextualized, confront us with the difficulties of categorizing any time as a lesser version of, or fully contiguous with, another. The hubris that we live in the most sophisticated or interesting period in history is demolished by visits to museums, which show how people long dead, in cultures foreign to anyone alive today, had inner lives as rich, skills as masterful, and belief systems as limiting yet sufficient as our own. And most centrally, though inadvertently, museums prove that across millennia, art is what remains. Leaders die, political systems fail, societies crumble, languages morph, religions burn out and are replaced, but art survives, despite time’s ravages. Centuries after their makers’ deaths, artworks continue to communicate.

*

Museums intending to turn themselves into empathy emporia will not be short on scientific experts with whom to partner. As with grant-seekers in the arts and humanities, those in psychology and neuroscience who focus on empathy and the arts are handsomely supported. Hundreds of studies and papers have been conducted and written in the last ten years. The effect of fiction reading on “theory of mind”—the brain’s cognitive mechanism for understanding the mental states of others—is the subject of most research.

Some of these studies have found a correlation between fiction reading and results on empathy tests. How are such studies conducted? Sometimes participants are given short texts to read. Other times they’re quizzed beforehand on their recognition of authors’ names—an indication, ostensibly, of how well read they are. Participants’ empathy levels are measured in various ways. One commonly used test asks a participant to guess people’s emotional states by looking at pictures of their eyes or faces. Another has the experimenter “accidentally” drop a handful of pens and record whether participants help to pick them up. Other studies have them fill out “emotional transportation” questionnaires.

A 2013 study in Science that found reading literary fiction temporarily enhances a reader’s performance on cognitive empathy tests was published to much media fanfare. The media didn’t bother to report that at least five attempts to replicate those specific findings failed. Other studies, particularly those that measure participants on how well they recognize author names, share a fatal flaw common to psychological experiments, in that they confuse correlation and causation. Individuals who are more empathic in the first place—and who are more interested in subjectivity and relationships generally—are the ones who enjoy and make time for reading novels. They read because they are empathic, not the other way around. As it turns out, what the entire scholarly subject was missing was some statistical analysis, that great elucidator of art. A 2018 meta-analysis of fourteen studies asserted the debate could be put to rest: “Fiction reading,” the authors found, “leads to a small, statistically significant improvement on social-cognitive performance.” What do these lab findings mean in the real world? I hazard nobody knows, least of all those who do fluffy write-ups of studies in the mainstream press.

Certainly the human brain’s predisposition to intersubjectivity is a matter of general and scientific interest. It should surprise no one with a marginal respect for the brain’s complexity that a lot is going on in there when we read literature, just as when we argue or stare into the fridge. Scans show the region of the brain concerned with grasping is activated when a person reads about a character in a story pulling a light cord. This pleasant factoid tells us nothing about how and why certain novels are valuable to our species, worthy of being carried across languages and down through generations. There’s a desperation about all this research into proving, empirically, fiction’s cognitive effects. You can tell a utilitarian by how he relishes hard data relating to emotion and the arts. If scientists can only prove that hearing music and looking at sculpture increases empathy, crowds will flock to the concert halls and galleries.

*

Denouncing the empathy racket is tricky because it comes across as callous. In our time, virtue is a matter more of public expression than of private action. Signs in the front yards of the country’s wealthiest neighborhoods inform passersby, “In this house we believe . . . kindness is everything,” a dictum most eight-year-olds have the life experience to know is rather facile. The cultural discourse, like the political, is stuffed with unspecific yet psychologically weighted words: justice, trauma, care. Arts institutions, critics, and artists recognize the importance of publicly demonstrating their virtuousness. The demand on them comes not only from the public but from inside the house, from other institutions, critics, and artists.

So it is a fine idea these days for artists pursing fellowships, commissions, and followers to brand their work as empathy-enhancing. The declaration is not always so calculated, however. Those artists who are insecure about their own practice—who feel but do not necessarily think their way through their art-making—often say it is rooted in empathy. Encouraging them is the art-world apparatus, which, out of its  own insecurity, has taken to asserting its political relevance. Happy, too, are the aspiring painter’s or poet’s middle-class parents, for whom art that preaches empathy has a ring of pragmatism about it. Their child is not a dreamy layabout. He’s a sort of one-person NGO.

*

More often than not, the people we know who are the kindest are not also those who have read the greatest number of literary works, absorbed the most art-house cinema, or spent the longest time amid art installations. Anecdotally, the most generous, forgiving, patient, and warm-hearted are by no means the most aesthetically sophisticated among us. There’s nothing confounding about this. Art and empathy’s relationship is not special—a detail those engaged in the empathy racket neglect to mention. Experiences as particular as losing a parent or as ordinary as eating the food of another culture can make a person more empathic toward others.

Can empathy for another be an outcome of an art experience? Naturally. Can reading stories and looking at pictures expand a child’s emotional intelligence—her ability to discern feelings, attitudes, and expressions from the vast corpus of internal and physiological states the human enjoys and suffers, many within the span of an hour, very rarely intentionally? Absolutely children can learn to understand themselves and others more deeply this way. Absolutely they should be taught and encouraged to do so.

The objectives and impacts of the empathy racket lie elsewhere. The top-down assertion from educational and cultural institutions that there are correct ways to feel and think about art has consequences for the individual psyche. Virtuous in intention, the empathy racket’s effects are instead adverse. Unwittingly, the insistence on empathic responses to plays and paintings and poems is absolutely detrimental to the mind. This is especially true for young people, who have known only a world in which they are constantly monitored. The empathy expectation entrenches the very problems of social isolation and misunderstanding that empathy is purported to treat. Asking artworks to teach people lessons means asking those who engage art to see themselves as morally wanting. As a circumscribed expectation of an art encounter, empathy burdens the mind. The imperative that one corral one’s feelings in a single direction is spirit-smothering, tyrannous. Already, we are told, mental health crises throughout the West are underway, the origins of which long preceded the pandemic. Among young adults and teens, levels of anxiety and depression have risen steadily over the past decade. No good can come of telling young people there are preferred outcomes to their experiences of art. The empathy expectation is an imposition on all the psychic faculties. The imagination cannot be restricted without consequence.

No doubt those arts institutions, such as CEVA, premised on building “a just and harmonious society” are promoting art on the basis not of its being aesthetically good but of its making audiences into good people. To the empaths, powerful art is benevolently humanitarian. The artist’s role is that of social worker and saint. In reality, empathic artists are frequently hectoring. A 2019 poetry anthology, What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump, calls on readers to “imagine the world we will leave behind in ruins lest we speak and act.” Engaging those poems, apparently, is our civic responsibility. It is no coincidence that artists who believe art should serve a function in society, the utilitarians, make works that are typically conformist, generic, and didactic. By fiat, they deny the imagination its mystery and irreverence. But the imagination, like the impact of any artwork, cannot be managed. The empathy discourse parades as a form of engagement in concrete social realities. In truth, it enforces predetermined categories on what is by nature dispersive and wild. Meaning, for the empath, is not explosive but aggressively limited. Empathy is a downer: Its high dulls the faculties rather than stimulates. Empathy domesticates, sanitizes, bleaches. The aligning of art with empathy signifies just how incapable of regarding and fairly representing art the literary and visual art worlds have become.

Readers and audiences are flattened into “members of society” by the empathy fixation, stripped of their all-too-human parts to which society is blind. But society had to be invented. It does not contain the human experience. Marxists and critical theorists, like social-engineering empaths, misunderstand this. We are not social beings only, acted on by power structures. There is more to existence than our emotional connection with or responsibilities to others.

*

To conclude, empathy has no inherent value when it comes to aesthetic appreciation. In literature, I struggle to see how much the empathy orientation can derive from the works of Gertrude Stein, Jay Wright, Victor Pelevin, or Gozo Yoshimasu, beyond simplistic biographical interpretations. The empathy approach does nothing to develop a personal canon, which cannot be built on interpersonal feelings alone. How the individual values art is a matter of personal judgment, of cultivated aesthetic sensibility, which is an aliveness to the full emotional, psychological, intellectual, and sensual dimensions of one’s life.

Great art can intimidate, alienate, disorient, and disturb. I hold that even ambivalence, when aroused by art, is a more significant—more involving—feeling than empathy. Ambivalence urges us to compare this with that, to ask ourselves why one work is more compelling than another. Ambivalence thereby develops our aesthetic sensitivity.

Feelings are shallow as often as they are deep. With no art-historical knowledge, with no contextual understanding, one only looks at a painting; one does not see it. Having invested some time in learning about Quattrocento art—how the mediums developed technically, how subjects and themes old and new were newly treated through the period—I think and feel a number of things when beholding a reproduction of Botticelli’s Primavera, and empathy is not one of them. Strangely clustered in the orange grove, the painting’s figures withhold their allegorical meaning, even as the meadow at their feet, the trees above, rose-scattering Flora, and the painter all cast out their fertile bounty.

Art should not be expected to make one feel better, in some therapeutic sense, or make one a better person, in a moral sense. Art should make one feel more human, more alive to one’s own spontaneity, contradictions, and irrationality. Crass and moralistic contemporary readings of Ovid reduce the Roman poet down to an empath of rape survivors. Such readings are blind to everything thrilling about the two-thousand-year-old Metamorphoses, 12,000 lines of relentless sinuous energy, a poem that flips the civilized human character over to reveal our intrinsic “double nature,” swooping between epic and burlesque, pastoral and comedy, tragedy and love elegy, its stories melding one into the next. The poem is entirely autonomous; its value lies in itself, not somewhere outside it.

Syntax and paint are not means to ends. Because artworks have a material—not theoretical, or ever entirely conceptual—reality, we engage them not merely as ideas but always as things. Great works communicate variously, in directions and degrees their makers could never fully intend or control. This is why our own responses to great works are so often unexpected. In painting, Dalí’s Surrealist dreamscapes have a harmony absent from most eighteenth-century landscapes; Leonardo’s Virgin paintings, a holy subject, have an ambiguous energy, mildly sinister; Agnes Martin’s hand-drawn grids, severely Apollonian, feel intensely personal when seen up close; Caravaggio invented photographic techniques centuries before the first camera; Cy Twombly’s most abstract masterworks, seemingly chaotic, are coherent as the rites of the Dionysian Mysteries; J. M. W. Turner’s sea storms capture human passion without a person in sight.

We each have a spirit life that does not heed society. Our spirit lives rear up out of the unconscious at all the most intense moments in our existence: during sex, meditation, and illness; when dreaming, in danger, and falling in love; through encounters with great art. Artworks speak to us in their own registers. It is on us to cultivate the many ways we can respond. 

A new essay published every few months. Always free to read.

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Presently I’m writing two prose books: one on the Muses, the source of artistic inspiration, which expands on this essay; and another on the mythological nude paintings of the Renaissance artist Correggio.

My writing is supported by an Emergent Ventures grant from the Mercatus Center.

Some of my poems can be read online in the NYRB, Liberties, and Prelude. My poetry manuscript will be completed later this year.

—March, 2025