<< Good Dog | Front Page | Julie & Julia: The Reading Group Guide; or, Why English Professors Aren't Welcome in Book Clubs >>
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Bleg: Aesthetic Preference, Pleasure or Ideology?
I’ve got a question about people’s expressed aesthetic preferences: Does it reflect their sense of immediate satisfaction with the work, a superimposed identity or ideology, or something else?
The question arises out of my own experience. During my teens, rock was ascendent (in transition from “rock ‘n roll” to “rock"). I was a self-identified “non-conformist” intellectual and disdained rock. Jazz was my music. And then I went off to college and the Beatles came out with “Sgt. Pepper’s.” I then decided that rock was OK and had no trouble finding lots to like. (I didn’t give up my love of jazz, nor of classical either).
Thing is, if I disdained rock during my early and mid-teens, it wasn’t because I couldn’t respond to the music, it wasn’t because the music didn’t make sense to me (in the way that Chinese opera doesn’t make sense). There were even times and tunes where I’d admit to myself, and only to myself, that I liked some of this stuff. But I’d adopted this identity that dictated disdain for rock.
So, I know that it’s possible to respond to music, or some other art form, while also believing it to be aesthetically unacceptable. I assume this sort of thing is widespread, but I don’t actually know that to be so. In any event, it seems to me that this is different from disliking/disapproving of some art because you can’t make sense of it. It seems to me that many people simply can’t make sense of abstract art, atonal music, post-modern fiction, not to mention art, music, and fiction from different cultures.
Comments anyone?
Comments
Gerard Genette has a terrific essay about this - “Axiological Relations,” collected and translated in Essays in Aesthetics.
When I was younger, I made an earnest effort to like the books/art/music etc. that matched the identity I was trying to inhabit. I was an insecure poseur rather than an aficionado.
Now that I’m old and content to like things that have no status whatsoever, I’m totally out of step and much happier. I’m the kind of person who likes Bollywood “filmi” music. Westerners think I’m nuts and educated Indians think I have low tastes. So what?
Bill, I think it’s not an either/or between personal response and ideological response.
Your disdain for rock and love of jazz was the standard intellectual response to rock at that time, as was the transformation effected by *Sgt. Pepper’s*. Elijah Wald details this process across the culture at the time in *How the Beatles Detroyed Rock Music*.
You—and many others—weren’t able, at however many levels, to enjoy rock until The Beatles made rock something you felt comfortable enjoying.
And that’s something that I find interesting: people who like atonal music find it comfortable to like atonal music, just as people who like Miley Cyrus find it comfortable to like Miley Cyrus. “Difficult” art is not difficult to those who enjoy it, nor is it “alienating” or “strange” or any of the those aesthetic buzzwords.
Instead, people (like me) who like atonal music or out jazz like the idea that we LIKE something that others would find challenging or strange or disturbing or alienating. (Same goes for Language Poetry and Charles Bernstein’s notion of absorption. I think fans of Lang Po are as absorbed in their reading of Lang Po as fans of Billy Collins are in their reading of Billy Collins. Lang Po challenges Collins fans, not Lang Po fans.)
At the same time, I don’t think the *only* enjoyment we get out of weird art is from being hip. I think some of us, for whatever cultural or personal reasons, really do enjoy out jazz or noise rock or black metal or whatever.
(So much of this makes me think of William James’ ideas, in the field of religious faith, of live and dead options and of conversion. I was converted to out jazz after some resistance, but I can also see that out jazz was always a live option because of other things I did enjoy. I will never become a Muslim, and will never become a fan of Foreigner. But I do think Catholicism is a live option for me, just as The Grateful Dead are a live option for me. Another way of thinking about this is Vygotsky’s idea of zones of proximal development—some cultural forms are not my favorite but are in my ZPD and could conceivably become my favorites, given the right conversion moment.)
The “superimposition of identity or ideology” on the artwork is a technical function of the culture industries. Philosophical aesthetics has always developed in tension with this industrial process. Our era of fully administered culture poses a challenge to us not only on a psychological or emotional level, but a political one. Administered culture defies us to make judgments on its products, to form preferences with respect to somatic pleasure, but not to base our judgment solely on private experience.
I think Luther is right in that Sgt. Peppers allowed you to enjoy rock but this was the “standard response” because Sgt. Peppers was a groundbreaking record. I like Luther’s idea of a “live options” There are a great deal of things that sound like “live options” for me. Maybe I would like anime if I gave it some time.
There is something going on in Sgt. Peppers that makes you want to listen over and over. You want to find out why it is unique but it also gives pleasure. It speaks to you in a way that Earth Angel and The Twist did not.
I don’t buy the idea that I listen to bands like Wilco, watch Mad Men, or read Thomas Pynchon or James Joyce because they make me feel hip because it is a contrast to what someone else enjoys. This is a solitary activity. I do it for fun and no one really cares which flavor of media I consume. I don’t “sneak” guilty pleasures. If I liked American Idol, I’d watch it. I don’t watch it because it seems very really stale.
Wald’s point about The Beatles is rather simple and elegant: rock music before *Rubber Soul* and *Revolver* was, for the most part, dance music. It was not meant to be listened to and admired at a distance, so to speak.
The Beatles’ great achievements are often overstated, not because they weren’t original but because they were original only in their original area of performance: rock music. They took the conceptual unity of mood music albums; the serious thematic concepts from Sinatra and other pioneers of the LP format; the harmonic developments of modern classical music; and they mixed it together with the tight unity of the touring rock band. As they went, they left the dance origins of their music by the wayside. The Beatles turned rock music in mood music not for swingers but for hipsters, hippies, psychedelic adventurers, brooders, etc. And that is a great thing, not least because they made rock music tolerable to people who otherwise would ignore it. But compared to the rhymic complexity of James Brown, or the harmonic complexity of jazz, or the full-scale experimentation of musique concrete, The Beatles were lightweights. (Who I love complete, to be honest.)
Feeling that a piece of art is “aesthetically unacceptable” while still responding to it is called being a poseur. As Zora pointed out.
Aesthetic acceptability is nothing more than personal taste that someone along the line has written or spoken about so articulately that insecure people feel ok about agreeing with.
Zak, I find your work illustrating Gravity’s Rainbow aesthetically pleasing myself.
However, I don’t feel bad in deferring to experts that have a better understanding of contemporary art to help inform my own visceral enjoyment of your work.
Christopher:
Yeah,, well, that’s a problem.
When I eat a steak, I don’t then immediately call up a food critic and ask if it was actualy any good.
...and doing so is a recipe for aesthetic conservatism.
Zak,
I think after exposure to a great deal of art, you develop a more discerning eye.
Your book sits in my library surrounded by works of fiction and non-fiction and very little of the visual arts beside the obvious (De Kooning, Dali) If my shelves were filled with more contemporary art, I would feel better equipped to critique it in a serious way.
That being said, I enjoy your illustrations and I am studying for my comprehensive exams with your book side-by-side with Pynchon.
Christopher:
“If my shelves were filled with more contemporary art, I would feel better equipped to critique it in a serious way.”
It’s too bad that you have no confidence iny our own respnse to things. When you have sex do you immediately call someone up to ask if it was fun?
Again, sadly, I don’t have the requisite experience. I’m married with a 5 year old so I lack the critical vocabulary.
To appreciate arts from times and cultures not your own, it’s frequently useful to have historical/cultural background. Education. You can’t really enjoy something if it’s riffing on matters beyond your ken. Once you have that background, the enjoyment can be *real*. However, publicly proclaiming that enjoyment can also be a claim to have the educated background necessary to truly appreciate X; hence one of the temptations to be a poseur.
(Note that you can have all the cultural background necessary to enjoy something and NOT enjoy it. I’m a devotee of 19th century novels but I do not like William James!)
Material from your own culture can make equivalent demands if it’s packed with allusions. I suppose you could make a distinction between art (and humor) that demands only a passing acquaintance with the current news, and art that demands a mastery of what currently passes for high culture. Mmmm, like the difference between Nankipoo’s “I’ve got a little list” (not so funny now, so often updated with references to current annoyances) and The Waste Land.
Interesting train of thought. Now, there’s a whole realm of geek and Internet allusion and humor that is meaningful or funny ONLY if you’re a certain sort of person. The sort of person who laughs at xkcd. Who catches all the geeky references in Charlie Stross novels.
Recently, someone made an online joke that turned on the use of ^H^H^H as a symbol of material that was meant to be stricken, but was still legible. A commenter kvetched. “Why is that ^H^H^H stuff funny?” Someone else painstakingly explained shell accounts and online word processing. “Well, no one uses shell accounts any more. That’s not funny!” Um, well, if you don’t mind being outed as the kind of person who doesn’t know how to use a UNIX shell account ...
We do like being able to show off our cultural competence, don’t we?
I almost regret having mentioned the Beatles & Sgt. Pepper as it’s such a specific example.
Luther:
... people who like atonal music find it comfortable to like atonal music, just as people who like Miley Cyrus find it comfortable to like Miley Cyrus. “Difficult” art is not difficult to those who enjoy it, nor is it “alienating” or “strange” or any of the those aesthetic buzzwords.
Instead, people (like me) who like atonal music or out jazz like the idea that we LIKE something that others would find challenging or strange or disturbing or alienating....
At the same time, I don’t think the *only* enjoyment we get out of weird art is from being hip. I think some of us, for whatever cultural or personal reasons, really do enjoy out jazz or noise rock or black metal or whatever.
So, do you think liking “difficult” music (or painting or literature, whatever) is just a matter of flipping some mental switch from “no” to “yes,” or do you have to listen to the music for awhile, become familiar with it, learn how it works?
D’oh. Henry James. Got my brothers mixed up. So much for displaying MY cultural competence :)
Bill, I think I am on the “learning how it works” side for difficult texts. It seems to describe what actually happens. I am sure you appreciate the difficult works more now with experience. You have to start with Dubliners, then ease into Ulysses.
Why should I struggle to appreciate difficult texts? I’ve bounced off Ulysses twice. Why should I try again? There’s so much to read that I *do* enjoy.
Perhaps there’s some kind of pleasure in parsing a difficult text that I just don’t understand ... Like the pleasure one gets from solving a math problem (which I do understand).
You don’t have to start with Dubliners in order to enjoy Ulysses. I didn’t. You just have to be the kind of person who likes to read things like:
“—Mustard, sir? —Thank you. He studded under each lifted strip yellow blobs. “
If you are, then read it. If you’re not, then don’t.
Trying to fabricate reasons to like something you don’t actually enjoy is as bad as failing to have the confidence to believe in the things you actually do enjoy.
Zak: I still have to disagree. I had to start with Dubliners and Crying of Lot 49 before Gravity’s Rainbow.
I’m from Staten Island.
As an aside: I was thinking about your GR project and giving the same treatment to Ulysses. The copyright issue is still in limbo, I think. However if you started it now on the web you could perhaps incorporate the actual text in a side-by--side coffee table format when the Joyce estate loosens its stranglehold on the work eventually.
That would be some book!
It seems to me that many people simply can’t make sense of abstract art, atonal music, post-modern fiction, not to mention art, music, and fiction from different cultures.
I think your set of examples is interestingly chosen, and reflects a common set of assumptions (though maybe ones you don’t hold) that drives me crazy. A lot of people also can’t make sense of classical and jazz music (this is sort of me; I’ve gotten better, but still can’t pay attention to it for more than five minutes unless it has words), or Greek tragedy, or still life paintings. But if you don’t “get” atonal music or free-verse poetry, this tends to be described as a matter of personal preference or (worse yet) an essential quality of the work ("inaccessible"); whereas if you don’t “get” something more canonical it’s described as a lack of taste or education. I really don’t think there’s a distinction there, though. (And I doubt you were trying to imply one; but the examples you chose were, I suspect, affected by a common and misguided way of talking about such things.)
@ Zak:
if all you’ve ever eaten has been your mother’s rubbery, dessicated steak, a passably cooked piece of meat at the local pub can taste like a godsend. Then maybe you move out, travel the world, go to three-star Michelin restaurants, and realize how good food can really be; then, if you go back to your hometown pub, and have the exact same steak cooked the exact same way, you find it inedible.
Until you develop all this experience on your own, though, there are critics. How hard is that to figure out?
Similarly, twenty years ago, when I loved Pynchon but didn’t know as much about art as I do today, I probably would have loved your GR book…
Galusha-
So, you ask critics to think for you until you feel you can spread your little wings and fly on your own?
Wow, you totally drank the Kool-Aid.
It’s amazing how many people there are running around who have no shame about not being able to think for themselves.