What is Great Art?
Written version of my speech for the Battle of Ideas Festival 2024.
Great artists take.
They take a woman and make her mindless and docile, a fuckable and faceless fantasy. Great artists take – use, abuse her as a muse – and then distil her essence for reward on paper, canvas, with stone.
Gauguin, was Tehura really available as a model?
Renoir, did you paint with ‘your prick’ to make a mark on the unobscured canvas?
Great art is an exploration of the most extreme emotions and scenarios. Life lived by the artist precariously, intensely, with cost. Burn out but first burn bright.
Is Great art the history of suffering? Does our experience of Great art necessitate the artist’s sublimation of their own pain, or the pain of others?
Great art is the search for visual languages that can describe these extreme – and seemingly inexpressible – emotions. In 1954, art historian Bernard Denvir published an article in the Daily Herald entitled ‘Women can’t paint’. He explained the reason behind this statement: “The trouble is, of course, that to women art is a hobby, like embroidery or bridge, only more exciting. To most men who paint art is a job, like selling insurance or driving a bus. They have to live by it.”
Living by something – and risking losing everything – is sacrifice.
Unfortunately, I cannot pass judgement on whether the same applies for bridge (a game so rudely dismissed by Denvir!), but if the history of art has taught us anything, it is that creation is a leap of faith towards a higher vision. Authors occupy the same role. Ernest Hemmingway allegedly wrote: "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." Authors, like visual artists, dedicate themselves to capturing the human experience. Great art is suffering, and it is a luxury to linger long enough to capture blood on the page or canvas.
I know what you’re thinking. How is suffering a luxury? Take Dostoyevsky (another ‘Great’). He faced a death sentence, spent time in a Siberian prison, suffered chronic epilepsy, grieved for the death of his young children, and battled a gambling addiction and manic depression. Yet, his incomparable experiences inform many of his novels’ most powerful scenes. Paradox fuels Great art: darkness alchemized into bright creativity. This takes time, patience, selfishness.
Writing was Dostoyevsky’s means of resisting oppression. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov cries out in critique of socialism:
they believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organise all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant, quicker than any living process! […] The living soul demands life, the soul won't obey the rules of mechanics, the soul is an object of suspicion, the soul is retrograde!
Dostoyevsky pits the living nature of the soul – including its sinful or retrograde nature – against the ideological system that, in promising to make society just and sinless, will kill life itself.
That leads us to the next question: Should we dismiss the notion of ‘Great’ art in pursuit of just and sinless – ‘moral’ – art?
Postmodernists think so. Since the 1980s one of the most influential feminist art historians has been Professor Griselda Pollock, who applies Marxist, structuralist, and psychoanalytic theories to advocate for creative equity and gender and race inclusiveness in museums and art. She defines the canon, the ordering system of ‘Great’ art, as:
a discursive formation which constitutes the objects/texts it selects as the products of artistic mastery and, thereby, contributes to the legitimation of white masculinity’s exclusive identification with creativity and with Culture. To learn about Art, through the canonical discourse, is to know masculinity as power and meaning, and all three as identical with Truth and Beauty
Pollock identifies the art canon with white masculinity. She dismays the notion of a canon because this would amount to a patriarchy, and this would be immoral because it goes against her self-professed ideals towards gender and race equity. As I argued earlier in this speech, privilege produces art from the margins and discriminates against those who cannot afford to be selfish. Taste, according to Pollock, can be manufactured to correct for inequity – much like the mathematical brain described by Dostoevsky, which kills life itself.
Ideological art claims to pursue moral ‘good’. This is nothing new. Theorists in Victorian England believed that art could have a didactic function. Regional galleries could instruct layman about proper behaviour. By refusing the ‘Great’ label are we simply trying to regulate behaviour, rather than taking a leap to ignite the human soul?
Great art trusts the viewer (you) rather than the governor.
I went to Frieze art fair last week. Much like a vegan tells you they’re vegan, people who follow art must mention Frieze at least once every day during the month of October. Frieze, the annual art fair held in Regent’s Park, has been described as “a spectator sport where leggy blondes eye up wealthy collectors on the make”. Alas, no wealthy collectors came my way. My legs aren’t long enough. But on the way to Frieze (I went to Frieze), I noticed a poster at the entrance that declared ‘Endless Good Art’. Ideological art can be good, teach one to be good, depending on ever-changing fashions of what it means to be good. But Great Art is thrilling, unpredictable. It illuminates the darkness and light of the living soul.
Good art endlessly comes and dies, but Great art is the painful process of becoming.
"Professor Griselda Pollock, who applies Marxist, structuralist, and psychoanalytic theories to advocate for creative equity and gender and race inclusiveness in museums and art."
This is what you get when Delores Umbridge is a role model.