Suzi Gablik (Has Modernism Failed?) argued that a key tenet of modernism is the idea of "uninhibited individualism," which she suggests can only progress at the "expense of the strength of common beliefs and feelings." In other words, such individualism is inherently antisocial. At the same time, she states that artists have a responsibility to be a moral presence in the world and suggests that such moral authority requires that artists make themselves into "exemplary beings," individuals with the charisma to influence society by positioning themselves outside of the dominant culture. She ends up saying that it all comes down to the quality of the individual: "to recognize truth is not a matter of talent but of character."
I wonder if the artists in our midst care to comment about the either: 1) the role of the "personality" of the artist in today's art culture; or 2) the importance of the "moral" authority of the artist?
both roles are too ambitious for me. At present, I could only think of offering myself as an object of self-study. As in this networked society (towards a global mind), an in-depth study of an individual could be a representative of the universal.
ReplyDeleteThe issue of the "moral authority" of the artist is a tricky one indeed. To begin with, if we were to eliminate from the record all artists whose "authority" was profoundly immoral, anti-social, or amoral at best, we'd be left much the poorer for it, artistically speaking. While I don't think there's necessarily a connection between great art and troubled or destructive psyches, neither is there a connection between great art and moral superiority. That said, I think there *is* a role for the artist as "pointer" toward the higher aspirations of humanity, whether she/he embodies them personally or not.
ReplyDeleteI suppose I have a problem with Suzi Gablik's vision for a "connective aesthetics" -- not because I find the vision problematic, necessarily, but because of the way in which this approach to art too often turns art into a kind of social work or activism that ignores art's unique properties *as art*. I also don't agree that there's something *inherently* disconnective about the conventional object-oriented media (i.e., painting, drawing,and sculpture). The problem seems to me to rest in the fundamentally dichotomizing worldview with which artworks of any kind are experienced.
One of the things I do appreciate so much about Suzi Gablik's writing is her insistence on a general "turning outward" in art and in the larger culture -- a leaving behind of our preoccupation with self (witnessed especially vividly in psychoanalysis) and a turning toward an address of the larger whole in which we all participate. Her redefinition of the spiritual in art to include not just introspection and self-healing but also "extrospection" and the healing of the earth and world was (and is) a much-needed one.