There's an attempt in art scholarship to link what goes in in the creative act with the nature of art itself, and explain why both are the way they are, and also to connect this to what makes art better and worse. And this corresponds to popular culture's obsession with the artistic processes of the greatest among us, its obsession with artists and their witty quips, which always seem to say - you too, can be creative, for this is what creativity is. I was just walking on the street and it popped into my head, an idea that art is actually very rational (imbued with reasons) and so here are some thoughts on that.
It seems like all good art objects carry some sort of necessity to them. If it had been done a slightly different way, it would not be nearly so good. Let’s try this out with some of my favorite painters. Perhaps, Poisson paintings would not be nearly so good without their pale almost garish blue background coat. Maybe if you remove a shadow or a building from some Sheeler painting, it would look like a cheap drawing on a design brochure. I’m sure there are exceptions to this rule. Probably many. But I’d like to think that good art must have a force of mental activity behind it - passion, obsession, addiction, religious dogma - whatever it is, I doubt there are many good works of art that were made in an apathetic mood. This force creates the conditions under which small details really matter, can come to have necessity. If not “it must be done like this,” then “it must be done exactly this way.” This obsessive focus can be directed to anything related to the art - the materials, the form, the way it is made. This is a fantasy I have because it seems to link the act of creativity to what art is and what it allows, and I don’t think it’s so far from reality. I think art requires some necessity to it, e.g. it had to have be done like this, to be good, to work. And cognitive activity itself has no necessity to it unless it is pushed to the extreme. Passion, addiction, obsession, love, logic - here we get focus.
An artist need not be able to explain their choice of a color, but when they say, it had to be done like that, there was no other way, this cries out for a reason. Why is it the case that it had to be done like that? For all the flak long winded art criticism gets, its main impulse is totally in line with this question which art asks them to ask. If art critics come up with the wrong reasons for things in the artwork being the way they are, that does not mean that there are not latent explanations in the artwork itself, and that making attempts to spell them out isn’t exactly what we’re supposed to try to do, even if the sometimes the effort fails or is otherwise futile.
When art is purposeless, it comes closer to this ideal of necessity. When there is no ultimate purpose for the work, there is not one reason in light of which the necessity of all the small details make sense. Room for rationality completely expands in an endless way. There could be dozens of cross-cutting concerns that lead the artist in each action down to the smallest detail. Without one purpose, there can be art objects within art objects ad infinitum. In a handheld camera movie, there can be one explanation for the movement of the camera in one scene (maybe to express some sort of emotion of the character) and then an explanation of a fundamentally different type for a very similar movement in the next scene (to distract the viewer). And there can be a reason for why the two movements were used in subsequent scenes. And on and on. Art objects are like a playground for rationality where anything can be done for any reason at all, and that’s precisely the point of it. In a way creative work is the most rational of all human activities. Because there are no rules, there can be rules everywhere - rules broken, enforced, made up, forgotten. Artists achieve art’s potential only when there is a massive amount of cognitive force in play. For without force, there is no need for necessity, for reason.
With necessity, art asks something of us. It does not matter if the reasons the art is as it is are unknown or unarticulated. They must be thought to exist either way, whatever the artist says or does. And once there’s this play of reasons going on, the artist is free to introduce an element that does not carry necessity, that could have been done any other way. For once that occurs there is the question, Why is it the case that that choice is incidental to the artwork as a whole? Why did the artist leave freedom there? And so the hunt for reasons scoops up every detail. And this is how art can be good or bad in really any possible way at all. There is not restriction. You can say or think or fell or understand anything about an artwork. And that’s because that’s exactly what artworks ask you to do.
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Written September 7th, 2023.
New York, New York.