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The
Supreme Importance of
Feelings in Art Today
by
Paul Soderberg |
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Ever
notice how there have been no child prodigies in painting or
sculpting?
Sure, there are talented youngsters, and the masters start revealing
their future greatness early, like Picasso, who began his art
training at age seven. But never in the visual arts have there
been the kind of true prodigies seen in other fields, especially
music, like Mozart, who |
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began
playing at age three, was composing at five, and at seven years
old was better than all the adult musicians in the world.
Why is that?
After a (long) lifetime in art-as a painter, painting tutor,
art teacher, sculptor's apprentice, art writer, art editor,
and art consultant (but never, I swear, an art critic)—I
have a theory. It's that visual art mastery requires emotional
maturity. Agony and ecstasy, betrayal and revenge, injustice,
despair: these and other feelings, not found in their mature
form in childhood, are the palette of emotions that are the
undercoat of any masterpiece in the visual arts.
For all you outraged parents of talented youngsters still fuming
at the point of my first sentence and thinking, "Okay,
where's my Voodoo doll, this guy Soderberg is going to get my
points!" let me back up a bit, to say simply that art mastery
is about more than the ability to pick up a paintbrush at flail
it at a canvas.
Chimpanzees can, and do, do that. So do dolphins, like Sunset
Sam, a watercolor-painting bottlenose dolphin in Florida. Ruby,
an elephant at the Phoenix Zoo in the 1980s and '90s, also painted
lots of pictures, some of which were auctioned at Sotheby's
in New York and sold for $100,000. So, financially speaking,
Phoenix's elephant is a better artist than your honor student,
so there!
Beyond the ability to use the tools and materials of art is
the self-expression of the artist, is what I'm saying. And it
is a simple truth that a person who is a child has not yet completed
the life journey to emotional maturity.
One example. A child's reaction upon seeing an ancient mummy,
the desiccated lips pulled back in a hideous rictus, would be
a scream. Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch, on seeing a
Peruvian mummy in 1889, was inspired to paint his greatest picture,
The Scream.
Across my desk at various art newspapers and magazines over
the years, literally tens of thousands of gallery and museum
press releases and artist résumés and artist statements
passed, all hoping for the moment of fame that is publication.
Invariably they listed art schools attended, artists studied
with, shows showed, and collections in; but not a single one
of them—not one—ever itemized what I really wanted
to know about the artist, which was his or her emotional path
to art. Always: "Attended the Scottsdale Artists' School"
(yawn). Never: "Worked in famine-relief in Africa,"
or, "Married three times but haven't give up hope yet,"
or, "Been emotionally around the block-more than once."
Lacking any knowledge of the emotional journeys of artists who
wanted publicity, I was always, in selecting ones to write about,
forced to look for clues to those journeys in their artworks.
It wasn't hard, actually. Emotions are either present or absent
in artworks, as any collector, connoisseur, or gallery director
knows. Some artworks have the emotional content of a bison stampede,
most have the emotional content of a cow staring at a cattle
guard. The works with emotion, naturally, always got the publicity.
Here's a fun way to appreciate art. Forget the work's ism (Realism,
Post-Modernism, whatever), and find out what was going on in
the artist's life when she or he painted or sculpted the work.
The classic example is Vincent van Gogh, who painted virtually
all of his most famous pictures during the last two years of
his life before he killed himself. The powerful emotions that
destroyed him gave the world some of the most powerful pictures
ever painted. And knowing that makes each of his paintings a
literal window into van Gogh's heart and mind. Ditto with any
masterpiece: it is a snapshot of what the artist was feeling
at the moment of creation.
Any artwork is also a single frame in the footage of the artist's
entire emotional journey since childhood. For example, it's
impossible to appreciate the master of Surrealism himself, Salvador
Dalí, without knowing about his older brother. That boy,
also named Salvador, had died 9 months before his birth. When
the future artist was five, his parents took him to his brother's
grave and told him that he was the reincarnation of the dead
boy. "He was probably a first version of myself,"
the adult artist said, between painting dripping clocks.
So artists' emotional states are the keys to their artworks.
Now here's the flipside: to actually appreciate art requires
exactly the same kind of emotional journey far out of childhood.
To be a great gallery director or museum department head requires
exactly the same emotional maturity that great artists have.
Connoisseurship without emotional maturity is also impossible.
That's why there are no great seven-year-old art collectors.
Yeah, yeah, kids don't have the millions of dollars to buy great
artworks. But give a child $1 Million and see what he buys.
So my theory, after a (long) lifetime in the visual arts, is
that emotions, feelings, are the unseen but solid bedrock on
which all art accomplishments and institutions are built, from
artist careers to great collections to high-end galleries to
the best museums.
That being the case, someone could make a bundle opening schools
to teach feelings to art hopefuls, maybe called things like
"The Greater New York Academy of Advanced Emotions,"
or "The Windy City Walking Wounded School," or something.
But of course, exactly such a school has always existed and
still offers free attendance to anyone: The School of Hard Knocks.
I once had a twenty-something painter ask me what she should
do to improve her art. I said, "Grow up." She slapped
me. (Last I heard, she had found a fulfilling career in computer
programming.) But it's true: growing up is the skeleton key
to art-making, to art-selling, to art-buying, and to art-appreciating.
This has little to do with chronological years and everything
to do with experiencing life-the more you experience, the more
you feel, and the more you feel, the faster you achieve emotional
maturity, as Nietzsche said best: "That which does not
destroy us makes us stronger."
The point is that all of us in art, from artists to collectors
to picture-framers to foundry workers, emotionally, are works-in-progress,
constantly chipping away at the things that block our self-awareness,
exactly like Michelangelo viewing his work as chipping away
marble until the hidden David stood revealed. His own deathbed
words have always impressed me, incidentally. There he was,
Michelangelo, considered by many to have been the greatest artist
that ever lived, and on his deathbed at age 89 he said, "My
one regret is that I have only just begun to learn the alphabet
of my profession."
Throughout his life he considered himself a work-in-progress,
in other words.
Michelangelo also once said, "If people knew how hard I
worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all."
So now back to the present, and this question: Why am I writing
about the supreme importance of feelings in art today? Two reasons.
First, because feelings are real. Second, because we are living
right now, today, in an artificial world.
Artificial things-knockoffs, counterfeits, and fakes-are everywhere,
starting in the supermarket near you, where you can save a few
pennies by buying artificial butter rather than the real thing,
and artificial milk, false cheese, counterfeit crab. Some artificial
things, like those food examples, are legal, but the vast majority
are illegal. Today more than one-third of all computer software
programs on the planet are knockoff products-35 percent of the
software working on world computers is pirated. The biggest-ever
seizure of knockoffs—so far—occurred in Germany in
November of 2006 when customs officers in Hamburg intercepted
a shipment of nearly 1 million pairs of knockoff Nike shoes,
nearly 105,000 pairs of knockoff Adidas and Puma shoes, 76,760
knockoff watches, and 1,454 knockoff toys, the entire shipment
in 117 big shipping containers weighing 1,500 tons.
Far worse are the knockoffs that kill people. Thanks to artificial
aircraft parts, a Norwegian airplane crashed, killing 55 people.
In China, knockoff powdered milk killed 15 infants. In Niger,
an artificial vaccine killed 2,500 people. Then there are knockoffs
that don't kill but sicken. In Chicago, authorities confiscated
knockoff Head and Shoulders Shampoo bottles that had stagnant
Chinese pond water in them, and in Colombia a knockoff of the
painkiller Ponstan was found to have been manufactured from
boric acid, floor wax, and yellow highway paint. And other artificial
products have led to not to deaths or sickness but to unwanted
births: authorities in Brazil recently confiscated a huge shipment
of knockoff, completely ineffective, birth-control pills.
And, as we all know, artificial people are everywhere today-identity
thieves pretending to be people they're not. Last I heard, 13.3
new cases of identity theft were occurring in America every
minute, around the clock.
Plenty of us are rebelling against this increasingly artificial
world in which we live. That's why the organic food market is
growing by 20 percent each year, compared to the food industry
growing by three percent each year.
There is also, I believe, a tremendous demand for reality rather
than artificiality in art. So we come full circle back to emotions,
and see their tremendous value: powerful art works, created
by artists who have graduated from the School of Hard Knocks,
are needed by the world more profoundly today than ever before
in history. Not just for the health of society, though. Also
for the survival of art itself.
A new art organization (opened in September of 2005) called
USA (United States Artists) recently published a shocking survey.
Titled An American Paradox: A Country That Loves Art, Not Artists,
the study found that while 96% of Americans were "greatly
inspired by various kinds of art and highly value art in their
lives and communities," and 95 percent "believe that
the arts are important in preparing children for the future,"
only 26 percent "believe that artists contribute 'a lot'
to the good of society." Whoa! What's going on here? Or,
to coin an artsy phrase: What's wrong with this picture?
To answer that question, I have another theory. It's that the
general public, who don't typically patronize galleries or personally
know any professional artists, do tend to believe what they
read. And the only art news stories that get published nationwide,
and read by the general public, are the ones about the wildest,
craziest, most shocking stunts of artists, like a photograph
of a crucifix immersed in a jar of the artist's own urine, or
a painting of the Madonna done in elephant dung, or a performance
artist whose performance consisted of walking onto a stage naked
and smearing her body with chocolate while screaming obscenities
at the audience, or a dead shark floating in formaldehyde sold
to a Connecticut collector for $8.1 Million. News stories like
those don't make the general public feel all warm and fuzzy
about artists, is my theory to explain that paradox.
So at a time when real artists are needed more than ever, to
fight back the tsunami of artificiality, the general public
is looking at all of us the way cats look at large bodies of
water.
And what, pray tell, is a "real" artist? Any artist
who has the emotional background of agonies and ecstasies that
enables her or him to paint or sculpt a buffalo stampede rather
than a cattle-guard-blocked cow.
There is yet another reason-a biggie-why real artists are tremendously
important today, and it is that our increasingly artificial
world is also becoming increasingly violent.
Call it "terrorism" or "liberation," it
is the attempt to solve social or political or philosophical
problems violently, through destruction. The most vivid examples
are those social reformers who fly airplanes into buildings.
But far more common dangers to Americans are posed by all the
"enemies" within, because this country today is awash
in civil wars. Brother against brother, sister against sister,
American against American, we are fighting each other bitterly,
and hurting each other, on battlegrounds called Immigration,
and Abortion, and Smoking.
The environment is a battleground a thousand times bigger than
Gettysburg, those who cherish the natural world locked in combat
with those who want to profit from it. Americans are fighting
over which language to use, como usted sabe (as you know).
Bitter skirmishes are being fought over biological things like
gender, religious things like prayer in schools, lifestyle things
like gay marriage, science things like stem-cell research, and
on and on, endlessly. It seems as if we're now so conditioned
to seeing every aspect of American life in militaristic terms
that we can't even describe a great social program without using
them: "the war on poverty," "the war against
drugs," "the war on waste" (in government agencies),
"the war on breast cancer," "the fight for equal
rights," "the fight for affordable prescription drugs,"
and "the war on illiteracy." We even do it in commerce
and politics, as in "the battle for mobile search"
(competing Internet search engines) and "the battle for
the Latino vote," and on and on ad nauseam, until we sound
like we Americans, despite our good intentions, are the most
warlike people this planet has ever seen.
And then our President solemnly tells the world, "We are
a nation of peace."
So, actually, is art-a profession of peace, for real. In fact,
in this entire destruction-loving artificial nation and world
in which we live, there is only one profession-just one-that
stands for exactly the opposite two things, that stands for
creativity and reality, and that is art.
The art world has always been a wild and crazy place to some
extent, and there have always been a relative handful of real
artists in the midst of a multitude of artists who never got
beyond their dreams of greatness. There has also, always, been
a tendency of art people to ignore the real world. One of my
all-time favorite art anecdotes is what happened when the Italian
painter Amedeo Modigliani and the French painter Maurice Utrillo
met each other for the first time. This was in Paris just before
World War I. Right away, Modigliani said, "You, sir, are
the world's greatest painter," to which Utrillo replied,
"No, you are the world's greatest painter."
"I forbid you to contradict me."
"I forbid you to forbid me, because you are the greatest
artist!"
"No, I am not, and if you say it again, I shall strike
you!"
Utrillo said it again, and there on the sidewalk outside a bistro
they started punching each other, at first mildly and then savagely.
Finally, out of breath, they decided to step into the bistro
for a drink. Each man raised his glass to the other and toasted,
"To the greatest artist!" Which started a new fistfight
right there in the bar. Well, eventually they calmed down and
began to drink seriously, and when they finally staggered out
of the bistro they discovered that someone very conveniently
had provided a gutter in which they could take a short nap.
The next day they woke up, there in the gutter, and discovered
that someone had stolen their wallets, watches and rings.
The moral of that true story is that while we art people today,
drunk on our own importance, argue about which of us are great
or worthy of being collected and which aren't, the real world
is stealing us blind-stealing reality and replacing it with
artificiality, stealing creativity and works of art and replacing
them with destructivity and acts of violence, to preoccupy the
lives of the general public, only 26 percent of whom think that
artists are contributing anything of value to society.
So what can we do? How can this scary state of affairs be rectified?
How can we snatch a new Renaissance of reality and creativity
from the jaws of the Dark Age of artificiality and destructivity
which is swallowing us all?
For once, I don't have a theory. After a long (since 1964) lifetime
in art, I have no real answer, much less a solution, to such
global problems. But I do have a belief, and I believe it absolutely.
It is that so long as there are boys and girls who grow up and
learn to paint and sculpt as they sculpt themselves into real
artists through experiencing feelings, there will be masterpieces;
and so long as there are masterpieces of visual art, and people
who love them, there is tremendous hope for us all.
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