Tuesday, July 15, 2014

The problem with art and news is not that they should be centrally planned

Taken together, Alain de Botton’s two latest books, Art as Therapy (with John Armstrong) and The News position the writer and philosopher as a consumer advocate, lobbying the monolithic institutions of art and—if “art” wasn’t broad enough for you—the news media on behalf of underserved customers who are not nearly as articulate as de Botton, a thinker whose writes with a fluidity that, for better or worse, makes common sense seem fresh and the ridiculous seem appealingly obvious.

Both projects are worthwhile enterprises. The visual arts, on which Art as Therapy dwells, have a marginal role in contemporary western society, despite the rich archive of beauty and longing, and the talent of current practitioners. A few minutes with a piece of visual art can evoke many new feelings and ideas, so you could argue that there’s bigger bang for the buck in it than our current obsession with TV shows, which require dozens of hours to absorb. The huge auction bids that go towards top artist brands (Is Gerhard Richter the Prada of the art world? Is Jeff Koons the Dolce and Gabbana?) are a testament not to the relevance of visual art, but its lack of centrality; collectability shifts the value from the meaning and emotional effect of a work to the market surges it creates, that is, to buzz.

And the news? As the highly formalized formats of TV news and newspaper stories are shoved aside by the cacophony of free online content (articles and charticles, rants and puff pieces, tome-like critiques that would never have been read if not for Facebook, video responses to video responses to non-official music videos chronicling news events), established profit-oriented media are desperately flailing for something that would make it stand out from a crowd composed of every literate and semi-literate person with access to a data plan. With news in such a deeply existential crisis, any advice is worth listening to.

For de Botton, the purposes of both visual art and the news are remarkably similar. In fact you could imagine the two books combined into a single volume: How media (plus nice buildings and furniture) can make a better, happier world through happier and more introspective people.

“Alongside its usual focus on catastrophe and evil, the news should perform the critical function of sometimes distilling and concentrating a little of the hope a nation requires to chart a course through its difficulties,” de Botton writes in The News. “While helping society by uncovering its misdeeds and being honest about its pains, the news should not neglect the equally important task of constructing an imaginary community that seems sufficiently good, forgiving and sane that one might want to contribute to it.” In Art as Therapy, de Botton and Armstrong propose that “art (a category that includes works of design, architecture and craft) is a therapeutic medium that can help guide, exhort and console its viewers, enabling them to become better versions of themselves.” Media can make us better. And can make us feel better.

I can’t disagree. A way forward is badly needed. De Botton’s intentions are worthy. Yet these two books seem simultaneously condescending and naïve. You admire de Botton for getting his ideas out there—the Art Gallery of Ontario is currently offering a show built according to his principles—and still shake your head about this unhelpful rabbit hole he has led us down.

In the case of art, the singularity of expectations set out in Art of Therapy ignores what most people find most delightful about the visual arts—surprise, open-endedness, transmutability. It’s a domain where effect in the heart and brain of the observer can separate itself entirely from artistic intent and critical interpretation; unlike in literature, you can ignore the voice telling you what it’s all about. But de Botton and Armstrong argue that discourse about art should focus on its effects on the human spirit and psyche, providing a balm—or perhaps a cure—for our anxieties about love, nature, family, work and politics.

The authors are right in attacking the dry art-history text that accompanies most art displayed in galleries—birth dates, historical events, formal artistic influences. No one can deny the art world is full of bad writing. But at least these curatorial insights are, for the most part, based on facts, even if they’re not particularly helpful in letting a piece of art work its way into our psyches. What de Botton and Armstrong suggest in lieu of dry, impersonal analysis of art is to insert an interpretive voice directly between the work and the viewer. They want to tell you exactly why they think a piece of art is good for you.

For example, the current description of Christ Appearing to His Mother in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York reads, in part: “This picture is the right panel of [Queen] Isabella’s triptych and can tentatively be attributed to her court artist Juan de Flandes on the basis of documentary and technical evidence. The center and left panels remain at Isabella’s burial site, the Capilla Real, Granada, where she bequeathed the triptych upon her death in 1504.”

Art as Therapy would substitute this historical tracking with something more like this: “This is an image of a loving mother-son relationship. But it does not avoid conflict or grief: these are precisely what the picture says are central to love. It is a very restrained image. They do not embrace. He will soon leave. How often has this scene been re-enacted. The picture makes the claim that such moments of return (and of survival), though fleeting and rare, are crucially important in life. It wants men to understand—and call—their mothers.”

That’s a fine approach for a newspaper column or a blog that is not official or definitive, text that does not claim to buttress the power of art in our lives. Critics can say what they want about art, no matter how wrongheaded or eccentric. But, as a comprehensive way of looking at art, de Botton and Armstrong’s approach makes not one but two wild assumptions. First, they assume what the artist’s intention was—did de Flandes explicitly try to paint that conflict and grief are central to love? Who knows?! I doubt he would have expressed it that way if he had expressed it at all. But worse, de Botton and Armstrong assume what’s going on—or what should go on—in the viewer’s own head. They have banished the viewer’s own imagination from the equation.

I have been a fan of de Botton for a couple of decades now. His early novels, especially, are brilliant at mapping the brain’s neuroses, the unique connections an individual’s experiences create. “Lucy lacked confidence in her intellectual capacities,” he writes in Kiss & Tell. “Afraid a conversation might grow beyond her comprehension, she had a habit of deflating matters to levels obviously below her. To discuss the politics of the Prime Minister would lead her to wonder how he combed his hair, consideration of a recent novel would elicit remarks on how the jacket cover matched the author’s eyes.” De Botton’s depictions of the idiosyncrasies of an individual’s emotional wiring is the opposite of universal. Lucy needs a counsellor for her problems, not a generic self-help guide. Yet in both Art as Therapy and The News, he plops his very specific expectations on us all.

There are times in Art as Therapy when I thought the authors were having me on, positing art as a propagandistic pharmaceutical: get the dosage right, take it with the right sort of criticism and you get a better life. I kept waiting for the joke to be unveiled: But of course art is not a drug! Of course our emotions are trickier than that! The punchline never came. They are dead serious.

The authors go so far as to commission an artwork according to an Art as Therapy-style brief: “Many couples have painful conflicts that break out over dinner. The spark often looks quite small, such as the way someone asked, ‘How was your day?’ which what feels like a sarcastic or sceptical intent….We would like an artwork to carry indications of an underlying but frustrated longing to be happy together. Perhaps the table is beautifully laid…. Can their suffering gain in dignity and be less catastrophic and lonely because of a work of art?”

Sounds like something Stalin might write if he cared more about matters of the heart than the grain harvest. But this is not satire, it’s sincere. As proof, there’s a photo by Jessica Todd Harper delivering on the brief’s dictates. Good for her, though you wonder if, while producing the piece, Harper wondered: Why don’t de Botton and Armstrong just go do this themselves? Besides, she didn’t quite get the RFP right: her table is not beautifully laid. Marshall McLuhan, who argued an artist’s power is discerning the environment we can not easily see—and seeing the future before others do—wouldn’t be impressed by this all-request-Friday approach to creativity.

The very appeal of visual art is that the space between the work and the observer is wide open. There are parameters, sure. But de Botton, more than anyone, should know how quirky human responses can be. Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire is both a gateway to the indescribably sublime and a provider of ideas for a new paint colour for the living room walls. Henri Matisse’s Dance (II) may conjure hope for some, but, in a certain mindset, it can conjure futility and desperation. The effects differ not only from observer to observer, but from day to day in a given observer. History changes the meaning of a piece of art more than any piece of critical text accompanying it. “Art,” declare de Botton and Armstrong, “has a powerfully therapeutic effect. It can variously help to inspire, console, redeem, guide, comfort, expand and reawaken us.” So true. But having someone guess how it should do so hurts rather than helps the process. Some of the text accompanying the show at the Art Gallery of Ontario seemed literally random, as if the authors had concocted a compelling meditation—a bit of chicken soup for the soul—and then rapidly chosen a work that might fit. You could easily imagine the therapeutic advice applied to another painting—or another hundred paintings—if the one on display hadn’t been brought to their attention. The specificity of any given piece vanishes in a wash of generic self-help.

The assessments laid out in The News seem less ridiculous, in part because de Botton doesn’t adopt a newly patented one-of-a-kind, super-duper self-help strategy in order to fix the mainstream media’s many problems.

He picks apart the failures of foreign news, cultural news and financial news with great astuteness. Foreign news and financial news, especially, are often stripped of all humanity—body counts and share prices reported without any sense of who’s dying and what’s been manufactured. “The financial news organizations have journalists embedded in some of the world’s most remote economic outposts. There are correspondents monitoring the wheat harvest in Saskatchewan, Canada, the progress of oil exploration off the coast of Brazil, the extraction of niobium and zirconolite in Malawi, the development of the next generation of commuter trains in the Ruhr Valley, Germany, the weaving of carbon-fibre aerospace panels in Chubu, Central Japan—and yet in spite of their extraordinary and privileged vantage points, these journalists are required to maintain a pinpoint focus on only such information as will help investors to answer one lone question: ‘To which companies should we commit our money?’”

But in an effort to produce a critique that is technologically neutral—de Botton focuses strictly on content, not delivery systems—he seems to ignore the established media’s current upheaval (I say “established” rather than “mainstream” because The New York Times and alternative weeklies are equally affected). It’s as if he’s talking about a time (perhaps an imaginary time but one that stands as a sturdy stereotype) when a citizen primarily got his or her news from a single newspaper, some hourly reports on the radio and an evening TV newscast. Even then, it’s as if magazines, weeklies and other news sources don’t exist in de Botton’s world. Sure, the daily financial news focuses on the bottom line, but Bloomberg Businessweek, say, is full of kooky characters and compelling narratives on which we can draw inspiration. The Economist may also be obsessed with data, but its writers often give us a quick snapshot of the people and places in which these trends and supply chains exist. It is certainly piecemeal. An idealist might suggest that instead of hourly updates about, say, the kidnapping of school girls in Nigeria, a 4,000-word piece about the country, the terrorist group doing the kidnapping and the lives of women there would be much more engaging and enlightening. But the fact that such hourly updates exist do not preclude that long feature. There are many journalists who dedicate themselves to such work.

In the chapter on photography, de Botton demonstrates his failure to see the mechanics of how news is produced. As a cultural critic, he does a great job of pointing out that great images communicate reams of information about their subjects, while poor images merely break up the text on a page. But it’s not like news organizations don’t want great images. It’s about talent, resources, timing and access. News organizations could wait until they get a compelling image of President Barack Obama before they publish one—but that could be weeks or months. Meanwhile, the Twitterati and blogosphere continue to talk about him, citizens still wonder what he’s up to.

There are indeed publications that wait for the right photo, the right story, the right writer, that try to rise above the 24-hour news cycle. Again, magazines seem to be something that deliver just what de Botton is asking for, but seems never to have encountered one he could cite in this book (he does quote a particularly bad piece of writing from The Economist, which seemed a little unfair. How about this as a way to improve the media: write better!). He seems to call for news to have some sort of codified system—perhaps not unlike the education system—but he ignores that the marketplace has created a system. Visual cues, language, venue and reputation guide gossip-seekers toward Us magazine and TMZ, thoughtful types toward the New York Review of Books and local shoppers toward their weekly flyers. Online publications like Slate and Salon have been particularly adept at blurring the line between highbrow and low brow, thoughtful and sensational, topical and enduring. In the west, we don’t rely on a single or handful of news organizations to surprise us and tell us what we want to know. We navigate between trite and deep as we see fit. Could the offerings be better? Oh yes. But that’s often an economic problem, not one of a commitment to quality or lack of thoughtfulness on the part of editors and producers.

The thing about de Botton as a consumer advocate is that he seems to lack faith in consumers themselves to bring their own insight to what they read and see, to know their own needs when they seek out and consume media and art. Certainly there are some consumers that take in only the loudest voices. But they have been with us always. And they are sometimes the consumers who also want a refined experience. Centrally planned art and news worlds can’t anticipate who wants what when. There’s no one door in.

This piece originally appeared on Suite.io.