When I was small child, my father was a painter. Once we were talking about one of his paintings and I asked him, in the way of small children, "but what is it for?" He had no real answer.
Indeed the perennial question, "What is art?" has not had an easy ride since the dawn of modernism and abstraction. Some fall back on the hoary old, "It's whatever you want it to be". But I have never bought that. Let me explain why not.
Consider a collector who owns both a small Henry Moore and a curious water-smoothed pebble of about the same size. One is a priceless work of art, the other a mere objet trouvé worth perhaps a thousandth as much. To the untrained and ignorant eye, it is not even clear which is which. Those thousands of pounds make it crystal clear that the Henry Moore is "Art" while the natural pebble is not. So - what makes it art? Is it whatever reason I want? Hardly. Clearly, in the first instance it is the hand of the artist. The hand is guided by the eye and the eye by the mind. I will say that the idea in the artist's mind is the Art, while the work of the hand and eye is Craft. In this sense, a craftsman works to a pattern, at best designs to a function. It is the greater idea in the artist's mind that makes an object into art. Not yours or the collector's, note, but the artist's.
An artist who says, "It's whatever you want it to be", is saying that they have no idea - literally - in their mind as to what its artistic qualities might be. No, that is not art, that is dishonesty. "I don't know" would be the more honest reply, and that too is common enough.
To make sense of an artist who is unaware of their art we must appeal to the subconscious, for where else can the ideas which drive the consciously ignorant eye and hand be found? The great psychologist C.G. Jung used to ask his patients to design mandalas - circular, symmetrical images which appear frequently in the religious art of the Far East. Often these patients had no idea why they chose the particular patterns they did. Jung used his knowledge of subconscious symbolism to divine the personal meaning hidden in their art, as a way to help diagnose their conditions.
And that, I believe, is the essence of what drives us to art. The complete awareness has no need of art, it has all it needs within itself. But most of us are not that lucky. We strive to escape from a mire of our own failings, to seek something better. Evolution has made us this way. And, whether we are an established maestro or a psychiatric patient, art is one of the most positive weapons we possess in that struggle. An artist is, above all else, their own private therapist. A great artist reaches deep into the human condition and becomes therapist to the world.
There are surely self-styled artists who make a comfortable living riding this phenomenon, whose only idea is to pass off arbitrary rubbish as valuable works by hiding behind art school culture and those "I don't know", "it's whatever you want" mantras. I don't mind paying objet trouvé prices for that sort of thing if it appeals to me, but it's not art. For art to be genuine, it needs to connect the artist to the beholder honestly, not as a con trick. Place a genuine objet trouvé on a pedestal for good reason, perhaps that water-smoothed pebble an elegant Concorde nose cone with all its history behind it, and suddenly you do have a work of art.
I first formed these ideas when I got fed up with reading too much bad poetry. Why, I wondered, did people write such rubbish? More astonishing still, why did others collect it into books, buy, recite and discuss it with adoration? In my arrogance I decided that they were crippled minds, to whom even this stricken level of imagination was a road to spiritual development. What then of my own poetry, seldom exposed to others because they never seemed to even see it as poetry (but that's another story)? Was I, too, some kind of spiritual cripple? Well of course, yes and no, depending on how hard you judge imperfection.
I love music, though I am no musician. I love folk, rock, tin whistles, often simple stuff that grates on the nerves of my classically-trained acquaintances. They in her turn often like choral stuff that I cannot bear - oh, the pretty-boy fruitiness and warbling Clara Clucks! They dismiss Ian Gillan's gloriously subtle primal song as mere "screaming". Neither of us is wrong, our tastes are not crippled, we are just different. Luckily, there is a vast body of work we both love. Poetry is surely the same. Each to their own path, and who is to judge how far another has progressed?
Any psychiatrist will tell you that sanity is the ability to function in society. But that of course begs the question, what is a sane society? If I function perfectly within an insane society, doesn't that rather defeat the psychiatrist's rationale? I would like to suggest here that art is Nature's way of tackling this question or, at least, one such way. It allows us as individuals to create a collective image of the sanity of our society. A perverted society is composed of similarly perverted spirits and its art will rub that in. The great artist who can expose the heart of the matter and take the culture's art to the next level is, as I said earler, therapist to the whole society, helping all those spiritually corrupted individuals towards the health of both themselves and of the society around them. Over time, vibrant societies with healthy art come to thrive while the unhealthy become decadent and fall.
Figurative fine art is one such healthy outcome. It is a feast to the eye, a handsomely-crafted celebration of its message. It releases positive feelings about the society one lives in and helps to bind that society together.
And this is shared by both traditionalism and the best of modernism. It is in recognition of our individual and collective sanity that people will pay a thousandfold more for a Henry Moore than for a pebble out of the ground, it's in our DNA.
Updated 5 May 2021