High culture is both boring and intense at the same time

But to explain how this can be, I need to delve into the nature of the aesthetic experience

I've recently read two very negative pieces about Ben Lerner. The first is this well-known one by

becca rothfeld

and the second is this review in Tablet of his new poetry collection. But I remember being so grateful ten years ago when I read his first novel, Leaving Atocha Station, which describes his consistent sense of mystification and even fraudulence when faced with high art:

I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew. I was intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or painting or piece of music “changed their life,” especially since I had often known these people before and after their experience and could register no change…the closest I’d come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity.

A year or two later I walked through Madrid's modern art museum, the Thyssen-Bornemisza, looking at the art and attempting to feel anything at all, and the only picture that aroused any genuine emotions in me were the paintings by Lucian Freud. I did enjoy his hyperrealistic style (it reminded me of an adventure game, maybe The Longest Journey, one of my favorites then and now), but I also felt relief. Wow, I am capable of enjoying art! In front of Guernica what I mostly felt was "This is so huge! Where did Picasso imagine this would hang when he painted it?"

With regards to modern art, I knew it was churlish and bourgeois to say "My kid could draw that", but I'd always wondered how you distinguish a good one from a bad one. Even earlier than my encounter with Guernica, I went seven or eight times one summer to the modern art wing of the National Gallery of Art (in DC, where I grew up). I would sit for hours in front of paintings and try to feel anything at all. I once ditched work and spent three hours in front of some squiggly lines, reading Heart of Darkness. I enjoyed HoD and was fascinated with its complex structure, but I felt nothing for the art.

For me the breakthrough came just a few years ago when I was reading a memoir by Francoise Gilot, one of Picasso's wives and a painter in her own right. She mentioned how Picasso would talk about painting, talking about the balance of the masses in a painting. I think this was the passage:

“When you compose a painting,” he said, “you build around lines of force that guide you in your construction. There’s one area where the first graphic sketch evokes the idea of a table, for example; another one, where you create the idea of the movement of space behind the table. Those lines of force set up a resonance that leads you to where you are going, because in general you don’t arbitrarily decide for yourself. But once you remove one of those elements from your composition and move it around as though it were walking at will through that two-dimensional space, you’re able to achieve a far greater effect of surprise than you could ever do by leaving it in the first position.” He painted out the first skull, pinned down the paper one and marked carefully the area it occupied. Then he removed the paper and painted in the skull in its new location. When he had finished, he saw that one portion of the first skull was still partly visible beneath the surface. He studied it for a moment, then quickly painted in a piece of Gruyère cheese over the obtrusive edge of the original skull, in such a way as to make the two forms coincide.

“The cheese serves a dual purpose,” he pointed out. “It eliminates the void created by the disappearance of the old skull, but since it has the same form, in part, as the new one, which was modeled after the old, it sets up a plastic rhyme between cheese and skull. And wait.” He added holes to the cheese. It was now unmistakably Gruyère. “You see how the holes in the cheese rhyme with the eye cavities in the skull?” he said. He set down his brush. The picture was finished and Pablo was happy. In solving the problem of balance, he had created and simultaneously solved another problem in a manner that made the painting far more effective than it could have been if the problem had never been raised. And it happened so quickly, it seemed almost like a miracle taking place before my eyes.

Reading this, I realized, "This guy isn't a charlatan. He's not just guessing. There's a real artistic instinct here." Like, this is how a writer thinks too. You just have this intuition that different masses balance each other out and that there's only a certain number of ways for thing to fit together. And I was like, oh...all these old guys, the Pollocks and the Mondrians too...they must've thought this way as well. They aren't just doing this intellectually. They're guided by a sense of beauty.

Nowadays the trend in art criticism is to make things very conceptual. In a writing MFA, you're silent during workshop, you don't explain the piece. But in an art MFA you stand next to it and defend it, telling everyone what you attempted to achieve. And depending on the explanation, people receive it differently.

And the truth is, a lot of writers and artists are charlatans. You can tell from how they talk: they've never really experienced artistic creation. They don't know that it's possible to just feel deeply the rightness of an element. And they also don't know that, absent that feeling, you can't make good art. That's the thing I've never liked about cancel culture. It's not that censorship is inimical to art: it's not. All the great Russian writers were censored by the czar's bureacrats. What's impossible is self-censorship. You can make great art even if you know someone will strike away offending passages. You can't make it if the world tells you that you shouldn't write offending passages in the first place. When writers talk about staying in your lane or avoiding problematic shit, you just know they're charlatans. No real writer is willing to internalize external authority in quite the way they suggest.

But that's an aside. What I want to talk about is the aesthetic experience. After reading that passage, I was willing to give both art and instrumental music a much bigger chance, to trust more the genius of the painter or composer, and it was only after I gained that trust that I began to have aesthetic experiences around high culture. The trust came before the emotional responses did.

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It's very hard to explain the aesthetic experience to people. Lots of folks seem to think it's socially constructed or contingent. You are taught to view art in a certain way, and if you view it in that way you think "Huh, that's interesting, I know what style this is and where this belongs in art history and what the various elements are supposed to evoke" and that's the aesthetic experience.

I would suggest that this is incorrect. Even if you know exactly what a painting wants to do and what it has done to others, you still haven't had the aesthetic experience unless it has actually done that thing to you!

To my mind, the aesthetic experience is composed of three responses: emotional, intellectual, and transcendent. None of these things is a constructed response. To the extent that the aesthetic experience requires training, it's because the eye needs to be trained to perceive nuance, and the attention span needs to be trained to lie still, and the heart needs to be trained to just give things a fucking chance.

But to describe the aesthetic experience I think it's helpful to start by discussing two very basic, very common forms of aesthetic experience: popular music and natural beauty.

When I was in college my favorite song was this tune by Carrie Underwood called Jesus Take The Wheel. It's about this woman who's driving with her baby in the backseat, and her car slips on a patch of ice and she surrenders herself to God and just prays to be okay, and she is!

I love Carrie Underwood. She was the winner of the fourth season of American Idol. Some argue that she ruined American Idol, because before her the winners and finalists were people like Kelly Clarkson, Ruben Studdard, Clay Aiken--people of rather average looks and backgrounds, who had some homespun charisma. But Carrie Underwood came on stage, and she was just the picture of a Nashville diva. She had a great vocal range, she was glossy and blonde and thin and very polished, and she won. And over time, the American Idol finalists started to look more and more polished, and you lost the underdog appeal of the thing.

Anyway I would listen to this song and just start crying. In college I was still drinking, still felt out of control, and I just didn't know what was wrong with me or how to feel better. I liked the song's straightforward evocation of mercy and grace. I had the song as my ringtone for many years! At least five years!

The song uses pretty conventional tricks. I don't have the musical vocabulary to describe how it works, but the first verse has a sense of foreboding, which is punctured by an extreme increase in volume and pitch (Carrie is known for singing VERY loud) that carries a sense of exaltation. The tension is released in the second verse, when the woman comes out safe and swears to live a better life. When I listen to the song I feel straightforward feelings, fear, desperation, and relief. The intellectual side is also straightforward. I am not Christian, but I feel Christian as I listen to it: I understand the appeal of an all powerful and merciful God, and I feel my own unworthiness.

The transcendent side is the most difficult to explain. It just comes from how I am transfigured. I am there with the woman in the car. Her experience becomes mine. I am saved, along with her. I feel the deep truth of the song--its timeless and supra-rational quality. It's the difference between knowing an idea and BELIEVING in that idea. For the duration of the song, I feel a shadow of what Christians must believe.

This is a very accessible song. It used to play on country music radio constantly. I experienced a strong intellectual, emotional, and transcendent response from it. I still do. Nobody taught me how to listen to country music. I just immediately liked it.

The question becomes, why do we need anything besides this? What is this missing? Why bother with high art at all?

The classic answer is that high art is more complex. It contains more nuance, more shades of meaning. There's not a lot to discuss with the Carrie Underwood song. The last time I looked at the YouTube comments for the video, for instance, it was full of people being like "I asked Jesus to take the wheel ten years ago, when I was in a skid...the accident killed my wife and paralyzed me" (those comments aren’t at the top anymore). Apparently whenever people are in accidents, it's very common for them, in the moment, to pray to be saved, and Jesus quite often does not intervene. This is not a nuance contained in the song. On quite an elemental level, the song is false--Jesus will not take the wheel, he will not save you from an accident. That's not even something Christianity promises! What Christianity promises is eternal, rather than temporal, salvation.

So we can imagine a story that's, say, about a man being paralyzed after asking Jesus to take the wheel--if a story brought up the feelings of this song, then punctured or reversed them, that would be more complex.

And I do think high art is more complex on an intellectual level, but I feel very instinctively that it's not only that. Intellectual complexity is what makes people explain art and literature, and be like, this represents this and that represents the other thing, and this feature is a symbol for whatnots. But is that really what art is about? Complexity? String theory is complex. If art’s complexity doesn’t lead to a deeper emotional and transcendent response, then who gives a shit? If we want to learn something, we take a class; when we look at or listen to an art-type thing, we’re looking for an aesthetic experience.

So, clearly, high art, to justify itself, also needs to have a deeper complexity, an aesthetic complexity, that can't exactly be put into words. You can explain why that cheese ought to be there, but, really, the cheese's rightness is self-evident. The form of the work demands that the cheese be in a specific place. Aesthetic complexity means that the story or picture or song complicates our initial sense of what a song or painting or story is going to do. Picasso originally painted it one way, and then he disrupted that, putting a cheese in there instead of a skull. He found a different, more complex, way for the painting to be right.

But what is the effect of that complexity? How do we experience that complexity, and why is that experience better than the experience of listening to Carrie Underwood?

Because the plain truth is that high art must be better than popular art. Unless it is better, deeper, more impactful, more meaningful, then it doesn't deserve to exist. Why would anyone train their eye or their ear or their mind to make certain distinctions unless making those distinctions gave them a reward? If Picasso doesn't pay more dividends than Carrie Underwood, then why is there a huge wall in Madrid devoted to his work instead of to Carrie's (I've been to the Country Music Hall of Fame, and they don't even have a particularly big Carrie section there!)

Recently I've been really getting into this Greek poet, Cavafy, and I've been watching myself, trying to figure out the truth of my reactions. I'm not interested in blowing smoke and pretending to feel things I don't. None of these poems have made me cry. None has compelled me to put it on repeat or turn it into a ringtone. And yet I am positive that the poems are indeed more valuable. So then what? Either I am a fraud or the benefit of high art must be primarily intellectual. But that also feels intuitively false to me, because understanding or interpreting a poem doesn't really, to me, increase my aesthetic response to it.

I think to figure out this conundrum, we should look at the highest possible aesthetic experience: natural beauty.

Cavafy is always meditating on the beauty of Alexandria, and I was like, man his life seems so romantic. And then I thought, wait a second, I live in San Francisco, the most beautiful city in America. I am the one who has a romantic life! So I went to the window and I looked out at the Mission, underneath me, with Potrero Hill in the distance. I saw the clear blue sky and the light playing off the trees. I just stood and looked at it for quite a long time, and I was like...this is really beautiful!

Forgive me, I am awful at visual descriptions, so I won't try to paint a picture. But I did notice that the longer I looked, the more absorbed I was, and the deeper my aesthetic experience became. The sense of stillness, the sense of quiet, the feeling of being perfectly in my own skin. I got the sense that neither past nor future exists, and that we only have this present moment, and that all of existence is just the play of different shapes and energies.

Natural beauty is, in my opinion, an aesthetic experience that arouses a relatively weak intellectual and emotional response, but very strong transcendent response. It is very easy to ignore natural beauty. I literally had a very strong reaction to the view outside my own window! Which I see every single day! And the day after that happened, I walked past the window without a second glance.

Natural beauty has a lot of power to please, but it has no ability to compel our attention. It isn't absorbing. Form, particularly simple forms, like those in narrative art and popular music, have the ability to compel our attention. They provide reliable doses of emotion and pleasure that keep us glued to the object. Instrumental music, visual art, and lyric poetry don't have the same power of absorption that popular music and narrative art have.

People are always saying reading is better than watching TV because "you have to put more of yourself into a book". As a former teacher of mine said "Reading Proust requires a lot of silence." You need to compel yourself to pay attention to high art, just like you have to compel yourself to pay attention to natural beauty.

But then the question is, to what end?

And I think that's not an answer that is simple. I think different art has different 'tastes.' The specific content of the emotional, intellectual, and transcendent reactions tends to vary--some of this is due to the properties of the art, and some relates to the specifics of the viewer's experience and taste. But there's the plain need for variety. We simply want to experience many different forms of aesthetic pleasure. It's very easy to say, well, we've all experienced the aesthetic pleasure given by absorbing arts, like popular music and television, and the aesthetic pleasure given by natural beauty, and now we just want to experience something different. I think a simple and unobjectionable answer is that the techniques needed to compel your attention, whether these are narrative or melodic techniques, tend to narrow the range of aesthetic experiences that popular music and narrative art are able to give. And that when art is freed of the need to compel absorption, it's also free to give different, more subtle aesthetic experiences.

Nothing on earth is easier to ignore than the view from your window, after all, and nothing on earth is more transcendent.

Another easy answer is that our attention is our most valuable resource. And the more we consciously manage it and choose to devote it to something, the more meaningful that thing becomes. High art is, perhaps, more meaningful precisely because we choose to view it, choose to search it for meaning. And we do that because we sense, as we do with natural beauty, that there is a deeper order within it--in other words, that this object is worthy of our attention. Some things, after all, are simply thin. Carrie Underwood is something you listen to on repeat, while you're playing a video game or cleaning your house. Her work doesn't reward a closer listen than that. That's not how you listen to a poem by Cavafy. The latter is worth the attention you might pay to it.

But I do think the Picasso painting, the Cavafy poem, the Beethoven symphony, the Carrie Underwood song, and the view from my window are all one thing. They're all aesthetic experiences. They all play on the same senses. I really strongly reject the idea that my response to any of these is fundamentally different than my response to the others, or that my response to one or any of them is either culturally constructed or is contingent on some knowledge or explanation that comes to me from outside the work.

And I reject it because that is simply not how I experience art of any sort. There is one component of it--the intellectual content, that can be altered or changed by the addition of background knowledge (as my knowledge of the Tang Dynasty deepened my understanding of Tu Fu), but to me that's only one part of the aesthetic experience, and it's not enough, by itself, to justify studying high art. I know that the democrat in us wants to insist that high art is no better than low art, but that's simply not true. Some things are simply more beautiful, more worthy of our interest, more capable of enlivening our life and offering up transcendent experience, than other things are.

I think that simply because the poetry isn't as absorbing or intense the Carrie Underwood song, I am tempted to feel ashamed of my interest in the Cavafy, but that would mean holding the poetry to a different standard than I do the view from my window. I would unquestioningly say that the view from my window is more beautiful than a Carrie Underwood song--it's simply that the view from my window is too intense, too awe-inspiring. It would be terrifying to sit staring out my window for even an hour, much less for an entire day. The Carrie Underwood isn't worth more because it's more absorbing than the view from my window--rather, that is precisely why it is worth less. The Carrie Underwood song doesn't overwhelm. It can be listened to over and over, ad nauseum, and easily digested. It doesn't unsettle or alter me. Its compelling quality isn't evidence of its strength, but, rather the opposite, of its weakness.

I had this experience recently while listening, for the umpteenth time, to the only piece of classical music I really know: the Dvorak "New World Symphony" (I saw it seven years ago performed by a really wild, energetic guest conductor at the SF symphony, on an early date with Rachel, and have listened to it at least fifteen times since). It's a complex work, meant to evoke the experience of America, and it alternates between these single instruments and these grand, sweeping movements. I felt very strongly connected to the sense of the heroic and the ideal--to the feeling of these plucky little instruments moving through this vast world, standing up to vast forces--and I kept thinking, "Why do people even bother writing novels? It's all here. It's all here. Everything the novelist is looking for, it's all here--all the heroism and courage. It's in these little instruments, juxtaposed against these big sounds." I was absolutely transported, blown away, everything I would've wanted.

So why hadn't I experienced this feeling earlier? Well to be honest this is the first time I had really forced myself to pay attention to the music without browsing the internet and doing anything else. Like, all the other times I had tried to experience high art, had I really paid attention? At the Reina Sofia I stood in front of paintings for thirty seconds, clocked my reaction and moved on. With Guernica I was half convinced beforehand that there wasn't anything there. With the modern art room, I read books mostly and only occasionally looked up and thought “Welp, it's still squiggles!” I had just never really trusted the music and focused on it in quite the way I did that morning before.

Since then, I've been clearing an hour most mornings to listen to all kinds of music: Brahm's 1st, Beethoven's 3rd and 5th, the Bach Cello Suites, and while I've enjoyed some more than others, I have found all of them almost unbearably moving, so the point where Carrie Underwood, for all her undeniable appeal, kind of sounds like the jangling of car keys.

But it's hard! I still struggle to pay attention! It's just like the view from my window! I still have to work to avoid my phone. I still have to make time for it, choosing to put off other priorities. It’s pretty really difficult! Reading a novel isn't difficult in quite that way. And, of course, a novel has semantic content, which a symphony does not. A novel takes the raw stuff of life--incident, memory, detail, dialogue--and arranges them to provide an aesthetic experience, which has its own sort of charm. The 'taste' of a novel is very different.

So my main point is that there js a reward for all this effort. What low art provides--that feeling of ease--is given up, which means high art isn't as relaxing or assimilable, but in return high art is disrupting in precisely the way we, as human beings, are often begging to be disrupted. And it disrupts us precisely because, when we allow ourselves to sink into it, the aesthetic experience offered by high art is so much more intense, so much more transcendent, and, ultimately, more pleasurable.

And that's only appropriate! I mean isn't it good that there are higher things? It would be sort of pathetic if a song I loved at age 21 still constituted the height of artistic achievement for me. It actually makes me hopeful and happy that even now, in early middle age, I can not only feel new things, but that the things I feel can be ao distinctl adult, so distinctly accessible only through the very adult virtues of effort and discipline that I have spent the last fifteen years cultivating!

Now the question, of course, becomes, "So what? Does the aesthetic experience serve any purpose besides pleasure?" I'm much more torn on this question, but it's one I'll have to take up at a later date.