Believe it or not, I’d never heard that Carrie Underwood song before. I can see why people love it. It’s good!
One thing I think about sometimes is the education I received. I grew up in a time & place with excellent, well-funded public schools. And so I received an education that prepared me to love, for example, classical music. In elementary school every kid got the opportunity to learn an instrument, and if your family was poor (like mine was), the school system found a way to get an flute or trombone or whatever into your hands even if you couldn’t afford one.
I played violin, and later switched to viola, and kept playing well into adulthood.
Experiencing this music *from the inside,* sitting in the middle of the orchestra, hearing it all around you, being part of this temporary superorganism that recreates the music live, has been one of the superlative experiences of my life. I consider myself so so lucky to have had the opportunity to do so.
But so that leads to your question... what is the point?
I don’t know. For me, the point has been in the experience of it, the joy of the aesthetic experience that unites, as you put it, the mind and the heart and the spirit. The intellectual puzzle that is also an object of extraordinary beauty and meaning.
What’s the larger reason or benefit though? I mean, I know there are very good arguments to be made for having a well-educated citizenry. But I also wonder whether there is (or was) a tacit agreement that this capacity to experience is valuable in itself, that the potential for this kind of joy is worth cultivating as a thing in itself to be passed on, a gift or inheritance.
I think having a good aesthetic sense keeps you from committing certain sorts of barbarism. In every area of your life it allows you to act more nobly and less disgraceful than you otherwise would. But it's not an argument one can prove empirically.
Like, *why* did the taxpayers of my home state think it was important to give kids these opportunities, even poor kids? I dunno, but I’m grateful they did.
Once, about ten years ago, I took a solo trip to France. I decided to visit a museum, because I was in France and it seemed like the thing to do. I'd never been big on museums -- didn't hate them, but I went to many against my will as a kid and so hadn't really sought them out as an adult.
Anyways, this musem was something like ten stories tall, maybe more, and it was arranged chronologically from the ground up. So the basement was all archeological artifacts, then for at least five or six stories you were immersed in still lifes and portraits, each of them trying their hardest to be photorealistic. I always took art electives throughout high school (and a couple in college), and I knew from experience how hard painting was, so I could appreciate the effort. But the experience wasn't going any further than that.
Until Van Gogh. After floors and floors, probably hours spent looking at muted bowls of fruit, I turned a corner and came face to face with color. I don't remember which Van Gogh was first, and it doesn't matter. All that mattered was that, in that moment, it was like I had never experienced color before in my life. It's not just that it was so vivid, or that I finally understood on a deep level why Van Gogh was so influential (though both of those were true); it was simply a sublime aesthetic experience, in a way that I have rarely experienced with any art, and one that was dependent upon the circumstances.
Thanks for writing this essay and bringing that experience to mind. I don't think I did justice putting it into words, but maybe I'll try again another time.
I had a similar experience the other day finishing Little, Big, which is one of the best novels I've read in years, and stepping out my door and suddenly noticing the pomegranate tree right outside as if for the first time. The heightened aesthetic sense as an afterglow of a meeting with something great is very real. I'm also reading Cavafy! He's in the air for some reason.
I think I needed to be explicitly told how to appreciate paintings. There are two experiences of reading about them that I'll never forget. The first was in this substack by this British writer John Phipps. He rarely updates it but when he does I think his art writing is so wonderfully joyous.
"But the best two canvases at MacConnal Mason are captivating, stop-you-in-your-tracks urban landscapes. They blend a bustling, wintry delight with a more atmospheric anomie. I challenge you to look at them without thinking of Brueghel’s skaters.
The best thing about them right now though, is this: with one in each window, you can’t see them in the store. You have to stand out in the grey and the cold and look inward. You can even bring a pint over from the Chequer’s pub and stand out with it. Have a pint and a cigarette and really take your time. It’s great to be standing outdoors in the cold looking at a cold, urban painting. Bring a friend. Bring four, and afterwards go to Maison Française across the road for a whole gourmet rotisserie chicken with chips and salad, which will cost you £14 each split five ways. Then go back to the pub and grab another pint, before going back to the Lowry. They bring the shutters down at about 4:30pm, after which you can’t see the paintings any more."
The second is the collection Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light by the longtime New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, imo the best art criticism of the last century. He's that sort of very bold, brash, democratic capital-A American (lots like Dave Hickey actually) and his writing is always emphasizing the physical response to paintings. There are too many amazing excerpts to post but here's him on Mondrian:
"Mondrian's pictures are now about only the experience that they offer. To have it, I suggest first going through the show studiously. Read the damned wall texts, because who can not read writing on walls? (It's primordial, maybe dating from "Beware the Sabre-Toothed Tiger.) Register the boilerplate "march toward abstraction." Remind yourself that you don't care. Mondrian could have marched to Pretoria for all it mattered. (It matters as a difficulty that he incurred and that made him sweat) Then, after a stroll in MoMAs garden, return to stalk joy.
Maybe start at the end, with Broadway Boogie Woogie. You have seen this jigsaw of colored lines and little squares many times. It is always up at MoMA. Now look hard. It is three pictures in one, each starring a color: red, yellow, blue. When you think red, the other hues defer. They do a jiggling routine in praise of the hero, red. When you think blue, blue steps out, and red joins the chorus. Then yellow, the same. (A fourth color, gray, shyly holds to a supporting role.) It really is like boogie-woogie piano, ping-ponging between left and right hands. You could also take it as an allegory of democracy. Don't, though."
After I read those something totally changed in me and I began to learn how to prioritize my own experience and open myself to paintings and gratefully receive what they had to offer me. I think it is partially that sense of democracy -- at the moment you're looking at a painting it's not FOR the artist's subject or the museum experts or critics or collectors. While you're standing there looking at it it's for you and no one else. And once you tune to that frequency it can open up all sorts of intense channels of emotion (I remember looking at a Picasso portrait and suddenly completely comprehending the depths to which this guy feared and HATED women).
And ofc you're right you do also start to notice form and balance and harmony where you just saw squiggles and stuff before.
These are great links and quotes, thanks! i wish that I lived in a city with more famous artworks in it! I want to go and see some Mondrians and see if I can see something!!!! This is the only one we have here: https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/98.310/
Yes, sorry for the novel! Yeah SFMOMA (I'm from there originally) is a bit lacking, last time I was at the Met in New York I was just gobsmacked by how good everything was. I really like the upper section of SFMOMA though with Agnes Martin and Ellsworth Kelly and Anselm Kiefer.
Yes, I think that’s a good way of breaking down the aesthetic experience, into emotional, intellectual and transcendent components. Oddly, the transcendent is the most difficult to describe, yet the easiest to experience. Who hasn’t stepped outside early on a spring morning and experienced the cool air, the soft light, the slight scent of something (lilac? last night’s rain? last year’s leaves?) and be overwhelmed by a feeling of transcendence? And then get into the car and drive to work and forget all about it.
And the emotional part is easy to understand. Music almost always leads with this, hence why it’s used in such a manipulative, if not cynical, way in movies. But music’s emotional residue can stay around for a long time. The other day I heard a reference to “Sylvia’s mother” and that sounded familiar, although I couldn’t recall why. Then a couple days later the song with that as its title came into my head, and it’s there right now. How did that happen?
It’s the intellectual part I’ve always struggled with. As you describe your first response to Guernica, I know exactly what that’s like. When I saw the reconstituted Rite of Spring on its 100th anniversary, I had trouble not thinking about the opening night’s riot, which was described in the program. More a food fight than a riot, was it tomatoes, soft fruit, baguettes, what? I couldn’t concentrate on the performance. How was I supposed to be responding intellectually?
Yes, and I think the intellectual is an important part, but it does require a lot of education, both formal and in terms of our taste. Like, I can pick apart what is interesting in a novel, because I know what works and what doesn't and the history of what has worked elsewhere, but there's the kind of intellectual appreciation that is actual appreciation ("I see what they're doing and it is really working!") and the kind that is merely empty ("I see what they're doing and why they're doing it"). They're equally difficult to achieve, but to me the latter isn't really part of the aesthetic experience
I loved reading this!
Believe it or not, I’d never heard that Carrie Underwood song before. I can see why people love it. It’s good!
One thing I think about sometimes is the education I received. I grew up in a time & place with excellent, well-funded public schools. And so I received an education that prepared me to love, for example, classical music. In elementary school every kid got the opportunity to learn an instrument, and if your family was poor (like mine was), the school system found a way to get an flute or trombone or whatever into your hands even if you couldn’t afford one.
I played violin, and later switched to viola, and kept playing well into adulthood.
Experiencing this music *from the inside,* sitting in the middle of the orchestra, hearing it all around you, being part of this temporary superorganism that recreates the music live, has been one of the superlative experiences of my life. I consider myself so so lucky to have had the opportunity to do so.
But so that leads to your question... what is the point?
I don’t know. For me, the point has been in the experience of it, the joy of the aesthetic experience that unites, as you put it, the mind and the heart and the spirit. The intellectual puzzle that is also an object of extraordinary beauty and meaning.
What’s the larger reason or benefit though? I mean, I know there are very good arguments to be made for having a well-educated citizenry. But I also wonder whether there is (or was) a tacit agreement that this capacity to experience is valuable in itself, that the potential for this kind of joy is worth cultivating as a thing in itself to be passed on, a gift or inheritance.
🤷🏻♀️
I think having a good aesthetic sense keeps you from committing certain sorts of barbarism. In every area of your life it allows you to act more nobly and less disgraceful than you otherwise would. But it's not an argument one can prove empirically.
Like, *why* did the taxpayers of my home state think it was important to give kids these opportunities, even poor kids? I dunno, but I’m grateful they did.
Once, about ten years ago, I took a solo trip to France. I decided to visit a museum, because I was in France and it seemed like the thing to do. I'd never been big on museums -- didn't hate them, but I went to many against my will as a kid and so hadn't really sought them out as an adult.
Anyways, this musem was something like ten stories tall, maybe more, and it was arranged chronologically from the ground up. So the basement was all archeological artifacts, then for at least five or six stories you were immersed in still lifes and portraits, each of them trying their hardest to be photorealistic. I always took art electives throughout high school (and a couple in college), and I knew from experience how hard painting was, so I could appreciate the effort. But the experience wasn't going any further than that.
Until Van Gogh. After floors and floors, probably hours spent looking at muted bowls of fruit, I turned a corner and came face to face with color. I don't remember which Van Gogh was first, and it doesn't matter. All that mattered was that, in that moment, it was like I had never experienced color before in my life. It's not just that it was so vivid, or that I finally understood on a deep level why Van Gogh was so influential (though both of those were true); it was simply a sublime aesthetic experience, in a way that I have rarely experienced with any art, and one that was dependent upon the circumstances.
Thanks for writing this essay and bringing that experience to mind. I don't think I did justice putting it into words, but maybe I'll try again another time.
Van Gogh really hits different in real life too, so much deeper and more vivid with all the layers of paint.
What museum? What town at least? I want to go!!
I had a similar experience the other day finishing Little, Big, which is one of the best novels I've read in years, and stepping out my door and suddenly noticing the pomegranate tree right outside as if for the first time. The heightened aesthetic sense as an afterglow of a meeting with something great is very real. I'm also reading Cavafy! He's in the air for some reason.
I think I needed to be explicitly told how to appreciate paintings. There are two experiences of reading about them that I'll never forget. The first was in this substack by this British writer John Phipps. He rarely updates it but when he does I think his art writing is so wonderfully joyous.
https://paintings.substack.com/p/run-dont-walk
"But the best two canvases at MacConnal Mason are captivating, stop-you-in-your-tracks urban landscapes. They blend a bustling, wintry delight with a more atmospheric anomie. I challenge you to look at them without thinking of Brueghel’s skaters.
The best thing about them right now though, is this: with one in each window, you can’t see them in the store. You have to stand out in the grey and the cold and look inward. You can even bring a pint over from the Chequer’s pub and stand out with it. Have a pint and a cigarette and really take your time. It’s great to be standing outdoors in the cold looking at a cold, urban painting. Bring a friend. Bring four, and afterwards go to Maison Française across the road for a whole gourmet rotisserie chicken with chips and salad, which will cost you £14 each split five ways. Then go back to the pub and grab another pint, before going back to the Lowry. They bring the shutters down at about 4:30pm, after which you can’t see the paintings any more."
The second is the collection Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light by the longtime New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, imo the best art criticism of the last century. He's that sort of very bold, brash, democratic capital-A American (lots like Dave Hickey actually) and his writing is always emphasizing the physical response to paintings. There are too many amazing excerpts to post but here's him on Mondrian:
"Mondrian's pictures are now about only the experience that they offer. To have it, I suggest first going through the show studiously. Read the damned wall texts, because who can not read writing on walls? (It's primordial, maybe dating from "Beware the Sabre-Toothed Tiger.) Register the boilerplate "march toward abstraction." Remind yourself that you don't care. Mondrian could have marched to Pretoria for all it mattered. (It matters as a difficulty that he incurred and that made him sweat) Then, after a stroll in MoMAs garden, return to stalk joy.
Maybe start at the end, with Broadway Boogie Woogie. You have seen this jigsaw of colored lines and little squares many times. It is always up at MoMA. Now look hard. It is three pictures in one, each starring a color: red, yellow, blue. When you think red, the other hues defer. They do a jiggling routine in praise of the hero, red. When you think blue, blue steps out, and red joins the chorus. Then yellow, the same. (A fourth color, gray, shyly holds to a supporting role.) It really is like boogie-woogie piano, ping-ponging between left and right hands. You could also take it as an allegory of democracy. Don't, though."
After I read those something totally changed in me and I began to learn how to prioritize my own experience and open myself to paintings and gratefully receive what they had to offer me. I think it is partially that sense of democracy -- at the moment you're looking at a painting it's not FOR the artist's subject or the museum experts or critics or collectors. While you're standing there looking at it it's for you and no one else. And once you tune to that frequency it can open up all sorts of intense channels of emotion (I remember looking at a Picasso portrait and suddenly completely comprehending the depths to which this guy feared and HATED women).
And ofc you're right you do also start to notice form and balance and harmony where you just saw squiggles and stuff before.
These are great links and quotes, thanks! i wish that I lived in a city with more famous artworks in it! I want to go and see some Mondrians and see if I can see something!!!! This is the only one we have here: https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/98.310/
Yes, sorry for the novel! Yeah SFMOMA (I'm from there originally) is a bit lacking, last time I was at the Met in New York I was just gobsmacked by how good everything was. I really like the upper section of SFMOMA though with Agnes Martin and Ellsworth Kelly and Anselm Kiefer.
What a great way to look at Mondrian!
Yes, I think that’s a good way of breaking down the aesthetic experience, into emotional, intellectual and transcendent components. Oddly, the transcendent is the most difficult to describe, yet the easiest to experience. Who hasn’t stepped outside early on a spring morning and experienced the cool air, the soft light, the slight scent of something (lilac? last night’s rain? last year’s leaves?) and be overwhelmed by a feeling of transcendence? And then get into the car and drive to work and forget all about it.
And the emotional part is easy to understand. Music almost always leads with this, hence why it’s used in such a manipulative, if not cynical, way in movies. But music’s emotional residue can stay around for a long time. The other day I heard a reference to “Sylvia’s mother” and that sounded familiar, although I couldn’t recall why. Then a couple days later the song with that as its title came into my head, and it’s there right now. How did that happen?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXcJNljjTG0
It’s the intellectual part I’ve always struggled with. As you describe your first response to Guernica, I know exactly what that’s like. When I saw the reconstituted Rite of Spring on its 100th anniversary, I had trouble not thinking about the opening night’s riot, which was described in the program. More a food fight than a riot, was it tomatoes, soft fruit, baguettes, what? I couldn’t concentrate on the performance. How was I supposed to be responding intellectually?
Yes, and I think the intellectual is an important part, but it does require a lot of education, both formal and in terms of our taste. Like, I can pick apart what is interesting in a novel, because I know what works and what doesn't and the history of what has worked elsewhere, but there's the kind of intellectual appreciation that is actual appreciation ("I see what they're doing and it is really working!") and the kind that is merely empty ("I see what they're doing and why they're doing it"). They're equally difficult to achieve, but to me the latter isn't really part of the aesthetic experience