The Courage to be Open

Creative
Courage
Series

I believe that great art is usually open — not veiled, sly, or mysterious. It’s not a display of technical skill or cleverness, nor is it some kind of intellectual exercise or puzzle to be solved. And it’s not emotionally blank.

Similarly, the artist’s ideal audience doesn’t have as its primary interest “figuring out” or analyzing the work. There are many intelligent people who seem genuinely interested in the arts and yet don’t understand this simple point.

So if serious art isn’t some kind of secret code waiting to be deciphered — if it isn’t a riddle for the cognoscenti — then what is it? Libraries have been written on this subject (they call it “aesthetics”) without resolving anything. I’ll skip the temptation to play in that lexical quagmire and just say that art is like pornography: I may not know how to define it, but I (usually) know it when I see it. And, like porn, when it’s doing its job well you don’t just feel it in your head.

The same tricksy art whose goal is to be some kind of intellectual puzzle is also prone to be prone — face down and emotions hidden.

Such impassive creations are too dry to draw a large audience, but may attract a hard core of connoisseur-ish fans who prefer to cherish what the masses ignore. Too many intellectuals conflate “clear meanings” with lack of sophistication, and conflate their clever analysis of abstruse meanings with having an artistic experience. (Conversely, they’re also likely to confuse intense emotion with gauche emotionality — although I doubt if opera fans have this problem. More on hyperemotionality in a moment.)

Perhaps as a result of encouragement by this small but élite-ish fan base, there are many contemporary poems, some paintings, and an occasional film that seem to be in this category: sly, filled with clues to make the audience feel clever when they decipher them, but devoid of real feeling.

Ah, you say, but what is “real” feeling? Well, suppose you slip on an avocado peel (banana peels are so clichéd) and the loutish bystanders start snickering. What you experience then — that’s a real feeling. Bad, but real. Or say you find out that the incandescent beauty you’ve secretly been lusting after actually wants to sleep with you. That’s a good, real feeling. I’m not saying “real” must have been personally experienced: a painter might never have seen an actual firing squad, or a cyclone at sea, or medieval peasants reaping, but if his thoughts about those subjects evoke strong emotions in him — at least, strong emotions unrelated to “I might be able to impress an audience with this” — that might be real enough.

But when a creator calculates how to simulate or imply some feeling he’s never felt; when he assembles some mechanical contraption of an “emotion” finely calculated to pull certain strings — that’s cheesy manipulation, not good art. And if the string-jerking also happens to be understated (to reduce the risk of the man behind the curtain being revealed), then it may be interpreted as “subtle and sophisticated” by the more artistically clueless in the audience.

By the way, don’t get hung up on “understated” vs. “overstated”: neither in itself is evidence of good or bad taste. For example, the depiction of raw emotion can be found in great art (see any of Goya’s late paintings, or Turner’s storms at sea) and in terrible art (don’t see the movie “Gladiator”). And the converse is also true: muted feeling can be found in masterpieces, such as any of Vermeer’s paintings, or most great landscapes; but also in bloodless work, such as many “color-field” abstract paintings, which often evoke little but a formalistic design sensation and the stuck-up satisfaction of being opaque to the unwashed masses.

At the other pole from “too dry” is “all wet.” Far more common, and usually more annoying, than bloodless art is its opposite: art that depicts (and hopes to evoke) intense emotion, but does so in a bogus way. It screams concocted feelings in your face. I’ve already mentioned a movie like this — there are many — but the category goes far beyond grimaces, grunts, and gore.

One definition of melodrama, for example, is art that demands of us an extreme emotional response that it hasn’t yet earned. But you don’t even have to go that far. Typically, most art that the general public likes — think effects-saturated Hollywood movies, over-produced pop singers, and formulaic pop genre fiction — seems at first glance like the opposite of the flat creations I referred to earlier.

Such popular art is not overly puzzling (except, perhaps, in the case of mystery novels) and pretends to be emotionally open. The creators may simply forge (in both senses of the word) a pseudo-emotional channel designed to induce emotional states that they themselves don’t actually feel.

In music, this might be the “blues” singer from a pampered suburban background, wailing about torments she‘s never known. In writing, this becomes the potboiler or tear-jerker, the soap opera or cheesy romance novel. In painting or illustration, we usually call this schlock: the pretty but largely structureless landscape, the sweetly blurred portrait of a cute child, or (going steadily downhill here) cats playing poker on a black velvet background.

This little essay is entitled The Courage to be Open. But what does that mean?

In everyday life, we necessarily learn to veil our true feelings about lots of things — often even hiding them from ourselves, since that makes it easier to hide them from others. And we learn, when called upon to show feeling, to frequently substitute fake ones that are more socially acceptable. Yet we expect genuine artists to do the opposite: open up and let us look inside — especially with respect to precisely those things that are normally most hidden (since those are often the least mundane and therefore most interesting). But artists, like everyone else, live most of their lives in everyday life. To suddenly reverse mode is painfully difficult, and requires courage. The all-too-typical failure to marshal that courage may be masked either by dry intellectualism or by its apparent opposite, phony contrived emotionality. So the two kinds of bad art I’ve been talking about can be traced to two different (possibly subconscious) strategies for dealing with the same lack of insight, skill — and, especially, courage.

What we want is a transparent window into the soul of the creator — but only if it’s really their soul, and only if their sensibility is worth gazing into. At best, something genuine in the creator resonates with something genuine in the audience — and this could happen on any level, from The Wizard of Oz to Hamlet.

Of course, good art doesn’t always seem emotionally transparent at first glance. It may be inherently complex or subtle (which is different from willfully convoluted) and therefore hard to understand. For example, I read a fair amount of poetry, and sometimes I have to read it two or three times to “get it.” Fine. But if I have to read footnotes or some academic’s exegesis just to get a sense of what the poem is even about — forget it, I’m out of there.

Some work is worth pondering, but it’s also true that groping for understanding while you’re looking at a painting or reading a poem is not conducive to making direct emotional connections. If the work is any good, typically the creator is at least trying to be clear and not to hide their feelings — and that means their feelings about their subject matter, about themselves, and about the relation between the two. A creator who purposely strives to be difficult or opaque — as many do — is simply a pretentious fraud, mistaking their own confusion about great art with the artistic experience itself. “If I make it obscure, it will seem really deep, just like that great art over there that I can’t understand.” Good art may sometimes seem opaque; but it‘s never purposely so.