Spring Bloodroot Moon
Here’s an interesting couple of paragraphs from a NYT article: My Dinner With Dr. King.
“After dinner Dr. King asked Wanda if he could use the telephone again. When he came back, he settled onto the sofa next to me. I tried to think of something clever to say, but before I could speak, he asked why I was studying for a Ph.D. in art history. He asked what I thought art could accomplish that other forms of communication could not. I remember that he said that he’d rarely discussed art, or even thought much about it. As I stammered an answer I cannot recall, he listened with the concentration of someone who genuinely wanted to understand. Never before, and rarely since, had I witnessed such authentic humility. It was so simple, so powerful a form of energy that for a few moments it freed me from bondage to myself.
A conversation that cannot have lasted more than 10 minutes ended up changing the way I thought about my life. When I got back to New York, my viewpoint toward earning a doctorate shifted. The determination to use my education to become a famous scholar gradually made room for a half-baked resolution to become a useful art historian. I began to consider the moral or religious content of Renaissance art; and once I got a job teaching art history at an institution whose values encouraged me to develop that ambition, teaching became a means for me to help students identify and examine their own values. That remains my goal. The short conversation I had with Dr. King had a lasting effect.”
This touched me in two ways. First, the power of unclouded attention. It’s so rare, especially in the age of the always-on. Consider how this conversation might have gone with I-pod buds in the ear. Or, checking the smart phone for messages furtively. Unclouded attention is something we can all offer to each other, the only price is our inner voice that wants to interject, comment, offer an opinion.
Second, it opens yet another perspective on art. Or, rather, it emphasizes a perspective I search for too little, a particular work’s moral or religious content, and I would add, its political. One example was the post I made in response to Roberta Smith’s snarky review of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood show at the National Gallery (March 31). This line of inquiry, a mode of praxis analysis, can locate a work in time and space and in so doing also place it in a longer line of argument, comment, ideas.
(Dreaming of St. Adorno, Siah Armajani)
Since the art historical point of view so rarely focuses on praxis, “…the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it,” (Paolo Freire), there is little danger to a work’s aesthetic relevance.
This lack of praxis analysis can be easily explained by the peculiar position of the art world when it comes to class structure. Art is usually made by persons who are poor and who operate on the margins of a society. Yes, by the time a work hits a museum, the artist may have become at least famous, perhaps rich, too, but the bulk of art comes from people of modest means. Yet, art in its art historical moment too often has become a captive of the art market, a tiny, a minuscule portion of the global population and a very wealthy one.
Thus when art comes into the lens of history and makes it onto gallery walls it most often gets there as an expression of someone’s power, only after that does it get noticed as art. Consider how most museums build their collections. Donors. Rich donors who often give whole their own collections. This produces a trickle up, a siphoning of art through a long tube whose vacuum comes from the amount of money at one end. Hardly the context for consideration of a work’s praxis.
