Art is When... (LE)

​Art is when we take in the world around us, and answer back with something beyond ourselves.  This could not be a more different answer from the one which Kandinsky provides us with, which is that art is the expression of “an inner harmony” (Kandinsky, 15). This was an answer inspired by Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophists, who “seek to approach the problem of [art] by way of the inner knowledge.” (Kandinsky, 13). Applying this logic to art was the basis for Kandinsky’s critique of the Impressionists; they sought to take the impression of the visual world and apply that to the canvas, instead of seeking for an inner truth, and making art of that. It may be safely said, then, that the Impressionists represented an outward artistic philosophy, while Kandinsky and O’Keefe were concerned with the inward art. Kandinsky later goes on to applaud Picasso for achieving the final end of this in “the logical destruction of matter” in his paintings (Kandinsky, 18). 

I am reminded of a lecture that Mr. McDonald gave on Friday night, in which he posited that the movement inwards is a purely contemporary movement. Insofar as all post-post-Impressionist art has sought to enact Kandinsky’s deep-dive into the self, this same permeant contemporality may be used to understand Kandinsky's philosophy. When art is constrained by the limits of introspection, it can only reflect the self in its present existence. The exploration of the self is an action of the present. In creating art which is progressively more concerned with expressing the inner condition of the (modern) soul, the art world is accelerated dramatically forwards, forever seeking the art of the future. Kandinsky’s triangle accelerates upwards. 

This is not an intrinsically bad thing. Everything needs to progress, and art is no different. But I do fear that there is a very real danger in exposing visual arts to an ever more futuristic and abstracted audience. What happens when the value of art ceases to be tied in any way to a corporeal medium, such as paint, and is purely internal? What happens when art is not art enough? The true judges of art can only ever be our modern audience, but what if we get it wrong? There are countless examples in recent years of high-art destruction. Why? Has our definition of art changed that significantly? I think it may be that our definition of self has changed that much, which can only change with the mode of production. Because we are obsessed with introspection, we have become atomized from any general human experience. Why would art which pertains to the general human experience (of looking at a mountain, for example), appeal to such an audience? To take a real, recent, and quite tragic example of this, a millionaire recently set fire to an original Frida Kahlo drawing, to launch his NFT of the same artwork. We have lost this art. https://nypost.com/2022/09/27/rare-frida-kahlo-drawing-torched-in-nft-sale/


Comments

  1. Krishnan VenkateshDecember 7, 2022 at 8:58 AM

    Really interesting insights. On the one hand, a concern with accurate knowledge of the external world keeps art anchored in objective reality. On the other hand, Kandinsky's "inner harmony" is not necessarily an attempt to express the individual self but something higher and beyond that, a kind of spiritual objectivity that we see in older religious art. Both are opposed to atomistic individualism.

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