Essays and the Blog (2)

Piero della Francesca, The Flagellation of Christ (detail)

In the first part of this exploration of the essay and blogging, I proposed that essays on blogs are actually evolving into something new, precisely because the medium invites give-and-take with readers instead of the open-and-shut exposition of a theme that is the essay’s traditional form.

The essay by Teju Cole on the late Michael Baxandall’s art criticism, published here on August 20th, is a case in point. Teju’s essay was, actually, a fairly traditional academic presentation designed to make its points and stand alone, and it would have been perfectly at home in an academic journal or other print/print-like presentation. In fact, it was noticed by Baxandall’s school, Berkeley, and quoted as the last word at the conclusion of the Berkeley News Service’s tribute to the late emeritus professor : his own colleagues saw that Teju had captured the essence of what Baxandall was all about:

Nigerian novelist Teju Cole wrote a guest tribute to Baxandall for "the cassandra pages" blog, saluting what he called "trademark Baxandall: the patient, inductive tone, the crystalline language, the erudite undertow, all in the service of clarifying our words for images."

In that world of traditional arts and letters -- pats on the back all around – Teju’s essay could have ended right there. But instead, here we are in blog-land, where that post elicited not only praise, but comments that raised new questions and begged further discussion on the topic I’m pursuing here.

I myself went to Interlibrary Loan at the Bibliotheque Nationale and borrowed two of Baxandall’s books, Painting and Experience in the Fifteenth Century, and Words for Pictures, curious if Teju’s assessment of Baxandall’s clarity and accessibility would hold true for me. It did, undoubtedly aided by the fact that I've studied art history myself and read a lot of art criticism. As the genre goes, this is as accessible and un-obscure as it gets. To make the reading even more interesting, the subject of Painting and Experience is how the 15th century art patrons and viewers themselves viewed and talked about the art of their own time. I was fascinated by Baxandall’s discussion of what was deemed important and worthy in 15th century pictures, the words that were used to describe them, and what this tells us about the culture of the day.

But Baxandall goes further:

Renaissance people were, as has been said, on their mettle before a picture, because of an expectation that cultivated people should be able to make discriminations about the interest of pictures. These very often took the form of a preoccupation with the painter’s skill... (and) the Renaissance beholder was a man under some pressure to have words that fitted the interest of the object...

In our own culture there is a class of over-cultivated person who, though he is not a painter himself, has learned quite an extensive range of specialized categories of pictorial interest, a set of words and concepts specific to the quality of paintings...in the fifteenth century there were some such people, but they had relatively few special concepts, if only because there was then such a small literature of art. (emphasis mine)

In other words, art criticism had not yet appropriated to itself the “expert” task of judging, comparing, and explaining art for the rest of us.

As Baxandall shows, Renaissance people (and artists as well) had skills that were developed in their daily lives – like the ability to “gauge” volumes, or to observe the natural world with keen attention (since one’s life often depended on it) – which directly impacted both what sorts of representations were prized in pictures, and people’s ability to look at them and talk about them. And although he admits that the ordinary peasant was outside this group of art-appreciators, Baxandall convinces me that feeling comfortable talking about fine art as something related to one’s own skills and daily life was a fact for many people in the Renaissance. The language used to talk about pictures was common.

Five centuries later, we’ve seen the distancing and rarification of “Art,” on the one hand, into a realm accessible only to the supposed cognoscenti -- those capable of affording its offerings and understanding its criticism --  and, on the other, into underground forms born out of alienation and disaffection, which often subsequently become popular and vibrant, but whose adherents seem increasingly disassociated from their own historical/cultural roots. And in the middle, a great morass of bland mass-media entertainment, accessible to everyone but of questionable satisfaction, and unlikely to encourage personal creativity except as rebellion and reaction.

If we are going to hang our “critical essays” about art on such a backdrop, then for whom are we writing? A shrinking group of hangers-on who have the education and leisure to read and ponder the fate of western art, or, at best, embrace a postmodern world view? What is the future interplay between art, and the writing about it? Does the writing serve that which it's supposed to honor and love, or actually contribute to its inaccessibility and eventual demise?

While there’s something stubbornly comforting about writing for and reading the work of people who share similar educations and socio-economic backgrounds, it feels to me like this is not only a dead end today, but one more way in which the world is becoming polarized into “insiders” and “outsiders”, “us” and “them.” If we cannot use the medium of writing to open doors and encourage dialogue across difference, we have lost the greatest gift of language. So – in that light – what is the role of the critical essay in the future?

In the next and final section of this series, I’ll explore some possibilities, using an email exchange that arose from comments on Teju Cole’s Baxandall essay.

Comments

[Dick]

At the risk of drawing on the vocabulary of 'bland mass-media entertainment', this is hard-core stuff, Beth - cogent, coherent and beautifully written. I wonder if the 'meta-essay' was a phenomenon back in the Age of Reason. From limited reading in that area, I can't bring anything of substance to mind (but I bet someone out there can!) With the 10th anniversary of the coining of the word 'blog' coming up next year, there's a real need for a comprehensive 'state-of-the-art' overview on the blog as essay. And what you have provided so far makes a fine abstract.

[Pat]

Seems to me you are not just defining "blog as essay" but re-defining the bounds of academia. Beth, I recall somewhere you wrote that you decided against going into academia - but the intelligent work you are doing here seems to me to be that of an academic who's created a new place for office, new avenues for peer review, and new routes to publication. (says the lab bound biologist walking the halls filled with little office doors)

As for sharing with a larger audience, I have found that huge numbers of people are deeply commited to non-verbal groking. I have seen this with my attemtps to explain meditation more scientifically. Even the Harvard educated can be disinterested - knowing what she feels and sees and lives suffices. Many may prefer their art that way too.

Or, to retell a story my therapist once told me: Her husband once mentioned, "I am an intellectual," to the horror of his young daughter who exclaimed, "I am an emotional!"

[beth]

Dick, thanks for your appreciation. Some of us (including you!) ought to get together and write "The State of Blogging at 10" - or else others will do it for (and about) us.

Pat, you're outing me! No, seriously, I've always had an attraction to academic inquiry and analysis, as well as to teaching and discussion - I guess that's obvious. At the time of making that choice, it felt too limiting and to isolated from the real world for me. The path I took was probably better for me, but it's also been a struggle to find a way to fit my whole self into regular life outside of academia. And there are limits to talking. I liked your story. My husband, the photographer with the art history degree, would probably add, "And I'm an artist! Why do we have to talk about it at all - let's just DO it." But of course, when your very medium is words, it gets sticky, doesn't it?

[Bill]

My regards to your husband, I've found "let's just not do it" to be the ring I pull the silk through. That leaves me free to think about and to sort things. It's an activity in itself -- it really is!

[Kaycie]

After reading Teju Cole's piece about Michael Baxandall here, I was quite intrigued. Not having a background in art history beyond the typical humanities courses in college, I had not heard of him. I looked at his work on Amazon and put a couple of his books on my shopping list. I am looking forward to reading them.

My husband tells a story about being kicked out of a basic art history class in college. There was a slide show on the first day of class. The professor showed a slide of a piece of cave art depicting an animal. Each student had to describe what they saw on the slide and guess why it had been drawn. My husband, being a practical, logical, mathematical type, said, "It's an animal. Probably some kind of cow, from the looks of it. I imagine it was raining or something, and the guy who drew this was hungry or wanted to hunt. Or maybe he was just bored."