Ars Gratia Artis

A Fresh Thomistic Angle on Modern Art

One common tenet among conservative Thomists is a vivid distaste for ‘modern art,’ despite an inability to categorize art that is temporally modern into the relevant subgenres, some but not others of which such a Thomist has good reason to dislike. Modern art is dismissed, and they assume that the listener just sort of knows the sort of modern art that they are talking about. I think Thomism can do better than this. In fact, the way I see other people of a Thomist bent speaking of art is profoundly inconsistent with Thomist principles. The following essay will be what I believe is a truly Thomist account of ‘modern art.’

In the twentieth century, the role of the artist within society took on an historically unprecedented character; in the wake of the broad secularization of Western society, the common man’s experience of any transcendent reality disappeared, and the artists’ creativity became the last connection of man with anything beyond or above his daily mundane experience. Because of this, artists were convinced that they were in some very real sense the ubermensch (or “overman”) in their own time, that is, they were truly able to see and experience something above and beyond the horizon of every other person’s experience (that incidentally they were the cause of), and they concluded that it was their task to bring that transcendent reality to bear on the world inhabited by the plebeian under-men by any means they deemed to be most effective.

The artists who began this task, I will argue, were truly acting sincerely with their audiences, but as the lack of the desired progress continued, these artists’ successors grew more and more condescending and ironic in their interactions with the new class of people they called the ‘philistines,’ culminating in some of the art we see today, which is more often than not actually a high-stakes game of irony between the artist and the philistines in which the artist holds all the cards, rather than sincere creative art.

This argument must start with an example of the first kind of modern artist, one who is sincerely trying to bring his audience into the creative process with himself, so as to elevate them to experience some element of that transcendent reality which the artist himself embodies. Wassily Kandinsky appears to be one such artist. A trailblazer in abstract and nonrepresentational art, Kandinsky is of great importance for understanding the genesis of modern visual art.

In his work entitled “Yellow Red Blue,” he presents his audience with a gateway to his own creative experience. The purpose of this piece, I believe, is to make the viewer be creative in how he/she finds the order within the different shapes and sections to make a coherent whole. Kandinsky’s title gives us a starting point, that is that there are three primary elements that we must contend with, a yellow, then a red, and finally a blue, which appear in this order from left to right.

Wassily Kandinsky "Yellow Red Blue" [1925]

Throughout the piece, we see motifs, a discernable rhythm, and repetition with variation, as well as more classical techniques concerning the interplay between foreground and background, transitions between sections, and even some intriguing instances of breaking with these older techniques. The motifs include concentric circles, multicolored checkerboards, overlapping opaque rectangles (the overlapping regions of which are not always the color one would expect them to be), and perhaps most significantly groups of parallel lines and curves resembling musical staves, which have a special importance because of Kandinsky’s synesthesia (the medical condition characterized by the fusion of multiple senses, in Kandinsky’s case sight and hearing). Any perceptive viewer is able, with the help of the title and given several minutes of focus, to see at least some order in the painting that is at first far from obvious, and it is the process of coming to this understanding that Kandinsky is trying to help his viewers experience, since it is exactly this transcendent process of half-creating-half-discovering order which the artist experiences, and wishes to share with his viewers.

The purpose of art seems to have taken on a new character in this era; it used to attempt to elevate the minds of viewers to a common transcendent experience that the artist assumed was shared by all or most of those who would view his art, but in the twentieth century, no such appeal could be made, and instead the purpose of art was art itself. Within “ars gratia artis,” the credo of artists in this era, is implicit the tenet that the creative process is itself the transcendent reality unto which the artist and viewer endeavored.

This was not specific to the visual arts; this new characterization of the goal of art also revolutionized music. This shift in the end pursued is exemplified best in the rise of improvisational jazz. Classical music was meant to elevate the mind and passions to some presupposed level of transcendent experience, usually provided by religion. But as religion was culturally sidelined, the creative impulse itself became the point of music, thus improvisation was glorified, and it became expected that improvisation would take up a majority of a given song.

The jazz artist also exhibits a sincerity in a similar way to visual artists such as Kandinsky. A jazz artist who did not care whether his audience accompanied him on his creative journey would not be bothered with “songs,” but would simply play in a more or less unstructured manner, free form, revolutionary, and seemingly lacking in structural coherence. This is how one might imagine the greats such as Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington in their private practice. But we do not see this mentality in the first half of the twentieth century’s jazz recordings and performances. In fact, we see a set of standard songs arise so that the audience can acclimate themselves to the music by hearing something familiar, which then allows them to contextualize and better understand and follow along with the improvisation that comes in the middle, which would be unintelligible to non-artists if it were not framed by the familiar song and did not make consistent reference to it.

These early twentieth century artists saw themselves as the saviors of the transcendent within a society that was becoming less and less creative and more and more uniform and regimented. In The Cunning of Freedom, Ryszard Legutko makes the case in his chapter, “The Artist,” that the freedom which the artist enjoys, that is the positive freedom to be creative and masterful in one’s craft, became very bound up with the negative freedom from the very rules which traditionally defined that craft/art. Legutko gives a list of “artists” who exemplified this kind of positive and negative freedom throughout history and, in exercising this freedom, shaped the world in which we live; he lists “Homer, Moses, Alexander the Great, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, [and] Napoleon.” His choice of representatives hints at his underlying thesis that those who most fully exercise the positive creative freedom of the artist and the negative freedom from the boundaries that restrict the artist are those who create their own standard of value. Many modern artists fall into, or at least believe themselves to fall into, this category of men, those whose creative impulse is strong enough to provide by itself the standard for its own evaluation.

We see in the development of modern art a constant reevaluation by the artists of their own prospects of success in bringing their audience into the new system they believe themselves to be creating. As the twentieth century progressed, they lost confidence in the plebeians’ ability to rise to their level, and so their interactions with audiences became less and less sincere, to the point of rebranding the plebeians as “philistines.” Finally, the measure of an artist’s success became aligned not with the creativity of his work, nor even the popular opinion of it, but rather his ability to show his superiority over the philistines. We observe this in contemporary “high art,” which resembles a game between the artist and the wealthy philistine who ironically tries to show himself to be on the level of the artist by purchasing his artwork, and yet the very purchasing of it reveals his creative inferiority.

At what point, if any, was the modern artist capable of a sincere interaction with others, or did the game of masks never cease? Contemporary artists, as has been said, are in fact involved in a game, and their very involvement in this game prevents them from ever truly leaving it behind, since they have violated an implicit trust between artist and audience which can never be rebuilt. But these artists are not actually the true revolutionaries among modern artists; rather, they pursue this game of masks not as revolutionaries, but as con artists wearing the mask of a revolutionary. They have lost the positive freedom which allowed their predecessors to create their new standards, and instead focus solely on the negative freedom of the “artist” who defies the standards of his own art.

Earlier artists and musicians such as Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Glenn Miller, etc. at least in general, showed themselves to be: 1) true revolutionaries who were uninterested in appealing to traditional standards of evaluating their art when those standards were constraining their positive creative freedom, and at the same time 2) openly sincere in their intentions to bring their audience to their transcendent experience of creativity. The key difference between these artists and their successors, to use Legutko’s terms, is the primacy of positive freedom in the historically prior group, and the primacy of negative freedom in the later group.

The reason the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre suggested the Nietzschean game of masks may never end is the inability of others to discern when the final mask has fallen, but it seems that, in the context of the relationship between artist and audience, this discernment is in fact possible, though not to all. For one to determine whether an artist is attempting in a given work to honestly elevate the mind of his viewers or listeners to a transcendent experience (of any kind), one must have the capacity to enter into, at least in some minimal sense, the creative process the artist himself enjoys. In other words, the viewer must possess in some limited sense the same positive freedom which the artist exercises fully, and this requires some basic knowledge of the tradition, medium, and context within which a certain artist works (or rebels against as the case may be). When one who possesses this capability is unable to experience the creativity of the artist through a given work, it is an indication that the artist has indeed ceased to be sincere and honest with his audience and has instead prioritized the negative freedom from the bounds of whatever tradition or practice of which he was previously a part.

The sincerity of artists with their audiences relies on a fragile trust, one which is essentially impossible to restore once violated. That said, there still is a possibility for one who sees himself as uniquely connected to a transcendent reality to have sincere interaction with those who lack the same connection (though still have not lost the potential for such creativity to the mindless regimented life of the modern underman). The modern artist truly matches Nietzsche’s conception of the overman, the one who is able to stare into the nihilistic wreckage left behind by modern man’s murder of transcendent truth and through a tremendous act of creativity supply a new transcendent reality, which is in fact the act of creation itself. And yet, many artists have shown that this act of creativity can in fact be shared in a sincere (albeit imperfect) way.

That is my current state of thought on modern art as a Thomist. I sincerely hope that it is more substantial than the subjective arguments we tend to have about whether there is beauty in a given piece of art. Essentially, it seems that we tend to look for beauty in art in a narrow way which was left behind by the artists that Thomists tend to criticize for the sake of a different kind of beauty which more resembles a reveling of the artist in the possibility of creative action itself. Since creation is properly a divine act, and humans have been given this limited window to participate in it, it seems well within the Thomist’s reach to say that this form of art, when practiced sincerely, is a beautiful thing.

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When modern man has turned his back on God

And plunged into the darkness of despair;

When all his efforts seem to be in vain,

And naught remains in which he can find joy,

An artist's spark of inspiration strikes

And takes him far beyond this vale of tears

To marvel at that great eternal blaze,

From which his spark did have its origin.

And coming back to share his new-found joy,

How wonderful it is for him to say

To downcast souls like his had been before,

In hopeful expectation that they follow:

"I have slipped the surly bonds of earth...

Put out my hand and touched the face of God."

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