TRAC2014: "Faking it" - Keynote Speaker Roger Scruton

good morning and what an absolutely glorious California day it is thank you for all coming to track 2014 we have a truly international group here from over 12 countries 29 States I hope you get to meet one another and I plan to meet every one of you now I would like to turn the podium over to my my dear friend and conference chair Michael Pierce Michael is a faculty member at the art department of California Lutheran University and he's curator of the Kwan Fong gallery of art and culture Michael is a figurative painter and installation artist whose work repeatedly refers to ancient history mythology and folklore through the use of symbolism and imagery to address the mystical relationship of man and God in 2010 he introduced the Italian to the CLU art department in which each faculty members provided their own studio space on campus and welcomed their students to welcome to the students to study alongside them as they create their own art Michael you talk louder Michael hey thanks Mike loud enough alright hey how you doing good morning all right track 2014 can you believe it we've done it I'm so glad to see you all here guess what we're doing it again next year we'll do it again I don't know where and I don't know when but we're going to do it so we're gradually slowly changing the direction of the ship a little bit all of us together not just track I mean all of us people in this room are slowly changing the direction of the cultural ocean liner and turning it and around the corner a little bit so I want to thank you for participating and doing that because we really really need to do that we got to change the direction of the ship and make make the world a better place right and we can do that by by changing the world with that I would like to introduce our keynote speaker Roger Scruton roger is well known among us for his incisive book beauty which explores that this timeless concept and tries to make sense of what beauty is in the postmodern age what what is going on what makes it beautiful his best known perhaps for his BBC two television show why Beauty matters which I'm sure nearly everyone in this room must have seen it's a very very popular show among us of course some controversy controversy when it first came out of course Roger graduated from Cambridge University and taught later at Boston University while building a public affairs consultancy in Eastern Europe since then he's been a freelance writer and consultant currently he's a visiting professor at Oxford University and he's a fellow at Blackfriars hall there at Oxford and senior fellow at the ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington DC Roger is one of my heroes and I mean extraordinary pleased to have him here to speak to us today so please welcome Roger Scruton thank you very much for that very kind introduction now I'm here really on false pretenses because that the film that you've as Michael said you've probably all seen was really only a byproduct of my my own real interests which are in philosophy and abstract ideas I was inveigled into doing it by people at the BBC who offered offered me two terms that I couldn't refuse at the time and you know I got really interested however in the course of doing it and realized that my abstract philosophy which some of which is contained in that little book on beauty it would be of no use to anyone if it couldn't translate itself into images and personal presentations of the kind that I tried in that film so today I'm going to come back to some of the philosophical thoughts behind what I was talking about then and address that the whole question of faking how one how we get through life by faking and how faking is sometimes something which is unavoidable and which has a whole artistic tradition behind it and I think understand just what it means to be a fake is something that is really important to us in the world in which we live because after all we know that there are occasions when we've got to do it but we also know that there are there is a deep need in all of us for the reality that the truth behind the faking and that's one of the things that we expect art to do for us to present the human condition in ways that don't falsify that don't make it into some cheap sugary version of itself would actually present the truth but present it in a way that enables us also to accept it and I think that ideal of art is something that I'm sure all the people in this room why would one be a representational artist if it weren't because one wants to show the world as it really is and in doing so give people the kind of consolation that they that comes to them through knowing the truth and I think this this idea that art should guide us in this way to the deep truth of things is something which I think we need to defend and is under attack in the world in which we live now I'm going to put on the screen various slides with with thoughts on them I know that as as visual artists you're probably hostile to the written word aren't you and especially when it contains abstract thoughts but there won't be too many of these but it's just so that you have something to look at when I try to explain my meaning and I think the first thing that I would like to impress on you is that there is a difference between lying and faking someone who tells a lie deceives his victim that's the whole point of it but a fake is someone whose deceives himself he's somebody who isn't just telling lies about what he is to others but he's also creating for himself an unreal personality which will be sufficient to take himself in and when people fake things they sometimes do it together as a kind of complicit deception which we see frequently in the modern world not least as I'm sure you realize in the art schools you know that if you look at the shows of people like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin who are at the art establishment in London you will always see that that they are surrounded by people who are busily busily confirming them in their completely self deceived opinion of themselves and this is mutual the the critics the critics themselves are flattered by the artists into record into believing of themselves that they have the ability to see the real aesthetic meaning of things so you there's a kind of almost a ballet of complicit deception and it's not just beliefs that can be faked you know as when I tell a lie or pretend to believe something and then deceive myself into believing it we can fake our emotions and that happens all the time sometimes you know good manners require us to pretend to emotions that we don't have obviously somebody who at a funeral actually said what he really thought about the deer but departed would not be welcome but so most of us in those circumstances have to be prepared to to deceive not to deceive but just to pretend but there is a kind of pretend sin emotion where we take ourselves in and think while while pretending to feel something that we really do feel it and that's the sort of the thought that that we are familiar with from sentimentality in the arts and people have make fake claims to eminence people believe themselves to be the geniuses that others will will think them to be provided they believe it so faking is a kind of achievement lying is not you can to tell anybody can tell lies it's sufficient to have a certain intention you know I just intend to say what is untrue in the hope of deceiving you but faking is an achievement that's something where I actually change the way things are I changed my own nature into something which takes me in and also takes you into so faking has always got a kind of success to it and that brings me to the topic of kitsch many people in this room I know have thought about this and a nod of course has has written some very interesting and profound things about just what kitsch really is in the world in which we live and I suspect that I'm talking about perhaps a pre nerdom concept of kitchen in what I go on to say when the concept was first introduced in the early 20th century it was always a term of abuse you know something to call a work of art Kitsch or anything Kitsch is to suggest that in some way it is belongs in the world of fakes at the world of fake emotions and fake emotions appeal to us because they're less demanding than real ones you know real love is a it's a problem as you all know but fake love has a lot of benefits attached to it with very few costs so in that area a Kitsch has a kind of purchase on things but it's a there's a sort of mystery run to kitsch you know when did it begin it seems odd if it is just simply another name for faking emotions it ought to have been a permanent part of the human condition but in art if we look back over the centuries you know there's a lot of primitive art in the Middle Ages but nobody would I think now would say that it was kitsch some those those frescoes of sinners being dragged down into Hell by demons or lifted up to heaven by angels on the frescoes of it in frescoes on country churches all over Italy and Romania and so on you you you don't think of those as kits you think yes they are naive and perhaps a little bit silly but never that I said something genuine behind all this however incompetent it is but it's only when we get to the mid 18th century perhaps even late 18th century that that the idea of kish begins to seem plausible I mentioned there Mario and grows I'll give you a couple of examples in a minute but it's very odd that something like this should have a beginning you know it should have been always with us like original sin and maybe you know some somebodies might say what is a manifestation of original sin the desire to get out of life by faking it isn't that just precisely what evil is in the end well that would be a thought but I you know nevertheless it is as we understand it something that rig an for us either in the 18th century or at least took took off then but became really urgent towards the end of the 19th century and it's not only about painting composers wrestled with this problem Marla famously wrestled with the with the problem of banality and cliche and his symphonies and you even went to see Freud of all people in the hope of getting a cure for his for his weakness so the fact that he's got to the great climax in the first movement and he has to bring in a little Viennese dancing band with a with a with a corny old waltz tune instead of a proper climax why is that why does this come over me all the time he says to Freud who was characteristically unhelpful in response so and at that time in the time of Marla it was a regard as a general general problem especially in the of course the late austro-hungarian Empire to which Marla belonged the word kitsch actually comes to us probably from addition probably from the austro-hungarian Empire and writers like New Zealand Christ Krauss wrestled with this problem and TS Eliot's did as well TS Eliot's famous les essays on criticism and his great poem that were the wasteland constitute a sort of comprehensive rejection of the temptations to write kitsch poetry which he associated with the Georgian school of his time let's say the school of George v in England people at watered de la Mer and so on but I think it's a yet more important point is that art is not the only sphere that we is colonized by Kitsch religion is just as important maybe more so and you know here's a something which you're all familiar with and it this this this disease settled especially upon the Roman Catholic faith during during the course of the 20th century and it's almost impossible now to find a holy object which doesn't have some some contagious impression of it but here to going back over the history here is one of Maria's endearing little little ruffians a very famous picture and many people will say yeah it's it's beautiful and characteristic and so on but isn't there some kind of falsehood they're sentimental ization of of an of the naughty boy and so on don't we see the beginnings in those eyes of the of the fake emotion and here of course is Maria's virgin and child yet tremendously accomplished but if we put beside it Bellini don't you think there is something something real here which which maria has failed to capture the maria is is giving us certainly an ordinary woman and an ordinary baby but the the best they can do by way of sacred creating a sacred atmosphere around their relation is by turning their eyes in that winsome way half towards the observer whereas here you have a kind of vision of celestial peace which she's not simply contained in the faces and the posture of the figures but in the blue of the Virgin's dress you know there's a way of painting painting holiness into her which seems to have disappeared by the time you get to the Maria I think I say this not dogmatically because of course you know if I could even paint a tent as well as Maria I would think I was a genius but nevertheless this I'm trying to explain why people think that a kind of falsehood was creeping in by Maria's time here is a gross picture of a the little infant who's worrying over a wounded bird and again hers of course a great another great painter who is often picked out us as the the starting point of the great Kitsch and tragic tree well I just want to say a few things this is where I get back to abstract ideas again with apologies there's a law called Gresham's law i formulated by Gresham who was a 17th century economist 16th century late 16th early 17th century economist who was considered the effects of the contamination of the coinage of the day you know monarchs would clip the edges off coins in order to retain some of the gold or mix the gold with with some alloy so as to debase its value so there was always in circulation both good currency the real thing the real gold or silver coin and the bad currency which which imitated it and his law very simple is that bad currency drives out good in other words if you've got in your hand the real gold coins and also the fake gold coins when it comes to the market transaction you're going to give the fake gold coins and keep the real ones and in general that everybody will be of this persuasion and within within months there will only be the fake ones in circulation and those fake ones will then be discovered will be recognized to be far less valuable and the result will be inflation right so you know and something like that that's so obviously true in economics but something like that works also with the life of the mind that false goods exchange more easily because they cost less to the person who offloads them but promised to bring the same reward you know if I if I can get the same from you by pretending to love you and that I would get by actually loving you suppose in a case of seduction you know I go for the pretend loved and I get the same reward but it's no cost or much lower cost yeah so in the world of emotions these the pretend emotions provided the others are taken in by them so I can get the reward they tend to drive out that the real ones and that's to some extent that is what people have been saying about kitchen tit if you think back down the years that somehow that our emotional currency has been debased and that surely the role of art is to put a stop to this to remind us of this fact and to say look there is real love there are real emotions that's what how we should live and here are the examples you know and I think I'm persuaded by that that insofar as art has a single universal function it would be something like that of bringing us back to the truth of our condition and saying that there are real feelings and not just fake ones and and that we can get through our life dealing in with this in this fake currency but we in the end the real reward of life will not come to us and fake philosophy and fake religion work like this and I'll just say a few things about the the problem of religion everybody I'm sure in this room who's who's travelled around Europe especially to the more pious parts of Italy and Spain and so on will have had the experience of seeing the and contrasting the cultivated tourists and the pious peasant okay religion is declining in Europe and all that but nevertheless it's a perfectly normal sight to see the the cultivated American tourists usually appalling lead rest in Bermuda shorts and things set and standing in front of a great statue by Donatello and next to him a simple widow in her we on her knees praying to some Dominic in plastic you know of a kind which I like that Holy Family I Ellis trated and the thought comes into your mind whose emotion is the real one you know that the tourist doesn't believe a word of all this stuff but is nevertheless very well informed he's Reddy's Bernard Berenson and all this kind of stuff and he thinks that this is a great work of art and he can probably give a an intelligent description of its metaphysical meaning and all that but he will move on happily to the next thing and add that to his diary and you know and and so and proceed in the normal way of tourists of of collecting interesting impressions whereas the little peasant on her knees for her nothing matters except her communication through this piece of kitsch with the divinity surely she has the real belief and to her it really matters and maybe she's pouring out a simple but but genuine heart into in in her prayers which though tourists has lost all sight of so they you know and I think we we do we're all aware of this contrast don't we we we are very sophisticated people and go through the world holding our beliefs in suspension and looking at works of art without sharing necessarily in the worldview that created them I'm you know many people in this room probably don't share the worldview of Bellini Giovanni Bellini in that beautiful picture of the Virgin and Child but nevertheless recognized that this is an extraordinary icon of the holy the holy condition of motherhood and so you know we were able to talk about it to think about it to take it into our lives but maybe the Kitsch object has a function in the lives of people who really believe and that is a very worrying thing maybe there is a reality that feeds on fakes and and maybe we are asking too much if we ask people to jettison Kitsch you know shouldn't should people get rid of all those little holy family images that I showed earlier and deliver so they were all art historians who won't tolerate a picture of the Virgin unless it's done by one of the Renaissance grapes you know surely that's demanding too much and also is a kind of snobbery towards the real emotions of simple people so there is a question here and we know that there is a reality behind that religious kitsch a realm of experience but we think that that realm of experience can be captured in other and better terms and one thought that occurs to me is that that the Kitsch religious object can't possibly have a meaning to anybody who does not have the associated religious beliefs whereas the non kitschy object the real work like the Bellini can have a meaning for all of us we don't actually have to share that the Roman Catholic vision of the holiness of motherhood in order to see that that vision is a real possibility and has a real meaning and we can see that from Bellini in the way that we couldn't from the Kitsch object so there maybe there is a way out of this dilemma that we can accept that there is religious feeling that requires Kitsch objects as its vehicle without thinking that kitsch is therefore somehow more real for those people who use it I'd say something about fake philosophy but I don't really want I think that all did distract us from the topic but I was going to give some I give some examples there this is really perhaps not relevant to you except that if you go if you make the mistake of going to a university and studying in a humanities department you will inevitably find yourself surrounded these days by fake philosophy usually with a French name attached to it attached to it I give some a couple of quotations there just so that you know that there is such a thing I won't read yeah I'll read the first of them by Jacques Lacan Jacques Lacan was a so-called psycho analyst and a total fraud but a very influential it is the connection between signifier and signified that permits the illusion in which the signifier installs the lack of being in the object relation using the value of reference back possessed by signification in order to invest it with the desire aimed at the very lack it supports right now I have studied that sentence for a long time and I think it will be very interesting you could make a very interesting poem by taking all those words and rearranging them in all the combinations that they that they offer and the result would certainly never be arrived at a meaning but um that there's a kind of Newspeak that grows into academic language what I would call an ingrown mental toenail which is constantly nagging at the area of thought without producing anything and the use of language to say nothing and the kind of nothing that comes out of this is nothing with a capital N and it reminds us that the fact that faking is a social activity and it's been extremely successful in the university that because the universities the social media and a lot of people there are committing for these enormous rewards let's face it you get a hundred thousand dollars a year for doing nothing except filling in forms or you can do yeah you see students every now and then but if you when you see students if you can just give them a lot of that you know you can take it off the internet and give it to them and say this is this is your reading for this week and you're there and so you just you know the the social community can actually survive by this kind of faking although it does require talent of a particular kind you know I don't think many people in the room could actually produce a sentence like the one I've just read but all over the academic world you find the emergence of this kind of nonsense a kind of complicit relation between the author and the reader a nonsense of this kind is that a bid for acceptance what Lacan is really saying is that here's a load of nonsense you can have this nonsense too and we can be in it together you know and and I I will I will authenticate your essays and you will authenticate my philosophy and and the money will go on circulating as before and this is another example of Gresham's law in other words a bad thought driving out good was bad thought circulates much more easily because it being cost-free Allah Allen so Collins wrong Greek more I wrote a book about this called fashionable nonsense which I recommend to you and Malcolm Bradbury our great English novelist and our last dead wrote little novel called Mansour about it too so it's not as though people haven't noticed this but there's an underlying agenda here the that kind of nonsense promises liberation from the oppressive structures including those which belong to thought itself and so it's a little bit like mystical religion which says you know I can give you the benefits of religion without the problem of actually having to believe anything just quote the necessary words right now this brings me back to the to the area of art and whether there is faking faking it in art and if so what form it takes and I think we have to again to look a little bit historically at our condition in the course of the 18th century there arose as I'm sure you know the cult of genius books were written about genius I can't included in his aesthetic philosophy the idea of genius as the distinctive condition of the artist that that somehow an artist has a different position visa vie reality from the rest of us we can go around the world understanding it using the ordinary tools of science and and conversation we can obey the rules we can make things works of craft but by learning techniques and so on but the artist lives in a different way he produces things through his genius which couldn't have been predicted you can't make a work of art by following the rules you can't produce it simply by learning the science of the materials and all the rest you have to have this extra spark which you will which imprints your original identity on the thing that you produce and it involves not just knowledge of the world but also knowledge of the heart and so all real artworks have to be original on this view they have to be have to contain that thing which is unique to the person who made them that the genius which is his which could never be predicted or will never be reduced to any kind of rule guided procedure know that that thought is a an interesting thought philosophically but of course it becomes a kind of cliched isn't it that if that is the case people think then only what is original can be considered to be art and then the next stage is to think well perhaps it's not just that only what is original can be considered to be art it's perhaps perhaps is that it's sufficient to be original you know all we have to do is do something that's not been done before and that will be a great work of art and you know like Damien Hirst's pickles animals you know nobody would have thought of doing this until he did it quite rightly but there that the very fact that he did it means that he has already passed the only test that people recognize namely he's done something that hasn't hasn't been done before and then the artists and the critics move in to say yes that is all wonderful and they and the same kind of complicit circle arises of people who who have taken themselves in and they taken themselves in collectively and we've seen this in the art world and also the world of music and so on Marcel Duchamp famously produced that his urinal and signed it and put it in a museum and it was you know amusing thing to have done at the time but it gave people that thought that yeah that's that's all I need to do something like that and if you go to a graduating class in most of the London art schools you'll just find effectively a hundred urinals there decidely ditch slightly difference that one might not be in porcelain yeah you know but it'll be something similar the same idea but just putting on display something that nobody would have thought to have been a work of art until it was put on display and the same thing happened in music whereas you know with John Cage's amusing experiments of sitting down in front of a piano with a full concert dress and doing nothing and but the interesting thing is that theoreticians like arthur danto come along and say yes this is this is what it's all about that's where art has got to art has at last become conscious of itself and that is the end of art you know art only exists so long as it is not conscious of itself but being becoming conscious of itself it raises the question am i art and that question is the end of art that's done Dontos famous thesis taken from Hegel but it only makes sense that thesis if you look at a very narrow range of extremely untalented people like Marcel Duchamp and John Cage you know at the same time as John Cage was sitting at his piano in his concert dress Stravinsky was writing his neoclassical stuff Warren Williams were still writing symphonies Shostakovich still writing symphonies great works of music were being produced which have gone on communicating to the massive music lovers ever since so you know it's what has happened is that what was conceived by some clever pranksters as a kind of joke against art has been elevated to the condition of all future art and this is partly because people have a fear of fakes there's this is this is what came into their mind with the whole revulsion against kitsch that people like Clement Greenberg introduced you know that we can't we can't produce these fakes and only original gestures will be accepted but original gestures as I said they can't be repeated and yet we see nothing but the repetition of dushyant's urinal nor nor does repetition of the unoriginal produce something original you know and although I know it's heresy to say so Andy Warhol's brillo boxes are not original and nor are they works of art of any significance at least but nevertheless some people because they're so afraid afraid of fakes they have introduced a kind of fake originality and this is something which we see all the time in the art world today Harold Rosenberg wrote a famous essay on this on the tradition of the new saying that in effect artists since the mid 20th century have been so devoted to the idea of novelty that that idea itself had become a tradition and that we have always to put our art in the framework of not of of the idea of novelty if it is to be considered seriously by the other critics but I think it's probably more true to say that when so conceived art isn't really new it's just it's just transgressive and transgression becomes a cliche here's an example the Chapman brothers are singularly loathsome pair of artists in the English school whose originality assists as you see in dissolving the objects of an intensely paedophile emotion and equipping them out with awful things like penises instead of noses and so on and ridiculous shoes it's offensive not only and what it does to the human body but also in in the emotions that it but it is stimulating in the observer and for that very reason because it's transgresses all kinds of moral norms and not to speak of aesthetic norms it counts as something original and it is very interesting that it's two people who produce this this is a ever since Gilbert and George those two artists produced by st. Martin's School in London it has become quite normal for young art students to do things together as a pair and by way of as it were defying the old idea of genius saying this isn't an individual thing we're doing this together but it's still original you know it's original because it's a defiance of the surrounding world but it isn't sufficient to defy things in order to do something interesting so that brings me to the question what is is real Kitsch here is a genuine fake this is obviously the sort of thing that people have had in mind when they've discussed catch that that an object in which fake emotions are being encouraged in the viewer and given a kind of symbolic expression in the object and there is a an establishment arose in response to that kind of thing Clement Greenberg in a famous essay said written in 1939 I think in partisan review I said that the all modern art is at a crossroads it can go in one of two ways you can go you can join the avant-garde or it can be Kitsch there's no third way you know if you're not with the avant-garde all you produce is banal and cliche ridden and and fake and this was incredibly inferential this essay and it correspond it to a feeling in or in the other arts as well in music and literature that somehow the ordinary language of artistic expression like representation in painting or like tonality and music or the ordinary rhythms of prose that the these have become unavailable because they've been too much used they've become clichés and if you try to use them again or you would produce his Kitsch fake art and that's of course it's responsible for the movement to eight on a tonality in music under the influence of Schoenberg and to modernism in literary prose under the influence of choice so that modernism became a kind of cult that we must this was the way to flee the whole disaster of cliche but I think the flight from cliche tends to end in cliche as in this example this is Barnett Newman you know you know Barnett Newman of course very famous American painter who produced ok it's not very well reflected on this screen it has a there are two colors there not one but the the a Barnett Newman was responsible for producing some some thousand or so of these which one could reasonably say are themselves cliches a cliche kind of abstraction so the great question is why do we object to cliche in Kish and that's really back to what I say about faking it we think that there is such a thing as real emotion and we also think that people can substitute unreal emotions for the real ones and that there's a difference between the real ones on the unreal ones the real ones in some sense cannot be sold they can't be put on this put on sale or made into into merely marketable things there are things which are precious to us and belong with us as as possessions and let me just give you a couple of examples here this is a handbag which you can buy in Italy which is obviously an abuse of real art just to sell an object but you not you never the real of the great work of art another's Last Supper which is being abused does not sell anything at all it expresses a sublime moment in the Christian narrative in a way which is a permanent possession of all those who perceive it and here's a fake art which is being used to sell Elvis Presley in his late years of decline and trying to show you that Jesus can forgive even him and but the great question is you know does it is this really meant what is what is it saying is it just another piece of false emotion and here is a famous work of art most people who have been brought up with any kind of critical understanding or any kind of knowledge of the of the whole Kitsch problem will see look at this thing but by Jeff Koons and see he can't possibly mean this you know and it's just so so awful that he must have something else in mind that than just to present this and that's true of this too you know how can somebody I have such a high opinion of himself as to think that his little balloon dogs set next to an elegant classical building like that deserve anything other than to be punctured but they this is something which I call pre-emptive Kitsch it's it's a new kind of faking there's a fake emotion in that Michael Jackson and monkey picture which is also connected with a kind of fake rejection of a fake emotion he's saying look this is so fake you can't believe that I mean it and and so you know I'm only I'm actually rejecting this but only sort of rejecting it so the whole thing is being put in in quotation marks as a chain of pretense I'm pretending to the emotion I'm pretending to reject that emotion and I'm pretending that I'm not rejecting that reject that emotion at the same time as a long train of pretense and where does it end perhaps it indeed never end there's a kind of meta language of the fake culture you'll find lots of critical stuff if you go into an art gallery and in this part of the world every every one of which presumably has to have some piece of Koons in place you'll find paragraph upon carrot paragraph often in the style of Jacques Lacan like that thing that I read to you telling you that this this is at least as important as Michelangelo look because the same things can be said about both of them so at what point in all this do we come to earth or do we never come to earth is can we just live in this world of fakes forever and that seems to be what essentially Koons is asking us to do I call his work pre-emptive Kitsch because it he's pre-empting the judgement of it as Kitsch he's making it so ostentatiously Kitsch that you can't believe that it really is so you hesitate to judge it and dismiss it as the second-rate rubbish that it is so do we have anything to contrast with this of course that's in that's what you in this room are all working toward that the thing that will contrast with this I give a couple of examples here Andrew wire who alas is just just died there is a simple piece of representational painting which I'm sure is familiar to many people in this room in which there's a restoration of the innocent interest in the world as it is and in particular the plain white wall and all the blemishes contained in it and all the human meanings that you can see in it that kind of painting is still available available to us and and Wyeth's paintings of course have been extremely influential and popular in this country because they have captured not just the way things look but also the human reality behind it what it actually is to be an American in this difficult time we have someone similar in David in Shaw there's that's just an example a very simple example of his painting just looking at some plain white wall and that and its surroundings and try to find in that whiteness that the reality the human reality which which it embodies because of the way in which these things have been used all their lives into which it's been incorporated that kind of representational art seems to me to be still available and there's nothing Kitsch about it there's nothing fake about it and yet we're supposed not to think that it's possible to do this you know the propaganda of the art schools will say you know this is all completely unavailable to us that we were in some sense pretending whereas of course it's much more much more reasonable to say that the pretense lies with people like Barnett and a parallel paradigm case of a pretend artist than them with David in Shore now I'm coming to the to the end so I was going to give you a few thoughts on value before I finish Oscar Wilde famously said that the cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing and that's a very profound remark you know prices are things that we're familiar with prices are fixed by exchange everything has a price if you're prepared to exchange it so things with a price can be substituted for each other they can be exchanged and compared but value attaches to the things that we are reluctant to exchange and compare you value your your wife and your children but you for that very reason you are not going to exchange them you know there's no price that you're going to put on their head but and of course this is very well-known in the area of erotic love or erotic feelings that these cannot be priced and as soon as you do price them they belong to another moral sphere they're put outside the normal realm of human interactions but we still do think that we can price certain emotions this is really what Walt Disney is all about the collection of emotional ready-mades which we can exchange for each other and which have a you know a clear cost attached and so on so what should we do by way and finally of avoiding this avoiding putting all our emotions on sale how do we how do we discriminate between works of art that do this and works about that don't and so on that is really what the question is that concerns us when we consider the whole history of kitsch and just wanted to concerned with a one or two little examples it was often said of ultra low or 3o who was a Spanish painter who settled in Paris at the time of the Impressionists that what he did was was fake impression that this has all the cliches of the impressionist idiom but with nothing that redeems it from a mere competence and here is it a picture of a street in my mouth sweet sort of thing yeah and it looked jolly good on on the wall of a cafe but is it real art what is wrong with it if anything there is a something by circa which ostensively is the same sort of thing and yet you do sense that there is a real life in the sofa that isn't there in the trio the figures are just as sketchy but somehow they are standing in the landscape and absorbing their posture from it in the way that these figures are not these figures are dolls put there for effect but they have no human relation no emotional relation to the facades around them and those facades are simple simply sketches of somewhere nice if you look at the trees in the cell how you see that there those trees are actually animated by something they are pointing to their own life as potentially dying things so you know you can see if you could make these sort of comparisons that indeed there is a distinction between between the fake and the real and it's not just a matter of the standard sentimentality so I will conclude with one image from a detail for a picture by Edward Hopper as again a piece of representational art which says something we don't know quite what it is it does say but you know that that's a real mug of coffee don't you and that there are real people sitting around it and it has a significance in their lives and that the light falling on it is a light in which people actually live and exchange things you know when you paint like that it is the case that you're trying to extract from a particular situation as it's a human meaning that's contained in it which is something that Utrillo was not doing in that picture of so thinking of those sort of examples I think we can conclude that we really do make a distinction and ought to make a distinction and can make a distinction between real art which is what you are aiming to produce and fake art which is actually what has been produced in the usual art schools so thank you so well thank you very much I think I bought in she's always so wonderful and you haven't discovered that I'm a fake but I gather that there is time for questions and I'm supposed to deal with questions on tide do I have a chairman on the record for which I'm condemned ask what it means to say something as opposed to say nothing and then there's a little bit or the problem with a lot of what the scrutiny says is that his idea that meaning seems to be privileged and isn't undefinable as to everybody else's yet he makes distinction and in such a way okay well it is a very interesting question and my response is to say of course all that I've been talking about is extremely difficult to get clear in one's mind I'm not saying that I don't want to imply that I'm as clear about this as you know my language might sometimes suggest it is very difficult to know what we mean by meaning and the difference between meaning something and saying nothing and it's precisely for this reason that there's this huge area in which people like Jeff Koons can as it were step in and occupy an uncontested space say look you know this whole place is space is being cleared away because Kitsch has been forbidden so I'm gonna step in and claim it all and do this Kitsch but but do it so horribly that everybody will know that I'm not really doing it and that's that's a very clever strategy and it pays off I think that sculpture was sold for fifty million dollars at some stage and so you know all this all this indicates that the effort to be real the effort to say what things what the human life really is and what really matters is a hard one we know that it is that it exists this effort we know that there's a great difference between late Beethoven quartets and say you two you know we know that Beethoven wrestled in a way that most of us are incapable of wrestling with the need to express our spiritual condition in a time of the loss of faith you know and he did it so and for that reason his works are consoling to us and valuable to us and we'll be for the rest of our lives and I think we have to recognize that human beings do need that they need that exploration of what is deep in themselves and when art ceases to do this and just becomes another flippant joke then there's no real need for it anymore [Applause] that's a very good question there's a great difference between between showing a bit of the world and and by presenting it to the audience or the viewer and by actually showing it through exploring it and translating it into something else you know any every bed in the world is a perfect representation of itself you know and my bed is less disgusting than Tracy Emmons but it's but it's just as accurate a presentation of what a bed might be but a real artist I take it in the film on beauty I take the example of um abdullah quartz bed in his in a musical the Lacroix in Paris in which he shows the the tormented sheets from which he has just emerged and this is not a presentation of an actual bed it's a it's a digest of a bed through the perceiving eye of a very refined observer somebody who is able to make those sheets into the symbol of the life that has escaped from them and make us know through the lie of the sheets just an the character of the torment of the person whose sheets they are that's something which is a completely different skill it means actually perceiving the spiritual reality of objects in Tracey Emin there is just the debris of her life an interesting life no doubt but increasingly you know exhausted given the number of times that it's put on display well everybody let's put it another way everybody shows himself as he really is because even if he's a fake you know there he is that's what he is but our part in my understanding presents reality by in some way transforming it into a symbol of itself so it isn't just the plane on undoctored reality before you it is something which has been made into an articulate presentation of itself a translation of itself into into an idea and this is what Hegel meant when he said that are all artists the sensuous shining of the idea I think that's really a very profound utterance you know that we look to art not just to present the things around us but to redeem them in some way by finding within them a meaning which is greater than and then the ordinary I can observe what you think the role of humor in art should be the role of what is the role of humor in art is the question humor is a very interesting idea the fact that human beings laugh at things is one of the most remarkable features of our condition and of course there there is an art form comedy which takes this as its ruling principle there are comic paintings they tend not to be very successful in theatre comedy works works a little bit in music but I think one of the important things about humor and this bears on your question is that humor is something about which we make very explicit judgments people who who utter jokes that are in bad taste you know or sexist or racist jokes or whatever tend to be regarded with intense disapproval you know and we all think that there is a difference between a refined sense of humor and a crude sense of humor you know someone who's constantly making sexual innuendos might have some kind of they might get a laugh every now and then but most of us think that such a person is not the sort of person you want to spend your your time with and I think that has bearing on the role of humor in art we think just the same in the case of art that the the comic in art must also be controlled by aesthetic judgment but by a sense of what is appropriate and what what is illuminating and what is merely crude and so on so that we do we do actually think very intensely about this in judging comedies and I suspect the same is true of painting when when Duchamp put his urinal in that exhibition he was some really very lucky that nobody saw that it was a joke partly because you know it's not such a funny joke that it was obvious and anyway art critics are notoriously humorless and so so it was taken seriously as though this were a gesture designed to induce some kind of new understanding of what our T's though apparently that eronel has disappeared it was thrown out after the exhibition and and with by his sister was it no there you are right but of course reproductions of it have been made and are in museums or all over the world with the reproduced signature of our mutton and all the rest but I think you know jokes are an extremely interesting area in which we exercise our aesthetic judgment and our art is full of them first question you received they asked you why should we believe you as compared to believing jeff koons or nothing and it seems obvious you make sense we can search their own mind did you search her apart and there's logic in what you say and it seems right truthfully I just thought and their two cents into this rabbinic film that the way we see this business artist I think such a self responding to this other stock teaching this other stuff is he is deceased be something it's like most what kind of cynicism that's like judgmental like I only get two religious discussions but it's almost like that lack of faith or something bigger than yourself my friends basement seem very cool and this to me is the symptom of I think that's a very true observation of course I didn't talk about him about this explicitly but I think you can't understand the phenomenon I'm describing if you don't recognize exactly what you've said that there it we live in a society in a historical could condition in which a kind of self-loathing and repudiation of the human condition is is normal and it's communicated to the young not necessarily by their teachers but by the surrounding culture and we have to fight against it and it's very hard to fight against it when we live in a world saturated by aggressive music and pornography and everything that seems to make human beings into into mere objects to be you know mutilated or played with you know there is very little room there for that for the real emotions and the real forms of human relationship even though we yearn for their those things and our yearning for those things is a religious yearning that is really what I think underlies your your sense that it is connected with religion it isn't it may not be that you believe in in God or in any particular revealed faith but still you have that learning the yearning were to see human life as potentially redeemable so it isn't just if you like a succession of of impressions each one more boring than the last and I think it's a young people today are in a really difficult position because they're they've entered a society created by people of my generation which offers some very few exits from the from the cycle of mere impressions and and excitements and so on yes how do you distribute to exchange I think well obviously the my role is a sort of philosophical ossifer is is to understand the situation no not to to change it but yeah Karl Marx famously said you know that hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world the point however is to change it and look what he did you know so we have a warning there I think it's what you're doing is I understand it it's the right thing get together think about this set each other an example criticize each other's work and try always to be guided by a higher vision of the meaning of human life than that which is you're bombarded with from the media every day you know and I think if you can do that perhaps eventually it'll crystallize and I think you know in music and literature people do this and I think it can be done in painting too you're to address the role of wealth great well to society what's going to be art not the role of wealth this is an interesting question the role of wealth in creating the art market it's a great tragedy really for painting that paintings can be owned we composers and novelists and poets don't have this problem nobody can walk out of the Symphony Hall with with a symphony in his pocket and even if he pays fifty five hundred million dollars for it because the symphony exists in another space on a space where we can which cannot be owned and it's because paintings can be owned and because their value depends upon what critics say about them that you get this strange distorted art market it's interesting that when Clement Greenberg launched his great campaign to say that all representational art is Kitsch and only avant-garde art is real art he dismissed Edward Hopper for instance who was the greatest American painter at the time as secondhand cliches in doing so he because they're gathered round in this circle of complicitous faking that I've been talking about everybody said yeah that's right it's only the avant-garde that works and and and Clement Greenberg explicitly picked out de Kooning as his his example of where art should go carefully buying up every possible to Kooning meanwhile and made a killing you know I don't know what you think about de Kooning in this room but to me it's the lowest play point at which avantgarde art ever ever reached it's not merely incompetent from the draftsman this point of view but also it does dirt on everything that it touches but it's hugely successful because of Clement Greenberg promotion of it and and by owning the de Kooning's he made himself a multi-millionaire so sorry well it I suppose it is insider trading but it doesn't but then it doesn't matter you know you have to think in the long term that money that that people are so stupid as to spend on a de Kooning it goes then to an artist who is very likely to be a drunkard with a lot of a wide circle of completely useless friends it will spread among them it will be spent on useful biodegradable things like like drink and and reach through the rest of society much more quickly than if it had been in a bank account so you know this this rubbish art actually has a very benign economic function no matter how badly we want to be able to tell us point it requires an audience ticket we need a commonality of leadership doesn't that there seems to be a tie between [Music] no absolutely I didn't mean to to pour scorn on the cultivated tourists just to to point to the contrast of attitude between him and the and the old lady praying to her favorite Saint in its in his in the in the Kitsch version that she happens to have a fixed on yeah it is very important that we we maintain the higher language of discussion of art where people where we really try to say why and what it means and why and the cultivated tourists is obviously one of the heroes in this respect and it's thanks to the cultivated tourists that all although great Renaissance works were preserved it was Goethe's discovery of Italy and determination to go around looking at these things and bringing in his wake all the German enlightenment writers and so on that that actually created the topic of art history and made those little municipalities in Italy start protecting and treasuring what they had yes yeah production of the First Nation all the official media the official news here our critics want to yeah about OD and that's I think [Music] you makes for big things but it's not enough I see declined and also the economic crisis is attacking the galleries and so on and we that Shelly abusing in the music you see blissful at the shine there's this your eyes don't sew universities and so on they don't pay attention they are well yes it's very difficult to change a whole culture all one can do is start something and see how it spreads you know I think that's really the only advice to be given when in the in Europe in particular there is an art establishment Holland is notorious for this in fact the Netherlands I mean the that there is a government funding for the Arts and committees bureaucrats who distribute this funding and of course their one concern is to be modern and up-to-date and and at the front of things so they won't be criticised as reactionary bourgeois and all the things that that I regard as terms of praise but and it's the same in in modern music in especially in the Netherlands that the subsidies go to the people whose music nobody wants to hear and that's one of the disadvantages of a bureaucracy a bureaucrats don't pay themselves the cost of what they subsidize this is why we should be grateful for private owners because they buy things because they like them that people who buy things from museums usually buy them because they hate them of course they think I if I hated it must actually be very modern and up today they stood for a lot of us I'm sure doesn't run a lot of the same opinions that the greco-roman ideal is the ideal way to do beauty and our relationship to the culture around us I'm wondering what you think about these advent of democracy and how that has changed the validity of the way we view the world we the work we produce and the validity of what we're trying to do because it's almost because what we're doing is elitist in a sense that we maintain these ideals and that we aren't open to the democratic i-12 which might be how did help would you um come to terms with those two different philosophies and in the work that we're doing well it's certainly true that democracy has changed the culture erratically because it's given a voice to people who in previous centuries might not have had a voice and the then it also means that it is become difficult to criticize popular art or especially popular music or music that has the the allegiance of the mass of humankind because it looked so much as though you're just dismissing their right to have a taste of their own and I think that is actually true but if you look back over it the history of democracy especially American democracy it hasn't always been associated with the worst form of popular taste on the contrary you know you just look at your tradition of painting someone like Winslow Homer he he was part of the whole democratic movement the movement to celebrate the American people and its landscape and was a great painter in my view and American music has always had this very strong Democratic side to it and of course produced in jazz the harmonic language which is now the language of popular music everywhere and for a long time jazz was a refined art form just like any other it's declined of course but it's declined in another wave not not purely because of the Democratic side of it so I think that one perhaps should try and recuperate the good side of democracy and recognize that that one has a duty to educate the ordinary citizen and not just to accept his taste as valid simply because he has it living in Los Angeles of course we celebrated a very independent plastic the great the alleged well that goes back to the gentleman's question over there about the sort of degeneracy of the surrounding culture and I think what what I would say is is this that there's a great difference between attending to something and being distracted by it and we live in a culture where distraction is the the means that is used to attract other people's attention rather than the presentation of something that is worthwhile in itself you know advertising is all about distraction that the the ordinary MU language of the movies now captures people's attention by the five-second cut you know so the eye is constantly gripped by it constantly distracted but never actually fulfilled and and I think that the role of art in all this is to is to put distraction to one side and and put it attention in the place of it and I think that's really what what you have to be doing bringing that together don't you think that post-modernism let's say cooks it's really taking ordinates it's really but we know that keep seldom the reason to teach and to take emotions on the screen itself don't you think that postmodern is to do exactly that they do sell teach under the wrapper and the pretense of irony because that is what accessible to that buying pool of those who made couple of billion puffs out of seven oil and for the same reason is body shop don't you think that essentially the entire link with a bumper jumper that you just described and intensify and it's just the way to sell something that they would buy anyways for five bucks that's a very very good way of putting it and I agree yeah that that you you irony is a very useful device because it enables you to do something which you know to be wrong while pretending you're not doing it and that's really essentially what Jeff Koons is doing and as you say it also reassures the buyer that this thing that he could get for five bucks on the street is actually worth whatever it is that he pays for it yes and this is a it's a sad thing what we're talking about weaknesses in human nature which it isn't possible to overcome but in the long run you know when you know say in a few thousand years time and all everything's being reduced to rubble a new civilization will come along and they'll pick up those Jeff Koons objects and they will be put in on the rubbish-heap and every now and then they'll come across a real work of art and say look here's something that they really did then but you know it takes time yeah you you [Music] [Music] [Music] you you

Channel: Odd Nerdrum

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Id: ZCoqQ5GUDig

Length: 86min 33sec (5193 seconds)

Published: Sun May 04 2014