After writing my last post, I realized I haven’t really stated my own theory of morality in a concise way. So: I think each of us have a responsibility to not deny other individuals their own right to express themselves as individuals. Put in a more positive vein, we each have a responsibility to allow other beings to act in their own way – because each of us wishes to act in our own way. Others actions may be distasteful to us, but then again, my father taught me very early of the principle of de gustibus non est disputandum – in matters of taste, there can be no dispute. He used to joke that it is the unofficial family motto: we’ll put it on our coat of arms once we ever merit having such a thing. We all have our tastes – we all like some things and dislike others. But while we can discuss those differences in taste to our hearts content, and passionately hold our tastes and passionately feel others’ preferences are just wrong, we have no right to prevent others from enjoying them. Tastes are not moral; they just are. Morality exists in the actions in which we give others the space to express their tastes – which is morally positive activity – and immorality exists in the actions in which we withhold from others the space to express their tastes.
I don’t believe there are any “moral” tastes – even when we get a sense of pleasure from empowering others to do what they want to do, it’s just a preference of our own, and we have to view it in light of all the other preferences which we have which have no such empowerment (like, say, enjoying fried clams or days at the beach or donuts – excuse me for thinking exclusively of Maine summer preferences just now). However, when we have tastes which involve withholding another’s ability to express their own individuality, those tastes are immoral – or no; indulging in those tastes is an immoral act. Thus, having sex with someone who cannot give consent is immoral – but sex, in any form, between consensual adults, is essentially non-moral. I have a number of friends who are into kinky sex – BDSM – and this area sometimes bothers me as I think hurting people is a kind of withholding of moral agency – or again, more precisely, hurting people establishes power relationships which are tricky at best as a means of maintaining the notion of equal consent – but they tell me no, kinky sex is either entirely consensual for all concerned, or, if it breaks the barrier of consent, then they agree with me, it’s wrong. But I’m still wary of it. Power in all of its forms bothers me even though I know it exists as a fact of life, but any momentum in a direction which seems to erode the equality that should otherwise exist in our relationships to one another, the equality that enables each of us to exist as individuals and express our individuality in full, sends up a warning signal in my soul.
Thus the immorality of Gauguin doesn’t consist of him leaving his wife per se, but in the way that he left her: he denied her the right to participate in a discussion about their marriage, and denied his children the means to become morally equivalent individuals. The immorality was the one-sidedness of his leaving, not the leaving itself. I have no doubt that his marriage wasn’t what he wanted, but to act unilaterally was to act immorally. Similarly, his sleeping with thirteen year olds was immoral because they weren’t given consent; his infecting them with syphilis was doubly immoral because he knowingly deprived them of health in what was already a non-consensual act. Caravaggio’s killings are obviously immoral in this sense – killing someone obviously deprives the victim of any future ability to express their individuality. William Etty was moral because of how he treated his models and his niece; his sensuality in his art was neither moral nor immoral, however. You can only be moral in respect of your actions towards other sentient beings – and that’s why banking is such a moral activity. Banking involves intermediating the exchange and expression of value among other people – and the expression of value is one of the primary mechanisms for us to express ourselves as individuals.
Similarly, when we express who we are as individuals – whether it be as parents, or artists, or BDSM or model railroad enthusiasts – we create a positive obligation on those to whom we reveal ourselves to respect that part of ourselves. They don’t have to like it, indeed they may actively not like it, but by making them aware of our expressive needs as an individual, we create a moral relationship between themselves and us. I acted immorally by cheating on my wife and leaving her not because I had sex with someone else in isolation, but because she had given me awareness of her needs as an individual – her need to be with someone who wouldn’t sleep with other people, and to be with me for the rest of her life – and I didn’t respect her enough to tell her that I wasn’t happy, that I needed to reopen the question of being married to her. I divorced her (eventually) in a moral way, by talking with her and giving her space to express herself and, in the presence of an unworkable arrangement, mutually agreeing to split up. But I left her initially in a wholly immoral way. I was a world class jerk, to use the phraseology of my last post, but eventually, I atoned for it and went about divorcing her in the best way possible.
So that’s it. Morality (to me) is very simple: we each have a right to express our individuality, but that right is recursive in that we also have to respect every other individual’s right to the same (or else we have no real right to expect others to allow us to express our own individuality, and thus we fail the initial test). The recursion makes the whole exercise complex and difficult, and that’s why morality is so rich a topic for fiction, for history, for philosophy, for analysis. Art, on the other hand, isn’t simple – the infinite range of visual expression seems boundless, and as technology enables more and more means of visual expression, the ways in which art can be created is just amazing. But it’s also not really recursive, which makes it inherently less interesting to me than other areas of human engagement. I love the emotional expression it can inspire, I love the range of sensations I feel when I look at art (good and bad), but art isn’t inherently moral.
In my last essay – or apodictic blathering, as one might say – I wrote about the essential linkage of the moral life of an artist with their work. But as I’m sure many of you must have realized, what does the viewer/critic do when confronted with a work created by someone who is wholly anonymous, either because of time’s ability to erase authorship (we cannot know who sculpted the Greek statuary which forms the foundation of Western conceptions of three dimensional form, and even if we know that there was some specific person who created it, there exists no record of their moral nature), or because of organizational dulling (the legion of artists who created cathedrals and their external expressions, stained glass wonderment, triptychs of wooden spectacular wow, consisted no doubt of both lovely, caring, recursively aware individuals, and a whole lot if Gauguin-like dicks)? We encounter works which have beauty, and recognize beauty in our own way all the time, without having any reference to the moral nature of their creators.
That, I think, is actually the normal way in which we confront beauty – unaware of the morality of the creator, only in the presence of something which we find more or less beautiful. I don’t pretend to have a theory or a statement of what makes beautiful things beautiful – and indeed, I think everyone has a different concept of beauty. (That’s part of being moral: my view of beauty is individual, and I have to respect others’ views which are vastly different.) That’s one of the many things that makes sentience amazing, the fact that concepts of not just aesthetic quality but any concept of quality are subjective, even as we converge on similar notions of quality in different realms. Our ability to construct worlds of meaning which are wholly individual means that we can construct visions of beauty which are wholly individual as well, and as long as we aren’t lazily internally self-contradicting, or willfully ignorant, any such construction has real meaning, and must be considered on its own two legs, as it were, as being truthful. But as I said in the last essay, we have to be active, non-lazy, non-ignorant. Even as we strive to do so, though, we’ll be confronted with works which are in their way detached: they have no reference point to their creator and that creator’s morality, or immorality.
When I went through the MFA a few weeks ago, I passed quickly through the Roman, Greek, and Egyptian galleries and went straight to the works of “modern” artists – basically, anything after 1500. I did so partially because I don’t really care for the work of ancient times – it is too remote, in both sensibility but also in how it is presented. I know intellectually that putting a 2nd century Roman statue, or 4th century BCE Greek statue or urn, in a 21st century museum takes it so far out of context that I know I can’t view it properly. The artist who created it, created it for a certain kind of eye, and I don’t have that eye. I know that and I don’t want to disrespect the artist by trying to interpret it in a setting that has no meaning for them. They created the work for some purpose which has been lost to history, and when I park my car on Huntington Avenue, put some quarters in a parking meter, enter via the Bank of America Main Entrance and pay my fee and first view a bunch of oil paintings which could not have existed when they sculpted their sculpture, then after a few hours stop for a glass of wine and a plate of smoked salmon which they could not have imagined as a possibility of food, take the lift up four stories to a constructed height beyond their conception to a gallery which shows their work amongst blank white drywall and under focused electrical light, I know that I have zero, negative nil, connection to their work efforts. I am an invader, and they created their work not for invaders but for an advancing and still-at-that-time-of-creation powerful civilization which I now view as primitive and backward and awful. I can’t see their work through their eyes – and even if I know they were creating art for eyes that owned them as artists and as slaves, and view their slavery in a kind of empathetic way to see them as artists more than their patrons did, I’m still off base. I’m still anachronistic.
With Gauguin, we have an artist who we can still understand as a western creature – and for Ai Wei-Wei, we have an artist who is from mainland China but who comes from a world which is comprehensible even if different – and for William Etty we have an artist who is clearly European even if removed by a couple of centuries. When we encounter art from artists who we cannot know, and who come from eras so far removed from our own that we know we cannot judge or even assess relatively evenly their background, how do we interpret the beauty that they create versus the morality of the art’s creation?
Well, we can’t.
I went for a walk today in the woods of central Maine. Yesterday I went for a walk in the woods along the Presumpscot River in Portland, Maine, with my son. On both walks, in the back of my mind, I was thinking about how to view art – human creations, or attempts at creation, of beauty – in light of this concept of the morality of the artist. On yesterday’s walk, I thought, wait, beauty is accessible to us everywhere. And it’s not just in nature, which is undeniably beautiful – in my instances, the birch trees and riverine green-brown waters, for my son the acorns and the differently wonderful sticks on the trail, for my trail companions (one of whom was canine) the damp-dark smell of the woods in a mist, the new saplings just itching to be peed on. Beauty is everywhere, in our eyes and in our bodies and in the strange etchings against nature which are roads and building lots and decaying churches in fields. Beauty is unstoppable wherever a sentient mind can pause, look, and reflect on what is offered to us. Beauty is in the act of recognizing the curious and amazing wonder of being alive and aware.
So the artist that we can’t know, who has vanished to history because of either time’s capacity to erase their personality or because of a kind of organizational anonymity which blends their personality into a pasty other, is really no different from Gauguin. Gauguin is interesting simply because we are able to choose to isolate his (rather extremely awful) personality. We should, instead, eliminate him from any presence in his creations. We should take him as a moral being and view him as the reprehensible creature that he is – and his art should be taken away from him, and be given back to the world of beauty that has no names, that is not only anonymous but has no need of being attributed. His paintings are lovely in their way but they aren’t better, or different, than the paintings of Etty, or the anonymous sculptures we’re left with from Greece and Rome and Egypt and Reims, or the unspeakable marvel of seeing a small dog curled up in comfort and safety and happiness in the back seat of my car. No human will paint that picture of a dog in a station wagon – although I once asked for someone to paint something akin to it, and now I realize it was a ridiculous question. I asked for someone to portray beauty when I had already beheld it. What nonsense on my part.
The artist is, really, irrelevant – or no, the artist as an individual is relevant as an individual, but the artist as an artist is completely irrelevant as an element of their art. Their individual artistic talent has no meaning once it has been expressed; the artwork lives on its own, and the artist can, in a real way, go to hell. On that level, the almost Platonically ideal artist would be Van Gogh: barely able to make do while he was alive, died a pauper, irrelevant to anyone other than his family and some friends, and his artwork then took on a life of its own. I said at the end of my last posting that the jury was out on Picasso, but no, I was wrong: the jury – the moral jury – should and must find him guilty of being a craven coward who valued his own comfort over the lives of those killed by Nazis as he enjoyed the privileges of a famous artist in occupied France. He was a dick. His art is magnificent but even that he crassly wrote off, signing napkins in Nice to pay for extravagant lunches because even his signature and a doodle was “valuable”. No: real beauty is always free, always available to all of us everywhere. To take advantage of others’ willingness to buy it, to brand it, is a power function. Die and let beauty find its expression – or better, live and create beauty because you can, because you see it, because it doesn’t matter if it is recognized. If you see your own value and push it, then you’re just exercising moral power over another – recognizing that you can be valuable in the eyes of another who doesn’t see their own value – and you are immoral.
I don’t think Caravaggio did that. I think, as I look at his work, that he lived his whole life conflicted between supporting power structures which he was powerless to confront – those of the counter-Reformation Catholic Church – and portraying a common world of people of mixed and confused choice like himself. But he died four hundred years ago – who knows? Gauguin was just a jerk, but his art is interesting and let’s view it with the same eye that views the sparkle in the eye of a six year old boy pondering a caterpillar – the six year old’s beauty will win, always, every time. Etty tried to show beauty – with mixed ability – in everything he did. He was a beautiful person, so far as I can tell, and let’s celebrate that – and admit that others were better painters. Picasso tried to push the boundaries of beauty but then also realized the world was cheatable and he could be a cheat. Enjoy his good art and feel comfortable recycling his signed napkins for the crass crap that they are.
I’m not an artist – as I said in the last post, I’m a banker. But as I look at art, I’m now looking less for the marks of beauty – because beauty is everywhere. I’m not looking for marks of originality, because that, too, is everywhere. I’m looking for those sparks on the canvas, or the shimmering across the marble or stone, or the electricity in the film, that indicate the artist is seeing deeply into the subject – person, setting, creature, whatever – that which makes them beautiful. It’s not that the artist is creating beauty, it’s that the artist is seeing beauty and giving it back to us, the future viewer, in a form that doesn’t celebrate the artist, but celebrates the subject. It gives us beauty that is already inherent.
So let me return to a couple of things. First, Sargent – he is my favorite painter and I realize now how much I like his slapdash, crap portraits. He painted robber barons and their wives in exactly the way they should have been portrayed: not as beautiful things, but as objects of monetary value. He got paid, he painted the paintings and portraits for value, and he got done quickly and finished and called it a day. That is, alas, exactly how the robber barons probably (I don’t know them individually enough to say with precision) deserved to be portrayed. He painted his friends with skill, not always with precision but with grace and love, and they are truly beautiful.
I think back to my other favorite painter, Winslow Homer. I love him for how he painted the cove in front of my childhood home, and it was perfect because it wasn’t so much accurate as it was right. He didn’t always paint well – one of his most famous paintings is of a lighthouse keeper which is so melodramatic that it just is laughable, the way Henry Longfellow’s poetry is just silly when read in modern form – but when he needed to, when he really sat back and thought about it, he could get the form of the Maine coast waters just right, and hit the yellows you’d see when sitting on a jutting bit of granite on a cold night with the sun setting behind you, and no one else could quite get the sense the way he could. I’d see the half dozen Homers in the Portland Museum of Art as a child and I’d think, wow, he was there, he saw what I saw, and while oil and canvas were crappy means of expressing it, he pushed through the crap and got it right. Even more right than I thought I could imagine. And it wasn’t anything other than presenting beauty that the world already had on its own.
It’s not simple, though. Art isn’t simple – it’s complex. Morality is simple in description but infinite in its expression; art is complex in its description but, somehow, quite simple in its expression. I’m drawn to morality – to history, to human experience – in a way that I’m not quite drawn to art. But I’m still drawn to art powerfully. I’ll divert a drive from Maine to San Antonio to Chicago – for those of you with a limited sense of geography, that’s a pretty foolish and time-consuming thing to do – simply because The Art Institute of Chicago has a comprehensive Sargent exhibition that I really can’t miss. But I’m taking a job in Texas, with no real connection to anything there, with no real reason to be in Texas at all, because the job enables me to connect morality and people and value and money in an odd but fascinating way. Artists will create beauty but I look at them and wonder, why? Beauty is everywhere. Morality, though, is no where. There is no place for morality. We have to respect each other, love each other, completely, without fear, to make it work. That is much harder than a landscape, than a still life, than a portrait, than a film. It’s hard to describe, but morality is harder to express. Choose the harder task. If you fail – and I’ve failed – then you can still atone and make good. If you do bad art, well, it will always look bad on the wall.