Upon reading the claim by a New York Times art critic that in looking at a painting “to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial,” the incomparable Tom Wolfe wrote in his book The Painted Word:
Then and there I experienced a flash known as the Aha! Phenomenon, and the buried life of contemporary art was revealed to me for the first time. The fogs lifted! The clouds passed! The motes, scales, conjunctival bloodshot, and Murine agonies fell away!
All these years, along with countless kindred souls, I am certain, I had made my way into the galleries of Upper Madison and Lower Soho and the Art Gildo Midway of Fifty-seventh Street, and into the museums, into the Modern, the Whitney, and the Guggenheim, the Bastard Bauhaus, the New Brutalist, and the Fountainhead Baroque, into the lowliest storefront churches and grandest Robber Baronial temples of Modernism. All these years I, like so many others, had stood in front of a thousand, two thousand, God-knows-how-many thousand Pollocks, de Koonings, Newmans, Nolands, Rothkos, Rauschenbergs, Judds, Johnses, Olitskis, Louises, Stills, Franz Klines, Frankenthalers, Kellys, and Frank Stellas, now squinting, now popping the eye sockets open, now drawing back, now moving closer—waiting, waiting, forever waiting for . . . it . . . for it to come into focus, namely, the visual reward (for so much effort) which must be there, which everyone (tout le monde) knew to be there—waiting for something to radiate directly from the paintings on these invariably pure white walls, in this room, in this moment, into my own optic chiasma. All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well—how very shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28, 1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward all along. Not “seeing is believing,” you ninny, but “believing is seeing,” for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.
Whether or not Wolfe is right about modern art (he’s usually right about most things), I believe he is on to something in his epiphany that “believing is seeing.” Painting may not exist to illustrate the text, but as a new study reveals, being able to talk about an artwork affects one’s aesthetic perception.
Ayumi Yamada asked half of 129 students to either verbalise their reasons for liking two paintings – one abstract, one representational (Piet Mondrian’s Woods near Oele, shown right, and his New York City, respectively) – or to verbalise their reasons for not liking the paintings. The remaining participants acted as controls and just viewed the paintings without saying anything. Afterwards, all the participants had to say which was their favoured painting.
Representational paintings are realistic, with content that can be easily talked about. Abstract art, by contrast, is less grounded in reality and more tricky to talk about.
The results showed that verbalising their responses to the paintings appeared to distort the participants’ subsequent preferences. Those participants in the verbalisation condition who’d been challenged to say why they liked the paintings were subsequently biased towards choosing the representational painting as their favourite. By contrast, participants in the verbalisation condition who’d been challenged to articulate their reasons for disliking the paintings were subsequently biased towards choosing the abstract painting as their favourite.
What was going on? Yamada thinks that the apparent ease with which we can verbalise our feelings affects our later judgements. Because participants found it easier to talk about why they liked the representational painting compared with the abstract one, this biased them in favour of the representational painting. Similarly, participants who had to talk about their dislike for the art, found this easier for the representational painting, which subsequently biased them against it. (Ref: Yamada, A. (2009). Appreciating art verbally: Verbalization can make a work of art be both undeservedly loved and unjustly maligned. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45 (5), 1140-1143 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2009.06.016)
Realistic art makes it easier to verbalize our feelings because we are often able to create a narrative about the work. Indeed, as Wolfe notes, this was one of the features for which modern art sought to correct:
Literary became a code word for all that seemed hopelessly retrograde about realistic art. It probably referred originally to the way nineteenth-century painters liked to paint scenes straight from literature, such as Sir John Everett Millais’s rendition of Hamlet’s intended, Ophelia, floating dead (on her back) with a bouquet of wildflowers in her death grip. In time, literary came to refer to realistic painting in general. The idea was that half the power of a realistic painting comes not from the artist but from the sentiments the viewer hauls along to it, like so much mental baggage. According to this theory, the museum-going public’s love of, say, Jean François Millet’s The Sower has little to do with Millet’s talent and everything to do with people’s sentimental notions about The Sturdy Yeoman. They make up a little story about him.
Wolfe argues in his book that abstraction merely shifts visual art from story to a theory. Each, however, is ultimately dependent on an underlying verbal foundation. Without the ability to vocalize a narrative (even if only internally), we are unable to truly appreciate a visual work.
The Abrahamic faiths have always privileged the word over the image so perhaps it is not surprising that our aesthetic sensibilities would be shaped by narrative. However, since the study was done in Japan, it appears that this may be a universal phenomenon. If so, what does it say about visual representation? Could it be that the key to appreciating visual art is merely learning how to better talk about it?
August 28th, 2009 | 2:41 pm
The relation between the verbal and the visual really is strong. For more on this, see Derrida and Walter Ong.
An elderly woman I know complains of poor eyesight. Eventually reading became impossible for her. TV is meaningless to her. Snapshots of family and friends are just a blur. But her ophthalmologist says her eyes are physically in fairly good shape and functioning.
She has Alzheimer’s, which has also robbed her of much of her vocabulary. Apparently she can see the lines and colors well enough but she can’t interpret them anymore. So she would have difficulty talking about the images even if she could recognize them. But which comes first, loss of the ability to “see” them or loss of the ability to talk about them? Or are these losses twin losses, two sides of the same coin?
August 28th, 2009 | 2:59 pm
Tom Wolfe is NOT “right about most things.” He is wrong about the novel, wrong about Shakespeare, and wrong about the existence of God.
If you want excellent art criticism, go to Jed Perl:
http://www.tnr.com/article/art/generations
August 28th, 2009 | 5:08 pm
Carter, thanks for the article. It’s a fascinating dichotomy. I know with literature, I may appreciate the work better if I understand it–or at least come to a satisfying understanding. If I don’t, I probably won’t like it. It’s not necessarily that I hate what I don’t understand, but finding a way to make what I don’t understand interesting enough to make it worth my while. Even then, it’s no guarantee I’ll like that book of literature. There are many other factors.
The problem I have with abstract art is that I can’t relate to it. I can come up with any theory whatsoever, but I find satisfaction in discovering the author’s intentions. Unless I go to an outside source, I can never be sure what an abstract piece is meant to represent. This makes me suspicious whether some modern art is made with any intentions behind them at all. That I find troublesome. How can art be art if it could mean anything to anybody, yet mean nothing concrete to everyone?
Abstract art may challenge us to verbalize our feelings about it, but is it worth the challenge? Why would that make representational art suddenly less appealing just because those who favored the abstract piece liked the challenge? I suppose what’s happening is, those that favored the abstract found a way to relate to it and make it . . . special to them. Representational art, on the other hand, may be more difficult to see ourselves in it because it’s meant to convey something specific that may even be in conflict with ourselves.
Just some thoughts.
August 28th, 2009 | 11:34 pm
I’m not sure what Wolfe thinks he’s proving. The ability to express what one likes about a work of art of course intensifies the experience of the work. But who can come up with a new theory of why a sunset is beautiful and moving?
Abstract art is just as much a representation of reality as so-called representational art is — what else would it be expressing? You don’t need a theory to gain a foothold, although a theory can help. You just need your eyes.
August 29th, 2009 | 11:26 am
You might like to read my views on this subject
I have just started a blog
ecclestonstudio.wordpress.com
or you can read my views in details at
http://ecclestonstudio.com/eccleston_studio5.htm
see you there ;O)
August 29th, 2009 | 4:45 pm
El Greco and Rembrandt were abstract artists in a manner…Rembrandt being abjured for “not finishing his canvases”. But, perhaps one of the reasons modern abstract art is difficult to understand beyond its celebration of form and movement is because this noisy era is difficult to understand, rationally or spiritually. It has become so difficult to understand that now we have cynicism creating diamond plated skulls and titanium balloon dogs.
August 29th, 2009 | 8:49 pm
So we’re talking about abstraction vs. representation? Remind me again what year this is. 1959, maybe? Wonderful! I’ll jump in.
Representational art presents so many ways to fail. It is very difficult to do well. It’s easy to talk about how bad it is, because often it’s easy to see just how bad it is.
Abstraction offers the viewer a more open path for contemplation. And often the result of this contemplation is weepy sentimentality–such as the gushing responses to Christo’s installation in Central Park that I heard on NPR. Those orange gates made people feel that the world could finally come together in harmony, if only for a moment (or whatever).
Goofy, but what’s not to like?
Nowadays (2009) there are many earnest young artists, with Tom Wolfe as their patron saint, working very hard painting and founding academies to reestablish “classical realism” as the highest form of art. Unfortunately, despite all the effort, they haven’t come up with much good art. And you can tell it’s not very good by looking at it, which is something at least.
August 29th, 2009 | 11:05 pm
T.B. Root, kindly help an ignororant art lover understand why it is, assuming you’re correct, that contemporary artists working in the realist vein aren’t very good.
August 30th, 2009 | 5:14 pm
Ken, I think I would say that the contemporary “realist vein” itself isn’t very good. There are thousands of young artists seriously painting the figure with the aim of restoring draftsmanship to historical standards. But the movement is more technical than aesthetic, and although seeking to revive tradition, it has in fact severed a crucial cord of taste and style (and tradition!) by breaking with the present. It’s a matter of the “persuasiveness” of the visual language. There simply is not a highly developed modern visual language of the figure (because modern art moved away from the figure), so the contemporary figure painter turns to the past and faces the problem of looking antiquated and corny, or just copies the model in a drab realism, or tries cheap gimmicks to perk things up. (Have you seen any convincing religious figurative art produced lately? Me either.) There are many talented artists, but we need a genius or two to solve the problem and create a new aesthetic language of the figure.
I’m also waiting for convincing results from the return to tonality in classical music.
August 31st, 2009 | 9:40 am
Thanks a lot for the explanation, T.B. I’m curious about what you think of the work of Edward Knippers, if you’re aware of it. In any case, I have never entirely understood the charge that antiquated styles can no longer yield high quality works of art. I guess the idea is that the people working in a particular old style lack the genius of those who pioneered it, and are more or less copying the originators.
September 1st, 2009 | 8:32 am
Thanks, Ken, for directing me to Edward Knippers work, which I enjoyed. I can’t say more without saying a lot more.
I fear that by raising my pet concerns I have misrepresented my larger position. I am greatly pleased that young artists are rediscovering the figure and attempting to converse with the art of the past. But I would say that painters should avoid playing period dress up (for the reason you mentioned and others), and should still honor the modern sensibility of understatement and judiciousness that formed as a counter-aesthetic to 19th c. academicism. But I’m being too general here to make much sense. Thanks for the conversation!
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