Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Recent work by Newberry

A colorful list is here.

Michael Newberry finished Venus (pictured here) in 2008, the same year that my extended interview with him on the theme of Art and Entrepreneurship was published in Kaizen.

Is modern art too complicated for us?

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, art critic Terry Teachout asks: “Are our brains big enough to untangle modern art?”

As examples, Teachout quotes one of thousands of sentences from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake like this one: “It is the circumconversioning of antelithual paganelles by a huggerknut cramwell energuman, or the caecodedition of an absquelitteris puttagonnianne to the herreraism of a cabotinesque exploser?” And he mentions “the splattery tangles and swirls” of Jackson Pollock pieces and quote music theorist Fred Lerdahl, who argues that much modernist music “overwhelms the listener’s processing capacities.”

To which I juxtapose three quotations from Section 23 of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment of 1790. Professor Kant divides art into the merely beautiful and that which is magisterially sublime:

“But there are remarkable differences between the two. The beautiful in nature is connected with the form of the object, which consists in having boundaries. The sublime, on the other hand, is to be found in a formless object, so far as in it or by the occasion of it boundlessness is represented, and yet its totality is also present to thought.”

Further: The beautiful “directly brings with it a feeling of the furtherance of life.” “But the other [i.e., the sublime] is a pleasure that arises only indirectly, viz. it is produced by the feeling of a momentary checking of the vital powers and a consequent stronger outflow of them, so that it seems to be regarded as emotion—not play, but earnest in the exercise of the imagination. Hence it is incompatible with charm; and as the mind is not merely attracted by the object but is ever being alternately repelled, the satisfaction in the sublime does not so much involve a positive pleasure as admiration or respect, which rather deserves to be called negative pleasure.”

And finally: “But the inner and most important distinction between the sublime and beautiful is, certainly, as follows. … . Natural beauty (which is independent) brings with it a purposiveness in its form by which the object seems to be, as it were preadapted to our judgment, and thus constitutes in itself an object of satisfaction. On the other hand, that which excites in us, without any reasoning about it, but in the mere apprehension of it, the feeling of the sublime may appear, as regards its form, to violate purpose in respect of the judgment, to be unsuited to our presentative faculty, and as it were to do violence to the imagination; and yet it is judged to be only the more sublime.”

So, for Kant, the sublime in art is formless, charmless, checks our vital powers, is repellent and a negative pleasure, violates our attempt to judge its purpose, and does violence to the imagination.

Another datum toward connecting Kant and modern art.

Fiery Catalan independence

How is this for an oath of allegiance to one’s monarch?

“We, who are as good as you, swear to you, who are no better than us, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided you observe all our liberties and laws — but if not, not.”

I’ve been reading Robert Hughes’s 2004 Barcelona: The Great Enchantress. Barcelona is the second largest city in Spain and the capital of the Catalan province, which has traditionally asserted a great deal of independence from the central authorities in Madrid.

The Catalans, as far back as the late medieval era, were among the first to re-establish democratic and republican political institutions. By the late 1200s, Barcelona was governed by a committee of seven individuals with varying powers along with a council of approximately one hundred citizens from all walks of life, as Hughes puts it, coopers, textile traders, “cobblers and bakers as well as bankers and the upper mercantile orders.”

Barcelona, with its excellent port and location on the Mediterranean, became a wealthy trading center and in keeping with its nascent democratic-republican polity developed a plucky spirit of independence. While it was not able to escape entirely the centralizing powers that aggrandized the authority of the monarch in Madrid, it was able to submit with some self-respecting grace, as the wonderful oath above indicates.

In keeping with that spirit of liberty, wealth, and self-assertiveness, Barcelona also developed an impressive arts and architecture culture, as the soaring Santa Maria del Mar cathedral, begun in the 1300s, indicates.

Kant and modern art

The poet John Enright has a post entitled “Kant and Abstract Art,” in which he takes up the claim Rand made in The Romantic Manifesto that “the father of modern art is Immanuel Kant (see his Critique of Judgment).” Rand does not elaborate, and Enright notes that some people scoff at the claim.

Rand’s claim is a strong one, in part because it makes intellectual-causal connection across centuries. How does one establish a fatherly connection between an uptight eighteenth-century philosopher and a sprawling twentieth-century movement? And in part Rand’s claim is hard to wrap one’s mind around because Kant’s philosophy is known to be turgid, arid, and highly rationalistic while modern art is known to be wild, weird, and wacky. How on earth could the Prussian lead to Pollock?

Is Rand right, and if so what is the connection?

I’ve been working on and off toward an essay on the topic of Kant’s influence on modern and postmodern art. Huge topic, so let me here give only some preliminary scholarly props to Enright’s post in the form of a few quotations from recent thinkers.

What have scholars after Rand said about the connection between Kant and modern art?

In a scholarly collection of essays on Kant’s philosophy, Eva Shaper writes that Kant is “the father of modern aesthetics” (“Taste, Sublimity, and Genius: the Aesthetics of Nature and Art,” in Paul Guyer, ed.,The Cambridge Companion to Kant, Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 368).

Harold Osborne, longtime editor of the scholarly British Journal of Aesthetics, writes of “Kant, who is rightly regarded as the founder of modern aesthetics” (Aesthetics and Art Theory: An Historical Introduction, E. P. Dutton, 1970, p. 153). And further Osborne claims of Kant’s analysis: “This theory is the most important anticipation of the modern aesthetic outlook in any philosopher before the twentieth century” (p.191).

Without the first part of Critique of Judgment, writes philosopher Roger Scruton, “aesthetics would not exist in its modern form” (Kant, Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 79).

Philosopher Arthur Danto agrees with influential modernist art critic Clement Greenburg on the centrality of Kant’s work to the modernist project:
‘“The essence of Modernism,” [Clement Greenberg in “Modernist Painting” (1960)] wrote, “lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.” Interestingly, Greenberg took as his model of modernist thought the philosopher Immanuel Kant: “Because he was the first to criticize the means itself of criticism, I conceive of Kant as the first real Modernist.” […] I suppose the corresponding view of painting would have been not to represent the appearances of things so much as answering the question of how painting was possible”’ (After the End of Art, Princeton University Press, 1998, p. 7).

Kant scholars Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer note that in the Critique of Judgment Kant “is entrenching the assumption of the subjective character of aesthetic judgment so strongly that by our own time it has become virtually an (unargued) commonplace” (Essays in Kant’s Aesthetics, University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 11).

And more sweepingly, Professor Denis Dutton, philosopher and author of The Art Instinct, writes that Kant’s Critique of Judgment is “the greatest work of philosophical aesthetics ever written” (Dutton’s website).

Enright notes that scholar Roger Kimball makes a point of connecting Kant and modernist art in an essay on Schiller.

So from Kant’s Critique to Christo — an interesting fill-in-the-blanks intellectual-history project awaits.

Slide show of “Post-postmodern Art”

Chris Vaughan has created a self-guided PowerPoint slide show version of my short essay on modern and postmodern art:

“Post-postmodern Art” Slide show [PowerPoint].

Also available in HTML at the Newberry site and here in PDF with the relevant images.

Great Connections, Chicago 2010

I will be giving a talk at the Great Connections Summer Seminar in Chicago this summer. The seminar for high school and college students is put on by the College of the United States.

My session will be on the fascinating, complicated, and often weird world of 20th-century art. My title is: “But is it Art? The Modern and Postmodern Movements.” The material comes from a book and documentary project I’m working on and builds upon two shorter pieces I’ve published, “Why Art became Ugly” and “Post-postmodern Art.”

Other speakers at the week-long seminar include Marsha Enright, Joseph Bast, William Dale, Jonathan Hoenig, Milo Schield, Karen Brienzo, and Andrew Humphries. An excellent line-up of speakers, and for any student a week in downtown Chicago in the summer is a great cultural experience.

How great artists become great

Beethoven, according to biographer Maynard Solomon’s Beethoven:

“Wegeler tells us that when a series of lectures on Kant was organized in Vienna in the 1790s, ‘Beethoven didn’t want to attend even once, even under my urging.’ Rather, Beethoven preferred self-education through voracious reading in popularizations of the works of the major thinkers; through rich encounters with poetry, drama, and opera; and, most happily, through discourse and conversation with good minds in pleasant surroundings—whether in the salon or the tavern, the palace or the coffeehouse.” (pp. 36-37)

And: “In 1809 [Beethoven] wrote to the Leipzig music publisher Breitkopf & Hä̈rtel: ‘There is hardly any treatise which could be too learned for me. I have not the slightest pretension to what is properly called erudition. Yet from my childhood I have striven to understand what the better and wiser people of every age were driving at in their works.’” (p. 37)

That intense engagement with the great works of the great minds reminds me of Michelangelo’s early and ongoing education.

When Michelangelo was a teen, according to biographer William Wallace, he was exposed to the best of the Florentine intellectual ferment:

“To begin with, the young boy was taken into the famiglia by Lorenzo the Magnificent, who treated him like a son. He spent two of the happiest years of his life in the Medici Palace, surrounded by the members of Lorenzo’s humanist circle and alongside his future patrons, Giovanni and Giulio de’ Medici (respectively popes Leo X and Clement VII).” (The Genius of the Sculptor in Michelangelo’s Work, p. 152)

That engagement with discussion, reading, and thinking, remained a lifelong passion. From James Hall’s Michelangelo and the Reinvention of the Human Body:

“Michelangelo venerated Dante throughout his life, and addressed two of his own poems to him. When he stayed in Bologna for about a year after the fall of the Medici in 1494, he is said to have read every evening to his patron Giovan Francesco Aldovrandi passages from Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio – only stopping when his employer fell asleep.” (p. 21)

Bridge over the Colorado River

From Popular Science’s “Looking Back at the 100 Best Innovations of 2009.” I love the drama of this photo of a bridge being constructed over the Colorado River:

You can almost feel the drive of the bridge’s arch sections to meet and complete themselves. It struck me as analogous to the energy flow between God’s and Adam’s hands in Michelangelo’s Creation of Man.

Creators indeed.

Here’s the description of the bridge at Popular Science:

“Temperatures upward of 115°F, winds capable of felling cranes, an 890-foot drop below: ‘Inhospitable’ doesn’t begin to describe conditions at the Colorado River’s new Mike O’Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge.

“A 1,900-foot span designed to divert traffic from the narrow, switchback-laden road across the Hoover Dam, it will be the longest concrete arch bridge in the Western Hemisphere when it opens next fall, with 106 segments of ultra-high-strength concrete forming a twin-rib arch. Workers scaled the canyon’s walls, digging notches for concrete foundation columns. To construct the 1,060-foot-long arch, they cast 24 feet of concrete at a time, while a separate, temporary cable-stayed bridge held up the unfinished ends until the gap was closed this year.”

For more wonderful, dramatic, and just plain interesting innovations from 2009 in Security, Health, Entertainment, Auto Tech, Computing, Building Technology, and more, visit Popular Science’s feature.