I haven’t written anything of substance here in a while, but today I read an article in the Times today and it fired me up. The article is by Michael Kimmelman, who recently also wrote about, among other things, how people walk absently through art museums instead of looking at the art. This museum article actually gives a pretty good context to the impression I get of Kimmeleman’s point-of-view: he’s trying to get at the purpose that art serves in these crazy modern times we live in. In the Louvre article, he posits that art’s role has degraded with the advent of technology - hardly a unique argument but framed nicely in the Louvre’s non-Western art room. In the Dresden article, he’s coming up with, well…

To summarize what you’ll read when you read the article, a pregnant Egyptian woman was murdered in a courthouse in Dresden by a Russian man who apparently is a racist psychopath. They were in a room together awaiting his trial for insulting her because she wore a veil. Kimmelman goes on to note that East Germany, and especially Saxony (Dresden is the capital of Saxony), has more problems with racially-motivated crime and especially racially-motivated violent crime than the rest of Germany. He then observes that Dresden is a marvelously beautiful city, now fully restored from the firebombing at the end of World War II.

Finally, Kimmelman accuses art of having not sufficiently altered the character of Dresdeners. If the city’s trove of architectural and artistic treasures had done its job, he implies, this terrible murder would not have occurred, and indeed all Dresdeners would live together in blissful multicultural harmony.

Again, Kimmelman is looking for the role art plays in society, or in this case, he’s attempting to tear down what I agree is a canard - that art is justified because it “lifts the soul” and makes all of us better human beings. That argument is central to the Louvre article - people go to museums for a perceived self-betterment rather than to seriously look at the art. But what I find fascinating in the Dresden article is the idea that simply an ambience of art should somehow improve the residents of a place. This argument actually seems to contradict Kimmelman’s purpose in the Louvre article, in which he extols the virtues of studying only two paintings over the course of six months and says “Slow looking, like slow cooking, may yet become the new radical chic.” In other words, in the Louvre article, he argues that simply being in the same place as art isn’t sufficient to understand or be bettered by that art. But in the Dresden article, he contends that simply being amidst the glories of Dresden should have improved its residents - and the fact that it didn’t becomes an indictment of art. He writes:

Arts promoters nowadays like to trumpet how culture helps business and tourism; how teaching painting and music in schools boosts test scores. They try to assign practical ends, dollar values and other hard numbers, never mind how dubious, to quantify what’s ultimately unquantifiable.

The lesson of Dresden, which this great city unfortunately seems doomed to repeat, is that culture is, to the contrary, impractical and fragile, helpless even…

The truth is, we can stare as long as we want at that Raphael Madonna; or at Antonello da Messina’s “St. Sebastian,” now beside a Congo fetish sculpture in another room in the Gemäldegalerie; or at the shiny coffee sets, clocks and cups made of coral and mother-of-pearl and coconuts and diamonds culled from the four corners of the earth in the city’s New Green Vault, which contains the spoils of the most cultivated Saxon kings. But it won’t make sense of a senseless murder or help change the mind of a violent bigot.

As I reread this passage over and over, I’m finding I have a hard time contradicting it too roughly. Like Kimmelman, I’m troubled by the idea that the arts have some concrete, uplifting value. I see my own artistic endeavor as profoundly selfish - it’s my own need to compose that makes want to compose, not a desire to make the world a better place. I’m always startled when someone thanks me for writing a piece after a concert because I feel that it’s me who should be doling out the thanks to the audience for paying attention to my self-absorbed monologue. My hope is always that my work will connect with the audience emotionally, that the distillation of my personal experience will tap into someone else’s personal experience and allow the work to fit into their life in a way that it fits into mine. Essentially, I hope to allow other people to have selfish moments around my selfishness.

But, still, I don’t like the light in which Kimmelman portrays the arts. It’s like he’s trying to tear down the arts, and unfairly at that, for not imposing itself on people who don’t care about it. Why does he feel it necessary to accuse art of having a hand in the Egyptian woman’s murder? I recognize he is trying to help by separating art from society, but the rhetorical flourish of turning art into an accessory to a gruesome crime… Why would you even think to blame art, which is genuinely “impractical and fragile, helpless even,” for such a thing, when the worst you really could say is that art is ignored by some of the people who live amidst it? (This is actually the best possible argument for more arts education - that teaching people about the arts will cause people to pay more attention to the arts. Circular reasoning, anyone?) We’ve always had art, and we’ve always had violence. Why is it necessary to link the two?

What I might say is that cultivating one’s connection with the arts is likely to make a person more self-aware. That seems to me the purpose of studying the arts - it’s a path to self-discovery. [A digression: this requires engagement, which is what Kimmelman, in the Louvre article, feels is lacking from the casual museumgoer. It is also lacking in the casual classical concertgoer.] Self-awareness is valued in humanistic Western culture and is of utmost importance to classical Chinese culture and the nearby cultures that were influenced by it. But it doesn’t inherently lead to right practices. Many of these ruling-class, well-cultured men (they were virtually all men), patrons of the arts, whom we would expect to be especially great-souled, were responsible for tremendous atrocities and warfare. And if we start looking at the creators of art, we find not much better. Wagner is the too-easy example. His music is certainly soul-enriching, but his politics weren’t far from those of the scary man who murdered the Egyptian woman. Many composers have exhibited nasty misogynistic streaks. If we believe Richard Taruskin, most composers are musical fascists, and he’s probably right about that.

…

Kimmelman ends with this cryptic statement:

“What we can also do, though, is accept that while the arts won’t save us, we should save them anyway. Because the enemies of civilized society are always just outside the door.”

This sounds like he’s saying that the arts protect us from uncivilized behavior. But didn’t he just wrote lengthily and articulately about how the arts do not protect us from anything?