What’s that supposed to be?
The Long Beach Museum of Art is one of two art museums in my city, the other being the Museum of Latin American Art, but it’s the one with the better location. On the bluffs overlooking the wide beach , the yacht-studded Pacific and a view of Catalina Island on clear days, it started life as a residence built by a wealthy philanthropist in 1912. These days, the original house is home to a café, a gift shop and administrative offices, while the handsome new two-story building next door houses the collection of modern art. It’s an interesting collection, and although I don’t always like everything on display, I ‘ve found some wonderful artists I would never have heard of without it.
But right outside the old section, and just inside the original brick wall, there is often a display of some oversize piece of sculpture. Recently, the display seemed to be a shapeless giant baby, sort of a concrete Pillsbury dough boy only cruder, in a violent yellow color. Passers by noticing it looming over the brick wall (at six feet tall, it was hard to miss) could be heard to ask, “What the **** is that supposed to be?” A good question.
Which leads me to a meditation on the subject of what, exactly, constitutes “Art” with a capital letter? I don’t think there’s been a human culture anywhere that hasn’t created art of some kind, so it must fill an important role in our development and wellbeing. Obviously, I’m not the first to wrestle with this definition! (We need to differentiate Art from Craft, something, no matter how lovely, designed primarily with a utilitarian purpose. Admittedly, there are crossovers and transcendences, but it’s not my intent to discuss them here.) Setting aside for the moment what for me has always been a non-answer: Art is in the eye of the beholder, I would suggest there are some prerequisites that must be satisfied before something can be called Art, otherwise the squiggles produced by monkeys could be set alongside the work of Michelangelo and Monet.
First of all, as I see it, Art should convey something of significance to the mind. I don’t mean it should be didactic, forcing us to accept its message as the worst of political or religious art is intended to do – “Work hard for the Fatherland!” “Resist the forces of Evil!” – but that it should convey an idea about life, the world or the human condition that we might have missed or taken for granted. Michelangelo’s David, for instance, makes me appreciate the wonder and beauty of a perfect male body, and by extension, the wonder of all human bodies in whatever shape or state of beauty. The more we look at a piece of real Art, the more it makes us think. Obviously, everybody is not equally impressed with everything, and it’s certainly possible to see flaws. Upon seeing one of Degas’ horse sculptures, my young granddaughter, a horse lover and aspiring artist herself, complained that the animal’s proportions were wrong.
Secondly, Art should speak to the spirit, giving us emotional experience, not just ideas. This effect is most obvious in non-vocal music, but it occurs whenever our emotions are stirred by Art without our being able to quite explain what or why. It’s difficult for me to look at the David without experiencing the possibility of a Creator capable of bringing such beauty into being – and also creating the artist who can capture it. And if you don’t buy that, it might give you the chills as you recognize the evolutionary process that culminates in such beauty and such talent to portray it. Van Gogh’s Starry Night may well be a byproduct of his flawed eyesight (and that’s a very interesting thought), but it arouses in me an almost religious sense of cosmic mystery. When Art has this effect on us, our emotions are engaged and words aren’t necessary.
Poetry does this particularly well, even when (and maybe because) we often don’t quite understand the words. “A poem should not mean/But be,” said Archibald MacLeish. Poetry is a language of emotion which has no language, or as Ursula Le Guin said about writing fiction, it’s putting into words what can’t be expressed in words.
Art can be entertaining while achieving those two exalted aims, of course, making us smile or lightening our mood in some way by capturing and poking fun at the mundane aspects of our lives. But we laugh with the piece, not at it – the fate of the museum’s awful yellow baby. We have a tendency to devalue the comic as Art, a judgement that spills over into other fields, so that movies that are comedies don’t often win Oscars, and comic novelists are less likely to be invited to talk to Oprah. I suspect the current Nebula winner in the novel category, Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, would not have won if it had been solely a romp.
All this leads me to the conclusion that Art – painting, sculpture, music, drama, dance or literature – must be more than just different or outrageous. Sometimes outrage or disgust is what the artist is aiming for, but to my mind that means the piece is didactic which I don’t believe is the function of Art. True Art changes us. Contemplating Art isn’t a passive activity; it’s interactive. The beholder is not just a spectator but enters into the work and is irrevocably altered by the experience.
So is the museum’s questionable exhibit “Art” after all? Did the 2150 lb blob transcend? I’m compelled to say that for me it didn’t. Viewing it didn’t lead me to any thoughts other than its hideousness, and the piece inspired no emotion, not even a true experience of disgust. Obviously, the museum curator and others had a different reaction to it. Yet I have to admit I certainly hadn’t intended to try to define Art before I saw it, and that’s a change for me.
Ah, now I get it: Art is in the eye of the beholder!
The author of eight novels, more than thirty short stories, dozens of poems and articles about science fiction, SHEILA FINCH has received several awards, including the Nebula Award, the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel in the Field, and the San Diego Book Award for Young Adult fiction. She has given workshops at
writers’ conferences all over Southern California and recently retired from twenty-eight years of teaching creative writing and science fiction at El Camino College, California. She lives in Long Beach, California, with a cat and two retired racing greyhounds.
To learn more about Sheila, see her website or read her blog.
5 comments so far.
the yellow blob baby made me laugh, so I suppose that’s something, right? right?
well...no, it is pushing it a tad:)
Well, the blob has gone to blob heaven now. It’s been replaced with something a trifle more traditionally thought-provoking. 
Lovely to see your thoughts, Sheila. I was unimpressed by the baby myself, but if I press my mind I could probably come up with some reflection on the prevalence of Chinese imported plastic objects, many of which sit in my children’s toy boxes. So perhaps a cultural criticism? Hmmm…
Oh my. That’s a thought. Art as plastic baby toy.
1. Aliette de Bodard on 29th September 2008 at 2:26 pm
Very good thoughts, thanks for sharing (and BTW, the blob didn’t do it for me either...)