Art is Magic – How Art Mystifies Reality

 

 

Note:  This an attempt to make the best case for a “Platonic” critique of art. It does not reflect my final opinion.

 

     Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List distorts the Holocaust; Oliver Stone's Platoon mystifies the Vietnam War; romantic love is sentimentalized not only by popular music but by Anna Karenina; tragedy is a creation of art which has little to do with real life – in short, art's illusions are enemies of truth.  It was Plato who first articulated this critique of art, and though few today are able to take it seriously, there are thinkers such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud who, following Plato, have explored the deeply problematic relation of art to truth. Western art is largely mimetic: it tries to portray aspects of the human condition, the world, or the inner life, however unrealistic the portrayals can sometimes be.  And the users – or in modern society, the consumers – of art imaginatively participate in the interpretative portrayals, whose influence on modern souls few would deny.  Movies like Platoon or The Deer Hunter contribute to the way society remembers the Vietnam War; popular music as well as novels and television mediate images of romantic love which help structure our very desires.  An artistic medium itself such as the picture structures intelligence and the perception of reality when it becomes dominant in a culture.

      The question is whether the doubtless impact of art – both high and low art – can reveal anything true about evil, horror, love, or tragedy, or whether something about expressing the depths of the human condition in the illusions of art is inevitably mystifying at worse, trivially entertaining at best.  Forceful reasons can be given to cast doubt on art as a vehicle of disclosing the reality of our world – its emotions and illusions work their magic independent of true insight, and where true insight is present in the mind of the artist, the magic of art will distort even this.

      It is, of course, common knowledge that art can distort, though some relativistically minded thinkers might deny the relevance of depth or truth altogether when it comes to art – and of course they would be right if the art were non-representational as decorative art often is. Goebel's anti-Semitic film, however, or the minstrel shows popular in segregated America (the list can be extended almost indefinitely) should suffice as a proof that art not only can distort but even pervert reality in the worst way. In any case, the burden of proof would seem to be on the deniers that mimetic art has any possible relationship to truth and reality to show that Nazi propaganda film is just one perspective among others, unless they wanted to equate the concept “art” with “good art,” and deny all works which do not measure up the honor of the title “work of art.”  But a relativist can naturally not make this move without allowing evaluative standards into the picture, which must include truth of depiction (not to be confused with simple realistic techniques: a surreal painting can theoretically reveal something true or deep about the world, although it is the thesis here that it cannot.)

      A more common illustration of the distorting influence of art is the treatment of romantic love in much popular music, which reveals something of the nature of the distortion.  This turns out to involve collusion between the fantasies (Plato's lower part of the soul) of artist and consumers.  Few who know what it is to love would doubt that much popular music sentimentalizes, and are embarrassed by such songs.  That love is only an intense feeling; that this feeling will last forever; that marriage is the final stage of romantic bliss where things end happily ever after – such are the theses which have informed much popular music, and nothing could expose one to a crueler reality shock than allowing such principles to color one's perceptions. The music, when effective, produces (infantile) fantasies, and when in their grip, hard thinking about the truth of their working assumptions is short-circuited.  Here Freud supports Plato: the unconscious fantasies of the consumer of such art are tapped by the artist's fantasy production. The power of art here is not in penetrating something deeply true about love, the province of science and philosophy, but to render the mind, with its focus on reality, helpless to block the release of psychic sexual energy which power the infantile fantasies of such art.

      None of this implies that emotion is hostile to rationality: to know what love really is does imply an emotional response – a robot can't know love. But emotions are of a different quality when informed by understanding rather than fantasy: for example, understanding the independent being of the lover, independent of my projections and the corresponding romantic projections of art.  It is, in other words, not a matter of denying the emotions in order to see clearly with reason – an artificial separation. The point is to educate both reason and emotion together by disciplined attention to real people and things as they are independently of one's self-centered fantasies.  This is the task of education. Art directs attention away from the real towards the desiring self.  Romantic art transforms real people into Venus; yet not an embodiment of Venus, but a real person is the object of genuine love.  To the extent men see women through the lens of art; they see Venus and not a real woman. Platonic-Socratic philosophy is training in seeing through fantasy in order to see the world as it is, producing not consumers of art, but intelligent art critics.

      The crucial point is that not only sentimental art is guilty of fantasizing – in fact, since many people know it for light entertainment, such art can be less dangerous than high art, which purports to say something profound.  The point is that mystifying reality is an inherent feature of all representational art, even the best.  The feelings one has in a cinema or theater, no matter how genuine and powerful they seem, are not directly connected to anything real about Auschwitz (as the audiences of Schindler's List are made to feel), the Vietnam War (as audiences of Platoon are made to feel), or the battle of Agincourt (as audiences of Henry V are made to feel).  The very fact that the audience is safe and being entertained prevents that; a spectator cannot know what horror is.  (It might be different for spectators who have lived through what is being represented. In Schindler's List, a survivor named Mila Pfefferberg was introduced to Ralph Fiennes on the set. She began shaking uncontrollably as he reminded her too much of the real Amon Goeth. According to Wikipedia, Fiennes also encountered a woman who was a Nazi sympathizer who had about the opposite reaction.) Whatever it is, it is certainly not dramatic.  Whatever the actors in such hellish predicaments were like, they were certainly not dramatically unified characters playing a part in a well-crafted narrative.  Nietzsche was merely developing a thought of Plato's when he wrote that literary characters are necessarily simplified, superficial images of real people, who we never know very well and whose unity of character itself is an art-like deception.   We are tricked into seeing art-bound structures like drama in life, and forgetting how little real life corresponds to the techniques of art.

      It resists the skills of the greatest artist to transfigure the meaning or a true picture of these events into a medium whose purpose is to tell a story and move an audience.  Similarly, art can't depict the inexhaustible being of the lover without reducing her to a character in a melodrama.  But people are not characters and life is not narrative, except to the extent that people begin to imagine themselves as living in a film or a play, in which case they live in a fantasy of the artist's making. This might seem unfair, given the high artistic quality of certain films and, of course, Shakespeare's plays; it seems plausible that a great artist can allow the audience to imagine what it is like to be a soldier in Vietnam or Agincourt: certainly, the artist can bring the audience to have pity with the soldiers, or hate them. But an artist can only imagine what it was like; he can inform his imagination, but without experience he has no knowledge – and if he had knowledge, he would know how impossible it was to communicate it in a dramatic story. 

     This is not circular: it is the situation of everyone who has experienced something intensely when they are asked to communicate it in the form of a story to those who have not experienced it.  As soon as a friend of mine, who was a veteran of the Vietnam War, attempted to tell me what it was like – in the form of a story, a proto work of art, so to speak – he would stop himself in frustration, and say “no, that's not what it was like” and confess his inability to convey his meaning to me.  Most story-tellers (we are all artists in daily life) cannot resist the temptation to entertain or impress with narratives which are based on their experiences, but which also distort them in the act of telling.  (My friend was interested in truth, partly out of friendship to me, and this outweighed his desire to impress me with a moving story – to become, in other words, an artist.)  Indeed, no tragic music was playing in the background in Vietnam. What is deep cannot be put into words, sounds, or pictures without removing its depth, giving it only the semblance of depth.  The audience is not sympathizing with or hating the soldiers in Vietnam in Platoon, but a fantasy of the film-maker which touches a fantasy in them.  Wittgenstein's dictum applies to art much more than philosophy: “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.“

    Not only with films about Vietnam - in a sense all political art is propaganda.   Art critical of society enjoys a high prestige among many thinking people because it raises social awareness – indeed, in mass-media dominated society art, in the form of movies, television programs, and popular music, is for many the only public forum for addressing such issues.  Art does raise awareness but distorts it at the same time. True political understanding is an inevitable victim of art's need to tell entertaining stories or produce emotionally moving images, which is what really drives political art.  This is true not just of the works which create fantasy pictures of political reality based on stark contrasts between good and evil, and the like; it is not true just of celebrity artists who instrumentalize political causes to project self-images; even in works which honestly strive to make a serious political statement, the truth is the first victim.

      The reason – anything important can be said in the common tongue in a public forum, where the focus of the audience is only on the truth or falsity of the statements. Music or images in the background contribute nothing to the truth of the statements; either the contribution of art is at best irrelevant, or at worst functions to emotionalize the audience such that they feel what the music and images suggest they are to feel (or what their own prejudices desired that they  feel), without the hard work of critical thought. Images and music suffocate thinking in the cradle, typically reducing the complexity of political reality to simplistic categories, however complex the artwork.  Art over-personalizes politics to tell a story, for instance, whereas the roots are often structural. In sophisticated presentations, the ability to create a fantasy world, to draw the art user into this fantasy world, can be very powerful – just as true of Josef Goebbels as of Michael Moore (not to equate these two morally!).  Even if one agrees with the essentials of the political presentation, political seriousness demands the utmost effort to attend to reality and avoid relapsing into prejudice and fantasy.  Politics is too serious for art.  Whatever is serious in human life is too serious for art.     

     The problem of art is thus not restricted to bad art; it is inherent in art itself. Other cultures seem to have understood this.  Traditional Muslim art, for example, is strictly non-representational and decorative, based on the insight whatever is holy must be profaned when transformed by human imagination into a representation – Plato would be largely sympathetic.   He would merely extend the thought to include whatever is deep, including the reality of individual human beings.  Western representation art was born before human minds learned to distinguish between the aesthetic and the religious, such that artists such as Homer and Sophocles were closely linked to religious prophets which special access to divine wisdom concerning the human condition. Plato's putting such wisdom squarely into the realm of human reason cut this connection. Yet the archaic, semi-religious function of art still ironically predominates in the most modern, secular societies, whereby in this respect traditional Islamic culture is more “enlightened.” The problem is not with art itself, but with the specifically Western, mimetic understanding of it.  Such art can be highly enjoyable; it can be powerful emotionally; but it is magic.