The Game of Art Part 2

In the current climate, however, I take Van Gogh, of all the artists widely accepted as Great, to be at the bottom of the scale for one attempting to dissociate himself from a middlebrow persona to adopt as an object of passion. On the one hand of course there is nothing more ridiculous than this man with his squalid, wretched, turbulent visions of life being an icon to the comfortable, overfed, risk-averse, unimpulsive and passionless mass of humanity that constitute the classic art fan base in modern America. On the other he is pathetic and cowardly in a peculiarly bourgeois way that is rarely associated with Great artists, whom we are accustomed to thinking of as berating and domineering over their hapless assistants, bedding teenagers and the wives of their lesser associates well into their eighties, continually bursting with fresh ideas and lacerating opinions, on occasion perhaps getting upset and killing someone in an argument (though this is primarily left to rappers now, the list of poets/artists/murderers in Western cultural history up to around 1700 is decidedly impressive. Caravaggio, Villon, B. Jonson, I think perhaps Malory just for starters). With Van Gogh all this baggage of additional superiority is blessedly absent, and the torment and sense of beauty as something achingly unattainable to sensitive human beings that activate his paintings and largely constitute the modern soul speak to democratic, secular man, however hazy the message is received in terms of articulate ideas.

I have noticed that the PBS-ur-middlebrow travel guru Rick Steves devotes several segments of his programs to Van Gogh-related sites museums in Arles and in the Netherlands in which he discusses with much exuberance the visible fury of the master's brushstrokes in his nature paintings, the melancholy symbolism of the lonely bedrooms and cafes, and so forth. This is not to say I dislike him, or his audience, of which I make at a certain level a part. Steves, if he possesses any snobbery, directs it upwards to the sort of people who shudder at the idea of the middlebrow masses attempting to tackle art, and not always from a position of pure ignorant bliss. He had training, apparently somewhat serious, as a musician in his youth, and I have often found musically trained people to have a better understanding than most that art, travel, mathematics, religion, etc are supposed to enrich people's lives, by generally enabling them to be more vividly, dynamically, virtuously, wisely and hopefully pleasurably lived, however intellectually inferior one may be to the best critic or how dark human nature is revealed to be. Any true work of art, however grim its subject, cannot succeed, or earn the name of art if it does not in its own form and execution demonstrate an opposing nobility and assertion of the possibility of grandeur, redemption, beauty in human life. Of course one must have confidence that his intellect, or, to use a quaint term, his soul, renders his life capable of being enriched in a meaningful way. I fear that many modern practitioners of the arts lack this confidence, and that this is why they appear to be in decline. They deny us the catharsis that our essential unpleasantness as humans requires us to undergo to attain all of the nobler qualities. The sciences and other rational areas of study have this effect of confidence on the intellect, and so it is to them we increasing look to enrichment. However taken by themselves they seem to have the effect of allowing a narrower range of acceptable activity for enrichment than I find in those who have studied music, or some genuinely thorough and rigorous humanities education, which if it is to be found I still consider on these grounds alone to be an excellent recommendation for it. But I have strayed from my topic.

Coming up in Part III. The Dutch Masters