The Work of Art

KINDS OF ART

The basic error in what we have called the illusion of culture is the assumption that art is something to be done by a special kind of man, and particularly that kind of man whom we call a genius. In direct opposition to this is the normal and humane view that art is simply the right way of making things, whether symphonies or airplanes. [emphasis added]

Manufacture is for use and not for profit. The artist is not a special kind of man, but every man who is not an artist in some field, every man without a vocation, is an idler. The kind of artist that a man should be, carpenter, painter, lawyer, farmer, or priest, is determined by his own nature, in other words by his nativity. No man has a right to any social status who is not an artist.

-- Ananda Coomaraswamy,
 The Christian and Oriental, or True Philosophy of Art

In Canada, a few years ago, I worked with a talented young woman who had left art school for a gardening internship at a center that was variously involved in permaculture, natural building, and public education. I had come to teach a workshop on art and design with earthen materials. She was particularly interested in using earthen pigments to paint the beauties of the garden, but also talked about her doubts about giving up on art school, where she had enrolled to “be an artist.” She loved being outdoors, working in the garden, observing the beauties of nature directly, and painting them, but the aesthetic at her school emphasized abstractions and theories, and pulled her away from what she loved. So she quit, to work where her love could grow. The gardening internship, however, left little time for painting.

Before the end of the workshop, she and her gardening partner made time to put on a farewell performance. A dozen or so of us followed their mobile performance out of the garden and into the woods. They showed us places where they had discovered the wild sources of all the well-ordered beauties of the garden; they showed us what they loved, and told us how they loved it. We gave them tears and laughter.

Later, sharing an hour’s car ride, she asked me how I’d gotten to where I was, which I took as a question about how I’d combined my own loves and managed to make a living as well. How do you answer a question like that? I laughed and said, “well, that’s all a bit of a long story.”

“That’s what I was hoping for,” she replied.

In fact, however, her own career impressed me for the clarity and confidence with which she had not only chosen love and beauty, but chosen to follow them into their native environment, and there pursue the practical skills by which to combine them. I had only recently come to the same place by many errors, a few trials, and much luck. She seemed to have already arrived, by surer means. Stories merely confirmed the truths we held in common – different arts; one purpose.

Eric Gill, the English artist and typographer who designed the typeface in which this book is set, put it very simply when he said “an artist is not a special kind of person – but every person is a special kind of artist.” In other words, all us have the capacity and, I would say, the duty to fit our love with the object of our love in a way that benefits the world. Gill, however, was quoting art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy, who further explains that:

The basic error in what we have called the illusion of culture is the assumption that art is something to be done by a special kind of man, and particularly that kind of man whom we call a genius. In direct opposition to this is the normal and humane view that art is simply the right way of making things, whether symphonies or airplanes. [emphasis added]

Manufacture is for use and not for profit. The artist is not a special kind of man, but every man who is not an artist in some field, every man without a vocation, is an idler. The kind of artist that a man should be, carpenter, painter, lawyer, farmer, or priest, is determined by his own nature, in other words by his nativity. No man has a right to any social status who is not an artist. (“The Christian and Oriental, or True Philosophy of Art”)

In essence, Coomaraswamy says our status depends on how we make ourselves useful to those around us – rather than how to make more than those beneath us. His “normal and humane view” comes out of his knowledge of traditional cultures where people earned their livings by hand – where the normal working person possessed skill or facility in the transformation of inert matter into useful things like vessels and containers, tools, food, sculpture, and pictures. Rather than define what art is or should be, Coomaraswamy challenges basic assumptions, and asks us to unpack the “illusion of culture,” to look deeper than status, titles, and aesthetic surfaces.

Of course, before books and publishing became the norm, we told our stories through song, dance, painting, and sculpture. Further, even lawyers and priests who didn’t make physical things, still had to make useful things, like justice or meaning, the usefulness of which anyone could measure, also on a public scale where status meant much more than the sum of the numbers on a cash register. Finally, the public scale of normalcy never reduced a person to zero. If you look at the old stories, even idlers provide a balance against the arrogance of measuring all value in human terms like money and status.

Such a view of normal is now, sadly, archaic, so much so that people call it unrealistic. Modern normality requires the buying and selling of stuff, mostly machine made. We have lost touch, literally, with the matter of life; we’ve exchanged the norms of art for the norms of trade. Now, to “make nothing” doesn’t mean that you’re an idler, but that your financial worth adds up to zero – or less! Instead of the still potentially useful role of “idler,” your worth is simply counted out in passive dollars. Public stories (sculpture and painting) and the public scale of social status have morphed into a private scale of bank balances, credit ratings, and stories that we print and digitize for increasingly private (idiotikos) consumption. We now believe in a global scale of value, ruled by speculation and gambling, counted out in paper chits or electronic bits in an imaginary “global marketplace.” When the imaginary house of cards collapses back to that imaginary number zero, men jump out of windows or shoot themselves. Is it any surprise? Of course art has lost significance. It has been privatized and converted to currency so that, as a cynical friend of mine aptly put it, you can “hang your money on the wall.” 

When I do call myself an “artist,” I sometimes feel as though I’ve admitted to being an idler, not much more than a bum, and almost a zero (except that, unlike many professionals for whom debt is a way of life, I have money in the bank and no debt). But (after I tell them how I earn money) people often take more interest in my art than they would ever have for a more profitable trade like marketing, engineering, or law.

So why does art still confer any status? Why do schools teach it? Among the professions, art is a notoriously dubious career choice.^[1] Artists are stereotypically poor, struggling, ignored, misunderstood, etc. Or art is vilified for being elitist, out-of-touch, irrelevant, rarefied, incomprehensible, Godless, etc. At the same time, art is the last refuge of the autonomous individual. Art is where it is possible to be authentic, honest, courageous, independent, visionary, prophetic, profound, and wise. And art still carries the connotation of excellence in any field: if you happen to find a competent, qualified, disciplined, thorough, reliable, and trustworthy worker, someone more likely to succeed where a mere journeyman might fail, it’s common to praise him as “an artist.” In this sense, art tempers aesthetics (feeling) with morality, and such artists work for beauty and goodness (which come to the same thing) instead of just for money; their motives, if not pure, may have enough complexity to escape the crucible of the market without being reduced to simple greed.

All of us, I think, seek to serve higher goals, but we need a set of common, public measures that give due weight to love, beauty, truth, justice, and even idleness. Will Congress or the President ever enact such measures? Do laws enact life? No, that’s the proper role of our combined, human arts, which must, like yeast in dough, infect and inspire us with living truth and working beauty. But individual yeasts, like individual artists, have too little strengths to act alone. Only when they multiply, combine, and collaborate can they unify into a culture that works into the entire loaf to make it rise.

^[1] The status of art in society comes in for interesting treatment in many places. Bureau of labor statistics for 2006 reported that artists held about 218,000 jobs (out of about 135 million – or just 0.16% -- that’s less than one fifth of one percent). The NEA gets a higher count: almost 2 million (a number they proudly compare to the “total number of active-duty and reserve personnel in the U.S. military (2.2 milion)” and also more than legal, medical (physicians, surgeons, dentists), or agricultural workers (farmers, foresters, ranchers, and fishers). “Artists in the Workforce, 1990-2005,” National Endowment for the Arts, www.arts.gov) Many so-called “art jobs” are, of course, in advertising. It’s also now a cliché that “real manufacturing” jobs have all gone to countries where labor is cheap. And while we still have way more folks in the “goods-producing” sector than we do in art, per se, even that sector only accounts for about 15% of the 2006 total. All of which serves, in my opinion, to underscore Coomaraswamy’s point about what constitutes a “normal” view of art.