Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 5 Number 2, August 2004
Special Issue: Jacques Derrida’s Indian Philosophical Subtext
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Sleinis, E.E. Art and Freedom. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. 235 pp. ISBN: 0-252-02777-9. U.S. Cloth Price: $29.95.
reviewed by
City University of New York
What does art provide that the “real world” does not? Why does art matter so much to the world? Sleinis takes on these and other challenging questions in Art and Freedom in pursuit of a “comprehensive” (111) theory of art, marrying aesthetic theory with philosophy in order to determine why art enhances our lives in a way that “real life” cannot. Sleinis’s answer to his governing question is “freedom,” and he proposes that we can determine the value of a work of art by the degree to which it “frees” its audience. Art, he writes, “is about freedom, but it is not merely freedom from; it is also freedom to garner rewards not otherwise attainable. Artworks that free without furnishing rewards beyond the freeing itself must surely be judged as artistic failures” (195). Art is there for “contemplation” (139), he argues, and seems to locate the true freedom of art in its release from social responsibility.
Sleinis relies rather too heavily on a generalized concept he calls “freedom,” without acknowledging that it is an explicitly political category. Perhaps he would disagree with this, but let us examine it in his terms. Art, according to Sleinis, offers many things that reality does not, such as accessibility, portability, and permanence. Most importantly for Sleinis, art enables the viewer a certain disconnect between perception and action. He argues that art does not require any action on the part of the viewer. This, I would respond, depends on the art in question. One can think of any number of works of art which do in fact work on the viewer in an active way. However, Sleinis does seem open to rebuttals of this nature, and he is at pains to offer suggestions which complicate his generalizations.
His questioning he conducts meticulously, looking at the three main schools of aesthetic theory: those concerned primarily with representation, expression, and form. He carefully investigates these modes in several different formulations: pure, augmented, sophisticated, and finally, unrestricted. It is in this first section that he articulates his thesis, which is that “the three core features of the art enterprise are that it fosters freedom, it creates objects that command, sustain, and reward contemplation, and it fosters and enlarges the inner life of individuals…these three features are mutually interdependent and that the art enterprise is impossible without any one of them. These features ground the capacity of art to deliver values unobtainable from a world without art” (5).
As he runs through the various theoretical modes in the chapters on representation, expression, and form, he examines what each contributes to our overall theory of art and what prevents that mode from being the last word. For example, the sophisticated theory of expression holds much promise, according to Sleinis, because it provides a means by which we can differentiate “low” from high art (although Sleinis does not put it in these terms). Here, his reliance on “pretheoretical assumptions” gets in the way of getting at anything specific. In appealing to our “common sense,” Sleinis believes it to be self-evident that “direct tear-jerker music” or “flashy plays” do not constitute “excellent artwork.” I think it is fair to step in here and classify such music or theatre under the kinder heading of “low art,” as it is sometimes referred to in order to acknowledge that it does in fact possess the characteristics which would mark it as “art.” Sleinis’s view thus seems very narrow. What, I wonder, does he make of the film “Moulin Rouge,” for example, in which his compatriot, Baz Luhrmann, attempts to subvert the high/low binary by using the very best of the very worst of trite, clichéd popular representations of love to create a film that is dazzling in its inventiveness?
In several places Sleinis enumerates the conditions for what he sees as the most tenable theory of art: first, we must have some kind of control device as to what constitutes art, what he calls a “spread-inhibitor,” something to control our standards of art; second, the account must be “reception-sensitive,” that is, whatever we are going to consider art must be sufficiently artistic that a group of people can agree that it is art; third, this theory of art must be “content-sensitive”; the content of a work cannot be destructive but rather creative. These guidelines serve Sleinis well, for the most part, although the reader is frequently tempted to nitpick with his generalizations.
At the heart of this work, Sleinis is after an understanding of how aesthetic value is created and conferred. He examines George Dickie’s “institutional theory,” in which the art world collectively decides what is “art” and what is not, using Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain as the litmus test for this theory. To the extent that Sleinis agrees with Dickie, it seems evident to me that this theory leads directly to the imbrication of art in the economy, and in a political schema. If value is to be considered in terms of what is added by the group versus what is essential to the work, our discussion seems naturally to give way to a discussion of the effect of the market on such decisions and conferrals. But Sleinis does not venture down this road. In spite of his proclamation at the beginning of the work that he locates himself in between Kant and Nieztsche, his insistence on a Kantian formulation of aesthetics undermines any basis his theories might have in a Nietzschean value system.
His prose is refreshingly free of jargon; however, one does feel somewhat condescended to when, every so often, he points out that he is operating from a basis of common sense, rather than within the vocabulary of specialized aesthetic theory. He assures us that he is relying heavily on “pretheoretical” assumptions about art—that is, what we can all agree on (based on our own experience with art) before we even begin to theorize. Indeed, he stresses the necessity of such “pretheoretical” assumptions, because “our pretheoretical intuitions” are what differentiate music from “random scrapings of nails on blackboards” (114). As critics, we are trained to question underlying assumptions, and so it is in my capacity as critic that I am piqued by his decision to leave those assumptions, whatever they may be, vague and unspecified. To assume that we all have the same basic assumptions about art leads Sleinis into dangerous waters, and drastically undermines the degree to which his treatise is convincing. These chapters are followed by investigations into “The Limits of Art” and “Art and Progress,” however once he has begun this second part of the book, the unity of his investigation seems to have disappeared under the copious weight of his inquiries in the first half of the book; he goes over his ideas quite thoroughly, but does not often allow his inquiry to conduct him to unforeseen or unexpected ends.
He argues for the importance of art in our contemporary culture, but he doesn’t acknowledge the importance of our culture in art. Neglecting to reverse his argument in such a manner constitutes an important drawback of the work. “The sheer ubiquity of art across different social and political systems argues against their being essential to art, for art flourishes even where political freedom is not an issue,” he insists. “If a significant connection exists between art and freedom, it must be at a more basic level than the political” (5).
Sleinis suggests here that there is a possibly of a world without politics, which strikes me as unlikely as a world without art. Perhaps there is a more basic level than the political, but art will always be political, and the context in which it is created and received is always-already political. He acknowledges that “social and personal factors” contribute to artistic creation; the artist produces a representation and/or expression of the world as s/he sees it, “embedded in a particular society, and steeped in particular methods of representation” (35). But this is as far as his acknowledgment of the “real world’ goes; he is not concerned here with the ways in which materiality and the market can constrain the freedom of the artist, not to mention the viewer.
This seemed the most regrettable lapse on the author’s part. He does not engage with the intersections of art and politics, which any work on art and freedom might seem to involve. His argument holds water; art does produce a kind of freedom, in the way he envisions. But doesn’t the social condition of the artist dictate the amount of freedom he has to create? And what of the limitations in distribution which society, even an “open” one such as we are supposed live in, can impose on the work?
He writes that “certain issues become meaningful only within a theory and are vacuous without one” (25). We must conceive of freedom in this work, in terms of the artists’ freedom of creation and the viewers’ freedom of reception, interpretation, judgment, etc., and this very freedom does not exist in a social vacuum. Sleinis worries about the freedom of the artist within the context of each possible aesthetic theory (representation, expression, etc.) but he does not problematize the freedom of the artist in his social context. Would that the relationship between art and freedom were simply a question of aesthetic choice. --.