Rational Philosophy

On what people want to see and believe.
“Audiences don’t want to see realistic films about the war in Iraq. They want to escape all the bad news.” So says Howard Suber (UCLA Film and TV Producers Program founding chair and author of “The Power of Film,”) reacting to this year’s decidedly gloomy crop of Oscar nominees. I agree. And then, I disagree.

Since the nominated films haven’t done well, relatively speaking, at the box office, Suber’s claim holds water; people tend not to flock to downer movies. But those who enjoy provocative, thoughtful films made with great craft and artistic vision do go to see the kinds of movies on the Academy’s short-list. The Oscars aim to reward notable artistic achievements in film, not rampant popularity. They provide much-needed counterweight to the rather less lofty day-to-day goals of the film studios.

This confusion of box office success and artistic merit masks a positive phenomenon in the American film industry — artistry can make its furtive way into movies that have no purported artistic aim, and block busters can have great artistic merit without needing to be labeled “art” movies. The movies “Knocked Up” and “Superbad,” for instance, both big draws in 2007, both pitched and consumed as “raunchy comedies,” accomplished their low, uncouth objectives while revealing flashes of superior, if uneven, comic artistry.

In the American film industry, art will out, it seems, despite the drive for popular appeal and profit. Movies can’t be divided into “art” and “popular” movies, because some popular movies involve incredible artistry and some purportedly artistic movies are mediocre imitations or approximations of art. (Big names can make seriously flawed movies and pass them of as serious.)
The Academy then has a tough job, rewarding artistic achievements where they see them, without there being any kind of reliable delineation between the serious and the silly.

Pastor Casimiro Roca also has a tough job persuading his flock to give credit where credit is due. The poor priest presides over a small church in Chimayo, New Mexico, where people come seeking to be cured. Roca despairs that many of those who come believe that the dirt in a pit in the middle of the church has miraculous powers. Roca believes it’s the Lord. (The dirt he replenishes regularly, having it trucked in.)

It seems odd that Roca enables the perpetuation of the myth by importing the dirt and keeping the shrine, as he does, as something of a destination. But perhaps, like the Academy, Roca does what he does not in support of the masses but in support of miracles that reveal themselves despite the masses.
Postscript: As a rationalist one can’t dismiss out of hand things that defy our current comprehension. Reason must allow for doubt. Science has revealed its own share of completely unexpected findings. Einstein’s general relativity, quantum mechanics, and supersymmetry, for instance, all require us to move beyond everyday reason. The term miracle misleads, though, and perhaps when we come across evidence of events that defy reason, the term “unexplained phenomenon” is more appropriate.

How do we value things?

Armed robbers stole a Van Gogh, a Monet, a Degas and a Cezanne valued at $163 million from a private art collection in Zurich, Switzerland. In what was perhaps the biggest (in financial value) and boldest (in broad daylight) heists of its kind, the art thieves apparently selected the paintings because they had been hung next to one another, leaving behind more valuable works of art. Experts speculated that the added weight of glass frames dissuaded the thieves from taking more.

For Lukas Gloor, the museum’s director, it felt like losing “family.” For the collection’s owner, or his insurance company, one can surmise that apart from anything else it felt like losing $163 million. For the robbers, it no doubt felt like winning the lottery. But what of the potential, underground purchaser of the four paintings?

Any purchaser would have to be wealthy. I expect that he or she would also value the stolen paintings for their artistry (otherwise why purchase them?) And the purchaser, unable to put them on public display, would have to relish his or her ownership in relative obscurity.

This brings us to a point of some philosophic importance: Intrinsic and extrinsic value. When we have vast wealth, the intrinsic value of something becomes completely or almost completely untethered from its extrinsic value. If we can afford to pay $40 million for a painting, the pleasure and satisfaction we will derive from looking at the painting cannot be related to what we are prepared to pay for it. We instead begin to ascribe value by how much others would be willing to pay.

If the purchaser of a $40 million painting became suddenly poor, it would, one can imagine, become much more important for him to eat and stay sheltered than to look at his painting, but eating and staying sheltered would cost far less.

Only when a thing is more or less ubiquitous does its extrinsic value relate closely to its intrinsic value.

A great work of literature, easily mass-produced, can be had for a few bucks. So, too, a wonderful piece of music can be heard and played over and over on vinyl or compact disk for the cost of a modest lunch. Even a live performance by the best in their field won’t cost you more than a nice sweater. And a visit to a good art museum where you can see some of the most fabulous works of art on display is sometimes free. The artworks themselves are worth millions because they are rare and must be owned by one and only one person at a time.

When we get confused between intrinsic and extrinsic value we diminish our sense of life’s value. I think about this, oddly, in relation to the intended purchase of Yahoo! by Microsoft. Yahoo! has spurned Microsoft’s advance. But even though here we’re talking about companies that have intrinsic worth (by virtue of their assets and ability to make money) I cannot help but feel that here is a similar disconnect between intrinsic and extrinsic value. Microsoft is willing to pay a hefty premium for Yahoo! in the hopes of countering Google’s success by leveraging a joint presence. But Google’s value derives from something quite different from assets and relationships. Google has mastered the art of leveraging finite intrinsic worth to produce vast extrinsic worth. Google is the Picasso of the Internet search world. And to beat a Picasso you don’t merge the ideas of two second-rate artists counting on them complementing one another’s styles.

On having fun.

Life can be oppressive at times. Several news stories today depressed me — in Baghdad, for instance, bombings killed dozens after terrorists strapped explosives to mentally disabled women, sent the women into crowds, and detonated the explosives remotely. On the personal front I’m having a low day trying to negotiate family tensions. But while it would be unnatural to be happy and have fun all the time, sometimes we could be having more fun than we are.

Giants’ Coach Tom Coughlin, not generally known for his levity, has surprised his team and observers this week by talking of ‘fun’ and ‘enjoyment.‘ That’s surprising for a man who’s team is headed into the Superbowl against such a formiddable opponent as the Patriots who haven’t lost a game all season. Somehow Coughlin has found a way to stay relaxed and have some fun.

Another story describes the rambling handmade home in Arizona built over the course of two decades by artist Michael Kahn and his wife, Leda Livant. Answering a question about whether she and her husband had planned their work on their home ahead of time, Livant replies: “Michael had no definite plan except to work and see what the natural shape would be. If you stay with a preconceived notion of what you want, it could be too restrictive.”

In this, perhaps, is a clue to having fun. We do many things for fun, and we do many things that could be fun but aren’t. The things we do for fun typically fall into two categories:

1. Things that provide intrinsic pleasure from the release of chemicals that make us feel good (sex, exercise, watching humorous performances, consuming recreational drugs, for instance)

2. Things that engage us in opportunities for being satisfyingly surprised (games, reading, and, for some, work)

To have the first kind of fun requires that we find ways to engage in these and similar activities. To have the second kind requires us either to engage in activities that we find intrinsically satisfying, or to engage in other activities with the right mindset.

This brings us back to Leda Livant’s idea of avoiding preconceived notions. If we expect to find a task monotonous, stressful or unpleasant without looking for ways to approach it differently, we will naturally not have fun. But if we set aside our expectation that a task won’t be fun, we give ourselves the opportunity to make it fun.

These opportunities come up all the time. For many of us, most of what we do in a day can seem monotonous, stressful or unpleasant. Sometimes even the things we enjoy can seem daunting. But if we can catch ourselves in that moment of being daunted, we have the opportunity to find some pleasure in the task at hand.

To give a very pertinent example: Before I began this blog entry I was sitting with about fifteen news stories open on my computer screen, feeling less and less inspired to write anything. Livant’s concept of “preconceived notions” didn’t seem enough and I wasn’t even sure I had anything to say about it. But I knew and told myself that I would enjoy the process once I began, and that beginning was a matter of committing to finding something. It worked.

On Stanley Fish’s views on the humanties, and congress’s obsession with baseball.

Stanely Fish has this to say about whether studying the humanties can change us for the better: “Do the humanities ennoble? And for that matter, is it the business of the humanities, or of any other area of academic study, to save us? The answer in both cases, I think, is no.” Fish argues that the humanities serve no purpose whatsoever, but that this is OK, since “an activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good.”

To which feel moved to give a short rebuttal (”bullshit”) but feel a sense of duty to respond with something longer and more thoughtful. Back to that in a minute.

The other matter that has me scratching my head again today is all the fuss in congress over baseball drug use. Perhaps this is one of those cultural or political gaps that comes from being born and raised elsewhere, but why on earth does the government feel it should spend taxpayers’ money investigating drug use in baseball? Roger Clemens has been desperately defending himself against the allegations in the recent report. And he should be held accountable if he’s sullied the name of baseball, but by the government?

How does this relate to Stanley Fish and his misapprehension of the value of the humanities? Well, you can find echoes of Kafka and Beckett and Heller in the congress’s pursuit of the baseball players abuses, just as you can find echoes of Kafka and Vonnegut and, yes, Heller again in the Bush administration’s press to invade Iraq and chronic abuse of human rights.

Over the weekend I saw “Charlie Wilson’s War.” Granted not a film of any great artistic merit, although effectively done, but it helps illustrate the point. I came out of the theater with a renewed sense of urgency about the value and hidden dangers of the political process, with a new sense of outrage at the current administration’s deliberate mishandling of the current war and manhandling of our rights. Could I have reached the same sense of outrage without the movie? Sure, but that’s not the point.

The humanities, along with news media, word of mouth, personal observation, government and independent reports, etc., give us a picture of the world we live in. In some cases, the humanities give us a picture that we couldn’t get in any other way (because it’s purely imaginitive or impressionistic or surreal). I would pose the reverse question to Fish. If humanities don’t serve a purpose, why do they exist?

We strive to create art because we want to represent something — an emotion, an impression, an urge, a feeling – that seems important to us. Art is the tangible manifestation of our humanity. Without art we have no tangible manifestation of our humanity. Some can live in such a world, perhaps, but most of us cannot.

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(Or Reading, Writing and Ramifications…)

“The Fall” by Albert Camus was the first book of literature I read by choice. (Before that I think I’d read mostly books from Ian Flemming’s James Bond series,
Agatha Christie’s detective series, science fiction, and the like). “The Fall” opened up for me a whole new world of reading. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it also opened up a whole new world of thinking.

A new study has shown that the flu is more common in the winter because the virus remains more stable and lives longer in cold dry weather. The debate about why the flu was more common in winter had raged for decades. The researcher’s clue to testing the flu’s communicability under controled conditions (more explicitly, what animal to test on — Guinea Pigs) came from reading a report from 1919 about a flu pandemic in New Mexico. (The author of the report noted in passing that Guinea Pigs at Camp Cody had succumbed to the flu.)

And in a New Orlean’s court case today, where the defendants may be asked to present their genitals for review in order to help prosecute a rape case, Defense attorney Robert Jenkins made the comment “I’ve never seen it before. Even in fiction, you don’t see this kind of stuff.” Which, when you think about things you do see in fictionalized court cases, is a statement as bold as the prosecutor’s request.

My wife, a lover of purchasing books if not always reading them, has set herself the challenge of reading ten books while she’s pregnant. When she asked me if I had any suggestions Camus’ “The Fall” was right up there. It’s a short book and she’s about half way through. Last night she felt so affected by what she was reading that she paused and read out loud a passage in which the narrator recalls a traffic incident in Paris. Stopped at a traffic light behind a stalled moped the narrator, who saw himself as the victim of events, ended up being seen by everyone around him as the villain. I don’t remember enough of the book to summarize its themes and aims, but my wife has been struck by the way that Camus exposes the layers of psychology that enwrap our everyday lives: Why do we try to be nice and good? Do we have an ulterior motive? Is that our only motive? How do we know? What makes up a person, his actions or his thoughts?

Camus, Faulkner, Thomas Bernhard, Robert Graves, Gunter Grass, James Joyce, Proust and so many other great writers wrote fiction that provokes inquiry and thought about the nature of the human condition and, in many ways, the nature of existence. Reading such texts communicates this process. We don’t need to agree with the writer’s perspective, and rarely is the writer’s perspective explicitly declared or even implicitly declared, but it is difficult to read the books of such writers without pausing to reflect. And it is difficult to reflect without acquiring some new insight.

The flu researcher makes his own case for writing down points of interest that may seem incidental at the time (such as Guinea Pigs with flu), but that can open up whole new realms of insight for readers in a dim, distant and indeterminate future. “Sometimes it pays to read the old literature,” says Dr. Palese, who made the discovery.

And the Defense attorney in the New Orleans court, unwittingly I think, points to the value of fiction as a way of expanding the realm of the possible. Fiction has been instrumental in changing what’s acceptable, possible, and conceivable. That the Prosecutor in the case has outdone fiction is a credit to his imagination if not his legal prowess.

All of which makes me want to go and read.

But before I do, I must stop to consider the flip side of this literatic love-fest. Even the best of texts can be misunderstood and misused. And the worst of texts can be downright dangerous in the wrong hands. The intent of the writer and the perspective and persuasion of the reader will determine whether a particular text generates more good than ill.

And what’s considered a dangerous book by one generation may be lauded as a groundbreaking work of innovation and courage by the next. (James Joyce’s Ulysses springs to mind; although it may not be the best example unless the sample group happens to be students of modern literature.)

Can we say then whether the overall value of literature and writing is in general positive, negative or neutral?

(This reminds me of a discussion I had earlier this year with someone who questioned, since truth and scientific understanding is not absolute, whether we can say that science has made progress.)

The question, in practice, is clearly unanswerable. Even if we were to agree on definitions for positive and negative, how would we compile a quantitative inventory of all of the positive and negative influences of things written and read?

Which reminds me that things written, while they should stir and prompt our own thinking, should not replace our own thinking. Whatever dangers exist in things written don’t derive from the writing itself, however inciteful and twisted, but from our being influenced by them without sufficient reflection and questioning. Just because we read Justine doesn’t mean that we’ll become amoral. Although if we swallow de Sade’s words without reflection, we may well come away worse off than when we arrived. But surely that would be our fault, not de Sade’s?
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In The Darjeeling Limited, Jason Schwartzman plays a writer who uses moments from his real life as the basis for his short stories, then insists to his brothers that the highly recognizable characters are fictional. The Darjeeling Limited is a gem-like movie, and this aspect of the story left me with a new insight, or the beginning of an insight into the relationship between art and life.

The actions of Schwartzman’s character create a text within the text. Schwartzman co-wrote the screenplay with Wes Anderson, the film’s director. So, we have the screen-writer playing the role of a writer who fictionalizes real moments in his life. The movie isn’t about art, Schwartzman’s fiction plays a minor role in the plot, but the film is about artificiality in life. The characters keep the world at arm’s length, rarely entering into events fully, yet believing that they do.

We use and appreciate art as a construct and technique to distance ourselves from reality. When it works, this distance provides a perspective that permits us to apprehend reality more fully, or to access a part of our perspective that would otherwise be hidden from us.

The artist takes a feeling or perspective, conscious or subconscious, and transfers it to some external medium (canvas, music, sculpture, text, etc.). After watching The Darjeeling Limited I was left with a new sense of life as unconscious art, or if not art then something akin to it.

Today is Halloween. Never in my recollection have I wanted to wear a Halloween costume nor enter into the spirit of the holiday, much to the disappointment of my wife and children. As I walked to the train this morning and reflected on this and on the premise of The Darjeeling Limited I felt a strong correlation between the two and the overlay of art in life.

If we think about distancing and abstraction as a critical construct of the artistic process, all of a sudden much of what we do in life starts to seem if not artistic then representational. Two days ago I got my hair cut, for instance, and felt disquieted by the relative neatness and attractiveness of my hair afterward. I now think that I was put out by the artificial construct of a haircut. We clothe ourselves partly for warmth, but the way we clothe ourselves is to a greater or lesser degree a representation of the image we seek to project to those around us. We are wearing an abstract perspective of ourselves.

The way we speak, the way we behave, the way we move, everything but the most automatic, innate impulse bears the impression of conceptual intervention. Focus on your breathing for a moment and all of a sudden you become conscious of how fast, how deep, how measured and the pattern of your breathing changes even if it doesn’t in fact become faster, deeper, more or less measured. The observation of your breathing makes it somehow different.

But whereas good art uses distance to bring us closer to something real, affectation in life distances us without achieving this ultimate closeness. Good art lets us feel or apprehend something more directly, more pertinently. A good haircut does nothing to bring us closer to reality. In fact, it takes us more deeply into the concept of ourselves as a person with attractive hair.

I’m not suggesting that we go about wearing sacks and with long, lank locks. But I am suggesting that being aware of the artificiality we invest in a good part of our waking life may actually be a step toward living more fully in the moment rather than in our minds.

Monet’s “Le Pont d’Argenteuil” at the Orsay Museum in Paris - badly damaged by intruders Sunday, Oct. 7, 2007.

(You can see the 4 inch tear below the bridge.)

In a related article, the French Minister of Culture, Christine Albanel, calls for better security and tougher sanctions against people who commit such acts of vandalism because, as she said “they are attacking our history.”

Another interesting aspect of the report is that it seems that the painting can be repaired. Presumably it would be impossible for a future museum visitor to know whether the painting had been repaired or not.

This reminds me of two other incidents: One from a New Yorker article, and one from my own life.

The New Yorker, September 24, 2007, article on Marie-Laure de Noailles - The Surrealist’s Muse, at one point describes how one of Marie-Laure’s lovers — a Spanish painter named Oscar Dominguez — made money by by copying Marie-Laure’s Picassos and selling the originals, leaving his forgeries in their place.

My wife bought me a lovely old Alfa Romeo “Spider” sports car for my birthday. It turns out that the car’s floor is rusted, a fatal problem. But in the course of investigating what could be done, if anything, to repair the damage, I discovered that, with old cars, enthusiasts value authenticity, including authenticity of a repair, so highly that an inauthentic repair (using a modern, custom-shaped floor panel rather than an original panel) would render the car practically worthless.

Is Albanel right in saying that an attack on a work of art is an attack on history? If a clever forgery can fool its owner, does the value of a work lie in the art or its pedigree? And if a car looks and drives as if it were intact, does the knowledge that it is patched with a modern piece of material diminish its inherent value?

All of these questions seem interrelated. The core question seems to be how and why do we attach the concept of value to an object or the idea of an object?

We may have several reasons for perceiving value in Monet’s painting of a bridge: We find the painting itself aesthetically pleasing. We find Monet’s work generally pleasing and therefore value this work as part of the body of his work. We value the effort and skill exerted in producing such a work of art. We find value in the work of art as a component of our cultural history… I’m sure there must be several other distinct reasons for perceiving value in the painting.

Likewise with my Alpha Romeo. I value it because I like the way it looks and drives. An enthusiast may value it for its authenticity and degree of intactness. A scrap metal merchant may value it as a heap of smeltables.

The concept of value in a forgery is a little trickier. Before we know it is a forgery, we may believe we value it for its place in a body of work, or for the skill of the original artist. But knowledge of its true pedigree makes it impossible to value a forged Picasso as a Picasso. (Although we could still value it as a skillful copy.)

All of which results in two important clarifications: When we think or talk about the value of a thing, it helps if we’re clear about the ground of the value, what is it based on from our perspective, allowing that others will have their own perspectives. The second clarification is that when we attach our sense of value to the idea of a thing (its pedigree, its place in a greater body of work, etc.) we are no longer valuing the thing itself, but an idea of the thing.

This second point, I believe, resolves the paradox that we can at one moment believe something very valuable, only to realize a moment later that it is worthless. The thing itself hasn’t changed, but our idea of it has.

For a work of art to have inherent value for us, then, that value must be attached to something immediate, such as its aesthetic impression.

This brings me back to my original conundrum. While I feel the emotional tug of the sentiment expressed by the French Culture Minister, that those who damage works of art should be more heavily sanctioned, I can’t find the logical support for it. What the idiots did was to damage a painting. Any attack on history resides only in the minds of those who perceive the idea of Monet’s painting as a part of French cultural history. Should criminal sentencing be influenced by something so subjective?

Does art (any kind of art — painting, sculpture, literature, music…) serve a purpose? And if so, what is that purpose? Why do we create art? And must the judgment of art be entirely subjective?

On Sunday, I visited the Brooklyn Book Festival. One of the booths housed The Aesthetic Realism Foundation. (I misread the sign at first and thought it said Atheistic Realism — this brought me up short. But even after I’d read it correctly I stayed to ask what Aesthetic Realism is.) Aesthetic Realism proposes that we can better understand our lives through the application of aesthetic principles. The booth staffer gave the example of the aesthetic practice of balancing heavy and light — being aware of the need for this balance in life can come through an understanding of its balance in art.

To me, this approach seems fascinating and insightful (and very worthy of the foundation’s efforts — for instance, they are hosting a forum on the social and personal value of Rock ‘n Roll, how cool is that?), but completely backwards philosophically; wherefrom do aesthetic principles derive if not from life?

When we ask whether art serves a purpose we ask a conceptual question. Can we relate art to a concept or set of concepts, and do these concepts give us insight into art’s possible purpose?

The answer to the first part of this question seems obvious if we think about who creates art — primarily people (and some particularly intelligent animals — larger primates and elephants). Since art requires the abstraction of ideas or impulses, it requires a conceptual process (whether subconscious or conscious). Without the product of the artistic process, which is not itself but what it represents, we have no art, therefore art relates to a set of concepts.

And herein, I believe, we have the answer to the second part of our question: The concept to which art consistently relates is abstraction! (This would still apply to representational art, in which the artist abstracts the idea or impulse of what he or she observes and transfers it to the medium of their choosing in a representational manner.)

And we also now have a clue as to a possible purpose of art. If art rests on the concept of abstraction of an idea or impulse. The artistic urge is the urge to abstract an idea or impulse. What is to be gained by acting on this urge?

Does the artist gain anything from acting on the urge? Do others gain anything from the result of the abstraction?

If we again go back to the concepts we can delve further into the concept of abstraction. Abstraction is the recreation of certain elements in another form. Abstraction is a form of reduction or refocusing. It draws out and emphasizes some aspects of the original idea or impulse.

We can say that the product of the artistic process aims to communicate this refocusing. It communicates the artist’s particular point of view on the idea or impulse. And these ideas or impulses similarly become concepts or representations themselves as they are abstracted.

If it is successful, art helps us better understand the world around us and ourselves. The more successful it is at aiding this understanding, the more valuable it is.

Hence, we have a dilemma. Art that is derivative and of little deep value in helping us better understand life’s complexities may still have mass appeal (most pop music). Whereas art that delves deeply and profoundly into complex matters may have very limited appeal.

Does the value multiply out over the number of people affected? Can an equation be drawn this simply?

More for later!