The Easy Answer for the Simple Mind

Sorry about yesterday, Bush. Bad joke. Still, you can’t afford to lose your sense of humor in all this, can you? I thought I’d start off today with a few thoughts about art, because that has been my speciality as a writer, for some thirty years now. I’ve written a lot about it, thought a lot about it. And what I was thinking about yesterday does have a broader significance, I think. But we’ll come to that.

First off, a bit of controversy picked up in the review of a current exhibition in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times. Curated by the well-known critic and historian, Donald Kuspit, it purports to champion the rejection of the “emperor’s new clothes” quality of much contemporary art, and a return to the humanitarian values of “masterpiece” painting. Kuspit identifies Marcel Duchamp—he of the infamous urinal exhibited as art—as the original villain of the theory that art can be anything the artist says is art. Things have gone a little far, he argues, when a Yale graduate student has nothing to show in her studio for her graduate review, and instead, as “art”, tapes her review committee’s visit, and their reaction to the absence.

Well, Bush, we all have our examples of the absurd excesses of contemporary artists. I happen to agree with Kuspit that something has gone awry, but I disagree with him about the cause. It’s not that artists have forgotten “the basics”—how to draw and paint—though I agree that many of them have. And I do enjoy those skills when I see them praticed. But I don’t see these skills as the “without which not,” the sine qua non of art today. It’s not, for me, about the medium or the skill with which it’s handled. Anything CAN be art because the artist says so.

But for me it doesn’t follow, as some would claim, that it IS. My personal gripe about a great deal of art that’s produced today is that it’s pathetically THIN. It's the sense that someone's banal "idea" is enough in itself to warrant my attention and appreciation. I do look for human values, but they can be explored in media other than the traditional “masterpiece” media. What I find unacceptable is the dreadful, almost self-congratulatory paucity of idea in much art that’s shown today—and that paucity can be found in the traditional media as much as in the new ones. What I personally need from art is some insight into the complexity and depth of the human experience—insight that does not, sometimes contemptuously, exclude any of the richness of the emotional, intellectual, physical, and spiritual complex that forms the wholeness of our experience of life.

Why is this imnportant for us to talk about, Bush? Because that paucity seems to permeate not only the work of some of our artists in today’s world, but almost every aspect of our experience. I believe it has become the stock-in-trade not only of artists, but of anyone who wants to lead us by the nose. Including those who want to sell us things and make us good consumers. And politicians, Bush. The easy, one-line sales pitch—“no new taxes”, “weapons of mass destruction”, “social security crisis”, you name it—has been substituted for the depth and complexity of honest thought required to address the difficult questions facing us as we seek to secure a tolerable and sustainable future for our world.

It’s destructive and dangerous, Bush, this simple-mindedness, this trading on the easily sold assumption that there are easy answers. We’re losing that indispensible ability to think critically about issues, and to hold paradoxical and contradictory thought simultaneously in our minds. We want the quick fix, and you, Bush, and your people are all too quick to offer it. And the trouble with the easy answers is that they usually prove not to be answers at all, but lead instead to further complications, further problems, and unintended consequences.

Look back at the last election, Bush. We were offered the clear choice between the breezy show of self-confident shallowness and thoughtful, sometimes dark, sometimes self-contradictory depth; between easy assurance and difficult, sometimes conflicted interior debate. In life, as in art, alas, we opt too frequently for quickest, easiest solution. It’s not about learning to draw again. It's not about retreating to the values of the past. It’s about learning to stretch the potential of the human mind, about expanding our humanity into greater understanding of each other, greater compassion, and greater fulfillment of our individual and collective destiny.