What Has Value and What is Dross: Reacting to a Work of Art

What is dross and what has value in the world of the arts?  Context and perspective matter.

When my son was eight years old I took him to the ruins of a French Cistercian monastery.  He looked at the stone rubble remnants of pillars and walls. He was singularly unimpressed.  “Just a pile of rocks.”  One of my favorite statues in the Louvre is the Winged Victory of Samothrace (aka the Nike of Samothrace).  It is a masterpiece of Hellenic sculpture dating from the second century BCE.  The statue presents a solid determined presence as the figure leans slightly forward with strong outstretched wings, an irresistible force moving through a formidable headwind.  Triumphant in the face of an invisible opposition, the statue hovers at the top a staircase overlooking a grand hall.  On the same visit to France, when my son noticed that Victory’s head and arms were missing, he remarked with disdain, “Dad, it’s broken.”  We moved on to Michaelangelo’s slaves.  “Why didn’t he finish them?” was the question of the day.  From my son’s perspective what many would consider magnificent sculpture or provocative ruins of a past culture inspired little interest for him.

One of the best lines in the movie Raiders of the Lost Arc comes when Indiana Jones’ arch-rival comments about a watch he is wearing, “Look at this [watch].  It’s worthless. Ten dollars from a vendor in the street.   But I take it; I bury it in the sand for a thousand years; it becomes priceless.”  Context matters.

Value is all about perspective.  This not only goes for the monetary value of objects but also for the intellectual value of commentary and opinions.  Recently I attended an exhibit of ancient art from the Three Yans, provinces in China that had some prominence in the third to fifth centuries.   There were various collections of rather mundane looking pottery, some intact, some in fragments.  In another room were some examples of ancient tack, including a set of stirrups that are the earliest datable set of stirrups ever discovered.  These no doubt carry great importance to an historian as the invention of stirrups was a major advance in military technology, affording the horseman a more stable position and greater leverage when wielding a weapon or launching a spear.   But in truth, the objects themselves were rather inherently dull.  The only value they had for me was by taking me back in time as I imagined the exploits of great horsemen stampeding across the Asian steppes.  But what I found most fascinating and immediately inspiring in the exhibit were paintings that were said to be accurate copies of murals found in tombs from the Yan period.  These paintings were delicately rendered. They gave one entry into a symbolic world of the tomb where different animals represented geographical directions:  Azure Dragon of the East; White Tiger of the West; Vermillion Birds of the South and Black Tortoise of the North. This menagerie served to orient the deceased inhabitants of the tomb.  These copies would have a cash value of whatever an artfully crafted painting is worth in the so called “decorative market” while the actual murals in the tomb are, well, priceless.  For me, who was not trying to glean the minutiae of life in ancient China from chards of clay or dilapidated artifacts, these paintings made this exhibit, presented at the China Institute in Manhattan, worth my time visiting.   I had learned of the exhibit from an article in the Wall Street Journal.   However, I really didn’t read the article until after I had made my visit.  The article was by a professor of art history who heaped compliments on the pottery and equestrian equipment and dismissed the paintings that resonated so much with me by noting, “A gallery devoted to hand-painted facsimiles of murals . . .  only demonstrate[d] the skillful painting of the reproduction artists.”  I am not meaning to denigrate the academic interest in mundane things of everyday life that so clearly interested the professor, but to someone like me, more interested in how a specific people view the world and the aesthetics of the art they produced, the painted reproductions deserved much more attention.  Perspective and mindset matter.

Most curated exhibits of art in museums come with a set of notes on each work as well as a catalog depicting the artwork accompanied by a series of erudite essays.   I hardly ever read these before actually looking at the art because I like having my own emotional and analytical reactions, without external influences.  Then and only then would I compare my reactions to others, more erudite but not necessarily more sensitive than me, or perhaps sensitive in dissimilar ways.  Often these scholarly articles and blurbs provide some historical background of a particular piece or of the whole collection, but to me historical and critical background are of secondary importance.  I may find such commentary interesting because it forces me to challenge my own objective, analytical assessment, but from the point of view of incorporating a piece of art into my emotional, subjective psyche its historical or philosophical origin hold little interest for me.  Even statements from artists themselves alter my own psychological, emotional and aesthetic judgements only in nuanced ways, if at all. The piece must stand on its own; it must cause some novel transformation within my consciousness, with no external buttressing, to have any value for me. 

Over the years of writing poetry and looking at lots of art I have come to the philosophy that once a poem of mine or a piece of literature or art by someone else is placed in the public domain, it no longer belongs exclusively to the creator.  A piece of art also becomes the property of the beholder, not necessarily in a material way, but in an emotional and intellectual way.  The only reason to seek out art in the first place, except for those who buy art exclusively for investment purposes, is to discover something new, enlightening, transformational.  Whan a person sees a work of art, or reads a poem, or listens to music, something that has no immutable or absolute inherent significance has the potential to be transfigured into something of inspirational importance.  Like it or not, in the public domain the creator forfeits control.  Read a poem, look at art, listen to music, take ownership and make it yours. If someone else’s creation doesn’t resonate with you, ignore the critics and taste makers, toss it aside and move on to the next adventure to discover something that does.   But who knows, someday you may come back to a discarded piece and find a revelatory connection after all.  Context and perspective matter.