At this stage of the week, I’m usually desperately poking around the deepest crevices of my mind with a cerebral toothpick, hunting for crumbs of ideas to winkle out (You can tell we’ve started cleaning for Pesach, can’t you?) and serve up as my latest post. On a good week, I come up with one idea. On a stellar week, I start off thinking that one idea might turn out to be a good idea, rather than simply coming to the conclusion that I don’t know of a better ‘ole.
This week, uncharacteristically, I feel spoilt for choice. It seems that, everywhere I look, there is the kernel of an idea that seems worth teasing out. How did a film musical that Bernice and I found it difficult to get into manage to win us over and sweep us along for two hours (Tick, Tick…Boom!)? Exactly why did we find the Hebrew stage adaptation of a film we both loved so leadenly disappointing (Hooked Up to Life – adapted from the French film The Intouchables)? What lessons can we draw from the fact that, of the 11 people murdered in Israel this week by terrorists acting against the Jewish state, one was a Druse border policeman, one was a Christian Arab policeman and two were foreign workers from Ukraine?
And then, of course, there’s the extraordinary story of the slap heard around the world. 1500 words? That story must have 15,000 words in it!
But in the end, I’ve decided to opt for a small story that caught my eye online today, and another story that that one led me to, about two people who, six years apart, raised all sorts of interesting questions about the nature of art. Both were, coincidentally, women (always assuming I know what that word means – there’s another subject for a post right there) and both were described, in the news reports I read, as pensioners (although I’m not sure of the relevance of that fact).
Our story begins, however, with that infinite group of monkeys, eternally and uncomprehendingly pounding on an infinite number of typewriters – or, I suppose, these days, keyboards. Eventually, so I was always led to believe, one of their number would randomly type out the text of Hamlet, or, I suppose, another, as yet unwritten, masterpiece of the theatre. My question is: Would that manuscript be a work of art? Let me ask the more generic question: Must a work of art necessarily be the result of a conscious act of creation? You may be inclined to dismiss the question as trivial, since it arises from a completely unrealistic situation. (Where are you going to house this infinite number of monkeys? How will you persuade them to keep typing away? How are you going to afford to buy all the bananas you’ll need?) However, let me give you a far more plausible example.
You can occasionally find, on certain seashores, a washed up, twisted piece of driftwood that is aesthetically very pleasing. Imagine taking such a piece home and placing it on display. A friend walks in and admires what she calls your ‘new artwork’. Is she mistaken? Or do you feel that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck – in other words, if it has beauty, is interesting to look at, can stir the observer’s emotions, stimulates reflections on the transience of form or the ceaseless passage of time – then it is indeed a work of art (or, perhaps, a duck)?
And so to our first pensioner, a retired dentist who, in 2016, visited a Nuremberg museum and stopped in front of an art exhibit in the form of a crossword puzzle with clues in English, which was captioned “Insert words” and “so it suits”. Since this 91-year-old knew English, she started filling in the answers, as she believed she had been invited to. She even used a ballpoint pen! She was then accused of damaging property – the 1977 artwork was valued at £68,000, and was on loan to the museum from a private collector.
When questioned, the woman pointed out that, if the museum did not want people to follow the artist’s instructions, they should have placed a warning notice alongside it.
Her lawyer later produced a seven-page rebuttal, arguing that, rather than harming the work, her actions had increased its value by bringing it to public attention, and, furthermore, her “invigorating reworking” of the exhibit meant that she now held the copyright of the co-created artwork, and perhaps the collector should sue the museum for destroying the co-creation by erasing the ballpoint pen additions.
You may find the lawyer’s rebuttal too clever by half, but is it any more so than the original work?
And then, in the Picasso Museum in Paris this week, a 72-year-old noticed a blue overall hanging on a wall. Assuming it had been forgotten, she took it, tried it on, found it was too big, and asked her tailor to shorten it. When she revisited the museum a few days later, she was arrested for art theft. The overall was, in fact, Old Masters, an example of the artist Vilanova’s “critical yet lively reflection on issues such as the role of images in transmitting culture and cultural values”, according to another gallery.
The pockets of the overall were full of the postcards that Vilanova collects in flea markets and which are a major theme of his work. The garment was intended to be unhooked and handled, and the postcards studied.
Prosecutors accepted the pensioner’s explanation that she had no idea she was stealing an artwork, although she confessed to the theft. She was let off with a warning. The museum is now left with an artwork 20cm shorter than originally. Is it still a work of art? Is its value reduced by the alteration? Was the alteration an act of vandalism, unintentional damage, or, indeed, artistic collaboration?
The side of the argument that I instinctively find myself on will not, I suspect, surprise many of my readers. Art, I would argue, requires artifice. That is a word that usually carries a negative connotation. Merriam-Webster notes:
‘Artifice’ stresses creative skill or intelligence, but it also implies a sense of falseness and trickery. Art generally rises above such falseness, suggesting instead an unanalyzable creative force.
As a counter-argument, I would cite Picasso’s comment that:
We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth – at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.
There are, I believe, two points to be made here. One is that art is always the result of a conscious act of creation as creation. For me, driftwood can be beautiful, but it cannot be art. Even the tailor’s handicraft is not part of the overall as a work of art; it is conscious, and indeed skillful, but it was not intended as art; it was not carried out to enhance the truth contained in the piece of art.
The second, not unconnected, point, is that art has to be cooked, not raw. Of course, just how much preparation is required to constitute ‘cookedness’ is a moot point. I was recently at a meal where one of the guests was very sceptical whether steak tartare could be called a food dish. (This scepticism meant, I am pleased to say, all the more for me!)
In a similar way, I am not sure whether an overall hung on a hook requires sufficient, and sufficiently skilled, preparation to ‘earn’ the status of art. There is a continuum: at one end (for me, at least) is a late Rembrandt self-portrait; at the other is an entirely blank, untreated canvas, hung in a gallery. Somewhere along the continuum a line needs to be drawn, dividing art from non-art. I don’t really feel qualified to decide where the line should be drawn, although I know that if I were forced to draw it, my line would be much closer to the Rembrandt than modern art experts argue. I am certainly out of kilter with the times; fortunately, galleries have not discarded their genuine old masters to make room for such work as Old Masters. There is still plenty for me to see when I visit a gallery.
Speaking of beautiful pictures (I keep doing it!), here’s two more. Tao clearly found this week’s stories more amusing than last week’s, and Raphael continues to thrive under tender, loving care.
