Tag Archives: New York Times

Can a novelist write [well] philosophically?

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“Can a novelist write philosophically?” begins the essay The Philosophical Novel in the NY Times Book Section last week. It’s an old question. The conflict is the long-held (hello, Plato) notion that philosophy is a dry, precise search for truth, heedless of aesthetics while novels tell stories to create illusions and explore imprecise, untrue things. It goes on to discuss philosophers who wrote well like novelists (Nietzche) and novelists who write like philosophers (David Foster Wallace), and whether either of the disciplines suffered for the mixture.

The questions are not unlike the series of lectures bound up in The Naive and Sentimental Novelist (2010) by Orham Pamuk. Pamuk’s love of reading and the craft of writing is a great read, all spun around the famous concept of Schilller: naïve writers write “spontaneously, almost without thinking, not bothering to consider the intellectual or ethical consequences of their words” while the sentimental writer is “thoughtful” and “troubled” and “exceedingly aware of the poem he writes, the method and techniques he uses, the artifice involved in his endeavor.”  The sentimental poet can be called philosophical. Pamuk himself writes–and reads– both naivelly and sentimentally at times. As a reader, he claims we all juggle the same differing mindsets, between the suspension of disbelief and the analytic understanding of what we are reading.

 Friedrich Schiller’s On the Naive and Sentimental in Literature (1795) is a paper on poetic (more generally artistic) theory, in which he as the reflective sentimalisch writer rather envies Goethe, a naive writer who never doubts whether the words that stream out of him are accurate and true. Schiller’s influential oppositional and psychological views have been very influential on later art history criticism and psychoanalysis. Within this dialogue is also the opposition of the Classical and the Romantic

While I imagine the Romantic poet as driven to pour out his heart unselfconsciously, ala Keats, and Wordsworth, Schiller himself felt the opposite. Classical poets like the Greeks were naive writers for whom there was no struggle to reach a natural state. Romantic writers suffered the anguish of trying to recapture their lost ideals, and doubt as to whether their words actually did. So inspired by all these connections, I’m trying to recapture the lost ideal that is my ability to focus on philosophy, and actually site down and read beyond the introduction of On the Naive and Sentimental in Literature. Surely these oppositional groups are more nuanced than they seem, and hopefully a novelist can find the teetering, tottering edge between the philosophical and the story, the naive and the sentimental.

“Why do we want these works to turn out to be by Velázquez and Michelangelo? After all, the art is the same either way.”

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The Wine of St. Martin’s Day, a previously ignored painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
 

“In the end we want another celebrity attribution like this one because we want to get things straight. History tries to make sense out of chaos, toward which the world inevitably inclines. Art historians create hierarchies, categories and movements; they attribute causes and effects to conjure an appearance of logic. Attributing a picture to a household deity like Bruegel or Michelangelo affirms our sense of control, our ability to get a grip on our affairs, at least for the moment. We take comfort in mooring some grimy, forgotten canvas, another example of life’s flotsam and, implicitly, of our own fate, to one of the pillars of art history.” – Via the NYTimes

Maybe that’s the reason; we’re so excited by the discovery of a masterpiece we forget we never thought it was great before. Maybe its the thrill of discovery. But I think we could all just be a tad foolish.

Post-Minimal Museums: Reprehensible?

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“After encountering so many bare walls and open spaces, after examining so many amalgams of photography, altered objects, seductive materials and conceptual puzzles awaiting deciphering, I started to feel as if it were all part of a big-box chain featuring only one brand.

The goal in organizing museum exhibitions, as in collecting, running a gallery and — to cite the most obvious example — being an artist, should be individuation and difference, finding a voice of your own. Instead we’re getting example after example of squeaky-clean, well-made, intellectually decorous takes on that unruly early ’70s mix of Conceptual, Process, Performance, installation and language-based art that is most associated with the label Post-Minimalism.”

Thus Roberta Smith, in New York Times article Post Minimal to the Max, begins to delve into what she would like to see the museums of New York begin doing in their shows. Hint: the key word is differentiation. The recent shows of Gabriel Orozco at MoMA, Tino Sehgal at the Guggenhiem, and Urs Fischer at the New Museum might be zeitgeist in action rather than reprehensible, but Smith argues that focusing on one thing creates a simplified art history by that very action. She points to artists, often those whose work is hand made or seems personally driven, who might merit a show that would be more than blank walls.


These recent exhibitions have much the same feel, and Smith’s point that it is at the expense of other aesthetics and styles. Ben Wadler at Artcards describes the situation as “reminiscent of one recently put forth by the White House, attributing the success of Fox News to the simple fact that it is selling the clearest narrative for people to follow. So too in the Art world do we want clarity, and the more others are following something, the less likely will it be a waste of our time to do the same.” I’m not sure exactly what the solution is, but I agree that something is wrong when Smith could write that;

“the idea of seeing a survey of contemporary painting at the Modern makes me squirm. It would look — I don’t know — too messy and emotional, too flat, too un-MoMA.”

Certainly the image we have of a museum ought to be one that reflects all the art in its mission. I would enjoy it if museums presented smaller, more intimate exhibitions for two reasons. It would allow for more, different work to be seen. Big exhibitions often have a big wow! factor, but not as much depth–or perhaps I am simply too overwhelmed and distracted to appreciate the nuances. However, change could be even simpler: as Smith asks, and obviously I’m biased, but why hasn’t a NY museum arranged to take on the new Chris Ofili retrospective currently in London?

Curators are under pressure to make sure their exhibitions succeed, and the exhibitions listed are certainly popular. More than that, they are good in their own right. So how do you ask a museum to change its curatorial program? Do the collective museums of New York have a duty to present a comprehensive view of art?

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