Art with a capital F

The cross-eyed old painter, McNeff,
Was colour-blind, palsied, and deaf.
When he asked to be touted
The critics all shouted
”This is art with a capital F!”

Well, who do they think they are, these critics, eh, slandering poor old McNeff like that? Considering their failure over the centuries to come up with anything approaching a persuasive definition of art, you’d think they’d be a little more reluctant to go around making pronouncements about it.

I admit, you do have your serious thinkers about art who define it as whatever artists or art critics say it is, but there’s one teeny-tiny little flaw with that definition – artists and critics never agree among themselves about what art is.

Then there are your people who say art is what artists do. A bit circular, that definition – "How do you know that's art?" "It's art because an artist did it." "Well, what makes him an artist?" "He does art! Duh."

And there are your people who say art is whatever is intended to be art, which makes James McIntyre’s “Ode on the Mammoth Cheese Weighing Over 7,000 Pounds” a work of art. Then you've got your people who consider art to be the appreciation of beauty. The problem with that idea is you then have to define beauty, and appreciation of beauty.

A lot of grand-sounding assertions are made about beauty, of course. “Truth is Beauty, and Beauty Truth.” Oh, sure.

Dentist: “Fact is, John, repairing that tooth’s going to set you back about a grand. I’m not kidding.”

Me: “Wow, that's beautiful, eh, doc? Thank god they made me read Keats in school so I could appreciate that.”

And what about “The Metamorphosis,” for example, or Guernica? They sure as hell ain’t beautiful, but they probably fall into your art category.

Beauty, my shorts. I’ll tell you what art is. Art is craft that rich people buy.

Render a few painstaking portraits of Elvis on beautiful navy blue or black velvet and, you know, no major art critics are going to come to your show. Slap some paint on a canvas to render an approximate facsimile of a nude woman, though, and all of a sudden you’re distinguished portraitist Lucian Freud (Freud is a good example because he started out painstakingly emulating Ingres and then switched to a far more slapdash style without the critics claiming he was no longer an artist; he also started raking in a lot more moolah). So what’s the difference between your exquisite portraits of Elvis and Freud’s less meticulous portraits of the unclothed? Simple – rich people buy the latter and don’t buy the former.

And why do rich people buy Lucian Freud but not portraits of Elvis on velvet? Rich people buy Lucian Freud rather than portraits of Elvis because Lucian Freud’s stuff costs a ton while even poor people can afford a portrait of Elvis on velvet.

What’s the point of being rich, eh, if people don’t know you’re rich? Filthy rich. Filthy, stinking rich. Filthy, stinking rich enough to plunk down a sum of money that would buy a medium-sized apartment house in exchange for a rendering of a nude which, if presented anonymously, would be considered an example of commercial art (in 2005, Freud’s Naked Girl Perched on a Chair, which looks as if it came from the cover of a 50s detective novel, pulled down $5.75 million US), a purchase you then put on your wall and proudly display as Great Art.

One artist who exploited this habit of rich people was Andy Warhol. He marketed portraits to the rich which were giant assemblages of photographs, made with a cheap camera, of the rich society women who had commissioned the portraits. Mum got to feel like a movie star for a day while a Major Artist took pictures of her in what resembled a modelling shoot, and Dad got to put a whacking great artwork on the wall which screamed to all and sundry “Buddy paid a whole hell of a lot of money for me! I’m a freaking Warhol!”

This definition of art as what rich people buy is not mine, of course. The great social commentator Lenny Bruce pointed out half a century ago that a depiction of factory workers screwing was smut, while a depiction of a titled lady screwing was Lady Chatterley’s Lover. No doubt the theory predates Bruce. The practice certainly does. Would the Marquis de Sade’s obsessive sadistic fantasies have been hailed as great works of literature if his title had been merely Monsieur?

Literature, of course, is what rich people read. Back in the day only the rich read novels, since the plebes, if they could read, had more important things on their minds, like going poaching so they could eat. When the plebes finally got some time to read, they still didn’t have as much time, obviously, as the leisured classes, so they wanted something with a strong plot, interesting characters, clear ideas, and lots of incident. Whence the current “literary” novel – if the plebes prefer strong plots, interesting characters, clear ideas, and lots of incident, then the “literary” novel has little plot or incident, boring characters, and as few ideas as possible.

Hmmm. I'm sensing something – aha! the work of Barbara Pym just popped into your mind, didn’t it?

Art music, of course, is concert music. Rich people go to the symphony, so the symphony repertoire is Art. Rich people go to the opera, so opera is Art. Rich people go to the ballet, so ballet is…what is it, everyone? That’s right, Art.

Jazz? Whoa – hold on there, cowboy. Jazz was produced by people who resemble not rich people but rather rich people’s servants. No, except to a small coterie of jazz-besotted fanatics, jazz is not Art but rather the colourful, undisciplined music produced by a crew of fascinating, untutored characters. That so many of them could remain untutored even after graduating from Juilliard is evidence of their happy-go-lucky approach to music.

Incidentally, ballet is really your art with a capital F, isn’t it? Telling a story by standing on tippy-toes in an outfit that not only looks silly but has a silly name does not seem to me to be the best way to achieve artistic effects. Ballet’s claim to being an art would be no better than figure skating’s (another endeavour in which people attempt to create art by performing curious physical feats while wearing unusual costumes) were it not for the presence in the ballet audience of…of whom, everyone? Yup – rich people.

Now, I have nothing against rich people, apart from their being rich and my not being. I wholeheartedly support their right to have their own subcultural craft activities. I also freely admit that I find many of those subcultural craft activities of theirs highly entertaining and even moving. What I object to is the art racket.

The art racket is simple – get what you like officially defined as Great Art and then use that classification to get the government to pay for it. The world is filled with temples to the art of the rich – that is, by art galleries, concert halls, opera houses, and so on. Many of those temples were endowed by and are completely paid for by the rich, who also do the non-rich a favour by letting them in for a look. However, “the arts,” as they are so grandly named, survive to a great extent on the largesse of government, more aptly described as the largesse of the non-rich. Does the name Canada Council strike a familiar note?

Okay, it’s a free country. Maybe you don’t find anything inappropriate about the modestly-incomed subsidizing the rich. Maybe you think “the arts” are just what’s needed to strike some civilization into the hearts of the great unwashed.

Well, guess what? The great unwashed don’t go to exhibitions of “the arts”! Maybe it seemed like a good idea at one time to promote the civilizing effects of rich people’s art on hoi polloi, but after decades of applying this strategy the only conclusion we can reasonably draw is that it doesn’t work! All those galleries, orchestras, opera houses, etc., are still losing money.

But…but…if the arts don’t get money from government, who will support them? Hmmm. Hmmm – wait a minute! I don’t know much, but I do know that one thing that rich people have a lot of is…like, money. I’m sure you will agree with me to some extent here. Rich people have stacks of money. They have piles of money. They have oodles of it, great whacks of it, enormous freaking collections of it. They have money up their elegant Rosedale wazoos. Listen to me, rich people – if you just substituted Ossetra caviar for Beluga a few days a year and donated the savings to the arts, the arts would flourish like flies in an outhouse!

Meanwhile, the rest of us could use the extra money in our pockets to buy paintings on velvet.

Art with a Capital F © John FitzGerald, 2007