The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [131]
Societies, however, do not generally make works of art; only individuals do. Authenticity as a truth of personal expression, so far as I have been to tell, is found in the highest art everywhere—even, as in older Chinese and some American Southwest Pueblo cultures, where traditional modesty requires that individuality be downplayed. From the major art centers of the world today to small-scale societies where there is no place a high/low art distinction as we would understand it, people recognize seriousness of purpose. From my own experience in New Guinea, I can that in Sepik River cultures you will find a clear understanding among expert artists of the enormous difference between a carving made to sell tourist and one that is made for a god or an ancestor. If a carver is producing a decorated shield on which his very life depends, the protecting ancestor depicted on the shield’s front will be accomplished with a seriousness of purpose you will never discover in a tourist trinket. To proper carving, a New Guinea artist named Pita Mangal said to the ethnographer Dirk Smidt, “you must concentrate, think well and be inspired. You must think hard which motif you want to cut into the wood. And you must feel this inside, in your heart.” No doubt many of the greatest African carvings are motivated by the same spiritual gravity. I imagine the psychology of authentic expression in this context is identical of the medieval artisan who, knowing that his handiwork would placed high on a cathedral out of human view, nevertheless lavished the most loving care on it. God, after all, would see it forever.
Murray’s conclusion that artistic masterpieces will be more likely found in cultures and times committed to transcendental goods that are justified in religious faith is backed up by the phenomenal strength arts in the Italian Renais sance (as it is by the decline of great art cynical, ironic ages, such as our own). Nevertheless, absolute seriousness purpose comes ultimately from an individual, not just a culture, and most great artists, musicians, and writers demonstrate a rare and often obsessional commitment to solving artistic problems in themselves. With Shakespeare, Beethoven, Hokusai, and Wagner we have artists for whom the art itself is the transcendental good and not a reflection anything else—an articulated religious or ethical ideal, or even a theory beauty. The commitment of many of the greatest artists comes from within them and is addressed to their art, its problems and opportunities, and not to their philosophy or their religion.
4. Distance. Human beings make art works to please each other, to be sure. There is a cool objectivity, however, about the greatest works of art: the worlds they create have little direct regard for our insistent wants and needs; still less do they show any intention on the part of their creators to ingratiate themselves with us. In contrast, ingratiating itself with the audience is a main function of the polar opposite of authentic artistic beauty, which is not ugliness (which can be a important component in beauty) but kitsch. The word “kitsch” can describe harmless knickknacks, or objects made to charm children, but the concept also has a more sinister place in the realm of high art as referring to a kind of bogus art that pretends to insight or achieved revelation but actually is made to flatter and reassure its consumers.
In his meditation on kitsch in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera notes the essential self-consciousness kitsch promotes. The kitsch object, as he explains it, calls forth “the second tear.” The first tear