Worthwhile art

We discuss something beyond our formal qualifications.

Our photographer and tutor fell into a discussion about art recently, a subject neither has any formal training in.  It was motivated by the photographer looking at some old books of photographs, particularly one entitled The World’s Best Photographs from some seven or eight decades ago.  The title is pretentious, though a little less so when it turns out to be confined to pictures taken only over a limited number years.  Our photographer noticed that few of the contents would make any such collection done these days.  He identified two reasons.  For most, the style of photography has changed.  The strong, even overdone compositions in black and white do not suit current taste.  There are a few that might fit in, except for the fact that they’ve already been done.  That is, even if you recreate a picture of acknowledged value, yours has little in itself.  To be good Art, you have to do something new.

[We’re aware that there exists a website dedicated to people making images as much like a given one as possible, sometimes with many examples from many contributors.  We think this only shows that you can find anything on the web if you look hard enough.]

Our tutor brought up a different idea.  He has been reading a collection of The Spectator, a set of short articles printed in the early 18th century.  You could think of it as an early blog.  In several of them the prevailing view is that art should be judged, not by its novelty, but by how well it does something that has already been done before.  Indeed, novelty is viewed with suspicion.  This attitude goes along with the idea that there are fixed standards for art, by which any work can be judged good or otherwise objectively (or almost).

We can identify eras of novelty and of standards as we consider history.  Classical Greece was enormously inventive; Hellenistic Greek culture, from Alexander to the rise of Rome, took Classical Greece as its standard.  No one wrote another epic, because in Homer it was already perfect.  In one sense, it was an age of literary criticism, not literature.  The inventiveness of the Elizabethan theater was succeeded by the unambitious Restoration comedy of manners, and then the fixed standards of the early 18th century.  These were in turn succeeded by the Romantics, who explicitly sought novelty.

Have we been in a novelty era since then?  Certainly to call a work “derivative” has been to dismiss it from consideration.  And new ways of writing and painting popped up all over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  Some things were and are valued only because they did something new or different.  “Innovation” is a (much overused) term of approval nowadays; before about 1800, it would have been something people shunned.  (Some of the most radical changes have been done in the name of returning to the past, often a past that never existed.)

But consider certain genres of writing: the crime novel, the Cold War spy novel, the thriller, the disaster novel.  They operate under a fixed set of assumptions, and gain praise by how they handle the details.  Some of them are certainly candidates for Art.  And many of the most popular and most praised movies of the past decades have been remakes or sequels.

Are we in an age of novelty or standards?