Matthew Arnold, he of the muttonchop sideburns and starched-collar seriousness, knew exactly what art should do: It should make people better.
By “better,” the 19th Century poet and literary critic meant more moral, more just, more optimistic, less selfish, more filled with “sweetness and light” — Arnold’s phrase for the good stuff that infuses the soul after a close encounter with art.
Almost a century and a half removed from the British author’s prim directive, we still live in the shadow of that idea, the idea of art as a didactic enterprise. Art as spinach. Art that teaches us Life Lessons — somehow, the capital letters seem essential — on a grand scale. Art that is Good For Us.
But is that idea necessarily good for art?
“It’s a serious mistake to treat the arts as if they were some sort of spiritual vitamin C,” declares Robert Fitzpatrick, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Jim Vincent, artistic director of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, says, “I think all art can be potentially morally uplifting. But that may not be the objective of all art.”
Yet many works are often critiqued as if moral uplift were the only authentic criterion, as if changing souls were the ultimate measure of art. And many people still talk about certain kinds of art that way, as if the fact that they attended the opera or visited a museum the night before bestows on them a moral superiority.
While the question of art’s soul-enhancing qualities doubtless stretches back to the first paintings scratched on the sides of caves with burnt sticks, it is increasingly topical in dicey economic times. As the sources of funding for arts groups and individuals grow scarce, we are forced to ask what matters most, what is worth our time and our dollars.
If art doesn’t make us better people, should it make the cut?
The recent decision by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to donate $42 million in grants to, among others, Chicago arts organizations such as Lyric Opera and the MCA, could be regarded as a vote of confidence in art’s essential importance, even in a perilous age over which brood the blunt specters of war and want. The grants, after all, don’t require the groups to muse on terrorism or the axis of evil. They just require the groups to keep doing what they’re doing.
The foundation’s gift, moreover, comes in the midst of a gradual shift in our thinking about art, some cultural commentators believe. The requirement for art to be useful — to push a political agenda or serve a moral or ethical purpose — may be giving way to a renewed appreciation for art as a medium to convey simple beauty.
Which is not, of course, simple at all.
“There seems to be an urgency now about discussing beauty,” says Wendy Steiner, a University of Pennsylvania English professor. “In the last four years, I’ve been on so many panels about beauty. Fifteen or 20 years ago, there was nothing.”
Beauty, of course, is a terribly fraught and controversial term in art, and Steiner’s special interest is in how the female subject was trammeled by modern art’s “mission of public enlightenment by purifying the art of pleasure — the vulgar, the desire for comfort, charm, warm, attraction, empathy,” she writes in “Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in 20th-Century Art” (2001).
Yet things may be changing, she says, and the word “beauty” — once dismissed as trivial and subjective — may be available once again in the vocabularies of response to art. Among people who seek out art, be it literature or the visual or performing arts, “There is an increasing sense of a desire for pleasure,” Steiner adds.
Pleasure, not morality
Pleasure — not earnest moral improvement, not a blueprint for a meaningful life. Not, in Fitzpatrick’s disdainful words, “a kind of spiritual castor oil.”
But where did we get the idea in the first place that art should function as a surrogate Sunday school teacher, making us better people? Who said art had to be personally and socially redeeming, anyway?
Certainly the opposite view — that certain works of art can be morally corrupting and spiritually desensitizing — also has been espoused from time to time. Psychologists in the 1950s warned parents that comic books would turn their children into criminals; the same arguments were mustered against the emergent musical field known as rock ‘n’ roll.
But those complaints largely have been mustered against popular culture — against works whose influence would, their detractors warned, slowly seep into society like pollution in ground water.
When it comes to so-called high art, the rarified world of literature, drama, dance and the fine arts, the expectations change: Here, the prevailing idea is that art instructs and elevates, summoning what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” But why and how?
The notion that exposure to art can make one a better person has some of its roots in 17th and 18th Century England, when an emerging middle class was elbowing aside the landed gentry at the feast of culture, says Todd Parker, a professor at DePaul University. The arts represented a higher, more ethereal realm to which the newly wealthy class could aspire. Writers such as essayist Joseph Addison (1672-1719) “saw their role as polite instructors for this class,” Parker says. “Addison talked about the cultivating influence of the arts, about raising the lower classes.”
Improving the soul
Art was a civilizing force. Art was something you could look at or lavish time upon in order to improve your soul — or at least to make it appear to your neighbors as if you were interested in improving your soul.
“Addison often argues that characteristics like wit and taste distinguish the true gentleman from the rabble and that an awareness of beauty improves both the individual mind and society as a whole,” Parker notes.
By the 19th Century, the idea had a firm grip on the cultural imagination: Art was the ultimate self-help tool. Art was about good, high, holy things, things that directed your gaze heavenward. Art, Arnold wrote, promulgates “a human nature complete on all sides.”
This conviction continued into the 20th Century, although with some modifications. Along with moral uplift, art also served its didactic purpose by dealing with urgent political realities. The trend toward naturalism in literature and drama, in the work of novelists such as Theodore Dreiser and playwright Arthur Miller, reflected the idea that art mattered because it could teach us things about social injustices, about galling inequities, about soul-killing alienation, and along the way, about how to become more conscientious people.
Better people, in fact.
Art’s moral responsibility may have found its greatest late 20th-Century champion in the late John Gardner, whose book “On Moral Fiction” (1978) is still in print. A work of art “is good . . . only when it has a clear positive moral effect, presenting valid models for imitation, eternal verities worth keeping in mind, and a benevolent vision of the possible which can inspire and incite human beings toward virtue,” Gardner wrote.
The idea that art is supposed to make people better still holds sway. The appeal of Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial killer created by novelist Thomas Harris and brought to the most vibrant cinematic life by actor Anthony Hopkins, proves this by indirection. What makes the Lecter character fascinating is that, despite an elegantly refined taste for things such as classical music and the fine arts, he is a monster; the supposedly civilizing influence of art has backfired.
Cultured cannibal
Had Lecter been a bumbling, armpit-scratching, beer-guzzling, WWF-watching layabout in a dirty T-shirt and backward baseball cap, his cannibalism would have seemed merely grotesque, the character forgettable. But the aesthetic sophistication of Harris’ character refutes our clear, simple expectation of the way culture is supposed to work — culture is supposed to make us more, not less, human — which in turn makes Lecter diabolically memorable.
Yet the question still hangs in the air like the final note of an overture: Can art make you a better person?
“I think it can,” Steiner says, “but I would want to say, `What do you mean by a better person?’ I think art makes you aware. You learn things about yourself by what you respond to in art.”
Parker says, “I think exposure to culturally significant works makes you smarter. It gives you something to use your brain on. When you read and think about difficult material, when you think about questions of aesthetic value and beauty, it makes you a more competent thinker. The lack of ability to think produces people who haven’t earned their souls.”
Phil Reynolds, executive director of the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago, says, “Exposure to artistic statements is definitely a life-enhancing experience.”
And it can contribute to psychological wholeness as well, says Mark Smaller, a Chicago psychoanalyst.
“From the moment we’re born, we’re constantly looking for meaning in our lives,” Smaller says. “We look in relationships, in work, in religion and spirituality — and in art. Art can feel very organizing. When we’re feeling good, we feel organized inside. If we’re feeling depressed, we feel disorganized.
“I can be feeling out of sorts and then I go to a Puccini opera or look at a Chagall and suddenly, I feel organized and good. More whole, more cohesive. It’s the same with a movie or a novel too.”
Vaccine for moral rickets
Art, then, can be spiritually uplifting — but must it be? That question is what makes Fitzpatrick wary of rhetoric accompanying talk about art and morality. He recalls the 1993-97 tenure of Jane Alexander as chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts when, he says, “she talked as if the purpose of art was to keep the nation’s schoolchildren from getting moral rickets. That’s not what the arts are about.
“Good art, by its nature, doesn’t admit to oversimplification. Bad art does. Bad art brings a smile or a warm glow and then you move on. Good art requires work. The better the art, the more the work. There’s a sense of enormous pleasure in seeing good art — but I hesitate to say that gives you moral superiority.”
Art’s moral suasion is a complex topic, of course, with a rich history, many layers and no real possibility of a final unassailable judgment. So why bother thinking about it at all?
“Just because questions don’t go away,” Parker says, “doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility of constantly trying to answer them.”
